From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Pierre Broué-Van Heijenoort-A Trotskyist in New York in the Second World War

 

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. 
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Pierre Broué-Van Heijenoort-A Trotskyist in New York in the Second World War

(April 1990

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From Revolutionary History, Vol. 9 No. 4, 2008, pp. 262–276.
Un trotskyste à New York pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale: van Heijenoort, in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, April 1990 (43), pp. 33–47.
Transcribed by Alun Morgan for the Revolutionary History Website.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

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In the obituary that I did for my old friend Van I touched on for the first time the question of his rôle in the analysis of the Second World war and his position in particular on this matter in the IV International. [1] In the past the Cahiers Leon Trotsky has published an article of his from 1942 on The National Question in Europe which enabled one to emphasise the originality of his political analyses. [2] Lastly the international Spartacist tendency with the characteristic irresponsibility in its method of analysis and its taste for amalgamating positions has attributed to both of us similar positions throughout the period.

In fact Van and I had long conversations in the eighties about the Second World War. From 1939 to 1945 Van was a foreign resident in the United States, living in difficult circumstances and sometimes in penury [3], semi-clandestine because of his position as a political emigré [4], kept away from influence by the leaders of Socialist Workers Party, in spite of, and perhaps because of, the part which he had played close to Trotsky and of his membership of the International Secretariat. [5] French in origin, he tried desperately during all those years, to find out what was happening in France, the shifting politics, the major movements in the working class and youth, watching for signs of the rise of the revolution. It was not simple curiosity: convinced of the accuracy of the “proletarian military policy” of which Trotsky had started to present the broad outline before his assassination, he sought the means to apply it in the European situation on the basis of which Trotsky had defined it. He did it with all the more ardour in that he was convinced he was the only one to have understood its spirit and that, as leader of the IS in New York, he clashed daily with Cannon and his representative Bert Cochran (E.R. Frank): forty years later, he still did not know if he had met with total incomprehension or a sectarian bad faith.
During this same period, I was then a young lad fourteen years younger than him, my perception sharpened by observing the crisis of French society, the collapse of the Army and its traditional values, the loss of prestige of “the elite” and the arrival in power of what seemed to me the worst militaro-clerical reaction in the wake of the military defeat. A teenager, initially attracted by Gaullism, then Stalinism, and, in both cases, put off by their organisational practices, I was won only to the idea of armed struggle with the masses against the occupation and the collaborators in Paris and Vichy; anti-fascist, as I said, I however refused to be or to let myself be called an anti-German and these were the “contradictions” which led me into the ranks of the Trotskyists in 1944.
This itinerary fascinated Van and I had to tell him, going over the extra details and unceasingly describing networks, groups, cadre schools, maquis frequented, operations carried out, which made me recollect my state of mind for him, my vision of the war, and also that of my companions in the struggle and my clandestine leaders, and what I had learnt through my personal experience, of the relations between Gaullists and Stalinist, for example. For him I was a past which he still wanted to decipher, a witness to be cross-examined and, it seemed to me, to provide evidence, somewhat despairing, that he had been right when he was silenced, which revived his regrets, his curiosity and sometimes his incredulity.
Undoubtedly these long conversations in the evenings by the side of the Charles river, at Cambridge, or on the paths bordered by eucalyptus on the Stanford campus, left me with the obligation to try today, in this article, to locate and identify his position on the war through his articles in Fourth International for the period when the SWP allowed them to be expressed without too many qualifications: I used for a great part of the period, relatively abundant material, a dozen articles which would undoubtedly occupy a little more than two-and-a-half issues of the Cahiers.
The sources of information on which he based his analyses were nothing extraordinary: the main ones consisted the big American national dailies, the European newspapers until 1940, then only the English ones, afterwards the rare letter from France, brief messages, sometimes the official reports which were confidential but available, a few meetings with someone who had come recently from Europe, reports also from England and Portugal based on bits of information, direct or indirect, from France.
Van was not a contributor to Fourth International who enjoyed the authority of a James P. Cannon. Only one “official” text was from his pen: the manifesto of the executive committee of November 1940 devoted to France under Petain and Hitler. All the others carried the signature of Marc Loris except for the last ones, which are signed Daniel Logan. [6]
The Manifesto gave a progress report on the world situation after the defeat of France. It rejected all the “technical” explanations for the defeat of the French Army. According to him the key resided in the fact that the bourgeoisie never defends the fatherland for itself, but only for private property, privileges and profit, and that it becomes “defeatist” when they are threatened. It was the fear of unleashing, while resisting to the limit, “a revolutionary war against Hitler”, which turned general Weygand into an advocate of capitulation and led him to request an armistice.
He began with the objective fact that the French revolution had not taken place. For him, the opportunity of June 1936 was deliberately snatched away by the socialist and communist parties, whose policy was to bar the road to the proletarian revolution while opening the way to war and Fascism.
Hitler had left to Petain — that was, to the Army high command, supported by “some anglophobe politicians” and the central core of the bourgeoisie — the “free zone” with its capital at Vichy and the job of dealing with the refugee problem and maintaining order cheaply, while enabling him to concentrate his forces for the invasion of Great Britain. The policy of collaboration and the denunciation by Vichy of Great Britain, again given the status of hereditary “enemy” were an invaluable lesson for the French workers:

The bourgeoisie … everywhere and always curbs, in the name of “national” interests, the struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation. The experience of France shows once more that “national” considerations serve only to mask the interests of the bourgeoisie which is always ready to change sides when it is a question of preserving its privileges. [7]

The fate of England had not yet been settled in a conflict which was still spreading. Laval was hoping for a German victory as a result of which he hoped that the French bourgeoisie would be able to participate in the “reconstruction” of Europe. The Manifesto continues:

The struggle for democracy under the flag of England (and the United States) will not lead to a noticeably different situation. General De Gaulle struggles against “slavery” at the head of colonial governors, that is to say, of slave masters. In his appeals, this “leader” uses, just like Petain, the royal “we.” The defense of democracy is in good hands! If England should install De Gaulle in France tomorrow, his regime would not be distinguished in the least from that of the Bonapartist government of Petain. [8]

It was not on the military chiefs that van Heijenoort focused. For him, the class struggle continued:

The big French bourgeoisie has already succeeded in arriving at an understanding with Hitler. National resistance is concentrated in the poorer sections of the population, the urban petty-bourgeoisie, the peasants, the workers. But it is the latter which give the most resolute character to the struggle and will know how to connect it with the struggle against French capitalism and the Petain government. [9]

An act of faith? Van enumerated the evils which were starting to hit them: food shortages, unemployment, inflation and price rises and control of the economy by the large companies. After having drafted the broad outline of a programme of transitional demands (workers control of food supply, sliding scale of working hours and wages, workers’ control of the production, elected factory committees), he continued:

The present situation will scarcely last long. Up to now Hitler’s successes have been due above all to the weakness and decline of the democracies. The real test of the Nazi system has only begun.

He predicted “the inevitable revolts” whose outcome would be determined by the existence of a revolutionary leadership and the Manifesto ends in a statement of faith in the victory of the IVth International in the new period, “that of the struggles and the convulsions of the death agony of capitalism”. [10]

The second article by Marc Loris related to Europe and its prospects. [11] The author’s youth had been marked by the German occupation of the North of France and he was aware of the people’s feeling of hatred against the foreign occupier. He noted as a prominent feature the similarity of the situation everywhere in the various occupied countries, and everywhere the decline of national fascist movements under the German occupation. He stated on the other hand that the upper bourgeoisie was most deeply involved in collaboration and that the advent in France of Admiral Darlan, who derived his influence from his fleet, a major element in the situation, had made Vichy what he called amusingly a “naval Bonapartism”.
On the prospects, he was categorical: Hitler could not unify Europe because the national feeling, which had initially helped him, had come back with a tenfold strength in the occupied countries. The European revolution which was coming would be led by the proletariat and would be characterised by the appearance of Soviets and a more or less long period of dual power. The question of the revolutionary leadership could only be settled if the candidates for this rôle recognised the rising wave of hatred against the occupier and drew the consequences by a declaration of the right to national self-determination.
Criticising the conception according to which the fight against national oppression would force the proletariat to make an alliance with the petty bourgeoisie on the basis of the latter’s demands, he vigorously emphasised that the socialist transformation of society was the only guarantee of the end of national oppression.
Noting that there was developing among both the petty bourgeoisie and even the workers in France a pro-English feeling, he dealt with the question by insisting that it was only necessary to envisage the types of struggle which were coming and to prepare for them. That meant in particular firmness against the petty-bourgeois methods of individual terrorism and sabotage. He concluded:

