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Wednesday, February 26, 2014
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Book Reviews
Book Review
Year One of the Russian Revolution-Victor Serge
I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.
The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.
Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And try to stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated Russia as the weakest link in the capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.
The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as Utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the specific Russian Question as a factor in world politics anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
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.
********
Engels’ article assessing the lessons of the 1848 revolution in the Habsburg empire was written exactly one year after he had joined Marx in their ringing appeal published in the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, Unite!” But his writings on the Austrian Slavs have thereafter been used to undermine the claim of the fathers of scientific Socialism to be consistent internationalists. Since they never publicly repudiated the 1849 articles, anti-Communist Slavs have repeatedly accused Marx and Engels of anti-Slavic chauvinism. This is despite their untiring efforts to win international support for the liberation of the Slavic Poles from Russia. Others have hinted chat Engels never really abandoned his youthful attachment to German nationalism, ignoring his noted attempt to smuggle a strategic plan to the Communards to cripple Bismarck’s army in occupied France in 1871.
Working at the onset of the Cold War in 1948, isolated among the Ukrainian exile community in Detroit, the veteran Ukrainian Bolshevik Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) subjected Engels’ position on the national question to a materialist analysis. Typically, in writing his polemic, Rosdolsky was not interested in placing a tick or a cross against 100-year-old positions, no matter how controversial. He was concerned to answer charges from other Ukrainian exiles that the Soviet Army, in seizing Czechoslovakia that year, was simply carrying out Engels’ call to annihilate those “reactionary peoples”, the former Austrian Slavs.
Rosdolsky makes use of the opportunity provided by his debate with the Ukrainian exiles to try to re-establish the Marxist tradition on the national question. Yet the left recoiled from his effort in horror. In a short preface, the translator John-Paul Himka recounts how Rosdolsky’s attempt to get the Yugoslav authorities to publish the article was sabotaged, and how it was only after he had acquired a reputation in European left circles with his most famous work, The Making of Marx’s Capital, that he was able to find a German publisher for his critique of Engels in 1964, 16 years after it was written. Himka himself alludes to his long battle to find an English publisher. The spirit in which Rosdolsky wrote his inquiry in 1948 is in even more need of revival today:
Rosdolsky divides Engels’ 1849 position into two parts – his realistic, materialist side; and his idealistic, Hegelian side. On the realistic side, Rosdolsky recognises that part of the reason for Engels’ position was due to his enthusiasm for the eastward spread of German industry and culture. He thought that German capitalism would be the vehicle that would destroy the old system, and quickly lay the basis for a revolutionary society where there would be no relations of exploitation.
Marx and Engels’ support for German capitalism was not because they were German nationalists, but was due to the profound weakness of capitalism elsewhere in Eastern Europe. That meant that any other nationalism except German nationalism was a rare phenomenon, and national revolts even rarer. The necessary preconditions for the outbreak of a national revolt – the unity of town and country, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry – barely existed anywhere in Eastern Europe, either because a national bourgeoisie was absent, or because it was German and therefore had little in common with the mainly Slav peasantry. As a result, the endemic struggles that peasants conducted against their landlords usually remained sporadic, local affairs that rarely acquired a national focus. That the mainly peasant Austrian Slavs sided with their landlords against the German revolutionaries suggests that, for all their agrarian conflicts, feudal relations remained largely intact in the region. Engels’ position was ‘realistic’ in that he believed that the only hope for lifting the Austrian Slavs out of their stagnant existence was their rapid assimilation into the German nation (and hence the `annihilation' of themselves as a people separate from Germans).
Rosdolsky subjects Engels’ “false prognosis” – his adoption of the theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ – to a devastating polemic. While he accepts that the Austrian Slavs had to be fought, insofar as they did eventually line up with the Habsburgs and Romanovs, Rosdolsky shows that at no stage were they ever offered freedom by the German revolutionaries of 1848, who, as capitalists, desired to suppress them anew. Rosdolsky believes that Marx and Engels should have led a campaign to back the liberation of the Austrian Slavs, since they could have at least expected to neutralise a number of those who subsequently threw in their lot with Metternich and reaction.
Instead Engels, as an editor of Cologne’s radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung, argued that the Austrian Slavs had betrayed the revolution because they had no history:
Rosdolsky believes Engels adopted Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ to describe the Austrian Slavs in order to justify his reluctance to jeopardise the democratic alliance against the Habsburgs and the Tsar. Though Engels had jointly written The German Ideology with Marx in 1844, in which Hegel’s idealistic understanding of history was overturned, Rosdolsky argues that Engels felt “compelled” by the “practical politics” of the situation to revive Hegel five years later.
Rosdolsky’s criticism of Engels for his use of the theory of ‘historic nations’ is correct, but his assessment of the reasons why Engels resorted to that theory is weak. The implication is that the ‘Austrian Slav’ issue is the sole example of either Marx or Engels compromising on their political method – though, of course, they were not adverse to flexibility in the presentation of their politics. Rosdolsky was aware that in 1848-49 Marx and Engels had just graduated from university and were only embarking on their long political careers. They were both upset – to say the least – at the collapse of the 1848 revolution. They spent much time in the early 1850s in exile in London reassessing and revising the positions they had both adopted during the revolutionary period – though not on the Austrian Slav issue. But these are all mitigating circumstances. There is a more substantial answer.
The reason why Engels adopted the attitude that he did towards the Austrian Slavs can only be discovered by bringing together Rosdolsky’s two separate parts, Engels’ realistic side and his “false prognosis”, and considering them as part of a contradictory whole.
On the one hand, Engels backed the democratic tradition that supported liberation struggles against reaction. For instance, he backed the struggles of both the Irish and the Poles against the twin bastions of European reaction, Britain and Russia. On the other hand, as a strict centralist, he was committed to uniting all nations in a single centralised world economy. As such, he was reluctant to support any struggle conducted against the more advanced countries that did not accelerate the capitalist transformation of the world. This was because, at that time, only capitalism could develop the material basis for a world economy, even though it accomplished this in a barbaric. fashion. Because struggles for national liberation were then the exception rather than the rule, this contradiction necessarily remained unresolved. It was the product of the level of development of capitalism at that time.
The best explanation Marx and Engels could offer was that, with the virtual absence of liberation movements, at least barbaric capitalism created the possibility of transforming society in a progressive direction, whilst pre-capitalist society meant barbarism without end. Nobody could produce any better answer than that, until there had been a further development of capitalist social relations. Given that the Austrian Slavs didn’t develop any national movements until some time after Engels was dead, it is perhaps understandable why he didn’t feel the need to repudiate his 1849 position.
Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that Marx and Engels began to change their position on the national question towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lenin, certainly, studied their Irish work closely in developing his own position. But in the end Lenin was able to solve the problem of the national question where his predecessors had necessarily failed because the development of imperialism itself had by his time provided the answer to the conundrum.
Imperialism’s arrival on the world’s stage announced the fact that capitalism was historically bankrupt, and the economic (though not political) basis for a centrally planned world economy had been laid. At the same tithe, imperialism had carved up the whole world into oppressor and oppressed nations. As a result, from being an issue of merely episodic concern, the national question became the ‘burning question’ of the day for Socialist revolutionaries in the period around the First World War when Lenin developed his position.
Lenin's position on the national question was that the imperialist epoch has made all nationalism reactionary, abstractly speaking, since only an internationally planned economy could bring progress. However, imperialism’s division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations posed a political problem – the international division of the working class, the only force which could provide the basis for such a fully centralised world economy, The form this political problem took was the struggle between the Great Powers and the colonies over the democratic demand for the right of all nations to self-determination. The Balkans, for example, where many of the Austrian Slavs lived, became the focus of intense inter-imperialist rivalries which fuelled the nationalist aspirations that sparked off the First World War.
Lenin argued that the international working class could never break politically from their own bourgeoisies, imperialist or otherwise, unless they championed the national question. Working class unity could therefore only be achieved internationally when, in the oppressor countries, the labour movement opposed Great Power nationalism and backed all anti-imperialist struggles unconditionally. It also required that, in a nation oppressed by imperialism, its labour movement should back the nationalist struggle insofar as it was directed against imperialism. This is because, in fighting Great Power oppression, small nation nationalism acquires a progressive content that it would not otherwise have in the imperialist epoch. In such conditions, it is by being the most consistent anti-imperialists that revolutionaries assert the separate interests of the working class, which are always independent of the more narrow concerns of the nationalists.
Consequently, although revolutionaries do not aim to create myriads of small nations dotting the globe, if that is what is required to defeat imperialism and to secure a voluntary union of the international working class, then so be it. Such union would consolidate the single world economy, and so lay the basis for the mixing of national cultures, and therefore the eventual withering away of separate nations.
Rosdolsky formally praised Lenin’s approach to the national question in several places in his book, yet he never gave any indication that he understood how imperialism had fundamentally altered the character of the national question. Indeed, he only polemicised against Hegel’s categorisation of some nations as ‘non-historic’. This left open the issue whether all nations should be considered ‘historic’. This is probably why Rosdolsky found that he “cannot help but ‘like’ [the Pan-Slav nationalist] Mikhail Bakunin’s nationality programme better than Engels’”. (p.179)
Moreover, Rosdolsky made no distinction between capitalist nations and the new Stalinist ones. No doubt influenced by his isolation among Detroit’s Ukrainian exile community, Rosdolsky argues in his book that, under the Stalinist regime:
Just as Rosdolsky in 1948 wasn’t motivated by a concern to correct Engels’ 1849 position, so we must draw out the lessons for the national question in Eastern Europe today. Engels’ diatribes against the Austrian Slavic people can now be put into perspective. He called for them to be removed from the stage of history because, by backing reaction, they acted as a barrier to progress in the region. His mistake lay in assuming that this would always be so.
In a time of Stalinist collapse and capitalist decline, however, Engels’ 1849 call has a diametrically opposite result. Today the mainly Slavic working class is the only force for progress in Eastern Europe. Through the deft manipulation of ethnic conflicts, the imperialists, the nationalists and the former Stalinist bureaucrats hope to paralyse them by keeping them divided. Even Rosdolsky’s 1948 call for ‘full’ Ukrainian independence is requiring a reactionary content now that the Stalinist regimes are degenerating. In a situation where there is ethnic conflict but no national oppression, the working class can only achieve social liberation through a struggle against all nationalisms.
Reading Rosdolsky’s Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples is a useful exercise in reinforcing the lesson that there is no general theory of nationalism. On the contrary, every national question has to be located in its own historical and social specificity. That is the Marxist approach to the national question.
Andy Clarkson
**********
At the end of 1921 Victor Serge, pessimistic about developments in Russia, asked for an assignment in Central Europe where, he believed, the fate of the revolution would be decided. Among his duties he wrote regularly for the Comintern press on events in Germany. For many years it was not known that articles signed by R. Albert (quoted in books on the German Revolution by Broué and Harman) were in fact by Serge.
Now, thanks to the efforts of Serge’s son Vlady and Broué, his articles for Correspondance internationale, Bulletin communiste and Clarté, covering mainly the period July to December 1923, have been gathered together in book form.
