From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution- Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 968
5 November 2010
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)
In Defense Of The October Russian
Revolution Of 1917- Comrade Markham’s Tale-Take
One
From The Pen Of Frank
Jackman
Comrade
Markham had been born a “red diaper baby.” I will explain what that means in a
minute but first to that Comrade Markham moniker. That name is the only name I have
known him by ever since I ran into him at an anti-war planning session over in
Cambridge a couple of years back, back in the fall of 2012, when we were
trying, people like Comrade Markham, the guys from Veterans for Peace, guys and
gals from some socialist groups and the usual Quakers, traditional peace
activists who always sign on to these efforts, to organize against the latest
governmental war cries. Although the previous decade or so had seen anti-war
mobilizations, great and small, mainly small, this session was planning a rally
to oppose President Obama’s then latest attempt to intervene in the civil war
in Syria. Comrade Markham, then eighty-seven years old and still trying to
change this wicked old world for the better rather than sitting in some
assisted living hellhole wasting away, had introduced himself to the group under
that moniker and although I had not seen him around before, had no sense of his
history then, others greeted and addressed him by that name without a snicker.
Of course as
I found out later that moniker was not his real name but had been the one that
he had used in his long-time membership in the old American Communist Party,
not the current version which is kind of out in limbo, but the one that we who
came of age in the 1960s had cut our teeth on as the great “red menace,” who
were taking “Moscow gold,” taking Stalin and his progeny’s gold, in order to undermine the American way of
life and so we had to be ever vigilant in the red scare Cold War night. He had
used the name so long that he knew no other to be called and in my associations
with him as he told me his story that is what I always called him. Someday I
suppose we will find out his real name but his story, an unusual American story,
is what matters and what will be forever his memorial.
But back to
that “red diaper baby” designation I promised to tell you about. Now I had
heard that designation before, back in the late 1960s when Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) was cutting a big swath through the political
landscape, especially among students. That was the time when even some of us
who came straight from the working-classes to be the first in our families to
go to college believed that students comfortably ensconced in ivory tower “red”
universities had replaced the working class and oppressed of the world as the
center of progressive action. A fair number of the emerging leaders, again some
who also were out of working class neighborhoods in places like Chicago,
Detroit, New York City and Oakland, had had parents who belonged to the
Communist Party or some other left-wing organization and were not like many of
us the first generation of radicals in our families. Thus the “red diaper baby”
designation which in some cases gave those who had grown up in that political milieu
an unwarranted standing based on some usually long past affiliation by their now
bourgeois (or better for working class kids bourgeoisified) parents. What has
made Comrade Markham unique in my
experience is that he was a red diaper baby from parents who had helped establish
the Communist Party in America back around 1920 (or one of the two that emerged
from the old Socialist Party but that story of the hows and whys of the
existence of two parties are beyond what I want to tell you about here except
in passing).
That thread
of history intrigued me, his whole story intrigued me as I pieced it together
in bits and pieces, and so after a couple of those planning sessions I asked
him to sit down with me wherever he liked and tell me his story. We did so in
several sessions most of them held in the Boston Public Library where he liked
go and check out books, magazines and newspapers about the old days, about the
time of his activist political prime. What I did not expect to get was an
almost chemically pure defense of the Soviet Union, of the Soviet experience,
through thick and thin until the end in 1990 or so. And of a longing for the
days when such questions mattered to a candid world. I admit I shared some of
his nostalgia, some of his sense that while this wicked old world needs a new
way of social relations to the means of production we are a bit wistful in our
dreams right now. That is why his story appears here as a running personal commentary
on this 97th anniversary year of the Russian October Revolution of
1917.
It is
probably hard today at least three generations removed from the time of the
great Russian October Revolution of 1917 to understand, to understand in depth.
the strong pro-revolutionary feeling that that event brought forth in the
world- the first fitful workers’ state, a state for the international
working-class to call its own, to defend against all the international
reaction. Of course that strong pro-revolutionary response also has its
opposite effect on the international bourgeoisie which was ready to move might
and main to break the back of the revolution and did so, did actively attempt,
one way or another, supporting one native anti-revolutionary faction or
another, or intervening directly. (The international bourgeoisie had as its
allies as well some of the reformist leaderships and better off segments of the
Western working class who were as fearful of revolution as any bourgeois). This
was the heady atmosphere in which Comrade Markham’s parents, known in the party
as Comrade Curtis and Comrade Rosa (after the late martyred Polish
revolutionary liked after the failed Spartacist uprising in Germany in late
1918, Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution), moved in the early days of
the party formed here in America.
