***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Night- When Jimmy Jack’s Jukebox Jumped

A YouTube film clip of Brenda Lee performing her classic teen longing song, All Alone Am I.

CD Review

Super Hits 1962, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1991

Scene brought to mind by the cover that graces this CD: Simple. A jukebox, a Wurlitzer jukebox gismo, bright lights inviting, all are welcome, standing alone in some off-hand corner ready to be played by the latest crowd of song-hungry nickel, dime and quarter carrying teens after they get out of a hard day of fighting boredom at school, in this case the hoary Olde Saco High School up in Maine (or down in Maine for the purists) or are getting ready to do the do on a Friday or Saturday night (in summer, any night) before heading to wilder visions out in the great snarl of the Atlantic Ocean wave machine that is the setting for more than one budding romance, teenage style, Maine ocean teenage style.

“No question, no question at all, Jimmy Jack’s,” answered Josh Breslin to the off-hand life and death question posed by Billy La Croix, king hell king or at least prince, given his age, a mere thirteen, of the be-bop-crazed young teen night around Olde Saco, and maybe farther.

And the question posed by young Billy? Who has the best jukebox with the best and most up to date tunes around town? Of course, the question was a no-brainer, a real no-brainer, for real, because Billy just had to know the answer before he said it. See Billy is none other than the son of the owner of Jimmy Jack’s Diner, the most popular hang-out for teens, young and old, in the whole southern coastal Maine area.

Perhaps an explanation is in order. First off, the Jimmy Jack’s Diner we are referring to is the one on Main Street (really U.S. Route One but everybody calls it Main Street just to be in tune with the seven million other Main Streets that are really part of some state or federal road system and are just as forgettable in the dreary pass through towns of wayward America) down by the old long closed MacAdams Textile Mills, the one with the primo jukebox I just mentioned. The other Jimmy Jack’s Diner, the one over on Atlantic Avenue heading to the beach, is strictly for the early supper, two dinners for the price of one before six, Monday through Thursday, discounts for seniors all day, every day, and tourista in summer, place. With no jukebox, and with no need for such an object to draw the oldsters in.

Second, don’t be fooled by the Jimmy Jack thing, like it was some wayward down home Alabama or Mississippi thing. That’s a vanilla American thing that Billy’s father, real name Jean Jacques LaCroix, picked out when everybody after World War II wanted to leave their heritage behind and drop hyphens. Billy, Jimmy Jack, hell, even Josh Breslin on his mother‘s side (nee Leblanc) are nothing but French-American from way back, not Parisian types though but from Canada, you know Quebec or Nova Scotia, places like that.

And don’t get any idea, any idea at all that Billy LaCroix, or Jimmy Jack’s Diner’s jukebox, is filled up with hokey Cajun ancient Arcadian twos-step jolie blon memory accordion stuff. No Billy is not the king hell king of, maybe prince, given his age, of that kingdom but the, like I said before, be-bop teen night. That means rock, rock and roll for the squares, maybe a doo-wop tune or a weeper for the girls just to keep things interesting. And that has been true for a while.

Here’s how it works. Mr. LaCroix (although everybody calls him Jimmy Jack, except Mrs. LaCroix who still calls him some romanticky, smoochy, lovey-dovey, Jean Jacques, for some reason) figured out that with two diners in one town he wanted to cater to two different clienteles. You already know about the nursing home diner over on Atlantic Avenue for cheapos trying to impress nobody since everybody is already married. But the real Jimmy Jack’s with jukebox in tow is now strictly for teen-agers, for those who want to be teenagers but can’t because they are too old (or too young, maybe), and at night, especially weekend nights a little older crowd, a motorcycle and hot road crowd really for action but in need of early evening or late night (Jimmy Jack’s is open 24/7) refreshments and a little hot music to get things going. And to check out, yah, check out the honeys who line up around the place to be checked out. But you figured that out already. I hope.

And this is where Billy comes in, although now that you know some stuff asking Josh that question about who had the best jukebox was nothing but pure vanity on his part. Jsut playing his part now that he is king, or prince or something. But what got Jimmy Jack pushing the teen scene business is from the time he met Stu Miller, the king hell king and not no prince either but a real king of the hot road night, the only serious night around Olde Saco. Stu came into Jimmy Jack’s one day, one afternoon, from what I heard, for some coffee and. Business was a little slow so they got to talking and during the conversation Stu mentioned that the joint could use a jukebox so that kids who wanted to hear the latest tunes about twelve times in a row could do so in comfort, maybe dance a little, and just hang out.

Jimmy Jack didn’t think much of the idea while Stu was talking until about a half hour later while they were still mulling it over, pro and con, at least fifteen girls began filling up the booths and ordering Cokes and. And, of course, if fifteen girls are, just casually after a hard day looking beautiful at school and all, sitting in any public space for more than two minutes then, like lemmings to the nearby sea, thirty guys are going to be hanging around the booths ordering their Pepsi and. Of course, the real draw was Stu and his custom-built ’57 fire red Chevy that every girl in town, and from what I heard a few women, a couple of married ones too, wanted a ride in. And enough had suceeded although with what lure we will leave to the reader's imagination, girls and women both, so that hanging around old Jimmy Jack’s, or any other such place where Stu might plant his flag was just plain good luck for any girl (or woman) looking to try her luck.

You know, naturally, that Stu still has a special parking spot out in front of Jimmy Jack’s and no one, not police or anybody, had better be seen in it, or else. What you don’t know is that once Stu made Jimmy Jack’s his headquarters the jukebox was a sure thing and the master mad man in charge of keeping the machine filled with the latest hits and throwing out last week’s faded flowers was none other than Billy LaCroix. And his vanity question. Although Josh, as is his wont, will probably be scratching his head for a while over why Billy asked that question, one and all should know that what makes Jimmy Jack’s jukebox jump is one William La Croix.

See Billy, since about the age of eight, has had an ear for the rumble coming out of the hills of rock and roll, for the real deal stuff, and the fakos too. So you can be sure that there will be plenty of Brenda Lee and her All Alone Am I and Break It To Me Gently for the swooning girls, and guys who have just been dumped by their true loves and couldn’t express themselves better than listening to Brenda eighty-six times to get over it, and they do,listen that is, the getting over part is a state secret. Of course the Drifters up-beat Up On The Roof (and whatever dream image that roof brings to mind) will get play as will the soapy Everley Brothers’ Crying In Rain. And Billy says Shelley Fabares’ Johnny Angel is nothing but candy for those self-same swooning girls and, get this, guys too because she looks kind of innocent foxy the way a lot of guys like their frills.

Jesus, you know every last dance dee-jay is hoping and praying that nobody ever, ever gets tired of last dance of the night because ‘Til by The Angels is built for nothing but last dance time. And every guy is hoping he gets lucky, and girls do too although they are wary of showing in staid stuffy Catholic slam down Olde Saco. By the way forget Neil Sedaka’s Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, The Lettermen’s When I Fall In Love and Brian Hyland’s Sealed With A Kiss. Strictly faded flowers. You see what I mean. Yah, Jimmy Jack’s was the best.

***From The Rag Blog- People's Park and beyond:

People's Park and beyond:
The way we were

By Chellis Glendinning / The Rag Blog / May 26, 2011
I plopped down onto the sidewalk in the first row of cross-legged protestors, eye-level with the shin-guards of the first row of National Guardsmen. My hair dropped down my back in a braid, and I was wearing a shirt made of an Indian-print bedspread. The blonde next to me leaned over and disclosed that she was on acid, in fact that she took acid every day.

I know all the details because a photograph of us showed up in Newsweek a few days later: me, the acid head, the dudes with their gas masks and rifles. It was snapped by photojournalist Peter Barnes, who later broke from the “objectivity” of press work, wrote a book on the oppression of soldiers, founded the progressive credit-card company Working Assets, wrote some more books -- and even later than that, by 20 years and wild providence, became lovers with the subject of his camera aim whose Indian-print shirt had long since shredded into compost.

Another photo appeared in that article about the rabble-rousers in Berkeley: a helicopter soaring between the Campanile and Sproul Hall dropping toxic CS gas into the plaza like it was Vietnam. Down at ground level people were screaming, fainting, falling down, blinded, retching, and the National Guard was advancing into the crowds cracking skulls with their batons.