Throughout Europe the proletariat is now submerged in the troubled waters of chauvinism. But the socialist solution, so remote today, obscured by nationalisms of all shades, tomorrow will be placed on the order of the day at once. The lessons of yesterday, the situation today and the tasks of tomorrow must be explained patiently to the advanced workers. The cadres of the party of the revolution must be gathered together. But this preparation is neither possible nor worthwhile except by participating in all forms of mass resistance to misery and oppression, by working to organize this resistance, to co-ordinate and broaden it. It is a task demanding the greatest efforts. But they are worth it, for tomorrow they will bear fruits a hundredfold. [12]

It was in October 1941 that Marc Loris saw “the first signs of the storm in France”. The conditions in his opinion, had radically changed in the past months: Petain, whose base was weakened, was dedicated to “loyal collaboration”, and the terrorist attacks, like that directed against Laval, were, despite of their futility, an indication of crisis. He wondered whether there was a relationship between the growth of individual terrorism and the Stalinist policy of defense of the USSR by all means, admitted that he was not able to settle the question, but repeated that the coming explosion was approaching and that it was necessary to build the revolutionary party before then.

The article Europe under the Iron Heel, dated 28 January 1942 [13], was a remarkable attempt to describe and analyze resistance in Europe. It described the various armed “resistance” activities, attacks against soldiers of Wehrmacht, attacks against their buildings, sabotage of the telephone installations, the railways and the bloody response of the Nazis leaders — executions of hostages. He stressed the importance of industrial sabotage, ranging from passive resistance to poor manufacture, continual misunderstanding of orders, which caused many “accidents” to materials.
Then he studied the clandestine press in which he first of all distinguished the newspapers that he called “national-bourgeois”, which called for a union of the “men of goodwill”, but were very guarded about their intentions at “liberation”. He stressed that some avoided too much criticism of Petain and that others said openly that they blamed him, above all, for opening the road to revolution. He showed that some of them sharply criticised the Communist Party by pointing out the desertion of Thorez in 1939. He spoke about the ambiguous attitude of the CP and the clandestine Humanité to Germany until the attack of 22 June 1941 and indicated in a sentence the new line of the “National Front”. In a few words he described the attitude of the churches, all the more divided since they were rooted in society and, he pointed out, in this last case, that the mass of the faithful were hostile to the occupation. For him, the hierarchy in general was playing into the hands of the collaborators. Once more he emphasised the decomposition and accelerated decline of the “indigenous” Nazis groups totally compromised by their links with the occupier, more hated than them if that were possible. He was very cautious about the state of affairs among the occupying troops and the rumours of mutinies and executions, but on the other hand he made a solid analysis of the economic situation, the draining of resources by the occupier, the shortages and inflation, the development of black market, together with the social consequences for France of the mass of prisoners of war kept in Germany. He thought that the reports of real hunger riots in several large French cities at the end of 1941 were to be believed.
The sequel to this analysis was in the July 1942 article entitled Washington’s “New Order” [14], in which he analysed the declarations by the Secretary of State Summer Welles and in particular his comment on the “Atlantic Charter”. He wrote:

Today Hitler’s “New Order” has already shown its real face. It is something old — oppression, misery, exploitation. But the “democracies” as well have nothing else to bring to the world. American imperialism is unable to develop the wealth of the globe by making fantastic promises. Far from raising China and India to the material level of the advanced countries, it can only reduce Europe to the level of India. […] the pax americana will be, in the final count, as unstable as the pax germanica. The union of the workers will be the peace of the world. [15]

The two long articles on The National Question and The Tasks of Revolutionaries under the Nazi Boot [16] constitute in a sense the core of Jean van Heijenoort’s thoughts after the three years of war and two of occupation. It is a veiled polemic against those in the movement, who treated the national question with contempt and did not understand the fantastic revolutionary power that came from generalised hatred of national oppression under the Nazi jackboot, and he also asserted the progressive character of a number of small bourgeois groupings of resistance which he stated should not be confused with “the Gaullists”. For him, the latter used the national feeling to chain resistance to the imperialist camp. A more educational approach was needed with other groups which were turning towards socialism but remained very confused. And van Heijenoort insisted on the value and the importance of the democratic slogans during the coming period, in particular that of the Constituent Assembly, which many Trotskyist leaders saw both as a concession to opportunism and at the same time as something counterposed to soviets. The elements of the conflict which would oppose van Heijenoort and his allies, Goldman and Morrow, to Cannon and the SWP leadership were now in existence.

However it remained to deal with the political aspects of the allied landings in North Africa. Van saw a clear confirmation of his world analysis in the decision to keep the admiral Darlan [17], the heir-apparent of Petain and chief of government of “the French State” in Algiers in power. The account he gave, derived from the reports in the New York Times was very appropriate, as was his assessment:

Now, this ex-democrat turned fascist has become an ex-fascist democrat and he works to “free” France. [18]

And van Heijenoort stressed that the American generals, to explain the confidence that they had in the Admiral, invoked “non-interference” in French politics, a supreme hypocrisy, however, since one the first things they had done was to recover the weapons which had fallen into the hands of Algerian peasants.

The conclusions of Van about this episode are very optimistic, because he considered it revealing.
He wrote:

The American collaboration with Darlan must have tremendous political repercussions, not only in France but throughout all Europe. For years millions of men have known intolerable suffering under the Nazi iron heel. A great number of them imagined that their liberation will come through the Anglo-American troops. The first act of the commander of these troops after the first landings was to collaborate with a lackey of the Nazi executioners, who finds a few hours enough to pass from one camp to the other. The people who are now still suffering and struggling under their own Darlans will learn quickly and well — we can be sure of that — the political lesson that must be drawn from this ignoble event. [19]

His last comment showed that he believed that the forecast of Trotsky was now close to becoming reality:

On both sides of the stage the masks are falling off. This means we are approaching the final act, where a new figure enters the scene: the revolutionary proletariat. [20]

In fact, he would recall again on several occasions the Darlan business which he regarded as extraordinarily revealing of the war aims of the allies, or, if one preferred, of the character of the war. In Political Misadventures of the French Bourgeoisie (March 1943) [21] he reconsidered the role of the working masses in the resistance to the occupation, showing the pressure which they exerted, in France, on the so-called “Resistance” organisations and the alliance of the Gaullists and of Stalinists to keep this movement as a sacred union for war. Thus he stressed that reluctantly both because he broke army discipline and because he opposed Vichy which, for the French, embodied reaction, the monarchist Charles de Gaulle embodied a certain kind of “left”.

As for its character, he defined it in a quotation taken from a broadcast speech by de Gaulle, where he criticized the American policy of support for Darlan, on 6 December 1942:

The nation will not permit that these men, having failed in foreign war and feeling themselves condemned, should save themselves by creating conditions from which would spring civil war. [22]

His comment struck like a blow from a fist:

Thus, according to the general, the deal with Darlan is dangerous because it revives class antagonisms. Since then, several spokesmen of the Gaullist movement have underlined the fact that Washington’s policy in North Africa increases the danger of communism in France, against which the Gaullist movement is a much better guarantee than Darlan or Giraud. [23]

A few weeks later, still in Fourth International, still under the name of Marc Loris, van Heijenoort studied the conflict between Giraud, the man of the Americans and de Gaulle, who, he said, was in this matter not in the pockets of the British. [24] For him, this conflict is full of lessons, because it marked what he called “this political rebirth of the French bourgeoisie”, … “in the very special conditions of a colonial milieu”.

