From The Marxist Archives-Bolshevism and the Spanish Civil War

Workers Vanguard No. 875	1 September 2006

TROTSKY

LENIN

Bolshevism and the Spanish Civil War

(Quote of the Week)

Seventy years ago, the Spanish working class rose up against General Franco’s attempt to overthrow the Republican government, which touched off the 1936-39 Civil War. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky and his Spanish comrades stressed, the road to defeating Franco’s fascist forces lay in the seizure of state power by the proletariat. But the treacherous leaders of the working class—centrally the Stalinists, joined by the social democrats, anarchists and the centrist POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification)—allied with the Republican bourgeoisie in a popular-front government. Their collaboration in the suppression of the insurgent workers paved the way for the victory of Franco’s forces.

According to the Socialists and Stalinists, i.e., the Mensheviks of the first and second instances, the Spanish revolution was called upon to solve only its “democratic” tasks, for which a united front with the “democratic” bourgeoisie was indispensable. From this point of view, any and all attempts of the proletariat to go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy are not only premature but also fatal. Furthermore, on the agenda stands not the revolution but the struggle against the insurgent Franco.

Fascism, however, is not feudal but bourgeois reaction. A successful fight against bourgeois reaction can be waged only with the forces and methods of the proletarian revolution. Menshevism, itself a branch of bourgeois thought, does not have and cannot have any inkling of these facts.

The Bolshevik point of view, clearly expressed only by the young section of the Fourth International, takes the theory of permanent revolution as its starting point, namely, that even purely democratic problems, like the liquidation of semi-feudal land ownership, cannot be solved without the conquest of power by the proletariat; but this in turn places the socialist revolution on the agenda.

—Leon Trotsky, “The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning,” 17 December 1937, reprinted in The Spanish Revolution (1931-39) (Pathfinder, 1973)

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Leon Trotsky

The Lessons of Spain:
The Last Warning

(1937)

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Written: End of 1937
First Published: Socialist Appeal [New York], January 8th and 15th, 1938
Translated: Socialist Appeal
Transcription/HTML Markup: Matt Siegried
Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 1999. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

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Menshevism and Bolshevism in Spain

All general staffs are studying closely the military operations in Ethiopia, in Spain and in the Far East in preparation for the great future war. The battles of the Spanish proletariat heat lightening flashes of the coming world revolution, should be no less attentively studied by the revolutionary staffs. Under this condition and this condition alone will the coming events not take us unawares.

Three ideologies fought – with unequal forces – in the so-called republican camp, namely, Menshevism, Bolshevism, and anarchism. As regards the bourgeois republican parties, they were without either independent ideas or independent political significance and were able to maintain themselves only by climbing on the backs of the reformists and Anarchists. Moreover, it is no exaggeration to say that the leaders of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism did everything to repudiate their doctrine and virtually reduce its significance to zero. Actually two doctrines in the so-called republican camp fought – Menshevism and Bolshevism.
According to the Socialists and Stalinists, i.e., the Mensheviks of the first and second instances, the Spanish revolution was called upon to solve only its “democratic” tasks, for which a united front with the “democratic” bourgeoisie was indispensable. From this point of view, any and all attempts of the proletariat to go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy are not only premature but also fatal. Furthermore, on the agenda stands not the revolution but the struggle against insurgent Franco.
Fascism, however, is not feudal but bourgeois reaction. A successful fight against bourgeois reaction can be waged only with the forces and methods of the proletariat revolution. Menshevism, itself a branch of bourgeois thought, does not have and cannot have any inkling of these facts.
The Bolshevik point of view, clearly expressed only by the young section of the Fourth International, takes the theory of permanent revolution as its starting point, namely, that even purely democratic problems, like the liquidation of semi-feudal land ownership, cannot be solved without the conquest of power by the proletariat; but this in turn places the socialist revolution on the agenda. Moreover, during the very first stages of the revolution, the Spanish workers themselves posed in practice not merely democratic problems but also purely socialist ones. The demand not to transgress the bounds of bourgeois democracy signifies in practice not a defense of the democratic revolution but a repudiation of it. Only through an overturn in agrarian relations could the peasantry, the great mass of the population, have been transformed into a powerful bulwark against fascism. But the landowners are intimately bound up with the commercial, industrial, and banking bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois intelligentsia that depends on them. The party of the proletariat was thus faced with a choice between going with the peasant masses or with the liberal bourgeoisie. There could be only one reason to include the peasantry and the liberal bourgeoisie in the same coalition at the same time: to help the bourgeoisie deceive the peasantry and thus isolate the workers. The agrarian revolution could have been accomplished only against the bourgeoisie, and therefore only through the masses of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is no third, intermediate regime.
From the standpoint of theory, the most astonishing thing about Stalin’s Spanish policy is the utter disregard for the ABC of Leninism. After a delay of several decades – and what decades! – the Comintern has fully rehabilitated the doctrine of Menshevism. More than that, the Comintern has contrived to render this doctrine more “consistent” and by that token more absurd. In czarist Russia, on the threshold of 1905, the formula of “purely democratic revolution” had behind it, in any case, immeasurably more arguments than in 1937 in Spain. It is hardly astonishing that in modern Spain “the liberal labor policy” of Menshevism has been converted into the reactionary anti-labor policy of Stalinism. At the same time the doctrine of the Mensheviks, this caricature of Marxism, has been converted into a caricature of itself.

“Theory” of the Popular Front

It would be naive, however, to think that the politics of the Comintern in Spain stem from a theoretical “mistake”. Stalinism is not guided by Marxist Theory, or for that matter any theory at all, but by the empirical interests of the Soviet bureaucracy. In their intimate circles, the Soviet cynics mock Dimitrov’s “philosophy” of the Popular Front. But they have at their disposal for deceiving the masses large cadres of propagators of this holy formula, sincere ones and cheats, simpletons and charlatans. Louis Fischer, with his ignorance and smugness, with his provincial rationalism and congenital deafness to revolution, is the most repulsive representative of this unattractive brotherhood. “The union of progressive forces!” “The Triumph of the idea of the Popular Front!” “The assault of the Trotskyists on the unity of the anti-fascist ranks!” ... Who will believe that the Communist Manifesto was written ninety years ago?

The theoreticians of the Popular Front do not essentially go beyond the first rule of arithmetic, that is, addition: “Communists” plus Socialists plus Anarchists plus liberals add up to a total which is greater than their respective isolated numbers. Such is all their wisdom. However, arithmetic alone does not suffice here. One needs as well at least mechanics. The law of the parallelogram of forces applies to politics as well. In such a parallelogram, we know that the resultant is shorter, the more component forces diverge from each other. When political allies tend to pull in opposite directions, the resultant prove equal to zero.
A bloc of divergent political groups of the working class is sometimes completely indispensable for the solution of common practical problems. In certain historical circumstances, such a bloc is capable of attracting the oppressed petty-bourgeois masses whose interests are close to the interests of the proletariat. The joint force of such a bloc can prove far stronger than the sum of the forces of each of its component parts. On the contrary, the political alliance between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, whose interests on basic questions in the present epoch diverge at an angle of 180 degrees, as a general rule is capable only of paralyzing the revolutionary force of the proletariat.
Civil war, in which the force of naked coercion is hardly effective, demands of its participants the spirit of supreme self-abnegation. The workers and peasants can assure victory only if they wage a struggle for their own emancipation. Under these conditions, to subordinate the proletariat to the leadership of the bourgeoisie means beforehand to assure defeat in the civil war.
These simple truths are least of all the products of pure theoretical analysis. On the contrary, they represent the unassailable deduction from the entire experience if history, beginning at least with 1848. The modern history of bourgeois society is filled with all sorts of Popular Fronts, i.e. the most diverse political combinations for the deception of the toilers. The Spanish experience is only a new and tragic link in this chain of crimes and betrayals.

Alliance with the Bourgeoisie’s Shadow

Politically most striking is the fact that the Spanish Popular Front lacked in reality even a parallelogram of forces. The bourgeoisie’s place was occupied by its shadow. Through the medium of the Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists, the Spanish bourgeoisie subordinated the proletariat to itself without even bothering to participate in the Popular Front. The overwhelming majority of the exploiters of all political shades openly went over to the camp of Franco. Without any theory of “permanent revolution,” the Spanish bourgeoisie understood from the outset that the revolutionary mass movement, no matter how it starts, is directed against private ownership of land and the means of production, and that it is utterly impossible to cope with this movement by democratic measures.

That is why only insignificant debris from the possessing classes remained in the republican camp: Messrs. Azaña, Companys, and the like – political attorneys of the bourgeoisie but not the bourgeoisie itself. Having staked everything on a military dictatorship, the possessing classes were able, at the same time, to make use of the political representatives of yesterday in order to paralyze, disorganize, and afterward strangle the socialist movement of the masses in “republican” territory.
Without in the slightest degree representing the Spanish bourgeoisie, the left republicans still less represented the workers and peasants. They represented no one but themselves. Thanks, however, to their allies – the Socialists, Stalinists, and Anarchists – these political phantoms played decisive role in the revolution. How? Very simply. By incarnating the principles of the “democratic revolution,” that is, the inviolability of private property.

The Stalinists in the Popular Front

The reasons of the rise of the Spanish Popular Front and its inner mechanics are perfectly clear. The task of the retired leaders of the left bourgeoisie consisted in checking the revolution of the masses and the regaining for themselves the lost confidence of the exploiters: “Why do you need Franco if we, the republicans, can do the same thing?” The interests of Azaña and Companys fully coincided at this central point with the interests of Stalin, who needed gain the confidence of the French and British bourgeoisie by proving to them in action his ability to preserve “order” against “anarchy.” Stalin needed Azaña and Companys as a cover before the workers: Stalin himself, of course, is for socialism, but one must take care not to repel the republican bourgeoisie! Azaña and Companys needed Stalin as an experienced executioner, with the authority of a revols time not at all thanks to high and mighty foreign patrons who supplied “this time not at all thanks to be dared to attack the workers.

