Sunday, February 16, 2014

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews

*Our Flag Is Still Red -Markin comment:

This is a repost of 2008's (and the two previous years)commentary in honor of our international working class holiday. I would add that the comments made then still apply today. I would further add that these damn bourgeois presidential campaigns have taken most of the air out of the political atmosphere thus retarding our efforts. Notice the virtually total fade away of pro-immigration street demonstrations. To speak nothing of Iraq. What happens to these parliamentary reformists if they wake up on January 20th 2009 and one John McCain is getting ready to take the oath of office? Enough said-for now.

COMMENTARY

THIS YEAR(2010) MARKS THE 124TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MAY DAY HAYMARKET FRAMEUPS. HONOR THE MEMORY OF AUGUST SPIES, ALBERT PARSONS, ADOLPH FISCHER, GEORGE ENGEL, LOUIS LINGG, MICHAEL SCHWAB, SAMUEL FIELDEN, OSCAR NEEBE- CLASS WAR VICTIMS OF AN EARLIER TIME. ALSO REMEMBER LUCY PARSONS WHO CARRIED ON THE STRUGGLE FOR VINDICATION AFTER HER HUSBAND’S EXECUTION. LET US REDOUBLE OUR EFFORTS TO FREE TODAY’S CLASS WAR PRISONERS.


Politically, the writer of these lines is far distance from those of the Haymarket Martyrs. Their flag was the black flag of anarchism, the writer’s is the red flag of communism. Notwithstanding those political differences, militants must stand under the old labor slogan that should underscore all labor defense work now as then- ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’. Unfortunately that principle has been honored far more in the breech than in the observance by working class organizations.

Additionally, in the case of the Haymarket Martyrs today’s militants must stand in solidarity and learn about the way those militants bravely conducted themselves before bourgeois society in the face of the witch hunt against them and their frame-up in the courts of so-called bourgeois ‘justice’. Not for the first time, and most probably not for the last, militants were railroaded by the capitalist state for holding unpopular and or/dangerous (to the capitalists) views. Moreover, it is no accident that most of the Haymarket Martyrs were foreigners (mainly Germans) not fully appreciative of the niceties of 19th century American ‘justice’. This same ‘justice’ system framed the heroic anarchist immigrant militants Sacco and Vanzetti in the early 20th century and countless other militants since then. As we struggle in the fight for full citizenship rights for immigrants today we should keep this in mind. Although, as we know, this American system of ‘justice’ will not forget the occasional uppity ‘native’ political dissenter either.

Most importantly, we must not forget that the Haymarket Martyrs at the time of their arrest were fighting for the establishment of a standardized eight hour work day. It is ironic that 120 years later this simple, rational, reasonable demand should, in effect, still be necessary to fight for by working people. All proportions taken into account since the 1880’s, a very high percentage of the working class still does not have this luxury- given the necessity of two wage-earner families, two job wage-earners, dramatic increases in commute time in order to gain employment, unpaid but mandatory work time (note especially the Walmartization of labor time) and a high rate of partially or fully unemployed able-bodied workers. To do justice to the memory of the Haymarket Martyrs this generation of militants should dust off another old labor slogan that used to be part of the transitional demands of the socialist movement- 30 hours work for 40 hours pay. TODAY THIS IS A REASONABLE DEMAND.

Obviously such a demand cannot be implemented in isolation. To even propose such a demand means we need to build a workers party to fight for it. Moreover, and let us not have illusions about this; this capitalist state does not want to and will not grant such a demand. Therefore, we must fight for a workers government. That would be a true monument to the memory of the Haymarket Martyrs.

 


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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.

Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.

The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.

Finally, I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read, learn, and try to figure out the
wheat from the chaff. 

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Reviews

Albert Glotzer, Trotsky: Memoir and Critique, Prometheus Books, New York, 1989, pp343, $24.95
This book is full of fascinating information. Albert Glotzer witnessed Trotsky at work on his famous History at Kadiköy (pp.38ff.), and defending himself before the Dewey commission in Coyoacan (pp.255-74); his own experiences took in the deliberations of the International Secretariat in Paris (pp.29-33, 181ff), including encounters with Maria Reese, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, the International Youth Conference in Brussels (pp.195ff.) and a visit to Germany shortly before Hitler assumed power (pp.75-8). Of especial interest to British readers is his account of his visit to Britain to make contact with oppositionists here (pp.80-2), his description of Trotsky’s correspondence with Ridley’s and Groves’ groups (pp.55-6), and his insider’s view of the negotiations between Ridley’s group and the International Secretariat (p.p30-1).
But for all the gems contained in it, this is an unsatisfying book. Glotzer’s descriptions of his childhood, and of his encounters with Trotsky and his movement in Kadiköy, France, Britain and Mexico are vivid, revealing and worthwhile. But these are used as a peg upon which to hang a vapid Cold War analysis. Five pages of embarrassing irrelevancy are devoted to an intemperate attack upon Gorbachev (pp.l37-41), and the supposed critique of Trotsky shows the political level of American Social Democracy to be surprisingly low, even by normal Social Democratic standards. Who, for example, among the labour intelligentsia of Western Europe, would base his view of Trotsky’s thought upon Knei Paz’s dull grey book (p.102), or describe that of Leonard Schapiro as “the now more frequently accepted view” (p.108), or a “celebrated study” (p.246)? The utilisation of such material, and even of better secondary works such as those of Medvedev and Bertram D. Wolfe, is inexcusable in one whose first-hand acquaintance with the primary sources goes back so far. Even the Second Congress of the RSDLP, whose deliberations are available in full in English translation, is dealt with exclusively by means of secondary reporting (pp.92ff.).

It is not entirely accurate. When we consider how deeply involved the leadership of the Bolsheviks had been in Western European Social Democracy before the war, such remarks as that Lenin “cared little about those traditions” (p.95), or that the Bolsheviks were “isolated from European or Western societies and reflected the backward culture of the Tsarist centuries” (p.148) can only strike the reader as absurd. It is simply not true to say that Our Political Tasks has “never been fully translated into other languages”, or that it has never been reprinted by Trotskyist organisations (p.102). Lenin did not call Trotsky “the best Bolshevik” (pp.124-5) but said that since he had joined them there had been “no better Bolshevik”. Nor is there any truth in the remark that Bruno Rizzi’s concept of bureaucratic collectivism “was unknown in the SWP” (p.305, n2).
The sheer polemical overkill not infrequently teeters on the absurd. Stalin, apparently “never changed a single principle of state and Party organisation as enunciated by Lenin” (p.133), and the book closes with the solemn affirmation that “Trotsky must share responsibility with Lenin for the rise of Stalin and Stalinism” (p.323). When we remember how democratic America refused him entry, democratic Britain both interned him and refused him entry, democratic France placed him under what amounted to house arrest, and democratic Norway put him under real arrest, we can only greet with hilarity the statement that “a man of Trotsky’s innate feelings of social justice and a utopian overview of mankind and its future could have thrived best only in democratic society” (p.322).
I much prefer the sort of careful first hand scholarship contributed by a ‘comrade Gates’ to Shirley Waller’s History of the International Marxist Youth Movement. What a shame that he did not write this book, instead of Albert Glotzer.
Al Richardson
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Reviews

