As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-The Zimmerwald Manifesto (1915)  

The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges by the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine.

The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas. The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs, were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space. Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war.                   

Over the next period as we lead up to the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

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Teddy Martin had come from a long line of workers, some of his forbears had been among the first domestic weavers in Spitalfield, had been the first machine-tenders in Manchester and had been workers like him and his father in the London shipbuilding trade. He knew deep in his blood there was an “us” and “them” in the world without his party, the Labor Party, having to tell him word one on the subject. He had even read Karl Marx in his early teens when he was trying to figure out why his family was stuck in the faraway outer tenements with their squalor and their human closeness (he never could get over being in close quarters ever since then). So yes he was ready to listen to what some left members of the party had to say if the war clouds on the horizon turned any darker. But, and hear him true, his was like his forbears and his father before him as loyal a man as to be found in the country. Loyal to his king (queen too if it came to that) and his country. So he would have to think, think carefully, about what to do if those nasty Huns and their craven allies making loud noises of late threatened his way of life. Most of his mates to the extent that they had any opinion were beginning to be swept up in the idea that a little war might not be such a bad thing to settle some long smoldering disputes. Still he, Teddy Martin, was not a man to be rushed and so he would think, think hard, about what to do if there was a mass mobilization.

No question, thought Teddy Martin, his majesty’s government had gotten itself into a hard situation ever since that mangy Archduke somebody had got himself shot by a guy, a damn anarchist working with who knows who, maybe freemasons, over in Sarajevo, over in someplace he was not quite sure he knew where it was if somebody had asked him to point it out in a map. That seemingly silly little act (except of course to the Archduke and his wife also killed) apparently has exposed Britain, damn the whole British Empire that they claim the sun never sets on, to some pretty serious entanglements because if France were to go to war with Austria or someplace like that then the king is duty bound to come to France’s rescue. And Teddy Martin as thinking man, as a working man, as a member in good standing of the Labor Party ever since its inception was still not sure what he would do. Not sure that he would follow the war cries being shouted out by the likes of Arthur Henderson from his own party. All he knew was that the usual talk of football or the prizefights that filled the air at his pub, The Cock and Bull, was being supplanted by war talk, by talk of taking a nip out of the Germans and those who spoke in that way were gaining a hearing. All Teddy knew was that it was getting harder and harder for him to openly express thoughts that he needed to think about the issues more. That was not a good sign, not a good omen. 

Yes, once the Germans were on the march toward Belgium and then threatened Paris in a race to the sea if not stopped then the guys at the Cock and Bull became more pensive, started to see that they would have to do right by the king. One night, one July night before the blood started flowing on the continent, one of the boys, Brewster, Teddy thought had led a toast to the king and all including Teddy rather sheepishly. But now, now with the blood up, no with the Empire at stake, new with even the wogs in India clamoring to serve their king and emperor Teddy Martin could see where each must do his duty. And so Teddy found himself less and less at the pub with the boys and more and more at home with his wife and two young boys waiting  for that minute when he would find himself heading to the recruiting station to give his all for his country. Although he lifted no glass to that fact.           

                  

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The German Social-Democratic Party had given Fritz Klein everything. Had taken him from a small furniture-making factory(less than one hundred employees constituting in those days small) where he led the fight for unionization (against all odds for that woefully unorganized industry and against the then still standing laws against unionization pressed by the state as well as well as the outlaw status of the S-D Party in those pre-legal days) and brought him along into the burgeoning party bureaucracy (boasting of this number of party publications, that number of members, and the pinnacle the votes attained for the growing number of party parliamentarians in the Reichstag). Made him a local then regional shop steward agent. Later found him a spot in the party publications department and from there to alternate member of the party’s national committee. As he grew older, got married, had two lovely children the party had severely sapped the youthful idealism out of him. Still he was stirred whenever Karl Liebknecht, old Wilhelm’s son, the father whom he knew from the old days, delivered one of his intellectual and rational attacks against the war aims of the Kaiser and his cabal. Still too though he worried, worried to perdition, that the British and, especially the French were deliberately stepping on German toes. Although tired, endlessly tired, he hoped that he would be able to stick to the Second International’s pledge made at Basle in 1912 to do everything to stop war in case it came, as was now likely. He just didn’t know how he would react, didn’t know at all. 

Fritz was furious, furious at two things. First that those damn whatever they were anarchists, nationalists, or whatever had assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand. Had threatened the peace of Europe, his peace, with their screwy theory of picking off various state officials thinking that would, unlike victory in the mass class struggles, change the world. Christ, they could have at least read Marx or somebody. Make no mistake Fritz had no truck with monarchy, certainly not the moribund Austro-Hungarian monarchy, despised the Kaiser himself right here in the German homeland (although on the quiet since the Kaiser was not above using his courts for the simple pleasure of skewering a man for lese majeste and had done so to political opponents and the idle wild-talkers alike). Still his blood boiled that some desperados would pick at a fellow Germanic target. Fritz was not at all sure that maybe the French, or the English, the bloody English were behind the activities. Hugo Heine thought so, his immediate regional director, so there could be some truth to the assertion.

Secondly, that same Hugo Heine had begun, at the behest of the national committee of the party, to clamp down on those who were trying to make the party live up to its promises and try to make a stand against any German, any Kaiser moves toward war over the incident at Sarajevo. The way Heine put it was that if war was to come and he hoped that it would not the Social-Democracy must not be thrown into the underground again like in the old days under Bismarck. Hugo had spent two years in the Kaiser’s jail back then for simply trying to organize his shop and get them to vote for the party then outlawed. The radical stuffing had come out of Hugo though and all he wanted was not to go back to jail now for any reason. Fritz cursed those damn anarchists again, cursed them more bitterly since they were surely going to disturb his peace.

