On The 75^th Anniversary Year Of The Defeat Of The Spanish Revolution- The Lessons Learned -Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory- Hannah Sell, Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales) 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

In July 1936 General Franco led a military uprising against the legally elected Popular Front government in Spain which set off three years of war, set off the Spanish Civil War, which proved to be a prelude, a “dress rehearsal” for World War II. That uprising, the initial massively popular fight against it by the leftist workers and peasants, and the ultimate victory by Franco’s forces and a forty year “night of the long knives” reign of terror in 1939 is filled with lessons for leftists today. Therefore it seems fitting to me that while we are sadly commemorating the 75^th anniversary of the defeat I can pass on some lessons that others have drawn from that experience both while the events were unfolding and later.  

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History Spanish civil war 27/04/2009


Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory- Hannah Sell, Socialist Party (CWI in England & Wales)
The Spanish civil war (1936-39) was the bloodiest stage in the ten year-long Spanish revolution that began in 1931. Spain was a further confirmation of Leon Trotsky’s theory of ’permanent revolution’, which was earlier borne out in the Russian workers’ socialist revolution of 1917.

But unlike Russia in 1917, where the revolutionary leadership under Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks was decisive, in Spain the workers’ leaders vacillated between reform and revolution, thereby allowing the capitalists to reassert control and the triumph of Franco. In this, the Spanish capitalists were aided by the Stalinist Communist Party.

On 1 April 1939, General Franco declared victory after three years of civil war, which followed an attempted coup by army officers against Spain’s democratically elected Republican government.

Franco’s victory, backed to the hilt by the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, marked the opening bars of the bloodiest war in human history - the second world war - which began exactly five months later. In Spain Franco’s dictatorship continued until his death in 1975.

During the civil war the ’white terror’ of Franco’s nationalist armies cost 200,000 lives, according to historian Anthony Beevor. Franco’s regime went on to consolidate its power with the blood of Spanish workers - with up to 200,000 killed in the aftermath of the war. It was only last year that the Spanish government officially recognised the suffering that took place under the dictatorship, when it accepted that those who had suffered repression or had lost family were ’victims’.

The net result of this bloody war was an appalling defeat for the working class. Yet there is another side to it: the incredible heroism and self-sacrifice of the Spanish working class in its struggle against fascism and for social and economic liberation. Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary, said, "One can neither expect nor ask for a movement of greater scope, greater endurance, greater heroism on the part of the workers than we were able to observe in Spain."

Even those capitalist historians who have studied Spain seriously, have felt compelled to reflect the courage and determination of the Spanish working class. Beevor, for example, describes how the working class in Barcelona responded to the fascist uprising with "a desperate selfless bravery". He vividly pictures how the unarmed working class of Barcelona prepared to prevent the nationalist army seizing control of their city:

"Isolated armouries were seized and weapons were taken from four ships in the harbour. Even the rusting hulk of the prison ship Uruguay was stormed, so as to take the warders’ weapons. The UGT dockers’ union knew of a shipment of dynamite in the port, and once that was seized, home-made grenades were manufactured all through the night. Every gun shop in the city was stripped bare. Cars and lorries were requisitioned and metal workers fixed crude armour plating while sandbags were piled behind truck cabs."

Beevor goes on to describe the key moment the next day when the battle turned in favour of the workers:

"At one moment during the fighting, a small group of workers and an assault guard rushed across to an insurgent artillery detachment with two 75mm guns. They held their rifles above their head to show that they were not attacking as they rushed up to the astonished soldiers. Out of breath, they poured forth passionate arguments why the soldiers should not fire on their brothers, telling them that they had been tricked by their officers. The guns were turned around and brought to bear on the rebel forces. From then on more and more soldiers joined the workers and assault guards."

Fear of revolution

In addition to boundless heroism and sound class instincts on how best to conduct the war, the Spanish working class and poor peasantry had enormous international support. This did not come from the capitalist democracies, which under the guise of ’neutrality’ refused to aid the Spanish Republic. The reason for this - mortal fear of the revolution - was explained clearly by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, based on his own experiences in Spain:

"Foreign capital was heavily invested in Spain. The Barcelona Traction Company, for instance, represented ten millions of British Capital; and meanwhile the trade unions had seized all the transport in Catalonia. If the revolution went forward there would be no compensation, or very little."

However, the international working class, along with many young intellectuals, were enthralled by the Spanish revolution. Worldwide, workers followed the conflict with baited breath.

Around 40,000 people from 53 different countries went to Spain to join the war against Franco. They included writers such as Orwell, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, and, more decisively, thousands of young workers - more than 2,300 of whom came from the factories and mines of Britain and Ireland. And yet, despite this tremendous international class solidarity, the workers in Spain were defeated.

Stages theory

Seventy years on, the reasons for the defeat in Spain are not just of historical interest. Some factors, particularly the role of Stalinism, are not present in the same way today. As Orwell commented, "in reality it was the Communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain."

Stalinist policy was not motivated by the interests of the working class, but rather by fear of upsetting the USSR’s diplomatic relations with the major capitalist powers, and terror that the revolutionary upsurge of the working class in Spain would infect the working class of the Soviet Union, by now crushed under Stalin’s monstrous bureaucratic machine. Even the Stalinist secret police agents, sent to Spain to crush the revolution in blood, were themselves mostly killed once they returned to Russia for fear that they had been infected with the heady aroma of a genuine revolutionary upsurge by the masses.

The Stalinist regimes are no more. However, the Stalinist justification for their policy in Spain - the stages theory - that is that it was necessary to first win the war against fascism and to have a period of capitalist democracy, only worrying about the question of socialism at some future date - has already come up in a different form today. It will do so on a broader scale in the future, particularly in the neo-colonial world, where many of the conditions that existed in Spain in the 1930s still apply today.

Even now the left government in Bolivia, to give one example, which has been elected on a wave of popular support, and has introduced some reforms to assist the working class and the poor. At the same time, socialism is something for the future, and, today, the government emphasises the need to compromise and negotiate with the brutal, capitalist right-wing opposition which has kept the Bolivian masses in dire poverty for generations. Giving this need for compromise as the reason, government troops have forcibly evicted land occupations of the poor peasants.

Today we do not yet live in a global era of revolution and counter-revolution such as existed in the 1930s. Nonetheless, the profound economic crisis that is developing worldwide will, over the coming years, lead to revolutionary struggles, which, if they are to be successful, will need to learn the lessons of Spain.

Weakness of capitalism

Just as it is the weakest economies of Europe - largely in Eastern Europe, but also Spain where unemployment has leapt to 14% - that are suffering worst in the current economic crisis, Spain was devastated by the 1930s depression. As in Russia in 1917, capitalism broke at its weakest link in Spain. Spain, once the most powerful country in Europe, had suffered what Karl Marx called a ’slow, inglorious decay’ over centuries. In this respect a certain comparison can be drawn with Britain today. The Spanish elite - the monarchy, church, the army and hangers on - had amassed enormous wealth as a result of the plunder of South America. This, however, became their downfall, as the backward feudal regime crushed the nascent capitalist class under piles of gold and silver. Capitalism, as it belatedly developed, was weak and intertwined with both the old feudal regime and the world imperialist powers. In the 1930s what very limited industry had developed was largely foreign owned. Spain was responsible for only 1.1% of world trade.

In 1931 of the eleven million that made up Spain’s economically active population eight million were poor, their work provided no more than subsistence, and often less. The monarchy and the Catholic Church, which were closely intertwined, were hated by the majority of the working class and poor. In April 1931, the revolution began when, under phenomenal mass pressure including a series of general strikes, the king abdicated and a republic was declared led by the capitalist republican, Manuel Azaña. The popular hopes that this would mean a better life for the majority were, however, soon deflated as the republic acted in the interests of the same ruling elite. Not for nothing did one moderate describe Azaña’s government as one of ’mud, blood and tears’.

The republican government was incapable of carrying out the basic tasks of the capitalist democratic revolution. For example, around 70% of the population still worked on the land. The division of land was the worst in Europe, with the poor peasantry owning only one third of the most infertile land. The only solution to this would have been the nationalisation of the two thirds of the land held by the big landowners. But Spain’s financial and industrial capitalism had completely merged with the big landowners. No capitalist government was therefore prepared to challenge their power. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, landowner was the Catholic Church. While the population began to take measures into its own hands, including the widespread burning of churches, the government moved at a snail’s pace - proposing measures that did no more than trim the fingernails of the church.