My husband Bill and I somehow ratcheted our bodies away from the toxic clouds, into the cafeteria, down the spiral staircase of the kitchen, and out into the lower plaza. It was the first (and last) time I ever hurled a rock through a window, I was so appalled by the military exercise, and I wonder to this day whatever happened to the woman on acid.


On Bloody Thursday, May 29, 1969, a crowd at Dwight Way and Telegraph is despersed with teargas, a few minutes before the Alameda County deputies came down the street with their shotguns. Photo by Kathryn Bigelow / Peoples Park.



The Third World Liberation Strike demanded that we students skip classes, so I regrouped in the Victorian house that Bill and I rented on Walnut Street, turned my attention to cooking Adele Davis-style, shook my fist during protests against racism, played volleyball with my professor-pal Troy Duster and his social-science comrades... and quietly kept up with my homework.

I was taking The Sociology of the Family. At the end of the quarter, when I decided I’d hand in my paper on women in the Soviet Union and take the final so I could still graduate, the template was laid for a nightmare that plagued my dreams for decades after.

I nervously approached the lecture hall that I hadn’t stepped Swedish clog into for three months. To my terror it was empty. Abandoned, reassigned, unavailable, gone. No students. No prof. No sign redirecting the Returning Striker.

Panic emanated from The Sociology of the Family again when I sheepishly edged toward the departmental office to retrieve the paper and final exam I had somehow managed to hand in. I rifled through the pile to no avail: neither was there -- and I felt as adrift as a hippie waif on Telegraph Avenue. I finally mustered the courage to ask the secretary, and she offered that I must be “the one” who was instructed to see the prof.

He had a beard and glasses (as if I even remembered what he looked like). With a stern voice he told me to sit down, and I felt the axe about to fall. He then smiled and explained that there had been only two A’s in the whole quarter... and they were my paper and my exam. It was hardly the moment to speak of irony, as he blubbered on encouraging me to pursue graduate sociology. I had a flare for it, apparently. Somehow the news was more stultifying than if he’d announced I’d been kicked out for fraud.

The strike was a raging success, laying the ground for what then became a norm in higher education: Black, Chicano, Asian, and Native American studies. I went on to write books that sprang from such experiences as our Third World Liberation Strike -- and at least hinted that I might have kind-of taken some sociology classes.


National Guardsmen confront students at Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus, May 20, 1969. Photo Dick Corten / Peoples Park.


I really can’t figure out how I have wrangled my way through this life, somehow doing the most out-there-outrageous things -- and at the same time being so timid.

The Café Mediterraneum was clearly the place to hang out. Michael Delacour was always there in his pea coat, earnestly talking revolution. There was Moe, with his waning hairline and cigar. Marty Schiffenbauer with his shorts, combat boots, and curly red locks flying every which-way. Old Carroll, the ghetto astrologer. Street poet Julia Vinograd in her yellow cap.

It was all I could do to go in there, I was so nervous: the place was that cool.

It was where the hot-and-heavy political strategizing took place. Where the Red Family grabbed a break from haggling about who did the dishes in the commune. Where the seekers from Shambhala Bookstore talked Krishnamurti, astrology, and Tibetan Buddhism. Where Simone de Beauvoir mixed it up with Martin Heidegger. Where the espresso machine swooshed, Vivaldi’s “Primavera” echoed, and folks sported Mao caps. Where, for Chrissake, everyone smoked... Galoise.

I went, at first ordering cappuccino dusted with chocolate and toting the de rigueur blue pack of cancer sticks, later (after I launched a brief stint with a two-hour-a-day yoga-meditation practice), the far thinner rose-hips tea.

But I always felt a tad “thin” in the cool department.

I cottoned right up to the fashion side of things, though. I mean, how many cases of scabies can be traced to the ultra-wide bell-bottoms scrounged from piles of threads on the concrete floor of the San Pablo army-navy store?

As my signature, I donned the Pirate Coat I paid $15 for at the Paris flea market. Some days I boasted a green leather jacket hinting of London Mod, purchased at the hippest of boutiques, Red Square, and my closet burst with slinky 1930s dresses.

But maybe the finest of couture happened when we dressed up in garb appropriate to the film we were seeing: tux and gowns for Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers; trench coats for noir; boxy 1940s suits and spectators for Preston Sturges; kimonos for Rashomon.

Being in jail had its perks. Quiet time, good food, ample bedding, exercise, books for illumination, freedom to roam -- they were not among them.

But it was a pre-feminist moment for us women to be together. I know now that we could have done things differently. There simply did not have to be that pre-midnight crescendo of panicked voices in a solitaire cell that some 100 women from the Mass Bust were now crammed into; we could have gathered into small groups to quietly discuss terror and claustrophobia. We could have been more supportive of our disparate needs. We could have meditated. Or done a ritual.

But what did we know?

We did know that the big bust was coming. Our own private rendition of Deep Throat within the police department had tipped us off, and a few had met in a living room just off campus to weigh our options. Tom Hayden was there. Wendy Schlesinger. Delacour. Bill Miller.

But somehow any planning we mustered had zero effect when the shit hit the fan and the cops cordoned off Shattuck Avenue, hemming in not just us anti-war protestors, but also innocent mailmen and shopping mothers. I was one of the Health Food 15. Guilty as all get-out, we had rushed into Goodson’s, grabbed wire shopping baskets, and pretended to be buying organic oatmeal -- but sure enough, a policeman emerged tall and angry through the back door and rounded us up for the bus ride to Santa Rita Detention Center.

Knowing it was coming, I had made my own plan for bail. It’s not a plan that -- what with post-9-11 paranoia -- would fly today, but it did back then. I had hand-penned a letter to Wells Fargo bank authorizing my commune-mate to take out $300 from my savings account, and when he showed up at the jail with papers for my release, I was never happier to see a parking lot.

The stories that came out of the men’s section were grim. While we women had had the freedom to fashion the plastic bags filled with Wonder-bread-bologna sandwiches into “volleyballs” for our nervous amusement, the men had been jammed face down in the yard and made to lie there without flinching through the night. One had his head tied to an iron pipe, and an officer had banged the pipe till blood gushed from his eyes, nose, and mouth.

In the end, the Health Food 15 got off through the efforts of our pro bono lawyer Bob Treuhaft. And in the end, the perk was seeing the system from the inside out.

In their humongous leather jackets, the Black Panthers came on as fierce as the police they were bucking. One day a militaristic line-up of them made the trek from downtown Oakland to hold forth at the noon rally in Sproul Plaza.

Their message was kind of confusing to those of us who had grown up on “We Shall Overcome” and sharpened our political teeth in the South during Mississippi Summer. Bristling with the radicalism of the international liberation/decolonization movements, the Black Panthers announced that the new revolutionary tack was to stand alone, Whitey not invited. At the same time, they demanded our support.

After that, a lot of interracial marriages broke apart in a frenzy of political realignment. Along with everyone else, I was reading Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and Frantz Fanon’s notion of violence against whites as a cleansing act was flying through the halls of academia, so I wasn’t completely in the dark about rage, separatism, and self-empowerment.

Just then something began to appear in the dark, hung on a peg in the hallway of the apartment we shared with a university secretary, who was white. It was the fiercest black-leather jacket of all. Every time it was there, a heavy silence emanated from behind her closed door, and soon she began to show up in a black beret behind the card table, taking the money and handing out leaflets, at Panther events.

I could only think that she, among very few, had mastered the delicacies of white support.

I had no idea that we activists -- sometimes amassed in crowds of 3,000, sometimes 100,000 -- had, through the years of rampaging around campus and in the streets, developed an unspoken method: a way of forming, spreading, taking over the city, then dispersing, and finally re-congealing like a dance that was in our genes.

That is, until the neophytes arrived -- which happened the summer after People’s Park when every Tom, Dick, and Hari Krishna east of Sproul Plaza decided that Berkeley was the place to hone one’s revolutionary skills. Suddenly, up against the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department “Blue Meanies,” the streets became a place of edginess, chaos, and utter lack of method.