Fritz Klein was beside himself when he heard the news, the Social-Democratic parliamentary caucus on August 4^th had overwhelming to support the Kaiser’s war budget (and because overwhelming each member was duty-bound to vote en bloc the way the majority vote went and did so despite the pleas of Karl Liebknecht), to give him the guns, ammunition and whatever he needed to pursue the war aims that were just beginning to unfold. Fritz had not expected the party to be able to stop the war preparations, or once the war clouds got too ominous, to stop the mobilizations, but he did expect that the parliamentary delegation (which was under its own discipline and not the party’s) would not cravenly grant the Kaiser’s every war supply. All those brave peacetime proclamations about the brotherhood of man and international working-class solidarity were now so much paper in the wind. He sat for a moment in disgust and disbelief that now Europe would be in flames for who knew how long before he knew he would have to explain to the party stalwarts the whys and wherefores of the budgetary decision. And have to explain why he and his comrades would soon be loading rifles instead of bags of flour somewhere near the Atlantic Ocean. For a flash he hoped for a short war but in his gut he knew the fates were fickle and that the blood of the European working-class youth would be spilled without question and without end.       

    

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Jacques Rous (and yes he traced his family roots back to the revolution, back to the “red” priest who he was named after who had led some of the plebeian struggles back then that were defeated by those damn moderate cutthroats Robespierre and Saint Just) had long been a leader the anarchist delegation in his Parisian district, had been in a few fights in his time with the damn city bourgeoisie, and had a long, very long memory of what the Germans had, and had not done, in Paris in ’71,in the time of the bloodedly suppressed Commune. Also Jacques had long memories of his long past forbears who had come from Alsace-Lorraine now in German hands. And it galled him, galled him that there were war clouds gathering daily over his head, over his district and over his beloved Paris.  

 But that was not what was troubling Jacques Rous in the spring of 1914. He knew, knew deep in his bones like a lot of his fellow anarchists, like a lot of the guys in the small pottery factory he had worked in for the past several years after being laid off from the big textile factory across the river that if war came they would know what to do. Quatrain from the CGT (the large trade union organization to which he and others in the factory belonged to) had clued them in, had told them enough to know some surprises were headed the government’s way if they decided to use the youth of the neighborhoods as cannon fodder. What bothered Jacques was not his conduct but that of his son, Jacques too named in honor of that same ancient red priest who was the lifeblood of the family. Young Jacques something of a dandy like many youth in those days, something of a lady’s man (he had reportedly a married mistress and somebody else on the side), had told one and all (although not his father directly) who would listen one night that he planned to enlist in the Grenadiers just as soon as it looked like trouble was coming. Old Jacques wondered if other fathers were standing in fear of such rash actions by their sons just then.  

Old Jacques could see the writing on the wall, remembered what it  was like when the German threatened to come back in ’70 and then came the last time. Came and left the Parisian poor to eat rats or worse when they besieged the city, old Thiers fled to Versailles, and Paris starved half-aided by those Germans and he expected the same if not worse this time because that country was now unified, was now filled with strange powerful Krupp cannon and in a mood to use it now that one of the members of their alliance had had one of its own killed in Sarajevo and all Europe was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He believed that the anarchists of Paris to a man would resist the call to arms issued by the government. Quatrain, the great leader ever since Commune days, almost guaranteed a general strike if they tried to mobilize the Parisian youth for the slaughter. Yeah Quatrain would stand tall. Jacques though had personal worries somebody had seen his son, also Jacques, heading with some of his “gilded” friends toward the 12^th Grenadier recruiting office in the Hotel de Ville ready to fight for bloody bourgeois France, for the memory of Napoleon, for the glory of battle. And he old Jacques knowing from some skimpily- held barricades back in ’71 just how “glorious” war was fretted in the night against his blood. 

Damn, the Germans were on the march again, yesterday it was Belgium and old Jacques knew in his heart where the bloody Kaiser was heading next. Hell knew it since those bloody May weeks in ’71 when the Germans acted as “honor guard” for the damn Thiers reaction once they broke out of Versailles so he was prepared to defeat his section to the death if it came to that, came to shedding an   old man’s blood. What worried Jacques, had worried him all spring was young Jacques cavalier attitude toward the impeding slaughter, his disregard for any of the principles that the old man had tried to instill in him from his youth.  Had in May joined the 47^th Grenadiers who were now stationed in a forward position in the border area between France and Belgium. Sure young Jacques looked the gallant like all the Rouses but that last look, that unknowing look that old Jacques detected in his young son before he saw him off told plenty about the fears to come. The fear that no matter how far apart they had drifted, father and son, they were kindred, they were French at this dismal hour.          

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George Jenkins dreamed the dream of many young men out in the heartland, out in the wheat fields of Kansas a dream that America, his America would keep the hell out of what looked like war clouds coming from Europe in the spring of 1914 (although dreams and dreamers were located not just on the farms since George was not a Kansas farm boy but a rising young clerk in Doc Dell’s Drugstore located in the college town of Lawrence). George was keenly interested in such matters and would, while on break or when things were slow, glance through the day later copy of the New York Times or Washington Post that Doc provided for his more worldly customers via the passing trains. What really kept George informed though was William White’s home-grown Emporia Gazette which kept a close eye on the situation in Europe for the folks.      