See Curtis
and Rosa had a long socialist past, had grown up respectively in a Kansas farm
belt (him) and a Chicago steel belt (her), had worked individually to build the
pre-World War I Socialist Party in their respective places of birth and had met
in Chicago when Curtis moved there to work on the 1912 presidential campaign
for the revered Eugene V. Debs (who amassed over one million votes that years,
a watershed year for socialist votes, gathered in large part by activists like
Curtis and Rosa who worked overtime for his election). They had been aligned
with the left-wing of the party in most of its internal debates and votes,
especially as President Woodrow Wilson and his administration started beating
the war drums to go to the aid of the Allies in the utterly stalemated World
War I. A war where the flower of the European youth had laid down their heads
for no apparent reason and Wilson was preparing the same fate for American
youth. Segments of the party wanted to support those efforts or to “duck” the
issue. So they were strongly for him and his supporters when Debs decided to
outright oppose the war entry publicly in 1917. Naturally they were rounded up
and went to jail for a time (at this time they also had also gotten married in
order to be able to visit whichever one was in jail at any given time) and
became more closely associated with the left-wing that was forming to defiantly
oppose American entry into the war but also a myriad of policies that the
right-wing leadership (socialist right-wing not generic right-wing) had imposed
on the party.
The pre-war
Socialist Party in America like a lot of socialist parties around the world
then had been based on the working class but had also been reliant on other
classes like farmers and urban professionals, especially during electoral
periods. So the American organization was a loose organization. Loose until
faction fight time, or when the leadership felt some threat and pulled the
hammer down on party discipline usually gunning for elements to their left but
sometimes just any opposition that might vie for party power which encompassed
many divergent elements. Elements that were not always on the same page. Comrades
Curtis and Rosa had to laugh when the old time Socialist Party leadership used
as its calling-card its looseness as against the Bolshevik iron vice. They knew
first-hand that leadership did not play second fiddle to anyone where
bureaucratic abuse occurred.
The biggest
organizations, better to say federations, were the Midwestern farmers, those
sturdy wheat and corn farmers from Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma who had moved over
from the defunct Populist and Greenback parties who could not keep up with the
times, the foreign language federations which included both American citizens
and recent immigrants who were merely transferring their socialist loyalties from
their native parties to the American one , and a smaller grouping of what I
would call “natives” who had been around America for a few generations and who
were city dwellers or worked in city professions like lawyering, journalism,
medicine and the like. These three rather heterogeneous groups and what
happened to them later are important to Comrade Markham’s parents’ story since
they were both native born and his father had been a law clerk (after he left
the farm and got some clerkship for a lawyer in Kansas City) and his mother a
school teacher (her steelworker father working overtime to put her through
Chicago Normal School as the first of her family to go to college).
A fair
number of the foreign language federations were opposed to American entry into
the war, as were farmers and the professionals and as noted a fair number were
rounded up and went to jail (or like with the IWW, Industrial Workers of the
World, Wobblies, anarchist workers were deported quickly if their immigration
status was shaky). What started the big fights inside the party, what got
Comrades Curtis and Rosa up in arms, was what attitude to take toward the
Russian revolution. Not so much the February 1917 revolution which overthrew
the useless Czar but the Bolshevik-led October revolution which its leaders,
Lenin and Trotsky, proclaimed as the first victory in the international battle
to make socialism the new way to produce and distribute the world’s goods. The
party split into several factions over this issue but what is important is that
Curtis and Rosa found themselves working with other “natives,” guys like Jim
Cannon, John Reed, Earl Browder, Jack Johnstone, some of the New York union
leaders, and many party writers who saw the Russian October as the new wave for
humankind and were ready to move might and main to defend that revolution
against all comers. That is the baptism of fire that the as yet unborn Comrade
Markham had in his genes.
Some say
that the events around the left-wing’s expulsion from the Socialist Party, or
rather what those leftist did, or did not do, to get themselves expelled, did
not bode well for those who would go on to form the American Communist parties
(yes, plural as two separate parties, one based roughly on the foreign language
federations, especially the Russian, Finnish, and Slavic, and the other around
the “natives,” the faction Curtis and Rosa worked with as noted above). There
is always a tension when great events occur and there is an impassable division
of the house over the issues and so whether the split/expulsion was premature
or necessary was not under the control of the ousted faction. Sure, staying in
would have produced a better, clearer explanation for why a split was necessary
in the post-October world. But the Russians were setting up a Communist
International in which they recognized, taking their own experiences in Russian
socialist politics as a guide, that in the age of imperialism, that the “party
of the whole class,” the socialist “big tent” where everybody who called
themselves socialists found a home was no longer adequate as a revolutionary
instrument to seize state power and begin the socialist agenda. Comrades Curtis
and Rosa had done yeoman’s work in Chicago and New York to round up all the
supporters of the Russian revolution they could before the hammer came down.
Although they were not in the first rank of left-wing leaders they were just
below that and had a certain authority having served jail time for their
anti-war views. Some of the few “natives” who faced that choice.