The classic reformists of the Second International, long ago derailed by the course of the class struggle, began to feel a new tide of confidence, thanks to the support of Moscow. This support, incidentally, was not given to all reformists but only to those most reactionary. Caballero represented that face of the Socialist Party that was turned toward the workers’ aristocracy. Negrin and Prieto always looked towards the bourgeoisie. Negrin won over Caballero with the help of Moscow. The left Socialists and Anarchists, the captives of the Popular Front, tried, it is true, to save whatever could be saved of democracy. But inasmuch as they did not dare to mobilize the masses against the gendarmes of the Popular Front, their efforts at the end were reduced to plaints and wails. The Stalinists were thus in alliance with the extreme right, avowedly bourgeois wing of the Socialist Party. They directed their repressions against the left – the POUM, the Anarchists, the “left” Socialists – in other words, against the centrist groupings who reflected, even in a most remote degree, the pressure of the revolutionary masses,
This political fact, very significant in itself, provides at the same time the measure of the degeneration of the Comintern in the last few years. I once defined Stalinism as bureaucratic centrism, and events brought a series of corroborations of the correctness of this definition. But it is obviously obsolete today. The interests of the Bonapartist bureaucracy can no longer be reconciled with centrist hesitation and vacillation. In search of reconciliation with the bourgeoisie, the Stalinist clique is capable of entering into alliances only with the most conservative groupings among the international labor aristocracy. This has acted to fix definitively the counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism on the international arena.

Counter-Revolutionary Superiorities of Stalinism

This brings us right up to the solution of the enigma of how and why the Communist Party of Spain, so insignificant numerically and with a leadership so poor in caliber, proved capable of gathering into its hands all reins of power, in the face of the incomparably more powerful organizations of the Socialists and Anarchists. The usual explanation that the Stalinists simply bartered Soviet weapons for power is far too superficial. In return for munitions, Moscow received Spanish gold. According to the laws of the capitalist market, this covers everything. How then did Stalin contrive to get power in the bargain?

The customary answer is that the Soviet government, having raised its authority in the eyes of the masses by furnishing military supplies, demanded as a condition of its “collaboration” drastic measures against revolutionists and thus removed dangerous opponents from its path. All this is quite indisputable but it is only one aspect of the matter, and the least important at that.
Despite the “authority” created by Soviet shipments, the Spanish Communist Party remained a small minority and met with ever-growing hatred on the part of the workers. On the other hand, it was not enough for Moscow to set conditions; Valencia had to accede to them. This is the heart of the matter. Not only Zamora, Companys, and Negrin, but also Caballero, during his incumbency as premier, were all more or less ready to accede to the demands of Moscow. Why? Because these gentlemen themselves wished to keep the revolution within bourgeois limits. They were deathly afraid of every revolutionary onslaught of the workers.
Stalin with his munitions and with his counterrevolutionary ultimatum was a savior for all these groups. He guaranteed them, so they hoped, military victory over Franco, and at the same time, he freed them from all responsibility for the course of the revolution. They hastened to put their Socialist and Anarchist masks into the closet in the hope of making use of them again after Moscow reestablished bourgeois democracy for them. As the finishing touch to their comfort, these gentlemen could henceforth, justify their betrayal to the workers by the necessity of a military agreement with Stalin. Stalin on his part justifies his counterrevolutionary politics by the necessity of maintaining an alliance with the republican bourgeoisie.
Only from this broader point of view can we get a clear picture of the angelic toleration which such champions of justice and freedom as Azaña, Negrin, Companys, Caballero, Garcia Oliver, and others showed towards the crimes of the GPU. If they had no other choice, as they affirm, it was not at all because they had no means of paying for airplanes and tanks other than with the heads of the revolutionists and the rights of the workers, but because their own “purely democratic”, that is, anti-socialist, program could be realized by no other measures save terror. When the workers and peasants enter on the path of their revolution – when they seize factories and estates, drive out old owners, conquer power in the provinces – then the bourgeois counterrevolution – democratic, Stalinist, or fascist alike – has no other means of checking this movement except through bloody coercion, supplemented by lies and deceit. The superiority of the Stalinist clique on this road consisted in its ability to apply instantly measures that were beyond the capacity of Azaña, Companys, Negrin, and their left allies.

Stalin Confirms in His Own Way the Correctness of the Theory of Permanent Revolution

Two irreconcilable programs thus confronted each other on the territory of republican Spain. On the one hand, the program of saving at any cost private property from the proletariat, and saving as far as possible democracy from Franco; on the other hand, the program of abolishing private property through the conquest of power by the proletariat. The first program expressed the interest of capitalism through the medium of the labor aristocracy, the top petty-bourgeois circles, and especially the Soviet bureaucracy. The second program translated into the language of Marxism the tendencies of the revolutionary mass movement, not fully conscious but powerful. Unfortunately for the revolution, between the handful of Bolsheviks and the revolutionary proletariat stood counter-revolutionary wall of the Popular Front.

The policy of the Popular Front was, in its turn, not at all determined by the blackmail of Stalin as supplier of arms. There was, of course, no lack of blackmail. But the reason for the success of this blackmail was inherent in the inner conditions of the revolution itself. For six years, its social setting was the growing onslaught of the masses against the regime of semi-feudal and bourgeois property. The need of defending this property by the most extreme measures threw the bourgeoisie into Franco’s arms. The republican government had promised the bourgeoisie to defend property by “democratic” measures, but revealed, especially in July 1936, its complete bankruptcy. When the situation on the property front became even more threatening than on the military front, the democrats of all colors, including the Anarchists, bowed before Stalin; and he found no other methods, in his own arsenal than the methods of Franco.
The hounding of “Trotskyists”, POUMists, revolutionary Anarchists and left Socialists; the filthy slander; the false documents; the tortures in Stalinist prisons; the murders from ambush – without all this the bourgeois regime under the republican flag could not have lasted even two months. The GPU proved to be the master of the situation only because it defended the interests of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat more consistently than the others, i.e., with the greatest baseness and bloodthirstiness.
In the struggle against the socialist revolution, the “democratic” Kerensky at first sought support in the military dictatorship of Kornilov and later tried to enter Petrograd in the baggage train of the monarchist general Krasnov. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks were compelled, in order to carry the democratic revolution through to the end, to overthrow the government of “democratic” charlatans and babblers. In the process they put an end thereby to every kind of attempt at military (or “fascist”) dictatorship.
The Spanish revolution once again demonstrates that it is impossible to defend democracy against the methods of fascist reaction. And conversely, it is impossible to conduct a genuine struggle against fascism otherwise than through the methods of the proletarian revolution. Stalin waged war against “Trotskyism” (proletarian revolution), destroying democracy by the Bonapartist measures of the GPU. This refutes once again and once and for all the old Menshevik theory, adopted by the Comintern, in accordance with which the democratic and socialist revolutions are transformed into two independent historic chapters, separated from each other in point of time. The work of the Moscow executioners confirms in its own way the correctness of the theory of permanent revolution.

Role of the Anarchists

The Anarchists had no independent position of any kind in the Spanish revolution. All they did was waver between Bolshevism and Menshevism. More precisely, the Anarchist workers instinctively yearned to enter the Bolshevik road (July 19, 1936, and May days of 1937) while their leaders, on the contrary, with all their might drove the masses into the camp of the Popular Front, i.e., of the bourgeois regime.

The Anarchists revealed a fatal lack of understanding of the laws of the revolution and its tasks by seeking to limit themselves to their own trade unions, that is, to organizations permeated with the routine of peaceful times, and by ignoring what went on outside the framework of the trade unions, among the masses, among the political parties, and in the government apparatus. Had the Anarchists been revolutionists, they would first of all have called for the creation of soviets, which unite the representatives of all the toilers of city and country, including the most oppressed strata, who never joined the trade unions. The revolutionary workers would have naturally occupied the dominant position in these soviets. The Stalinists would have remained an insignificant minority. The proletariat would have convinced itself of its own invincible strength. The apparatus of the bourgeois state would have hung suspended in the air. One strong blow would have sufficed to pulverize this apparatus. The socialist revolution would have received a powerful impetus. The French proletariat would not for long permitted Leon Blum to blockade the proletariat revolution beyond the Pyrenees. Neither could the Moscow bureaucracy have permitted itself such a luxury. The most difficult questions would have been solved as they arose.
Instead of this, the anarcho-syndicalists, seeking to hide from “politics” in the trade unions, turned out to be, to the great surprise of the whole world and themselves, a fifth wheel in the cart of bourgeois democracy. But not for long; a fifth wheel is superfluous. After Garcia Oliver and his cohorts helped Stalin and his henchmen to take power away from the workers, the anarchists themselves were driven out of the government of the Popular Front. Even then they found nothing better to do than jump on the victor’s bandwagon and assure him of their devotion. The fear of the petty bourgeois before the big bourgeois, of the petty bureaucrat before the big bureaucrat, they covered up with lachrymose speeches about the sanctity of the united front (between a victim and the executioners) and about the inadmissibility of every kind of dictatorship, including their own. “After all, we could have taken power in July 1936 ...” “After all, we could have taken power in May 1937...” The Anarchists begged Stalin-Negrin to recognize and reward their treachery to the revolution. A revolting picture!
In and of itself, this self-justification that “we did not seize power not because we were unable but because we did not wish to, because we were against every kind of dictatorship,” and the like, contains an irrevocable condemnation of anarchism as an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine. To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest power.
No one could have prevented the Anarchists after the conquest of power from establishing the sort of regime they deem necessary, assuming, of course, that their program is realizable. But the Anarchist leaders themselves lost faith in it. They hid from power not because they are against “every kind of dictatorship” – in actuality, grumbling and whining, they supported and still support the dictatorship of Stalin-Negrin – but because they completely lost their principles and courage, if they ever had any. They were afraid of everything: “isolation,” “involvement,” “fascism.” They were afraid of France and England. More than anything these phrasemongers feared the revolutionary masses.
The renunciation of the conquest of power inevitably throws every workers’ organization into the swamp of reformism and turns it into a toy of the bourgeoisie; it cannot be otherwise in view of the class structure of society. In opposing the goal, the conquest of power, the Anarchists could not in the end fail to oppose the means, the revolution. The leaders of the CNT and FAI not only helped the bourgeoisie hold on to the shadow of power in July 1936; they also helped it to reestablish bit by bit what it had lost at one stroke. In May 1937, they sabotaged the uprising of the workers and thereby saved the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Thus anarchism, which wished merely to be anti-political, proved in reality to be anti-revolutionary and in the more critical moments – counter-revolutionary.
The Anarchist theoreticians, who after the great test of 1931-37 continue to repeat the old reactionary nonsense about Kronstadt, and who affirm that “Stalinism is the inevitable result of Marxism and Bolshevism,” simply demonstrate by this they are forever dead for the revolution.
You say that Marxism is in itself depraved and Stalinism is its legitimate progeny? But why are we revolutionary Marxists engaged in mortal combat with Stalinism throughout the world? Why does the Stalinist gang see in Trotskyism it chief enemy? Why does every approach to our views or our methods of action (Durruti, Andres, Nin, Landau, and others) compel the Stalinist gangsters to resort to bloody reprisals. Why, on the other hand, did the leaders of Spanish anarchism serve, during the time of the Moscow and Madrid crimes of the GPU, as ministers under Caballero-Negrin, that is as servants of the bourgeoisie and Stalin? Why even now, under the pretext of fighting fascism, do the Anarchists remain voluntary captives of Stalin-Negrin, the executioners of the revolution, who have demonstrated their incapacity to fight fascism?
By hiding behind Kronstadt and Makhno, the attorneys of anarchism will deceive nobody. In the Kronstadt episode and the struggle with Makhno, we defended the proletarian from the peasant counterrevolution. The Spanish Anarchists defended and continue to defend bourgeois counterrevolution from the proletariat revolution. No sophistry will delete from the annals of history the fact that anarchism and Stalinism in the Spanish revolution were on one side of the barricades while the working masses with the revolutionary Marxists were on the other. Such is the truth which will forever remain in the consciousness of the proletariat!