And with all of that information here is what George Jenkins, American citizen, concluded: America had its own problems best tended to by keeping out of foreign entanglements except when America’s direct interests were threatened. So George naturally cast skeptical eyes on Washington, on President Wilson, despite his protestations that European affairs were not our business. George had small town ideas about people minding their own business. See too also George had voted for Eugene V. Debs himself, the Socialist party candidate for President, and while he was somewhat skeptical about some of the Socialist Party leaders back East he truly believed that Brother Debs would help keep us out of war. 

Jesus, those damn Europeans have begun to make a mess for themselves now that some archduke, Jesus, an archduke in this day and age (and George Jenkins thanked some forgotten forebear for getting his clan out of Europe whenever he did so and avoided that nonsense about going to the aid of somebody over a damn archduke). Make no mistake George Jenkins had no sympathy for anarchists and was half-glad a couple of years ago when the Socialist Party booted the IWW, the damn Wobbies, out if that is what they did and the beggars didn’t just walk out. Although he had an admiration for Big Bill Hayward and his trade union fights that is all it was-admiration and policy could not be made on that basis. So no he had no truck with anarchists but to go to war over an archduke-damn. Still George was no Pollyanna and kept abreast of what was going on and it bothered him more than somewhat that guys like Senator Lodge from Massachusetts and others from the Northeast were beating the war drums to get the United States mired in a damn European war. No way, no way good solid Midwesterners would fall for that line. And so George watched and waited. Watched too to see what old Debs had to say about matters. George figured that if the war drums got loud enough then Brother Debs would organize and speak up to keep things right. That was his way.   

George, despite his membership in the American Socialist Party and devotion to its presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1912 when he travelled all over Kansas on weekends trying to drum up votes among the small hard-pressed farmers and small town people whom he was kindred with, had somewhat neglected what was happening among his fellow European socialists in the big-tent Second International. All he knew was that at least since the turn of the century when so many countries were getting industrialized and were to prove they counted making war cloud noises that the International was committed to stopping the madness of war anyway they could. He could not say though he was shocked, naïve shocked anyway, when all of Europe mobilized for war and the German Social-Democrats had led the way and voted the Kaiser’s war budget without a murmur (as far as he knew). Hadn’t this country gone crazy with war hysteria when the Maine went down and Teddy and the boys gave old hombre Spain a bloody nose in return. And received heros’ welcomes and glad tidings when they returned. Thankfully the war clouds in America were not fierce yet, but he knew once they came, as he feared they would those small farmers and small town people would not receive him with open arms like in 1912. 

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Ivan Smirnov was no kid, had been around the block a few times in this war business. Had been in the Russian fleet that got its ass kicked by the Japanese in 1904 (he never called them “Nips” like lots of his crewmates did not after that beating they took that did not have to happen if the damn Czar’s naval officers had been anything but lackeys and anything but overconfident that they could beat the Johnny-come-lately Japanese in the naval war game). More importantly he had been in the Baltic fleet when the revolution of 1905 came thundering over their heads and each man, each sailor, each officer had to choice sides. He had gone with rebels and while he did not face the fate of his comrades on the Potemkin his naval career was over.

Just as well Ivan had thought many times since he was then able to come ashore and get work on the docks through some connections, and think. And what he was thinking in the spring of 1914 with some ominous war clouds in the air that that unfinished task from 1905 was going to come to a head. Ivan knew enough about the state of the navy, and more importantly, the army to know that without some quick decisive military action the monarchy was finished and good riddance. The hard part, the extremely hard part, was to get those future peasant conscripts who would provide cannon fodder for the Czar’s ill-thought out land adventures to listen up for a minute rather than go unknowingly head-long into the Czar’s arm (the father’s arms for many of them). So there was plenty of work to do. Ivan just that moment was glad that he was not a kid.    

As the war clouds thickened after the killing of the archduke in bloody damn Sarajevo in early summer 1914 Ivan Smirnov knew in his bones that the peasant soldier cannon fodder as always would come flocking to the Czar like lemmings to the sea the minute war was declared. Any way the deal was cut the likely line-up of the Czar with the “democracies” of the West, Britain and France and less likely the United States would immediately give the Czar cover against the villainies of the Huns, of the Germans who just the other day were propping up the Czar’s treasury. It could not end well. All Ivan hoped for was that his party, the real Social-Democrats, locally known as the Mensheviks from the great split in 1903 with the Bolsheviks and who had definitely separated from that organization for good in 1912, would not get war fever just because the damn Czar was lined up with the very democracies that the party wished to emulate in Russia.

He knew too that the talk among the leadership of the Bolsheviks (almost all of them in exile and thus far from knowing what was happening down in the base of society at home) about opposing the Czar to the bitter end, about fighting in the streets again some said to keep the young workers and the peasants drifting into the urban areas from the dead-ass farms from becoming cannon-fodder for a lost cause was crazy, was irresponsible. Fortunately some of the local Bolshevik committee men in Russia and among their Duma delegation had cooler heads. Yea this was not time to be a kid, with kid’s tunnel vision, with great events working in the world. 