I said, “To Hell With It,” and retired to my commune on Vine Street. It was a good time to pull back for a spell. The obvious next step was something akin to what we’d seen in the film Battle of Algiers, and indeed many in the New Left were joining gun clubs, just as some Students for a Democratic Society radicals back East were morphing into the Weather Underground.

Bill and I hightailed it to Europe, bought a second-hand Deux Chevaux in Amsterdam, and tooled at 40 m.p.h. through Holland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Andorra, Spain, and Morocco. When we got back and retreated to a maple-sugar farm in Vermont, sure enough, the FBI tracked us down and paid a visit to see what we were up to.

Things being as they were, Bill refused to ID any of the folks in the photos and told the FBI dude to shove it.

[Chellis Glendinning is the author of five books, including My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. Her Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade, both won the National Federation of Press Women book award in nonfiction, in 2000 and 2006 respectively. She lives in Marquina, Bolivia, and can be reached via www.chellisglendinning.org.]



The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 11:45 AM
Labels: American History, Berkeley, Chellis Glendinning, New Left, People's Park, Rag Bloggers, Sixties

5 Make/read comments:
Mariann said...
This is brilliant -- thanks so much -- rings true in every detail. Indeed, the way we were.

May 26, 2011 2:46:00 PM
sg65 said...
Thank, Chellis.
You uncovered some details I never knew. You've revealed some of the intensity, perplexity, and endurance of the issues and the insanity of that time. Your lookalike, Jane Fonda, wrote a similar review of a shorter and less intense protest of that era in Cleveland Heights.

May 26, 2011 6:02:00 PM
Anonymous said...
This is a valuable historical gift, especially for a 16-year-old guy missing all the excitement because he had sailed to Europe.

I sort of made up for it by living near People's Park in 2005-2006, and playing on the stage in the Park my "Have a Global Warming Day."

In my May 2011 essay "Social Justice Activists Must Take Into Account Ecological, Cultural, and Economic Transformation" I wrote:

The alternative to the faltering "$ociety," the love tribe, has been practiced long before the hippies began the Back to the Land movement at People's Park, Berkeley, in 1969. Today, some of us still live so as to constructively undermine the dominant system, living outside it as much as possible. We thereby hasten -- at least by example -- the end of the corporate economy and the U.S. as we know it. We are messengers and preservers of viable natural systems. We stand for nonviolence, and thus support a truly sustainable culture. Perhaps at best we are showing the way modestly and minimally, through a tough transformation beyond the settling of the dust.
(Read the whole essay at http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/725/1/ )
- Jan Lundberg

May 26, 2011 9:55:00 PM
Dana said...
Thanx for taking us all back to that time and place.

I still remember (fondly) the going away party that was thrown for you when you chose to move away from the San Francisco Bay Area. I called you a "cross-over" revolutionary...because you were involved in so many revolutions (political, spiritual, health, women's rights)...and you continue to work and be on these frontlines.

Blessings and blissings to you...

May 27, 2011 12:00:00 PM
Didier said...
The way you were
"To assure that our history survives the inevitable tendency of revisionism, it's critically important that we grow our own versions of what happened and why"

Reading the FBI files.http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/new-left
COINTELPRO\New Left- San Francisco Part 03 of 03 P 86
"Students and Revolution : a discussion. Patterns of irrationality" by Lewis S. Feuer,

According to Feuer, "every student movement is a last desperate protest on behalf of the children’s world ". And many other insanities. Read it.
And tell and write your story, for the next generations.
Keep on trucking
Didier

***In Honor Of The 93rd Anniversary Of the Founding Of The Communist International-From The International Communist League's Marxist Bulletin Series- The Third Congress (1921):Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization

The Third Congress (1921):Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization

by Reuben Samuels New York, 5 September 1998
The Second Congress of the Communist International [17 July-7 August 1920] that Steve dealt with took place at what in hindsight turned out to be the peak of a revolutionary wave that followed World War I and was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution. As you will recall, a great map was hung at the Congress charting the progress of the Red Army and its march on Warsaw. But the Red Army was unable to take Warsaw.

The massive scope of the postwar class war reached the point of revolutionary crisis in countries like Hungary, Germany and Italy. It contributed decisively to the Red Army victory over the White Guard forces and their imperialist allies. The imperialists were unable to crush the Soviet workers state, but despite heroic battles, without a tempered and authoritative revolutionary party, the combative working classes of Hungary, Germany and Italy were unable to overthrow their own bourgeoisies.

As Lenin stated at the Third Congress in the summer of 1921:

"The result is a state of equilibrium which, although highly unstable and precarious enables the Socialist republic to exist—not for long—of course, within the capitalist encirclement."
—"Theses for a Report on Tactics of the R.C.P.", Collected Works (CW), Vol. 32, p. 454, First English Edition (Progress Publishers, 1965)

The defeats of this period demonstrated both the immaturity of the newly formed communist parties and the ability of the Social Democracy—despite its role in WWI mobilizing the proletariat for the imperialist slaughter, and despite its vanguard role in the imperialist expeditions against the Soviet Union—to maintain its base among the organized working class in the advanced industrial countries. So we had in the period leading up to the Third Congress a mighty coal miners strike in Britain that was betrayed by the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy. A very similar development took place in the fall of 1920 in Italy, which was the mightiest upsurge of the working people in all of Europe in that period, which was also betrayed by Social Democracy. Then there was the defeat of the German proletariat in Saxony, March 1921, crushed by social-democratic governments. In each case, the defeat was a confirmation of what Trotsky wrote in the Lessons of October (1924): "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, with a substitute for the party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer" (The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-25, p. 252).

At the Third Congress, Trotsky, in concluding the opening report that he gave on the economic situation and the prospects for proletarian revolution, stated:

"Now for the first time we see and feel that we are not so immediately near to the goal, to the conquest of power, to the world revolution. At that time, in 1919, we said to ourselves: 'It is a question of months.' Now we say: 'It is perhaps a question of years'."
—quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Vol. 3, p. 385 (Macmillan, 1953)
The Third Congress was devoted to using this period of precarious equilibrium to prepare the communist parties that were often communist parties only in name and stated goals, but not in their activity and organization.

In summing up the work of the Third Congress, Trotsky made what I think is an important point about historical materialism, about the crises of the bourgeoisies such as developed directly out of WWI. This point was important to counteract crisis-mongers like the Healyites in the '60s—or for that matter the Stalinists in the Third Period—who claimed that there were crises so severe that their own dynamic alone would bring down the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie would create a form of social suicide. And Trotsky responded to this in light of his report to the Third Congress where he had emphasized the temporary stability of capitalism:

"History has provided the basic premise for the success of this [proletarian] revolution—in the sense that society cannot any longer develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not at all assume upon itself— in place of the working class, in place of the politicians of the working class, in place of the Communists—the solutions of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian vanguard...History says to the working class, 'You must know that unless you cast down the bourgeoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civilization. Try, solve this task!'" —
"School of Revolutionary Strategy," The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2, p. 6 (Monad Press, 1972)

So it was clear to the Bolsheviks—at least it was clear to Lenin and Trotsky going into the Third Congress—that it was no longer sufficient to lay out the broad outlines in principles of the Bolshevik Revolution. Equally important was transmitting the strategy of revolutionary struggle for the conquest of power. The two decades of experience of building die Bolshevik Party, the instrument for the proletarian revolution, had to be made available to these fledgling communist parties that had gathered around the Comintern. This experience had to be made accessible to them and had to be applied by them to the specific circumstances in their own countries.

The debates that took place at this Congress, the debates over tactics, party building, the relationship to the trade unions, communist work among women and youth, could not have taken place without the programmatic ground-breaking work of the First and Second Congresses: the "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World," the "Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the "21 Conditions for Admission to the CI." These documents sought to draw the hard programmatic line against the centrists and opportunists who sought to destroy the new revolutionary international from within with their own brand of anti-revolutionary entrism. This was the framework in which this discussion could take place. It was not going to be a discussion with the centrists who would not split with the reformists.