At the same time peasants’ revolts and workers’ strikes, and particularly the anarchist trade union - the CNT, were met with increasingly brutal repression. In one particularly vicious example in early 1933, peasants in a village called Casas Viejas, who after two years of patiently waiting for land reform, had independently begun to till the local aristocrats’ land, were gunned down by the Civil Guard, with twenty of them being killed.

No wonder that, in the elections that followed in 1933, the government parties lost. As a result the forces of outright reaction came to power. The new government, however, had a very limited social base. In 1934 it was replaced by a reactionary dictatorship. This was met with an enormous uprising of opposition by the working class and poor peasantry. This culminated in the Asturian Commune which the dictatorship called in Franco to crush - 5,000 were killed mostly after surrendering.

This was the background to the elections in February 1936 which brought the Popular Front government to power. Azaña was again prime minister. PSOE, the mass social democratic party, won the largest number of seats of the parties that made up the Popular Front. All the government ministers, however, came from the capitalist parties. Having been burnt by their experience of taking part in the 1931-33 Azaña government, the left wing of PSOE prevented the right wing from joining the government. The programme of the government was exceedingly limited, even when compared to 1931-33.

Both the working class and poor and the representatives of capital had learnt lessons from the last five years. The workers and poor peasants did not wait for the new government to act. Around 30,000 political prisoners were liberated. Between February and July there were 113 general strikes and 228 other major strikes. Peasants started to occupy the land.

At the same time the capitalists drew the conclusion that they could not defend their system by democratic means - and began to prepare the ground for Franco’s coup.

When the coup came the working class responded, as has already been described, with enormous heroism. They were horribly hampered by a government which, as Beevor quotes one Seville carpenter as explaining, "were not prepared to give us [the workers] arms because they were more afraid of the working class than they were of the army." Nonetheless, as Upton Sinclair witnessed, "these educated workers and their wives ...charged machine guns with carving knives and pieces of board with nails sticking out."

Where they successfully pushed back the fascists the workers held power in their hands. Felix Morrow, in his book, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Spain 1931-1937, explained how the anti-fascist militia in Catalonia, based on workers’ organisations, conquered the Aragon region in five days from 19 July. "They conquered Aragon as a social liberation army. They formed anti-fascist village committees, expropriated land, harvests, cattle, tools etc, from the landlords and the reactionaries. Then the village committee organised production on its new foundation, usually in the shape of a collective and created a village militia to implement the socialisation and to fight reaction."

In republican Spain the capitalist class did not exist, having fled with the fascists. Beevor describes how in Barcelona the anarchists installed their headquarters in the former premises of the Employers’ Federation. The Ritz was used as ’Gastronomic Unit No 1’, a public canteen for all those in need. He goes on to explain how: "In Barcelona worker committees took over all the services, the oil monopoly, the shipping companies, heavy engineering firms such as Vulcano, Ford motor company, chemical companies, the textile industry and a host of smaller enterprises."

Class collaboration

However, the myth that was perpetuated, in essence, by the leadership of all the major workers parties, and above all by the Communist Party, was that in order to preserve ’unity’ with capitalist forces in the fight against fascism it was necessary to postpone the struggle for socialism to some later date. Beevor accurately states that "the most outspoken champions of private property were not the liberal republicans, as might have been expected, but the Communist Party."

At the same time the power of the working class was never organised via democratic workers’ committees, linked up locally, regionally and nationally in the way that took place twenty years earlier in the soviets of the Russian revolution.

The Communist Party did not bear sole responsibility. In Barcelona, for example, Garcia Oliver, the anarchist leader (the anarchists were the strongest force in Barcelona), explained how the anarchists could easily have taken power in July 1936 ’because all the forces were on our side’ but did not do so because, they did not ’believe in doing so’. This did not prevent the anarchist leaders, including Oliver, later joining the Popular Front government together with capitalist parties. In this way the role of the leaders of the workers’ parties allowed the capitalist class, initially no more than a shadow, gradually to regain substance before physically repressing the socialist revolution in May 1937.

Far from strengthening the fight against fascism, the policy of the workers’ leaders resulted in the defeat of that fight. Desperate to re-establish the rule of big capital, and to avoid upsetting the world imperialist powers, the heads of the workers’ organisations refused to adopt the policies that were necessary to win over ordinary soldiers fighting on the side of Franco.

Programme, party and leadership

The fascist coup was launched from Morocco, and many North African soldiers fought on the side of Franco. Yet the Republican government did not inscribe independence for Morocco on its banner. To do so would have quickly and dramatically fermented revolt in Franco’s army. Nor was the republican government prepared to call for expropriation of the big landowners, which would have been invaluable in winning those poor peasants who did not support the republic over.

There are obviously only very limited comparisons that can be drawn between the struggle to defeat Franco’s armies, backed to the hilt by the Spanish ruling class, and the campaigns socialists are involved in today against the far-right, racist British National Party. Nonetheless, there are lessons to be learnt. The approach of the majority of Unite Against Fascism, which has widespread trade union support, is to limit its demand to the plea ’don’t vote BNP’. UAF’s organisers argue that to put forward anything else would alienate the Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat politicians who support the campaign. However, it is the anti-working class policies of the big three parties that have played the main role in driving a layer of workers to vote for the BNP. A genuine workers’ party, putting forward a clear class programme, is the only means by which the BNP can be undermined. It is for this reason that the decision of the railway and transport workers’ union, the RMT, to initiate a challenge in the European elections is so important.

The working class of Spain instinctively had the right approach to how they could win victory. Unfortunately, no party existed which was capable of, and willing to, put forward and campaign for a programme that expressed and codified the approach taken by the working class. Today, the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) is known internationally to a younger generation chiefly as a result of Ken Loach’s excellent film, ’Land and Freedom’. The POUM was an anti-Stalinist party that, once the revolution had been crushed, suffered horrific repression at the hands of the Stalinists, including the murder of its leader Andre Nin.

Despite being decried as ’Trotskyist’ by the Stalinists, the POUM was no such thing. If it had followed the programme put forward by Trotsky from afar, the outcome of the Spanish struggle would have been completely different. Under the impact of the revolution the POUM grew in membership very quickly - from 8,000 on the eve of the civil war it quadrupled its membership in a few months - and potentially could have grown far more. Tragically, however, rather than putting an independent class programme forward, it trailed behind the anarchist and social democratic parties - standing a little to the left - but not putting forward any clear alternative.

Trotsky, in his tremendous article, ’The Class, the Party, and the Leadership’, takes up those who argued that the working class in Spain did not take power because they were ’immature’.

"What does the ’immaturity’ of the proletariat signify in this case? Self-evidently only this, that despite the correct political line chosen by the masses they were unable to smash the coalition of Socialists, Stalinists, Anarchists, and the POUMists with the bourgeoisie."

"The workers’ line of march at all times cut at a certain angle to the line of the leadership. And at the most critical moments this angle became 180 degrees. The leadership then helped directly or indirectly to subdue the workers by armed force."

The twentieth century was littered with attempts by working-class people to overthrow capitalism and to carry out the socialist transformation of society. In a litany of tragic failures, none is more heart rending than the events in Spain, nor so rich in lessons of what might have been, had the working class had a leadership worthy of it. Today we are just beginning to witness the full brutality and bankruptcy of twenty-first century capitalism. There is no doubt that in the future we will see struggles to transform society which will dwarf even the greatest events of the twentieth century. If, this time, we are to succeed in building a new society that meets the needs of all, it is essential that the new generation of young people now looking to socialist ideas study the lessons of the great battles of the century, including the lessons of Spain, only a few of which are touched on here.


Spanish revolution timeline
• April 1931 revolution establishes the second republic. King Alfonso goes into exile. Pro-worker reforms introduced.
• July-August 1933. Strike wave. General strike in Seville crushed by Republican government artillery.
• November 1933. Elections to Cortes (national parliament). Rightists and monarchists form government with Lerroux as prime minister (PM); begins to repeal reforms.
• October-November 1934. General strike of socialists and anarchists defeated. Lerroux calls in Franco to crush uprising of Asturian miners.
• August-September 1935. Communist International (Comintern) proclaims Popular Front policy. Founding of POUM.
• February 1936. New elections brings Popular Front to power; Azana is PM; anarchists and POUM support Popular Front in the election.
• July 1936. Spanish Communist Party declares full support to government. Fascists rising begins in Morocco and spreads to Spain. Companys (leader of the Catalan regional government - the Generalitat) refuses to distribute arms. Workers seize arms.
• September 1936. Largo Caballero (left wing leader of Socialist Party) becomes PM on condition that CP join government. CNT and POUM join Generalitat.
• October 1936. Central government ends independence of militias. Siege of Madrid begins.
• November 1936. Central government reorganised to include Anarchists. International Brigades arrive in Madrid.
• December 1936. POUM expelled from government. Letter from Stalin to Caballero insists on protection of private property.
• May 1937. Government attempt to seize Barcelona telephone exchange from Anarchists leads to new workers’ upsurge; Negrin (right wing leader of Socialist Party) replaces Caballero as PM.
• June 1937. POUM outlawed by central government; leaders arrested.
• April-June 1938. Franco’s forces reach coast, cutting Republican Spain in half.
• November 1938. International Brigades withdraw from Spain.
• January 1939. Barcelona surrenders to Franco.
• February 1939. France and Britain recognise Franco while Republicans still hold a third of Spain.
• March 1939. Madrid and Valencia surrender.
• April 1939. US recognises Franco.
• August 1939. Stalin-Hitler pact.

