Venezuela: U.S. Imperialism Fuels Right-Wing Protests-Break with Chavismo! For a Revolutionary Workers Party! Workers Vanguard No. 1043	4 April 2014

Venezuela: U.S. Imperialism Fuels Right-Wing Protests-Break with Chavismo! For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

 

For almost eight weeks, students and middle-class demonstrators demanding the salida (exit) of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro have set up barricades in affluent neighborhoods in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities. While deriding the country’s oppressed masses and raving against purported Cuban infiltration of the government, protesters have also attempted to tap very real popular grievances—shortages of necessities like cooking oil, flour and toilet paper, rising inflation and high crime rates. The government has called out the National Guard against protesters, but by several reports the protesters themselves are responsible for many of the almost 40 deaths. There have also been rumors of a coup attempt, leading to the arrest of three air force generals on March 24.

The U.S. imperialists, who back the right-wing opposition, and their media mouthpieces have raised a great hue and cry over Venezuelan government repression. On March 4, the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the Maduro government by a vote of 393-1. Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry threatened sanctions against Venezuela and denounced Maduro for waging a “terror campaign against his own people.” (Actually, the U.S. secretary of state is the real expert in waging terror campaigns against civilian populations.) Florida gusano Congressmen are foaming at the mouth over the possibility of ousting Maduro and stopping the 100,000 barrels of oil that Venezuela ships to Cuba daily, partly in exchange for the services of 30,000 medics and other Cuban personnel.

Leading figures in the protest include neoliberal opposition politicians Maria Corina Machado, who was recently stripped of her parliamentary immunity, and the now imprisoned Leopoldo López. Machado, a congresswoman from a wealthy district who is known as the “Venezuelan Iron Lady” for her conservative views, was honored at the White House in 2005 by George W. Bush for her attempts to undermine the regime of Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. The group she cofounded, Súmate, has taken money from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a notorious CIA front. López, a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School of Government, has the blessing of Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank funded by ExxonMobil, Chevron and the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), which is another CIA conduit. A member of Venezuela’s oligarchy, he is a wealthy descendent of the 19th-century Latin American nationalist Simón Bolívar.

Since Chávez was first elected in 1998, the U.S. imperialists have sought to install someone more to their liking in Caracas. Hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. funds have been poured into attempts to undermine the Venezuelan government through U.S. AID’s “humanitarian” programs and NED grants to train political activists and provide “democracy assistance.” Toppling the regime was the goal of the failed U.S.-backed coup in April 2002, the capitalist lockouts designed to cripple the oil industry in the winter of 2002-03 and the campaign to recall Chávez in 2004. After Maduro was elected president by a narrow margin last April, Washington’s local agents claimed fraud and attempted to reverse the results in favor of their candidate.

Many of Venezuela’s capitalists made their profits as front men for imperialist interests. Gustavo Cisneros is one. The Cisneros family amassed immense wealth as the Venezuelan distributors of Pepsi, later branching into media and other industries. Cisneros’s backing of the 2002 failed coup against Chávez earned his TV station, along with three others, the nickname the “four horsemen of the apocalypse.”

In deeply polarized Venezuelan society, poor and working people overwhelmingly remain tied to chavismo, the left-wing nationalist populism associated with strongman Chávez and adopted by Maduro, who came to prominence on Chávez’s coattails. Chávez consolidated popular support by denouncing U.S. imperialism’s military interventions around the world and bucking its policies in Latin America. He used the wealth generated by selling oil to fund social welfare programs like food subsidies, improving pensions and health care (the latter with Cuban assistance).

In Chávez’s first 12 years in office, the population’s caloric intake increased 50 percent and the poverty rate fell from over 50 percent to less than 30 percent. He made it harder to fire workers, mandated pensions for domestic workers and repeatedly raised the minimum wage. Unlike the traditional political elite who flaunt their European roots while oozing contempt for the poor, Chávez boasted of his zambo (mixed African and indigenous) heritage. When Maduro—Chávez’s vice president and hand-picked successor—was narrowly elected president after Chávez’s death a year ago, he promised to continue the “Bolivarian Revolution” begun by Chávez in 1999.

Though in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism and hated by the layer of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie most closely tied to the imperialists, Maduro, like Chávez before him, heads a capitalist government. Chávez himself repeatedly emphasized that his regime did not pose a risk to private property. While Marxists support the establishment of social welfare programs for the poor and defend nationalizations in dependent countries, these measures do not in any way alter the capitalist character of a society, no matter the amount of “socialist” packaging that’s given to them.

In fact, chavista nationalist populism helps deflect social struggle and ideologically binds the impoverished masses and the working class to capitalist rule. The nationalizations of land and private companies—carried out in large part through government buyouts—represent a means by which countries under imperialist domination can achieve a degree of economic independence. But far from placing the productive wealth of society in the hands of working people, these nationalizations have helped Chávez’s cronies in the so-called boliburguesía (Bolivarian bourgeoisie) line their pockets.

U.S. policy in Latin America has left a centuries-long bloody trail of military interventions, American-installed dictators and death squads. It is in the interests of working people in the U.S., as well as in Venezuela, to oppose a U.S.-backed coup or other imperialist intervention in the country. At the same time, political support to chavismo and the Maduro regime only subordinates the Venezuelan working class to its capitalist exploiters. For this reason, during the 2004 referendum to recall Chávez, we argued for abstention rather than a no vote. As we wrote in “U.S. Imperialism’s Referendum Ploy Fails—Populist Capitalist Ruler Chávez Prevails” (WV No. 831, 3 September 2004):

“The immediate perspective that is urgently posed is not only to oppose U.S. imperialist incursions into Venezuela and elsewhere, but to fight to shatter the support of the workers movement to either Chávez or the opposition, and to forge a revolutionary internationalist workers party to lead the working class to power. This requires an intransigent fight against nationalism in Venezuela, which obscures class divisions in the country. Only the victorious struggle for working-class rule, i.e., socialist revolution throughout the Americas, will ensure land to the landless and enable the oil workers and other proletarians to enjoy the wealth created by their labor.”

Nationalist Populism: Dead End for Working People

Like Lázaro Cárdenas who ruled Mexico in the 1930s or Argentina’s Juan Perón in the 1940s and ’50s, Chávez, a former colonel who had attempted an unsuccessful military coup in 1992, was what Marxists call a bonapartist ruler. The term applies to a strongman, typically a (former) military leader like the original Napoleon Bonaparte, heading a regime that in a period of crisis elevates itself to a position of “leader of the nation.” As revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky explained when writing about the Cárdenas regime which expropriated the petroleum and energy industries:

“In the industrially backward countries foreign capital plays a decisive role. Hence the relative weakness of the national bourgeoisie in relation to the national proletariat. This creates special conditions of state power. The government veers between foreign and domestic capital, between the weak national bourgeoisie and the relatively powerful proletariat. This gives the government a Bonapartist character of a distinctive character. It raises itself, so to speak, above classes. Actually, it can govern either by making itself the instrument of foreign capitalism and holding the proletariat in the chains of a police dictatorship, or by maneuvering with the proletariat and even going so far as to make concessions to it, thus gaining the possibility of a certain freedom toward the foreign capitalists.”