Role of the POUM

The record of the POUM is not much better. In the point of theory, it tried, to be sure, to base itself on the formula of permanent revolution (that is why the Stalinists called the POUMists Trotskyists). But the revolution is not satisfied with theoretical avowals. Instead of mobilizing the masses against the reformist leaders, including the Anarchists, the POUM tried to convince these gentlemen of the superiorities of socialism over capitalism. This tuning fork gave the pitch to all the articles and speeches of the POUM leaders. In order not to quarrel with the Anarchist leaders, they did not form their own nuclei inside the CNT, and in general did not conduct any kind of work there. To avoid sharp conflicts, they did not carry on revolutionary work in the republican army. They built instead “their own” trade unions and “their own” militia, which guarded “their own” institutions or occupied “their own” section of the front.

By isolating the revolutionary vanguard from the class, the POUM rendered the vanguard impotent and left the class without leadership. Politically the POUM remained throughout far closer to the Popular Front, for whose left wing it provided the cover, than to Bolshevism. That the POUM nevertheless fell victim to bloody and base repressions was due to the failure of the Popular Front to fulfill its mission, namely to stifle the socialist revolution – except by cutting off, piece by piece, its own left flank.
Contrary to its own intentions, the POUM proved to be, in the final analysis, the chief obstacle on the road to the creation of a revolutionary party. The platonic or diplomatic partisans of the Fourth International like Sneevliet, the leader of the Dutch Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, who demonstratively supported the POUM in its halfway measures, its indecisiveness and evasiveness, in short, in its centrism, took upon themselves the greatest responsibility. Revolution abhors centrism. Revolution exposes and annihilates centrism. In passing, the revolution discredits the friends and attorneys of centrism. That is one of the most important lessons of the Spanish revolution.

The Problem of Arming

The Socialists and Anarchists who seek to justify their capitulation to Stalin by the necessity of paying for Moscow’s weapons with principles and conscience simply lie unskillfully. Of course, many of them would have preferred to disentangle themselves without murders and frame-ups. But every goal demands corresponding means. Beginning with April 1931, that is, long before the military intervention of Moscow, the Socialists and Anarchists did everything in their power to check the proletariat revolution. Stalin taught them how to carry this work to its conclusion. They became Stalin’s criminal accomplices only because they were his political cothinkers.

Had the Anarchist leaders in the least resembled revolutionists, they would have answered the first piece of blackmail from Moscow not only by continuing the socialist offensive but also by exposing Stalin’s counterrevolutionary conditions before the world working class. They would have thus forced the Moscow bureaucracy to choose openly between the socialist revolution and the Franco dictatorship. The Thermidorean bureaucracy fears and hates revolution. But it also fears being strangled in a fascist ring. Besides, it depends on the workers. All indications are that Moscow would have been forced to supply arms, and possibly at more reasonable prices.
But the world does not revolve around Stalinist Moscow. During a year and a half of civil war, the Spanish war industry could and should have been strengthened and developed by converting a number of civilian plants to war production. This work was not carried out only because Stalin and his Spanish allies equally feared the initiative of the workers’ organizations. A strong war industry would have become a powerful instrument in the hands of the workers. The leaders of the Popular Front preferred to depend on Moscow.
It is precisely on this question that the perfidious role of the Popular Front was very strikingly revealed. It thrust upon the workers’ organizations the responsibility for the treacherous deals of the bourgeoisie of Stalin. Insofar as the Anarchists remained a minority, they could not, of course, immediately hinder the ruling bloc from assuming whatever obligations they pleased toward Moscow and the masters of Moscow: London and Paris. But without ceasing to be the best fighters on the front, they could have and should have openly dissociated themselves from the betrayals and betrayers; they could and should have explained the real situation to the masses, mobilized them against the bourgeois government, and augmented their own forces from day to day in order in the end to conquer power and with it the Moscow arms.
And what if Moscow, in the absence of a Popular Front, should have refused to give arms altogether? And what, we answer to this, if the Soviet Union did not exist altogether? Revolutions have been victorious up to this time not at all thanks to high and mighty foreign patrons who supplied them with arms. As a rule, counterrevolution enjoyed foreign patronage. Must we recall the experiences of the intervention of French, English, American, Japanese, and other armies against the Soviets? The proletariat of Russia conquered domestic reaction and foreign interventionists without military support form the outside. Revolutions succeed, in the first place, with the help of a bold social program, which gives the masses the possibility of seizing weapons that are on the territory and disorganizing the army of the enemy. The Red Army seized French, English, and American military supplies and drove the foreign expeditionary corps into the sea. Has this really been forgotten?
If at the head of the armed workers and peasants, that is, at the head of so-called republican Spain, were revolutionists and not cowardly agents of the bourgeoisie, the problem of arming would never have been paramount. The army of Franco, including the colonial Riffians and the soldiers of Mussolini, was not at all immune to revolutionary contagion. Surrounded by the conflagration of the socialist uprising, the soldiers of fascism would have proved to be an insignificant quantity. Arms and military “geniuses” were not lacking in Madrid and Barcelona; what was lacking was a revolutionary party!

Conditions for victory

The conditions for victory of the masses in the civil war against the army exploiters are very simple in their essence.

1. The fighters of a revolutionary army must be clearly aware of the fact that they are fighting for their full social liberation and not for the reestablishment of the old (“democratic”) forms of exploitation.
2. The workers and peasants in the rear of the revolutionary army as well as in the rear of the enemy must know and understand the same thing.
3. The propaganda on their own front as well as on the enemy front and in both rears must be completely permeated with the spirit of social revolution. The slogan “First victory, then reforms,” is the slogan of all oppressors and exploiters from the Biblical kings down to Stalin.
4. Politics are determined by those classes and strata that participate in the struggle. The revolutionary masses must have a state apparatus that directly and immediately expresses their will. Only the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies can act as such an apparatus.
5. The revolutionary army must not only proclaim but also immediately realize in life the more pressing measures of social revolution in the provinces won by them: the expropriation of provisions, manufactured articles, and other stores on hand and the transfer of these to the needy; the redivision of shelter and housing in the interests of the toilers and especially of the families of the fighters; the expropriation of the land and agricultural inventory in the interests of the peasants; the establishment of workers’ control and soviet power in the place of the former bureaucracy.
6. Enemies of the socialist revolution, that is, exploiting elements and their agents, even if masquerading as “democrats,” “republicans,” “Socialists,” and “Anarchists,” must be mercilessly driven out of the army.
7. At the head of each military unit must be placed commissars possessing irreproachable authority as revolutionists and soldiers.
8. In every military unit there must be a firmly welded nucleus of the most self-sacrificing fighters, recommended by the workers’ organizations. The members of this nucleus have but one privilege: to be first under fire.
9. The commanding corps necessarily includes at first many alien and unreliable elements among the personnel. Their testing, retesting, and sifting must be carried through on the basis of combat experience, recommendations of commissars, and testimonials of rank-and-file fighters. Coincident with this must proceed an intense training of commanders drawn from the ranks of revolutionary workers.
10. The strategy of civil war must combine the rules of military art with the tasks of the social revolution. Not only in propaganda but also in military operations it is necessary to take into account the social composition of the various military units of the enemy (bourgeois volunteers, mobilized peasants, or as in Franco’s case, colonial slaves); and in choosing lines of operation, it is necessary to rigorously take into consideration the social structure of the corresponding territories (industrial regions, peasant regions, revolutionary or reactionary, regions of oppressed nationalities, etc.). In brief, revolutionary policy dominates strategy.
11. Both the revolutionary government and the executive committee of the workers and peasants must know how to win the complete confidence of the army and of the toiling population.
12. Foreign policy must have as its main objective the awakening of the revolutionary consciousness of the workers, the exploited peasants, and oppressed nationalities of the whole world.
    

Stalin Guaranteed the Conditions of Defeat

The conditions for victory, as we see, are perfectly plain. In their aggregate they bear the name of the socialist revolution. Not a single one of these conditions existed in Spain. The basic reason is – the absence of a revolutionary party. Stalin tried, it is true, to transfer to the soil of Spain, the outward practices of Bolshevism: the Politburo, commissars, cells, the GPU, etc. But he emptied these forms of their social content. He renounced the Bolshevik program and with it the soviets as the necessary form for the revolutionary initiative of the masses. He placed the technique of Bolshevism at the service of bourgeois property. In his bureaucratic narrow-mindedness, he imagined that “commissars” by themselves could guarantee victory. But the commissars of private property proved capable only of guaranteeing defeat.