Now this doesn't mean there was a cleavage between these Congresses. Lenin and Trotsky realized from the very beginning the necessity to impart their organizational and tactical experience to these revolutionaries who had been won to the October Revolution, but not yet won to Bolshevism. Lenin wrote the manual on tactics, "Left-Wing" Communism-An Infantile Disorder, so that it was in the hands of all the delegates to the Second Congress of the CI. But it was still necessary at this Congress to devote significant time to the struggle against the centrists and opportunists who were seeking to "get on the bandwagon" of the then extremely authoritative and popular October Revolution and its new International, offering a clean banner on which they could wipe their blood-besmirched hands.

To give you an example of the problems that the Comintern and the Bolsheviks faced, take the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Like the German party, in Czechoslovakia, the Comintern won a substantial section of the old Social Democracy and a party with hundreds of thousands of members. Now, the tradition of this party, very much like the French and German, was very reformist, very much in the tradition of Noske and the French Social Democracy. As late as 1919, a social-democratic coalition government sent Czech troops in to crush the Hungarian Soviet. However, this actually had a radicalizing influence on the base of the Social Democracy.

A substantial left wing took over the party headquarters and newspapers. The social-democratic leadership responded by calling in the troops. This resulted in a political general strike of one million workers in December 1920, just before the Third Congress of the Comintern. The most militant sections of this working class, however, were organized into separate national parties. Czechoslovakia was put together from the remnants of the Habsburg Empire, and the Slovaks and Sudeten Germans each had their own parties with substantial minorities of Jews, Gypsies, Hungarians—you name it, they had it. The parties were divided along national lines. And the strongest, the Bohemian-Moravian party, was also the most reformist and the last to declare its agreement with the Comintern and the 21 Conditions.

This was an anomalous situation: a country with two parties that said: 'We're ready, take us in!' And hanging back was a third party that says: 'We're almost ready! We agree with the 21 Conditions. We agree with getting together and having a united party.' Finally they held what many thought would be their unification congress in the middle of May, just one month before the Third Comintern Congress. But instead of unifying, the congress set up a "Committee of Action" for this purpose. It was really a delaying tactic to prevent the consolidation of a united communist party in Czechoslovakia. Going into the Comintern Congress, maybe there was a party, maybe there were three parties, but, then again, maybe no party. So, when you read reports and exchanges at the Congress, very angry about the leadership of the Czech Communist Party, you can understand why.
And this was not atypical. So much of the discredited Social Democracy was drawn in the wake of the authority and enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution that the sorting-out process was not easy.

NEP: A Necessary Retreat


Now, within the Soviet Union itself, the Soviet workers had successfully defended themselves from domestic counterrevolution backed by the intervention of 17 imperialist armies. The dictatorship of the proletariat was triumphant, but the proletariat was shattered as a class. It was at the expense of the physical existence of the working class that this victory was won.

In 1921, famine swept Russia. Even cannibalism reappeared. The proletariat, already a small minority of three million at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, was reduced by half. And very often this proletariat was subsidized, supported by the state simply to maintain intact remnants of the class, the basis for the dictatorship. This is graphically described in Deutscher's, The Prophet Unarmed: "...[B]y the end of the civil war, Russia's national income amounted to only one-third of her income in 1913...industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods produced before the war...the coal-mines turned out less than one-tenth and the iron foundries only one-fortieth of their normal output...the railways were destroyed." -p. 4

All the stocks, reserves and the exchange of goods and services on which the economy depended for its work were utterly destroyed. Russian cities and towns became so depopulated after 1921 that Moscow had only one-half and Petrograd one-third of their former inhabitants. And the people of the two capitals had for many months lived on a food ration of two ounces of bread and a few frozen potatoes.

What was the situation in the military? There were five million soldiers in 1920. There was a policy of demobilization, but how? What to do with five million armed men and women? There were no trains to transport the demobilized troops home. There was no fuel for them in the barracks. Many of these troops demobilized themselves and became bandit partisans. They would simply roam the countryside and the cities and try to forage food and a little bit of clothing to stay alive. This became such a significant problem that the Cheka, which is often mis-translated as secret police but was actually the Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation, formed a special section to combat banditism.

Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, worked in what was called the Department of Enlightenment and a lot of her "enlightenment" had to do with teenage bands that had no other way to survive than to act like gangs. They went out and foraged and stole what they could, by any means they could, to stay alive! At the time of the 1921 June-July Third Congress of the Comintern, bandit partisan warfare is still going on throughout the Soviet Union. I just mention one district, Temblov. In Temblov the old Socialist Revolutionaries had gotten together an armed band of 21,000, and this was just in one district. This was happening while the Third Congress was going on. If you read The Trotsky Papers (1917-1922), volume 2, put out by the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam you'll see more paper is devoted to Temblov than is devoted to the Third Congress.

This problem was increasingly taking the form of a civil war of the countryside against the cities. How to deal with it? As Lenin said: 'the easy part was expropriating the bourgeoisie. Difficult was defeating the imperialist-backed counterrevolution. But we did that too. Now we've hit the real bedrock of capitalism: the petty proprietors, the peasants. Without their food the cities cannot be rebuilt. There cannot be any kind of reconstruction under this devastation of civil war.'

It was necessary to make what was openly called a retreat: introducing a tax in kind for the peasantry. This is what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The tax in kind meant instead of having all their grain and foodstuffs taken by the state, they had to pay a certain amount in the form of taxes. Then they could market the rest. That is the restoration—within the context of state ownership of land—of market trade. Likewise, there was encouragement—not with a lot of success—of foreign concessions and foreign investment in Soviet industry.

Now, this policy was attacked by various oppositions within the Bolshevik Party. And Lenin's speeches and the reports to the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party deal with these positions in trying to hammer out a policy to deal with the catastrophic economic and social collapse. Under these conditions, the Kronstadt sailors revolt. This was a different generation from the Kronstadt sailors who formed the Red Guard and a cornerstone of the Red Army. Another generation had gone into the military, very closely tied to the countryside, which represented the peasant unrest there.

It was fundamentally a counterrevolutionary uprising. The main demand was: "Soviets without Bolsheviks!" This was also one of the main demands of the Workers Opposition. In a situation where the proletariat itself was shattered as a class, its only cohesive identity as an instrument of proletarian class-consciousness was the party, which itself, of course, was devastated. In the middle of this Congress it was necessary to take every delegate with military training and send them to Constant to put down the uprising. That's what you call a working congress.

The reaction of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) right wing, Dittmann and Crispien, was to say, 'You see, we're _ for the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in dark, backward Slavic Russia, to take power, to take responsibility for rebuilding from the devastation of the imperialist war, that is the source of all these problems. So, you see, yes we're for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but not where it exists, not where it is struggling to survive.'

These policies were also attacked by the ultra-lefts in Germany and Holland. They were also attacked by the Italian Socialist leader Serrati— remember him from the Second Congress? He's the guy that kept interrupting John Reed's report on the black question. 'Let's get on to the real proletariat.' I guess he didn't know what was happening to America.

So, NEP and economic reconstruction was one of the important, fighting issues of the Third Congress of the Comintern. This was a retreat and it was necessary to lay this out before the Tenth Party Congress, but also before the highest tribunal of the Communist movement, the CI, at the Third Congress. Lenin treated the Comintern as an international soviet that would render the final judgment on the policies not only for Germany, not only for Italy, but also for the Soviet Union. He of course fought so that the policies he thought should win would win.

Lenin was orchestrating just about everything that happened at the Congress insofar as it was possible, as he was a sick man by this time. But his principal report was on the tactics of the Russian Communist Party. He tied these questions together with the policies that were necessary in Western Europe, especially in the advanced industrial countries, but not only there.

If you read Carr and Detacher—especially Carr is very strong on this point—they basically see the Third Congress as a whole chapter called the "Congress of Retreat." Carr's point is that with the defeat of the march on Warsaw, with the defeats in Hungary and Italy, the Soviet Union was forced to be "reasonable" and "statesmanlike," forced to adopt Realpolitik, the politics of national interest, to which the policies of the Comintern would be subordinate. If you want trade and investment from the capitalists of other countries you have to tone down overthrowing them, don't you? Which is exactly what Serrati charged about the NEP.