According to him, Giraud, the personification of the military chief, had no other program but that of Vichy whose rule in Africa he had maintained, but the general outcry which followed the agreement with Darlan obliged him “to take a democratic mask” and he had to throw out some ballast by dismissing the too well-known Vichyites: which did not prevent him from stressing that he had “no wish to revive the follies that led to the catastrophe in 1940.”, an allusion, in the purest Vichyite style, to the strike movement of June 1936 and the working-class upsurge.
De Gaulle, at the beginning represented a “purely national-military” opposition, but had covered himself since then with a programme of “democracy” and “restoration of republican legality” to preserve contact with and to gain, if possible, control of the Resistance in the interior. The fact that he succeeded in getting foothold in Algiers, against the will of the American government, illustrated the instability of the pax americana. In July 1943, van Heijenoort was astonished that the French upper bourgeoisie did not yet seem to have chosen “the most intransigent bourgeois” nationalism” this Gaullism which, in North Africa, succeeded in bringing together officers of high rank, youth, the students and the “left” petty bourgeois, and which among the working class enjoyed the support of the CP.
His conclusion is a remark of long term significance with which a historian of colonial wars could not fail to be struck.. He stressed how difficult it was for a ruling class to reconstruct its national unity after a military defeat, especially if it had broken the officer corps, like that of 1940 which led to the demand for an armistice and de Gaulle’s broadcast of 18 June, indications of a rupture which would last a long time.
The last contribution of van Heijenoort on the European question in the columns of Fourth International is an article entitled Whither France?, signed Daniel Logan, and dated 17 September 1944. [25]
He started with the observation that a real insurrection had just occurred in France against the German occupation. The press reports of American correspondents enabled him to show that this insurrection was in the majority of cases preceded by strikes in the factories and forced on by the pressure of the masses. He stressed that this insurrection, “whose immediate objective was to destroy the German yoke”, had thus a “popular” and “unanimous” nature which made it resemble the revolutions of the 19th century.
Power was in the hands of insurgents and, even more important than the presence of armed civilians in the streets, was the fact that the factories passed into the hands of the workers as was shown in an article by David Anderson in the New York Times of 7 September. How would the question of property be dealt with? He thought that it could only be by a workers’ government:

The first necessary conditions to go along this road are already here: a firm will among the workers not to go back to the past, a deep contempt for the ruling classes, a great confidence in their forces. That’s what the mere existence of the workers’ committees means. They will gradually fully understand the implications of their position and draw the revolutionary conclusions. The obstacles will not be lacking, the most dangerous of them being the treacherous policy of the Stalinist Party. But the French workers are on the march. [26]

The article by the American journalist led van Heijenoort to a certain number of remarks on points which he thought of greatest importance: the Parisian FFI [French Forces of the Interior] were in fact, according to him, the armed working class, the workers militia in the factories. He stressed their political heterogeneity while indicating the great weight of the CP. He wrote:

On the whole, a leftist spirit must dominate, — a great thirst for freedom, a deep distrust for authority, a complete contempt for the old ruling classes, with their industrialists and bankers compromised by collaboration, a strong desire for something new. [27]

He explained De Gaulle thus:

De Gaulle’s program is, nationally and internationally, the restoration of bourgeois France. Nationally, his first aim is the re-establishment of “law and order.” The present objective of De Gaulle is to stifle the uprising against the Nazis and Vichy in the noose of “republican legality”, — which, of course, would not prevent the general from using in the future, if need be, the Bonapartist sabre. [28]

For the rest, he could make only hollow promises, and announce elections eventually while immediately nominating prefects who came into conflict with against the liberation committees.

For the first time since he had been writing for the American journal, van Heijenoort finally tackled the question of Stalinist influence. The bad state of relations between Gaullists and Stalinists, at the time when he wrote, he explained by the removal of the French Communists from the government and the will of the latter to channel the present discontent against the “men of Algiers”. He did not underestimate them, and wrote:

The Stalinist influence among the Parisian workers is very great … The party has strong positions in the FFI. In fact, the Stalinist Party is the strongest organised political force in France. It has avoided outright collaboration with De Gaulle and is, at the present time, in a kind of opposition, which cannot fail to increase its influence. [29]

The conflict on the horizon was that of the arming of the people:

After the first “popular”, “unanimous” stage of an uprising is over, a problem inevitably rises up: what to do with the arms that brought victory? Today in France hundreds of thousands (maybe over a million) have arms in their hands. The De Gaulle government cannot tolerate such a situation for long, so fraught with dangers for the bourgeois “law and order.” It can do, and is probably attempting to do, two things: either outright disarming the FFI groups or incorporating them into the regular French army. In the second case the question of the discipline would immediately rise up. The FFI elected or chose their own leaders. In the regular army they have to obey officers imposed upon them from above.

[…] The problem of disarming the population will occupy a large part of the political arena in the coming period.

[…] De Gaulle has obviously not the force at the present time to imitate Thiers. His first task is the regrouping of the bourgeoisie. He will eliminate its most discredited and hated representatives, soothe its divisions, try to give it back its internal strength and cohesion and an honest face. He needs time. [30]

This time, van Heijenoort did not conclude with the need for “the revolutionary party” and for the victory of the revolution.

He concluded:

Victory will not be easy. But the French workers have made a good start: coming out of the political primitivism of German oppression, they have immediately started to storm capitalist society. We are entitled to place our highest hopes in them. [31]

In the meantime, Jean van Heijenoort had devoted an article to the Italian situation: Problems of the Italian Revolution dated 9 July 1944, which did not appear in Fourth International like the preceding ones, but in the Quatrième Internationale of the European secretariat in January–February 1945 [32]. It was already clear that he had differences with the SWP leadership and even with the European secretariat. [33]

The author started by recalling that Italian Fascism, for a long time the “herald of the reaction” appeared “one of the weakest links” of capitalism. With the fall of the Mussolini regime, “like a rotten apple” Italy has entered a period “of revolutionary instability”:

The Italian revolution is still in its infancy, but it will grow, will fight, will educate itself and will win. Nobody has any more illusions in the stability of the present regime. [34]

The primary question in his eyes was that of monarchy: whether it was that of the king or the crown prince recently proclaimed the lieutenant-general of the kingdom with the blessing of Togliatti’s CPI, the monarchy remained the centre of reaction, as in the time of Mussolini, which it had borne in its arms for so long. Van Heijenoort wrote:

To all the monarchists, to the ambulating corpses of liberalism and to the stalino-royalists, the revolutionary party must answer by the slogan: Immediate proclamation of the Republic, arrest of the king, the crown prince and the royal family, immediate confiscation of all their goods for the benefit of the people! [35]

He commented:

The party that during present weeks would untiringly diffuse these slogans among the large masses would infallibly draw their attention and thus prepare their ears to receive more advanced slogans. At a further stage it would enjoy the authority of having foreseen the march of the development and of having been with the masses in their most elementary struggles. [36]

To the primary slogan of the “republic”, he added that of the “constituent assembly” together with elections of officials by the people as the only correct way of “purging”, the rights of assembly, freedom of press, meeting, of association, the separation of the Church and the State and the confiscation of Church property.

Breaking with a position which had been his at the beginning of the war, he proposed, on the question of the Soviets, to push the idea in a more “Italian” form. Continuing what was apparently an internal polemic within the SWP, he wrote: “The opposition between the national assembly and the Soviets is at present completely artificial. It becomes a reality only at a higher level of struggle — in fact with its conclusion. If Soviets make their appearance in Italy in the immediate future, it will be by mobilizing the masses on the basis of democratic watchwords [...] the formula should not be “Constituent assembly or Soviets” but to “create Soviets and develop their political consciousness”. [37]
His work on the problems of the Italian revolution ended in a long warning against “the danger of ultra-leftism” and a warning which showed where the core of the discussion was:

History puts all the teachings of Bolshevism on the order of the day more imperatively than ever. And one of these lessons is Bolshevism’s contempt for mere enlightening propaganda about the virtues of Socialism, its ability to feel the aspirations of the masses, to seize upon the progressive side of these aspirations and on that point to drive a wedge that would detach the masses from their conservative parties and leaders. Can this lesson be forgotten in the present time? [38]

So it is no surprise that the last article signed Daniel Logan to appear on this general area in 1945 was a piece dated 1 October 1944 entitled On The European Situation And Our Tasks, a closely argued critique of the SWP congress resolution from November 1944, presented by the editorial board as a discussion article from a member of the minority.