Jesus, thought Ivan once the Czar declared his allegiance to the Entente, once he had gotten the Duma to rubber-stamp his war budget, he could not believe that Plekhanov, the great Plekhanov, had declared for the Czar for the duration and half of his bloody own party had capitulated (the other half, the leadership half had been in exile anyway, or out of the country for some reason) this was going to be hell. There would be no short war here, no quick victory over the land hungry Huns, nothing but the stench of death filling the air overcoming all those mobilization parades and the thrown flowers, the kissed girls, the shot of vodka to fortify for the run to the front. Most of the peasant boys marching to the front these days would never see Mother Russia again, never get to smell the good Russian earth and if he had anything to say about it their own piece of good Russian earth unlike their fathers who toiled on the land for Mister’s benefit for nothing. He thought too about the noises, and they were only noises just then, exile noises that the Bolsheviks had a point in opposing the war budget in the Duma, those who had not deserted the party for the Czar in the patriotic build-up, now being sent to Siberia for their opposition. They were still the wild boys and he argued with their committeemen to keep their anti-war positions quiet for now while the hysteria was still building but he was getting to see where maybe they were right-this war would be the mother of invention for the next revolutionary phase.           

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International Socialist Conference at Zimmerwald

Manifesto

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Source: The Bolsheviks and War, by Sam Marcy ;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

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Proletarians of Europe!

The war has lasted more than a year. Millions of corpses cover the battlefields. Millions of human beings have been crippled for the rest of their lives. Europe is like a gigantic human slaughterhouse. All civilization, created by the labor of many generations, is doomed to destruction. The most savage barbarism is today celebrating its triumph over all that hitherto constituted the pride of humanity.
Irrespective of the truth as to the direct responsibility for the outbreak of the war, one thing is certain. The war which has produced this chaos is the outcome of imperialism, of the attempt on the part of the capitalist classes of each nation, to foster their greed for profit by the exploitation of human labor and of the natural treasures of the entire globe.

Economically backward or politically weak nations are thereby subjugated by the Great Powers who, in this war, are seeking to remake the world map with blood and iron in accord with their exploiting interests. Thus entire nations and countries, like Belgium, Poland, the Balkan states, and Armenia are threatened with the fate of being torn asunder, annexed as a whole or in part as booty in the game of compensations.

In the course of the war, its driving forces are revealed in all their vileness. Shred after shred falls the veil with which the meaning of this world catastrophe was hidden from the consciousness of the peoples. The capitalists of all countries who are coining the red gold of war-profits out of the blood shed by the people, assert that the war is for defense of the fatherland, for democracy, and the liberation of oppressed nations! They lie. In actual reality, they are burying the freedom of their own people together with the independence of the other nations in the places of devastation.

New fetters, new chains, new burdens are arising, and it is the proletariat of all countries, of the victorious as well as of the conquered countries, that will have to bear them. Improvement in welfare was proclaimed at the outbreak of the war – want and privation, unemployment and high prices, undernourishment and epidemics are the actual results. The burdens of war will consume the best energies of the peoples for decades, endanger the achievements of social reform, and hinder every step forward. Cultural devastation, economic decline, political reaction these are the blessings of this horrible conflict of nations. Thus the war reveals the naked figure of modern capitalism which has become irreconcilable, not only with the interests of the laboring masses, not only with the requirements of historical development, but also with the elementary conditions of human intercourse.

The ruling powers of capitalist society who held the fate of the nations in their hands, the monarchic as well as the republican governments, the secret diplomacy, the mighty business organizations, the bourgeois parties, the capitalist press, the Church – all these bear the full weight of responsibility for this war which arose out of the social order fostering them and protected by them, and which is being waged for their interests.
Workers!

Exploited, disfranchised, scorned, they called you brothers and comrades at the outbreak of the war when you were to be led to the slaughter, to death. And now that militarism has crippled you, mutilated you, degraded and annihilated you, the rulers demand that you surrender your interests, your aims, your ideals – in a word, servile subordination to civil peace. They rob you of the possibility of expressing your views, your feelings, your pains; they prohibit you from raising your demands and defending them. The press gagged, political rights and liberties trod upon – this is the way the military dictatorship rules today with an iron hand.

This situation which threatens the entire future of Europe and of humanity cannot and must not be confronted by us any longer without action. The Socialist proletariat has waged a struggle against militarism for decades. With growing concern, its representatives at their national and international congresses occupied themselves with the ever more menacing danger of war growing out of imperialism. At Stuttgart, at Copenhagen, at Basel, the international Socialist congresses have indicated the course which the proletariat must follow.

Since the beginning of the war, Socialist parties and labor organizations of various countries that helped to determine this course have disregarded the obligations following from this. Their representatives have called upon the working class to give up the class struggle, the only possible and effective method of proletarian emancipation. They have granted credits to the ruling classes for waging the war; they have placed themselves at the disposal of the governments for the most diverse services; through their press and their messengers, they have tried to win the neutrals for the government policies of their countries; they have delivered up to their governments Socialist Ministers as hostages for the preservation of civil peace, and thereby they have assumed the responsibility before the working class, before its present and its future, for this war, for its aims and its methods. And just as the individual parties, so the highest of the appointed representative bodies of the Socialists of all countries, the International Socialist Bureau, has failed them.

These facts are equally responsible for the fact that the international working class which did not succumb to the national panic of the first war period, or which freed itself from it, has still, in the second year of the slaughter of peoples, found no ways and means of taking up an energetic struggle for peace simultaneously in all countries.

In this unbearable situation, we, the representatives of the Socialist parties, trade unions and their minorities, we Germans, French, Italians, Russians, Poles, Letts, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Swedes, Norwegians, Dutch, and Swiss, we who stand, not on the ground of national solidarity with the exploiting class, but on the ground of the international solidarity of the proletariat and of the class struggle, have assembled to retie the torn threads of international relations and to call upon the working class to recover itself and to fight for peace.