But the reality was that the Bolshevik Revolution was made for the world revolution, and its survival depended on world revolution. With its delay the Bolsheviks were compelled on the one hand to take certain measures to buy time within the Soviet Union, and at the same time to struggle for the preparation of these new parties of the Comintern so that they could fulfill their task.

Split at Halle Wins Mass Base for KPD

So what's happening in Germany? The USPD, which had considerable authority—it claimed at least on paper 700,000 to 800,000 members-had a congress in Halle in October 1920 to decide on affiliation to the Comintern on the basis of the 21 Conditions that had been adopted at the Second Congress. The USPD split, a majority going with the KPD and Comintern, a minority retaining the "Independent" label for another year while fading back into the SPD. The Communist Party brought 40,000 members to this unification, the USPD left wing brought about 300,000 to 400,000. So the number of Communists after the fusion increased tenfold.

It was not accidental that this congress was held in Halle. Halle was a left-wing stronghold of the workers movement in Germany. It was the center of a region, the province of Saxony, which contained a strong component of radical miners. Like American miners, they lived in relatively backward, isolated communities. Nevertheless, radicalized by their experiences in the blood-soaked trenches of WWI, they very often came back left-wing Social Democrats, members of the USPD.

Also, the war had accelerated the development of a petrochemical industry in Halle-Merseberg. In 1895 there were a thousand workers. By the end of WWI there were 35,000 workers, 23,000 of whom worked in the Leuna Werke [plant] near Halle. It was the biggest industrial plant then in Germany. It was a real stronghold of the USPD that claimed a membership in this one district of 80,000. Not only did the Communist Party and the USPD have a substantial base there, but so did the ultraleft syndic lists of the KAPD.

This was reflected in the class struggle in this region as well. Now, you might have read in your history books that in the Weimar Republic, with that wonderful, democratic constitution, workers got the eight-hour day. But it was a six-day or 48-hour workweek, so don't get so excited. And it was not implemented anywhere but in some sections of the civil service and in this region. Everywhere else people were working 54 hours a week. That was the norm. Wages were higher in this region. People got a third more vacation. And if I told you how little vacation you got you'd think you must be in America! Nevertheless they got a third more in this region and this represented some sharp class struggle.

I'll just give you one example. In January the mine bosses decided, 'We're gonna bring in a special police to be guards in the mines.' And workers just walked out and said, 'We're gonna hire our own guards, they're gonna be war veterans and workers who've been injured working in the mines, and they're gonna be beholden to us and not the mine chiefs.' And they won.

This was a militant section of the working class with a huge industrial base that had, just like in Russia, grown up in a period of less than 15 or 20 years. It had won substantial gains and was strongly Communist. On 20 February 1921, there were elections to the Prussian parliament (called the Landtag). In these elections to the Prussian state parliament the SPD got 70,000 votes. What was left of the USPD got 75,000 and the Communist Party got 197,000 votes. That is one-third more than the combined votes of the SPD and USPD. This didn't go unnoticed to the rest of the ruling class in Germany and is the background to the 1921 March Action, that took place mainly in this region.

This was a red sore in the eyes of the German bourgeoisie at a time when they had to pay substantial reparations to the victors of WWI, especially France and Britain. In fact one of the demands raised by the Communists was, "Make the bourgeoisie pay for Versailles!" Lenin's attitude was, 'We don't care about Versailles, we've got other things on the agenda. If we took power in Germany, we might also be compelled to pay reparations. But the main thing is to get the power.' He drew a very hard line in this regard against the kind of nationalist propaganda that came out in this period, including from the Communist Party. This problem worsens and will be dealt with in greater detail in the next class.

Back to 1921: What's going on in the KPD? After the fusion they had two chairmen: one from the old USPD left wing, Ernst Daumig, and the other who was the chairman of the Communist Party after Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches were murdered, Paul Levi. Paul Levi was an attorney who had defended Luxemburg and Liebknecht before the Kaiser's court. He joined the Spartacists and the left wing of the Zimmerwald Movement during WWI. He was known to Lenin, so he had some authority, but he also had some other less sterling qualities which we'll get to in a moment.
Radek was the Comintern rep in Germany, or seemed to be. They have a phrase in German—"the man for all things." So he was the all-purpose representative for this and that. Imprisoned by the Social Democrats, he met in jail with one of Germany’s foremost industrialists, Walter Rathenau, to discuss trade relations with Russia. Rathenau organized Germany's industrial supply line for WWI. He also happened to be Jewish. (Rathenau paid with his life for his trade and military negotiations with the Soviet Union, gunned down the following year by two fascist army officers.)

"Open Letter": Precursor to the United Front

One of the more intelligent things Levi and Radek came up with was the "Open Letter," which was drafted and printed in the beginning of January 1921, right after the fusion of the KPD and the USPD left wing. It was short, punchy and to the point. It consisted of a bunch of what we would call economic and transitional demands: for example, higher wages; the unemployed should be paid at the standard wage rate of the industry from which they have been laid off; pensions for the old people; distribution of cheap food; workers control, etc. Germany went through all these wars and the castles still stand, right? Throw out the princes, bring in the homeless.

The "Open Letter" was an appeal to all the workers' organizations—from the SPD and the big trade-union federation to the KAPD (a left split from the KPD) and its little union organization called the "one big union." This document was published in the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne [Red Flag] in January 1921. It anticipated the "Theses on Tactics" that would be discussed at the Third CI Congress and the united-front tactic that was elaborated at the Fourth. And it anticipated the Transitional Program upon which the Fourth International was founded.

I've always believed this document had no impact except with people like Lenin and Trotsky. Wrong. The Social Democrats did not go rushing to endorse this document and to sign up to throw the princes out of the palaces and to seize the shutdown factories. But a big congress of metalworkers held in Berlin at the end of January unanimously adopted the demands of this document. No social-democratic representative from the union movement could vote against it, at most they could abstain, because the document was too powerful. There were meetings of what was called the trade-union Kartell or federation for Greater Berlin. The same thing happened, it was unanimously adopted. It was extremely popular.

It turns out the place where it had no impact was in the KPD, because the tactic was never fought out. Levi had a bright idea. He got together with Radek, they wrote it up—after all he's the Chairman, right—so it appears in their newspaper Rote Fahne, bang, that's it! Are we going to implement it? How are we going to implement it? Were there any discussions to that effect? No.

Livorno: "Unity" That Strangled Italian Revolution

Now the next thing that shapes the history of the German party doesn't happen in Germany, it happens in Italy. And we get back to our old friend, Serrati. The Italian Socialist Party called a congress in Livorno in January 1921. This is after this party, through its reformist right wing and the trade-union bureaucrats, had sabotaged this great industrial and agrarian workers uprising. Because it didn't lead to workers revolution, they had in effect opened the road to the fascists. So now they're going to have a congress and decide what they're going to do about the Comintern and those 21 Conditions.
And everybody's there from Turati and Serrati to Bordiga—they're all there. What the Comintern wanted was for Serrati to break with the reformists. He refused. The Comintern sent two representatives—the Hungarian, Rakosi, and a Bulgarian, Kabakchiev. It was very hard to get people into Italy at this point. They traveled there under extreme difficulties. Comintern agents did not get the red carpet treatment from border guards.

Zinoviev, who opens the Third Congress with one of his usual pithy four-hour reports on the work of the ECCI, describes what happens to these guys when they get to Livorno. They walk into the Congress and are greeted with delegates yelling, "Long live the Pope!" This is in Italy! You thought the Pope lived in Rome? No, the Vatican is in Moscow. If you didn't know, you found out at this congress. Zinoviev even claims somebody released a bird at this point, a dove, into the congress. The Comintern reps come this great distance at great peril to be heckled and mistreated. This is internationalism?