The Spanish proletariat displayed first-rate military qualities. In its specific gravity in the country’s economic life, in its political and cultural level, the Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution not below but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917. On the road to victory, its own organizations stood as the chief obstacles. The commanding clique of Stalinists, in accordance with their counterrevolutionary function, consisted of hirelings, careerists, declassed elements, and in general, all types of social refuse. The representatives of other labor organizations – incurable reformists, Anarchists phrasemongers, helpless centrists of the POUM – grumbled, groaned, wavered, manuevered, but in the end adapted themselves to the Stalinists. As a result of their joint activity, the camp of social revolution – workers and peasants – proved to be subordinated to the bourgeoisie, or more correctly, to its shadow. It was bled white and its character destroyed.
There was no lack of heroism on the part of the masses or courage on the part of individual revolutionists. But the masses were left to their own resources while the revolutionists remained disunited, without a program, without a plan of action. The “republican” military commanders were more concerned with crushing the social revolution than with scoring military victories. The soldiers lost confidence in their commanders, the masses in the government; the peasants stepped aside; the workers became exhausted; defeat followed defeat; demoralization grew apace. All this was not difficult to foresee from the beginning of the civil war. By setting itself the task of rescuing the capitalist regime, the Popular Front doomed itself to military defeat. By turning Bolshevism on its head, Stalin succeeded completely in fulfilling the role of gravedigger of the revolution.
It ought to be added that the Spanish experience once again demonstrates that Stalin failed completely to understand either the October Revolution or the Russian civil war. His slow moving provincial mind lagged hopelessly behind the tempestuous march of events in 1917-21. In those of his speeches and articles in 1917 where he expressed his own ideas, his later Thermidorean “doctrine” is fully implanted. In this sense, Stalin in Spain in 1937 is the continuator of Stalin of the March 1917 conference of the Bolsheviks. But in 1917 he merely feared the revolutionary workers; in 1937 he strangled them. The opportunist had become the executioner.

“Civil War in the Rear”

But, after all, victory over the governments of Caballero and Negrin would have necessitated a civil war in the rear of the republican army! – the democratic philistine exclaims with horror. As if apart from this, in republican Spain no civil war has ever existed, and at that the basest and most perfidious one – the war of the proprietors and exploiters against the workers and peasants. This uninterrupted war finds expression in the arrests and murders of revolutionists, the crushing of the mass movement, the disarming of the workers, the arming of the bourgeois police, the abandoning of workers’ detachments without arms and without help on the front, and finally, the artificial restriction of the development of war industry.

Each of these acts as a cruel blow to the front, direct military treason, dictated by the class interests of the bourgeoisie. But “democratic” philistines – including Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists – regard the civil war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, even in areas most closely adjoining the front, as a natural and inescapable war, having as its tasks the safeguarding of the “unity of the Popular Front.” On the other hand, the civil war of the proletariat against the “republican” counterrevolution is, in the eyes of the same philistines, a criminal, “fascists,” Trotskyist war, disrupting ... “the unity of the anti-fascist forces.” Scores of Norman Thomases, Major Atlees, Otto Bauers, Zyromskys, Malrauxes, and such petty peddlers of lies as Duranty and Louis Fischer spread this slavish wisdom throughout our planet. Meanwhile the government of the Popular Front moves from Madrid to Valencia, from Valencia to Barcelona.
If, as the facts attest, only the socialist revolution is capable of crushing fascism, then on the other hand a successful uprising of the proletariat is conceivable only when the ruling classes are caught in the vise of the greatest difficulties. However, the democratic philistines invoke precisely these difficulties as proof of the impressibility of the proletarian uprising. Were the proletariat to wait for the democratic philistines to tell them the hour of their liberation, they would remain slaves forever. To teach workers to recognize reactionary philistines under all their masks and to despise them regardless of the mask is the first and paramount duty of a revolutionist!

The Outcome

The dictatorship of the Stalinists over the republican camp is not long-lived in its essence. Should the defeats stemming from the politics of the Popular Front once more impel the Spanish proletariat to a revolutionary assault, this time successfully, the Stalinist clique will be swept away with an iron broom. But should Stalin – as is unfortunately the likelihood – succeed in bringing the work of gravedigger of the revolution to its conclusion, he will not even in this case earn thanks. The Spanish bourgeoisie needed him as executioner, but it has no need for him at all as patron or tutor. London and Paris on the one hand, and Berlin and Rome on the other, are in its eyes considerably more solvent firms than Moscow. It is possible that Stalin himself wants to cover his traces in Spain before the final catastrophe; he thus hopes to unload the responsibility for the defeat on his closest allies. After this Litvinov will solicit Franco for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. All this we have seen more than once.

Even a complete military victory of the so-called republican army over General Franco, however, would not signify the triumph of “democracy.” The workers and peasants have twice placed bourgeois republicans and their left agents in power: in April 1931 and in February 1936. Both times the heroes of the Popular Front surrendered the victory of the people to the most reactionary and the most serious representatives of the bourgeoisie. A third victory, gained by the generals of the Popular Front, would signify their inevitable agreement with the fascist bourgeoisie on the backs of the workers and peasants. Such a regime will be nothing but a different form of military dictatorship, perhaps without a monarchy and without the open domination of the Catholic Church.
Finally, it is possible that the partial victories of the republicans will be utilized by the “disinterested” Anglo-French intermediaries in order to reconcile the fighting camps. It is not difficult to understand that in the event of such a variant the final remnants of the “democracy” will be stifled in the fraternal embrace of the generals Miaja (communist!) and Franco (fascists!). Let me repeat once again: victory will go either to the socialist revolution or to fascism.
It is not excluded, by the way, that the tragedy might at the last moment make way to farce. When the heroes of the Popular Front have to flee their last capital, they might, before embarking on steamers and airplanes, perhaps proclaim a series of “socialist” reforms in order to leave a “good memory” with the people. But nothing will avail. The workers of the world will remember with hatred and contempt the parties that ruined the heroic revolution.
The tragic experience of Spain is a terrible – perhaps final – warning before still greater events, a warning addressed to all the advanced workers of the world. “Revolutions,” Marx said, “are the locomotives of history.” They move faster than the thought of semi-revolutionary or quarter-revolutionary parties. Whoever lags behind falls under the wheels of the locomotive, and consequently – and this is the chief danger – the locomotive itself is also not infrequently wrecked.
It is necessary to think out the problem of the revolution to the end, to its ultimate concrete conclusions. It is necessary to adjust policy to the basic laws of the revolution, i.e., to the movement of the embattled classes and not the prejudices or fears of the superficial petty-bourgeois groups who call themselves “Popular” Fronts and every other kind of front. During revolution the line of least resistance is the line of greatest disaster. To fear “isolation” from the bourgeoisie is to incur isolation from the masses. Adaptation to the conservative prejudices of the labor aristocracy is betrayal of the workers and the revolution. An excess “caution” is the most baneful lack of caution. This is the chief lesson of the destruction of the most honest political organization in Spain, namely, the centrist POUM. The parties and groups of the London Bureau obviously either do not wish to draw the necessary conclusions from the last warning of history or are unable to do so. By this token they doom themselves.
By way of compensation, a new generation of revolutionists is now being educated by the lessons of the defeats. This generation has verified in action the ignominious reputation of the Second International. It has plumbed the depths of the Third International’s downfall. It has learned how to judge the Anarchists not by their words but by their deeds. It is a great inestimable school, paid for with the blood of countless fighters! The revolutionary cadres are now gathering only under the banner of the Fourth International. Born amid the roar of defeats, the Fourth International will lead the toilers to victory.
 

From The Marxist Archives-Defend the Gains of the Chinese Revolution!

Workers Vanguard No. 874	4 August 2006

TROTSKY

LENIN

Defend the Gains of the Chinese Revolution!

(Quote of the Week)

Drawing on his analogy between the Soviet degenerated workers state and a trade union, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky asserted the critical need to defend the USSR against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution. Today, this question is urgently posed in regard to defense of China, which, despite the Stalinist bureaucracy’s undermining of the gains of the 1949 Revolution, is the largest of the remaining deformed workers states and the imperialists’ strategic target for counterrevolution.

From the point of view of our program, the trade union should be an organization of class struggle. What then should be our attitude to the American Federation of Labor? At its head stand manifest agents of the bourgeoisie. Upon all essential questions, Messrs. Green, Woll, and Company carry out a political line directly opposed to the interests of the proletariat.... But the AFL does not because of this cease to be an organization of the trade unions....

The function of Stalin, like the function of Green, has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie; but he cannot serve the bureaucracy without defending that social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalized property from imperialist attacks and from the too impatient and avaricious layers of the bureaucracy itself. However, he carries through this defense with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. It is exactly because of this that the Stalinist clique must be overthrown. But it is the revolutionary proletariat who must overthrow it. The proletariat cannot subcontract this work to the imperialists. In spite of Stalin, the proletariat defends the USSR from imperialist attacks.

Historical development has accustomed us to the most varied kind of trade unions: militant, reformist, revolutionary, reactionary, liberal, and Catholic. It is otherwise with a workers’ state. Such a phenomenon we see for the first time. That accounts for our inclination to approach the USSR exclusively from the point of view of the norms of the revolutionary program. Meanwhile the workers’ state is an objective historical fact which is being subjected to the influence of different historical forces and can as we see come into full contradiction with “traditional” norms.

—Leon Trotsky, “Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?” (November 1937)

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Leon Trotsky

Not a Workers’ and
Not a Bourgeois State? [1]

(November 1937)

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Written: November 25, 1937.
Published: Fourth International, Vol.12 No.4, July-August 1951, pp.123-127.
Transcribed for the Trotsky Internet Archive: by Martin Schreader in 1999

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November 25, 1937

Political Form and Social Content

Comrades Burnham and Carter [2] have placed a fresh question mark over the class character of the Soviet state. The answer which they give is, in my opinion, completely erroneous. But inasmuch as these comrades do not attempt, as do some ultra-leftists, to substitute shrieking for scientific analysis, we can and should seriously discuss with B. and C. this exceptionally important question.