***On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Voting Rights Act-Blowing In The Wind - With Bob Dylan And The Generation Of ‘68 In Mind

 

 

 

Scene: Girls’ Lounge, North Clintondale High School, Monday morning before school, late September, 1962. Additional information for those who know not of girls lounges, for whatever reason. The North Clintondale High School girls’ lounge was reserved strictly for junior and senior girls, no sophomore girls and, most decidedly, no freshmen girls need come within twenty feet of the place for any reason, particularly by accident, under penalty of tumult. It was placed there for the “elect” to use before school, during lunch, after school, and during the day if the need arise for bathroom breaks, but that last was well down on the prerogatives list since any girl can use any other “lav” in the school. No queen, no lioness ever guarded her territory as fiercely as the junior and senior girls of any year, not just 1962, guarded the aura of their lounge.

Needless to say the place was strictly off-limits to boys, although there had been recent talk, 1962 talk, if talk it was, about some girls thinking, or maybe better, wishing, that boys could enter that hallowed ground, after school enter. Unlike the cigarette rumor this one while persistent never seemed to have gone anywhere. Moreover after school most junior or senior girls were either working part-time jobs, heading home to help mother take of younger children, playing lady-like intramural sports far away from boy eyes, or, most likely already with some boy in his latest homemade automobile after a quick run over to North Adamsville Beach. Still that boy rumor possibility was much more likely than entry by those forlorn sophomore and freshman girls, lost or not.

Now the reasoning behind this special girls’ lounge, at least according to Clintondale public school authority wisdom established so far back no one remembered who started it, although a good guess was sometime in the Jazz Age, the time of the “lost generation,” was that junior and senior girls needed some space to attend to their toilet and to adjust to the other rigors of the girl school day and, apparently, that fact was not true for the younger girls. So for that “as far back as can be remembered” junior and senior girls have been using the lounge for their physical, spiritual, demonic, and other intrigue needs.

Certainly it was not the décor that they were fierce about. Now the physical set- up of the place, by 1962 anyway, was that of a rather run-down throne-ante room. Your standard school, heck, for that matter any public building Ladies’ restroom (remember as well this was situated in a public school so erase any thoughts of some elegant woman’s lounge in some fancy downtown Clintondale hotel, some Ritz-ish place); stalls, three, three sinks complete with oversized mirrors for proper preening, several paper towel dispensers and a couple of throw away waste paper baskets (and of course a place to dispense with those monthly napkins) all set off in public building colors.

Beyond that though was the lounge area maybe twice the size of the bathroom area which this year as almost any of the previous ten years contained two old time sofas, a couple of easy chairs, three end tables filled with magazines, mainly girl-fashion related magazines from various years and a couple more waste paper baskets. On one long green wall photographs of previous years of junior and senior girls who were privileged to sit in this very area. On the other providing some fresh air in season three very large glass windows with latch opening for ease of use. (Those windows rumored but only rumored to allow an errant young woman or seven to puff cigarettes and blow the smoke out into the airs. If the school authorities ever discovered that such practices went, of if they did, did anything about it is unclear however those rumors persisted until long after 1962.)        

The “charm” of the place was thus in its exclusivity not its appearance. Come Monday morning, any school day Monday morning, the ones that counted after hard social weekend of fending, or not fending off some sidewalk Lothario, and the place was sure to be jam-packed with every girl with a story to tell, re-tell, or discount as the case may be. If this had been a Catholic school rather than public it would have required the full-time services of a senior cleric to absolve all the lies told on any given Monday morning. Also needless to say, and it took no modern sociologist, no sociologist of youth culture, post-World War II youth culture, no one studied in the tribal norms, in the angsts and alienation, to figure it out in even such an elitist democratic lounge which apparently took it model from ancient Greek civic life except ruled by young women rather than old men certain pecking order, or more aptly cliques aplenty.

The most vocal one, although the smallest, was composed of the “bad” girls, mainly working class, or lower, mostly Irish and Italian, fathers working in the local shipyard or the factories that dotted the river, cigarette-smoking, blowing the smoke out the window this September day as the weather was still good enough to have open windows. As if the nervous, quick-puff stale smells of the cigarettes were not permanently etched on the stained walls already, taking no bloodhound to figure out the No Smoking rule was being violated, violated daily. (Again no action by school authorities was ever taken while a junior or senior girl was in this sanctuary.) Oh yes, and those “bad” girls just then were chewing gum, chewing Wrigley’s double-mint gum, although that ubiquitous habit was not confined to bad girls, as if that act would take the smell of the cigarette away from their breathes. One girl, Anna, a usually dour pretty girl, was animatedly talking, without a seeming hint of embarrassment or concern that others would hear about how her new boyfriend, a biker from Adamsville who to hear her tell it was an A- Number One stud, and she “did it” on the Adamsville beach (she put it more graphically, much more graphically, but the reader can figure that out). And her listeners, previously somewhat sullen, perked up as she went into the details, and they started, Monday morning or not, to get a certain glean in their eyes thinking about the response when they told their own boyfriends about this one. If they did.

Less vocal, but certainly not more careful in their weekend doings talk, were the, for lack of a better term, the pom-pom girls, the school social leaders, the ones who planned the school dances and such, and put the events together in order to, no, not to show their superior organizing skills for future resumes as one might think, but to lure boys, the jock and social boys, into their own Adamsville beach traps. And not, like Anna and her biker, on any smelly, sandy, clamshell-filled, stone-wretched beach, blanket-less for chrissakes. Leave that for the “bad” girls. They, to a girl, were comfortably snuggled up, according to their whispered stories, in the back seat of a boss ’57 Chevy or other prestige car, with their honeys and putting it more gingerly than Anna (and less graphically) “doing it.”

And, lastly, was the group around Peggy Kelly, not that she was the leader of this group for it had no leader, or any particular organized form either, but because when we get out of the smoke-filled, sex talk-filled, hot-air Monday morning before school North Clintondale junior and senior girls’ lounge we will be following her around. This group, almost all Irish girls, Irish Catholic girls if that additional description is needed, of varying respectabilities, was actually there to attend to their toilet and prepare for the rigors of the girl school day. Oh yes, after all what is the point of being in this exclusive, if democratic, lounge anyway, they too were talking in very, very, very quiet tones discussing their weekend doings, their mainly sexless weekend doings, although at least one, Dora, was speaking just a bit too cryptically, and with just a little too much of a glean in her eyes to pass churchly muster.

And what of Peggy? Well Peggy had her story to tell, if she decided to tell it which she had no intention of doing that day. She was bothered, with an unfocused bother, but no question a bother about other aspects of her life, about what she was going to after high school, about her place in the world than to speak of sex. It was not that Peggy didn’t like sex, or rather more truthfully, the idea of sex, or maybe better put on her less confused days, the idea of the idea of sex. Just this past weekend, Saturday night, although it was a book sealed with seven seals that she was determined not to speak of, girls’ lounge or not, she had let Pete Rizzo “feel her up,” put his hands on her breast. No, not skin on skin, jesus no, but through her buttoned-up blouse. And she liked it. And moreover, she thought that night, that tossing and turning night, “when she was ready” she was would be no prude about it. When she was ready, and that is why she insisted that the idea of the idea of sex was something that would fall into place. When she was ready.

But as she listened to the other Irish girls and their half-lies about their weekends, or drifted off into her own thoughts sex, good idea or not, was not high on her list of activities just then. Certainly not with Pete. Pete was a boy that she had met when she was walking at “the meadows,” For those not familiar with the Clintondale meadows this was a well-manicured and preserved former pasture area that the town fathers had designated as park, replete with picnic tables, outdoor barbecue pits, a small playground area and a small restroom (a facility that made the girls’ lounge at Clintondale High look like one in a downtown hotel by comparison). The idea was to preserve a little of old-time farm country Clintondale in the face of all the building going on in town. But for Peggy the best part was that on any given day no one was using the space, preferring the more gaudy, raucous and, well, fun-filled Gloversville Amusement Park, a couple of towns over. So she could roam there freely, and that seemed be Pete’s idea, as well one day. And that meeting really set up what was bothering Peggy these days.