Harold Walter Nelson, Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection 1905-1917, Frank Cass, London 1988, pp158
This is a fascinating and most disturbing book, disturbing because it is written by an American army colonel who appears to be a good deal more aware of the problems of Socialist insurrection – a key aspect of Leon Trotsky’s thought – than the vast majority of those who call themselves Trotskyists. The author has used the Russian edition of Trotsky’s Collected Works, published in 12 volumes in Moscow between 1925 and 1927 and cites these references, which makes crosschecking with the far more limited English and French language material available to this reviewer difficult. Essentially the work divides into three: firstly and most novel to me, Trotsky’s rôle in the debates among revolutionaries after 1905 about the tactics necessary to overcome the Tsarist army, involving the complex and subtle interaction of politics and military technique; secondly, the comments and analyses on the Balkan wars and the First World War of Trotsky the brilliant journalist; and finally an account of the way in which Trotsky mobilised and commanded the Bolshevik seizure of power – all clearly and well written in less than 200 pages.
The second of these three themes, that of Trotsky the war correspondent, is the least politically controversial, and can be dealt with first of all. Whether it was his Marxist training or his own natural genius, Trotsky was able to perceive as closely as any civilian could both the way in which total war involved total society and – though forbidden proximity to the front – the nature of the stresses on humans in twentieth century battle. In this sense he foreshadows the work of academic authors like John Keegan or Michael Howard who, with the advantage of hindsight over two tremendous military convulsions this century, systematise much of what Trotsky brilliantly foresaw in a small war in a god-forsaken corner of Europe. What was incredibly original then is now part of conventional wisdom, and indeed Michael Howard once said to me that “We are all Marxists now”, by which I understand him to mean that many of Marx’s insights about society have passed into the general consciousness of good historians. So Marxists seeking to understand war might all start by reading the Face of Battle by Keegan and the Franco-Prussian War by Howard.
Trotsky’s feat was the more amazing when one glances at what passed for military science in those days, such as the work of Bernhardi or, on a more specialised level, the documents submitted to the Cabinet by the Committee of Imperial Defence, let alone the attempts of Hilaire Belloc to explain war to a civilian readership in early 1915. On a simple strategic plane Trotsky was more than competent, though I have some doubt myself as to whether Nelson is correct in believing that the former’s strategy would have enabled the Bulgarian army to take Constantinople and avoid the costly battle of Lule Burgas. Indeed a Marxist – and not only a Marxist – analysis would tend to see costly savage battles as inevitable between enemies who were more or less equally well-equipped. Some clever little manoeuvre could not avoid this, and it would be all the more true when, as Trotsky pointed out, the technical conditions of the day favoured the defence. However reactionary he may be, an historian like John Terraine is surely right about the need for fighting in order to win, and Nelson’s surprising admiration for his subject has carried his judgement away. Chauvinists amongst us might assert that the American military expects to win without fighting – simply by technologically brilliant massacre.
One interesting aperçu that Nelson does not develop is that after his Balkan War experience, Trotsky became convinced that partisan warfare was not suited to a Socialist revolution, though he thought that guerrillas could be useful to a nationalist movement. [1] Perhaps it is a pity that many Trotskyists in the late ’sixties and ’seventies did not appear to be familiar with this judgement. It also raises an interesting question about Nelson’s view of the Vietnam war in which he served. Perhaps he does not think Vietnam is Socialist, in which case he may judge it to be capitalist or state capitalist! But the author’s Vietnam experience seems to have marked him in other ways, since he chooses not to mention Trotsky’s furious denunciation of the atrocities of the Bulgarian army and their habit of killing enemy wounded which, since Turkish army units contained up to 25 per cent Christian soldiers – either Bulgarian, Greek, Armenian and so on, resulted in the murder of many men who would have been delighted to join the victorious allies. Such behaviour was therefore militarily counter-productive, as well as barbarous. But perhaps for a serving American officer in an army which had, as a matter of policy, bombed Vietcong hospitals to break their opponents’ morale, it would be too delicate ’ not to say handicapping for promotion prospects ’ to praise Trotsky for this. (Their legal experts said that the Vietcong wounded were not covered by the Geneva convention, since they were not members of a state’s armed forces.)
Trotsky’s writings on the First World War continue with his search to understand the psychological and social stresses on the front line soldier in greater depth, and there is even a remarkable sentence that foresees the invention of the tank. Yet the psychological aspect on which he insisted is one, if not the main, reason why generals today wish to put their troops in armoured vehicles. If that is done, their soldiers can be carried forward into danger against their will like the crew of a warship. Unlike the Prussian soldier of Frederick the Great, imprisoned by ferocious brutal discipline in the regiment, modern servicemen can be imprisoned in the steel walls of their weapons and so are both forced to fight and not to fraternise. The most extreme example of this is in naval operations – the bureaucratic mechanised mode of warfare par excellence. So the technical solution, armour, arises in part from the psychological needs of the death-avoiding soldier in opposition to the desire of the general to control this impulse. Here Trotsky’s sharp intellect seems to be on the right lines.
For Socialists the main interest of this book will surely lie in the debates in which Trotsky participated after 1905 concerning the tactics to be used to overthrow the Tsar’s army – the concentrated essence of the autocratic state. This argument boiled down as to how far the army could be overthrown militarily or subverted internally, and Nelson deals with this clearly, concisely and subtly. The weakness of the book here is that the author concentrates overmuch on Trotsky, the military hero, though this whole dispute should be seen in rather broader context, and the documents of the SRs and both the two factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party might have been looked at. Indeed the question could be broadened further and the whole debate on ‘People’s Armies’, in which. western Socialists such as Jaures took part, could be examined in order to understand the context of the Russian quarrel. On Nelson’s evidence the Bolsheviks, at one time, do seem to have had a very ultra-left and triumphalist attitude, believing that they could smash the Tsarist army by means of a workers’ insurrection, and justifying individual acts of terrorism. Nelson fails to point out that after the excesses of some Bolshevik bank robbers Lenin changed his mind. A matter that many sectarians today do not understand is that a working class party develops its programme, not in one thunderous stroke of genius by the revolutionary leadership, but by a process of class struggle, trial and error. The working class and its leaders learn from experience and each other in a dialectical way, and though it is equally true that some understanding of the past may save them from dreadful mistakes, historical knowledge alone may not provide any clear answers to present day problems. So the Bolsheviks and Lenin learnt and looked at events and the consequences of their own actions, and they did not merely tell people what to do.
For the Bolsheviks the military question was complicated by the fact that the army was overwhelmingly recruited from the peasant masses rather than from the working class, where the RSDLP was influential. Things were even more complicated as the different arms were raised from different social groups, the engineers and gunners being more likely to be workers than the infantry. But it was the peasant infantry who were used for repression. In the First World War the socially backward infantry were misused by their commanders and so slaughtered in ill-considered offensives that they became temporarily very advanced politically, and the problem was resolved. It was the military defeat of the army by the Germans, rather than the revolutionaries, that opened the way to its subversion and the seizure of power. When the revolutionaries went on the military offensive the subverted army collapsed with scarcely any resistance. Earlier, when the Russian Socialists debated the military question in the prewar period, it had been noted that attacks on the army had often resulted in a hardening of attitudes against the revolutionaries among the soldiers.
It may be relevant here to note that attempts to do agitational work in the army in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s met with very limited success, and that the few soldiers and NCOs contacted – however advanced in other ways – were always very hostile to the rather pro-IRA line put forward by the agitators from a Trotskyist group. The soldiers perceived the Irish problem as a fight between two reactionary groups of Irish people, not a struggle for national liberation, and it is at least arguable that they, not the revolutionaries, were the more correct. The British army today, like that of the United States and unlike the Russian, is composed of long service volunteers and, in Britain at least, it contains a strong janissary element. [2] Agitation here will take place on unpromising terrain, though if the units have been thinned out in an unsuccessful war the situation would change, as it did in Russia among the peasant levies of Tsar Nicholas. And if such a war arises it will do so because of a political crisis facing the regime, as did the little Falklands affair, which surely owed its outbreak to the internal problems of the British and Argentine governments of the day. Such crises, and the consequent opportunities, will doubtless continue to arrive.
Much of the final section of Nelson’s book dealing with the seizure of power will be broadly familiar to readers who know Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. It is nevertheless very well done and worth reading. I return to the point with which I began by asking myself how it comes about that an American Colonel can deal with this field so very competently. What ‘being’ has determined his ‘consciousness’? I can only assume that his experience in Vietnam, and those of his fellow officers at the War College, when they saw their own army disintegrate before their eyes, despite a casualty rate that was tiny by the standards of World War One, has made them exceedingly sensitive to the problem of the social cohesion of the armed services. Events in Iran, too, where there were many US military advisers, may have had an impact. These instances underline the fact that those very few American Trotskyists who during the Vietnam war maintained that, rather than running away to Canada, revolutionaries should allow themselves to be drafted to work into the army, were correct. Alas, they had but tiny resources while the Woodstock generation, which was their milieu, proved an unpromising layer from which to recruit a Bolshevik party willing to undertake that hardest task of all for Marxists – agitation in the regiments. Nevertheless the modern army, despite the vastly enhanced technical ability of military power in the modern capitalist state, is far from invulnerable to its own working class. And, as this excellent book indirectly bears witness – they know it.
Ted Crawford