— “Nationalized Industry and Workers’ Management” (1939)

Populist reform and neoliberal austerity are two faces of capitalist class rule in dependent countries, that is, alternate policy prescriptions available to the national bourgeoisie, as demonstrated in Venezuela itself. In 1976, President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the oil industry with compensation. Buoyed by increasing oil prices, he invested heavily in social programs, expanding government employment and improving education and health care. But when Pérez was elected president again in 1989, the oil market had crashed, so he implemented massive austerity at the behest of the International Monetary Fund.

Chávez’s principal concern upon coming to power in 1998 was to solve the problem of the country’s faltering oil profits, the lifeblood of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie. He moved immediately to discipline the oil workers union and to otherwise increase the efficiency of the state-owned oil industry, while pressing the OPEC oil cartel to jack up prices. It was for such efforts, and in the interest of political stability, that Chávez was initially supported by much of the ruling class. This included not least his former comrades in the military high command, who were instrumental in restoring him to power after the short-lived 2002 coup.

Chávez was lucky: the price of oil rose from $10.87 per barrel in 1998 to $96.13 in 2013. However, the price of oil is notoriously unstable and the United States, the largest recipient of Venezuela’s oil, has cut its imports. The social welfare programs introduced by Chávez cannot be sustained in the long term under capitalism. With declining productivity dragging down its economy, Venezuela has managed to keep afloat in no small part due to billions of dollars in loans from the Chinese deformed workers state in exchange for oil.

Most of the Venezuelan capitalist class enriched itself by siphoning off the oil wealth of the country. Chávez’s use of this revenue for social reforms angered elements of the bourgeoisie who had long seen this money as their personal slush fund. When Chávez implemented price and currency controls and nationalizations, the divide deepened. Some one million wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans have left the country from the time Chávez came to power. Many have sent their money abroad—including to Miami, the snake pit of anti-Communist Cuban exiles. In response, the government instituted more price and currency controls, which made it more difficult for private companies to get capital, hardening opposition to the government. As a result, many capitalist manufacturers, such as in the auto industry, have closed up shop, increasing Venezuela’s dependency on imported goods.

To boost profits, many private stores have refused to sell products at the official government rates, insisting on higher prices. Government-subsidized staples are illegally exported to Colombia by speculators and sold for higher prices. Hoarding is reported to be widespread. The traditional “market solution,” i.e., relaxation of price and currency controls and government subsidies introduced by Chávez, would no doubt spur private capitalists to produce and sell more products. Just as in Colombia and other Latin American countries, such measures would be good for the balance sheets of the capitalists, but disastrous for everybody else.

In Venezuela today, the poor are not starving, but shortages of basic products have made conditions more miserable. So long as the productive wealth of society is in private hands, production will be guided by what increases capitalist profits. The masses will remain subject to exploitation and oppression, and economic development will be subordinated to the dictates of the imperialist-dominated world market. There can be no permanent amelioration of the plight of the urban and rural poor without the smashing of the capitalist state and the overthrow of the capitalist social order. The perspective of the International Communist League is for a series of workers revolutions across the globe, which would pave the way for an internationally planned, collectivized economy and the accompanying expansion of the productive forces of society in accordance with human need.

Left Apologists for Chavismo

Most self-described socialist organizations flocked to support Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” and continue to act as the leftist marketing department for Maduro. Alan Woods, who leads the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), is prominent among these types, boasting of being a “Trotskyist” adviser to first Chávez and now Maduro. The March 5 article “Carry Out the Legacy of Hugo Chávez!” (marxist.com) by Woods lauds the toiling masses for having “saved the Revolution and pushed it forward” and beseeches them to buckle down against the “reformists” and “bureaucrats” in the Caracas government.

In the declaration “Hugo Chávez Is Dead: The Fight for Socialism Lives!” (6 March 2013) issued prior to the election of Maduro last year, the IMT elaborated: “Hugo Chávez died before completing the great task he had set before himself: the carrying out of the socialist revolution in Venezuela. It is now up to the workers and peasants—the real motor force of the Bolivarian Revolution—to carry this task out to the end.” They go on to implore: “We must ensure that the next government will carry out a socialist policy.”

The IMT would have the working masses serve as foot soldiers to bolster the position of Maduro, thereby helping to prop up capitalist rule. The glorification of a former army colonel and his acolyte, who have been at the helm of the repressive Venezuelan capitalist state for the last 16 years, disarms the workers and binds them to a wing of Venezuela’s ruling class. The only reliable defense against capitalist immiseration, whether imposed by the rightist opposition or by the Maduro government, is the independent struggle of the working class. And the fight for socialism can advance only if the proletariat struggles under its own banner. Socialism will result not from the “Bolivarian Revolution” that does nothing to challenge capitalist property but from workers revolution that sweeps away the bourgeois state apparatus and expropriates capitalist property.

The IMT sees in the “Bolivarian Revolution” a repeat of the Cuban Revolution. As IMT spokesman Jorge Martin put it, the “dynamic of action and reaction of the Venezuelan revolution reminds us in a very powerful way of the first years of the Cuban revolution” (marxist.com, 1 March 2005). Such a comparison, though, has no basis in reality.

When Castro’s forces marched into Havana on 1 January 1959 culminating several years of guerrilla war, the bourgeois army and the rest of the capitalist state apparatus that had propped up the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship collapsed in disarray. Initially, the heterogeneous petty-bourgeois rebels were committed to no more than a program of radical-democratic reforms, but under the pressure of U.S. imperialism would begin a series of nationalizations. By the time Castro declared Cuba “socialist” in 1961, the Cuban bourgeoisie and the U.S. imperialists and their CIA and Mafia henchmen had all fled and capitalist property had been expropriated. Quite unlike Venezuela, where the bourgeoisie is fully intact as a class, what was established in Cuba in 1960-61 was a deformed workers state: a society in which private property is collectivized, but a parasitic bureaucratic caste, not the workers, holds political power.

The fact that a petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement could overthrow capitalist rule was due to historically exceptional circumstances—the absence of the working class as a contender for power in its own right, hostile imperialist encirclement and the flight of the national bourgeoisie, and a lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union. The Cuban workers state itself was modeled on the Soviet Union after its bureaucratic degeneration at the hands of the Stalinist usurpers beginning in 1923-24. As we did with the Soviet degenerated workers state before its destruction, we call for the unconditional military defense of Cuba and for workers political revolution to oust the ruling bureaucratic caste.