It was a timely intervention. It allowed the author at least to emphasise some inconsistencies and show that the line which underlay them was not particularly clear. Moreover he attacked with devastating irony the assertion of the SWP leadership according to which the coalition government of Ivanoe Bonomi in particular, including Socialist and Communist ministers, would only be a cover for the “open military dictatorship” of the Anglo-American occupation.
He also stressed the confusion which prevailed in the majority resolution on the possibility of seeing the re-appearance in Europe of bourgeois democratic regimes, the only real alternative after the war being, according to it, either the dictatorship of the proletariat or the most brutal police or military dictatorships.
Pointing out that the majority resolution spoke neither about the slogan of “republic”, nor of that of “constituent assembly”, limiting itself to “the election of officials” and the “freedom of the press” he suggested the launching of the slogan of a “Togliatti-Nenni Government” (PC-PS).
He explained:

Thousands, tens of thousands can learn through direct propaganda [...] But millions, tens of millions have to come to Socialism through their own experience. They have to discard, one after the other, regimes about which they have had illusions. They have to discard false leaders in whom they have put their confidence. The task of the revolutionary party is to speed up and facilitate that process as much as possible, but it cannot jump over it. This is precisely what programs of democratic or transitional demands are designed for. [39]

The amendments presented by Van at the national congress were rejected by 51 votes to 5. A few weeks later, he declared himself in favour of transferring the powers of the IS [International Secretariat] in New York to the ES [European Secretariat] in Paris, putting an end to this situation. His struggle in the SWP minority with Goldman and Morrow belongs to another chapter of the history of IV International.

The best analyst of the SWP, Alan Wald, in the few allusions which he makes to Goldman, Morrow and van Heijenoort, is very severe towards them, recognising however that they were largely correct when they opened the discussion and when they raised the problems of methods, but criticised them for having deviated seriously and having become hostile, adopting methods that they themselves had condemned. [40]
Such as it was, with its breaks, imperceptible turns, interruptions, and with the gaps in our knowledge, the route of Jean van Heijenoort between 1940 and 1944 is enthralling. In conclusion one finds there very little incantation and acts of faith, of hollow formulae and set language, but on the other hand a permanent attempt to analyse the facts under development as Trotsky would have done. In this respect, this reflection is rather impressive, opening horizons of which professional historians and political commentators seem to have been unaware.
His thought seems to have become more concrete as the formulae and references, which were not justified by reality but which at first he considered essential to convince people of his orthodoxy, disappear. From this point of view, it seems that van Heijenoort evolved while moving away from and even opposing Cannon, whose more rigorous formulations were often scarcely compatible with a complex reality.
There remained a terrible gap. The ritualistic references of the early years were followed at the end of this period by the recognition, which was not completely disillusioned, that the “revolutionary party” did not exist; the revolutionary crisis had not waited for it, and without it, it was fated to go into decline.
Like all the Trotskyists of his generation, wasn’t Van convinced that, without such a party, the revolution had not least chance of being successful?
Was this, in the last analysis, the cause of a certain despair observable both in his writings and in later remarks made in confidence? The last political text of van Heijenoort, his farewell to Marxism, placed the responsibility for the “bankruptcy” of the revolutionary cause on the working class which had failed to play the role of a revolutionary class, and thus forced the revolutionaries who had expected too much to recognise that their beliefs had been illusions and their analyses abstract constructions. [41]
Under these conditions, indeed, one cannot long continue an effort in the political field, if one has a feeling, which undoubtedly van Heijenoort had, that he could “be useful” in and develop his enthusiasm in another area. But I maintain the conviction that the isolated French Trotskyist in New York who tried to disentangle and get a grasp of the chain which led from national oppression to proletarian revolution, did not waste his time and that his effort to understand the course of the war will one day, in one way or another, help to understand and to change the world.

---

Notes

1. Pierre Broué, Van, le Militant, l’Ami, l’Homme, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 26, June 1986, pp. 7–14.

2. Marc Loris, La Question nationale en Europe, Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no. 23, September 1985, pp. 88–110. For the originals in English see all these articles on the web at http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

3. He lived by “moonlighting” and doing odd jobs for comrades.

4. The American Army called up for military service a man who went under several pseudonyms, and who eventually took a female pseudonym to make his life easier.

5. Trotsky’s correspondence expresses the fear that his old colleagues, Jan Frankel, and Van, would be regarded as his “spies”. In their correspondence from New York, both hid neither their difficulties nor their severe judgements on the American leadership.

6. We have used here one unsigned article, twelve signed Marc Loris and two signed Daniel Logan; fourteen published in Fourth International and one in Quatrième Internationale. The Manifesto appeared in Fourth International, I, no. 7, December 1940, pp. 179–182, under the title France under Hitler and Petain. Manifesto of the Fourth International. For the original in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

7. Ibid., p. 180.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 182.

11. Marc Loris, Perspectives for Europe, Fourth International, II, no. 6, July 1941, pp, 179–182.

12. Ibid., p182. For the original in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

13. Marc Loris, Europe under the Iron Heel, ibid., January 1942, pp. 52–57. For the original in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

14. Marc Loris, The Washington “New Order”, ibid., III, no. 7, pp. 211–214. For the original in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

15. Ibid., p. 215.

16. Marc Loris, The National Question in Europe, ibid., III, no. 9, pp. 264–268 & Revolutionary Tasks under the Nazi Boot, ibid., no. 11, pp. 333–338, both published in French in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, LT no. 23, cf. N.2. For the originals in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

17. Marc Loris, North Africa, A Lesson in Democracy, ibid., III, no. 11, pp. 359–362. For the original in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

18. Ibid., p. 361.

19. Ibid., p. 362.

20. Ibid.

21. Marc Loris, The Political Misadventures of French Bourgeoisie, ibid., IV, no. 3, pp. 76–79. For the original in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

22. Ibid., p. 78.

23. Ibid.

24. Marc Loris, The Giraud-de Gaulle Dispute, ibid., IV, no.7, pp199-202. For the original in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

25. Daniel Logan, Whither France?, V, no. 9, pp. 267–270. For the original in English see http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/heijen/index.htm.

26. Ibid., p. 268.

27. Ibid., p. 269.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 270.

31. Ibid.

32. Marc Loris, Problèmes de la Révolution italienne in Quatrième International, janvier–fevrier 1945, no. 14/15, pp. 19–22.

33. An introductory note to Loris’s article expressed reservations because of the date at which it was written, six months earlier. It should be remembered that the Loris article can be found in almost its entirety in that of Logan cited below.

34. Quatrième International, no. 14/15, p. 19.

35. Ibid., p. 20.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., p. 21.

38. Ibid., p. 22.

39. Ibid., p. 31.

40. Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals, NY 1987, pp. 254–256.

41. Jean Vannier (JvH), A Century’s Balance Sheet, Partisan Review, March 1948, pp. 288–296.

 

 

Free the NATO 3 Now!-Free All The Class-War Prisoners! Workers Vanguard No. 1047	30 May 2014

Chicago-Free the NATO 3 Now!

 

On April 25, Cook County judge Thaddeus Wilson sentenced Jared Chase, Brent Betterly and Brian Church to prison for eight, six and five years respectively. The three fell prey to a sting operation carried out in the name of the bipartisan “war on terror” after traveling to Chicago to join protests against a May 2012 gathering of NATO imperialist war criminals. Across the country, “anti-terror” witchhunts have increasingly become a club wielded by the Feds and local cops in their efforts to quash leftist political protest. All opponents of capitalist inequality and the depredations of U.S. imperialism as well as fighters for black and immigrant rights have an interest in demanding freedom for the NATO 3.

 

The young activists had been convicted on February 7 on two frame-up felony counts of possessing Molotov cocktails and two misdemeanor “mob action” charges in what was a chemically pure example of police entrapment. Undercover agents Nadia Chikko and Mehmet Uygun infiltrated the Occupy group with whom the defendants, who had driven up from Florida, were bunking. The agents provocateurs hatched a plan, pushed it forward and assembled some Molotov cocktails, goading and dragging along Betterly, Church and Chase at every step. Despite two weeks of intense surveillance, not a single piece of evidence was produced linking the NATO 3 to the assembly of the Molotov cocktails, as charged in the indictment.