Paul Levi got better treatment. He went down there in part at the initiative of Clara Zetkin. He pursued an entirely different policy, a policy counterpoised to the Comintern. He argued, 'Well, if you've got a party that is outside the Comintern like the USPD, then it's okay to split it. But if you have a party that's already in the Comintern, like the Italian Socialist Party (the whole party had formally joined the Comintern), then how can you splinter them? It's like cutting off a part of the body, say the arm, to have such a split.'
And we're talking about 1921, that is several months after these same people that are sitting in the same hall had sabotaged the general strikes, the plant occupations, the occupation of land by agrarian workers, so magnificent and so betrayed. The bourgeoisie got scared enough that they then backed the fascists: 'We can't just rely on Serrati and Turati to keep this working class under control. Time to go for the surgical operation and apply the knife.'

Levi goes back to Berlin really proud of himself and makes a report to the Central Committee or Zentralausschuss—his report is counterposed to the policy of the Comintern. Everybody knows that. His report is put up for a vote. He loses, narrowly. At this point, Levi, who is the chairman of the Party, Clara Zetkin, Daumig, who is co-chairman, and two other members of the Zentralausschuss resign, like it's a parliamentary vote of no confidence: 'You didn't vote for me, so I'm not going to be on your Zentralaus¬schuss anymore. I'm taking a powder.' So they leave. However, they don't resign their actual seats in parliament. These they keep.

Now you had a party that was very much divided between the so-called left wing and a right wing of which Levi, and Zetkin, to a certain extent, were representative. They wanted to do things like the "Open Letter." They also wanted to do things like support Serrati at Livorno. But these issues were never fought out.

Lenin writes a personal letter to Levi and Zetkin in April 1921, after the March Action. And he says, 'On the Italian Question I think you're wrong. But I'm mad at you because you walked out of the central committee simply because you lost a vote. How are we ever going to build a collective leadership if we can't even have political struggle within the leadership? So, by doing this 1) you undermined the "Open Letter," which was never fought for anyway in the party, and 2) you opened the road to the so-called leftists in the party.' The leftists now felt they had a free hand.

Indeed they had. A funny thing, how often today's ultraleftists are tomorrow's rightists. Levi was replaced as chairman by Heinrich Brandler, who would go from being a leader of the so-called lefts to a leader of the Right Opposition associated with Bukharin in Soviet Russia. He was a construction worker, a union official from the age of 16, and an early supporter of the Spartacists. He would be chairman of the party again in the crucial months of 1923 when the KPD blew a final decisive revolutionary opportunity.

In Berlin the so-called leftists were represented by the Fischer-Maslow-Reuter group. You may have already heard of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. Ernst Reuter would go on to a short tenure as General Secretary of the KPD before following the road blazed by Levi back into the SPD.

Comrades who have visited Berlin may recall that in the center of the West part there is a traffic circle bordered by the Technical University called Ernst Reuter Platz. This was not named after Reuter for his service or disservice to German communism. At the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 when Berlin was under four-power occupation, Reuter was elected "Lord Mayor" of Berlin. Notorious for his anti-communist views, Reuter was vetoed by the Soviets. The Lord Mayor returned the compliment, calling the country which freed Europe from fascism "a nation of slaves."

The German bourgeoisie has a long history of dealing with revolution—in Germany, in France, in Hungary and elsewhere. It has a lot of experience and it augmented its experience by recruiting a number of ex-leftists through the instrumentality of the Social Democracy.

The March Action

Back to Germany, early 1921. Who shows up in Germany but Bela Kun and Kun's sidekick, Jozsef Pogany, a.k.a. John Pepper, who in the United States steered the CP into the Farmer-Labor Party mess. These people messed up the 1919 Hungarian Revolution—they fused with the Social Democrats and refused to give land to the peasants. They made every mistake you could make, for which the working class, as always, paid. Based on this authority they were sent as Comintern agents to Germany. How this happened is not well documented and remains a mystery.

Bela Kun was big on the "Revolutionary Offensive." What is offensive about it we'll find out shortly. Backed by Kun and Pepper, suddenly Rote Fahne started raising a lot of abstract propaganda: "Overthrow the bourgeoisie! Down with the regime!"
Lenin's letters to the KPD after the Third Congress and Trotsky's remarks in "School of Revolutionary Strategy" underlined the German bourgeoisie’s method of operation. The rulers set up the German proletariat where they are most left-wing and provoke a premature, isolated uprising and chop off its head. Then they send the armed forces and Nazi gangs city to city, chop, chop, decapitating the party, its work facilitated by the KPD's federated structure. That's what we saw in 1919, first in January and later in March. That's what we saw in March of 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and what we see again in March of 1921. The architects of the bourgeoisie’s "March Action" were the very experienced social-democratic Prussian minister of police Carl Severing and Saxon President Otto Horsing.

In war-devastated Germany, working conditions were terrible. Miners, in order to survive, got to take a couple of bags of scrap coal home. That was stopped. No more free coal; buy it on the market like everybody else. Then the bosses claimed that the workers were stealing. That's always a big, explosive issue. The workers are the thieves, not the capitalists?

After WWI, most workers kept their guns. They thought they might come in handy for another kind of war. During the Kapp Putsch in the previous year, armed workers militias sprouted up throughout Germany. Although their arms were pathetic compared to the state arsenal, they could deter fascist gangs and some paramilitary forces. Now the capitalist rulers declared they were going to disarm the workers and put an end to "unrest"—the codeword for class struggle.

For this purpose they created a new paramilitary police force, the Schutzpolizei (Schupos) and organized it into groups of a hundred, or Hun-dertschaften. They were going to occupy the mines around Halle and search the homes of workers to suppress "stealing" and disarm the workers.

The Communist Party was also thinking of having a March offensive. Now, in Germany, everything revolves around holidays, like Easter. The country totally shuts down for the four-day Easter weekend. They wanted to have their general strike after Easter.
The bourgeoisie wouldn't cooperate. They started their offensive before Easter. Around the 16-17 of March they started moving Schupos into Halle. The workers were outraged and looked to the Communist Party for leadership. The Communist Party was not prepared, even though they'd been calling for a "general strike" and to "overthrow the bourgeoisie" for two months. The secret police raided the CP headquarters in February and reported: 'we can't find the evidence that they're preparing anything!' They hadn't prepared a damn thing.
Still the CP calls for a general strike. And it does get a response. In many of these small mining communities the workers took over, formed armed guards and set up committees that were embryonic Soviets. You had dual power in this one little region. In the Leuna Werke solidarity demonstrations increased in size to some 18,000 before all hell broke loose.

The government purposely didn't send enough troops to do the job. As the Schupos approached the Leuna Werke, the workers responded by occu¬pying the plant and forming a workers militia and a commissary. So Red Leuna is born; followed by Red Merseburg, then Red Ammendorf.

Communists were subjected to savage persecution in all capitalist countries and had to take certain elementary measures of self-defense. Recall the Palmer Raids—mass deportation of foreign-born leftists and mass imprisonment of many more here. That edifice to bourgeois democracy, the Weimar Republic, was built over the broken and bullet-riddled bodies of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches and thousands of the finest fighters. The KPD also took to heart the attack of many Communists throughout the world that they had not adequately protected Karl and Rosa. The Comintern, in its statutes and the 21 Conditions for Membership, insisted that Communist Parties must conduct such defensive measures and must work even when they have been declared "illegal" by reactionary, witch-hunting laws or when work must be conducted "underground" due to persecution by the state or fascist bands.

For this work the KPD had set up military and counter-espionage organizations, the Militdrrat and Nachrichtendienst. However, in the KPD this, like all work, was highly federated. Much was left to local initiative which sometimes got completely out of control. In the midst of all this, you've got the anarcho-syndicalist KAPD and a substantial current in the KPD that believes the philistine German working class isn't going to respond unless we give them a kick in the ass.

And the KAPD had some assistance from Max Hoelz, the Robin Hood of the German proletariat. Hoelz was a very interesting guy. He was a very high-grade technician in the repair and servicing of railroads. He formed a workers militia in the November Revolution. The revolution was suppressed but his militia lived on. He would do bank jobs and distribute funds to the poor, in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's question: is it a greater crime to rob a bank or own one? Usually he'd pick targets that were often justly hated by the proletariat, like courthouses. He is reputed to have derailed just plain personnel trains that had nothing to do with the movement of military goods. If so, we would have opposed this. All of this was based on the "Theory of the Offensive," that the working class cannot be motivated by consciousness of its own political interests and historical destiny; we need to ignite the working class with deeds of great daring. There was nothing new about this theory, it was not invented by Radek and Bela Kun. The Marxist movement had combated some anarcho-syndicalist tendencies since its birth in the 1840s.