Notes
1. I am greatly indebted to Judith Shapiro who went to considerable trouble to check the Russian language references for this review. However she was quite unable to find the quote which Nelson puts in inverted commas on p.66 citing Sochineniia, Volume 6, p225. I had thought that it was from a passage from Kievskaya Mysl no.293, of October 1912, which seems thematically related to this topic and which can be found on p.234 of The Balkan Wars, Pathfinder Press, 1980. Even if the citation has been muddled it seems to be either a not unjustified paraphrase of Trotsky’s thought on this issue or may indeed appear somewhere else.
2. By ‘janissary’ I mean individuals who have been torn out of society and lack even family links with it, let alone trade union ones. In Britain this is the case with almost all the many boy recruits, about a third of the infantry, who join at sixteen, the vast majority being from broken homes who do not get on with their step-fathers. Like the janissaries their only home is the regiment. The statistics concerning the background of these lads are, of course, an ‘official secret’ – perhaps with good reason.
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Reviews

S.F. Kissim, War and the Marxists: Socialist Theory and Practice in Capitalist Wars, Volumes One and Two, Andre Deutsch, London, 1988 and 1989, pp291 and 262, £17.96 each
The programmatic reason for the great split in the international working class movement was the issue of war, and, more particularly, the attitude to the First World War. It was not the other topics, such as colonialism or immigration, which divided the Second International at the Stuttgart conference of 1907, let alone the future organisation of the economy under a Socialist government, which was never discussed, that foreshadowed this great schism, while the issues of war and militarism were also the main topics at both the Copenhagen and Basel congresses that followed Stuttgart. It is therefore most welcome that the late Siegfried Kissin’s scholarly and well written study of this area has now been published. It consists of two volumes, the first being the attitude taken by the Socialist movement up to the final split in the International at the end of the ‘First Great War for Civilisation’ while the second takes the story up to the end of the Second World War and, among other things, deals with the debates in the Trotskyist movement on that issue.
The contents of the first volume should be almost unreservedly welcomed by the readers of Revolutionary History. Kissin tells us of the positions taken up by Marx and Engels on various nineteenth century conflicts and the debates among Socialists both before and during the First War. Marx and Engels had a very much more flexible and less intransigent view of the many wars in their time than we are now accustomed to think of as ‘Marxist’. They were seldom defeatist, and since many of us are only familiar with the later debate from a rather one-sided Leninist polemic, much of the material that Kissin introduces will be fresh and new. The position of the Founding Fathers in any particular case depended on an assessment of the effects of victory or defeat for the prospects of Socialism in a world context. Later the differences amongst those denounced by Lenin – differences which at the time might have appeared more important to the participants than those which divided the centre and moderate left from the Bolsheviks – are clearly brought out, and add a good deal to our understanding of the flavour and context of the dispute at the time. A final, if controversial piece looks at the differences between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin on the 1914-18 war, where Kissin seems to come down on Luxemburg’s side. Even in the First World War case, however, Kissin argues that in the parliamentary democracies of England and France it was not necessary to work actively for and desire the defeat of one’s own government, though he would denounce the ‘social-patriots’’ belief that the war meant a truce in the class struggle.
One fascinating aspect with contemporary echoes is his account of the debate on the Boer War, which for me has parallels with the Falklands campaign. Kissin makes the point that defeatism, as in the Boer War example, does not have to be revolutionary and that there maybe cases (Britain in the Falklands war was surely one), where the defeat of one’s own side would merely lead to a change from a conservative to a slightly more left wing government at the next election, rather than a revolution. This is nearly always the case in colonial wars where the nation’s existence is not perceived to be imperilled. In this event, as he says, there may well be liberals and pacifists who are thorough defeatists, though none of this makes the defeatist position incorrect. And just as it could be argued – as it was by Hyndman – that a British defeat would leave the South African Blacks enslaved by the Afrikaners, so, I suppose, it could be argued that in the Falklands British victory was a great benefit to the Argentine, if not to the British working class. In the event, the Blacks were enslaved anyway, and the end of the Junta has seen an even further fall in Argentine living standards. As the First World War showed, there could be more than one honest opinion on this. Indeed, one impression from reading Kissin about the German SPD in 1914 is how naive many of them were about their own government and how ‘wet’ they appear, faced with dissimulating noblemen who clearly did believe in the class war, made little distinction between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ enemy and saw these nice SDP deputies as adversaries to be tricked and beaten like foreign foes. Distant Lenin saw far more clearly than the German Socialists what the game was about.
In Kissin’s three page conclusion in Volume One, he attempts to forecast what attitude Marx and Engels would have taken to the events in the early twentieth century, and here he sets them up in opposition to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Of course, this is not the first time that this has been done, but at least he makes a good job in arguing his case. A more basic reservation that I have is that Kissin sees the issues of war and conflict in rather static terms, so that he approvingly quotes Luxemburg’s forecast of German nationalist revival and another war as a consequence of Germany’s defeat. But this was surely not an inevitable result of such a defeat, and it was a close-run thing between revolution and counter-revolution.
The second volume continues the story with a description of the positions taken on the many pre-Second World War conflicts by left wingers from both the Social Democratic and Communist traditions. Kissin tests the later Stalinist wrigglings against the classical Leninist position with damning conclusions. Finally, in the last part of the book he discusses the Trotskyists and, by printing a paper he submitted to the Edinburgh WIL in 1943, he makes his own position on the Second World War clear. He was an unabashed defencist, as he thought that the war was not primarily a national one, but a European civil war between the working class allied to a section of the bourgeoisie against Fascism, and the other bourgeois fraction. So, just as left wingers in Spain had supported Azana against Franco, in Britain they should stand with Churchill against Hitler. They should, of course, maintain a programme distinct from that of the conservative and Stalinist patriots. Such a programme would include the demand for independence for India and the colonies, constant fraternal appeals to the German workers and a guarantee of no vindictive Versailles peace, but a promise to integrate Germany into a peaceful Europe after the overthrow of the Nazis, together with demands for workers’ control of war production, election of officers tend so on. Such a position had much more in common with ‘Proletarian Military Policy’ of the SWP or the WIL than the RSL and other more pacifistic and abstentionist Trotskyists who were inclined to see the war as a re-run of 1914-18. He argues that victories for Hitler meant the smashing of all the gains from working class struggle, and the imposition of Fascist and authoritarian regimes in the occupied countries. In the event he was correct, as there was a greater left wing movement among the people of the Allied countries as a result of victory than among the populations of the defeated Axis.
The great value of the book is the immense range of evidence that Kissin has collected to illustrate his theme. There are some splendid choice items from the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact – in particular some statements by the late unlamented Walter Ulbricht and a fascinating account of how in 1939 the Labour Party leadership, which had started by declaring that the enemy was Hitler, not the German people, ended up in 1945 with a much more social-patriotic line which was only slightly more civilised than that of the Communists. The Labour lefts like Bevan stand out for their decency on this issue.
There are a number of omissions and inaccuracies in the book, above all in the final section on the Trotskyists, which probably arose as he seems to have researched it in isolation, perhaps not realising that there were a number of other people honestly seeking to understand this period. He does not seem to have been aware of Bornstein and Richardson’s War and the International, or of the debates in the United States between the Workers Party and the SWP on the problem of the war with Japan, which was much more purely an inter-imperialist conflict than the war in Europe. Indeed, Kissin thinks that the Workers Party quickly disappeared after the 1940 split, which was by no means the case. Neither has he read Guérin's analysis of Trotsky’s political evolution at the beginning of the war though this analysis has considerable similarities with his own. Furthermore, he does not mention the tiny group of French defeatists led by Barta, though today those in that tradition around the paper Lutte Ouvrière seem to be the largest Trotskyist tendency in France.
These are, however, minor blemishes. For those on the left who seek to understand the history of war and the Marxist attitude to it, and whatever disagreements one might have with the author’s judgements, these two volumes will be an invaluable source of information.
Ted Crawford
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Reviews