Pete was a freshman at the small local Gloversville College. Although it was small and had been, according to Pete, one of those colleges founded by religious dissidents, Protestant religious dissidents from the mainstream Protestantism of their day, it was well-regarded academically (also courtesy of Pete). And that was Pete’s attraction for Peggy, his ideas and how he expressed them. They fit right in with what Peggy had been bothered by for a while. Things that could not be spoken of in girls’ lounge, or maybe even thought of there. Things like what to do about the black civil rights struggle that was burning up the television every night. Pete was “heading south” next summer he said. (That term of youthful political art signifying that he would be taking a bus, or maybe as part of a carload, and head for hellish Alabama or goddam Mississippi to aid the besieged black civil rights fighters in one of the programs drawn up by one of the increasingly active Northern campus activist coalitions.) They also as youth will talked of things like were we going to last until next week if the Russians came at us, or we went after the Russians.

Also things though like why was she worried every day about her appearance and why she, like an addiction, always, always, made her way to the girls’ lounge to “make her face” as part of the rigors of the girl school day. And that whole sex thing that was coming, and she was glad of it, just not with Pete, Pete who after all was just too serious, too much like those commissars over in Russia, although she liked the way he placed his hands on her. And she was still thinking hard on these subjects as she excused herself from the group as she put the final touches of lipstick on. Just then the bell rang for first period, and she was off into the girl day.

Scene: Boys’ “Lav,” Second Floor, Clintondale High School, Monday morning before school, September, 1962. (Not necessarily the same Monday morning as the scene above but some Monday after the first Monday, Labor Day, in September. In any case even if it was the same Monday as the one above that coincidence does not drive this story, other more ethereal factors do.) Additional information for those who know not of boys’ lavs, for whatever reason. The Clintondale High School boys’ rest rooms, unlike the girls’ lounge mentioned above at North, or where a similar rule applied to the girls’ lounge at Clintondale, was open to any boy in need of its facilities, even lowly, pimply freshmen as long as they could take the gaffe. Apparently Clintondale high school boys, unlike the upperclassmen girls needed no special consideration for their grooming needs in order to face the schoolboy day.

Well, strictly speaking that statement about a truly democratic boys’ lav universe was not true. The first floor boys’ lav down by the woodworking shop was most strictly off limits, and had been as far back as anyone could remember, maybe Neanderthal times, to any but biker boys, badass corner boys, guys with big chips on their shoulders and the wherewithal to keep them there , and assorted other toughs. No geeks, dweebs, nerds, guys in plaid shirts and loafers with or without pennies inserted in them, or wannabe toughs, wannabe toughs who did not have that wherewithal to maintain that chip status need apply. And none did, none at least since legendary corner boy king (Benny’s Variety Store version), “Slash” Larkin, threw some misdirected freshman through a work-working shop window for his mistake. Ever since every boy in the school, every non-biker, non-corner boy, or non-tough had not gone within fifty yards of that lav, even if they took shop classes in the area. And a “comic” aspect of every year’s freshman orientation was a guided finger to point out which lav NOT to use, and that window where that freshman learned the error of his ways. No king, no lion ever guarded his territory as fiercely as the “bad” boys did. Except, maybe, those junior and senior Clintondale girls of any year, and not just 1962, as they guarded their lounge lair.

That left the boys’ rooms on the second floor, the third floor, the one as you entered the gymnasium, and the one outside of the cafeteria for every other boy’s use. A description, a short description, of these lavs is in order. One description fits all will suffice; a small room, with stalls, sinks, mirrors, etc the same as found in any rest room in any public building in the country. Additionally, naturally, several somewhat grimy, stained (from the “misses”) urinals. What draws our attention to the second floor boys’ room this day are two facts. First, this rest room is in the back of the floor away from snooping teachers’ eyes, ears and noses and has been known, again for an indeterminate time, as the place where guys could cadge a smoke, a few quick puffs anyway, on a cigarette and blow the smoke out the back window, rain or shine, cold or hot weather. So any guy of any class who needed his fix found his way there. And secondly, today, as he had done almost every Monday before school since freshman year John Prescott and friends have held forth there to speak solemnly of the weekend’s doing, or not doings. To speak of sex, non-sex, and more often than seemed possible, of the girl who got away, damn it.

Of course, egalitarian democratic or not, even such drab places as schoolboy rest rooms have their pecking orders, and the second floor back tended to eliminate non-smoking underclassmen, non-smokers in general, serious intellectual types, non-jocks, non-social butterflies, and non-plaid shirt and loafer boys. And Johnny Prescott, if nothing else was the epitome of the plaid shirt and loafer crowd. And just like at that up-scale North Clintondale girls’ lounge come Monday morning, any school day Monday morning, the ones that count, and the place was sure to be jam-packed with every plaid-shirted, penny-loafered boy with a story to tell, re-tell, or discount as the case may be. Also needless to say, and it took no modern sociologist, no sociologist of youth culture, post-World War II youth culture, to figure it out in even such a smoky democratic setting there was a certain standardized routine-ness to these Monday mornings. And that routine-ness, the very fact of it, is why John Prescott draws our attention on this day.

And if Johnny was the king of his clique for no other reason than he was smart, but not too smart, not intellectual smart, or showing it any way, that he was first to wear plaid and loafers and not be laughed at, and he had no trouble dating girls, many notched girls, which was the real sign of distinction in second floor lav, he was nevertheless a troubled plaid-ist.

No, not big troubled, but, no question, troubled. Troubled about this sex thing, and about having to have the notches to prove it, whether, to keep up appearances, you had to lie about it or not when you struck out as happened to Johnny more times than he let on (and as he found out later happened to more guys more often than not). Troubled about political stuff like what was going on down in the South with those black kids taking an awful beating every day as he saw on television every freaking night. And right next store in Adamsville where some kids, admittedly some intellectual goof kids, were picketing Woolworth’s every Saturday to let black people, not in Adamsville because there were no blacks in Adamsville, or Clintondale for that matter, but down in Georgia, eat a cheese sandwich in peace at a lunch counter and he thought he should do something about that too, except those intellectual goofs might goof on him.

And big, big issues like whether we were going to live out our lives as anything but mutants on this planet what with the Russian threatening us everywhere with big bombs, and big communist one-size-fits- all ideas. Worst, though were the dizzying thoughts of his place in the sun and how big it would be. Worse, right now worse though was to finish this third morning cigarette and tell his girl, his third new girl in two months, Julie James, that he needed some time this weekend to just go off by himself, “the meadows” maybe, and think about the stuff he had on his mind.

*******

Scene: Clintondale Meadows, late September 1962. The features of the place already described above, including its underutilization. Enter Johnny Prescott from the north, plaid shirt, brown loafers, no pennies on this pair, black un-cuffed chinos, and against the winds of late September this year his Clintondale High white and blue sports jacket won for his athletic prowess in sophomore year. Theodore White’s The Making Of A President-1960 in hand. Enter from the south Peggy Kelly radiant in her cashmere sweater, her just so full skirt, and her black patent leather shoes with her additional against the chill winds red and black North Clintondale varsity club supporter sweater. James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain in hand. Johnny spied Peggy first, makes an initial approach as he did to most every girl every chance he got, but noticed, noticed at a time when such things were important in Clintondale teen high school live the telltale red and black sweater, and immediately backed off. Peggy noticing Johnny’s reaction puts her head down. A chance encounter goes for not.

****

That is not the end of the story though. Johnny and Peggy will “meet” again, by chance, in the Port Authority Bus Station in New York City in the early summer of 1964 as they, along with other recent high school graduates and current college students- “head south.”

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

On The 75^th Anniversary Year Of The Defeat Of The Spanish Revolution- The Lessons Learned-75 Years Later, the Lessons of Guernica-by Amy Goodman 

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From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

In July 1936 General Franco led a military uprising against the legally elected Popular Front government in Spain which set off three years of war, set off the Spanish Civil War, which proved to be a prelude, a “dress rehearsal” for World War II. That uprising, the initial massively popular fight against it by the leftist workers and peasants, and the ultimate victory by Franco’s forces and a forty year “night of the long knives” reign of terror in 1939 is filled with lessons for leftists today. Therefore it seems fitting to me that while we are sadly commemorating the 75^th anniversary of the defeat I can pass on some lessons that others have drawn from that experience both while the events were unfolding and later.  