The Castro bureaucracy in Cuba embraces the Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country.” Thus, it denies the need for proletarian revolution internationally, not only elsewhere in Latin America but particularly in the advanced capitalist world. Further damaging the defense of Cuba, the bureaucracy has cozied up to and provided “revolutionary” cover for all kinds of anti-working-class capitalist regimes. Meanwhile, various “market reform” measures introduced in response to Cuba’s severe post-Soviet economic problems have brought widening inequality (see “Cuba: Economic Crisis and ‘Market Reforms’,” WV No. 986, 16 September 2011).

In those countries like Venezuela where capitalism emerged belatedly, the bourgeoisies are too weak, too fearful of the proletariat and too dependent on the world market—dominated by the U.S., Europe and Japan—to break the chains of imperialist subjugation and resolve mass poverty and other burning social problems. The only way forward is, as Trotsky stated in The Permanent Revolution (1930), the fight for “the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.” The dictatorship of the proletariat would place on the order of the day not only democratic but also socialist tasks, such as collectivizing the economy, giving a mighty impulse to international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the advanced capitalist world would ensure against bourgeois restoration and secure the possibility of bringing socialist construction to its conclusion.

It is the task of Marxists to break illusions in bourgeois populists like Chávez in order to forge revolutionary parties of the working class. As we wrote in “Venezuela: Populist Nationalism vs. Proletarian Revolution” (WV No. 860, 9 December 2005):

“History will reserve a harsh verdict for those ‘leftists’ who promote one or another left-talking capitalist caudillo. The way forward for the downtrodden throughout the Americas does not lie through painting nationalist strongmen as revolutionaries and populist forays as revolutions. It lies instead in constructing national sections of a reforged Fourth International in the spirit of uncompromising revolutionary hostility to any and all kinds of capitalist rule.”

South of the Río Bravo, such parties will have to be built in political struggle against widespread illusions in populism and nationalism. In the U.S., a revolutionary workers party will be built in the struggle to break the proletariat from the capitalist Democratic Party and to mobilize it in solidarity with all those oppressed and exploited by U.S. imperialism around the world.

************

“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International

Emblem of the Fourth International.

Click below to link to documents of the early 4th International.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/

Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the slogan in the headline.

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers' international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor ordered, by all means, be my guest, BUT only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

Workers Vanguard No. 1025	31 May 2013

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Promise of a Socialist Society

(Quote of the Week)

In the selection below, Friedrich Engels makes plain how proletarian revolution opens the road to an emancipated future in which the productive powers of humanity are unleashed for the benefit of all mankind.

Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself....

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears.... Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.

—Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878)

***An Old Geezer Sighting-Another 50^thAnniversary –A Run For The Roses  

 

I first met my old friend Peter Paul Markin down at the Surf Ballroom in Hull in the summer after we graduated from high school (he from Hull High) when we chased the same girl on the dance floor (who eventually dumped both of us, me first). Recently when I told him one afternoon over lunch the story of my 50^th anniversary “jog” around the old North Quincy cross-country course in the fall of 2013 I insisted on his writing something up about the event like he had done with other stuff I told him. Until now it has been a book sealed with seven seals but I thought this site would be an appropriate place to tell the gruesome tale. Here’s Markin’s recollections from that afternoon:    

Writers, or at least people who like to write, know, know deep in their souls, or hell, maybe only know by instinct that some things should not be written. Or if written then discarded (and in the age of cyberspace one can just press the DELETE button, praise be). That was my initial response when my old friend from the end of our high school days, Alfred Francis Johnson (hereafter just Al which is what everybody except nerdy girls called him refusing to play to that three-name thing like he was descended from Mayflower people or something), asked me to write a little something celebrating a 50th anniversary that he was all exercised about. I figured that the subject would be, knowing Al, some political event, the historic civil rights March on Washington, the fall of the Diem regime in Vietnam that led to all hell breaking out there, and here, or the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination that brought about a sea- change in American culture, brought down the “nights of the long knives” that we are still fighting a rearguard action against. But no Al had nothing so exalted in mind. What he wanted was to commemorate, if that is the right word here, the 50^thanniversary of the last year that he ran the storied North Quincy cross-country as a member of the North Quincy team. Jesus.

Yes I know, although these days the media and others on slow news days are prone to commemorate all kinds of anniversaries of events including odd-ball years like 30^thand 40^th, this was a weird request. But Al argued his case as he does when he is exercised about something and I had to hear him out. It seems that he had actually run that course this fall [2013] after 50 years of statutory neglect and so had wanted to tout that fact to all who would listen. He said that he had taken up jogging a few years previously to while the time away and keep the extra pounds off and somehow expected that would soften me up. That explanation however left me non-plussed even though I personally would have a hard time running one hundred yards (or meters, whatever the short distance is they run these days) without crying out desperately for oxygen and many other medicals services. So I was ready to give the devil his due with a pat on the back, see you later and move on, especially that move on part.

Al then went into high gear. He mentioned that a few years back, it must have been 2010, he had written a sketch about his current running prowess to commemorate the 50^thanniversary of when he began to run as a sport. He had run a mile over at some practice field, the “dust bowl” he called it which gives you an idea of the condition of the track, then and now, to prove that he was not over the hill, or something. Yes, I know again, like this was some fleet-footed ancient marathon feat worthy of notice. His point was that the sketch was well received by the AARP-worthy audience in need of elderly care he was addressing thus throwing down the gauntlet about my ability to match that result. No sale, brother, no sale.

That negative response on my part set him off, had him seeing red. He went into his classic “you owe me” rant. That “you owe me” stems from way back in the summer of 1964 when we first met down in my hometown of Hull which is about twenty miles south of North Quincy. We had met at the Surf Ballroom where there was a weekly live band dance (rock and roll, of course, now called classic rock, damn) and I “stole” a girl from him that we were both interested in. The girl eventually faded but our friendship began. And with that little tidbit he won his argument. Not on the merits of his case, and not even to shut him up, but because I told him that if I wrote something now about his silly anniversary then next year, next summer, I would get to write the real story about the 50th anniversary of the night that I supposedly “stole” that girl from him. And that would not be pretty, brother, it would not be pretty.

Al spent the better part of an hour telling me the story of his “mock heroic” run, including some back story information about that “historic” mile run at the dreaded “dust bowl” in 2010 to add, what did he call it, oh yeah “color.” Mostly though what he had to say was filler, you know, stuff, supposedly profound stuff, about memory, aging, mortality and other such lofty sentiments as he jogged along. After all how much can one write about an old geezer going at snail’s pace, sweating, swearing and huffing and puffing. Maybe a quick paragraph and done. As usual I only listened half-heartedly once I saw where he was heading so some of the material I jotted down may be off but here is the gist of it:

The year 2010 was decisive for Al ’s return to the running roads and fields. One day, one January day while he was walking along the Charles River in Boston he remembered that it had been 50 years before that he had first started running, running to get out of the cramped tiny single family seen-better-days house that he shared with three brothers and his parents, running to chase the blues away, running to get rid of about sixteen tons of thirteen year old teen angst and alienation, hell, running just to hear the sound of his feet setting a beat on the road and his breathe becoming steady after the first huffing and puffing. That angst running for the heck of it eventually led to a high school career in cross-country and indoor and outdoor track where he had successes and failures like a lot of others who pursued sports at some level. The up and downs of that career need not detain us except to give reason to why he was commemorating some woe-begotten anniversary. After high school he had given up running and went on to pursue more natural things like wine, women and song, including “stealing” a couple of young women on his own, a little dope (actually sometimes a lot of dope when hippie-dom was in high flower, some counter-cultural things, a tour in the army, work, seven kinds of work, some marriages and other relationships. You know an ordinary life, lived well or poorly but lived as time marched on.