This struggle is the struggle for freedom, for the reconciliation of peoples, for Socialism. It is necessary to take up this struggle for peace, for a peace without annexations or war indemnities. Such a peace, however, is only possible if every thought of violating the rights and liberties of nations is condemned. Neither the occupation of entire countries nor of separate parts of countries must lead to their violent annexation. No annexation, whether open or concealed, and no forcible economic attachment made still more unbearable by political disfranchisement. The right of self-determination of nations must be the indestructible principle in the system of national relationships of peoples.

Proletarians!

Since the outbreak of the war, you have placed your energy, your courage, your endurance at the service of the ruling classes. Now you must stand up for your own cause, for the sacred aims of Socialism, for the emancipation of the oppressed nations as well as of the enslaved classes, by means of the irreconcilable proletarian class struggle.

It is the task and the duty of the Socialists of the belligerent countries to take up this struggle with full force; it is the task and the duty of the Socialists of the neutral states to support their brothers in this struggle against bloody barbarism with every effective means. Never in world history was there a more urgent, a more sublime task, the fulfillment of which should be our common labor. No sacrifice is too great, no burden too heavy in order to achieve this goal: peace among the peoples.
Working men and working women! Mothers and fathers! Widows and orphans! Wounded and crippled! We call to all of you who are suffering from the war and because of the war: Beyond all borders, beyond the reeking battlefields, beyond the devastated cities and villages –

Proletarians of all countries, unite!

Zimmerwald, September 1915.

 

In the name of the International Socialist Conference:

For the German delegation: Georg Ledebour, Adolf Hoffmann.
For the French delegation: A. Bourderon, A. Merrheim.
For the Italian delegation: G.E. Modigliani, Constantino Lazzari.
For the Russian delegation: N. Lenin, Paul Axelrod, M. Bobrov.
For the Polish delegation: St. Lapinski, A. Warski, Cz. Hanecki.
For the Inter-Balkan Socialist Federation: In the name of the Rumanian delegation: C. Rakovsky; In the name of the Bulgarian delegation: Wassil Kolarov.
For the Swedish and Norwegian delegation: Z. Hoglund, Ture Nerman.
For the Dutch delegation: H. Roland-Holst.
For the Swiss delegation: Robert Grimm, Charles Naine.

International Socialist Commission at Berne,
Bulletin No. 1, p. 2,
September 21, 1915.

Defend The Cuban Revolution 

A YouTube film clip of Pete Seeger performing Guantanamera.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.


Markin comment:

As has been appropriate on this date for over one half a century- Defend The Cuban Revolution! Free The Cuban Five!

GUANTANAMERA

Original music by Jose Fernandez Diaz
Music adaptation by Pete Seeger & Julian Orbon
Lyric adaptation by Julian Orbon, based on a poem by Jose Marti

Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crecen las palmas
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crecen las palmas
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma

Chorus:
Guantanamera
Guajira Guantanamera
Guantanamera
Guajira Guantanamera

Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmin encendido
Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmin encendido
Mi verso es un ciervo herido
Que busca en el monte amparo

Chorus

I am a truthful man from this land of palm trees
Before dying I want to share these poems of my soul
My verses are light green
But they are also flaming red

(the next verse says,)
I cultivate a rose in June and in January
For the sincere friend who gives me his hand
And for the cruel one who would tear out this
heart with which I live
I do not cultivate thistles nor nettles
I cultivate a white rose

Cultivo la rosa blanca
En junio como en enero
Qultivo la rosa blanca
En junio como en enero
Para el amigo sincero
Que me da su mano franca

Chorus

Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazon con que vivo
Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazon con que vivo
Cardo ni ortiga cultivo
Cultivo la rosa blanca

Chorus

Con los pobres de la tierra
Quiero yo mi suerte echar
Con los pobres de la tierra
Quiero yo mi suerte echar
El arroyo de la sierra
Me complace mas que el mar

Chorus

©1963,1965 (Renewed) Fall River Music, Inc (BMI)
All Rights Reserved.

“Food Chains” private screening in NYC brings out a VIP crowd… Screening recruits powerful new allies in the fight for Fair Food! Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation, addresses the crowd ahead of the private screening of the documentary “Food Chains” in Manhattan this past Tuesday. These past few weeks, while millions of Americans have been hitting the beaches or heading to the hills to escape the mid-summer heat, the intrepid film crew from the documentary “Food Chains” has been criss-crossing the country as part of the long promotional campaign ahead of the film’s big November release.   Their tour brought them to New York City this past Tuesday for an invitation-only showing of the film at the Bryant Park Hotel screening room in midtown Manhattan attended by a VIP crowd of Oscar-nominated filmmakers, representatives of leading philanthropical foundations, and some of the city’s top labor, community, and food industry leaders.  Representatives from the CIW were also on hand to take questions from the crowd following the screening... Head over to the CIW website to read the firsthand report from the screening from “Food Chains” director

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold- The Life And Times Of British Master Spy Kim Philby

What Made Double Agent Kim Philby A Great Spy? His Friends.

July 27, 2014

 

http://www.wbur.org/npr/335777906/what-made-double-agent-kim-philby-a-great-spy-his-friends

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Copyright 2014 National Public Radio (Source).

HEROIC RUSSIAN SPIES OR BRITISH DUPES?

BOOK REVIEW

DECEIVING THE DECEIVERS: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, S.J. Hamrick, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004.