The brief articles collected here are up-to-the-minute descriptions, but thanks to Serge’s perceptiveness, they are valuable raw material for anyone seeking to understand the failure of the German Revolution. With his eye for concrete detail, Serge vividly recreates the effects of inflation; the salary that evaporates in the two days before it is paid, and the rising suicide rate. And he equally notes the huge dividends received by the rich, adding that the figures “are doctored in order not to give too much of a shock to people with no bread and no shirt who still read the newspapers” (p.36).
He also observes that in such a situation the state machine will begin to crack because of the effects of the crisis on the people who make up that machine. He describes the misery of women who have been queuing for days in the cold for a bit of margarine, but also notes the “inevitable policeman ... bad-tempered and fed up at being ashamed of his job. Perhaps his wife is there with the other women ...” (p.126).
On his own testimony Serge was one of the first in the Comintern to take the threat of Fascism seriously. At the beginning of 1923 Hitler was still so obscure that Serge could mistakenly refer to him as “Colonel Hitler”. But he traces Hitler’s role during the year, financed by big capital (including Henry Ford), but ditched as soon as the revolutionary threat had subsided. By the end of the year Hitler was in prison since “heavy industry doesn’t need civil war” (p190). But he also prophesies that Hitler is not finished. And he notes the success of the KPD in holding debates with the Fascists and winning over their rank and file – a reminder that refusal to debate with Fascists is not a question of timeless historical principle.
It would be wrong to expect a book like this to answer the major questions about the failure of the German Revolution. Serge was writing in the heat of struggle, and as a committed militant he could not write anything that would undermine the struggle until it was over (in some ways a comparable situation to the last months of the miners’ strike in 1985). Some of his judgements may, in retrospect appear too optimistic. And on 26 October he categorically denies reports that the Hamburg rising was Communist-led: “Our party rejects isolated and partial actions, which are easily suppressed and weaken and debilitate revolutionary preparation” (p.131). (In a note Broué speculates as to whether Serge was lying to protect the Hamburg comrades, or whether he was genuinely misled. There is a third possibility – a veiled, ironic criticism of his own comrades.)
In one of the last articles – written for the French journal Clarté (close to, but not controlled by, the PCF) – Serge recognises that the opportunity had been missed, and calls far “constant, vigorous, intensive self-criticism” (p.191). Unfortunately, in Zinoviev’s International he was not to get it.
As Serge notes in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the crisis of leadership must be understood partly as an expression of the crisis of popular consciousness. In his reports Serge helps us to see why, in a situation where the social order was visibly rotting, the working class failed to reach revolutionary consciousness.
Firstly, he notes the effects of continuing food shortages; by the autumn workers were simply “too hungry to fight” (p.171). Marxists are sometimes too anxious to avoid lapsing into ‘vulgar materialism’ and miss such points.
Secondly, he points to the treacherous role of the Social Democrats. Certainly there was a massive upheaval in the SPD ranks – SPD full-timers in Leipzig demanded the expulsion of Ebert from the party. But, he notes, even the “left Social Democrats are only revolutionaries in spite of themselves” (p.136), and the KPD underestimated the continuing grip of Social Democracy.
In the 1920s Serge wrote prolificly for a range of publications. Often his positions at the time differed sharply from his later judgements (as over Kronstadt). Yet Serge’s peculiar blend of commitment and detachment made him an invaluable witness. Hopefully the renewed interest in Serge produced by the forthcoming centenary will lead to more of his journalism being collected in book form.
Ian Birchall
*******
Although the writer of this book is an Associate Professor of politics, the fact that he lacks a basic training in Marxism and writes for a milieu that has no concept of class politics at all means that what we have here is yet another non-political book written about political movements. The fact that the Trotskyist movement in the USA, the Socialist Workers Party, is just about the most theoretically wretched in the entire world cannot have helped matters. Add to that more than a dash of old-fashioned Stalinism and we have a very exotic mixture indeed.
His attempt to grapple with Trotskyism is deeply flawed. It cannot, of course, be understood without some command of either its basis within Bolshevism, or of its transitional methodology. On the first count Fields’ understanding of the conflict of Bolshevism and Stalinism seems to be limited to a remark about Trotsky’s propensity to blame all the bureaucratic deformations of the Soviet Union on Stalin (p.234), and so little is grasped about democracy within the party that he appears to believe that Trotsky’s support for democratic centralism and for factional rights at the same time is “inconsistent” (p.235). On the second count, believing as he does that the Transitional Programme is meant to pose “minimum demands” (p.239), he thinks that “Trotskyists in the United States place much more stress on the Transitional Program than do the French Trotskyists who are appealing to a much more radical working class” (p.181), and that “there is thus less a need for the Ligue to emphasise the Transitional Program in the more radicalised milieu of the French workers than there is for the SWP in the United States where the workers are more conservative” (p.158). Even workers’ control, apparently, is a “minimum demand” (p240). Oblivious of Lenin’s demand for Communist membership of the Labour Party, he assumes that the practice of entry is “not one which is clearly consistent with what most people would recognise as Leninism” (p.239), and even confuses it with left wing activists belonging to trade unions, for example those of the UJCML inside the CGT (p.92).
And whilst we can sympathise with anyone approaching the complexities of Trotskyist history from outside, the blunders he makes are monumental. Pierre Frank, apparently, is “still active” (p.42), Pablo was “General Secretary of the Fourth International in 1942” (pp.48-9), Lutte Ouvriere is “probably smaller” than both the LCR and the OCI (now PCI) (p.77), and the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike was in 1939 (p.182). We are told in all seriousness that the Union Communiste dropped its claim to belong to the Fourth International, not because of a threatened lawsuit, but in order to “secure some sort of reform of the PCI and possible unification with it” (p.74). Most fatuous of all is the assertion that the American SWP “has been subjected to a severer and relentless repression by those who control the political system, the parallel of which can only be found in France during the World War II Occupation” (p.139).
He has also swallowed an ocean of Stalinist and Maoist nonsense. Although Stalin did not even know that the Netherlands were part of Benelux, his writings on the national question, apparently, “are among his most important contributions to the larger body of Marxist-Leninist thought” (p.219). Mao, whose works on dialectics were ghost written for him, and didn’t know Hegel from Harold Lloyd, “touched the philosophical basis of Marxism” (p.16), and during the Cultural Revolution, a noxious purge if ever there was one, he was really “attempting to mobilise the younger generation to control the bureaucracy” (p.9).
Most amusing, however, are his own dialectical meanderings, particularly in chapter six. He appears to operate using his own concept of the first, second and third levels of practice, which he nowhere relates to Marxism, and along with this comes all manner of sub-Althusserian claptrap. “Trotsky and the movements which have followed in his wake have played the role of international superego” and “like most superegos, Trotskyists are little appreciated and much repressed” (p.243), and since they are unwise enough to have a theory, it “becomes increasingly dysfunctional at the level of practice as the practitioners move away from a suggestive conception of theory and towards a rigidly scientist conception and a posture of vigilence [sic] against all political pragmatics” (pp.253-4). But beneath this elaborate smokescreen his own concept is really rather crude: that the Trotskyist and Maoist movements are split because they are not only at odd; with “the pecularities of the political culture in which the attempt to apply the theories is made” but that there are also “contradictions which inhere in the guiding theories themselves” (p.ix).
Although class concepts rarely intrude upon his analysis (at one point we are given the telling fact that only between eight and nine per cent of LCR member are factory workers, p.52), it is in fact only by using them that this extreme fragmentation both of organisation and of theory can be explained. Based as the groups are within essentially unstable strata that are caught between the primary contending classes of the bourgeoisie and the working class, ideological vacillation, sectarian sterility or opportunist adaptation are nor only to be expected, but are virtually inevitable. The very ideological freedom he recognises in French Maoism, for example, is surely because its romantic escapist Third World peasant ideology has only historic contact with France’s past, and not a great deal to offer it in the present. The romanticism of the middle class left (in Britain as well as in the USA and France) is only matched by its irrelevance.
We search in vain for any inkling as why this is so. But the marginal position which the left finds itself rests upon a real material basis, in the global defeat of the working class before and during the Second World War which, along with the long boom and the spread of Stalinism an ideology of peasant nationalism, could not fail to promote Stalinist and Social Democratic illusions, not only among masses but even among would-be revolutionaries.
To add to the distress of any innocent who might reach for this book as a guide to the maze of far left politics is the incredible violence done to the English language. Apart from verbal barbarisms such as “delegitimization” (p27) and “thusly” (pp.54, 95), organisations “operate at tight end of the continuum” (p.ix), social scientists “hypothesize” (p.35), Marx calls “to transform the social universe in an emancipatory direction” (p.ix), and we repeatedly encounter the mysterious “postures of vigilence against Marxist-Leninist pragmatics” (e.g. p.252). Oh dear!
Year One of the Russian Revolution-Victor Serge
I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.
The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.
Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And try to stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated Russia as the weakest link in the capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.
The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as Utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the specific Russian Question as a factor in world politics anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
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.
********
Reviews
Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Critique, Glasgow, 1987, pp 220, £8.00But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat ... the Austrian Germans and the Magyars will gain their freedom and take a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will scatter the Slav Sonderbund [alliance], and annihilate all these small pigheaded nations even to their very names. The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance.' (F. Engels, The Magyar Struggle, January 1849)Rosdolsky correctly notes that Engels’ position on the Austrian Slavs has been irrevocably refuted by “the severest critic of all critics – history”. The “reactionary peoples” condemned by Engels are the Czechs and Slovaks that today populate Czechoslovakia, the Serbs and Croats who help make up Yugoslavia, and the Galician Ukrainians who now live in the Western Ukraine. These peoples have recently emerged from the collapsing Stalinist Eastern Bloc only to be thrown once again into the cauldron of insurrection and ethnic conflict. For that reason, the recent publication in English of this 40-year-old study of Engels’ peculiar attitude towards the nationalities of Eastern Europe in 1849 is timely, and to be welcomed.
Engels’ article assessing the lessons of the 1848 revolution in the Habsburg empire was written exactly one year after he had joined Marx in their ringing appeal published in the Communist Manifesto: “Workers of the world, Unite!” But his writings on the Austrian Slavs have thereafter been used to undermine the claim of the fathers of scientific Socialism to be consistent internationalists. Since they never publicly repudiated the 1849 articles, anti-Communist Slavs have repeatedly accused Marx and Engels of anti-Slavic chauvinism. This is despite their untiring efforts to win international support for the liberation of the Slavic Poles from Russia. Others have hinted chat Engels never really abandoned his youthful attachment to German nationalism, ignoring his noted attempt to smuggle a strategic plan to the Communards to cripple Bismarck’s army in occupied France in 1871.
Working at the onset of the Cold War in 1948, isolated among the Ukrainian exile community in Detroit, the veteran Ukrainian Bolshevik Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) subjected Engels’ position on the national question to a materialist analysis. Typically, in writing his polemic, Rosdolsky was not interested in placing a tick or a cross against 100-year-old positions, no matter how controversial. He was concerned to answer charges from other Ukrainian exiles that the Soviet Army, in seizing Czechoslovakia that year, was simply carrying out Engels’ call to annihilate those “reactionary peoples”, the former Austrian Slavs.