Later that month Al had an epiphany. He had been back in his old North Quincy hometown on some unrelated business when he decided to walk around some of the streets adjacent to the old high school. While doing so, while taking this memory walk as it turned out, he walked past the old track (that “dust bowl” of blessed memory) where he had practiced long ago and that is where the idea of seeing whether he could still run a mile took form. A couple of weeks later, weeks when you and I and any rational AARP-er would be in sunny Florida or sunny some place Al was ready to run for the roses out in the frostbitten air.

Naturally he had picked a day and time when every dog-owner in the area was walking his or her day so he was to have no private agony as he ran his laps. From his description of the thing it was clear that he was foolishly ill-prepared to do a mile having not practiced, or even run except for a wayward bus in twenty-five years, and it was a close thing that he actually finished the distance. I will spare the reader the medical details and just note that the one funny thing Al said when I asked him his time for the mile was that information was top secret in the interest of national security. But enough of ancient filler.

That haphazard run got Al back to running, or rather jogging is the better term on regular basis. Jogging to get out of the cozy single- family house in the leafy suburbs that he shared with his third wife, jogging to chase the blues away, jogging to get rid of about sixteen tons of sixty plus years of angst and alienation, hell, jogging just to hear the sound of his feet setting a beat on the road and his breathe becoming steady after the first huffing and puffing. Now you have to know this about Al, despite his quirky nature he is intensely committed to a sense of history, to a sense of memory whether for large events or small. For example, when he talks about John Brown and his heroic raid in 1859 (date provided by Al as I did not remember it) at Harper’s Ferry you would think he had been there as an eye-witness he gave so much detail, stuff like that. So naturally when the small anniversary of his last year of competitive cross-country running came up of course he was going to commemorate it, although this time be better prepared than that ill-fated mile on the dusty old track.

Al had mentioned to me before, maybe several years ago, that this North Quincy cross-country course was storied, although not his story. The reason for that distinction was that his best friend, his running mate in both senses, running around the track and running around town, was Bill Cadger. Bill was a great runner who over his career won many races on the course and for many years held the course record. Al stood in his shadow, stood deep in his shadow. That fact is neither here nor there now, except that this course of two and one-half miles which they had run together in practice many times was laid out along the streets of old North Quincy in a way that Al had not noticed back in the day when running the thing. There were many landmarks of his youth as he ran it this time, this time when he was running, oops, jogging slowly enough to see things. To reflect on things, to remember. And those recollections, that filler, is what I will finish this sketch with. Except to tell anybody who will listen, anybody who wants to know, that yes Al finished the course, and did not, I repeat did not need medical attention, none.

The first part of the course started on the side of the high school, the East Squantum Street side. Just seeing the old high school reminded Al of the tough times he had getting through the place. Not academically, not even socially, except a little, a little shy and unknowing about girls (now called young women, thank you), no knowledge shy with four boys and no girls in the family to ease the way. And a deep-crusted Catholic studied ignorance of things sexual, how to deal with the subject, okay. He was moreover, and Bill too, which is why they got along, filled with all kinds of teenage angst and alienation, feelings of being isolated, and feeling out of sorts with the world. He said he laughed as he thought about that, thought about how someday, now someday he might get over that angst and alienation. Yah, he said he had to laugh about that, about how they all said back in the day he would get over it when he got older. The only thing better now was that he had a small handle on it, and some helpful medication.

The second leg of the course went down Bayfield Road, a road strewn with house of relatives, some that he liked and some, who later when he joined, joined with abandon (as did I), the “youth nation” that was a-borning in the late 1960s shut their doors to him, called him renegade, called him in the parlance of the times, “red,” “commie,” and “monster.” Jesus. But that street also had houses filled with budding romances, or flirtations in that close- packed community, romances and flirtations. Flirtations that he, girl-shy, had trouble picking up on when the boys’ “lav” Monday morning before school bull- sessions (emphasis on the bull) and he came up on the radar as someone that Sally, Susie, or Marie “liked” on that preternatural teen grapevine that had Facebook beat six ways to Sunday. He wondered as he passed some cross streets off of after Bayfield what had happened to Sally, Susie, and Marie. Did they too fade from the town’s memory like he had, Had they, like many in their nomadic generation, shaken the dust off of the town unlike their parents, his parents, definitely grandparents who stayed anchored to the town and took a certain pride in that fact. He had to laugh again, why not, he was moving slow enough to laugh and look and feel about things, and about that dog ahead who for a time was moving faster than he was, that even now it always came down to girls, oops, women, even after three marriages and a million short- haul things. And he still was trying to figure them out. Jesus   

 

The third leg brought him along what is now Quincy Shore Boulevard, along the ocean, along the one piece of geography that had defined his life; the old days remembrances of running along in the sand, a task too tough now with those wobbly knees and aching ankles, with Bill running a mile ahead, him getting all red from the sun; summer afternoons spent on the beach between the Squantum  Yacht Club and the Wollaston Boat Club the “spot” to hang in waiting around for, what else, that certain she you had had your eye on in school, or just what came in on the ocean; Saturday night parking steamed cars with the roar of the ocean drowning out love’s call; end of night stops at Joe’s for burgers and fries to placate a different hunger. Later, later walks (not runs, hell, no) along Pacific beaches, Malibu, Carlsbad, LaJolla, Magoo Point, with love Angelica, Angelica from Indiana and ocean-deprived, her almost drowning in some riptide not knowing the fierceness of Mother Nature, Uncle Neptune when the furies were up; solo walks, lonely walks when the booze and dope almost broke him (and he called me, desperately called me for help, and I said “I’ll meet you in Malibu and we’ll get you dried out, brother”). Much later solitary walks along endless Maine beaches trying to figure out what went wrong with that second marriage, and right with the third. Simple stuff that the rush of the foam-flecked waves called out for serenity. As he made the turn for home, the fourth leg down Atlantic Boulevard  heading back to the school he laughed again, twice laughed, first that he was going to finish running the whole course and secondly that no matter what somebody better make sure that he was not buried in some place like Kansas when his time comes. He had come from the muck of the sea and let him lay his head down there.