B. and C. do not forget that the main difference between the USSR and the contemporary bourgeois state finds its expression in the powerful development of the productive forces as a result of a change in the form of ownership. They further admit that “the economic structure as established by the October Revolution remains basically unchanged.” They deduce from this that it is the duty of the Soviet and world proletariat to defend the USSR from imperialist attacks. In this there is complete agreement between B. and C. and us. But no matter how great the degree of our agreement, it by no means covers the whole issue. Though B. and C. do not solidarize themselves with the ultra-lefts, they nevertheless consider that the USSR has stopped being a workers’ state “in the traditional (?) sense given to this term by Marxism.” But since the “economic structure ... still remains basically unchanged,” the USSR has not become a bourgeois state. B. and C. at the same time deny – and for this we can only congratulate them – that the bureaucracy is an independent class. The result of these inconsistent assertions in the conclusion, the very one the Stalinists draw, that the Soviet state, in general, is not an organization of class domination. What, then, is it?
Thus we have a new attempt at revising the class theory of the state. We are not, it goes without saying, fetishists; should new historical facts demand a revision of the theory, we would not stop at doing so. But the lamentable experience of the old revisionists should in any case imbue us with a salutary caution. We should, ten times over, weigh in our minds the old theory and the new facts before we attempt to formulate a new doctrine.
B. and C. themselves remark in passing that in its dependence on objective and subjective conditions the rule of the proletariat “is able to express itself in a number of different governmental forms.” For clarity we will add: either through an open struggle of different parties within the soviets, or through the monopoly of one party, or even through a factual concentration of power in the hands of a single person. Of course personal dictatorship is a symptom of the greatest danger to the regime. But at the same time, it is, under certain conditions, the only means by which to save that regime. The class nature of the state is, consequently, determined not only by its political forms but by its social content; i.e., by the character of the forms of property and productive relations which the given state guards and defends.
In principle B. and C. do not deny this. If they nevertheless refuse to see in the USSR a workers’ state, it is due to two reasons, one of which is economic and the other political in character. “During the past year,” they write, “the bureaucracy has definitively entered the road of destruction of the planned and nationalized economy.” (Has only “entered the road”?) Further we read that the course of development “brings the bureaucracy into ever-increasing and deepening conflict with the needs and interests of the nationalized economy.” (Only “brings it”?) The contradiction between the bureaucracy and the economy was observed before this, but for the past year “the actions of the bureaucracy are actively sabotaging the plan and disintegrating the state monopoly.” (Only “disintegrating”? Hence, not yet disintegrated?)
As stated above, the second contention has a political character. “The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not primarily an economic but predominantly a political category ... All forms, organs, and institutions of the class rule of the proletariat are now destroyed, which is to say that the class rule of the proletariat is now destroyed.” After hearing about the “different forms” of the proletarian regime, this second contention, taken by itself, appears unexpected. Of course, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not only “predominantly” but wholly and fully a “political category.” However, this very politics is only concentrated economics. The domination of the Social Democracy in the state and in the soviets (Germany 1918-19) had nothing in common with the dictatorship of the proletariat inasmuch as it left bourgeois property inviolable. But the regime which guards the expropriated and nationalized property from the imperialists is, independent of political forms, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
B. and C. “in general,” as it were, admit this. They therefor have recourse to combining the economic with the political contention. The bureaucracy, they say, has not only definitively deprived the proletariat of political power, but has driven the economy into a blind alley. If in the previous period the bureaucracy with all its reactionary features played a comparatively progressive role, it has now definitively become a reactionary factor. In this reasoning there is a healthy kernel, which is in complete conformity with all former evaluations and prognoses of the Fourth International. We have more than once spoken of the fact that “enlightened absolutism” has played a progressive role in the development of the bourgeoisie only afterward to become a brake upon this development; the conflict resolved itself, as is known, in revolution. In laying the groundwork for socialist economy, we wrote, “enlightened absolutism” can play a progressive role only during an incomparably shorter period. This prognosis is clearly confirmed before our very eyes. Deceived by its own successes, the bureaucracy expected to attain ever bigger coefficients of economic growth. Meanwhile it ran up against an acute crisis in the economy, which became one of the sources of its present panic and its mad repressions. Does this mean that the development of productive forces in the USSR has already stopped? We would not venture to make such an assertion. The creative possibilities of nationalized economy are so great that the productive forces, in spite of the bureaucratic brake put on them, can develop for a period of years although at a considerably more moderate rate than heretofore. Along these lines it is scarcely possible at the moment to make an exact forecast. In any case, the political crisis which is rending the bureaucracy asunder is considerably more dangerous for it today than the perspective of a stoppage of the productive forces. For the sake of simplifying the question, however, let us grant that the bureaucracy has already become an absolute brake upon the economic development. But does this fact in itself mean that the class nature of the USSR has changed or that the USSR is devoid of any kind of class nature? Here, it seems to me, is the chief mistake of our comrades.
Up until the First World War bourgeois society developed its productive forces. Only during the past quarter of a century has the bourgeoisie become an absolute brake upon economic development. Does this mean that bourgeois society has ceased being bourgeois? No, it means only that it has become a decaying bourgeois society. In a number of countries, the preservation of bourgeois property is possible only through the establishment of a fascist regime. In other words, the bourgeoisie is devoid of all forms and means of its own direct political domination, and must use an intermediary. Does this mean then that the state has stopped being bourgeois? To the extent that fascism with its barbaric methods defends private property in the means of production, to that extent the state remains bourgeois under the fascist rule.
We do not at all intend to give our analogy an all-inclusive meaning. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that the concentration of power in the hands of the bureaucracy and even the retardation of the development of the productive forces, by themselves, still do not change the class nature of society and its state. Only the intrusion of a revolutionary or a counterrevolutionary force in property relations can change the class nature of the state.
(The London New Leader, under the editorship of Fenner Brockway, writes in an editorial, dated November 12 of this year: “The Independent Labour Party does not accept the Trotskyist view that the economic foundations of socialism in Soviet Russia have been destroyed.” [3] What can one say about these people? They do not understand the thoughts of others because they do not have any of their own. They can only sow confusion in the minds of the workers. – L.T.)
But does not history really know of cases of class conflict between the economy and the state? It does! After the “third estate” seized power, society for a period of several years still remained feudal. In the first months of Soviet rule the proletariat reigned on the basis of a bourgeois economy. In the field of agriculture the dictatorship of the proletariat operated for a number of years on the basis of a petty-bourgeois economy (to a considerable degree it does so even now). Should a bourgeois counterrevolution succeed in the USSR, the new government for a lengthy period would have to base itself upon the nationalized economy. But what does such a type of temporary conflict between the economy and the state mean? It means a revolution or a counter-revolution. The victory of one class over another signifies that it will reconstruct the economy in the interests of the victors. But such a dichotomous condition, which is a necessary stage in every social overturn, has nothing in common with the theory of a classless state which in the absence of a real boss is being exploited by a clerk, i.e., by the bureaucracy.

Norm and Fact

It is the substitution of a subjective “normative” method in place of an objective, dialectical approach to the question which renders it difficult for many comrades to arrive at a correct sociological appraisal of the USSR. Not without reason do Burnham and Carter say that the Soviet Union cannot be considered a workers’ state “in the traditional sense given to this term by Marxism.” This simply means that the USSR does not correspond to the norms of a workers’ state as set forth in our program. On this score there can be no disagreement. Our program has counted upon a progressive development of the workers’ state and by that token upon its gradual withering away. But history, which does not always act “according to a program,” has confronted us with the process of a degenerating workers’ state.