Marshall S. Shatz, Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of the Russian Intelligentsia, University of Pittsburg Press, Pittsburg, 1989, pp251, $29.95
Machajski and the group of ideas called Machaevism, which he brought together and defended from the turn of the century through into the Russian Revolution, played only a very minor rôle in the building of the Russian revolutionary movement. To this reviewer at any rate, the mention of his name merely stirred a vague memory of him being mentioned, although only briefly, by Trotsky in My Life when referring to some long forgotten debate among Tsardom’s Siberian exiles.
The book does not disguise the limitations of its subject matter. And yet ... this very fair and balanced history will undoubtedly leave many with an uneasy feeling. Even today, 64 years after his death, Machajski’s idea about the intelligentsia or middle strata, and its power to dominate the working class movement, will strike many as an advance warning of dangers which became only too real in the ruthless rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. To others it will seem to explain the reason why the working class movement has, as they see it, been betrayed by so many of its political leaderships.
Machajski was concerned with the growing reformist trends in Social Democracy, and with the untrustworthiness of the Russian intelligentsia. He presented an original and even Marxist-sounding explanation. Just as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat pursued their own class interests, so it must also be regarded as natural and inevitable that the middle class strata, primarily composed of ‘intellectual workers’ would do likewise. Control by these groupings of the knowledge-ideas factors which are essential for commodity production and the administration of modern society, already gives them power and considerable rewards. How much better, however, to ensure that such power became ever more dominant and secure through a centrally planned society? Socialism or Social Democracy were not to be regarded as ideologies in the interests of the working class, but as ideologies founded on the interests of an already relatively favoured section of society, the middle strata or intelligentsia.
Such a theory immediately calls into question any possibility of ever formulating an ideology which conforms to objective reality. According to Machajski’s logic, all attempts at evolving such an ideology would be doomed to distortion by the sectional or class interests of those intellectual workers responsible for producing it. As Shatz points out, Machajski never faced up to this contradiction. His main conclusion was to set up a group called the Workers’ Conspiracy which, according to Shatz, played little practical rôle in its short existence. Presumably it was to contain some intellectuals such as Machajski, although how these were to be identified as trustworthy and unbiased was left unclear.
To this vague idea he added the equally vague concept of a self-led working class in an upsurge that would claim the entire surplus of society after inflicting a massive defeat on both bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. Oddly enough, he also pressed for one relatively simple and almost reformist demand. Workers should ensure that any surplus wealth they appropriated from society be used for the full-time advanced education of all workers’ children. This argument came close to being market based – if everyone were to be intellectually trained, no one would be able to claim the special privileges that the middle strata had always been able to command.
The question of how ideologies, and, in particular, Socialist ideologies do or can arise is not addressed by this book. Shatz is writing about Machaevism and not about such philosophical issues. What the book does do is to report on the debates in Russian society about the nature and functions of their middle strata.
Machajski’s ideas sprang from his analysis and experience of the specific Russian intelligentsia, expressing, as he saw it, the interests of the Russian middle class. This book brings out very well the need to be clear about the exact structures and the continually varying nature of the middle layers of society. The author outlines the diffuse nature of the Russian middle classes, stretching from the remains of the gentry who had been partially dispossessed by the earlier land reforms inaugurated by Tsardom, the small but growing industrial-based sector, to the expanding professions and the restless students. All these groupings were hemmed in by the autocracy. Politically they evolved few ideas of their own beyond the terrorist bomb and slavish legalism. Their incoherence and frustrations were compounded by the flooding in of Western ideologies whether appropriate or inappropriate to their society. Machajski himself, moved from a Polish nationalism tinged with Socialism, through a form of Marxism to a ‘workerist’ criticism of both European Social Democracy and Russia's intelligentsia – and finally moved on to his own anti-Socialist form of Socialist-Anarchism!
The book continually reasserts the Russian based starting point but tentatively explores how far such ideas can be applied to other times and other places. In fact one of Shatz’s most thought provoking sections deals with the near-extermination of the pre-1917 intelligentsia in the purges of the 1930s, and its replacement by a new ex-worker become apparatchik-intelligentsia. Khrushchev perhaps best embodied the nature of the changeover. His personal manners may well have identified his working class origins. They did not define the social function he was actually performing.
This book should be regarded as more than a specialist biography of an obscure Socialist responsible for an even more obscure sect. Marshall Shatz writes clearly and with very few preconceptions. The central ideas of Machajski may well prove to point to yet one more dead end, but in a period when the Marxist movement must face up to a massive self-questioning we have to check and recheck virtually all our ideas to see where the Socialist enterprise started to go so terribly wrong. We may have to go further back than we expect. It was not merely 1917 that was a blind turning. Revolutionary History must increasingly be a history of such ideas rather than of people and groupings.
Planning this review produced 10 pages of notes including a number of awkward questions still to be answered. How, indeed, do we avoid the distortion of Socialist theory by the unconscious bias of the intellectuals, who must of necessity be involved in its evolution? What are the intellectual disciplines needed constantly to check that Socialist ideology both accords with reality and is acceptable to a clear majority of the population? How should intellectual workers and manual workers (if this is a valid dividing line) relate to each other in existing labour movements? How do we break down the unconscious middle class arrogance of a very high proportion of the present labour movement?
This book presents a good starting point for asking some of the right questions and for asking them without the harsh polemical style which unfortunately came to dominate Socialist histories. Getting the answers, however, is going to be more difficult.
Frank Ward

Note

Name spelling and even people’s initials can vary when anglicised from the Polish or Russian. Machajski can appear as Makhaiski, Machajskii and his initials as KV as well as JW.