I like a James Bond spy thriller, replete with the latest technology, as well as the next guy. Le Carre’s Cold War-inspired George Smiley series. Even better. So when I expected to get the real ‘scoop’ on the actions of the Kim Philby-led Ring of Five in England that performed heroic spy service for the Soviet Union I found instead mostly skimpy historical conjecture by Mr. Hamrick. The central premise of his book that the Ring of Five was led by the rings in their noses by Western intelligence made me long for one of Mr. le Carre’s books. Apparently the only virtue of the opening of Cold War archives has been not to bring some clarity about the period but to create a cottage industry of conjecture and coincidence that rivals the Lee Harvey Oswald industry. Interestingly, the New York Review of Books (April 26, 2007) in its review of Mr. Hamrick’s book brought in the big guns. The review by Phillip Knightley, who actually has done some heavy work sorting out the Philby case, politely, too politely, dismisses the claims as so much smoke. No disagreement there from these quarters.

Intelligence gathering, as we are painfully aware in light of the Iraq fiasco, is a very inexact science. So mistakes, honest mistakes unlike the fudged Iraq intelligence, are part of the price for increased knowledge about what your enemy is up to. This writer makes no bones about his admiration for Kim Philby and the others who came over to the side of communism, as they saw it. That they were traitors to their English upper class upbringing, to boot, only increases their appeal. One can argue all one wants to about whether the information they provided to the Soviets was good, tainted, ignored or thrown in the waste paper basket. The question for history is did they subjectively aim to aid the cause of socialism. And did they come to regret their youthful decisions. From all the evidence, especially in the case of Philby, they did not. Until someone comes up with the ‘smoking gun’ that the Ring of Five’s work was all a sham socialists should still honor their memories. And that of Richard Sorge in Japan. Also Leopold Trepper and his “Red Orchestra” in Europe during the German Occupation. And, dare I say it, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States.

***When The Artist Formerly Known As Prince Was Prince- The Thirtieth Anniversary Of Purple Rain

Yeah, purple rain, purple rain

Minneapolis' Starring Role In 'Purple Rain'

by Allison Keyes

September 03, 2011 4:47 AM ET

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hide captionPrince, onstage at the Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue, in a scene from the film Purple Rain.

Warner Brothers/AP

From the opening scenes of Purple Rain, as Prince and the Revolution rock the stage of the cavernous First Avenue nightclub, it's clear that the city of Minneapolis, with its thriving music scene, is going to be a character of its own.

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hide captionThe First Avenue nightclub during the Purple Rain era.

Dan Corrigan

The First Avenue nightclub during the Purple Rain era.

Dan Corrigan

In 1984, when Prince made his film debut in the semi-autobiographical movie, he was already a homegrown star, a Minneapolis boy who cut his musical chops in the city's kaleidoscopic music scene.
By the time Purple Rain was filmed, Prince was already a regular on the First Avenue stage. But in the film, Prince plays The Kid, a talented and charismatic musician with a lot to prove, who channels his angst into his music. He's got plenty to go around. Beset by the demons of domestic abuse at home, his music doesn't go over with the manager of the hottest club in town.
Apollonia Kotero, who played the beautiful aspiring singer with whom The Kid begins to fall in love, says she was already familiar with the diverse music scene in Minneapolis by the time she arrived. She even knew about the club where Prince took her on the night of her audition for the film.
"I remember it was crowded and all these people were staring," she says. "And I thought, 'Oh, this is like, this is like his place!' And we danced!"

ii

hide captionThe Ike Reilly Assassination performs at First Avenue earlier this year.

Allison Keyes/NPR

The Ike Reilly Assassination performs at First Avenue earlier this year.

Allison Keyes/NPR

Roy Freedom, who has been a DJ at First Avenue for 30 years, says that Prince's music fit right into the club's cutting-edge vibe in the 1980s.
"It was just a really exciting, fun time. Well, Prince was the main thing, of course," Freedom says. "There was that whole wave of what was coming over from England — New Order — and then we had some New York stuff. I don't know if you remember; there was a song called 'The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.' That was a big record here."
Jon Bream, a music critic who has been with the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 36 years, first saw Prince perform at the Capri Theater here in 1979.
"That's one of the great blessings of him growing up here," Bream says. This live music town, he says, had a mix of sounds when Prince was coming up that included punk, garage rock, funk and R&B. "So he didn't limit himself to R&B music. He listened to everything. He listened to a lot of classic rock and got a lot of influences in his music."
When Purple Rain came out in 1984, it drew attention to Minneapolis, but many figures in the local music scene don't think the movie really had a huge effect on the city's music. Especially since, at the time, it was already boasting other hot bands like The Replacements and Husker Du.

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hide captionA star commemorating the filming of Purple Rain painted on the wall inside First Avenue.

Allison Keyes/NPR

A star commemorating the filming of Purple Rain painted on the wall inside First Avenue.