Rosdolsky makes use of the opportunity provided by his debate with the Ukrainian exiles to try to re-establish the Marxist tradition on the national question. Yet the left recoiled from his effort in horror. In a short preface, the translator John-Paul Himka recounts how Rosdolsky’s attempt to get the Yugoslav authorities to publish the article was sabotaged, and how it was only after he had acquired a reputation in European left circles with his most famous work, The Making of Marx’s Capital, that he was able to find a German publisher for his critique of Engels in 1964, 16 years after it was written. Himka himself alludes to his long battle to find an English publisher. The spirit in which Rosdolsky wrote his inquiry in 1948 is in even more need of revival today:
There are two ways to look at Marx and Engels: as the creators of a brilliant, but in its deepest essence, thoroughly critical, scientific method; or as church fathers of some sort, the bronzed figures of a monument. Those who have the latter vision will not have found this study to their taste. We, however, prefer to see them as they were in reality. (p.185)In his book, Rosdolsky sets out Engels’ justification for his position at length. Briefly, both Marx and Engels supported the bourgeois revolutions that broke out from February 1848 throughout Europe as the necessary precursors to the Socialist revolution, which they erroneously expected to be imminent. However, the revolutionary fervour of the bourgeoisie soon evaporated, and the forces of reaction rallied, particularly in Metternich’s Austria. In October 1848 the bloody suppression of the Vienna rising marked the turning point of the insurrections, and the revolutionary forces were thrown back everywhere from then onwards. What motivated Engels to write his vituperative articles was the Austrian Slavs’ rejection of their chance to win freedom from the oppressive rule of the Habsburgs, and their enthusiastic participation in Metternich’s counter-revolution.
Rosdolsky divides Engels’ 1849 position into two parts – his realistic, materialist side; and his idealistic, Hegelian side. On the realistic side, Rosdolsky recognises that part of the reason for Engels’ position was due to his enthusiasm for the eastward spread of German industry and culture. He thought that German capitalism would be the vehicle that would destroy the old system, and quickly lay the basis for a revolutionary society where there would be no relations of exploitation.
Marx and Engels’ support for German capitalism was not because they were German nationalists, but was due to the profound weakness of capitalism elsewhere in Eastern Europe. That meant that any other nationalism except German nationalism was a rare phenomenon, and national revolts even rarer. The necessary preconditions for the outbreak of a national revolt – the unity of town and country, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry – barely existed anywhere in Eastern Europe, either because a national bourgeoisie was absent, or because it was German and therefore had little in common with the mainly Slav peasantry. As a result, the endemic struggles that peasants conducted against their landlords usually remained sporadic, local affairs that rarely acquired a national focus. That the mainly peasant Austrian Slavs sided with their landlords against the German revolutionaries suggests that, for all their agrarian conflicts, feudal relations remained largely intact in the region. Engels’ position was ‘realistic’ in that he believed that the only hope for lifting the Austrian Slavs out of their stagnant existence was their rapid assimilation into the German nation (and hence the `annihilation' of themselves as a people separate from Germans).
Rosdolsky subjects Engels’ “false prognosis” – his adoption of the theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ – to a devastating polemic. While he accepts that the Austrian Slavs had to be fought, insofar as they did eventually line up with the Habsburgs and Romanovs, Rosdolsky shows that at no stage were they ever offered freedom by the German revolutionaries of 1848, who, as capitalists, desired to suppress them anew. Rosdolsky believes that Marx and Engels should have led a campaign to back the liberation of the Austrian Slavs, since they could have at least expected to neutralise a number of those who subsequently threw in their lot with Metternich and reaction.
Instead Engels, as an editor of Cologne’s radical Neue Rheinische Zeitung, argued that the Austrian Slavs had betrayed the revolution because they had no history:
Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilisation ... have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs. (Democratic Pan-Slavism, February 1849)Rosdolsky links Engels’ adoption of this conception directly to Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic people’. In his Philosophy of Mind, the German philosopher held that only those peoples that could – thanks to inherent “natural and spiritual abilities” – establish a state were to be the bearers of historical progress: “A nation with no state formation ... has, strictly speaking, no history – like the nations which existed before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery.” As a result, those who were indifferent about possessing their own state would soon stop being a people. The reactionary implications of Hegel’s theory are clear: he thought that some peoples will always be uncivilised, no matter what. For instance, in 1830 Hegel wrote off Africa in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: “Anyone who wishes to study the most terrible manifestations of human nature will find them in Africa ... it is an unhistorical continent, with no movement or development of its own.”
Rosdolsky believes Engels adopted Hegel’s theory of ‘non-historic peoples’ to describe the Austrian Slavs in order to justify his reluctance to jeopardise the democratic alliance against the Habsburgs and the Tsar. Though Engels had jointly written The German Ideology with Marx in 1844, in which Hegel’s idealistic understanding of history was overturned, Rosdolsky argues that Engels felt “compelled” by the “practical politics” of the situation to revive Hegel five years later.
Rosdolsky’s criticism of Engels for his use of the theory of ‘historic nations’ is correct, but his assessment of the reasons why Engels resorted to that theory is weak. The implication is that the ‘Austrian Slav’ issue is the sole example of either Marx or Engels compromising on their political method – though, of course, they were not adverse to flexibility in the presentation of their politics. Rosdolsky was aware that in 1848-49 Marx and Engels had just graduated from university and were only embarking on their long political careers. They were both upset – to say the least – at the collapse of the 1848 revolution. They spent much time in the early 1850s in exile in London reassessing and revising the positions they had both adopted during the revolutionary period – though not on the Austrian Slav issue. But these are all mitigating circumstances. There is a more substantial answer.
The reason why Engels adopted the attitude that he did towards the Austrian Slavs can only be discovered by bringing together Rosdolsky’s two separate parts, Engels’ realistic side and his “false prognosis”, and considering them as part of a contradictory whole.
On the one hand, Engels backed the democratic tradition that supported liberation struggles against reaction. For instance, he backed the struggles of both the Irish and the Poles against the twin bastions of European reaction, Britain and Russia. On the other hand, as a strict centralist, he was committed to uniting all nations in a single centralised world economy. As such, he was reluctant to support any struggle conducted against the more advanced countries that did not accelerate the capitalist transformation of the world. This was because, at that time, only capitalism could develop the material basis for a world economy, even though it accomplished this in a barbaric. fashion. Because struggles for national liberation were then the exception rather than the rule, this contradiction necessarily remained unresolved. It was the product of the level of development of capitalism at that time.
The best explanation Marx and Engels could offer was that, with the virtual absence of liberation movements, at least barbaric capitalism created the possibility of transforming society in a progressive direction, whilst pre-capitalist society meant barbarism without end. Nobody could produce any better answer than that, until there had been a further development of capitalist social relations. Given that the Austrian Slavs didn’t develop any national movements until some time after Engels was dead, it is perhaps understandable why he didn’t feel the need to repudiate his 1849 position.
Nevertheless, there is much evidence to suggest that Marx and Engels began to change their position on the national question towards the end of the nineteenth century. Lenin, certainly, studied their Irish work closely in developing his own position. But in the end Lenin was able to solve the problem of the national question where his predecessors had necessarily failed because the development of imperialism itself had by his time provided the answer to the conundrum.
Imperialism’s arrival on the world’s stage announced the fact that capitalism was historically bankrupt, and the economic (though not political) basis for a centrally planned world economy had been laid. At the same tithe, imperialism had carved up the whole world into oppressor and oppressed nations. As a result, from being an issue of merely episodic concern, the national question became the ‘burning question’ of the day for Socialist revolutionaries in the period around the First World War when Lenin developed his position.
Lenin's position on the national question was that the imperialist epoch has made all nationalism reactionary, abstractly speaking, since only an internationally planned economy could bring progress. However, imperialism’s division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations posed a political problem – the international division of the working class, the only force which could provide the basis for such a fully centralised world economy, The form this political problem took was the struggle between the Great Powers and the colonies over the democratic demand for the right of all nations to self-determination. The Balkans, for example, where many of the Austrian Slavs lived, became the focus of intense inter-imperialist rivalries which fuelled the nationalist aspirations that sparked off the First World War.
Lenin argued that the international working class could never break politically from their own bourgeoisies, imperialist or otherwise, unless they championed the national question. Working class unity could therefore only be achieved internationally when, in the oppressor countries, the labour movement opposed Great Power nationalism and backed all anti-imperialist struggles unconditionally. It also required that, in a nation oppressed by imperialism, its labour movement should back the nationalist struggle insofar as it was directed against imperialism. This is because, in fighting Great Power oppression, small nation nationalism acquires a progressive content that it would not otherwise have in the imperialist epoch. In such conditions, it is by being the most consistent anti-imperialists that revolutionaries assert the separate interests of the working class, which are always independent of the more narrow concerns of the nationalists.
Consequently, although revolutionaries do not aim to create myriads of small nations dotting the globe, if that is what is required to defeat imperialism and to secure a voluntary union of the international working class, then so be it. Such union would consolidate the single world economy, and so lay the basis for the mixing of national cultures, and therefore the eventual withering away of separate nations.
Rosdolsky formally praised Lenin’s approach to the national question in several places in his book, yet he never gave any indication that he understood how imperialism had fundamentally altered the character of the national question. Indeed, he only polemicised against Hegel’s categorisation of some nations as ‘non-historic’. This left open the issue whether all nations should be considered ‘historic’. This is probably why Rosdolsky found that he “cannot help but ‘like’ [the Pan-Slav nationalist] Mikhail Bakunin’s nationality programme better than Engels’”. (p.179)
Moreover, Rosdolsky made no distinction between capitalist nations and the new Stalinist ones. No doubt influenced by his isolation among Detroit’s Ukrainian exile community, Rosdolsky argues in his book that, under the Stalinist regime:
The [Ukrainian] question cannot be solved as long as the Ukrainians have not achieved full – and not merely formal ’ independence with or without federation with the Russians. (p.165)This hint of pro-nationalist sentiments indicates that, while Rosdolsky formally accepted Lenin’s approach, he retained reservations in practice.
Just as Rosdolsky in 1948 wasn’t motivated by a concern to correct Engels’ 1849 position, so we must draw out the lessons for the national question in Eastern Europe today. Engels’ diatribes against the Austrian Slavic people can now be put into perspective. He called for them to be removed from the stage of history because, by backing reaction, they acted as a barrier to progress in the region. His mistake lay in assuming that this would always be so.
In a time of Stalinist collapse and capitalist decline, however, Engels’ 1849 call has a diametrically opposite result. Today the mainly Slavic working class is the only force for progress in Eastern Europe. Through the deft manipulation of ethnic conflicts, the imperialists, the nationalists and the former Stalinist bureaucrats hope to paralyse them by keeping them divided. Even Rosdolsky’s 1948 call for ‘full’ Ukrainian independence is requiring a reactionary content now that the Stalinist regimes are degenerating. In a situation where there is ethnic conflict but no national oppression, the working class can only achieve social liberation through a struggle against all nationalisms.
Reading Rosdolsky’s Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples is a useful exercise in reinforcing the lesson that there is no general theory of nationalism. On the contrary, every national question has to be located in its own historical and social specificity. That is the Marxist approach to the national question.