 

In the lead-up to the NATO summit, Democratic mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy whipped up an atmosphere of hysteria and unleashed a massive display of police power to intimidate protesters (see “Defend Anti-NATO Protesters!” WV No. 1003, 25 May 2012). The “Welcome Wagon” offered by Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff, was captured in a YouTube video, posted by the NATO 3 less than a week prior to their arrest, that shows squad cars surrounding their vehicle. Invoking the police riot against protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, one cop taunts them, “What did they say back in ’68?” Another cop replies: “Billy club to the fucking skull.”

 

The NATO 3 are the first to ever be charged with violating Illinois anti-terror statutes, which were enacted after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But, in a partial setback to the state, the jury did not buy the “conspiracy to commit terrorism” charges. Calling the proceedings a “terrorist show trial,” the NATO 3’s defense team aptly noted that the state’s definition of terrorism was so vague and broad that it could include “labor strikes, peaceful occupations and sit-ins, political protests and boycotts.” And “conspiracy” is what the government uses to nail those it wants to silence but cannot charge with demonstrable criminal acts. Organizing against slavery was “conspiratorial,” and labor unions used to be considered illegal conspiracies in this country.

 

The conviction and draconian sentences for these activists is a frontal attack on the right of protest. The Partisan Defense Committee has contributed to their defense and urges WV readers to do likewise. Donations can be made at www.wepay.com/donations/freethenato3.

***In The Time Before The Rock ‘n’ Roll Jailbreak –They Shoot CD Players (Or iPODs) Don’t They

 

Some people ask, although I am not one of them, if there was music before 1950s rock ‘n’ roll. Usually such people are young, or were before what is now called the classic age of rock and roll became the classic age and so now they, the young, ask was there music before hip-hop nation beat down the doors, or if any other genre strikes their interest like techno-rock that might form the basis for their question. But rock, rock as I know it, I, Frank Jackman, who lived for the latest 45 RPM record to hit the stores along with my corner boys was the basis for the question back then. Back in the 1950s when the world was young and America, young America, still had that capacity to wonder before the lamp went out, wonder just like Scott Fitzgerald pointed out about those who found places like New York City, the Mecca for a lot of things, including the production of those 45 RPM records I mentioned, people like those Dutch sailors with the Van names must have felt when they saw that “fresh green breast of the new world.” And rightly so since what we heard before, heard to perdition was some vanilla stuff that our parents liked but I will get to that later. In other words time, new millennium time, has left classic rock for the aficionados or for, well, old fogies, you know the AARP-worthy denizens whose demographics form the basis for rock musical compilations and “oldies but goodies” revivals with now ancient heartthrobs from back in the day who have lost a step or three coming out on some massive stage and lip-synch, yes, lip-synch their greatest hits (or hit in the case of those important musical one-hit johnnie and janies). But there, believe it or not, but take my word from me like old Rabbit Brown used to say his song James Alley Blues, were other types of music, music that helped formed rock and roll that I found out about later after I had my fill of 45 RPM records and corner boys and wanted to dig into the history of the American songbook, see what drove earlier generations of the young to seek their own jailbreak out.      

So of course there was music before rock, I had better say classic rock so nobody gets confused and I have taken some pains to establish the roots of rock back to Mississippi country blues around the turn of the century, the 20^th century, when all those freed slaves who thought they were economically free and not just manacle-free wound up working for Mister in his twenty-eight thousand acres of the best bottomland in Mississippi for a pittance. Kept in line, and here is where the bitch of the thing is by a guy, well, not really a guy but a way of life named after a guy maybe, one Mister James Crow, and so those freed blacks who slaved on Mister’s land had to blow off steam and that was the basic of the blues, and I don’t mean blues like when a guy has a good girl who done him wrong on his mind. Hell that problem was easy to solve. I mean when Mister, or his Captain, pushed the pace all week (half a day Saturday included) and every worthy buck and every good-looking gal, big thighed or not, hit Jimmie Jack’s juke joint to listen to some itinerant brother with a broken down guitar wail away about that damn Captain, his, the singer’s, unfaithful women and about how “the devil’s gonna get him” for nickels and dimes in the pot (and some of Jimmie Jack homemade) and got the crowd swaying and clapping their hands to the beat on See See Rider or Mississippi Highwater Rising. Yeah, that’s the start. Okay.

Too far back for you? Okay let’s travel up the river, the Big Muddy, maybe stop off at Memphis for a drink, and to nurse the act, before hitting the bitch city, Chicago, hog butcher, steel-maker and every other kind of tool and appliance-maker to the new industrial world just ask Carl Sandburg. But also maker by proxy of the urban blues, those old hokey plantation Son House/Charley Patton/ Blind Blake (and a million other guys with Blind in front of their names) juke joint Saturday night full of homemade blues turned electric with the city and turned guys like plain boy Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf (you would laugh at their real names although you would not do that in their presence, especially the Wolf because he would cut you bad, real bad) into the kings of  Maxwell Street and all the streets around with back-up and all putting just the right twist on Look Yonder Wall, Rocket 88, Hoochie Goochie Man and Little Red Rooster (with kudos to Willie Dixon too). So, yeah, electric blues as they traveled north to the heartland industrial cities

Jazz too maybe a little Duke and Benny swing as it got be-bopped and for the beat, for the drum action, for the “it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing” that took over after a while. But Dizzy, Charlie Thelonius too with that cool, detachment mood that spoke to the beat down, the beaten down, the big blast beaten fellahin world. Certainly throw in rhythm and blues, north and south, throw in big time one Mister Big Joe Turner toot-tooting his sweet mama to Shake, Rattle and Roll that had all those alienated, angst-ridden white guys (whether they knew it or not ) lined up to cover the damn thing. Yeah guys like Elvis (when he was hunger), Bill Haley when he needed to kick his act up a notch, and Jerry Lee when he needed to put fire into that piano.

Then came alone a strange mix and match, rockabilly as it came out of the white small town South, Tupelo, Biloxi, Lake Charles, Lafayette, Jesus, the smaller the town it seemed the more the guys wanted to breakout, wanted to push the envelope of the music, wanted to get away from that “from hunger” look, wanted that big bad Caddy they saw in the magazines. Came out with those same boys lining up to sing Joe Turner, hungry Elvis, Carl, Johnny, Jerry Lee, to sing black along with that good old boy Saturday night moonshine tucked in the back seat of that bad ass Chevy looking, looking for danger, and looking for women to sing to who were looking for danger. Country boys, yeah, but not hokey George Jones country boys these guys wanted to breakout of  Smiley’s Tavern over on Highway One, wanted girls to dance on the tables, wanted guys to get up and dance with those Rubys and red-headed girls. Yeah, they mixed it and matched like big time walking daddies (and I hear had fun doing it, hell, it beat eking out a living clerking at Mister Smith’ feed store.  

What rock and roll owed little to, or at least I hope that it owes little to, is that Tin Pan Alley/ Broadway show tune axis part of the American songbook. You know Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Oklahoma, Singing in the Rain, Over The Rainbow stuff. That part of the songbook seems to me to be a different trend away from that jailbreak song that drove us wild and one that was reflected in a CD compilation review I did one time (for the young, maybe the very young, CDs were discs loaded with a bunch of songs, some you liked, maybe three, and the  rest you had to buy as well because you desperately wanted those three not like today when you just hopped on some site to grab something and download it, presto), The 1950s: 16 Most Requested Songs, which really was about the 16 most requested song before the rock jailbreak of the mid-1950s. Yeah, not exactly stuff your parents liked but stuff that maybe was good if you a “hot” date that did not turn out well and you listened to it endlessly on your defeated way home. Yeah, let’s be clear about that, that stuff your older brother and sisters already halfway to that place where your parents lived swooned over, not you.