As Al travelled that last leg, the leg that brought him to the corner of his old neighborhood he cringed, cringed at the thought of all the misbegotten things that had happened in that vanished shack of a cramped house and of his estrangement from his family, a shame, a crying shame (and I, Hull–born twenty miles away from the same kind of neighborhood, with the same family grievances will not go into detail here -see we do not “air our family linens in public,” got it). But he also had a certain nostalgia, a certain sadness as he remembered the various generations of cats that helped make life a little bearable when cursed mother got on her sway, father silent, silent as the grave. Joy Smokey, Snowball, Blackie, Big Boy, Sorrowful, Grey Boy, Calico, and many others making him think of later long gone beloved Mums who had helped him get through drugs, booze, depression, angst, a bad marriage and about seven other maladies, and recently gone and still filled with sorrows and sadnesses his companion shadow Willie Boy shed a tear for him, and them all.

Then past Atlantic Avenue and many miles walked getting up the courage to talk to Lydia the first girl he fell hard for, and wonder, wonder too what happened to her, doing well he hoped. And last stop before the finishing hill and kick to the line Grandma’s Young Street house, savoir sainted (everybody agreed, sainted especially with devil Grandpa) Grandma who saved his tender teens from total despair, from starvation too and blessed memories. And regrets, regrets too that he had not been better at the end for her. Sorrows there, joys too.

Ah, streets, all known streets, all blessed streets (not church-blessed but still blessed), all ocean-breezed streets, all memory streets, as he chugged up that hill. A hill where in memory time, fifty years ago time, he would put a rush kick to the finish. That day he ambled across the ancient imaginary finish line, fist in the air like some Olympic champion. Done.

********

After Al had finished his story, his ordinary man down memory lane story, I asked him how long it took him to complete the course. (Al had told me at an earlier time his course times from the old days and I suspected that he had kept the time. I knew my man.) He replied that in the interest of national security that tidbit shall remain top secret. Some things don’t change. We both laughed.

Well I suppose since I wrote this sketch that I should wish Markin a happy 50^thanniversary and I do so here. But remember brother that other 50^thanniversary coming up next summer, and that story will not be pretty, no not at all.

 

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Two      

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 


For several years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period to honor revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since in the month of January leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.

I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I on some previous occasions. I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, “the Rose of the Revolution.” This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, as he attempted to define himself politically. Below is a sketch of a young fictional labor militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary developments in Russia under the Tsar toward the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century. This sketch should help define the problems facing the working-class there then, and perhaps now as well.

******

“Big Ivan” Smilga (called such for obvious reasons) had been out of work, steady work anyway, the best part of a year after he (along with his work crew) had been laid off by John Smiley and Son, the English textile firm working under license from Tsar in Moscow. He had been called “redundant” (and of course the crew as well) after the job he held as lead-man on a work crew that took the rolls of finished fabric off the bobbing machines for further processing and transport had been replaced by a machine which did the task automatically. He had sulked and drunk himself silly for a while and then grabbed any work he could find as he was running out of funds. (That course of action pursued only after a “caper,” a Luddite caper, in which he and his crew snuck into the closed Smiley factory one Saturday night and wreaked the hauling machinery only to find that next Monday morning that it was replaced by an exact replica. Fortunately he and the crew were never discovered and nobody snitched to the Okhrana or he/they would be in Siberia just them). Grabbing whatever work he could find entailed moving down the working-class scale as his once substantial stash of cash was dwindling and as he came in contact with more nefarious types at the workingmen’s taverns that he then more frequently hung out at to kill time.

One night at the Golden Eagle Tavern (rough Russian translation and allegedly named in honor of the Tsar) he ran into some workmen whom he knew and a few who were not working men but students, maybe from Moscow University, who were talking in the back room, talking quietly although not attempting to cover their voices or the door which led into the back. One of the workmen, Vladimir Suslov, known to him from his time at Smiley and Son, motioned him to come join the group. This Suslov knew of Ivan’s ill-fated attempt to wreak the machinery at Smiley’s from one night when Ivan had been too talkative and he had overheard Ivan speaking of the attempts. What Vladimir, and one of the students, Nicolas Kamkov as he found out later, had to say was that things had become intolerable in Russia, that the sons and daughters of the land needed a reprieve, that the growing working- class needed relief and that the students (they called themselves the “intelligentsia”) needed to be able to breath and say whatever they wanted. And this motley group of students and workmen had a plan to solve this problem.

Nicolas let Suslov tell the broad outline of the plan. The idea, like something out of the People’s Will movement of blessed if now distant memory, was rather than try to assassinate governmental officials like in the wild old days, instead to take them hostage, hostages to be returned for various grants of relief for peasants, workers and students. Suslov looked directly at Ivan when he asked who was in and who was out. Ivan nodded, or half-nodded, that he was in. (He later said he feared some Suslov indiscretion more, especially if he was caught, more than the very real doubts he initially expressed about the plot). Since everybody in the room expressed an interest they began to plan. The main idea for hostage number one, the Tsar’s finance minister, was that Ivan was to do the strong-arm work one evening at the minister’s home. So the planning went on over the next few days. Then just as quickly it was over as a knock came on Ivan’s door one night and when he opened it there was Daniev, the local Okhrana official with Suslov in tow. Suslov had betrayed him (and the others), in order to get out from under his own hard time as a ring-leader. Ivan was thereafter banished to Siberia for two years, a hard two year, for even thinking about the idea of kidnapping the Tsar’s minister.        

From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-The KAPD in Retrospect-An Interview with a Member of the Communist Workers Party of Germany

 

Markin comment:

The Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia in October 1917 was consciously predicated by the leadership (Lenin, Trotsky, etc., some others pushing forward, some being dragged along in the fight) on the premise that the Russian revolution would not, could not, stand alone for long either against the backlash onslaught of world imperialism, or on a more positive note, once the tasks of socialist construction reached a certain point. The purpose of the Communist International, founded in 1919 in the heat of the Russian civil war, by the Bolsheviks and their international supporters was the organizational expression of that above-mentioned premise. To work through and learn the lessons of the Bolshevik experience and to go all out to defeat world imperialism and create a new social order. I might add that political, social, and military conditions in war-weary World War I Europe in 1918 and 1919 made those premises something more than far-fetched utopian hopes. And central to those hopes were events in Germany.

If the original premise of Marxism (espoused specifically by both Marx and Engels in their respective political lifetimes) that the revolution would break out in an advanced capitalist European country then Germany, with its high level of capitalist development and socialist traditions and organizations, was the logical place to assume such an event would occur. And that premise, despite the betrayals of the German social democratic leadership in the war period, animated Lenin and Trotsky in their planning for the extension of socialist revolution westward. The rise of a “peace” socialist wing (the Independent Socialists) during the late phases of the war, the events around the smashing of the German monarchy and the creation of a socialist-led bourgeois republic in the wake of military defeat, the ill-starred Spartacist uprising, the working class response to the later Kopp Putsch, the also-ill-starred March Action of 1921, and the possibilities of a revolution in 1923 in reaction to the French exactions in the Ruhr and other events that year all made for a period of realistic revolutionary upheaval that was fertile ground for revolutionaries. And revolutionary hopes.