Andy Clarkson
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Reviews
Victor Serge, Notes d’Allemagne (1923), (edited by Pierre Broué), La Breche, Paris, 1990, pp 213, 90FAt the end of 1921 Victor Serge, pessimistic about developments in Russia, asked for an assignment in Central Europe where, he believed, the fate of the revolution would be decided. Among his duties he wrote regularly for the Comintern press on events in Germany. For many years it was not known that articles signed by R. Albert (quoted in books on the German Revolution by Broué and Harman) were in fact by Serge.
Now, thanks to the efforts of Serge’s son Vlady and Broué, his articles for Correspondance internationale, Bulletin communiste and Clarté, covering mainly the period July to December 1923, have been gathered together in book form.
The brief articles collected here are up-to-the-minute descriptions, but thanks to Serge’s perceptiveness, they are valuable raw material for anyone seeking to understand the failure of the German Revolution. With his eye for concrete detail, Serge vividly recreates the effects of inflation; the salary that evaporates in the two days before it is paid, and the rising suicide rate. And he equally notes the huge dividends received by the rich, adding that the figures “are doctored in order not to give too much of a shock to people with no bread and no shirt who still read the newspapers” (p.36).
He also observes that in such a situation the state machine will begin to crack because of the effects of the crisis on the people who make up that machine. He describes the misery of women who have been queuing for days in the cold for a bit of margarine, but also notes the “inevitable policeman ... bad-tempered and fed up at being ashamed of his job. Perhaps his wife is there with the other women ...” (p.126).
On his own testimony Serge was one of the first in the Comintern to take the threat of Fascism seriously. At the beginning of 1923 Hitler was still so obscure that Serge could mistakenly refer to him as “Colonel Hitler”. But he traces Hitler’s role during the year, financed by big capital (including Henry Ford), but ditched as soon as the revolutionary threat had subsided. By the end of the year Hitler was in prison since “heavy industry doesn’t need civil war” (p190). But he also prophesies that Hitler is not finished. And he notes the success of the KPD in holding debates with the Fascists and winning over their rank and file – a reminder that refusal to debate with Fascists is not a question of timeless historical principle.
It would be wrong to expect a book like this to answer the major questions about the failure of the German Revolution. Serge was writing in the heat of struggle, and as a committed militant he could not write anything that would undermine the struggle until it was over (in some ways a comparable situation to the last months of the miners’ strike in 1985). Some of his judgements may, in retrospect appear too optimistic. And on 26 October he categorically denies reports that the Hamburg rising was Communist-led: “Our party rejects isolated and partial actions, which are easily suppressed and weaken and debilitate revolutionary preparation” (p.131). (In a note Broué speculates as to whether Serge was lying to protect the Hamburg comrades, or whether he was genuinely misled. There is a third possibility – a veiled, ironic criticism of his own comrades.)
In one of the last articles – written for the French journal Clarté (close to, but not controlled by, the PCF) – Serge recognises that the opportunity had been missed, and calls far “constant, vigorous, intensive self-criticism” (p.191). Unfortunately, in Zinoviev’s International he was not to get it.
As Serge notes in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the crisis of leadership must be understood partly as an expression of the crisis of popular consciousness. In his reports Serge helps us to see why, in a situation where the social order was visibly rotting, the working class failed to reach revolutionary consciousness.
Firstly, he notes the effects of continuing food shortages; by the autumn workers were simply “too hungry to fight” (p.171). Marxists are sometimes too anxious to avoid lapsing into ‘vulgar materialism’ and miss such points.
Secondly, he points to the treacherous role of the Social Democrats. Certainly there was a massive upheaval in the SPD ranks – SPD full-timers in Leipzig demanded the expulsion of Ebert from the party. But, he notes, even the “left Social Democrats are only revolutionaries in spite of themselves” (p.136), and the KPD underestimated the continuing grip of Social Democracy.
In the 1920s Serge wrote prolificly for a range of publications. Often his positions at the time differed sharply from his later judgements (as over Kronstadt). Yet Serge’s peculiar blend of commitment and detachment made him an invaluable witness. Hopefully the renewed interest in Serge produced by the forthcoming centenary will lead to more of his journalism being collected in book form.
Ian Birchall
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Reviews
A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States, Autonomedia, Brooklyn 1988, pp363Although the writer of this book is an Associate Professor of politics, the fact that he lacks a basic training in Marxism and writes for a milieu that has no concept of class politics at all means that what we have here is yet another non-political book written about political movements. The fact that the Trotskyist movement in the USA, the Socialist Workers Party, is just about the most theoretically wretched in the entire world cannot have helped matters. Add to that more than a dash of old-fashioned Stalinism and we have a very exotic mixture indeed.
His attempt to grapple with Trotskyism is deeply flawed. It cannot, of course, be understood without some command of either its basis within Bolshevism, or of its transitional methodology. On the first count Fields’ understanding of the conflict of Bolshevism and Stalinism seems to be limited to a remark about Trotsky’s propensity to blame all the bureaucratic deformations of the Soviet Union on Stalin (p.234), and so little is grasped about democracy within the party that he appears to believe that Trotsky’s support for democratic centralism and for factional rights at the same time is “inconsistent” (p.235). On the second count, believing as he does that the Transitional Programme is meant to pose “minimum demands” (p.239), he thinks that “Trotskyists in the United States place much more stress on the Transitional Program than do the French Trotskyists who are appealing to a much more radical working class” (p.181), and that “there is thus less a need for the Ligue to emphasise the Transitional Program in the more radicalised milieu of the French workers than there is for the SWP in the United States where the workers are more conservative” (p.158). Even workers’ control, apparently, is a “minimum demand” (p240). Oblivious of Lenin’s demand for Communist membership of the Labour Party, he assumes that the practice of entry is “not one which is clearly consistent with what most people would recognise as Leninism” (p.239), and even confuses it with left wing activists belonging to trade unions, for example those of the UJCML inside the CGT (p.92).
And whilst we can sympathise with anyone approaching the complexities of Trotskyist history from outside, the blunders he makes are monumental. Pierre Frank, apparently, is “still active” (p.42), Pablo was “General Secretary of the Fourth International in 1942” (pp.48-9), Lutte Ouvriere is “probably smaller” than both the LCR and the OCI (now PCI) (p.77), and the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike was in 1939 (p.182). We are told in all seriousness that the Union Communiste dropped its claim to belong to the Fourth International, not because of a threatened lawsuit, but in order to “secure some sort of reform of the PCI and possible unification with it” (p.74). Most fatuous of all is the assertion that the American SWP “has been subjected to a severer and relentless repression by those who control the political system, the parallel of which can only be found in France during the World War II Occupation” (p.139).
He has also swallowed an ocean of Stalinist and Maoist nonsense. Although Stalin did not even know that the Netherlands were part of Benelux, his writings on the national question, apparently, “are among his most important contributions to the larger body of Marxist-Leninist thought” (p.219). Mao, whose works on dialectics were ghost written for him, and didn’t know Hegel from Harold Lloyd, “touched the philosophical basis of Marxism” (p.16), and during the Cultural Revolution, a noxious purge if ever there was one, he was really “attempting to mobilise the younger generation to control the bureaucracy” (p.9).
Most amusing, however, are his own dialectical meanderings, particularly in chapter six. He appears to operate using his own concept of the first, second and third levels of practice, which he nowhere relates to Marxism, and along with this comes all manner of sub-Althusserian claptrap. “Trotsky and the movements which have followed in his wake have played the role of international superego” and “like most superegos, Trotskyists are little appreciated and much repressed” (p.243), and since they are unwise enough to have a theory, it “becomes increasingly dysfunctional at the level of practice as the practitioners move away from a suggestive conception of theory and towards a rigidly scientist conception and a posture of vigilence [sic] against all political pragmatics” (pp.253-4). But beneath this elaborate smokescreen his own concept is really rather crude: that the Trotskyist and Maoist movements are split because they are not only at odd; with “the pecularities of the political culture in which the attempt to apply the theories is made” but that there are also “contradictions which inhere in the guiding theories themselves” (p.ix).
Although class concepts rarely intrude upon his analysis (at one point we are given the telling fact that only between eight and nine per cent of LCR member are factory workers, p.52), it is in fact only by using them that this extreme fragmentation both of organisation and of theory can be explained. Based as the groups are within essentially unstable strata that are caught between the primary contending classes of the bourgeoisie and the working class, ideological vacillation, sectarian sterility or opportunist adaptation are nor only to be expected, but are virtually inevitable. The very ideological freedom he recognises in French Maoism, for example, is surely because its romantic escapist Third World peasant ideology has only historic contact with France’s past, and not a great deal to offer it in the present. The romanticism of the middle class left (in Britain as well as in the USA and France) is only matched by its irrelevance.
We search in vain for any inkling as why this is so. But the marginal position which the left finds itself rests upon a real material basis, in the global defeat of the working class before and during the Second World War which, along with the long boom and the spread of Stalinism an ideology of peasant nationalism, could not fail to promote Stalinist and Social Democratic illusions, not only among masses but even among would-be revolutionaries.
To add to the distress of any innocent who might reach for this book as a guide to the maze of far left politics is the incredible violence done to the English language. Apart from verbal barbarisms such as “delegitimization” (p27) and “thusly” (pp.54, 95), organisations “operate at tight end of the continuum” (p.ix), social scientists “hypothesize” (p.35), Marx calls “to transform the social universe in an emancipatory direction” (p.ix), and we repeatedly encounter the mysterious “postures of vigilence against Marxist-Leninist pragmatics” (e.g. p.252). Oh dear!
Al Richardson
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Out In The Black Liberation Night- The Black Panthers And The Struggle For The Ten-Point Program-The Complete Stories
Eleven-One-In the Beginning
…they came out of the hard okie/arkie white trash Hell’s Angels- dominated mean streets of Oakland, Oakland out in sunny California at the end of the American continental line. The place where the staccato faux -Spanish style (speaking unknowingly of earlier conquistador invasions) was to close out dreams, dreams of plenty, dreams of an ocean’s worth of good times. They came out of the cop-infested army of occupation on those dark 1960s negro streets (the streets that they wanted to make black, proud black, devouring old Spanish negro alien word, and deed). They came out of the mid-1960s hard reality that while their brothers and sisters in Selma, Montgomery, Lake Charles, Albany (GA), Greenwood, and all points south, south of the American slick democracy had gained something, something worth fighting (and dying) for that they, Oakland, Watts, Harlem, Cleveland, Newark, and all points North and West, north and west of American slick democracy, had been left behind. That they too had to face down their own copper nightmare, their own ghetto-imposed wanting habits nightmare, wanting some decent sweat-less non-grinding job, wanting their own cozy bungalow (white picket fence optional in the laid-back Frisco Bay night), wanting their own take a vacation out in the high Sierras, wanting above all to stop being cop looked at every time they went onto the white streets of town, hell the black streets too, and to get rid of their own subtle (and maybe not so subtle when they started to rile up the okies and arkies) Mister James Crow.