The KPD with its own theory of the "Revolutionary Offensive" was not in too good a position to combat this—on the contrary. So the KPD sent Hugo Eberlein down to Halle to help out. He was the KPD representative at the founding Congress of the Comintern. A fine comrade, but he was a bit loony, and known among his comrades and fellow workers as "Hugo the Fuse," as he was behind some of the military activity of the KPD. His advice was, 'to really get workers moving here what we ought to do is take the two regional party secretaries, who seemed like pretty good guys, kidnap them and say the police did it. If that doesn't work, then we'll blow up a couple of party headquarters
and blame that on the police!'

I think those two regional party secretaries spiked Eberlein's inventive proposals. But the main problem was that the action in the March Action was restricted to Saxony and Halle. The KPD did try to extend the strike into other sections of Germany. In Berlin they had almost no support and their appeal for a general strike resulted in fist-fights with workers in front of AEG and other big industrial plants. The KPD did write an appeal to social-democratic workers. It was called, "Either you're for us or against us." Paul Levi said this was a declaration of war on four-fifths of the working class. He was not wrong. It also had another charming quality. It called on them to hang their leaders from the lampposts. You might call this an early version of the united front from below. As comrade Robertson said, their hearts were in the right place. But as you can imagine, this didn't make much of an impact in extending the strike to the social-democratic workers.
Hamburg was even more tragic. On the docks you had a division among longshoremen very much like the United States. You had steady guys who were social-democratic and then you had the casuals who were Communists. The steady guys had the jobs—there was high unemployment at that point in Hamburg. So the CP organized the unemployed to seize the docks. There were big physical fights, but the CP mobilized enough forces so they were able to occupy the docks. There was no attempt to win over the SPD workers except by the threat: "join us or else."

The Hamburg KPD liked showy demonstrations so they marched off the docks and down to the nearby Fish Market while the police and the Social Democrats took back the docks. This was burned into the memory of the social-democratic work force. (In October 1923 when Thalmann tried to bring about the uprising not knowing it had been canceled—it had been voted down in Chemnitz again—many of the social-democratic workers joined the police as volunteers to suppress the KPD-led uprising.)

In other cities, where the CP had a base, there were short, one-day general strikes, such as Essen. But workers in the Ruhr and elsewhere were not aware of what was happening in Saxony. So there was no preparation and no apparatus to pull them into a struggle.
The KPD "Revolutionary Offensive" played right into the hands of the bourgeoisie, so that the general strike could be suppressed militarily. To take the Leuna Werke 1,200 Schupos backed up by the Reichswehr and artillery were used. They shot into the plant that made ammonia knowing that it could set off an explosion. They captured several hundred workers, locked them up in a silo and kept them there for two weeks. Two dozen Communist youth who sought to liberate these workers—very courageous individuals—were all murdered, massacred. The number of dead is hard to estimate-there was a cover-up. The number of arrested is public record—6,000. Special courts were set up to deal with this. The Rote Hilfe, or Red Aid [the first Communist-affiliated defense league and an inspiration for the International Labor Defense], got its start providing legal defense and material support to the prisoners and their families, in many cases widows and families who had lost the breadwinner to this action. That was the March Action, which ended with the end of March.

Comrades asked me in Chicago, "What would have been a correct policy for Communists?" In fact in the "School of Revolutionary Strategy" Trotsky answers:
"The offensive was in reality launched by the Social-Democratic policeman Hoersing. This should have been utilized in order to unite all the workers for defense, for self-protection, even if, to begin with, a very modest resistance. Had the soil proved favorable, had the agitation met with a favorable response, it would then have been possible to pass over to the general strike. If the events continue to unfold further, if the masses rise, if the ties among the workers grow stronger, if their temper lifts, while indecision and demoralization seize the camp of the foe—then comes the time for issuing the slogan to pass over to the offensive."
-p. 21

As this essay shows, there was a discussion in the Comintern of what should have been done and how the Party should be prepared to avoid a similar situation. That was a crucial fight.

Levi, as you'll recall, had resigned as chairman of the party. And knowing that the March Action was about to happen—because Clara Zetkin made Bela go talk to him about it—he did the responsible thing...and went on vacation. He was in Vienna on his way to Italy where he seemed to enjoy spending time. Then the March Action started and he did come back. In the beginning of April he issued a brochure entitled "Our Way." It contained many just criticisms of the March Action. But it also claimed that the March Action was the greatest putsch in history, that the CP had acted like General Ludendorff in WWI, sending endless waves of youth into a bloodbath on the front lines. It was a critique that lacked any solidarity whatsoever with the party but offered much material to the prosecutors. It was used, as he must have known it would be, by those special courts that had been set up to sit in judgment on the Communists and their supporters. For this he was expelled from the Communist Party and the expulsion was confirmed at the Comintern Congress.

It's clear in his 16 April letter to Clara Zetkin and Levi that Lenin didn't know even at that late date what had happened in Germany. But he quickly figures it out. He calls Bela Kun back from Germany. Lenin calls him in for a talk, which, according to Bela Kun's Hungarian biographer, resulted in Bela Kun, upon leaving Lenin's office, having a heart attack.

But the problem was not just Bela Kun. The KPD claimed the March Action was nothing less than a great victory. It was hailed by the "ultralefts" listed in "Left-Wing" Communism, by the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern, by the Vienna Bureau, and by the Young Communist League. Everyone was on the March Action bandwagon, including Zinoviev, who was head of the Comintern, Radek, who was—insofar as he was official anything—official Comintern representative in Germany, and Bukharin. Lenin and Trotsky realized that they were about to lose the Comintern, that they were a minority, at least among the leading elements, probably in the IEC and several European parties.

Part of this was an understandable reaction against Social Democracy. But part of it was what Lenin described as infantile leftism: playing with phrases as a surrogate for the more arduous but essential task of forging a communist vanguard that wins the allegiance of a majority of the working class. Many "leftists" who attacked the necessary concessions to the peasantry for the survival of the Soviet workers state were the loudest champions of the "Revolutionary Offensive" and the March Action.

This fight had to take place simultaneously in the Russian delegation which had six members and was split evenly on the question of the March Action—between Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev on one side and Radek, Bukharin and Zinoviev on the other. That is the background to the Third Congress that is best described in the Prometheus Research Series bulletin on the Organizational Resolution passed at the Third Congress (Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work [New York, 1988]).

Third Congress: School of Revolutionary Stategy
The Congress is approaching: what is to be done? I encouraged comrades to read Lenin's "Letter to Zinoviev" on the "Thesis on Tactics" (CW, Vol. 42, pp. 319-323) because it shows how the fight would be waged before, during and after the Congress. Lenin decided that the cause of proletarian justice as well as Marxist clarity would best be served by having one of the principal malefactors, Radek, incorporate the lessons of the March Action defeat into his report "On Tactics" which would inform and guide all of the sections of the CI. Radek did a draft. As the delegates arrived Radek showed the draft to his buddies from Germany: Thalheimer, Brandler and Maslow. They suggested changes: 'You see, where it says "conquest of the majority of the working class," why don't you take that out and put in "important sections of the working class," or "decisive sections of the working class."' Just tone down the main thing that was supposed to be emphasized at this Congress! And if that wasn't enough, they got together with a recovered Bela Kun to draw up their own amendments.

On 1 June they ship this all to Lenin in an envelope. He opens it, reads the contents and furiously makes notes on the envelope, which are in the Russian edition, but alas, not the English. These notes are then developed in the letter to Zinoviev which opens: "The crux of the matter is that Levi in very many respects is right politically. Unfortunately, he is guilty of a number of breaches of discipline for which the Party has expelled him" ("Letter to Zinoviev," p. 319). Lenin is categorical that the "Open Letter" tactic was correct and important:
"...[Waverings in regard to The 'Open Letter' are extremely harmful, shameful, and extremely widespread. We may as well admit this. All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress."
-ibid., p. 321

To show how carefully crafted this congress was, it begins with an appeal to the German proletariat on behalf of Max Hoelz, who had just been captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. While fully incorporating the Marxist critique of individual terror, the resolution passed by the Congress declares: "But his actions emanated from his love of the proletariat and his hatred of the bourgeoisie," and "instructs the German proletariat to defend him." It was as if you say, 'OK young hotheads and ultralefts, we will pound you politically, but we applaud your elan and seek only to give it Marxist direction and purpose.'