But does this mean that a workers’ state, coming into conflict with the demands of our program, has ceased thereby to be a workers’ state? A liver poisoned by malaria does not correspond to a normal type of liver. But it does not because of that cease to be a liver. For the understanding of its nature, anatomy and physiology are not sufficient; pathology too is necessary. Of course it is much easier upon seeing the diseased liver to say: “This object is not to my liking,” and to turn one’s back upon it. But a physician cannot permit himself such a luxury. Depending upon the conditions of the disease itself, and the resulting deformation of the organ, he must have recourse either to therapeutic treatment (“reforms”) or to surgery (“revolution”). But to be able to do this he must first of all understand that the deformed organ is a sick liver, and not something else.
But let us take a more familiar analogy; that between a workers’ state and a trade union. From the point of view of our program, the trade union should be an organization of class struggle. What then should be our attitude to the American Federation of Labor? [4] At its head stand manifest agents of the bourgeoisie. Upon all essential questions, Messrs. Green, Woll, and Company carry out a political line directly opposed to the interests of the proletariat. We can extend the analogy and say that if until the appearance of the CIO [5], the AFL accomplished somewhat progressive work, now that the chief content of its activity is embodied in a struggle against the more progressive (or less reactionary) tendencies of the CIO, Green’s apparatus has definitely become a reactionary factor. This would be completely correct. But the AFL does not because of this cease to be an organization of the trade unions.
The class character of the state is determined by its relation to the forms of property in the means of production. The character of a workers’ organization such as a trade union is determined by its relation to the distribution of national income. The fact that Green and Company defend private property in the means of production characterizes them as bourgeois. Should these gentlemen in addition defend the income of the bourgeoisie from attacks on the part of the workers; should they conduct a struggle against strikes, against the raising of wages, against help to the unemployed; then we would have an organization of scabs, and not a trade union. However, Green and Company, in order not to lose their base, must within certain limits lead the struggle of the workers for an increase – or at least against a diminution – of their share of the national income. This objective symptom is sufficient in all important cases to permit us to draw a line of demarcation between the most reactionary trade union and an organization of scabs. Thus we are duty bound not only to carry on work in the AFL, but to defend it from scabs, the Ku Klux Klan, and the like.
The function of Stalin, like the function of Green, has a dual character. Stalin serves the bureaucracy and thus the world bourgeoisie; but he cannot serve the bureaucracy without defending that social foundation which the bureaucracy exploits in its own interests. To that extent does Stalin defend nationalized property from imperialist attacks and from the too impatient and avaricious layers of the bureaucracy itself. However, the carries through this defend with methods that prepare the general destruction of Soviet society. It is exactly because of this that the Stalinist clique must be overthrown. The proletariat cannot subcontract this work to the imperialists. In spite of Stalin, the proletariat defends the USSR from imperialist attacks.
Historical development has accustomed us to the most varied kind of trade unions: militant, reformist, revolutionary, reactionary, liberal and Catholic. It is otherwise with a workers’ state. Such a phenomenon we see for the first time. That accounts for our inclination to approach the USSR exclusively from the point of view of the norms of the revolutionary program. Meanwhile the workers’ state is an objective historical fact which is being subjected to the influence of different historical forces and can as we see come into full contradiction with “traditional” norms.
Comrades B. and C. are completely correct when they say that Stalin and Company by their politics serve the international bourgeoisie. But this correct thought must be established in the correct conditions of time and place. Hitler also serves the bourgeoisie. However, between the functions of Stalin and Hitler there is a difference. Hitler defends the bourgeois forms of property. Stalin adapts the interests of the bureaucracy to the proletarian forms of property. The same Stalin in Spain, i.e., on the soil of a bourgeois regime, executes the function of Hitler (in their political methods they generally differ little from one another). The juxtaposition of the different social roles of the one and the same Stalin in the USSR and in Spain demonstrates equally well that the bureaucracy is not an independent class but the tool of classes; and that it is impossible to define the social nature of a state by the virtue or villainy of the bureaucracy.
The assertion that the bureaucracy of a workers’ state has a bourgeois character must appear not only unintelligible but completely senseless to people stamped with a formal cast of mind. However, chemically pure types of state never existed, and do not exist in general. The semifeudal Prussian monarchy executed the most important tasks of the bourgeoisie, but executed them in its own manner, i.e., in a feudal, not a Jacobin style. In Japan we observe even today an analogous correlation between the bourgeois character of the state and the semifeudal character of the ruling caste. But all this does not hinder us from clearly differentiating between a feudal and a bourgeois society. True, one can raise the objection that the collaboration of feudal and bourgeois forces is immeasurably more easily realized than the collaboration of bourgeois and proletarian forces, inasmuch as the first instance presents a case of two forms of class exploitation. This is completely correct. But a workers’ state does not create a new society in one day. Marx wrote that in the first period of a workers’ state the bourgeois norms of distribution are still preserved. (About this see The Revolution Betrayed, the section Socialism and the State, p.53.) One has to weigh well and think this thought out to the end. The workers’ state itself, as a state, is necessary exactly because the bourgeois norms of distribution still remain in force.
This means that even the most revolutionary bureaucracy is to a certain degree a bourgeois organ in the workers’ state. Of course, the degree of this bourgeoisification and the general tendency of development bears decisive significance. If the workers’ state loses its bureaucratization and gradually falls away, this means that its development marches along the road to socialism. On the contrary, if the bureaucracy becomes ever more powerful, authoritative, privileged, and conservative, this means that in the workers’ state the bourgeois tendencies grow at the expense of the socialist; in other words, that inner contradiction which to a certain degree is lodged in the workers’ state from the first days of its rise does not diminish, as the “norm” demands, but increases. However, so long as that contradiction has not passed from the sphere of distribution into the sphere of production, and has not blown up nationalized property and planned economy, the state remains a workers’ state.
Lenin had already said fifteen years ago: “Our state is a workers’ state, but with bureaucratic deformations.” In that period bureaucratic deformation represented a direct inheritance of the bourgeois regime and, in that sense, appeared as a mere survival of the past. Under the pressure of unfavorable historical conditions, however, the bureaucratic “survival” received new sources of nourishment and became a tremendous historical factor. It is exactly because of this that we now speak of the degeneration of the workers’ state. This degeneration, as the present orgy of Bonapartist terror shows, has approached a crucial point. That which was a “bureaucratic deformation” is at the present moment preparing to devour the workers’ state, without leaving any remains, and on the ruins of nationalized property to spawn a new propertied class. Such a possibility has drawn extremely near. But all this is only a possibility and we do not intend beforehand to bow before it.
The USSR as a workers’ state does not correspond to the “traditional” norm. This does not signify that it is not a workers’ state. Neither does this signify that the norm has been found false. The “norm” counted upon the complete victory of the international proletarian revolution. The USSR is only a partial and mutilated expression of a backward and isolated workers’ state.
Idealistic, ultimatistic, “purely” normative thinking wishes to construct the world in its own image, and simply turns away from phenomena which are not to its liking. Sectarians, i.e., people who are revolutionary only in their own imagination, guide themselves by empty idealistic norms. They say: “These unions are not to our liking, we will not join them; this workers’ state is not to our liking, we will not defend it.” Each time they promise to begin history anew. They will construct, don’t you see, an ideal workers’ state, when God places in their hands an ideal party and ideal unions. But until this happy moment arrives, they will, as much as possible, pout their lips at reality. A very big pout – that is the supreme expression of sectarian “revolutionaryism.”
Purely “historical,” reformist, Menshevik, passive, conservative thinking busies itself with justifying, as Marx expressed it, today’s swinishness by yesterday’s swinishness. Representatives of this kind enter into mass organizations and dissolve themselves there. The contemptible “friends” of the USSR adapt themselves to the vileness of the bureaucracy, invoking the “historical” conditions.
In opposition to these two casts of mind, dialectical thinking – Marxist, Bolshevik – takes phenomena in their objective development and at the same time finds in the internal contradictions of this development at a basis for the realization of its “norms.” It is of course necessary not to forget that we expect the programmatic norms to be realized only if they are the generalized expression of the progressive tendencies of the objective historical process itself.
The programmatic definition of a union would sound approximately like this: an organization of workers of a trade or industry with the objective of (1) struggling against capitalism for the amelioration of the workers, (2) participating in the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, (3) participating in the organization of economy on a socialist basis. If we compared this “normative” definition with the actual reality, we should find ourselves constrained to say: there does not exist a single trade union in the world today. But such a counterposing of norm to fact, that is to say, of the generalized expression of the development to the particular manifestation of this same development – such a formal, ultimatistic, nondialectical counterposing of program to reality is absolutely lifeless and does not open any road for the intervention of the revolutionary party. In the meantime the existing opportunistic unions, under the pressure of capitalist disintegration, can – and given correct policies on our part in the unions must – approach our programmatic norms and play a progressive historical role. This, of course, presupposes a complete change of leadership. It is necessary that the workers of the United States, England, France, drive out Green, Citrine, Jouhaux and Company. [6] It is necessary that the Soviet workers drive out Stalin and Company. If the proletariat drives out the Soviet bureaucracy in time, then it will still find the nationalized means of production and the basic elements of the planned economy after its victory. This means that it will not have to begin from the beginning. That is a tremendous advantage! Only radical dandies, who are used to hopping carelessly from twig to twig, can lightmindedly dismiss such a possibility. The socialist revolution is too tremendous and difficult a problem for one to lightmindedly wave one’s hand at its inestimable material advancement and begin from the beginning.
It is very good that Comrades B. and C., in distinction from our French comrade Craipeau and others, do not forget the factor of the productive forces and do not deny defense of the Soviet Union. But this is completely inefficient. And what if the criminal leadership of the bureaucracy should paralyze growth in the economy? Can it be possible the Comrades B. and C. in such a case will passively allow imperialism to destroy the social bases of the USSR? We are sure this is not the case. However, their non-Marxist definition of the USSR as neither a workers’ not a bourgeois state opens the door for all kinds of conclusions. That is why this definition must be categorically rejected.

Simultaneously a Ruling and an Oppressed Class

“How can our political conscience not resent the fact,” say the ultra-leftists, “that they want to force us to believe that in the USSR, under Stalin’s rule, the proletariat is the ‘ruling class’ ...?!” This assertion phrased in such an abstract manner can actually arouse our “resentment.” But the truth is that abstract categories, necessary in the process of analysis, are completely unfit for synthesis, which demands the utmost concreteness. The proletariat of the USSR is the ruling class in a backward country where there is still a lack of the most vital necessities of life. The proletariat of the USSR rules in a land consisting of only one-twelfth part of humanity; imperialism rules over the remaining eleven-twelfths. The rule of the proletariat, already maimed by the backwardness and poverty of the country, is doubly and triply deformed under the pressure of world imperialism. The organ of the rule of the proletariat – the state – becomes an organ for pressure from imperialism (diplomacy, army, foreign trade, ideas, and customs). The struggle for domination, considered on a historical scale, is not between the proletariat and the bureaucracy, but between the proletariat and the world bourgeoisie. The bureaucracy is only the transmitting mechanism in this struggle. The struggle is not concluded. In spite of all the efforts on the part of the Moscow clique to demonstrate its conservative reliability (the counterrevolutionary politics of Stalin in Spain!), world imperialism does not trust Stalin, does not spare him the mist humiliating flicks and is ready at the first favorable opportunity to overthrow him. Hitler – and therein lies his strength – simply more consistently and frankly expresses the attitude of the world bourgeoisie to the Soviet bureaucracy. For the bourgeoisie – fascist as well as democratic – isolated counter-revolutionary exploits of Stalin do not suffice; it needs a complete counter-revolution in the relations of property and the opening of the Russian market. So long as this is not the case, the bourgeoisie considers the Soviet state hostile to it. And it is right.

The internal regime in the colonial and semicolonial countries has a predominantly bourgeois character. But the pressure of foreign imperialism so alters and distorts the economic and political structure of these countries that the national bourgeoisie (even in the politically independent countries of South America) only partly reaches the height of a ruling class. The pressure imperialism on backward countries does not, it is true, change their basic social character since the oppressor and oppressed represent only different levels of development in one and the same bourgeois society. Nevertheless the difference between England and India, Japan and China, the United States and Mexico is so big that we strictly differentiate between oppressor and oppressed bourgeois countries and we consider it our duty to support the latter against the former. The bourgeoisie of colonial and semi-colonial countries is a semi-ruling, semi-oppressed class.
The pressure of imperialism on the Soviet Union has as its aim the alteration of the very nature of Soviet society. The struggle – today peaceful, tomorrow military – concerns the forms of property. In its capacity of a transmitting mechanism in this struggle, the bureaucracy leans now on the proletariat against imperialism, now on imperialism against the proletariat, in order to increase its own power. At the same time it mercilessly exploits its role as distributor of the meager necessities of life in order to safeguard its own well-being and power. By this token the rule of the proletariat assumes an abridged, curbed, distorted character. One can with full justification say that the proletariat, ruling in one backward and isolated country, still remains an oppressed class. The source of oppression is world imperialism; the mechanism of transmission of the oppression – the bureaucracy. If in the words “a ruling and at the same time an oppressed class” there is a contradiction, then it flows not from the mistakes of thought but from the contradiction in the very situation in the USSR. It is precisely because of this that we reject the theory of socialism in one country.
The recognition of the USSR as a workers’ state – not a type but a mutilation of a type – does not at all signify a theoretical and political amnesty for the Soviet bureaucracy. On the contrary, its reactionary character is fully revealed only in the light of the contradiction between its antiproletarian politics and the needs of the workers’ state. Only by posing the question in this manner does our exposure of the crimes of the Stalinist clique gain full motive force. The defense of the USSR means not only the supreme struggle against imperialism, but a preparation for the overthrow of the Bonapartist bureaucracy.
The experience of the USSR shows how great are the possibilities lodged in the workers’ state and how great is its strength of resistance. But this experience also shows how powerful is the pressure of capitalism and its bureaucratic agency, how difficult it is for the proletariat to gain full liberation, and how necessary it is to educate and temper the new International in the spirit of irreconcilable revolutionary struggle.