And so they, okay, okay, Huey and Bobby they, started putting together a little group, a little group of students and the young bucks from the ‘hood (neighborhood , okay, but who else would you expect to start stuff like that, insurrection kind of stuff, out in sunny blood-stained California, even a California by that freaking fog-bound bay ), corner boys really, under a simple proposition-voting and the such might have been okay in that all point south night down in America but in land’s end that didn’t mean jack. What meant jack was to get that damn down presser man, the guys in blues, the almost totally white guys in blue off their backs, and let the brothers and sisters breath. And so they, black proud, and black smart, decided after looking at history a little, fog-bound black history as fogged as that rusted colored golden gate bridge once Mister Whitey got through with it, that the only time that Mister Whitey paid attention was when proud black warrior-savants pressed the issue, defended themselves against that slave market and jim crow night. And so they looked to the mighty 200,000 strong of the Union black army, and the mighty southern struggle Robert F. Williams over across the land in Monroe, North Carolina just a few years back and said enough. So they righteously armed themselves. And said in some small recess of the brain they knew that this too was worth dying for.
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black Community.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Some Stages of the Revolution in the South of Vietnam(1947)
Book Review
Year One of the Russian Revolution-Victor Serge
I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.
The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.
Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And try to stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated Russia as the weakest link in the capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.
The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as Utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the specific Russian Question as a factor in world politics anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
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.
********
The author, writing under the thinly disguised pseudonym of ‘Lucien’, was one of the leading members of the International Communist League, and had been one of the militants of the pre-war October group who had been arrested and tried, as recounted in Ngo Van Xuyet's outline above.
According to the terms of the statement, Japanese imperialism surrendered all power to the legal governments of the various countries that constituted Indochina: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. These peoples, the statement added, were from now on independent, with the right to self-determination.
Several hours after this news had broken throughout Vietnam, from the north to the south, from town to country, from factory to street, from one family to another, a social storm arose with the power to overturn everything and smash anything.
Men and women of all ages, regardless of their political persuasion, poured into the streets in surging waves, shouting cries of hatred mingled with joy; together they swore to fight to the last drop of their blood for the complete liberation of their country.
On 19 August, the workers of the Ban Co district of Saigon were the first to move into action and set up the first popular committee in the south. Some went out into the streets with army rifles they had stolen from the Japanese and hidden away for months. Others carried pistols of various and dubious origins.
Those who had no firearms carried daggers or bamboo pikes. With their blue caps with red stars on their heads, and their weapons on their shoulders, they formed armed detachments, marching together through the streets, in groups of 50, 100 or 200.
They paraded in military formation, singing the revolutionary anthem, then shouting with a voice that pierced the sky: “Rather death than slavery! Defend the people’s power!”
On the morning of 20 August, throughout the Saigon-Cholon region, hundreds of Vanguard Youth Committees declared before their flag their willingness to die for freedom. Phu Nhuan district, the largest working class district in the city, elected its popular committee, proclaimed the complete abolition of the former regime, and proclaimed that from then on, 10 a.m. on 20 August 1945, only this Committee would be considered the legal power in the district.
During the following days, mass organisations of many social and political tendencies mushroomed, and it was impossible to keep track of their numerical strength and the extent of their activities.
From 19 August onwards, the word went around the capital that there were peasant uprisings in the provinces. Armed demonstrations and terrorist acts struck mortal terror into the bourgeoisie and the feudalists.
On 19 August, the peasants of Sadec province ransacked about 10 magnificent villas belonging to their landlords. At the same time they burned down a large number of granaries full of rice.
Many dignitaries and officials were arrested by the peasants, and a number of them were shot on the spot. While members of the rural police were drowned by the revolutionary masses, former officials of the French and Japanese governments, who had all been declared enemies of the people, saw all their possessions go up in flames. In the course of a few days in Long Xuyen, an entirely rural province, 200 dignitaries and rural policemen were stabbed to death.
From the middle of August, the revolutionary peasants in central Vietnam began to drive out the royalist-imperialist mandarins, and seized control of the organs of local government by armed force. During the same period, well-equipped armed detachments of peasants launched surprise attacks on Japanese military posts, capturing arms and ammunition.
From the second week of August onwards, the landowners of north Vietnam suffered the same fate as their brothers in the south. In a number of villages, granaries, villas and land were confiscated ‘arbitrarily’ for the benefit of the Popular Committees.
Big landowners and former officials were brought before popular tribunals, where they were tried publicly by the villagers. Several hundred former faithful servants of France and the Japanese general staff were beheaded in a few days.
On 18 August, these groups of political nonentities called a joint meeting, at which they decided unanimously to set up a political front that then became known as the United National Front.
The day after reaching this political agreement, this bourgeois-feudalist bloc issued a joint declaration calling on the people to take part in a demonstration organised under the leadership of this Front, at Gam on 21 August in Saigon’s Norodom Square, to celebrate national independence. Who were these political parties?
The Cao-dai party: in reality this was only a semi-political religious organisation, based on a motley collection of mystical ideas. Essentially its purpose was to assist the French government in slaughtering the revolutionary peasants who followed the Communist movement in Cochin-China in the period of 1930 to 1941.
But when French imperialism signed its military and economic capitulation to Japanese militarism in 1941, the Cao-dai party turned its back on its former French patron in order to play the role of political double agent for the Japanese general staff.
However, with the coup of 9 March 1945, by which Japanese militarism ousted the French colonial government, this party’s position changed completely. Whilst its leaders preached loyalty to the emperor of Japan, its followers rose in revolt throughout the country, trampling God and landed property underfoot.
The second religious sect, the Hoa Hao party, which brought together more than a million poor and middle peasants, played a no less important role in support of the Japanese army. Hoa Hao-ism differed from Cao-daism in that it sought to unite politically urban workers and rural proletarians, but on the basis of a total rejection of the class struggle. What the former and the latter parties have in common is that they are both instruments in the service of foreign imperialism, and are both violently opposed to social revolution.
The National Independence Party, the acknowledged instrument of the national bourgeoisie, was essentially composed of petit-bourgeois intellectuals (academics, engineers, journalists, lawyers and former French government officials) and was totally devoid of theoretical and political principles. In reality, it was no more than a group of socially degenerate careerists and speculators.
During the years of revolutionary upsurge, the leaders of this party did nothing to conceal their reactionary attitude, and always placed themselves in the camp of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Today these petit-bourgeois take advantage of the absence of workers’ parties in the political arena, and impose their bogus patriotic sentiments to confuse the revolutionary masses.
From 1939 to 1944 no revolutionary communist voice was to be heard among the masses. Hundreds of militants of the two parties (the La Lutte group and the LCI) fighting under the banner of the Fourth International, had been deported, exiled or jailed, and quite a few had disappeared into prisons and concentration camps.
But towards the end of 1944 the Trotskyist movement became active again. At first the LCI, reconstituted in Saigon in August 1944, brought together only a few tens of members, among them five founding members of the Trotskyist movement who had each experienced at least 12 years of revolutionary struggle. To this number were added a few experienced comrades sent by the section in the north.
After the Japanese coup of 9 March 1945, the LCI lost no time in issuing a manifesto calling on the revolutionary masses of Saigon to prepare politically for a revolution in the very near future:
The Cao-daist and Hoa Hao-ist peasants formed a column 10,000 strong, with the monarchist banner at its head. In opposition to the reactionary nationalist parties, the LCI boldly unfurled its huge flag of the Fourth International, three metres long and two metres wide.
Carried by the worker C, an old Bolshevik-Leninist, the flag was a proud beacon of revolutionary strength, and attracted the lively attention of hundreds of thousands of slaves, who had been duped for many years by the exploiters of their country.
Revolutionary slogans were inscribed in huge letters on a series of huge placards and banners that waved above our heads: “Down with imperialism! Long Live the World Revolution! Long Live the Workers’ and Peasants’ Front! Popular Committees everywhere! For a People’ Assembly! For the arming of the people! Nationalise the factories under workers’ control! For a workers’ and peasants’ government!”
Thousands of workers who had been leaderless, dispersed and demoralised during the war years, had never lost their memory of the revolutionary movement. From the first moment when the flag of the Fourth International and the slogans of the revolutionary proletariat appeared, they spontaneously recovered their political consciousness and felt their revolutionary faith reviving.
They embraced each other for joy in the midst of the crowd, and they competed for the right to carry this placard or that flag. Workers arrived in waves, greeting each other with the clenched fist salute, and declared themselves ready to fight with their vanguard party. Within a few hours, the workers who gathered under the leadership of a few tens of Trotskyists numbered more than 30,000.
Terrified by the violence of the revolutionary masses, the bourgeois could only grit their teeth: they were politically paralysed, and obliged to leave the field clear for the activities of the Trotskyists. While the masses marched through the streets, the militants of the LCI tirelessly put forward their policies at open air meetings.
For their part, the peasants, marching separately behind reactionary leaders, listened attentively to our speeches on the national and peasant problems.
Disregarding the political discipline imposed by their parties, they enthusiastically applauded every time the flag of the Fourth International was carried past. Inspired by the Trotskyist slogans, workers and peasants looked to each other as friends.
After the military defeat of Japanese imperialism the bourgeois and feudalist parties had fallen into hopeless disarray, and had no idea how to put an end to the ‘anarchist’ terror. These political nonentities had tried to deceive the masses once again with the setting up of the United National Front, but when they had taken stock of the situation they felt more isolated than ever.
Within a few days there emerged, in addition to these nationalist parties, about 50 other separate petit-bourgeois political groupings, each with its own headquarters and military leaders. The bourgeois and petit-bourgeois disagreed and were divided amongst themselves to the extent that the political unity of the ruling classes crumbled irretrievably. From only a few members at the beginning of 1945, the LCI saw its forces increase by the end of the August of the same year to 200, each of whom played a definite part in the revolutionary mass organisations. After the success of 21 August, the Trotskyists greatly increased their political influence, and formed, in relation to the bourgeois parties, an important political force that, at the time, was a formidable revolutionary pole of attraction.
On 23 August the LCI unfurled its huge red flag outside its headquarters, thus legitimising its political power in the face of reaction. The LCI had its own printing shops and press, and every three hours its political directives were sent among the people in the form of communiqués.
In addition to its political preparations, the LCI were actively engaged in the formation of military cadres, which was considered to be the burning question of the hour in relation to the arming of the people and the carrying out of the historical tasks of the party in the approaching decisive period.
In fact, after the defeat of Japanese imperialism, the Vietminh (the Stalinist party in disguise) put themselves forward to the bourgeois nationalist parties as an authority sanctioned by the Allied imperialists.
For their part, however, the revolutionary masses saw in the Stalinist party a force capable of leading them on the road of anti-imperialist revolution. Under these historical conditions, the Stalinist party rose spontaneously above the social conflict and thus established a bonapartist dictatorship.
At a meeting of the United National Front on the evening of 22 August, Tran Van Giau, with the support of the former head of the Japanese police, Huynh Van Phuong, ordered the leaders of the self-styled pro-Japanese parties to relinquish completely their official positions in the administration, which were to devolve upon the Vietminh, the ‘official representatives of the Allies’. “Your role is now finished,” concluded Tran Van Giau, “hand over to us!”