Allison Keyes/NPR

"The movie had absolutely no relevant bearing on anything," says Steve McClellan, who spent more than 30 years in booking and management at First Avenue. McClellan calls Prince a fantastic artist whose music broke down some racial barriers that used to effect Minneapolis clubs in the '80s. But, he says, the movie itself didn't improve local music.
"A lot of mediocre bands were created very quickly because the major labels signed anybody funk," McClellan says. "That happens in every market, right?"
Recording engineer Joe Mabbott runs the Hideaway Studio in Northeast Minneapolis, where he has recorded many of the city's notable hip-hop musicians including P.O.S., Brother Ali, Dessa and Atmosphere. He says the local music scene remains diverse to this day.
"I think it helps that Purple Rain was done here in the area, but obviously it's gone way past that," he says. "A huge array of styles of music, from hip-hop to traditional Irish folk music to everything in-between, basically."
But Bream says Prince — and Purple Rain — changed the stakes for musicians in Minneapolis. "People knew you could make it out of here and make it big. Bob Dylan is from here. He went to college here, but he had to move to New York to make it," he says. "Prince proved you could stay here to make it, and you could make it huge."
The movie's mystique clearly lives on: Bream says that almost any big-time rock band that comes through Minneapolis on tour makes some comment about Prince and Purple Rain, especially if it plays First Avenue.

********

'Purple Rain' Taught Me How To Be In A Band

by Eric Deggans

July 26, 201410:00 AM ET

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i i

hide caption"I never wanted to be your weekend lover": Prince and his Purple Rain costar Appolonia Kotero.

Warner Bros./Getty Images

"I never wanted to be your weekend lover": Prince and his Purple Rain costar Appolonia Kotero.

Warner Bros./Getty Images

Prince's semi-autobiographical film, Purple Rain, hit theaters 30 years ago this weekend, presenting the world with a bold new model for the contemporary pop artist. NPR television critic Eric Deggans remembers the moment vividly. Hear his conversation with special correspondent Michele Norris above, and read his personal essay on the movie below.

---

Little compares to that magic moment when you sit down in a movie theater and watch a film that seems as if it's telling your story. That happened to me three decades ago. The film was Prince's pop-funk masterpiece, Purple Rain.
The movie and its soundtrack were milestones for music and media: the christening of Prince as a pop star and the explosion of his uniquely multicultural, genre-bending, sex-drenched form of funky sonic genius.
But for me, nothing before had so fully captured what it was like to perform in a band.
I was a young drummer starting a band with classmates at Indiana University, which would eventually get a short stint as Motown recording artists, playing throughout the Midwest and even in Japan. Watching Purple Rain, before all that would happen, felt a bit like seeing an autobiography, set to the baddest music around.
A band is essentially a marriage with three or four or eight or ten people. It requires you to spend outlandish amounts of time together, sweating to make the kind of art that might move a few hearts and allow you to earn a living besides.
For all its flaws — from the stilted, amateurish acting to clumsy direction and clunky lines — Purple Rain nailed that feeling. As Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman begged Prince to let the band play one of their songs, I relived a thousand other band fights fueled by insecurity, fatigue and immaturity.
Seeing them eventually work it out and blow the roof off of the First Avenue club felt like a special message: You can do this, too.

YouTube

Purple Rain was special to the world for many other reasons. At a time before YouTube, social media or the World Wide Web, few artists had the power to create multimedia experiences on multiple platforms to speak directly to fans.
Prince, who cultivated a mystique by giving few interviews and revealing little about his life or work, let fans into a fictionalized version of his history on the big screen. And the film, juiced by career-making turns from slick lothario Morris Day and his band The Time, gave Prince-heads a super-sized vision of their idol, tooling around Minneapolis with a tricked-out motorcycle and fiercely ruffled shirts.
Not many years before, the music world was seriously segregated. MTV had to be shamed into playing Michael Jackson videos and the "disco sucks" movement too often felt like a thinly veiled way of saying, "black and brown and gay people suck."

The Record

My American Dream Sounds Like Prince

But Prince offered a musical world that put genres in a blender. "Let's Go Crazy" married a bouncy '50s-style rock rhythm to a percolating, '80s pop funk beat. "Purple Rain" was a soulful ballad fired up by incendiary guitar solos. "When Doves Cry" was a percussive marvel held together by a spastic drum machine groove and soaring, Prince-ian vocals.
Sitting in an Indiana theater packed with kids my age, I saw Purple Rain as a validation of the musical world I was already seeking out: a glorious, paisley-drenched descendant of Sly & the Family Stone by way of James Brown and Bill Haley's Comets.
Film purists will insist the movie itself is pure shlock. The female lead, Patricia "Appolonia" Kotero, emotes like she learned her lines that morning. Only the masterful Clarence Williams III — the Mod Squad veteran who gives an emotional performance as Prince's abusive father — seemed to have any real acting chops at all.
But when you're on the tip of a cultural revolution, little of that matters. And looking back over 30 years, it's obvious that Purple Rain became a generational manifesto, while providing the largest megaphone yet for one of the greatest geniuses in pop music.

***21^st Century Teen Angst and Alienation- Liam James’ The Way Way Back

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Way Way Back, starring Liam James, Steve Carroll, 2013 

Call it them generation of’68, the “me” generation, the millennial generation, generation X,Y, or Z any way you package it the growing of up years of each generation have been filled with more teenage angst and alienation that you  could shake a stick at. And while each generation has its own little sociological quirks, for example today’s average teens are more likely to face their anxieties in single parent homes than say, the generation of ’68, there are many more similarities. Take the film under review, The Way Way Back, definitely a 21^st century teen angst “coming of age” film where this generation of ‘68er found himself uncomfortably squirming in his seat at various points remembering back to some very familiar episodes.        

Now this film is billed as a comedy and in many ways it is but it also contains the raw data of themes that most teens run through-questions of self-esteem and self-identity, close and distant relationships with parents and the adult world generally, and the question of questions for most guys-what makes girls tick (most girls just flip the genders, okay). All of those are questions that our “hero” Duncan (played by Liam James) encounters and has to work through in dealing with his world one summer when he, his mother, Pam, her fairly new boyfriend, Trent (played by Steve Carroll), and his daughter, Steph, pack up to go to Trent’s summer place down in Cape Cod for some fun in the sun.   