---

Endnotes

1. Not a Workers’ and Not a Bourgeois State?, Internal Bulletin (OCSPC), No.3, December 1937. This was a contribution by Trotsky to the internal discussion that preceded the founding convention of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Internal Bulletin, No.2, November 1937, had published a draft resolution on the Soviet Union by the Convention Arrangements Committee, and a longer amendment by Burnham and Carter, which Trotsky analyzes here. (Internal Bulletin, No.3, December 1937, was to contain Burnham and Carter’s answers to Trotsky.)

2. James Burnham and Joseph Carter were leaders of the Bolshevik-Leninist faction of the Socialist Party left wing and later of the SWP. In the pre-convention discussion they represented a tendency in the leadership that sought to change the party’s characterization of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state, but insisted that they continued to support the defense of the USSR against imperialist attack. In addition, they were beginning to express apprehensions about the centralist aspects of Bolshevik organizational policy. At the SWP convention their resolution on the USSR received the votes of three delegates against sixty-nine for the majority resolution. The Burnham-Carter resolution on the organization question was withdrawn when the majority agreed to minor amendments in its resolution. In 1940 Burnham and Carter, this time joined by Shachtman and Abern, broke with the SWP over the class nature of the Soviet state. Burnham soon withdrew from the Shachtmanite Workers’ Party, and later became a propagandist for McCarthyism and other ultra-right movements and an editor of the right-wing National Review.

3. The New Leader was the paper of the British Independent Labour Party. The ILP was founded in 1893 and helped to found the Labour Party, left it in 1931, and was now associated with the centrist London Bureau. It returned to the Labour Party in 1939. Fenner Brockway (1890-1979) was an opponent of the Fourth International and secretary of the London Bureau. He was also a leader of the ILP.

4. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a conservative craft union federation, whose president was William Green (1873-1952) and one of whose vice presidents was Matthew Woll (1880-1956).

5. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was originally set up in 1935 as a committee within the AFL. The AFL leaders refused to respond to the demand for power new organizations to represent radicalizing workers on an industry-wide basis, and expelled the CIO unions in 1938, forcing them to establish their own national organization. The AFL and CIO merged in 1955.

6. Sir Walter Citrine (1887-1976) was the general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress from 1926 to 1946. He was knighted for his service to British capitalism in 1935, and was made a baronet in 1946.

 

Bradley Manning Trial-Day 13

Government concluding merits case against Bradley Manning: trial report, day 13

digg

In what’s expected to be the last day of the government’s merits case, prosecutors read stipulations of expected testimony and fact, largely regarding their “aiding the enemy” charge. They’ll call their final witness today. We’ll update this post this afternoon. See all previous courtroom reports here.
By Nathan Fuller, Bradley Manning Support Network. July 1, 2013.

Danny Lewis, DIA. Sketched by Debra Van Poolen.

Today is likely the final day of the government’s merits (guilt or innocence, pre-sentencing) portion of its case against Pfc. Bradley Manning. Prosecutors read final stipulations of fact and expected testimony, and will call their final witness after today’s lunch break.
Before those stipulations, prosecutors announced that they had subpoenaed Mr. Butler from the Internet Archive, to testify about the nature of the Archive’s capturing of websites at a given point. They need his testimony to help verify a 2009 WikiLeaks ‘Most Wanted Leaks’ list, which Judge Denise Lind rejected for lack of authentication last week. Defense lawyer David Coombs said he’d spoken to Butler and will talk to him again today at the lunch break, and may withdraw his authentication objection afterward.
Judge Lind also noted that she would rule on whether to take judicial notice of several items from each party. The government wants to admit that Julian Assange was working in Iceland in 2010, a Lt. Col. Lee Packnett quote in the New York Times, and a 2010 New Yorker profile of Julian Assange. The defense objects to these on hearsay (not first-hand knowledge) and relevance grounds.
The defense wants to admit the fact that Congress believed over-classification was an issue and therefore passed legislation, which “contained not only just findings but also specific statutory initiatives to address that issue.”
The defense also wants to admit statements by J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), declaring that an ISOO report concluded that “even trained classifiers, with ready access to the latest classification and declassification guides, and trained in their use, got it clearly right only 64% of the time in making determinations as to the appropriateness of continued classification.”
Finally, the defense wants to admit correspondence between Senator Carl Levin and Defense Secretary Robert Gates regarding the impact of WikiLeaks’ releases. Sen. Levin wrote a letter inquiring about potential damage, and Sec. Gates responded, claiming “the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure.”
Judge Lind is expected to rule on these items later today.
Aiding the enemy stipulations
Today’s stipulations are part of the government’s case for its “aiding the enemy” charge, for which it has to prove “actual knowledge by PFC Manning that by giving the intelligence to WikiLeaks, that he was actually giving intelligence to the enemy through this indirect means.”
The first stipulation was expected testimony of Youssef Aboul-Enein, a U.S. Navy commander who has advised the Department of Homeland Security on militant Islam. His testimony provided background information on Al Qaeda, a recounting of its attacks on America, and its practices.
Aboul-Enein says that Al Qaeda has used the internet since the 1990s, uses “all publicly available websites,” and specifically uses sites that research U.S. operations.
Prosecutors read a stipulation of fact regarding a July 3, 2011, video featuring Adam Gadahn, an American member of Al Qaeda. In the video, Gadahn cites material released by WikiLeaks, and plays part of the WikiLeaks-released ‘Collateral Murder’ video. He encourages his listeners to use the internet to make use of “all means possible” to carry out jihad. That stipulation also referenced the fourth issue of Inspire Magazine, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) publication. That issue says “anything useful from WikiLeaks” can be archived, and that archiving large amounts of information is useful for Al Qaeda and AQAP.
The government also read a previously read-aloud stipulation of fact regarding Osama bin Laden’s computer, affirming that in the U.S. of OBL’s compound, on May 2, 2011, agents obtained digital media. That media included a letter from OBL to another member of Al Qaeda, requesting Department of Defense information posted to WikiLeaks. That member responded in a letter, attaching the Afghan War Logs. The remainder of that stipulation is classified – as is the entirety of stipulation of expected testimony.
Notably, both pieces of evidence were found well after the government charged Manning with “aiding the enemy,” on March 1, 2011. They’ll be used to confirm “receipt” of U.S. defense intelligence by the enemy, an element required to prove that charge.
After a long lunch break, the government will call its final witness, Defense Intelligence Agency’s Daniel Lewis, whom it will attempt to qualify as an expert on counterintelligence. Part of that testimony will be conducted in a closed session to elicit classified information.
Update — closed session
The court is now in a classified session, closed off to the press and public, for two hours (expected to run until 4:30pm ET), to continue questioning DIA’s Daniel Lewis. The parties questioned Lewis about his counterintelligence (CI) work briefly in open court first. The government had him recount his 29 years of CI experience, including offensive operations, and his awards for CI success.
The government wants to use Lewis’ testimony to support its 18 USC 641 – federal larceny – charges, specifically the claim that Manning “stole” documents worth more than $1,000.
The defense does not believe he’s an expert on valuing classified information. Defense lawyer Maj. Hurley questioned Lewis, establishing that Lewis has never had to put a specific monetary value on a classified document, and he’s had no specific training or guidance on the issue. Lewis said that he could instead tell the court, from experience, what a foreign adversary would pay for certain classified information, but couldn’t look at a document and determine its value.
The government asked to move to a closed session to continue building a foundation for Lewis’s expertise. After that questioning, Judge Lind will make a ruling, and if he’s qualified as an expert, we’ll continue in open court.
Update — 4:42pm ET — returning tomorrow at 11 AM
We’ve just been told the parties are still in closed session but won’t return for an open session today. We’ll resume in open court tomorrow morning at 11 AM.

From The Marxist Archives - Immigrant Rights in the Early Soviet Republic

Workers Vanguard No. 873	7 July 2006

TROTSKY

LENIN

Immigrant Rights in the Early Soviet Republic

(Quote of the Week)

In its 1918 Constitution, the Soviet workers republic granted citizenship rights to all foreign working people in its territory, while taking measures to safeguard the proletarian dictatorship against counterrevolutionaries. Today, based on the program of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, the Spartacist League calls for full citizenship rights for all immigrants as part of our struggle for new October Revolutions.

20. Acting on the principle of the solidarity of the toilers of all nations, the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic grants all political rights enjoyed by Russian citizens to foreigners resident within the territory of the Russian Republic provided they belong to the working class or to the peasantry not using hired labor. Local Soviets are authorized to confer the rights of Russian citizenship upon such foreigners without any formalities or difficulties.

21. The Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic offers asylum to all foreigners persecuted for political and religious offenses.

22. The Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, recognizing the equality of all citizens, regardless of race or nationality, declares it contrary to the fundamental laws of the Republic to institute or tolerate any privileges or advantages based upon such grounds, or to repress national minorities, or to limit their rights in any way.

23. To safeguard the interests of the working class as a whole, the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic deprives individuals and groups of rights which they may use to the detriment of the Socialist Revolution.

—James Bunyan, ed., Intervention, Civil War, and Communism in Russia: April-December 1918—Documents and Materials (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1936)

*********

Workers Vanguard No. 873	7 July 2006

Defend Immigrant Rights!

(Letter)

Seattle, WA
19 May 2006

To the Editor,

President Bush plans to spend billions of our dollars to turn the Mexican border into a war zone, using paramilitary troops and high tech equipment. It’s a horrible idea that Congress should quash immediately. Immigration is a result of social and economic forces that the U.S. has a major part in creating, such as poverty and joblessness in South America. The great wealth that undocumented workers create in the U.S. is unacknowledged, while the government illegally declares war on border communities in the U.S. and Mexico. Who can doubt that Chicanos and Mexicans, and other brown-skinned people, will be abused and killed by trigger-happy, privatized soldiers whose bosses care only for the money they make. The dismal record of privatized prisons shows what poor and workingclass people of color can expect.