The leaders of the pro-Japanese parties bowed their heads in submission and affirmed their loyalty to the Vietminh front. A day later, the UNF issued a statement proclaiming its own dissolution and the adherence of all the nationalist parties to the Vietminh front.
On 25 August at Sam all governmental posts were occupied by the leaders of the Vietminh front without the knowledge of the people. The transfer of power was carried out quietly, behind the backs of the whole population.
The Vietminh took power with the ruling classes and the whole of the state apparatus behind it. Nevertheless, 24 hours after the accession to power of the Vietminh, Tran Van Giau cynically proclaimed that the “revolution” carried out by his party was truly “democratic” and that there had been “no spilling of blood” (sic).
This was nothing but a lie: this was not a revolution at all, just a coup d’état carried out with the support of all the exploiting classes and behind the backs of the revolutionary masses.
All social classes participated in this huge demonstration. The number of demonstrators, who arrived from every corner of western Nam Bo, amounted to more than a million. Compared with the first demonstration, the political complexion of the second was expressed with much greater clarity and in much greater depth.
There must have been as many as 30 political organisations of various tendencies that turned up in full strength. Of these the Stalinist Vietminh and the Communists of the Fourth International were the most significant.
The class struggle had reached such a pitch that even the police, the loyal instrument of the bourgeois state, had split into two opposing political camps. The first, led by the two former chiefs of the Japanese police, Huynh Van Phuong and Ho Vinh Ky, marched under the banner of the Fourth International; they called themselves ‘assault police’. The second, more numerous camp, influenced by the Stalinists, gathered under the banner of the Vietminh.
The number of workers marching with the LCI was reduced to 2000 on this occasion, as opposed to 30 000 on the 21st. This was not accidental, as this time most workers felt obliged to march with their trade unions.
In spite of its numerical weakness, the LCI still remained a political force to be reckoned with on the demonstration. On the strength of its clear and truly revolutionary slogans it attracted to its ranks all the best elements of the working class. Hundreds and thousands of workers and peasants constantly and loudly applauded the slogans “Land to the peasants! Factories to the workers!”
Faced with the stand taken by the LCI militants, the Stalinist leaders could only grit their teeth, and had no idea of what to do in the face of the increasing excitement of the revolutionary masses.
Whereas the Stalinists originally maintained in their propaganda that the democratic republic had already been established, we, the Internationalist Communists, told the masses that the revolution had not yet been made.
While the Stalinists shouted: “All power to the Vietminh!”, we replied: “All power to the popular committees!” Two days after his coup d’état, the Stalinist Minister of the Interior, Nguyen Van Tao, threatened the Trotskyists in the following terms:
Day in and day out, Dr Phan Ng, Thach, a faithful lieutenant of Tran Van Giau, and a whole band of bureaucrat lackeys of the Stalinist government, constantly insisted to the people, through the press and radio, that the national independence of Vietnam was only a matter of diplomatic negotiations with the Commission of the imperialist Allies.
“Those”, said Tran Van Giau on September, “who incite the people to take up arms will be regarded as saboteurs and provocateurs, as enemies of national independence. Our democratic freedom will be granted and guaranteed by the democratic Allies.”
The members of the propaganda commission insisted again that the country’s independence depended entirely on the will of the Allied Commission, which therefore meant, claimed the government, that the population had to observe perfect law and order. The people took the government at its word.
At 4 p.m. the following day, more than 400,000 people, men and women, young and old, marched peacefully past Saigon Cathedral in massed columns, armed with bamboo pikes and waving placards and banners above their heads. Suddenly, from high up on the church, a burst machine gun and pistol fire was shot into the peaceful and defenceless crowd. About 40 marchers were killed and about 150 were wounded.
Loud cries went up: “The French are shooting!” Maddened with fury, the demonstrators forced the church door, climbed to the roof and searched every nook and cranny that might hide their criminal enemies.
From then on it was rumoured around the city that French imperialism would probably be helped by the Allied forces to reconquer its colony soon, and slaughter the revolutionary people. It was a matter of life and death.
On 4 September the LCI Central Committee made an urgent appeal to the people for the revolutionary defence of national independence. In particular, it said, in the following clear Bolshevik terms:
In the south of Vietnam (Nam Bo) more than 150 Popular Committees were set up in three weeks under the influence of the LCI. One hundred of those in Saigon-Cholon were mainly working class.
A provisional Central Committee, the highest body of the Popular Committees, consisting at first of nine members and later of 15, had been formed after 21 August, and its independent headquarters were guarded by armed workers. That was where popular delegates of various political tendencies came to discuss and study the problems of the revolution.
On 26 August the delegates of the people of Saigon-Cholon, gathered together in general assembly, decided on their common programme which can be summed up as follows:
The LCI led the revolutionary masses through the Popular Committees. It was due to these that it succeeded to a large extent in politicising the most advanced layers of the revolutionary masses.
For the first time in the history of the Indochinese revolution the LCI, in spite of its numerical weakness, carried out a great historical task, namely, the setting up of Popular Committees, or Soviets.
The defeat of Trotskyism in Indochina by the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy will never wipe out the correctness of putting Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution into practice in Indochina.
Once the question of armed struggle against the imperialist invasion had been posed at the beginning of September, the Popular Committees played an extremely important role in making the political and material preparations. Hundreds of committee members came to the Central Committee with many valuable proposals, about which the bourgeois governmental and military leaders hardly ever found out anything.
The workers of the Ban Co district and of Phu Nhuan proposed at the conference of 4 September to expropriate all imperialist enterprises and turn them into war factories. Others suggested that we should turn the Bank of Indochina building into a fortress that would be very resistant to bombardment by enemy ships in the ports. Many very important revolutionary proposals were put forward and studied.
The Popular Committee movement posed an increasing threat to the Stalinist government, which was also the target of constant criticism from the bourgeois parties who accused it of impotence in internal affairs, that is, in repressing the revolutionary masses.
On 6 September the government launched a vicious attack on the Trotskyists, accusing them of being responsible for unrest and provocations. The entire Stalinist press went into action against the Trotskyists in an attempt to divert the people from the imminent danger of imperialist invasion.
On 7 September Tran Van Giau gave the order to disarm all non-governmental organisations. The decree stated: “Those who call the people to arms and above all to fight against the imperialist Allies will be considered provocateurs and saboteurs.”
On 10 September British troops disembarked at Saigon, while successive waves of French aircraft flew over the city. Faced with the approaching danger, the LCI put all its efforts into preparing the masses for taking up the imminent armed struggle, in spite of all the slanders and threats from the Stalinist government.
On 12 September, the Popular Committees and the LCI issued a joint statement openly denouncing the political treachery of the Stalinist government in its capitulation in the face of the threat from the British general staff. The turmoil of the masses grew every day.
At 4.30 p.m. on 14 September the Stalinist chief of police, Duong Bach Mai, sent an armed detachment to surround the headquarters of the Popular Committees when the assembly was in full session.
We conducted ourselves as true revolutionary militants. We allowed ourselves to be arrested without violent resistance to the police, even though we outnumbered them and were all well armed. They took away our machine guns and pistols, and ransacked our headquarters, smashing furniture, tearing up our flags, stealing the typewriters and burning all our papers.
This was a defeat for Trotskyism in a two-fold sense: physical extermination of the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat, and the handing over of the people of Indochina to ‘democratic’ imperialism.
Having carried out this operation, Tran Van Giau, with the agreement of the government in the north, ordered the systematic killing of all Trotskyist elements in the country. Tran Van Thach, Ta Thu Thau, Phan Van Hum and dozens of other revolutionary militants were murdered in circumstances that, to this day, have not been property established.
The two former chiefs of the Japanese police, the accomplices of Tran Van Giau in the carrying out of the Vietminh coup d“état, were also killed, having been accused of Trotskyism.
For sympathising with Trotskyism, the woman doctor Ho Vinh Ky, a former member of the government, was shot together with the leaders of the La Lutte group by one of Tran Van Giau’s agents. Our three most dedicated comrades, Le Ngoc, a member of the Central Committee, Nguyen Van Ky, an engineering worker and trade union leader, and Nguyen Huong, a young Trotskyist and fighter in the workers’ militia, were murdered by a Stalinist police chief in July 1946.
Lu Sanh Hanh
Book Review
Year One of the Russian Revolution-Victor Serge
I have read several books on subjects related to the Russian Revolution by Victor Serge and find that he is a well-informed insider on this subject although the novel rather than history writing is his stronger form of expressing his views. This book can be profitably read in conjunction with other better written left-wing interpretations of this period. Sukhanov's Notes on the Russian Revolution (for the February period), Leon Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World come to mind.
The task Serge sets himself here is to look at the dramatic and eventually fateful events of first year of the Russian Revolution. Those included the Bolshevik seizure of power, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly and the struggle by the Bolsheviks against other left-wing tendencies in defining Soviet state policy, the fight to end Russian participation in World War I culminating in the humiliating Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and, most importantly, the beginnings of Civil War against the Whites. In short, he investigates all the issues that will ultimately undermine and cause the degeneration of what was the first successful socialist seizure of state power in history.
Serge's history is partisan history in the best sense of the word. It is rather silly at this late date to argue that historians must be detached from the subject of their investigations. All one asks is that a historian gets the facts for his or her analysis straight. And try to stay out of the way. Serge passes this test. Serge worked under the assumption that the strategic theory of the Bolshevik leaders Lenin and Trotsky was valid. That premise stated Russia as the weakest link in the capitalist system could act as the catalyst for revolution in the West and therefore shorten its road to socialism. The failure of that Western revolution, the subsequent hostile encirclement by the Western powers and the inevitable degeneration implicit in a revolution in an economically undeveloped country left to its own resources underlies the structure of his argument.
The Russian revolution of October 1917 was the defining event for the international labor movement during most of the 20th century. Serious militants and left -wing organizations took their stand based on their position on the so-called Russian Question. At that time the level of political class-consciousness in the international labor movement was quite high. Such consciousness does not exist today where the socialist program is seen as Utopian. However, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet state in 1991-92 and the essential elimination of the specific Russian Question as a factor in world politics anyone who wants learn some lessons from the heroic period of the Russian Revolution will find this book an informative place to start.
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backissu.htm
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.
********
Some Stages of the Revolution in the South of Vietnam
The following is a translation of an article, Quelques etapes de la revolution au Nam-Bo du Vietnam, which appeared in Quatrième International, September/October 1947, of which a version appeared in instalments in the Militant (USA), 18 and 23 February and 1, 8 and 15 March 1948. A full translation subsequently appeared in Workers Press, 10 and 17 January 1987, and was reprinted in Vietnam and Trotskyism, a Communist League pamphlet, Australia 1987, pp.61-72. As this book is now out of print, it is this version that is reproduced below.The author, writing under the thinly disguised pseudonym of ‘Lucien’, was one of the leading members of the International Communist League, and had been one of the militants of the pre-war October group who had been arrested and tried, as recounted in Ngo Van Xuyet's outline above.
The War and the Revolutionary Crisis
At 9am on 16 August 1945, news of the final defeat of Japanese imperialism was announced throughout the countries of Indochina. The following day, the Japanese general staff announced that it was handing over civil administration to the indigenous peoples.According to the terms of the statement, Japanese imperialism surrendered all power to the legal governments of the various countries that constituted Indochina: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. These peoples, the statement added, were from now on independent, with the right to self-determination.