Naturally school’s out for the summer so Duncan should be ready from the get-go for fun and checking out the girls at the beach. This thing however starts out as something like a prison camp for the alienated Duncan (including his initial hunched-up physical persona) who still hasn’t resolved the break-up of the family home and his long gone dad and who moreover loathes Trent. And Trent and the summer time adult gang, including Pam, do nothing to alleviate that feeling as they drink and carouse the weeks away. What does alleviate some tensions  is meeting “wild and wooly” mad monk Owen who helps run the waterworks amusement park in town, gives Duncan a summer job and some serious, if at times comical, advise about how to survive until adulthood. Throw in a short, if chaste, relationship with the girl next door ( a fox whom he should have been all over from minute one once she came hither on him but he was too wrapped in the teen angst thing to see that he could have gone that summer route-but we all made those kinds of mistakes) and a scandalous confrontation with Pam and Trent over Trent’s backdoor affair with a neighbor’s wife to add to the pile of wisdom that Duncan figures out by the time that whole crowd leaves early to go home and try to survive until next summer. A few places toward the end were a little too “feel good” but this one is worth watching for the chuckles and the traumas.         

DEFEND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION!!! 

 

COMMENTARY

END THE U.S. BLOCKADE!-U.S. OUT OF GUANTANAMO!

This year marks the 58th anniversary of the Cuban July 26th movement, the 52nd anniversary of the victory of the Cuban Revolution and the 44th anniversary of the execution of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara by the Bolivian Army after the defeat of his guerrilla forces and his capture in godforsaken rural Bolivia. I have reviewed the life of Che elsewhere in this space (see blog, dated July 5, 2006). Thus, it is fitting to remember an event of which he was a central actor. Additionally, the Cuban Revolution stood for my generation, the Generation of '68, and, hopefully, will for later generations as a symbol of revolutionary intransigence against United States imperialism.

Let us be clear about two things. First, this writer has defended the Cuban revolution since its inception; initially under a liberal- democratic premise of the right of nations, especially applicable to small nations pressed up against military forces of the imperialist powers, to self-determination; later under the above-mentioned premise and also that it should be defended on socialist grounds, not my idea of socialism- the Bolshevik, 1917 kind- but as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolution nevertheless. That prospective continues to be this writer’s position today. Secondly, my conception of revolutionary strategy and thus of world politics has for a long time been far removed from Fidel Castro’s (and Che’s) strategy, which emphasized military victory by guerrilla forces in the countryside, rather than my position of mass action by the urban proletariat leading the rural masses. That said, despite those strategic political differences this militant can honor the Cuban revolution as a symbol of a fight that all anti-imperialist militants should defend.

Let me expand on these points, the first point by way of reminiscences. I am old enough to have actually seen Castro’s Rebel Army on television as it triumphantly entered Havana in 1959. Although I was only a teenager at the time and hardly politically sophisticated I, like others of my generation, saw in that ragtag, scruffy group the stuff of romantic revolutionary dreams. I was glad Batista had to flee and that ‘the people’ would rule in Cuba.

Later, in 1960 as the nationalizations occurred in response to American imperialist pressure, I defended them. In fact, as a general proposition I was, hazily and without any particular thought, in favor of nationalizations everywhere. In 1961, despite my then deeply felt affinity for the Kennedys, I was pleased that the counterrevolutionaries were routed at the Bag of Pigs. Increased Soviet aid and involvement in the economic and political infrastructure of beleaguered Cuba? No problem. The Cuban Missile Crisis, however, left me and virtually everyone in the world, shaking in our boots. Frankly, I saw this crisis (after the fact) as a typical for the time Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union with Cuba as the playground. Not as some independent Cuban ploy. In short, my experiences at that time can be summed up by the slogan- Fair Play for Cuba. So far, a conclusion that a good liberal could espouse as a manifestation of a nation’s, particularly a small nation’s, right to self-determination. It is only later, during the radicalization of the Vietnam War period that I moved beyond that position.

Now to the second point and the hard politics. If any revolution is defined by one person the Cuban revolution can stand as that example. From its inception it was Fidel’s show, for better or worse. The military command, the strategy, the political programs, and the various national and international alliances all filtered through him. On reflection, that points out the basis problem and my major difference with the Fidelistas. And it starts with question of revolutionary strategy. Taking power based on a strategy of guerrilla warfare is fundamentally difference from an urban insurrection led by a workers party (or parties) allied with, as in Cuba, landless peasants and agricultural workers responsible to workers and X (fill in the blank for whatever allies apply in the local situation) councils. And it showed those distortions then and continues to show them as the basis for decision making –top down. It is necessary to move on from there.

Believe me, this writer as well as countless others, all went through our phase of enthusing over the guerrilla road to socialism. But, as the fate of Che and others makes clear, the Cuban victory was the result of exceptional circumstances. Many revolutionaries stumbled over that hard fact and the best, including Che, paid for it with imprisonment or their lives. In short, the Bolshevik, 1917 model still stands up as a damn good model for the way to take power and to try to move on to the road to socialism. Still, although I have made plenty of political mistakes in my life I have never regretted my defense of the Cuban Revolution. And neither should militants today. As Che said- the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution- and to defend them too. Enough said. U.S. HANDS OFF CUBA! END THE BLOCKADE! U.S. OUT OF GUANTANAMO