Millions of immigrants and their supporters in the streets on May Day displayed a powerful force for change that can also help U.S. citizens who are feeling the contempt of our government for their jobs, wages, pensions, and freedom of speech. It’s time that unions, women, the elderly, and all people of color join undocumented workers and stop the destruction of their rights and ours.

Sincerely,
A.W.

***On “Now” Photos For The AARP Generation

For Robert Flatley, North Adamsville Class Of 1964

A YouTube film clip of Iris Dement performing After You're Gone.

Peter Paul Markin, North Adamsville Class Of 1964, comment:

“’Cause I’ve memorized each line in your face, and not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me”-a line from the folksinger/songwriter Iris DeMent’s hauntingly beautiful song, After You’re Gone.

Well, of course, those hard-wire lyrics only apply to our male classmates. After all Iris is singing about her gone man. He long gone but not forgotten man. I do not, this age of sexual equality notwithstanding, want to extend their application to our sister classmates because I do not need to have every cyber-stone in the universe thrown at me. But those same lyrics do bring me to the purpose for today’s comment. As part of getting a 'feel' for writing about our days at old North Adamsville High I have perused some of the class profiles this infernal 1964 class committee that keeps badgering me for ever more information has provided me. Apparently once you answer a couple of off-hand questions about your doings (or not-doings) over the past half century you are fair game for every possible form of interrogation. Interrogations that would shame even the most hardened CIA or NSA bureaucrat. I don’t know about you but I am thinking of hiring a lawyer and putting a stop to this maddening harassment, and possible constitutional violation. But that is a subject for another day. For now, forward.

A number of you have placed your current photos on the profile pages thoughtfully provided by said committee, although a number of people, including myself, are apparently camera-shy. I admit to not being particularly camera-shy but rather to being something of a technological luddite (look that word up on Wikipedia if you do not know it) in that I do not own the digital camera required to upload a snappy photo, have no immediate intention of owning one, and would, moreover be helpless to do such a tortuous task as uploading a photo. Truth. Some, however, like the Chase brothers are not. Not camera shy or apparently luddites that is. (By the way, Jim and John, and others as well, what is up with wearing hats these days? We are Kennedy-era boys and hats most definitely were not part of our uniform.) Or like born again "muscle man" (read: huge) Bill Bailey, the star cross- country runner and track man from our class, whom I have has previously written about in this space as slender-strided and gracefully-gaited. That photo-readiness on the part of some classmates forms the basis for my comment. Those who are photo-less can breathe a sigh of relief-for now.

I have to admit that I have been startled by some of the photos. Many of them seem to have been taken by your grandchildren just before their naps. Or maybe by you just before your naps, or some combinations of the two especially for those who are performing grandparental (is their such a word?) duty as “babysitters” in a world where both parents are forced by hard-time circumstances to work to make ends meet these days. Isn’t the digital age supposed to have made the camera instantly user-friendly? Why all the out-of-focus, soft-focus, looking through a fish tank or a looking- glass kind of shots. And why does everyone seem to be have been photographed down the far end of some dark corridor or by someone about six miles away? Nobody expects Bachrach-quality photos but something is amiss here. [ Bachrach’s was the photograph studio that took our individual class pictures for those who don’t remember or didn’t otherwise know.-Markin]

In contrast, a new arrival on this class committee profile page interrogation wall (sorry), Robert Flatley, has found just the right approach. Initially, Robert placed a recent shot of himself on his profile page. Frankly, the old codger looked like he was wanted in about six states for “kiting” checks, or maybe had done a little “time” in some far-off county farm or state prison for armed robbery. More recently, however, his page has been graced with a stock photo provided by the site, a tastefully-shot, resplendent wide old oak tree. Automatically I now associate Robert with the tree of life, with oneness with the universe, with solidity, with the root of matter in him, and with bending but not breaking. Wise choice, Brother Flatley. Now, moreover, I do not have to suppress a need to dial 911, but rather can think of Robert as one who walks with kings, as a sage for the ages. And nothing can ever erase the story that tells to me.

Artist: Dement Iris
Song: After You're Gone
Album: Infamous Angel Iris Dement Sheet Music

There'll be laughter even after you're gone.
I'll find reasons to face that empty dawn.
'Cause I've memorised each line in your face,
And not even death can ever erase the story they tell to me.

I'll miss you.
Oh, how I'll miss you.
I'll dream of you,
And I'll cry a million tears.
But the sorrow will pass.
And the one thing that will last,
Is the love that you've given to me.

There'll be laughter even after you're gone.
I'll find reasons and I'll face that empty dawn.
'Cause I've memorized each line in your face,
And not even death could ever erase the story they tell to me.
************

Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-In Honor Of The Frontline Fighters Of The International Working Class Today-The International Working Class Anthem- The Internationale

 

 

 

A YouTube film clip of a performance of the classic international working class song of struggle, The Internationale.

Markin comment:

In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.

*****

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

“We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

***********

The Internationale  [variant words in square brackets]

 

Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers

Arise ye prisoners of want

For reason in revolt now thunders

And at last ends the age of cant.

Away with all your superstitions

Servile masses arise, arise

We'll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]

And spurn the dust to win the prize.

 

So comrades, come rally

And the last fight let us face

The Internationale unites the human race.

So comrades, come rally

And the last fight let us face

The Internationale unites the human race.

 

No more deluded by reaction

On tyrants only we'll make war

The soldiers too will take strike action

They'll break ranks and fight no more

And if those cannibals keep trying

To sacrifice us to their pride

They soon shall hear the bullets flying

We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

 

No saviour from on high delivers

No faith have we in prince or peer

Our own right hand the chains must shiver

Chains of hatred, greed and fear

E'er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]

And give to all a happier lot.

Each [those] at the forge must do their duty

And we'll strike while the iron is hot.

________________________________________

 

L'Internationale

 

Debout les damnés de la terre

Debout les forçats de la faim

La raison tonne en son cratère

C'est l'éruption de la fin

Du passe faisons table rase

Foules, esclaves, debout, debout

Le monde va changer de base

Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout

 

C'est la lutte finale

Groupons-nous, et demain (bis)

L'Internationale

Sera le genre humain

 

Il n'est pas de sauveurs suprêmes

Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun

Producteurs, sauvons-nous nous-mêmes

Décrétons le salut commun

Pour que le voleur rende gorge

Pour tirer l'esprit du cachot

Soufflons nous-mêmes notre forge

Battons le fer quand il est chaud

 

L'état comprime et la loi triche

L'impôt saigne le malheureux

Nul devoir ne s'impose au riche

Le droit du pauvre est un mot creux

C'est assez, languir en tutelle

L'égalité veut d'autres lois

Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle

Egaux, pas de devoirs sans droits

 

Hideux dans leur apothéose

Les rois de la mine et du rail

Ont-ils jamais fait autre chose

Que dévaliser le travail

Dans les coffres-forts de la bande

Ce qu'il a crée s'est fondu

En décrétant qu'on le lui rende

Le peuple ne veut que son dû.

 

Les rois nous saoulaient de fumées

***“Young America”- The Stephen A, Douglas Story (Yah, The Guy That Debated Lincoln Way Back When)

 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman    

Stephen A. Douglas: Defender Of The Union, Gerald M. Capers, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1959

At a time when we are deep into commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the American Civil War (yes I know the sesquicentennial but who knows that word now so 150^th okay) my recent reading interest has been on some of the outstanding figures from that period. Not the obvious big name figures who, one way or the other drove the political or military action, like John Brown, Lincoln, Seward and Davis or Grant and Lee but other figures important to  understanding how the conflict, in the final analysis, as Seward (and others pointed out) was irrepressible. That led me to and old time biography (1959 old, old by the furious standard of revisionist biography) by Professor Caper done at a time when the 100^th anniversary (okay, okay centennial) of the war was approaching.

Now Douglas died near the beginning of the war and so his effect on the outcome was small but as the leading advocate for the theory of popular sovereignty that swirled around in the decade before the war he was certainly an influential figure in the political struggle to do something, something seemingly benign in his case, to avoid the war that he also knew was coming, and that would be, as it turned out, be bloody hell.  Although he is popularly known, if now known at all, as Lincoln’ s punching bag (okay nemesis) during the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign debates he actually was a more powerful figure than Lincoln and his fledgling Republican Party (to speak nothing of the moribund Whigs and Know-Nothings of unblessed memory) during this period. Moreover Dougal was  a central power, and perennial presidential candidate, in the northern wing of the Democratic Party and it was thus no accident that Professor Caper’ s wrote his biography at that time.        

The figure of Abraham Lincoln has been subjected to many periodic revisions, most recently around whether he was just another redneck racist who just so happened to see that if the union was to be preserved and to prosper that damn slavery had to go. That swirling teacup controversy got me thinking about how Douglas’ reputation would stand up today since even under Professor Caper’s sympathetic story line Douglas was not a friend of black people, no serious opponent of slavery except as it affected the preservation of the union, and was prepared to sees its extension under the terms of his popular sovereignty doctrine to any place that it could thrive. So a biographer writing today would almost be honor bound to create a more critical study. In short, among the various revisionist trends today, Lincoln should not, could not, be the only white man to take a serious posthumous beating by historians on the question of racial attitudes.       

Strangely the figure of Douglas, a poor boy from the sticks who made good in Chicago real estate and other ventures and had a “fire within” desire to be an important political figure, to be president, like Lincoln was perfect example of that Western (then western) ethos that sprang up in this country from about Andrew Jackson’s time. That bootstrap ethos formed the core of the “Young America” movement, a movement that was part of a larger international movement of the times, which inhaled the nationalist spirit and heralded the rise of the capitalist ethos as the way forward for America. Douglas’ popular sovereignty doctrine where under its terms each new state (or territory) would determine in its own way whether slavery was to be permitted in its jurisdiction fed right into that spirit. Of course Douglas paid a heavy political price, the split, north and south, and of his beloved Democratic Party which would howl in the wilderness for most of the rest of the 19^th century and the effective thwarting of his presidential ambitions, for his steadfast adherence to his doctrine.

If you want to understand the seismic roilings of the 1850s in this country over the extension of slavery into places like Kansas and California then knowing about Douglas’ place in those political struggles is important. As for Professor Caper’s old time biography that would be a place to start not to finish now in the study of this central figure leading up to the Civil War.