*********
Thursday, July 19, 2012

Published on Thursday, July 19, 2012 by TruthDig.com

75 Years Later, the Lessons of Guernica-by Amy Goodman
Seventy-five years ago, the Spanish town of Guernica was bombed into rubble. The brutal act propelled one of the world’s greatest artists into a three-week painting frenzy. Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” starkly depicts the horrors of war, etched into the faces of the people and the animals on the 20-by-30-foot canvas. It would not prove to be the worst attack during the Spanish Civil War, but it became the most famous, through the power of art. The impact of the thousands of bombs dropped on Guernica, of the aircraft machine guns strafing civilians trying to flee the inferno, is still felt to this day—by the elderly survivors, who will eagerly share their vivid memories, as well as by Guernica’s youth, who are struggling to forge a future for their town out of its painful history.

The German Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion did the bombing at the request of Gen. Francisco Franco, who led a military rebellion against Spain’s democratically elected government. Franco enlisted the help of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who were eager to practice modern techniques of warfare on the defenseless citizens of Spain. The bombing of Guernica was the first complete destruction by aerial bombardment of a civilian city in European history. While homes and shops were destroyed, several arms-manufacturing facilities, along with a key bridge and the rail line, were left intact.

Spry and alert at 89, Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea sat down with me in the offices of Gernika Gogoratuz, which means “Remembering Gernika” in the Basque language. Basque is an ancient language and is central to the fierce independence of Basque-speaking people, who have lived for millennia in the region that straddles the border of Spain and France.

Luis was 14 and working as an assistant at a local bank when Guernica was bombed. It was market day, so the town was full, the market square packed with people and animals. The bombing started at 4:30 p.m. on April 26, 1937. Luis recalled: “It went on and on for three and a half hours. When the bombing ended, I left the shelter and I saw all of the town burning. Everything was on fire.”

Luis and others fled uphill to the nearby village of Lumo, where, as night fell, they saw their hometown burning, saw their homes collapse in the flames. They were given space to sleep in a barn. Luis continued: “I don’t remember if it was at midnight or at another time, as I did not own a watch at the time. I heard someone calling me. ... In the background, you could see Guernica on fire, and thanks to the light of the fire, I realized that it was my mother. She had found my other three siblings. I was the last one to be found.” Luis and his family were war refugees for many years, eventually returning to Guernica, where he still lives and works—as did Picasso in Paris—as a painter.

Luis took me to his studio, its walls covered with paintings. Most prominent was the one he painted of that moment in Lumo when his mother found him. I asked him how he felt at that moment. His eyes welled. He apologized and said he couldn’t speak of it. Just blocks away stands one of the arms factories that avoided destruction. It was the plant where chemical weapons and pistols were made. It is called the Astra building. While Astra has moved away, the weapons company maintains its connection to the town by naming is various automatic weapons the “Guernica,” designed “by warriors, for warriors.”

Several years ago, young people occupied the vacant plant, demanding it be turned into a cultural center. Oier Plaza is a young activist from Guernica who told me, “At first the police threw us out, and then we occupied it again, and finally, the town hall bought the building, then we started this process to recover the building and to create the Astra project.”

The aim of the Astra project is to convert this weapons plant into a cultural center with classes in art, video and other media production. “We have to look to the past to understand the present, to create a better future, and I think Astra is part of that process. It is the past, it is the present, and it is the future of this town.”

From Picasso’s “Guernica” to Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea’s self-portrait with his mother, to the efforts of Oier Plaza and his young friends, the power of art to turn swords into plowshares, to resist war, is perennially renewed.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2012 Amy Goodman



Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 900 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Approaches -Lenin On The Tasks Of Social-Democrats 

Workers Vanguard No. 1049	11 July 2014

TROTSKY

LENIN

World War I and the Betrayal by Social Democracy

(Quote of the Week)

At the outbreak of World War I on 4 August 1914, the German Social Democratic Party voted to fund the war effort of its “own” ruling class. This historic betrayal of the proletariat by the largest party of the Second International was repeated by “socialists” in almost all other combatant countries. In response, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin launched a fight to break revolutionaries away from the social chauvinists of the Second International and regroup them around a proletarian internationalist program, as expressed in the excerpt below. This sharp fight, which hammered on the need to turn the interimperialist slaughter into civil war pitting the proletariat against the capitalists, was essential in preparing the Bolshevik Party to lead the working class to power in the socialist revolution of October 1917 in Russia.

 

It is the duty of every socialist to conduct propaganda of the class struggle, in the army as well; work directed towards turning a war of the nations into civil war is the only socialist activity in the era of an imperialist armed conflict of the bourgeoisie of all nations. Down with mawkishly sanctimonious and fatuous appeals for “peace at any price”! Let us raise high the banner of civil war! Imperialism sets at hazard the fate of European culture: this war will soon be followed by others, unless there are a series of successful revolutions. The story about this being the “last war” is a hollow and dangerous fabrication, a piece of philistine “mythology”.... The proletarian banner of civil war will rally together, not only hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers but millions of semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois, now deceived by chauvinism, but whom the horrors of war will not only intimidate and depress, but also enlighten, teach, arouse, organise, steel and prepare for the war against the bourgeoisie of their “own” country and “foreign” countries. And this will take place, if not today, then tomorrow, if not during the war, then after it, if not in this war then in the next one.

 

The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International, purged not only of “turncoats”...but of opportunism as well.

The Second International did its share of useful preparatory work in preliminarily organising the proletarian masses during the long, “peaceful” period of the most brutal capitalist slavery and most rapid capitalist progress in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. To the Third International falls the task of organising the proletarian forces for a revolutionary onslaught against the capitalist governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all countries for the capture of political power, for the triumph of socialism!

 

—V.I. Lenin, “The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International” (November 1914), Collected Works, Vol. 21

 

From the Archives of Spartacist-25th Anniversary

“International Communist League Launched”-Spartacist No. 43-44, Summer 1989

Markin comment-some of this material is obviously time-specific and dated but  some of it reads like today's headlines- Let's get going here and move onto socialism-fight the capitalist beasts.

Workers Vanguard No. 1049	11 July 2014

From the Archives of Spartacist-25th Anniversary

“International Communist League Launched”-Spartacist No. 43-44, Summer 1989

To mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), we reprint the following article from the organ of the ICL’s International Executive Committee.

It is with pride tempered by a sober assessment of our responsibilities that we announce the founding of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), previously the international Spartacist tendency. The International Executive Committee took this step on 13 May 1989.

Fifty years ago, Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s companion in arms and founder of the Red Army, proclaimed the creation of a new International to carry forward the authentic Leninist program abandoned and besmirched by the Communist International under the sway of J.V. Stalin and his anti-revolutionary bureaucratic clique. The ICL today fights to reforge the Fourth International.

In the shadow of the approaching second imperialist world war, Trotsky observed with increasing urgency that the objective preconditions for world proletarian revolution were overripe, but what was lacking to uproot decadent capitalism on the world scale and establish a socialist world order was an authentic revolutionary leadership at the head of the proletariat. The spread of the barbarism of fascism and the oncoming world war were not the only deadly dangers confronting the workers of the world at that crucial moment; posed also was the question of the very survival of the Soviet Union and the remaining gains of October.

Today once again, those who struggle against capitalist oppression and exploitation in what is unquestionably a period preparatory to war still confront that same excruciating crisis of leadership, but in a different situation. The contradictions of Soviet society and the problems of the Chinese revolutionary struggle, both brilliantly analyzed by Trotsky, have exploded with pent-up force. In the capitalist countries, the working class certainly lacks the level of socialist consciousness and organization it possessed in the 1920s and 1930s. The legacy of Stalin’s reign of terror inside the Soviet Union, and of the repetitive betrayals of crucial revolutionary opportunities, has been the massacre of pro-Communist militants from China to Spain to Greece to Chile to Iran. Stalinism has created millions of anti-Communists and the general level of identification of human progress with the idea of communism stands at a relative low point. Yet as the workings of capitalist imperialism create millions of new subjective communists across the globe, the absence of genuinely communist leadership is acutely felt by many and the program of Leninist internationalism can be put forward with great impact.

The Homeland of October Is in Grave Danger— All Power to Workers Soviets!