***********

Reviews

Chris Harman, Class Struggles in Eastern Europe, Bookmarks, London, Third Edition, 1988, pp373, £7.95
This is the third edition of Chris Harman’s book on the ‘People's Democracies’, being a revision of the book previously issued under the title of Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe. It differs from the original 1974 edition by the extension of a chapter on Poland into the ’eighties, and the addition of a third part on theory and perspectives. Like the original, it is a very useful compendium of facts set into a handy historical framework, and displays an impressive command of the source material.
However, this was an advantage already enjoyed by the first edition, and it cannot be said that the additional material has made it into a better book. Quite the reverse.
For a start, it shows a studied neglect of contributions written by Socialists and Communists of other persuasions, a fault not quite so glaring in the previous edition. Among the works to which no reference at all has been made are the mass of material now available on the post-war purges (e.g. Loebl and Slingova) François Manuel and Bill Lomax on Hungary, Pelikan, Broué and Karalasingham on Czechoslovakia, and the collections of Czech material in Voices of Czechoslovak Socialists and Coates’ Czechoslovakia and Socialism, not to mention the extensive writing on Poland. And the author is very selective in his polemics, making no attempt to answer those who argue for the working class character of these states. Trotskyists are bracketed along with Stalinists as “people who still had illusions, to a greater or lesser extent, in the Socialist (or at least workers' state) character of Eastern Europe” (p.321) and Mandel is only quoted to show his mistakes (p.102), the writer preferring easier targets (p.321). But some of the arguments used to affirm the capitalist nature of these set-ups are very flimsy indeed. When the Soviet Union conquered these countries in 1944-45 we were told that “the old ruling classes were in no condition to put up resistance to Russian demands” (p.20). Why should they? The evidence shows clearly that Stalin was desperately trying to reanimate them, an endeavour in which he had to admit his failure. The attempt to distinguish between the top bureaucracies of these states and the ‘intermediate strata’ rests upon no more solid class criterion than ‘control’ (p.143ff.). To prove the existence of capitalism there at one point we are given the decisive argument that “a working class is a peculiar feature of capitalist societies” (p.321). Does the writer believe, then, that it is possible to abolish wage labour the day after a revolution – even in backward countries? And wouldn’t this criterion prove that Lenin’s Russia was as ‘capitalist’ as Stalin’s, then? But the choicest piece, surely, in view of present happenings in these countries, must be the remark on page 142: “It is hardly likely, therefore, that old-style, private capital would even consider breaking up Hungarian industry into small competing units ...”
Secondly, a comparison of the present edition with that of 1974 shows a distinct development of the party pretensions of the organisation that has produced it. Although the necessity for Marxist parties in these states is a lesson that can be (and is) drawn throughout, we are suddenly introduced to an extended advertisement for ‘the Revolutionary Party’ in the context of Poland in the ’eighties (pp.312ff.), which, to tell the truth, fits no better there than anywhere else, except in the sense that it is near the end of the narrative part of the book, and might well never be read if it had been simply consigned to the theoretical bit at the back.
So whilst being useful compendia of factual matter, the chief value of the different editions of the book, as with Tony Cliff’s Rosa Luxemburg, lies less in their analysis of the events and more in the mathematical exactitude by which they measure the ascent of the SWP into sectarian self-proclamation as ‘the Revolutionary Party’.
Al Richardson

*******
 

Reviews

Alan M. Wald, The Revolutionary Imagination, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Mill and London, pp247
The modernist poets John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan were part of the move to the left in America of many middle and upper class intellectuals in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This was a result of the Great Depression which brought with it sudden doubt as to the efficacy of the capitalist system. However, unlike most of their contemporaries, neither Mangan nor Wheelwright succumbed to Stalinism, and therefore did not come under the censure of bureaucrats authorised to limit their literary opinions. Nor did they have to go through the traumas of writers such as Phillips, Rahv and others who eventually broke away from Stalinism in the first instance because of the Communist Party’s antagonism to literary and artistic modernism. (See the review of Alan M Wald’s The New York Intellectuals, Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no.2). Instead, both Mangan and Wheelwright from the first supported Trotsky, and became members of the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party.
With regard to writing, the difference Wald draws between the two men is that, whereas Wheelwright regarded the making of poetry as his revolutionary contribution, Mangan shelved his need to write poetry and redirected his creative impulse into missions and work for the Fourth International. In fact Wheelwright considered part of his revolutionary activity to be reciting his poems to proletarian groups, such as Workmen’s Circles, the WPA Writers’ Group, the Young People’s Socialist League of Boston, the Chelsea Labor Lyceum and at branches of the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party. A quotation from a letter written by John Wheelwright at the beginning of the book reads: “be a Socialist painter, as another is a Socialist cook, mechanic, lemon picker or as with Engels, manufacturer”. Mangan, on the other hand, made a dichotomy between art and politics, and in a letter also quoted by Wald states: “Even though revolutionary politics are an honourable occupation, it's poetry I still love best”.
It is not uncommon for revolutionaries to consider the political tasks in hand as too important for them to spend time on the arts and literature, although Trotsky never took this view. Trotsky would no doubt have agreed with Wald that the discourse of poetry works on the emotional, aesthetic, imaginative and moral senses, which can result in a leap in understanding from the subconscious to then conscious. In this way, a poet imaginatively reworks experience in order to communicate a new form of consciousness. Certainly, Wald’s concern is to what extent Wheelwright and Mangan were able to use the lives and experiences of the working class in poems to transform their vision to a Socialist society, for poetic discourse is not bound by the: same limitations as political discourse.
Therefore, the Socialist poet need not use the rationality of prose. As an example of this, Wald provides two simple poems to compare from the Communist Party’s 1935 anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States. The first, by Maxwell Bodenheim, in short lines states the horrors of Tsarist Russia and the glories of the Soviet Union, four lines of which read:

And in the Russia of today
Men and women proud of work hours
Take their summer vacations
On the steppes in cleaner games.
Against this he posits Langston Hughes’ Sharecroppers, an ironic work-song in simple nursery rhyme metre, which illustrates the rhythm of working, of which four lines read:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
When the cotton’s picked
And the work is done
Boss man take the money
And we get none.
Apart from its tortuous construction, the first could have been written in prose as part of a political polemic, while the second is there with the workers, and brings to the surface their thoughts and feelings.
Generally, the construction and vocabulary of Wheelwright’s poems are more involved than the above, but he also is intent upon presenting in poetry a vision of society in which the rôle of the working class is central.
Wheelwright’s poem Skulls as Drums, for instance, was written as an answer to Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem Beat! Beat! Drums! Whitman’s poem calls upon the populace to sink all their individual activities and interests into the war. Wheelwright’s poem, on the other hand, counterposes resistance and reflection by all citizens in order to determine the appropriate response to war. Whereas Whitman’s poem commences each of the three stanzas with a stirring “Beat! Beat drums! Blow! Bugles! Blow!”, Wheelwright disperses the references to these irregularly throughout the poem, so as to indicate that they are outside of the true interests of the population and also includes images of First World War battlefields and marching corpses:
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
Gaze on the corpse, pre-mortified
– gas bloated – of Mars. And on the fearful helm of Suicide
Inc, drum, drum, drum drum louder to drum up more fear.
While Wheelwright’s poems differ in their accessibility to the general reader, there is no doubt that from a reading of the poems from Wheelwright’s Collected Poems, New Directions, 1972, that he achieved what Wald refers to as “a public poetry ... a distinct rhetorical voice, colloquialisms, jolts and other devices aspiring to evoke a revolutionary myth”. Wheelwright himself writes in his notes entitled Argument that he had found no way of turning with scientific Socialism “from a mechanical to an organic form of life than to draw from moral mythology as well as from revolutionary myth”.
Mangan, on the other hand, Wald writes, was unable to forge the poetic myths necessary to poetry. From my limited reading of Mangan’s work, for I have been unable to obtain any apart from the poems and prose reproduced in Wald’s book, it is clear that he was a very different writer from Wheelwright. Wald provides two extracts from Mangan’s prose writings which I see as highly satirical and very funny in a Monty Pythonish sort of way. The first concerns a performer of the Indian rope trick who no longer wants to put dye on his face so as to appear Indian. The quick-witted proprietor brings him on in an oxygen tent and tells the audience he is dying but “the show must go on”! The second shows a man absentmindedly playing pat-a-cake with buildings as he looks out of his 14-storey apartment. Hitting at one too hard, he accordions it so that he has to grab its cornices, but even then it shoots up to send the man cartwheeling over the city. Wald says that Mangan assaults the pseudo-rationality of bourgeois society by making pseudo-irrationality or ironic ‘insanity’ a central theme of his work. Mangan undoubtedly had a gift for irony, and the poems included in the book which exclude this sense of the ridiculous, are readable, but pedestrian.
Wald writes that he has written this book to “perform ... function of enriching the vision of the revolutionary Marxist political and cultural tradition”, and I would say from my reading that this aim has been largely achieved. The book is of especial interest to us in this country where 1930s poets, such as Spender and Auden, were attracted to Stalinism and, on disillusionment, turned away from politics altogether, or moved to the right. Therefore, it is good to find Trotskyist poets such as Wheelwright and Mangan. Wheelwright was run down and killed by a drunken driver in 1940 at the age of 43. This was at a time when, as Gregory and Zatureska write, Wheelwright’s mature life as a poet had just begun. (A History of American Poetry 1900-1940, Gordian Press, 1969.) So, it is difficult to know what his future development, both politically and poetically, would have been. Mangan remained a Trotskyist to the end of his life and during the Cold War period sacrificed both financial security and health to the movement. He died in abject poverty in 1961 at the age of 57 years.
Sheila Lahr

However gifted a poet he may have been, Mangan left very much of a mixed legacy to the revolutionary movement.
On the one side there is his fine reportage, among the best the movement has ever produced. His description of the arrival in France of Spain’s left refugees in 1939 conveys not only the atmosphere, but even the entire essence of the tragedy of the politics of the Spanish Civil War. [1] His account of the fall of Paris to Hitler’s armies must rank with the most profound narrations ever to be composed upon the theme of fallen glory. [2]
Unfortunately, his belief that he was a Marxist political leader was at some distance from the facts. There was always something theatrical about him, like “a sort of upper class boy scout”, as Sam Bornstein put it. We have it on good authority from Haston that the famous revolver at the 1946 Pre-Conference contained no bullets at all [3], the same, no doubt, that he delighted in showing to John Goffe beneath his pillow in a room in one of London’s top hotels.
His conception of his international rôle lay somewhere in the mists where the ghosts of Bela Kun, Valtin and Zinoviev converse with each other. The repeated failure of the unifications that he glued together on no discernible political basis whatsoever does not appear to have broken him of the habit. The catch-all unity he created in Argentina in 1941 not only fell apart on the spot, but his article in Fortune magazine cost the Fourth International entire sections in Latin America, and allowed its critics there to associate it with Yankee imperialism for years to come. [4] As midwife to the RCP in Britain his obstetrics were so Byzantine that he not only produced a group that was half entry and half open, but it even had within it a secret faction with no political basis that ultimately tore it apart. [5] His career as International Secretary was crowned by the comic opera adventure of the April 1946 Pre-Conference. [6]
There can be no doubt that he was sincere. Perhaps he might have not done so much damage if he had not been. He should have stuck to poetry and reporting.
Al Richardson
 

Notes

1. Wald, p.184; S. Mangan (Terence Phelan), Spanish Militants Describe Escape from Barcelona, in Socialist Appeal (USA), 3 March 1939. To be republished with other material on the Spanish Civil War later this year by Socialist Platform Ltd.
2. Wald, p.185; S. Mangan (Terence Phelan), The End of French Democracy, in Fourth International, Volume 2, no.3, March 1941, pp.79-83.
3. Wald, p.196; Haston in Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, War and the International, London 1986, p.180.
4. Wald, pp.186-7; cf. R.J. Alexander, Trotskyism in Latin America, Stanford, 1973, pp.56-7, and Osvaldo Coggiola, The History of Argentine Trotskyism, in Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no.2, Summer 1989, pp.l5ff., 23, etc.
5. Bornstein and Richardson, op. cit., pp.104ff.
6. Wald, pp.195-6; Bornstein and Richardson, pp.178-81.