Several hours after this news had broken throughout Vietnam, from the north to the south, from town to country, from factory to street, from one family to another, a social storm arose with the power to overturn everything and smash anything.
Men and women of all ages, regardless of their political persuasion, poured into the streets in surging waves, shouting cries of hatred mingled with joy; together they swore to fight to the last drop of their blood for the complete liberation of their country.
On 19 August, the workers of the Ban Co district of Saigon were the first to move into action and set up the first popular committee in the south. Some went out into the streets with army rifles they had stolen from the Japanese and hidden away for months. Others carried pistols of various and dubious origins.
Those who had no firearms carried daggers or bamboo pikes. With their blue caps with red stars on their heads, and their weapons on their shoulders, they formed armed detachments, marching together through the streets, in groups of 50, 100 or 200.
They paraded in military formation, singing the revolutionary anthem, then shouting with a voice that pierced the sky: “Rather death than slavery! Defend the people’s power!”
On the morning of 20 August, throughout the Saigon-Cholon region, hundreds of Vanguard Youth Committees declared before their flag their willingness to die for freedom. Phu Nhuan district, the largest working class district in the city, elected its popular committee, proclaimed the complete abolition of the former regime, and proclaimed that from then on, 10 a.m. on 20 August 1945, only this Committee would be considered the legal power in the district.
During the following days, mass organisations of many social and political tendencies mushroomed, and it was impossible to keep track of their numerical strength and the extent of their activities.
From 19 August onwards, the word went around the capital that there were peasant uprisings in the provinces. Armed demonstrations and terrorist acts struck mortal terror into the bourgeoisie and the feudalists.
On 19 August, the peasants of Sadec province ransacked about 10 magnificent villas belonging to their landlords. At the same time they burned down a large number of granaries full of rice.
Many dignitaries and officials were arrested by the peasants, and a number of them were shot on the spot. While members of the rural police were drowned by the revolutionary masses, former officials of the French and Japanese governments, who had all been declared enemies of the people, saw all their possessions go up in flames. In the course of a few days in Long Xuyen, an entirely rural province, 200 dignitaries and rural policemen were stabbed to death.
From the middle of August, the revolutionary peasants in central Vietnam began to drive out the royalist-imperialist mandarins, and seized control of the organs of local government by armed force. During the same period, well-equipped armed detachments of peasants launched surprise attacks on Japanese military posts, capturing arms and ammunition.
From the second week of August onwards, the landowners of north Vietnam suffered the same fate as their brothers in the south. In a number of villages, granaries, villas and land were confiscated ‘arbitrarily’ for the benefit of the Popular Committees.
Big landowners and former officials were brought before popular tribunals, where they were tried publicly by the villagers. Several hundred former faithful servants of France and the Japanese general staff were beheaded in a few days.
The Reactionary Parties and the UNF
Faced with the revolutionary situation that was in full upsurge throughout the country, the leaders of the bourgeois and feudalist parties known as Cao-daists and Hoa Hao-ists or Nationalists were unable to find any force either on the right or on the left that could save their country, as they saw it, from the sword of the threatening revolution.On 18 August, these groups of political nonentities called a joint meeting, at which they decided unanimously to set up a political front that then became known as the United National Front.
The day after reaching this political agreement, this bourgeois-feudalist bloc issued a joint declaration calling on the people to take part in a demonstration organised under the leadership of this Front, at Gam on 21 August in Saigon’s Norodom Square, to celebrate national independence. Who were these political parties?
The Cao-dai party: in reality this was only a semi-political religious organisation, based on a motley collection of mystical ideas. Essentially its purpose was to assist the French government in slaughtering the revolutionary peasants who followed the Communist movement in Cochin-China in the period of 1930 to 1941.
But when French imperialism signed its military and economic capitulation to Japanese militarism in 1941, the Cao-dai party turned its back on its former French patron in order to play the role of political double agent for the Japanese general staff.
However, with the coup of 9 March 1945, by which Japanese militarism ousted the French colonial government, this party’s position changed completely. Whilst its leaders preached loyalty to the emperor of Japan, its followers rose in revolt throughout the country, trampling God and landed property underfoot.
The second religious sect, the Hoa Hao party, which brought together more than a million poor and middle peasants, played a no less important role in support of the Japanese army. Hoa Hao-ism differed from Cao-daism in that it sought to unite politically urban workers and rural proletarians, but on the basis of a total rejection of the class struggle. What the former and the latter parties have in common is that they are both instruments in the service of foreign imperialism, and are both violently opposed to social revolution.
The National Independence Party, the acknowledged instrument of the national bourgeoisie, was essentially composed of petit-bourgeois intellectuals (academics, engineers, journalists, lawyers and former French government officials) and was totally devoid of theoretical and political principles. In reality, it was no more than a group of socially degenerate careerists and speculators.
During the years of revolutionary upsurge, the leaders of this party did nothing to conceal their reactionary attitude, and always placed themselves in the camp of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Today these petit-bourgeois take advantage of the absence of workers’ parties in the political arena, and impose their bogus patriotic sentiments to confuse the revolutionary masses.
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
The Party of the Fourth International and the Events of 21 August 1945 |
But towards the end of 1944 the Trotskyist movement became active again. At first the LCI, reconstituted in Saigon in August 1944, brought together only a few tens of members, among them five founding members of the Trotskyist movement who had each experienced at least 12 years of revolutionary struggle. To this number were added a few experienced comrades sent by the section in the north.
After the Japanese coup of 9 March 1945, the LCI lost no time in issuing a manifesto calling on the revolutionary masses of Saigon to prepare politically for a revolution in the very near future:
The imminent defeat of Japanese imperialism will launch the Indochinese people on to the road of national liberation. The bourgeois and feudalists, who today are the cowardly servants of the Japanese general staff, will likewise serve the Allied imperialist states.
The petit-bourgeois nationalists with their adventurism will also be incapable of leading the people to revolutionary victory. Only the working class, fighting independently under the flag of the Fourth International, will be able to accomplish the task of leading the revolution.
The Stalinists of the Third International have already abandoned the working class in order to rally wretchedly to the ‘democratic’ imperialists. They have betrayed the peasants and no longer mention the agrarian question. If today they march with the foreign capitalists, then in the coming period they will assist the indigenous exploiting classes to crush the revolutionary people.
Workers and Peasants! Gather under the banner of the party of the Fourth International!
(Manifesto of 24 March 1945)At Gam on 21 August more than 300,000 men and women, grouped in columns, thronged Saigon’s Norodom Boulevard. Banners and placards blossomed above this human sea.
The Cao-daist and Hoa Hao-ist peasants formed a column 10,000 strong, with the monarchist banner at its head. In opposition to the reactionary nationalist parties, the LCI boldly unfurled its huge flag of the Fourth International, three metres long and two metres wide.
Carried by the worker C, an old Bolshevik-Leninist, the flag was a proud beacon of revolutionary strength, and attracted the lively attention of hundreds of thousands of slaves, who had been duped for many years by the exploiters of their country.
Revolutionary slogans were inscribed in huge letters on a series of huge placards and banners that waved above our heads: “Down with imperialism! Long Live the World Revolution! Long Live the Workers’ and Peasants’ Front! Popular Committees everywhere! For a People’ Assembly! For the arming of the people! Nationalise the factories under workers’ control! For a workers’ and peasants’ government!”
Thousands of workers who had been leaderless, dispersed and demoralised during the war years, had never lost their memory of the revolutionary movement. From the first moment when the flag of the Fourth International and the slogans of the revolutionary proletariat appeared, they spontaneously recovered their political consciousness and felt their revolutionary faith reviving.
They embraced each other for joy in the midst of the crowd, and they competed for the right to carry this placard or that flag. Workers arrived in waves, greeting each other with the clenched fist salute, and declared themselves ready to fight with their vanguard party. Within a few hours, the workers who gathered under the leadership of a few tens of Trotskyists numbered more than 30,000.
Terrified by the violence of the revolutionary masses, the bourgeois could only grit their teeth: they were politically paralysed, and obliged to leave the field clear for the activities of the Trotskyists. While the masses marched through the streets, the militants of the LCI tirelessly put forward their policies at open air meetings.
For their part, the peasants, marching separately behind reactionary leaders, listened attentively to our speeches on the national and peasant problems.
Disregarding the political discipline imposed by their parties, they enthusiastically applauded every time the flag of the Fourth International was carried past. Inspired by the Trotskyist slogans, workers and peasants looked to each other as friends.
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
The Evolution of the Balance of Political Forces after 21 August |
Within a few days there emerged, in addition to these nationalist parties, about 50 other separate petit-bourgeois political groupings, each with its own headquarters and military leaders. The bourgeois and petit-bourgeois disagreed and were divided amongst themselves to the extent that the political unity of the ruling classes crumbled irretrievably. From only a few members at the beginning of 1945, the LCI saw its forces increase by the end of the August of the same year to 200, each of whom played a definite part in the revolutionary mass organisations. After the success of 21 August, the Trotskyists greatly increased their political influence, and formed, in relation to the bourgeois parties, an important political force that, at the time, was a formidable revolutionary pole of attraction.
On 23 August the LCI unfurled its huge red flag outside its headquarters, thus legitimising its political power in the face of reaction. The LCI had its own printing shops and press, and every three hours its political directives were sent among the people in the form of communiqués.
In addition to its political preparations, the LCI were actively engaged in the formation of military cadres, which was considered to be the burning question of the hour in relation to the arming of the people and the carrying out of the historical tasks of the party in the approaching decisive period.
The Vietminh Coup d’état and the Stalinist Reaction
During the war, the Indochinese Stalinists had become docile servants of the Allied imperialists. On 23 August, the leader of the southern Vietnamese Stalinists, Tran Van Giau, notorious above all for his anti-Trotskyism, admitted cynically in the proclamation of the Vietminh front of which he was General Secretary: “For five years we have fought at the side of the democratic Allies ...”In fact, after the defeat of Japanese imperialism, the Vietminh (the Stalinist party in disguise) put themselves forward to the bourgeois nationalist parties as an authority sanctioned by the Allied imperialists.
For their part, however, the revolutionary masses saw in the Stalinist party a force capable of leading them on the road of anti-imperialist revolution. Under these historical conditions, the Stalinist party rose spontaneously above the social conflict and thus established a bonapartist dictatorship.
At a meeting of the United National Front on the evening of 22 August, Tran Van Giau, with the support of the former head of the Japanese police, Huynh Van Phuong, ordered the leaders of the self-styled pro-Japanese parties to relinquish completely their official positions in the administration, which were to devolve upon the Vietminh, the ‘official representatives of the Allies’. “Your role is now finished,” concluded Tran Van Giau, “hand over to us!”
The leaders of the pro-Japanese parties bowed their heads in submission and affirmed their loyalty to the Vietminh front. A day later, the UNF issued a statement proclaiming its own dissolution and the adherence of all the nationalist parties to the Vietminh front.
On 25 August at Sam all governmental posts were occupied by the leaders of the Vietminh front without the knowledge of the people. The transfer of power was carried out quietly, behind the backs of the whole population.