Under Gorbachev we have witnessed an attempt to “restructure” the Soviet economy in the direction of encouraging powerful forces toward capitalist restoration, combined with a “diplomacy” of apparently limitless appeasement of imperialism which is being paid for in blood in Afghanistan (although the mujahedin siege of Jalalabad has evidently been thrown back, much to the dismay of American policymakers and the Pakistani annexationists), and which has devastating implications as well for the working people from Nicaragua to Southern Africa to Indochina. Now within the USSR, national antagonisms—spurred by the recent “reforms” termed “market socialism” which encourage the richer republics to seek greater autonomy from their poorer neighbors, but also nourished by decades of the bureaucracy’s Great Russian chauvinism—threaten to dismember the homeland of the October Revolution. The slogan of “free elections” and the agitation for “national independence,” particularly in the Baltic states, in this context can be nothing but a transparent cover for the program of capitalist restoration. Should nationalist unrest spread to the Ukraine, this would be extremely ominous. The anti-Semites of the Russian nativist “Pamyat” fascists have grown dangerously, protected by elements of the bureaucracy. Today, the continued existence of the bureaucratic caste, the heirs of Stalin, constitutes a more immediate and direct threat to the conquests of October than ever before: what is posed is nothing less than civil war. Only through the return to the working people of their state, through the rule of soviets (councils of workers and soldiers), can the egalitarian consciousness (the idea that nobody should live off the exploitation of the labor of others) which remains deeply ingrained in sections of the Soviet working masses be mobilized in decisive struggle to uphold the gains of October.

The effects of what is termed “market socialism” are clearly shown in Eastern Europe. In Poland, the Stalinist bureaucracy’s gross economic mismanagement and heavy-handed repressiveness opened the road for workers’ grievances to be channeled into a reactionary-clericalist company union on behalf of the “free trade union” CIA along with the Western bankers and the Vatican. Every leader of Solidarność is and has been since 1981 a traitor to the working class on behalf of NATO imperialism. Today the Polish regime and Solidarność are selling the country to the IMF and are prepared to allow the historic centers of the proletariat—the Lenin Shipyard workers, the miners of Upper Silesia—to be dismembered. The Stalinist schema of “national autarky” has come home to roost—Down with the Stalinist nationalists in Moscow and East Berlin who allow the imperialist world market to regulate the terms of trade between “fraternal socialist” trading partners; reforge the historic link between the German and Polish proletariats through proletarian political revolution!

In China, the mass outpouring of defiance in early June heralded the Chinese proletarian political revolution against the corrupt and despised Stalinist bureaucracy. What began as a student upheaval around vague demands for greater democracy was embraced by the working people of Beijing who came out into the streets seeking by their massive numbers to block the unleashing of troops against the demonstrators. Some units fraternized with the crowds, other units were brought in to shoot down the people. For the moment the Deng regime has arrested the momentum of the Beijing spring with a wave of repression which has struck first and hardest at the working class. But tremendous resentment has built up among the salaried people against the beneficiaries of “building socialism with capitalist methods”—a full-fledged NEP [New Economic Policy]. The decrepit bureaucratic caste which has opened the doors of China to massive capitalist encroachment and shamelessly allied itself with U.S. imperialism can be shattered. The urgent task which stands before the Chinese workers is the forging of an authentic communist party, an internationalist vanguard, which can lead the struggle for the unity of China under workers leadership.

Stalin and Mao and all the pygmy Stalins and Maos have done everything they could to make “communism” a code word for murdering your own people and trying to get little concessions from imperialism by being its cat’s paw, as the Chinese have been America’s agent militarily against Vietnam. In part, illusions in “Western democracy” among the Chinese students stem from the misidentification of militant communism with Maoism—i.e., economic primitivism and “barracks socialism,” the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, the student protesters are singing the Internationale.

Decadent Imperialism Has Been Given a Breathing Space

Today the capitalist world remains marked by the decomposition of the short-lived “American Century”: having emerged as the dominant capitalist power after the devastation of Europe and Japan in World War II, Washington’s “new world order” quickly unraveled, beginning with the Chinese Revolution and America’s consequent embrace of its former enemy, Japan, as a bulwark against the spread of revolution in Asia, continuing with the Cuban Revolution and underlined by the dirty, losing war against the peasants and workers of Vietnam. Now beset by sharp trade rivalry with Japan and the demands of resurgent German imperialism to assume its “rightful” place as the leader of capitalist Europe, American capitalism has become the world’s biggest debtor nation; its essential industrial plant decays while its exports increasingly center on raw materials and agricultural products. At the same time this wounded capitalist colossus maintains its ambition to police the world from Latin America to the Persian Gulf, while possessing a nuclear arsenal which could destroy the world a hundred times over.

The resurgent bourgeois anti-Sovietism of the 1980s, inaugurated by Jimmy Carter’s hypocritical “human rights” crusade and escalated under the unashamed Cold Warriors of Reagan/Bush/Thatcher, highlighted the timidity and demoralization of the “left.” Also standing out sharply are the criminal passivity of the trade-union “leaders” who, confronted by sharp attacks on the workers’ living standards and working conditions, continue seeking to eschew the traditions of mass militant struggle which built the unions; the craven subservience of the “black elected officials” to the racist ruling-class establishment whose only program for jobless black youth, welfare mothers, the homeless amounts to genocide; and the bankruptcy of the “liberals” who have largely abandoned the pretense of concern for the workers and poor. Today the communists, whose aim is the proletarian conquest of state power and the reconstruction of society on a new basis, are at the same time the most consistent defenders of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the gains of bourgeois revolution: the right to bear arms; the separation of church and state—against the imposition of religious fundamentalism as a political program; against censorship, whether by “creationists” seeking to ban the teaching of evolution or “anti-pornography” feminists or the burning of Salman Rushdie’s “blasphemous” novel; against the racist death penalty; for the liberation of women. In Britain, where the bourgeois revolution was early and uncompleted, we say: Down with the monarchy, the aristocracy, the established churches—For a voluntary association of workers republics in the British Isles! In Japan, where the bourgeois revolution came late and from the top down, we demand the abolition of the emperor system—For a Japanese workers republic!

War and Revolution

Lenin, in his work on imperialism as the epoch of capitalist decay, showed that the system of class relations had now become (as Marx had analyzed) a barrier to the development of the productive forces, leading to interimperialist rivalry and war to redivide the world’s spoils. The first imperialist world war brought unprecedented suffering and mass slaughter of the working people and revealed most of the Socialists of the Second International to be cowardly chauvinist tails on the imperialist ambitions of their “own” ruling classes. But defeat in war can be the mother of revolution, and Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who had built up a hard revolutionary party and broken sharply from the social-patriots, were able to transcend their own inadequate theoretical formulas (which had denied the possibility of proletarian revolution in backward Russia) and thereby to lead the small but militant Russian working class to the taking of state power, on the basis of an internationalist program. This historic conquest on behalf of the workers of the world led straight to the foundation of the Third (Communist) International, which was able to expose the “socialist” pretensions of the respectable reformist gentlemen of the Second International and win the allegiance of advanced workers and subjectively revolutionary militants on every continent.

But the international revolutionary wave which swept up the working masses from Germany to Bulgaria receded and was thrown back; the failure to extend the Russian Revolution, particularly the failure of revolution in Germany with its powerful working class, left the young Soviet workers state isolated. Trotsky summed up the causes and future implications of the playing out of that cycle of revolutionary struggle in his Lessons of October.

In the USSR, under conditions of extreme poverty and demoralization, with the working class decimated and exhausted by the Civil War, the way was open for a conservative bureaucracy to arise as a parasitic excrescence upon the working class. By 1924, this bureaucratic caste had acquired self-consciousness and a program: the self-contradictory dogma of “Socialism in One Country”—the antithesis of the Leninist outlook of internationalism which had animated the revolution. Predicated on the illusion that it was possible for an isolated Soviet workers state to survive and coexist with capitalist imperialism over an extended period, this program in Stalin’s hands meant the destruction of the Communist International as an instrument of revolution and ultimately led straight to the murder of all the leaders of the Bolshevik Party. In place of soviet democracy was created a monstrous apparatus of bureaucratic control: first by the Stalinized party, then by the Stalin faction, and finally by Stalin backed up by a small handful of cronies, after the purge trials wiping out all the Bolshevik Old Guard.

Beginning with Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” and carried forward with new momentum under Gorbachev’s glasnost, the heirs of Stalin in the Kremlin have been forced increasingly to acknowledge the crimes of Stalin: the brutality of forced collectivization, the deportations and executions of oppositionists, the purge of the Red Army on the eve of World War II. In part a reflection of the emergence of a new generation of Soviet leaders lacking personal responsibility for Stalin’s dirty deeds, and of the growth of a new layer of Soviet academics and bureaucrats embarrassed by the transparent mendacity of official Soviet history, Gorbachev’s glasnost is mainly a response to the intractable problems of the Soviet economy. The call for “openness” in political discussion is centrally intended as an adjunct to perestroika, or “restructuring” of the economy in line with market forces, and much of the debate has as its not-so-secret agenda the refurbishing of the reputation of Nikolai Bukharin and the economic program of the Right Opposition.