******

Reviews

Andy Johnston, James Larraghy, Edward McWilliams, Connolly: A Marxist Analysis, Irish Workers Group, Dublin 1990, pp72, £3.75
James Connolly is not only the most important figure in the history of Irish Socialism, he is also an important figure in the history of the response of revolutionary theory to imperialism. His influence within Irish politics as the claimed patron of the Irish Labour Party, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the Workers’ Party, the Communist Party, each of the Trotskyist groups, and the Republican Movement, is the main reason why the Irish Workers Group have published this analysis. This unique position within the Second International as a militant trying to deal with the development of imperialism, not from within the imperialist heartlands but from within a colony, is not so widely recognised.
The work argues that Connolly’s theory was not, as has been claimed, identical to the positions of Lenin and Trotsky. On the contrary, it argues that, despite his many virtues, Connolly proved uncritical of nationalism in his original contribution to Socialist theory, and that this was a serious flaw in a country in which the pursuit of class struggle was deeply bound up with the struggle for national independence.
The strength of this book is not that it makes this claim – which has been made before by many on the left who seek to avoid the national question – but the way in which it draws on a wide reading of Connolly’s scattered work, on the best of existing historiography on Ireland and on a well developed articulation of Marxist theory to explain the problems with Connolly’s Marxism, and the need for Socialists in Ireland to adopt a critical approach to nationalism combined with committed advocacy of national independence.
It shows firstly how the Marxism of the British Social Democratic Federation and Morris’ Socialist League in which Connolly learnt his Marxism not only failed to produce a principled position on Ireland, but failed also to give its members the understanding of Marx’s political economy and historical method, which would have allowed Connolly to work out a position on Ireland.
Theoretically weakened in this way, Connolly turned to the radical wing of Irish nationalism, taking up their romantic argument that private property had always been an alien British intrusion in Ireland, and that the struggle against British rule was really a struggle against capitalism.
The book is at its strongest in answering this claim. Making use of Marx’s studies on pre-Norman Ireland in his Ethnological Notebooks, and Marx’s studies of the period of bourgeois revolution in Ireland (1782-1800), and also using the best available academic research, the book argues convincingly that primitive Communism had long since been replaced by a developing feudalism before the Norman invasion, and that the modern national struggle was initiated by the Irish bourgeoisie in search of an independent road of capitalist development.
These arguments provide a powerful basis not only for the criticism of Connolly, but also for a long overdue Marxist analysis of the development of capitalism in Ireland.
On this foundation the book goes on to examine Connolly’s views on party, state, religion, the oppression of women, and the Protestant working class – central testing areas for any Socialist politics in Ireland.
Here the book deserves some criticism. Originally authors, being somewhat eclectic in their method, and not always maintaining the high standard of analysis the authors have set themselves.
In the chapter on Connolly’s view on women and the family, the book falls into the trap of merely condemning Connolly for failing to match the position of Marx, despite explicitly denying that it wishes to do that (p.107). On religion, Marx’ position is incorrectly portrayed as similar to that of Feuerbach. As a result, the real difficulties of Connolly’s theist position of criticising ‘interference’ by organised religion in politics, while accepting the validity of religion as a language of the oppressed, are not adequately analysed.
The period of intense political activity by Connolly in Ireland from 1910 to 1916 is the real test for this book. It fails to recognise that Connolly, in practice, always emphasised the importance of the minority of educated and organised Socialist activists in initiating successful class struggle. It incorrectly claims that building the ITGWU as a syndicalist ‘One Big Union’ was Connolly’s first priority in this period. On the contrary, Connolly’s first priority was always to build a Socialist Party of Ireland, and then when this party collapsed (during a period in which all Irish political parties were replaced by armed militias), to reorganise the ITGWU’s ad-hoc militia, the Irish Citizens Army, into a disciplined workers’ fighting force.
These errors mean the work is unable to explain Connolly’s role in the 1916 rising, except in the most general terms. This act of Connolly’s has been described by previous writers as Connolly’s abandonment of Socialism, as proof of his Republicanism (i.e. of his commitment to achieving national independence prior to Socialism) and, most absurdly, by C.D. Greaves as evidence that Connolly shared Lenin’s response to the war. All these positions must be rejected.
Connolly believed that with the suspension of Home Rule, the restriction of democratic rights and ‘economic conscription’ into the army, politics were being reduced to military strength. His initiation of the rising was a bold, but misguided, attempt to take advantage of the weakness of the dominant Irish bourgeois party and of Britain’s preoccupation elsewhere, to reverse the collapse of the SPI and the defeat of the ITGWU in the 1913 lock-out. Instead of analysing this, the book is diverted into an examination of the Second International’s position on the war and the varying responses of Lenin, Trotsky and Radek to the rising. This is useful material, but does not amount to a constructive analysis of Connolly’s politics in this period.
What we are left with, then, is a brilliant analysis of Connolly’s theory of Irish history within a less successful assessment of his overall politics. But even this is far superior to almost everything else written on Connolly’s politics and the overall result is a book which is essential reading for any Socialist concerned with Irish politics or with campaigns of solidarity with the struggle against imperialism in Ireland.
MM

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-The Complete Stories

 



One-A Room Of One’s Own

Big Joe Barker (the Big Joe, rather than just Joe earned from many labor battles along the docks, along the waterfront, going back to the big one, the Frisco big one in ’34) sat in that Merritt College (Oakland, out in California, if you didn’t know its locale) classroom, a room like many another he had sat in over the years, chalky blackboard, wooden chairs and all, wondering what Bobby Seale, the Chairman of this new Black Panther Party that had gotten all the notoriety earlier in the year flashing rifle barrel up shot guns over in the state capitol, Sacramento, and had the all the power puff white boys all freaked out, freaked out big time, was going to say about the black nation, about how he, and his black brethren were going to finally inherit the earth, finally have a place to call home without ever eye-balling whitey hanging his fat white ass all over the place.

Funny, Big Joe thought, as he waited for the room to fill a little and the program to begin, how what goes around comes around. He remembered way back in the early 1930s when he first heard of the Communist Party when they had come around the Embarcadero, around Third Street over in Frisco and were helping him and a couple of the brothers out trying to stop people from being evicted on his block at the height of the Depression that one of their comrades had mentioned, mentioned in passing, wouldn’t it be great if black people had their own nation. That idea, that simple seeming idea, had drawn his interest since he had been (and his daddy too, his daddy like Malcolm’s never getting over that first thrill of black-ness, black righteousness) a fervent supporter of Marcus Garvey and his black- nationalist movement back in the early 1920s. So at that time he was all ears when that guy had mentioned something about Harry Haywood and his work on the black nation question, the question of the right of national self-determination, for their organization.

And so, like this evening, he had gone to a meeting, a meeting like this one, chalkboard and wooden chairs included, over at Berkeley, when Harry Haywood had come to town on a speaking tour touting Communist Party work, work on the Negro question as it was then posed. Now this Harry Haywood was beautiful, smooth as silk, seemed like a “talented tenth” guy (although not having read W.E.B. Dubois then he would not have used that term), a good speaker, and fashioned himself out as the “black Bolshevik,” but some of the stuff he had to say was just pure air.

See, he, or someone, had gone to a lot of trouble, to show on a map just exactly how the right to self-determination (that’s the way they liked to present the idea, present it in democratic terms) would look if a black nation was created, created in the south of the United States where most black people lived then. He had laughed, laughed to himself that the damn thing looked like a checker board. Moreover, he (and his daddy) had hightailed it out of the south, the damn Mister James Crow south in the late 1920s to get the hell away from that crap. If that was the black nation they wanted him to fight for then no deal, no sale. So while he worked with the Communists in that '34 Frisco strike, and a few things afterward, sometimes very closely, he always kept a certain distance even though he had never given up on that idea of a black nation, or black something.

So he wondered, wondered what this Bobby Seale was going to say, say about what this right of self-determination was going to look like. He swore if they brought that old time Haywood map, or something like it, out he would walk right out. If Seale said let’s take California as our space then he would give a serious listen. Still, he had learned a few things since those old days, that the black man’s fate, his fate (or, more importantly his grandchildren's) for better or worse, and he hoped not for the worst like always, was trying to break down the goddam barriers in the whole country, trying to jail-break out of the whole thing. Still he liked the idea of a black nation, a room one could call one’s own…


[42]

Ten Point Program[edit]

The original "Ten Point Program" from October, 1966 was as follows:[43][44]
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.
We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.
2. We want full employment for our people.
We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.
We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people.
We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the "average reasoning man" of the black community.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
 
This Saturday, February 15th at 2pm
15 Now New England 
Day of Organizing
Working people in New England need a raise. We can't rely on the two parties of Wall St to give it to us, we need to build a movement of working people to win it. That is why we are having an open conference this weekend in Boston to launch the campaign for 15 Now New England. We will have speeches and workshops to discuss how we will win this important demand. Workshops will include:

-Organizing 15 Now in the Workplace
-The 15 Now Toolkit
-Getting 15 Now on the Ballot
-15 Now and the Struggle for Women's      Rights


This is going to be the beginning of an important movement for workers rights in New England and across the nation. Tomorrow is your chance to be on the ground floor. We need 15 Now, because the rent won't wait. 