I have along the way, in championing classic rock as the key musical form that drove the tastes of my generation, the generation of ’68, contrasted that guitar-driven, drum/bass line driven sound to that of my parents’ generation, the ones who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought World War II, and listened to swing, jitter-buggery things and swooned (they really did check YouTube if you want to take my word from me) over big bands, brass and wind swings bands, Frank Sinatra, the Andrews Sisters and The Mills Brothers, among others. In other words the music that, we of the generation of ’68, heard as background music around the house as we were growing up. Buddha Swings, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca-Cola, Paper Dolls, Tangerine, and the like. Stuff that today sounds pretty good, if still not quite something that “speaks” to me. That is not the music that got us moving to break out and seek a newer world, to try to scratch out an existence in a world that we had not say in creating and dream, dream do you hear me, about turning the world upside down and keeping it that way for once. I remember writing in that review that the music in that compilation drove me up a wall and I was ready to shoot my CD player, the instrument that I heard it on, once I heard it (younger reader just put shoot your iPOD and we will be on the same page.

No, this was the music that reflected, okay, let’s join the cultural critics’ chorus here, the attempted vanilla-zation (if such a word exists) of the Cold War Eisenhower (“I Like Ike”) period when people were just trying to figure out whether the Earth would survive from one day to the next. Not a time to be rocking the boat, for sure. Once things stabilized a bit though then the mad geniuses of rock could hold sway, and while parents and authorities crabbed to high heaven about it, they found out that you could let that rock breakout occur and not have everything wind up going to hell in a hand basket. Mostly. But this music, these 16 most requested songs were what we were stuck with before then. Sure, I listened to them then like everyone else, everyone connected to a radio, but this stuff, little as I knew then, did not “speak” to me. And unlike some of that 1940s stuff still does not “speak” to me.

Oh, you want proof. Here is one example. On this compilation Harbor Lights is done by Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra. This was cause one for wanting to get a pistol out and start aiming. Not for the song but for the presentation. Why? Well, early in his career Elvis, when he was young and hungry while he was doing his thing for Sam Phillips’ Memphis Sun Records operation, covered this song. There are a myriad Elvis recordings during the Sun period, including compilations with outtakes and alternative recordings of this song. The worst, the absolute worst of these covers by Elvis has more life, more jump, dare I say it, more sex than the Kaye recording could ever have. NO young women would get all wet, would get all sweaty and ready to try their underwear at the drop of a hat for Sammy’s version. Case closed. And the compilation only got worse from there with incipient things like Frankie Lane’s I Believe, Johnny Mathis’ It’s Not For Me To Say, and Marty Robbins’ (who did some better stuff later) on A White Sports Coat (And A Pink Carnation). And you wonder why I ask whether they shoot CD players. Enough said.

*******

Harbor Lights Lyrics
(words & music by H. Williams - J. Kennedy)

I saw the harbor lights

They only told me we were parting

Those same old harbor lights

That once brought you to me.

I watched the harbor lights

How could I help it?

Tears were starting.

Good-bye to golden nights

Beside the silvery seas.

I long to hold you dear,

And kiss you just once more.

But you were on the ship,

And I was on the shore.

Now I know lonely nights

For all the while my heart keeps praying

That someday harbor lights

Will bring you back to me.

***On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Release Of The Dixie Cups’ Chapel Of Love  

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Some songs in any generation act as markers for that generation. For the generation of ’68, my generation (and Bill Clinton’s but I will make that connection more fully in a minute), one of those songs was the Dixie Cups’ Chapel of Love which was released fifty years ago this week. Of course that was a time in our generation when the world was young and we were full of wonder, enough wonder to echo Scott Fitzgerald’s words about what those long ago old Dutch sailors must have felt when they eyed Long Island and caught a glimpse of that “fresh green breast of the new world” and all its possibilities. A time before the flame burned out in America and we could no longer claim the rights of innocence.  And we were innocent then about lots of things, including the subject of the song, marriage to that special one that had caught your eye and whom you could not live without unless you were hitched. A lot of us, including this, writer were caught up in the trail leading to marriage, leading to the eternity of togetherness almost automatically without thinking. Like a lot of things though not every search for the newer world ended happily. But don’t blame the Dixie Cups for that. Okay.

 

Of course Chapel of Love was one of those iconic songs that even fifty years later one can remember and sing (well at least lip-synch) without a problem, or without embarrassment. Even Bill Clinton. On an interview show today on public radio the guests today included the Dixie Cups reminiscing about the song, how it was produced, the trials and tribulations of the music road as result of their success, and the lasting fame they have received from that one big, big hit. One of the singers, I forget which one, mentioned that at a concert in New York City they were introduced to Bill Clinton who knew exactly who they were and moreover broke out into the song at the mere mention of their names. Pretty good. Guess what, if anybody asked me I too could break out and sing the song without missing a beat. Thanks, sisters.              

 For those who don't remember though here you are:

 

Chapel of Love  

 

Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel of love

Spring is here, the sky is blue, whoa oh oh
Birds all sing as if they knew
Today's the day we'll say, "I do"
 And we'll never be lonely anymore because we're

 

Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel of love

 

Bells will ring, the sun will shine, whoa oh oh
I'll be his and he'll be mine
We'll love until the end of time
And we'll never be lonely anymore because we're

 

Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel and we're gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and we're gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel of love

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Goin' to the chapel of love
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Goin' to the chapel of love

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‘Chapel Of Love’ Song Turns 50

 

Members of the singing group The Dixie Cups, from left, Rosa Hawkins, Barbara Hawkins and Athelgra Gabriel, pose for a photo during the reception for the 13th Annual Pioneer Awards presented by the Rhythm & Blues Foundation Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003 in New York. (Frank Franklin II/AP)

Fifty years ago, three young women from New Orleans hit it big with the release of their single “Chapel of Love.” The Dixie Cups song was an instant chart-topping hit on the pop and R&B charts, displacing the reigning champs of the Billboards, The Beatles, and reclaiming the charts for American musicians in the midst of the British Invasion.
Since 1964, the song has become a part of American culture, providing the soundtrack for countless weddings and used in movies like “The Big Easy” and “Father of the Bride,” and on the TV show “Glee.”

It surpassed everybody on the chart, and it knocked the Beatles out of first place.

– Rosa Hawkins

The group was comprised of two sisters, Rosa Hawkins and Barbara Hawkins, along with their cousin Joan Marie Johnson.
Today The Dixie Cups are still performing, but not with the original line-up. The newest Dixie Cup is Athelgra Neville, who the sisters refer to as “our sister from our extended family.”
All three ladies joined Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson to talk about “going to the chapel.” The Hawkins sisters reminisced about the unlikely way they got their big break — a high school talent show, in which the group did not even place.
“There was a talent scout in the audience, and he didn’t know how to get in touch with us,” Barbara said. “We used to babysit for Larry McKinley, who was the disc jockey in New Orleans, and we were at his home, and his wife’s cousin won second place. Her name was Barbara. So she asked me to go with her to the talent scout, and we ended up going to his home. Well, when we walked in, he kept looking at me. So then he said, ‘Are you one of the ladies who was in the green dresses at the talent show,’ and I said yes. So he went and picked up the program and showed me that he had circled our names. He said, ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you guys. You guys were wonderful.’ He said, ‘I want to talk to you about recording,’ and we sang for him, and he just went crazy.”

The Dixie Cups pose for a photo with former U.S. President Bill Clinton in September 2005. (Courtesy of the Dixie Cups)

The rest, as they say, was history, and once the group signed to a label, it took next to no time for “Chapel of Love” to climb the charts.
“When it was released, it went zoom,” Barbara said. “Joe [Jones] had told us that, ‘Your chance of making a number-one record is a 150 million to one.”
“The Beatles were out, and they had, at that time, their time was ‘Love Me Do,’” Rosa added. “But ‘Chapel of Love,’ it was released, it surpassed everybody on the chart, and it knocked the Beatles out of first place and kept first place for three weeks.”
To this day, the song remains a classic and is often used in movie soundtracks. According to Neville, the theme is timeless.
“Everybody wants to get married,” she said. “Every woman wants to go to the chapel. So, you know, I think that’s what did it.”

Guests

• Barbara Ann Hawkins, original member of The Dixie Cups.
• Rosa Lee Hawkins, original member of The Dixie Cups.
• Athelgra Neville, newest member of The Dixie Cups.