The Vietminh took power with the ruling classes and the whole of the state apparatus behind it. Nevertheless, 24 hours after the accession to power of the Vietminh, Tran Van Giau cynically proclaimed that the “revolution” carried out by his party was truly “democratic” and that there had been “no spilling of blood” (sic).
This was nothing but a lie: this was not a revolution at all, just a coup d’état carried out with the support of all the exploiting classes and behind the backs of the revolutionary masses.
The Events of 25 August
The LCI had marched with the masses on the demonstration of 21 August organised by the bourgeois National Front. It was impossible for the LCI not to take part in the demonstration of 25 August, even though it had been organised by the Vietminh who, from the moment they came to power, sought to gauge the depth of the likely political and moral reaction of the revolutionary masses.All social classes participated in this huge demonstration. The number of demonstrators, who arrived from every corner of western Nam Bo, amounted to more than a million. Compared with the first demonstration, the political complexion of the second was expressed with much greater clarity and in much greater depth.
There must have been as many as 30 political organisations of various tendencies that turned up in full strength. Of these the Stalinist Vietminh and the Communists of the Fourth International were the most significant.
The class struggle had reached such a pitch that even the police, the loyal instrument of the bourgeois state, had split into two opposing political camps. The first, led by the two former chiefs of the Japanese police, Huynh Van Phuong and Ho Vinh Ky, marched under the banner of the Fourth International; they called themselves ‘assault police’. The second, more numerous camp, influenced by the Stalinists, gathered under the banner of the Vietminh.
The number of workers marching with the LCI was reduced to 2000 on this occasion, as opposed to 30 000 on the 21st. This was not accidental, as this time most workers felt obliged to march with their trade unions.
In spite of its numerical weakness, the LCI still remained a political force to be reckoned with on the demonstration. On the strength of its clear and truly revolutionary slogans it attracted to its ranks all the best elements of the working class. Hundreds and thousands of workers and peasants constantly and loudly applauded the slogans “Land to the peasants! Factories to the workers!”
Faced with the stand taken by the LCI militants, the Stalinist leaders could only grit their teeth, and had no idea of what to do in the face of the increasing excitement of the revolutionary masses.
The Stalinist Counter-revolution
Faithful to its revolutionary programme, the LCI remained politically independent of the Vietminh front, whilst constantly insisting on the necessity of pursuing the tactic a tactic of the anti-imperialist United Front, in accordance with which the LCI marched separately from, but fought together with, all popular organisations against foreign imperialism. The LCI never stopped explaining in its leaflets and its press that the Vietminh was a form of bourgeois coalition in which the Stalinists played a key political roleWhereas the Stalinists originally maintained in their propaganda that the democratic republic had already been established, we, the Internationalist Communists, told the masses that the revolution had not yet been made.
While the Stalinists shouted: “All power to the Vietminh!”, we replied: “All power to the popular committees!” Two days after his coup d’état, the Stalinist Minister of the Interior, Nguyen Van Tao, threatened the Trotskyists in the following terms:
Those who incite the peasants to seize landed property will be severely and mercilessly punished. We have not yet made the Communist revolution that will solve the agrarian problem. This government is only a democratic government. Therefore it is not up to it to carry out such a task. Our government, I repeat, is a bourgeois democratic government, even though the Communists are the ones actually in power.The day after this leader of Vietnamese Stalinism had made this statement, the entire Stalinist press viciously attacked the Trotskyists, accusing them of trying to stir up trouble and provoke social unrest.
Day in and day out, Dr Phan Ng, Thach, a faithful lieutenant of Tran Van Giau, and a whole band of bureaucrat lackeys of the Stalinist government, constantly insisted to the people, through the press and radio, that the national independence of Vietnam was only a matter of diplomatic negotiations with the Commission of the imperialist Allies.
“Those”, said Tran Van Giau on September, “who incite the people to take up arms will be regarded as saboteurs and provocateurs, as enemies of national independence. Our democratic freedom will be granted and guaranteed by the democratic Allies.”
The Events of 2 September
At noon on 1 September, the Nam B0 government propaganda commission drove around Saigon-Cholon calling on the population to take part in the ceremony in honour of the Allied Commission that was to arrive in Saigon on the evening of 2 September.The members of the propaganda commission insisted again that the country’s independence depended entirely on the will of the Allied Commission, which therefore meant, claimed the government, that the population had to observe perfect law and order. The people took the government at its word.
At 4 p.m. the following day, more than 400,000 people, men and women, young and old, marched peacefully past Saigon Cathedral in massed columns, armed with bamboo pikes and waving placards and banners above their heads. Suddenly, from high up on the church, a burst machine gun and pistol fire was shot into the peaceful and defenceless crowd. About 40 marchers were killed and about 150 were wounded.
Loud cries went up: “The French are shooting!” Maddened with fury, the demonstrators forced the church door, climbed to the roof and searched every nook and cranny that might hide their criminal enemies.
Facing the Common Enemy
The events of the evening of 2 September produced an unheard-of turmoil in the hearts of the people in Saigon. It had been proved that the government was incapable of defending the country, and even more so of leading it to real independence.From then on it was rumoured around the city that French imperialism would probably be helped by the Allied forces to reconquer its colony soon, and slaughter the revolutionary people. It was a matter of life and death.
On 4 September the LCI Central Committee made an urgent appeal to the people for the revolutionary defence of national independence. In particular, it said, in the following clear Bolshevik terms:
We, the international communists, have no illusions at all that the Vietminh government, with its policy of class collaboration, will be capable of fighting the imperialist invasion in the days to come. Nevertheless, if the government declares itself prepared to defend national independence and to safeguard the people’s liberties, we shall not hesitate to assist and to support it with all physical means in the revolutionary struggle.
But to this end, we are entitled repeat again that we shall strictly maintain the complete independence of our party in relation to the government and to all other parties, for it is on this political independence that the whole existence of a party calling itself Bolshevik-Lenin depends.
(LCI statement of 4 September).
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
The Popular Committees and the Massacre of the Trotskyist Militants |
A provisional Central Committee, the highest body of the Popular Committees, consisting at first of nine members and later of 15, had been formed after 21 August, and its independent headquarters were guarded by armed workers. That was where popular delegates of various political tendencies came to discuss and study the problems of the revolution.
On 26 August the delegates of the people of Saigon-Cholon, gathered together in general assembly, decided on their common programme which can be summed up as follows:
1. Recognising that the Indochinese revolution is an anti-imperialist revolution, we insist that the national bourgeoisie will be completely incapable of playing the role of revolutionary vanguard, and that only the popular alliance of industrial workers and rural toilers will be able to free the nation from. the domination of foreign capitalists.
2. The Popular Committees are the most concrete expression of the alliance of the revolutionary classes. They therefore proclaim the necessity for bringing together the proletariat and the peasantry under the leadership of the Popular Committees.
3. In relation to the bourgeois government and all political parties, the Popular Committees will maintain complete political independence.
4. The Popular Committees recognise only the Central Committee, elected on the principle of democratic centralism, their highest body.
5. The Popular Committees recognise that they alone are the real basis of the power of the revolutionary people. Th, highest authority will be the national assembly of delegates from all Popular Committees, which will take place in Saigon in the near future.
6. The Popular Committees insist the necessity for creating a single revolutionary front against imperialism, by categorically denounce all acts, from whatever quarter, that seek to sabotage the freedom of action of the working class and the popular masses.
(Resolution of the assembly of the popular delegates of the district [place name illegible in original]Conferences were organised regularly at the headquarters of the Popular Committees at which participants were able to express their political position with the greatest of freedom.
The LCI led the revolutionary masses through the Popular Committees. It was due to these that it succeeded to a large extent in politicising the most advanced layers of the revolutionary masses.
For the first time in the history of the Indochinese revolution the LCI, in spite of its numerical weakness, carried out a great historical task, namely, the setting up of Popular Committees, or Soviets.
The defeat of Trotskyism in Indochina by the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy will never wipe out the correctness of putting Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution into practice in Indochina.
Once the question of armed struggle against the imperialist invasion had been posed at the beginning of September, the Popular Committees played an extremely important role in making the political and material preparations. Hundreds of committee members came to the Central Committee with many valuable proposals, about which the bourgeois governmental and military leaders hardly ever found out anything.
The workers of the Ban Co district and of Phu Nhuan proposed at the conference of 4 September to expropriate all imperialist enterprises and turn them into war factories. Others suggested that we should turn the Bank of Indochina building into a fortress that would be very resistant to bombardment by enemy ships in the ports. Many very important revolutionary proposals were put forward and studied.
The Popular Committee movement posed an increasing threat to the Stalinist government, which was also the target of constant criticism from the bourgeois parties who accused it of impotence in internal affairs, that is, in repressing the revolutionary masses.
On 6 September the government launched a vicious attack on the Trotskyists, accusing them of being responsible for unrest and provocations. The entire Stalinist press went into action against the Trotskyists in an attempt to divert the people from the imminent danger of imperialist invasion.
On 7 September Tran Van Giau gave the order to disarm all non-governmental organisations. The decree stated: “Those who call the people to arms and above all to fight against the imperialist Allies will be considered provocateurs and saboteurs.”
On 10 September British troops disembarked at Saigon, while successive waves of French aircraft flew over the city. Faced with the approaching danger, the LCI put all its efforts into preparing the masses for taking up the imminent armed struggle, in spite of all the slanders and threats from the Stalinist government.
On 12 September, the Popular Committees and the LCI issued a joint statement openly denouncing the political treachery of the Stalinist government in its capitulation in the face of the threat from the British general staff. The turmoil of the masses grew every day.
At 4.30 p.m. on 14 September the Stalinist chief of police, Duong Bach Mai, sent an armed detachment to surround the headquarters of the Popular Committees when the assembly was in full session.
We conducted ourselves as true revolutionary militants. We allowed ourselves to be arrested without violent resistance to the police, even though we outnumbered them and were all well armed. They took away our machine guns and pistols, and ransacked our headquarters, smashing furniture, tearing up our flags, stealing the typewriters and burning all our papers.
This was a defeat for Trotskyism in a two-fold sense: physical extermination of the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat, and the handing over of the people of Indochina to ‘democratic’ imperialism.
Having carried out this operation, Tran Van Giau, with the agreement of the government in the north, ordered the systematic killing of all Trotskyist elements in the country. Tran Van Thach, Ta Thu Thau, Phan Van Hum and dozens of other revolutionary militants were murdered in circumstances that, to this day, have not been property established.
The two former chiefs of the Japanese police, the accomplices of Tran Van Giau in the carrying out of the Vietminh coup d“état, were also killed, having been accused of Trotskyism.
For sympathising with Trotskyism, the woman doctor Ho Vinh Ky, a former member of the government, was shot together with the leaders of the La Lutte group by one of Tran Van Giau’s agents. Our three most dedicated comrades, Le Ngoc, a member of the Central Committee, Nguyen Van Ky, an engineering worker and trade union leader, and Nguyen Huong, a young Trotskyist and fighter in the workers’ militia, were murdered by a Stalinist police chief in July 1946.
Lu Sanh Hanh
Updated by ETOL: 18.7.2003
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