Yet the Gorbachevites have been unable to prevent the raising in the discussion of the archetypical “blank space” of Soviet history: the figure of Leon Trotsky. Even as Stalin’s heirs seek to replace their discredited lies with new and different distortions, the question of Trotsky is potentially explosive, for—unlike Bukharin, Stalin’s bloc partner until 1929—Trotsky led a fight against Stalin and the epigones, aimed at restoring the domestic and international policies pursued by Soviet Russia to a Leninist course. The policies which Trotsky fought for from 1923 until his murder by Stalin’s assassin represented the Leninist alternative to Stalin, the “gravedigger of revolution.” Today Trotsky’s road is the only means for the survival of the Soviet Union.

Beginning in 1923, Trotsky and his supporters of the Left opposition sought to address the problems of the devastated Soviet economy through policies aimed at reconstituting an industrial proletariat and overcoming the divisions between city and countryside through a perspective of industrial growth. They predicted that Bukharin’s program of “socialism at a snail’s pace,” implemented by Stalin, would enormously strengthen forces toward capitalist restoration, eventually compelling the ruling clique to adopt measures proposed by the Left. This is what happened, but instead of the Left’s policy (voluntary collectivization with the incentive of mechanization of agriculture), Stalin’s version was the now-infamous brutal forced collectivization.

It is unquestionable that, even under bureaucratic leadership, the Soviet planned economy made tremendous progress and a modern country was forged in formerly backward Russia. Nonetheless, even after 50 years Trotsky’s brilliant analysis of the Soviet economy and society in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) remains the touchstone for understanding Russia today. Only the Trotskyist perspective of proletarian political revolution to reverse the political dispossession of the working class by the privileged bureaucratic caste can unleash the creativity and productivity of the Soviet working people and regulate the problems (e.g., heavy industrial investment vs. consumer goods, egalitarianism vs. “material incentives,” centralized planning vs. local control, and the problem of quality) which have bedeviled the Soviet economy recurringly and have re-emerged in sharpened form today.

Rejecting the suicidal dogma of “Socialism in One Country,” the Left oppositionists in the 1920s struggled to reassert the perspective of international extension of the revolution as the only effective answer to the isolation and capitalist encirclement of the first workers state. Events in China, where Stalin’s opportunistic subordination of the Communists to the treacherous bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek led to the beheading of a powerful revolutionary struggle, confirmed Trotsky’s warnings. But while some of Trotsky’s cothinkers believed this vindication would lead to gains for the Left, Trotsky observed that whereas a successful Chinese revolution would have increased the class consciousness and confidence of the Russian and international proletariat, the setback of revolutionary struggle would only strengthen Stalin’s hold.

The International Left Opposition, constituted in 1930, after Trotsky had been exiled from the USSR, considered itself a forcibly externalized faction fighting to return the Third International to a revolutionary course. But when Hitler’s Nazis were coming to power in Germany in 1933—based on the bourgeoisie’s fear of revolution by the powerful, pro-socialist German working class—the Stalinists refused to fight. Nor did this disaster precipitate any fundamental struggle within the Communist Parties internationally. The Trotskyists declared that the Third International could not be reformed. Especially with the promulgation in 1935 of the “People’s Front” policy—the systematic perspective of an alliance with the parties of so-called “democratic” imperialism—the conclusion was inescapable: there was no place for revolutionists in the Stalinist Communist Parties. In place of Lenin’s revolutionary International had been consolidated a powerful anti-revolutionary apparatus as a new obstacle to revolution, more disciplined and effective than the old Social Democracy. The false identification of Stalinism with Bolshevism provided Stalin with dedicated political agents throughout the world; only Stalin and perhaps a half-dozen cronies (who these were changed over time) knew what it was all about. Millions who loyally carried out his dictates, up to and including the murder of Trotskyists, believed all the while that they were fighting for socialism.

In 1933, the Trotskyists constituted themselves as the International Communist League (Bolshevik-Leninist) in recognition of the imperative need for an authentically communist new International, the Fourth International. Trotsky rightly foresaw that the menace of German fascism would lead in a straight line to war against the Soviet Union. As the interimperialist rivalries and alignments of the upcoming war took shape, the Trotskyists struggled against time to break the Stalinists’ hold over the advanced workers. The Fourth International was founded in 1938 on the basis of the document, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (the Transitional Program), and the perspective put forward in “War and the Fourth International” (1934) of uncompromising revolutionary defeatism toward all imperialist combatants, including those aligned with the USSR, combined with revolutionary defensism of the Soviet degenerated workers state.

The launching of the Fourth International was opposed by some, like Isaac Deutscher, who argued it was premature. Trotsky insisted that, on the contrary, the second imperialist world war would, like the first, provoke social convulsion throughout the capitalist world and a new wave of international revolutionary struggles. And he predicted that the brittle system of Stalinist rule in the USSR, which had arisen as an accommodation to the breathing space for the imperialist world order secured by the failure of the post-WWI revolutionary wave, would itself crack under the impact of the new world war or soon thereafter.

The validity of Trotsky’s predictions was in fact confirmed by the Red Army’s initial collapse in the face of Hitler’s invasion, as well as by the turbulent social conditions in Western Europe at the war’s end. In Italy and Greece, naked treachery by the Stalinists was needed to militarily and politically disarm the leftist Resistance forces and hand power back to the capitalist class (however, Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia refused to commit suicide—they led a peasant-based indigenous revolution to victory and established a bureaucratically deformed workers state). In France the Stalinists endorsed “national reconstruction” to re-establish a stable bourgeois regime. Trotsky’s insistence on the need for revolutionary leadership was tragically confirmed by the results of its absence: the Stalinists, who emerged stronger than before in Italy and France based on their resistance to the Nazis, were successful in deflecting revolutionary struggle.

Central to that outcome was Stalin’s success in putting over the lie that World War II in the Allied imperialist nations was a struggle of liberation—that it was a great battle against fascism and for a better world. In the context of the mass popular revulsion against fascism, Stalin’s policy of the Popular Front—the alliance with “democratic” imperialism—prevented the growth of mass antiwar sentiment paralleling the massive radicalization of World War I. The lie was successful; a war fought so that U.S. imperialism could emerge as the predominant imperialist power, the capitalist “world policeman” which rained death down on Vietnam for two decades after Dien Bien Phu, was popularly accepted as a war of the people against fascism.

Nonetheless the victory of the Anglo-American imperialist bloc was conditional. It was the Red Army which had smashed Hitler’s Wehrmacht; moreover, Hitler’s East European puppets had all made a mad dash for the nearest American headquarters, leaving behind a power vacuum which the occupying Soviet army quickly filled. The victorious imperialists had to divide Europe with Stalin.

The war devastated the small forces of the Fourth International—having geared up for battle against fascism and war, they were in effect militarily defeated. The physical obliteration of the Left Opposition in the USSR was completed by the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico by a Stalinist agent in 1940. Large numbers of Trotskyist cadre in Europe and Asia were wiped out by war and repression. The decimation of the most promising young Trotskyist leaders was a factor in the emergence of a revisionist current within the FI in the early 1950s. So was the passivity of the American Socialist Workers Party, a relatively strong party nourished by close collaboration with Trotsky, and located in a country insulated from the real carnage of the world war.

The revisionist current, led by the impressionist Michel Pablo, abandoned the perspective of workers revolutions in order to become for a time entrists into and political tails of the CPs. Worshipping the accomplished fact of Stalinism’s continued existence, they had decided it would endure perhaps for “centuries” and they therefore decided that a “new world reality” would compel it to play a “roughly revolutionary” role, obviating the need for Trotskyist parties. Within a couple of years, Russian tanks were crushing the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Today it is very clear that the CPs play no such revolutionary role in the world, while the bureaucratic caste of Stalin and his heirs has brought the Soviet Union itself to the threat of civil war, and an incipient political revolution was provoked in China. Trotsky’s expectation of a terminal crisis of Stalinism is as alive as today’s headlines.

Today the representatives of the revisionist current—having passed through a period of vicarious guerrillaist/pro-Stalinist enthusiasm which included hailing the massacre of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, then having gone for “Eurocommunism” and Soviet dissidents, and in a big way for the Solidarność devotees of Marshal Pilsudski (the bonapartist founder of modern capitalist Poland)—are in a position to do some harm as vociferous apologists of those demanding “national liberation” for the Baltic republics. In their mouth, “Trotskyism” is made out to be some kind of latter-day left social democracy.