As we are painfully, no, very painfully, aware no revolution occurred in that period and that hard fact had profound repercussions on the then isolated Russian experiment. That hard fact has also left a somewhat unresolved question among communist militants, thoughtful communist militants anyway, about the prospects then. The question boils down to, as foreshadowed in the headline to this entry, whether there was any basis for the notion that a revolution could have occurred in Germany in 1923. We know what happened because it didn’t, but there are sometimes valuable conditionals pose in absorbing the lessons of history, our communist history. The yes or no of a German revolution is one such question. I have given my opinion previously-if there was no chance of revolution in Germany in 1923, win or lose, then the whole notion of proletarian revolution was just a utopian dream of a bunch of European outcast radicals. The corollary to that proposition is that, in the year 2010, the socialist cooperative notion that we fight for, other than as an abstract intellectual idea, is utopian, and that we are the mad grandchildren (and great-grandchildren) of those mad Europeans. That idea, with world imperialism wreaking havoc and breathing down our backs relentlessly in all quarters makes that corollary ill-founded. So let’s take another look at Germany 1923 from the several perspectives I have gathered in today’s postings.

Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.

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. 
******** 

Bernard Reichenbach

The KAPD in Retrospect-An Interview with a Member of the Communist Workers Party of Germany

Bernard Reichenbach (1888–?) was a left-wing member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party during the First World War. He joined the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) when it was founded in April 1921. The KAPD was mainly composed of the left-wingers who had been expelled from the German Communist Party (KPD) at its second congress in October 1919, as they did not accept the party’s insistence upon working within trade unions and bourgeois parliaments. The KAPD claimed a membership of 38,000, only a little less than that of the KPD, and was stronger than the KPD in Hamburg and Berlin. The KAPD was recognised by the Communist International as a sympathising section. Reichenbach was a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, and was one of the five KAPD representatives at the Third Congress of the Communist International in June 1921, speaking under the name of Seemann. The KAPD was excluded from the Communist International in September 1921. The party went into decline, and by the time it was outlawed in November 1923, it was of little political significance. Reichenbach rejoined the SPD, and split off with the Socialist Workers Party (SAP) in 1931. He moved to Britain after Hitler’s rise to power. At the time of this interview (1969), he was an activist of the German anti-parliamentary left. This interview first appeared in Solidarity, Volume 6, no. 2 (13 November 1969), and we thank Ken Weller for donating this valuable piece to the Socialist Platform Library.

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The German Workers’ Councils

BETWEEN 1920 and 1923, the KAPD acted as an extra-parliamentary opposition. Do you consider this essential?

Yes. It educated people to act on their own political initiative, independently of any representatives.

At the time, this expressed itself not only as extra-parliamentary opposition, but as anti-parliamentary opposition. Did you consider it essential that the working class should struggle against parliamentary institutions?

Definitely. You must remember that at the end of 1918 there was a revolutionary situation in Germany. Participation in parliamentary activity was, we felt, a betrayal. Parliament, amongst other things, was held responsible for the war. During 1919 almost the whole of left politics took place within the workers’ councils, not in the trade unions or in parliament. The councils were extra-parliamentary, and potentially anti-parliamentary, institutions. The trouble was that in these councils the Social Democrats were in a majority. They put forward economistic rather than political demands, and reformist rather than revolutionary demands. The Social Democrats, however, did not impose these views. Their majority reflected the will of the broad mass of the workers inside the councils, and that even during a revolutionary situation.

A Leninist would argue that what was missing was a leadership party which would have exposed the policies of the Social Democrats on the war, and that it was the lack of such a party that prevented the revolutionaries from bringing the revolutionary situation to a conclusion.

The conditions in Germany differed considerably from those in Russia. Russia was emerging from centuries of autocratic rule. The whole social atmosphere was ripe for a fundamental change. Germany had a tradition of parliamentary institutions, a tradition of government by elected representatives. In such conditions, revolution is much harder, because it appears as coercion against democratically-elected representatives. After all the years of a bourgeois majority in parliament, the victory of the Social Democrats appeared as a decisive victory for the left. It is true that the decisive arena of struggle for political power was within the workers’ councils, but, for the reasons mentioned earlier, any action against the elected government appeared out of the question, especially whilst that government had a majority within the councils.

What was the real activity of the councils vis-à-vis the unions and parties?

Independent councils, based on factories rather than trades, as had been common previously, appeared spontaneously all over Germany. This was to a considerable extent a result of the economic chaos. When a factory came to a standstill due to a lack of fuel or raw materials, there was no one to turn to for help. Government, parties, unions, capitalists – no one could do anything to solve the basic problems of transport, fuel, raw materials, etc. Resolutions, declarations, orders, and even paper money, were of little use. Under these conditions, workers would form a council, and set out to solve these problems by themselves. We of the KAPD believed that the trade unions were an obstacle to the creation of the new society, and that the main thing was to encourage workers to take direct action, independently of the unions.

What was your attitude to union members, as opposed to the union leadership?

We continuously explained to them that it was essential to organise on the basis of places of work, not trades, and to establish a National Federation of Works Committees.

How many revolutionary parties then existed?

In 1920 there were five parties aiming at a Socialist reconstruction of society, and all calling themselves Marxist: the SPD, the USPD, the Left USPD, the KPD and the KAPD. Apart from these, there were various Anarchist groups. The working class was torn by their mutual strife, and showed little united action vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie.

What were the differences at the level of action between the members of your party and the KPD, at their places of work?

The KPD at the time acted organisationally and tactically in precisely the same way as the Social Democrats; the only differences were in the slogans. We stood for workers’ direct action.

Did differences already emerge at that time within the KPD between those who stood for the rule of the party, and those who stood for the rule of the councils?

That differed very much from factory to factory. Generally speaking, it was the social atmosphere and widespread practice for workers’ councils to operate as recognised – almost natural – institutions.

What were the relations between members of the rival parties at their places of work?

That differed from works to works, too. A single individual in a key role would create an atmosphere which could decide the case. Quite often there was excellent cooperation between members of all parties. You could almost always trace it to a worker in a leading role, who was respected by everybody due to his capacity as a leader. In other places, there would be incessant and acrimonious strife.

Could you describe in detail how things were organised inside a factory?

Not accurately. Firstly, I was not a professional worker, but a paid party activist. Secondly, whilst being a member of the management in a Berlin factory in 1920, my experience there is of little general relevance because the factory was owned by its workers, and there was therefore hardly any friction between the management and the council. It was in the privately-owned factories that the councils would come into conflict with the management. Splits would occur within the ranks of the council over the question of policy towards the management – for example, between those who accepted the views of Social Democracy, and those who insisted on workers’ management.
 

Moscow 1921

Could you tell us something about the activity of the Third International?