For any questions about this event or about the campaign for 15 Now, please email us at 15NowNewEngland@gmail.com or call (857) 615-5082
For admission we ask for a donation of around $5, but no one will be turned away because they cant pay.
Saturday,
February 15th 
From 2pm to 4pm
The Democracy Center,
45 Mount Auburn Street 
Cambridge, MA, 02138

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President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning

Because the public deserves the truth and whistle-blowers deserve protection.

We are military veterans, journalists, educators, homemakers, lawyers, students, and citizens.

We ask you to consider the facts and free US Army Pvt. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

As an Intelligence Analyst stationed in Iraq, Pvt. Manning had access to some of America’s dirtiest secrets—crimes such as torture, illegal surveillance, and corruption—often committed in our name.

Manning acted on conscience alone, with selfless courage and conviction, and gave these secrets to us, the public.

“I believed that if the general public had access to the information contained within the[Iraq and Afghan War Logs] this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy,”

Manning explained to the military court. “I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare.”

Journalists used these documents to uncover many startling truths. We learned:

Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus helped support torture in Iraq.

Deliberate civilian killings by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan went unpunished.

Thousands of civilian casualties were never acknowledged publicly.

Most Guantanamo detainees were innocent.

For service on behalf of an informed democracy, Manning was sentenced by military judge Colonel Denise Lind to a devastating 35 years in prison.

Government secrecy has grown exponentially during the past decade, but more secrecy does not make us safer when it fosters unaccountability.

Pvt. Manning was convicted of Espionage Act charges for providing WikiLeaks with this information, but  the prosecutors noted that they would have done the same had the information been given to The New York Times. Prosecutors did not show that enemies used this information against the US, or that the releases resulted in any casualties.

Pvt. Manning has already been punished, even in violation of military law.
She has been:
Held in confinement since May 29, 2010.
• Subjected to illegal punishment amounting to torture for nearly nine months at Quantico Marine Base, Virginia, in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Article 13—facts confirmed by both the United Nation’s lead investigator on torture and military judge Col. Lind.
Denied a speedy trial in violation of UCMJ, Article 10, having been imprisoned for over three years before trial.
• Denied anything resembling a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to change the charge sheet to match evidence presented, and enter new evidence, after closing arguments.
Pvt. Manning believed you, Mr. President, when you came into office promising the most transparent administration in history, and that you would protect whistle-blowers. We urge you to start upholding those promises, beginning with this American prisoner of conscience.
We urge you to grant Pvt. Manning’s petition for a Presidential Pardon.
FIRST& LAST NAME _____________________________________________________________
STREET ADDRESS _____________________________________________________________

CITY, STATE & ZIP _____________________________________________________________
EMAIL& PHONE _____________________________________________________________
Please return to: For more information: www.privatemanning.org
Private Manning Support Network, c/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610

 

Note that this image is PVT Manning's preferred photo.


Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

Six Ways To Support Freedom For Chelsea Manning- President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!
 
 
 
 
 
 Note that this image is PVT Manning's preferred photo.
 
Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.
The Struggle Continues …
Six Ways To Support Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-Blower Chelsea  Manning
*Sign the public petition to President Obama – Sign online http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/chelseamanning  “President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning,” and make copies to share with friends and family!
You  can also call (Comments”202-456-1111), write The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, e-mail-(http://www.whitehouse.gov’contact/submitquestions-and comments) to demand that President Obama use his constitutional power under Article II, Section II to pardon Private Manning now.
*Start a stand -out, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, in your town square to publicize the pardon and clemency campaigns.  Contact the Private Manning SupportNetwork for help with materials and organizing tips http://www.bradleymanning.org/
*Contribute to the Private  Manning Defense Fund- now that the trial has finished funds are urgently needed for pardon campaign and for future military and civilian court appeals. The hard fact of the American legal system, military of civilian, is the more funds available the better the defense, especially in political prisoner cases like Private Manning’s. The government had unlimited financial and personnel resources to prosecute Private Manning at trial. And used them as it will on any future legal proceedings. So help out with whatever you can spare. For link go to http://www.bradleymanning.org/
*Write letters of solidarity to Private Manning while she is serving her sentence. She wishes to be addressed as Chelsea and have feminine pronouns used when referring to her. Private Manning’s mailing address: Bradley E. Manning, 89289, 1300 N. Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304. You must use Bradley on the address envelope.
Private Manning cannot receive stamps or money in any form. Photos must be on copy paper. Along with “contraband,” “inflammatory material” is not allowed. Six page maximum.
*Call: (913) 758-3600-Write to:Col. Sioban Ledwith, Commander U.S. Detention Barracks 1301 N Warehouse Rd
Ft. Leavenworth KS 66027-Tell them: “Transgender rights are human rights! Respect Private Manning’s identity by acknowledging the name ‘Chelsea Manning’ whenever possible, including in mail addressed to her, and by allowing her access to appropriate medical treatment for gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT).” (for more details-http://markinbookreview.blogspot.com/2013/11/respecting-chelseas-identity-is-this.html#!/2013/11/respecting-chelseas-identity-is-this.html
Send The Following Message (Or Write Your Own) To The President In Support Of A Pardon For Private Manning

To: President Barack Obama
White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

The draconian 35 years sentence handed down by a military judge, Colonel Lind, on August 21, 2013 to Private Manning (Chelsea formerly known as Bradley) has outraged many citizens including me.

Under Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution the President of the United States had the authority to grant pardons to those who fall under federal jurisdiction.
Some of the reasons for my request include: 

*that Private Manning  was held for nearly a year in abusive solitary confinement at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, which the UN rapporteur in his findings has called “cruel, inhuman, and degrading”

*that the media had been continually blocked from transcripts and documents related to the trial and that it has only been through the efforts of Private Manning’s supporters that any transcripts exist.

*that under the UCMJ a soldier has the right to a speedy trial and that it was unconscionable and unconstitutional to wait 3 years before starting the court martial.

*that absolutely no one was harmed by the release of documents that exposed war crimes, unnecessary secrecy and disturbing foreign policy.

*that Private Manning is a hero who did the right thing when she revealed truth about wars that had been based on lies.

I urge you to use your authority under the Constitution to right the wrongs done to Private Manning – Enough is enough!

Signature ___________________________________________________________

Print Name __________________________________________________________

Address_____________________________________________________________

City / Town/State/Zip Code_________________________________________

Note that this image is PVT Manning's preferred photo.



Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.


Heroic Wikileaks Whistleblower Private Chelsea Manning ‘s Fight For Freedom Will Again Be Remembered At The Fourth Annual Veterans For Peace-Led Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade in South Boston On March 16, 2014

 
 
 

We will be forming up at the corner of D Street and West Fourth in South Boston (take Redline MBTA to Broadway Station-walk up four blocks and then left) at 1 PM for a 2 PM step-off (note time change). Supporters of Chelsea Manning will be out in force distributing informational leaflets and stickers as well as encouraging participants to sign the Amnesty International and Private Manning Support Network petitions calling on President Barack Obama to pardon her. We will not leave our sister behind