 

 

 

 

On The 25th Anniversary Of The Tiananmen Square Massacre

China: Bureaucratic Cancer Gnaws at Workers State-Workers Must Sweep Away CCP Tops, Princelings-Why China Is Not Capitalist Workers Vanguard No. 1047	30 May 2014

China: Bureaucratic Cancer Gnaws at Workers State-Workers Must Sweep Away CCP Tops, Princelings-Why China Is Not Capitalist

 

Last November, Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Political Bureau, was placed under house arrest in a corruption investigation. As head of China’s domestic security apparatus before his retirement, Zhou had overseen a government department with a massive budget. After assets worth at least $14.5 billion were confiscated from Zhou’s family members and associates, the New Yorker (2 April) observed: “Chinese civil servants and their associates seem to have accrued a nest egg that is somewhat larger than the gross national product of Albania.”

On March 31, Lieutenant General Gu Junshan, former deputy chief of the General Logistics Department of the People’s Liberation Army, was charged with bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power. Gu has been accused of using his control over procurement of housing, infrastructure and supply contracts for China’s 2.3 million-strong armed forces to amass a fortune for himself and his family, including real estate holdings, art work and luxury items like a solid gold statue of Chairman Mao, founding leader of the People’s Republic of China.

On April 19, Song Lin, chairman of China Resources, was sacked over accusations that he misused $1.6 billion in funds, took bribes and laundered money through his mistress, a senior investment banker at the Hong Kong office of the Swiss bank UBS. China Resources is one of China’s largest state-owned enterprises with more than $120 billion in assets.

These are just a few choice examples of the massive corruption at the top of the workers state established with the 1949 Chinese Revolution. As top CCP bureaucrats continue to enrich themselves, many of their offspring have parlayed their privileged social position into places among the entrepreneurial elite. In a 2012 investigation into the descendants of top CCP officials, Bloomberg News traced the fortunes of 103 heirs of the “Eight Immortals” of the CCP who rose to political power in the period following Mao’s death in 1976. Among these “princelings” were 43 who had transformed themselves into capitalists in the space created by the regime’s “market reforms,” gaining private ownership of factories, investment firms and real estate ventures. Some launched joint ventures with foreign companies; others took executive posts in foreign investment banks.

Bloomberg noted that “the lifestyle of some members of the third generation tracks that of the global affluent class—people who were their schoolmates in Swiss, British and U.S. boarding schools” (“Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility,” 26 December 2012). Having rubbed shoulders at elite prep schools and universities with the scions of the American and European capitalist rulers, the princelings were positioned to serve as intermediaries for world imperialism in China. This was not lost on JPMorgan Chase and other top American investment banks, which got some bad press at home for hiring the relatives of well-connected Chinese officials as a means to open doors for their investments in mainland China.

The overthrow of capitalist rule in 1949 laid the basis for a planned, collectivized economy that led to enormous social gains for the worker and peasant masses. But that revolution, carried out by a peasant guerrilla army, was deformed from its inception by the rule of the CCP bureaucracy, which based itself on the model of the Soviet Union under Stalin. More than six decades later, the bureaucratic cancer is increasingly gnawing away at the fabric of the workers state, fostering a domestic base for counterrevolution and undermining the defense of China against the U.S., Japan and other imperialist powers.

Defend China! For Workers Political Revolution!

The development on the Chinese mainland of a class of bourgeois entrepreneurs and a well-heeled urban petty bourgeoisie, along with the ever-present corruption in the CCP officialdom, are taken by most leftists as proof that the country has reverted to capitalism. Voicing a question that our comrades frequently hear, one reader of WV wrote us last year asking: “You at the Spartacist League hold China as a deformed workers’ state and regard it as not capitalist. Explain to me why China, a ‘socialist state’, has such a high Gini index, higher than dozens of capitalist countries?” Commonly used by bourgeois economists, the Gini index measures the extent of inequality in income or consumption expenditure in particular countries.

China is not a capitalist society. There is, indeed, a nascent capitalist class, tied to the imperialists by economic interest and to many CCP leaders by blood. But while this layer poses a grave potential danger of capitalist restoration, it does not hold state power. China remains a bureaucratically deformed workers state akin to the former Soviet degenerated workers state and to Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and Laos today. Each of these societies was or is based on collectivized property forms.

The Stalinist bureaucracy is not a class—i.e., a social stratum with its own unique relation to the means of production—but a parasitic caste occupying an unstable position atop the workers state. In China, many CCP officials take advantage of their administrative positions, skimming funds and receiving gifts for favors and acting as middlemen for the imperialists. Yet the bureaucracy is at times compelled to defend the workers state in its own way, whether out of concern to maintain its own privileges or to ward off working-class revolt.

The state controls foreign trade and regulates capital markets and currency, with credit determined primarily according to quotas, not by the market. The core of the economy remains collectivized, with state-owned enterprises controlling 90 percent of assets in oil, electricity, communications and other key sectors. There is a CCP cell with the power to veto decisions in every private company, including foreign-owned operations. While the government has opened the door wide to capitalist investment and market forces, it maintains strict controls over the capitalist class, which is prevented from organizing political parties and is subject to strict censorship. This, of course, also applies to the working class: the CCP would see its legitimacy challenged by the development of any workers movement outside its control.

Despite bureaucratic deformation, the Chinese workers state testifies to the superiority of a collectivized economy over capitalist production for profit. The 1949 Revolution in short order led to huge gains for workers, peasants, women and all the downtrodden. Since then, China has gone from a backward, peasant country to a majority-urban one capable of landing a lunar rover. Notwithstanding the yawning gap between rich bureaucrats and princelings on the one hand and the working class and peasants on the other, more than 600 million people were lifted out of poverty in the last three decades. The population on average now eats six times more meat than in 1976, and 100 million people have exchanged bicycles for automobiles. Having done away with guaranteed medical care in implementing “market reforms,” the regime has spent the equivalent of $180 billion on improving health care since 2009. Now 99 percent of the rural population, including migrant workers, have access to basic health insurance.

Compare these gains to the unspeakable misery and despair that define life for the hundreds of millions of urban and rural poor in India: This is the short answer to those ostensible socialists who portray China as capitalist or irrevocably on that road. It is also a starkly clear argument for our Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of China and the other deformed workers states against imperialism and domestic counterrevolution.

In the past quarter alone, as the capitalist world remained mired in stagnation, the Chinese economy expanded by 7.4 percent, on top of many years of remarkable development. However, China’s explosive economic growth, impressive as it is, is not a harbinger of steady progress toward socialism—a society of material abundance based on the highest level of technology and resources. The all-round modernization and development of China, including its rural hinterland, require the aid of proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, which will set the stage for a globally integrated and planned socialist economy. The CCP bureaucracy, whose program is based on the nationalist Stalinist dogma of building “socialism in one country,” has always opposed this perspective.

Today, CCP spokesmen claim that China is far along the road to becoming a global economic “superpower” by the mid 21st century. This view ignores the economic vulnerabilities of China in its relations with the world capitalist market and the implacable hostility of the imperialist bourgeoisies, above all the U.S. ruling class. Further, it ignores the internal instability of Chinese society. With an enormous divide between corrupt government officials, capitalist entrepreneurs and privileged petty bourgeois on one side and the hundreds of millions of proletarians—in both state-owned and private enterprises—and poor peasants on the other, China has for years experienced a high level of strikes and social protest against the consequences of bureaucratic misrule.

This ferment points to the potential for a proletarian political revolution that will sweep away the Stalinist regime and replace it with the rule of workers and peasants councils (soviets). As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote in the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding programmatic statement of the Fourth International, in regard to the Soviet Union: “Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

Parasites and Princelings

The CCP bureaucracy is beset by enormous contradictions. Although it zealously guards its privileges, it does not own the means of production or have at its disposal all the methods of social control that a ruling capitalist class possesses. Its power stems from its political monopoly of the government apparatus. Trotsky’s explanation of the material roots of the Soviet Stalinist regime in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) applies with full force to China:

“The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all. When there are enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there are few goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order. Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It ‘knows’ who is to get something and who has to wait.”