For the "rightists" you might say, there was also a celebration of Clara Zetkin's 65th birthday. Naturally a KPD "leftist," Fritz Heckert, gave a wonderful valedictory speech for Clara. The guy that did the presentation on the organizational resolution was another KPD left-winger, Koenen.

If some of this seems mildly perverse, Lenin was trying to make a point here. He was struggling for genuine homogeneity, not by hiding the issues but by fighting them out among comrades. He felt that 'we have gotten rid of the people—or they have gotten rid of themselves—that we don't want in this Communist International. Now we've got to fight to forge cadre.' The lesson you get, how this Congress was orchestrated, is a lesson in party building.

If the "Theses on Tactics" read a little vacuous in parts, it's not accidental. At the last minute Lenin couldn't get Radek to do all that many changes. There are passages that read like: 'When there's a defeat, it's necessary to retreat.' Except, that was bold language for some in this Congress. But, there is one section that runs from page 285 to 286 (Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International fink Links, London, 1980]) which is a description of the role of transitional demands that motivates Trotsky's Transitional Program. It is a very powerful statement.
Trotsky's "School of Revolutionary Strategy" is his summary and analysis of the key debates of the Third Congress. They are relevant to fights that we've had in our own party around the general strike in Italy and Germany. When I was in the SpAD we were advocating an adventurist policy on paper. We didn't do much except put out propaganda filled with phrases about "general strikes" and "mass strikes" in precisely the region where the March Action took place—the mining, industrial region that includes Bischofferode, Wolfen (which had also developed a big chemical industry), the Halle Leuna Werke.

The problem is that by 1990-91, when we started to make this general strike agitation, these plants were finished. The bourgeoisie had decided to close them down. In the case of Bischofferode the workers were only fighting over who would get the last paycheck to turn off the lights. The empty propaganda we put out at that time was counter-posed to explaining to the workers what hap¬pening was and what had happened to them because of capitalist counterrevolution.

In "School of Revolutionary Strategy," Trotsky has a devastating indictment of the Italian SP. He said: 'Yes, you called for the revolution. You called for mass strikes. You called for all these good things and you prepared nothing. You set these people up and led to a disaster.' In his criticism of the Comintern's draft program for the Sixth Congress Trotsky writes:

"The slogan of the Third Congress did not simply read 'To the masses' but: 'To power through a previous conquest of the masses]' After the faction fight led by Lenin (which he characterized demonstratively as the 'Right' wing)...Lenin arranged a private conference toward the end of the Congress in which he warned prophetically: 'Remember, it is only a question of getting a good running start for the revolutionary leap. The struggle for the masses is the struggle for power.'"
—The Third International After Lenin, pp. 90-91

These documents for us are living documents. When you read the Third Congress "Resolution on Communist Work among Women" you should know that there was a fight in the SL about this question when we had the opportunity to recruit from radical, feminist collectives in the early '70s. These documents became for us a living reference point and are reprinted in the early issues of Women and Revolution. The same thing with the document on the youth question. The communist youth theses lay out very clearly the motivating principles that became fighting issues in the very birth, first of the Revolutionary Tendency and then, after another kind of faction fight over our orientation to SDS, the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus.

Because we claim the tradition of the October Revolution as ours, it is our obligation to examine critically our work and perspectives by the standards set at the first four congresses of the Comintern. I really appreciate the way Trotsky concluded Lessons of October. That is: revolutionary tradition is not a museum display, it's not an internet search engine. He writes:

"The party should and must know the whole of the past, so as to be able to estimate it correctly and assign each event to its proper place. The tradition of a revolutionary party is not built on evasions, but on critical clarity."

Summary following discussion

Markin comment- I have not republished the summary here as there is no context for the statements made during the course of the discussion.
*******
Reading List for Educationals on the Comintern
III. The Third Congress: Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization
Lenin, "Theses for a Report on the Tactics of the R.C.P.," 13 June 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 453461 Lenin, "Speech on the Italian Question," 28 June 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 462-467 Trotsky, "Speech on the Italian Question," 29 June 1921, FFYCI, Vol. 1, pp. 262-268

Lenin, "Speech in Defence of the Tactics of the Communist International, July 1," 1 July 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 468-477

Trotsky, "Speech on Comrade Radek's Report on Tactics of the Comintern' at the Third Congress," 2 July 1921,
FFYCI, Vol. 1, pp. 269-281 Trotsky, "Theses of the Third World Congress on the International Situation and the Tasks of the Comintern,"
4 July 1921, FFYCI, Vol. 1, pp. 238-261

Comintern, "Theses on Tactics," 12 July 1921, FFC, pp. 274-299

Comintern, "Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women: Theses," 8 July 1921, ibid.,
pp. 212-229

Comintern, "The Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement," 12 July 1921, ibid., pp. 230-233 Trotsky, "The School of Revolutionary Strategy," July 1921, FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 143 Lenin, "A Letter to the German Communists," 14 August 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 512-523 Additional Readings:
Trotsky, "Report on the World Economic Crisis and the New Tasks of the Communist International," 23 June 1921,

FFYCI, Vol. 1, pp. 174-226 Radek, "The Levi Case," excerpted in International Communism in the Era of Lenin, by Helmut Gruber, NY, 1967,
pp. 341-346, originally published in Die Kommunistische Internationale, II, No. 17, September 1921

Trotsky, "Paul Levi and Some 'Lefts'," 6 January 1922, FFYCI, Vol. 2, pp. 85-90 Trotsky, "Through What Stage Are We Passing?" 21 June 1924, excerpted in Challenge of the Left Opposition,1923-1925, pp. 167-174

Trotsky, "Report to the 8th All-Russian Congress of the Transport Workers' Union," 20 October 1923, The Military Writings and Speeches of Leon

Trotsky, (a.k.a. "How the Revolution Armed"), Vol. 5, pp. 193-221

Zetkin, C., Reminiscences of Lenin, pp. 21-32 (International Publishers, NY, 1934) Note: this section is excerpted in Gruber, pp. 351-354 Background:

Lenin, "The Party Crisis," 19 January 1921, CW, Vol. 32, pp. 43-53

Lenin, "Report on the Political Work of the Central Committee of the R.C.P.(B.), March 8," 8 March 1921, CW,Vol. 32, pp. 170-191

***From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
***********
Reviews

Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight, Fortress, London 1988, pp.497, £6.95.

Although the main thrust of this book deals with the last half dozen years and hence lies outside the scope of this magazine, it does include a preliminary sketch on the history of the labour movement in Liverpool and one or two hints about the part played in it by the Trotskyists.

Appendices 4 and 5 contain matter supplied in interviews by Jimmy Deane and Tommy Birchall. Along with several interesting details we are told that Charles Martinson, who later stood as an RCP candidate in the council elections, left the Communist Party when he was in the International Brigade over the attacks made on the POUM, and joined the Trotskyists when he got back to Britain.

Such items as these supplied by these veterans stand in marked contrast to what appears in Taffe and Mulhearn’s text whenever it touches on that time. Thus we are told (p.34) that already in 1938 Ted Grant was the “theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain” There is no mention at all of D.D. Harber’s Militant group that Deane and Birchall joined to begin with and to which Grant belonged himself, that it was Gerry Healy who brought the Liverpool youth into the WIL, or that Ralph Lee, who had converted Grant to Trotskyism whilst still in South Africa, was far more prominent as a theoretician in the WIL to begin with than was Grant. And Haston and Tearse do not merit a mention at all.

A quick recourse to Trotsky’s Stalin School of Falsification should convince the writers how little credit they gain from this attitude to history.

Al Richardson