In 1921 I participated as an observer in the sessions in Moscow. I stayed in the Lux Hotel. We met once a week, with Zinoviev as Chairman. The Russian delegation was the strongest, both in numbers and in influence. They ruled the meetings with an iron hand. The German delegation was the second largest. The tremendous influence of Lenin resulted very much from his strong personality. The other Russian comrades were not his yes-men. He carried them with him, if not by the power of his argument, then by the power of his personality. To European revolutionaries, Stalin was virtually unknown, and I never heard his name mentioned. People used to argue a lot about what this or that person had done or said in some situation in the past. During my stay of six months or so, I did not hear Stalin’s name mentioned, even once.

I met Lenin in 1921 in his room in the Kremlin. We had a long discussion about the German situation. There was a big map of Russia on the wall, and it was obvious that Lenin was very overworked. He explained to me that as a ruling party, they had to manage a huge country like Russia, and he had hardly any time to become familiar with details of revolutionary activity in the West. I told him of our criticisms of the policy of the KPD, which was considered a sister party of the Bolsheviks. I criticised their – and his – policy towards the insurrection of March 1921. He said that he accepted Trotsky’s analysis on European matters, and Radek’s analysis of Germany, without going into details. That meant that once we got into a conflict with Radek, we would find Lenin almost automatically lined up against us, despite the fact that quite often it was not he who formulated the Bolshevik line on that issue. Things were similar with respect to France.

What about discussions with different Russian comrades?

There were quite a lot of these discussions, especially with members of the Workers Opposition. A few days before the beginning of the Third Congress of the Communist International, Alexandra Kollontai, then a prominent member of the Workers Opposition, came to my room and told me that she was going to attack Lenin after he had made a speech about the New Economic Policy (NEP). She stated that she might possibly be arrested later, and asked me whether I could keep in safe custody the text of her speech about the Workers Opposition. I said I would, and as we were sending a courier to our Executive Committee in Berlin, I gave it to him. [1]

The session during which she delivered her famous speech for the Workers Opposition (which was contained in the text she had given to me) was one of the most memorable experiences in my life. Lenin, Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, Bukharin and others sat on the platform. She stood with her back to them, facing the audience, which included revolutionary militants from all over the world. She spoke first in fluent German, which was the official language of the International. When she finished, she repeated the whole lot in French for the benefit of the French comrades. She probably didn’t trust the interpreter. Finally, she repeated the whole speech in Russian. When she finished, silence fell. Lenin didn’t say a single word, although he took notes all the time. Trotsky answered for the platform. He tried to play the whole thing down, to the effect that she was a ‘softy’, and far too sensitive for the tough business called revolution, which demanded an iron hand. Neither of the speakers dealt directly with her arguments or facts. [2] The line was to play the whole criticism down by reducing it to a matter of her personality.
Behind the scenes, Trotsky took her in hand. She gave in, capitulating to party discipline. A few days later she came to me, and wanted for her manuscript back. I was, of course, unable to return it to her. Later my comrades translated the manuscript into German, and published it under the title of Alexandra Kollontai’s Die Arbeiter Opposition in Russland.
When I returned to Berlin, the KAPD decided that there was no point in remaining an associate member of the Third International.

What was the attitude of Lenin and Trotsky to your party?

It was critical, although at first fraternal. They very much wanted that we should join the KPD, and give up our independent organisation. But the policy of the KPD, dictated by the Russians, made this impossible. It was obvious, as I said, that the KPD had become a tool of Russian foreign policy.

What can you tell us about the 1921 insurrection?

At the time I was in Russia. The uprising, the so-called ‘March Action’, had been undertaken by the local organisations of the KPD and the KAPD, the former in response to an instruction from the Russian emissary Béla Kun (the exiled leader of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919). At first, the March Action was approved by Lenin. After its failure, however, he changed his mind, mainly under the influence of Clara Zetkin, a member of the Central Committee of the KPD, and Paul Levi, another Central Committee member, who resigned from the leadership of the party, and denounced the uprising as a ‘putsch’. He did this in a pamphlet which was damned by Lenin and Trotsky, although they shared his criticism. Paul Levi’s policies were continued.

Do you believe that there was a connection between the New Economic Policy of 1921 and the policy of the Third International towards the ‘March Action’?

One can discern some underlying common factors. The NEP was considered by Lenin as a fortification of the revolution in Russia; he considered the revolutionary process as having come to an end. The Bolsheviks had expected a victorious revolution in Western Europe. This failed to materialise, thus creating an ambiguous relationship between them, as a ruling party, and the capitalist regimes in Europe. On the one hand, they wanted normal inter-state relations, which would ensure them peaceful borders. On the other hand, the revolutionary struggle inside the capitalist countries weakened their regimes. Once the Bolsheviks became disillusioned with the revolution in the West, they began to consider the revolutionary movements as auxiliary tools of Russian foreign policy. That did not start with Stalin, but with Lenin and Trotsky, back in 1921. In 1921 Krasin, People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade, warned in an interview with the Berlin Rote Fahne (the daily paper of the KPD) that a particular strike would interfere with deliveries of machinery being manufactured for the USSR.
 

In Retrospect

Why did the KAPD disband in 1923?

Actually, the party did not disband in 1923. When the ‘March Action’ failed (and later the 1923 insurrection also), only a few hundred activists remained. Originally, we were a party of industrial militants, with only a few paid functionaries. When the industrial activity of these militants died down, our party simply ceased to exist. It was not a matter of taking a political decision. When our militants ceased to be active, all that was left to do was to acknowledge the situation, and draw the appropriate conclusions. We, the younger activists, decided to enter other political parties, simply because this was the only place where we could meet politically-minded workers, and try to win them over.

We failed for a number of reasons. Firstly, during our best period, in 1921, we numbered only 30,000, this being very small out of a proletariat of many millions. Secondly, we overestimated the revolutionary potential of the workers, and the role of the economic factor as an initiator of revolutionary activity. In this respect, our political adversaries Ebert and Scheidemann of the Social Democratic Party had a more realistic understanding when they concluded that a struggle for economic improvement can be contained by means of reform, and need not lead to revolution. Perhaps we erred in our analysis of society by considering it to revolve mainly on the economic axis, although in the 1920s this was certainly the main factor.

Did you consider yourself a Marxist at the time?

Yes. I and most of my comrades considered ourselves as people who put Marx’s ideas into action, according to our interpretation of them. Naturally, every self-defined Marxist will be criticised by other Marxists for the non-authenticity of his interpretation. In general, our tendency to over-emphasise the role of ‘objective factors’ stemmed from our interpretation of Marx’s ideas, and contributed to our failure. I think that Marx’s stress on the economic factor as the main motivation for revolutionary activity is not always right and everywhere valid; whereas his sociological insights were right at the time.

Assuming your analysis of society was valid at the time, as you just said, where then do you locate your failures?

A valid social analysis is one thing, implementing it in reality is another matter. One should distinguish between the theories of the KAPD and the practice through which it attempted to implement them (although the two are obviously interrelated). Up to 1923 the revolutionary activity of the working class was widespread throughout Germany in the wake of the collapse of the Kaiser regime, and of its political, social, economic and ideological institutions. But following the defeat of the insurrections of March 1921 and later of 1923, it became evident that, whereas during periods of political collapse and economic misery the working class exhibits independent revolutionary initiative and readiness to sacrifice a lot for the creation of a new social order, it does not sustain this type of activity during the prolonged periods between one political-economic crisis and the next.