The bourgeoisie is celebrating in anticipation of the “end of Communism.” The Stalinist bureaucracies have indeed reached the point of terminal crisis. But their crisis is because they are opposed to everything communism stands for. The national antagonisms in the Soviet Union, the revolt in China, arise in response to “market socialist” policies that are counterposed to centralized socialist planning. The bureaucratic stranglehold over political and cultural life, the appeasement that has emboldened imperialism—these are not communism, but its antithesis.

An International Program Mandates International Organization

“By its very nature opportunism is nationalistic, since it rests on the local and temporary needs of the proletariat and not on its historical tasks. Opportunists find international control intolerable and they reduce their international ties as much as possible to harmless formalities...on the proviso that each group does not hinder the others from conducting an opportunist policy to its own national taste.... International unity is not a decorative facade for us, but the very axis of our theoretical views and our policy” (Leon Trotsky, “Defense of the Soviet Republic and the Opposition,” 7 September 1929).

From the time of our tendency’s inception as a left opposition within the Socialist Workers Party of the United States in the early 1960s, we have recognized that national isolation must in short order destroy any subjectively revolutionary formation, not least one subjected to the pressures of operating in the heartland of world imperialism, the United States. We stand proudly on our record of 25 years of struggle for authentic Trotskyism and are working on documenting it archivally and historically. In January 1974 an interim Conference centered on European work and perspectives, with participation of comrades from seven countries, was held in Germany. The document which formed the programmatic basis for the Conference accepted the “responsibility to struggle actively for the constitution as soon as possible of a democratic-centralist international Spartacist tendency.”

In July 1974 the “Declaration for the Organizing of an International Trotskyist Tendency” announced the constitution of a nucleus for the early crystallization of the international Spartacist tendency, to be governed under the principle of international democratic centralism. The document sharply attacked the federalist practices of competitors claiming the mantle of Trotskyism, noting that Pablo’s political heirs of the “United Secretariat” and the Healyite “International Committee” “have chronically mocked the principles of internationalism and of Bolshevik democratic centralism as their different national groups or nationally-based factions have gone their own way—ultimately in response to the pressures of their own ruling classes.”

American Revisionists and the Voorhis Act

In particular the “Declaration for the Organizing of an International Trotskyist Tendency” noted the revisionists’ invocation of the U.S. government’s Voorhis Act as a convenient excuse for anti-internationalism. The Voorhis Act, passed in 1940, sought to massively inhibit international political affiliation through “registration” requirements intended to paralyze political organizations. Already in 1953, when the SWP was still adhering to “orthodox Trotskyism” but shrinking from waging an aggressive international fight against Pablo, they cited the Voorhis Act to justify their passivity in the international arena which had facilitated the rise of impatient young impressionists like Pablo: in his May 1953 speech, “Internationalism and the SWP,” the party’s leader, James P. Cannon, said that after 1940 “We no longer belonged to the Fourth International because the Voorhis law outlawed international connections. Our role, therefore, could only be advisory and consultative” (Speeches to the Party).

Our 1974 “Declaration” charged: “The ‘Voorhis Act’ with its patently unconstitutional and contradictory provisions has never been used by the government—only the revisionists.” We cited the United Secretariat’s evasion of our appeal against expulsion from the Socialist Workers Party: the USec’s Pierre Frank replied to us on 28 May 1965: “...we call your attention first of all to the fact that the Fourth International has no organizational connection with the Socialist Workers party and consequently has no jurisdiction in a problem such as you raise.”

Our 1974 “Declaration” also quoted, from a 1974 SWP internal bulletin, a particularly explicit SWP formula for nationally limited political responsibility:

“The Socialist Workers Party proclaims its fraternal solidarity with the Fourth International but is prevented by reactionary legislation from affiliating to it. All political activities of members of the SWP are decided upon by the democratically elected national leadership bodies of the SWP and by the local and branch units of the party.... There are no other bodies whose decisions are binding on the SWP or its members.”

Our document cited as well the assertion of national autonomy by the sinister “International Committee” of Gerry Healy, whose American publicist, Tim Wohlforth, wrote in his 1972 pamphlet, “Revisionism in Crisis”:

“With the passing of the Voorhis Act in 1940 the SWP was barred from membership in the Fourth International by law. Ever since that time the SWP has not been able to be an affiliate of the Fourth International. So today its relationship to the United Secretariat is one of political solidarity just as the Workers’ League stands in political solidarity with the International Committee.”

And we quoted our response to Healy in 1966 when he sought to suppress an opponent’s pamphlet by claiming it would render his U.S. supporters as well as ourselves vulnerable to the Voorhis Act:

“The Voorhis Act is a paper tiger—never used against anyone and patently unconstitutional. For the Justice Department to start proceedings against a small group like ours...would make the government a laughing stock, and Healy knows this. He is aware that for years the SWP has hidden behind this very act to defend its own federalist idea of an International.”

The first delegated international conference of the international Spartacist tendency was held in Britain in 1979. Over the following decade, the development of the sections, particularly in Europe, and their cohering of leaderships has become an increasingly important component in shaping the international tendency. Now looking back at the pressures to which a decade of Reaganite bourgeois reaction has subjected our American organization, we must believe that if our tendency had not achieved significant international extension, the SL/U.S. would have become an eccentric and disintegrating American sect.

For Revolutionary Regroupments— For Lenin’s Communism!

Today, our small forces confront very high stakes. The achievements of the international Spartacist tendency, now the ICL, are modest: our militant labor/black mobilizations against fascist provocations in the United States—an expression of our consistent understanding that the fight against racial oppression is key to the American workers revolution—have been warmly greeted, as have other legal and social defense initiatives of the Partisan Defense Committee and cothinkers internationally; we have protested every move by U.S. imperialism against the Latin American masses, and raised funds for Nicaragua; among some layers of the Communist movement in West Europe we have become known as “the Trotskyists who defend the Soviet Union”; our forthright championing of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, under the slogan, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan—Extend Social Gains of October to Afghan Peoples,” was grudgingly admired by elements of the Western CPs which were seeking to resist the “Eurocommunist” drift toward greater social-democratic accommodation with one’s “own” ruling class. Recently, our offer of an international brigade to fight the CIA’s mujahedin “holy warriors” after Gorbachev’s cowardly withdrawal and, when that offer was declined, our publicity and fund-raising campaign for the civilian victims of Jalalabad met with surprising support from women and from Muslim immigrants and other minorities in many countries, as well as among Stalinist milieus. Our defense of the program of “permanent revolution” for those vast areas of the world deformed by imperialist domination—i.e., that the proletariat, independent of the weak and cowardly bourgeoisie and counterposing a vision of social emancipation to the ideologies of nationalism (particularly the nationalism of the majority), must take power to achieve even those democratic tasks formerly associated with bourgeois revolutions—has won us a hearing among oppressed national minorities.

Revolutionary regroupments on the program of Leninist internationalism are the means to resolve the disproportion between our small forces and our task. The heirs of Stalin manifestly lack the capacity to defend the Soviet power, of which they have been simultaneously the parasitic defender and the counterrevolutionary disorganizer for 65 years. Yet to the same measure that they have brought “communism” into disrepute thanks to the crimes they have committed in its name, they have also reduced their ability to manipulate the allegiance of dedicated pro-Communist workers throughout the world. No longer can a Stalin and his half-dozen conscious accomplices wield “monolithic” parties as instruments of class-collaborationist treason in the name of “building socialism.”

We take our stand on the authentic communist tradition of the Bolsheviks who made the Russian Revolution. We choose the communism that had Lenin as its greatest teacher in the imperialist epoch. We choose the communism of Lenin’s comrade Trotsky, who beginning as early as 1923 understood the main lines of what needed to be done. We choose the communism that Stalin utterly betrayed as he deliberately destroyed the Third International. We choose the communism of a new Fourth International that will do away once and for all with the exploitation of man by man and establish a socialist society based on a new vision of the continual expansion of human freedom in all spheres: in politics, economics, culture and in every aspect of personal life.

We must believe that, failing sudden working-class upsurge against the conditions of capitalist decay, the reforging of a communist Fourth International, built of authentic communist parties on every continent, will be arduous and often dangerous. But this is the only road forward for all of humanity. Yet as we seek to bring this program to bear among the world’s workers and oppressed, we must recognize that the possession of the technology of nuclear holocaust by an irrational imperialist ruling class foreshortens the possibilities: we probably do not have much time.

But experience, not least bitter negative experience, can also be a powerful and accelerating teacher. We had better follow the precepts and practices of such comrades as Lenin and Trotsky. Thus we could cut short by months or years the time required for the necessary rearmament of the communist movement.