Observing that the bureaucracy’s “appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the character of social parasitism,” Trotsky wrote:

“To the extent that, in contrast to a decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration. This contradiction between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot grow indefinitely. Either the bourgeois norms must in one form or another spread to the means of production, or, conversely, the norms of distribution must be brought into correspondence with the socialist property system.”

As in Stalin’s USSR, while the CCP bureaucrats and their princeling offspring feed off state resources, they chafe under the legal restrictions placed on private wealth. Capturing an aspect of this phenomenon, the Financial Times (28 November 2012) wrote, “The fact that property rights cannot be taken for granted means that capital flight has also become an issue,” including money salted away in offshore tax havens. Another conduit is the channeling of funds through relatives living abroad. According to an internal report by the CCP’s Organization Department, 76 percent of the senior executives in China’s 120 flagship state-owned companies have immediate family members who live overseas or hold foreign passports. In a New York Times (11 May) opinion piece, Chinese author Yu Hua reported how corrupt officials are prone to hiding their money rather than depositing it in banks for fear of its discovery. Among the well-known cases are one who stashed 25 million yuan in safe deposit boxes, another who hid his cash in cardboard boxes in the bathroom of his apartment and a third who used a hollow tree, a latrine and other places.

Of the 500 protests, riots and strikes estimated to take place every day in China, many are sparked by anger at profiteering officials who are ostensibly devoted to communist ideals. One response of the regime is to cover up the extent to which the workers state’s resources have been diverted for the use of these parasites. In its 2012 investigation, Bloomberg noted that state controls over the media and Internet help cloak the business dealings of bureaucrats and princelings from view, while public documents often obscure the culprits by using multiple names in Mandarin, Cantonese and English. A mouthpiece of finance capital, Bloomberg News well knows that such practices pale in comparison to the looting by the ruling classes of capitalist countries, as seen several years ago in the hundreds of billions of dollars doled out to the corporate bosses of failing banks and automakers in the U.S.

After he came into office in 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping launched a campaign for the “thorough cleanup” of corruption in the CCP. According to the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, more than 180,000 party officials were punished for corruption and abuse of power last year, with 31 senior leaders investigated. No doubt political maneuvering plays a role here: Purged official Zhou Yongkang is known as a factional opponent of Xi, and there is a CCP tradition reaching back to Mao of using anti-corruption campaigns to get rid of rivals.

The Xi government also aims to help stabilize Chinese society by reining in the ostentatious flaunting of wealth and privilege. Xi’s campaign has included a crackdown on luxury spending. In January, high-end clubs in public parks in Beijing, Hangzhou, Changsha and Nanjing were closed, with a government statement declaring: “The buildings should be used to provide services for the general public rather than the privileged few” (Xinhua, 17 January). Officials have been banned from hosting elaborate banquets and military license plates are no longer allowed on luxury cars. Such a campaign is simply inconceivable in the U.S., where the “right” of the capitalist ruling class to its obscene wealth, and to dispose of it at will, is enshrined in law.

A particular focus of Xi’s anti-corruption drive has been the waste, fraud, nepotism and buying and selling of rank that undermine military effectiveness. Soon after taking office, Xi placed blame for the collapse of the Soviet Union in part on the loss of control of the armed forces by the Kremlin under Mikhail Gorbachev. Xi’s cleanup has included antigraft measures, audits and criticism sessions; enlarged drills to upgrade “battle readiness”; and contentious plans to reform the military’s bloated and outmoded structure.

In our defense of China, we support the development of an effective and advanced military. However, Xi is himself the leader of the bureaucratic regime that endangers the workers state by its utopian pursuit of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. The imperialists aim for nothing less than the overthrow of the People’s Republic of China and the reconquest of the mainland for their untrammeled exploitation. To this end, they employ both economic and military pressure—the latter seen, for example, in the Obama administration’s “pivot” toward Asia and U.S./Japan military provocations in the East China Sea.

The Spectre of Tiananmen

China at the time of its revolution was qualitatively poorer and more backward than even tsarist Russia at the time of the Bolshevik-led workers revolution in October 1917. The Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky’s leadership knew that such backwardness could not be overcome without the extension of proletarian revolution to the advanced industrial countries. This understanding is utterly alien to the Stalinist perspective of “socialism in one country,” a false ideology embraced by the CCP bureaucracy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping.

Inequality in China began to grow rapidly in the aftermath of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a bitter intra-bureaucratic struggle launched in 1966 that threw economic and social life into chaos. Having benefited from Soviet aid in the first decade after the 1949 Revolution, China increasingly pursued economic autarchy after the Chinese and Soviet bureaucracies fell out. By the early 1970s, Beijing had treacherously struck an alliance with U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union, which Mao castigated as “social imperialist.”

Maintaining its own privileges, the bureaucracy under Mao promoted a model of “egalitarianism” that amounted to generalized want among the masses, based on China’s still backward industrial base. When they took the reins after Mao’s death, the Eight Immortals led by Deng Xiaoping resorted to the whip of the market to increase economic productivity. With Western and Japanese imperialist and offshore Chinese concerns invited to invest in designated sections of the mainland, the economy regained its feet, but at the price of greatly increased inequality and the growth of pro-capitalist forces within China.

Twenty-five years ago, popular anger over inflation, official corruption, the rise of the princelings and the bureaucracy’s stifling political control erupted in mass protests centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. In April 1989, a group of students from Beijing University laid a wreath in the square in honor of Hu Yaobang, who at the time of his death shortly before was regarded as relatively open to student protest and as one of the rare CCP officials not to be corrupt. By the time of Hu’s funeral a week later, a mass student protest had assembled and begun to draw in contingents of workers. While sections of the student protesters looked to Western-style capitalist democracy, the protests were dominated by the singing of the Internationale—the international workers anthem—and other expressions of pro-socialist consciousness. The protests were transformed into a mass working-class outpouring against the bureaucracy and the effects of its “market reforms.”

For almost two months, the government was unable to curb the protests, which developed into an incipient political revolution. Workers organized their own defense guards. Even the police were joining the demonstrations, a clear reflection of the class difference between a workers state and a capitalist state. The first army unit called in to crush the demonstrations refused to do so as workers fraternized with soldiers. Not only enlisted men but also elements of the military brass and some of the regime tops came down on the side of the protesters—a manifestation of the nature of the bureaucracy as a brittle caste. The regime finally found loyal units and used them to crush the uprising, marked by the massacre of mainly working people in Beijing on June 3-4. Mass strikes broke out in protest and at least 80 cities throughout China were caught up in the turmoil.

Crucially missing in May-June 1989 was an authentically communist—i.e., Leninist-Trotskyist—workers party, which would have fought to lead the workers to political power. Having regained control, the bureaucracy lashed out not mainly at students but at the proletariat. Arrested workers were paraded through the streets and many were shot.

Corruption, profiteering, political repression, inequality: 25 years later, the scourges that drove students and workers to protest en masse are back with renewed force. At the same time, economic growth has drawn new layers of the population into the working class. Migrants from the countryside have flocked to manufacturing and light industrial jobs in urban areas, where they are subject to systematic discrimination. Meanwhile, renewed investment in state-owned industry has strengthened the economic position of workers in that sector. Due to combative struggle by workers and a shortage of labor, wages have risen dramatically. In a recent display of workers’ militancy, 10,000 employees of the Yue Yuen shoe factory in the southern city of Dongguan went on strike on April 14 demanding that the Taiwanese company pay the full amount of legally mandated social security and housing compensation. Strikers returned to work following a combination of company and government promises and repression.

The devastation wreaked by capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe is not lost on the Chinese proletariat, which has the power and the objective interest to sweep away bureaucratic misrule. As we wrote in Part One of “China’s ‘Market Reforms’: A Trotskyist Analysis” (WV No. 874, 4 August 2006):

“At some point, likely when bourgeois elements in and around the bureaucracy move to eliminate CCP political power, the multiple explosive social tensions of Chinese society will shatter the political structure of the ruling bureaucratic caste. And when that happens the fate of the most populous country on earth will be starkly posed: either proletarian political revolution to open the road to socialism or a return to capitalist enslavement and imperialist subjugation.”

Victory for the workers in that conflict will require the leadership of a revolutionary workers party, a Chinese section of a reforged Fourth International.