Do you think that the non-materialisation of any revolution in Germany was a product of objective factors, or that it was due to the failure of the subjective – revolutionary – factor?

It is impossible to give a decisive answer to such a question. Objective factors can create conditions for a revolution, but its realisation depends on the subjective factor. Owing to our interpretation of Marx’s theory, we considered the subjective factor as of minor significance when compared to the objective factors. We suffered from a tendency to base all our activity on ‘economic determinism’.

Did not Lukács [3] criticise this tendency in 1924?

He did. On the other hand, Lenin also attacked us from the other side (in his famous Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder), accusing us of adventurism, by which he meant depending too much on the subjective factor. Gorter, one of our Dutch co-thinkers, wrote an excellent reply. [4]

Who was Anton Pannekoek?

He was a Dutch astronomer, who, before the First World War, edited a revolutionary paper in Bremen. Karl Radek, who later became a Bolshevik expert on Germany, learnt his revolutionary theory from him whilst working on the paper. In 1917 Pannekoek and Herman Gorter defended the Russian Revolution. When the Russians instituted a Western European Bureau of the Comintern in 1919, Pannekoek and Gorter were among those put in charge of it. [5]

Their later criticisms of the Bolsheviks concerned mainly their analysis of and policies towards the working-class and revolutionary movements in Western Europe, and their lack of understanding of the workers in the industrialised West. They pointed out that what was suitable for Russian conditions was not necessarily applicable to the entirely different conditions in the West. They made a very detailed and fraternal critique of Lenin’s policies, to which Lenin never replied in kind. Instead, he declared: ‘History will decide who was right!’

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Notes

1. The Workers Opposition was a faction in the Soviet Communist Party led by Alexander Shlyapnikov (1883–1937), an Old Bolshevik, and Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952). Formed in late 1920, it called for the management of industry to be turned over to the trade unions, and opposed one-man management in industry and the use of ‘bourgeois specialists’. It was officially banned at the party’s Tenth Congress in March 1921, which voted to prohibit all organised factions. The Opposition’s programme, The Workers Opposition, was also published in Britain in Sylvia Pankhurst’s paper, the Workers Dreadnought, and can be found in A. Holt (ed.), Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai (London 1984, pp. 159–200). Kollontai became active in the Russian Socialist movement in 1899, and sided with the Mensheviks in 1906. Active especially in work amongst women workers, she joined the Bolsheviks in 1914. She abandoned oppositional activity after the collapse of the Workers Opposition, and from late 1922 was engaged in diplomatic work until her death.

2. Bukharin was the other speaker.

3. György Lukács (1885–1974) was an Hungarian Marxist whose philosophical writings emphasised the importance of the subjective factor in political activity.

4. Herman Gorter (1864–1927) joined the Dutch Social Democratic Workers Party in 1897, helped to start the radical paper De Tribune in 1907, whose adherents split from the party in 1909. He was with the Zimmerwald Left during the First World War, and joined the Dutch Communist Party. Disagreeing with many positions of the Communist International, he was a major influence upon the KAPD, and he helped to form the Communist Workers Party of the Netherlands in 1921. His criticism of Lenin is available in English, An Open Letter to Comrade Lenin (Wildcat, London 1989).

5. Anton Pannekoek (1873–1960) joined the Dutch Social Democratic Workers Party in 1902, helped to start De Tribune, and split from the party in 1909. Moving to Germany, he taught in the SPD’s schools, and edited the radical Bremer Bürgerzeitung. He was with the Zimmerwald Left, and joined the Dutch Communist Party, which he left in 1921. He was a major influence upon the KAPD. He remained a leading proponent of Council Communism until his death.

 

***The Granddaddy Film Of Going Where The Dough Is- George Clooney’s Ocean’s 11

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of  Frank Jackman

Ocean’s 11, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitts, Eliot Gould, and a bunch of other guys, 2001

Recently in reviewing George Clooney’s Ocean 13 I made the following comment (Yeah, I know I am a little off on the chronology of the series but viewing that one go me back to watching the long gone granddaddy of stick-ups, modern version, unlike the shoot-em-up cowboys and the rat-tit-tat-tat gangster films of the 1930s and 1940s):  

“Everybody likes to see a bad guy get his comeuppance. Nobody likes to see a guy screw his partner (not in the old days anyway maybe now things are different in the raw dog-eat-dog world). Everybody likes to see a bad guy from Vegas get his comeuppance in duplicate and that is the premise behind Danny Ocean’s action in this third of the modern Ocean series (the old Frank Sinatra-led pack in the 1960s or so being the “classic”). Danny (played by George Clooney) and Rusty (played by Brad Pitts) are once again called to right some Vegas wrongs in the film under review, Ocean’s 13.”           

And not so strangely since nothing succeeds in Hollywood like success the plot-line for grandpa was just as simple, and similar- Danny Ocean (played by, ah, George Clooney), a beguiling ex-con who had been put always for being in the wrong place at the wrong time had plenty of time in stir to think up the heist to end all heists- the big enchilada- the trifecta-three big hotel casinos all in Vegas (forget that Las Vegas gag by now for we are all honorary citizens having now waded through two of these films).  The take- about 150 million, nothing to sneeze at even today, if things go right and even I am in on this one if that is the pay-out. All owned by a bad guy, Terry (played by Andy Garcia), the guy who stole Danny’s wife away (played by Julia Roberts) while he was in stir, and who has many enemies, many guys glad to take him down about seven steps, maybe more.      

Danny and the guys go about their business of doing this deed using all the high tech skills available to the motley crew of expert do-gooders. See, what they do is draw all the resources from the top to bottom by hook or by crook, including a raid on a a campus power source, to grab the money. And they would have made as the old master burglary Willie Sutton proud. So between the individual hi-jinx necessary to pull the plot off and Danny’s thoughtful plan to gain revenge Brother Terry has egg on his face, no question. Danny though just keeps trucking on in the sultry Vegas night (with that fickle leggy ex-wife so who needs dough). Yes, as easy as these guys made it look I am in if they ever need a guy when they make an Ocean’s 14. 

 

***On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Historic Voting Rights Act Of 1964

 

http://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-mavis-staples-sings-the-soundtrack-of-civil-rights/

Frank Jackman comment: maybe the Voting Rights Act Of 1964 was not the be-all and end-all of the civil rights struggle in America, and the struggle for racial equality, but it was an important milestone to have in the essentially police-state run South in those days when voter suppression was state policy. The importance of the Act has only been underlined by the recent judicial and legislative attempts to deprive whole segments of the voting population of America, mainly blacks and other minorities, of the need of leftist to protect the right to vote just like we vociferously defend all hard fought (and reversible) democratic rights and social gains.