As mentioned
above some of the organizations which had been affiliated with the Socialist
Party were not on the same page. That fact was equally true of the groupings
who would try to form an American Communist Party. This is the place where the
differences between the foreign language federations and the “natives” came to
the fore (again these are rough divisions of the social basis of the
antagonistic groupings as there was some overlap as usual). So for a few years
there were two parties, both underground at the beginning given the heat from
the American bourgeoisie who were apoplectic about the revolution in Russia
(including armed intervention there) and unleased the Palmer Raids to round up
every red under every bed and kill them through vigilante action, deport them
or jail them (named after the Attorney-General of the time). Mostly Curtis and
Rosa kept a low profile, worked clandestinely (having already seen American
jails they were leery of going back and one could not blame them, especially
Rosa who had a hard time having been placed with the common criminal women for
lack of other facilities and who had to fend off one woman who wanted to make
Rosa her “girl”), tried to keep the press published and distributed, and tried
to fight against all the various “theories” that basically ignorant American
comrades had about the “virtues” of an underground party which the foreign
language federations were in favor of. The issue of the legal/underground party
finally after a few years of controversy had to be resolved by the Russians, by
the Communist International, hell, by Trotsky himself. So for a time Comrades
Curtis and Rosa had a very high opinion of that Russian leader, that victorious
leader of the Red Army, especially after Jim Cannon came back with the favorably
verdict and how it was arrived at. If anything, according to Comrade Markham’s recollections of what his parents told him
about the founding days of the party they became even more fervent about
defense of the Russian revolution and spent a great deal of time during the
early years propagandizing for American governmental recognition of the Soviet
Union.
The early
1920s say up to about 1924 were hectic for the American Communist Party, hectic
until the Communist International straightened out that dispute between the
“legal” party and “underground” party factions noting that the changed
political climate allowed the party to act more openly (the frenzy of the red
scare Palmer raid days abated in the “lost generation,” “Jazz Age ”days but
where the “dog days” of political struggle of the 1920s in the labor movement were
then also descending on the American landscape). The hard “under-grounders” had
departed leaving those who wanted to increase the public face of the party able
to do so without rancor (of course other disputes would rise up to enflame the
factions but that is another story). Still the party in many ways was
rudderless, had not kept pace with what was going on in the Communist
International. Nowhere was this problem more apparent than the whole question
of supporting a farmer-labor party in the 1924 presidential elections, in
short, to support that old progressive Republican, Robert Lafollette, in his
independent campaign.
The impulse
was to make a big public splash on the national scene with the advantages that
the exposure of a national campaign would bring. Both Comrades Curtis and Rosa
having been public activists and strong supporters of the idea pushed Jim
Cannon and his co-thinker, Bill Dunne, toward support for the idea. Cannon and
Dunne a little more knowledgeable about American bourgeois organizations were
lukewarm after the Chicago labor leaders balked and began a red-baiting
campaign. Curtis and Rosa saw that campaign as a way to publicize the campaign
for American recognition of the Soviet Union. The problem with support for a
farmer-labor party, a two-class party is that the thing is a bourgeois
formation, an early version of what in the 1930s would become the “popular
front” policy. The name and reputation of Lafollette should have been the
tip-off. So most of the year 1924 was spent in trying to iron out the problem
of whether to support a farmer-labor party or just a labor party. The internal
politics of this dispute are important. No less an authority on the early party
than Cannon said later that a wrong decision (to support Lafollette or some
version of that idea) would have destroyed the party right then. The CI stepped
in and changed the policy not without controversy. Comrades Curtis and Rosa
were not happy, certainly not happy with Cannon then but deferred to the
factional leadership’s judgment. They spent most of that year doing trade union
support work for William Z. Foster’s Trade Union Education League drawing closer
to that leader as a result although still aligned with the Cannon faction.
Comrade
Markham was a “love” baby. (He had his parents word on this when he asked some
child’s question about it later when he was first learning about sex.) A “love baby” in the days when most ideas of
contraception, even among knowledgeable revolutionaries connected with the
Village and other places where such things might be discussed, was some
variation of the old Catholic “rhythm” method dealing with a woman’s cycle
(both Curtis and Rosa had been brought up as Catholics). After the hectic times
around the farmer-labor question the pair decided to bring a child into the
world, into their world and so Rosa stopped counting the days in her cycle. And
in the fall of 1925 Markham was born, born and nurtured by two happy parents.
Part of
Comrade Curtis and Rosa’s decision to have a child was determined by the low
level of class struggle in America at the time (and world-wide especially after
the aborted German revolution of 1923 which while they were not familiar with
the details had sensed that something big had been missed). Labor strikes were
few and far between, the party message was not getting much of a hearing
outside the New York area, and the Coolidge administration was adamant about
not recognizing “red” Russia. Moreover after the death of Lenin and the
struggle for power in the Soviet party between Stalin and Trotsky (and in the
Communist International where Zinoviev was in a bloc with Stalin against Trotsky)
some of the wind went out of the sails for Comrade Curtis and Rosa, a not
unknown phenomenon in the “dog days” of any movement. So while they remained
good party members, paid their dues and sold the paper on Saturdays, remained
loyal to the defense of Soviet Russia they were less active in those years when
they were raising Markham over in Brooklyn after moving from Chicago looking
for work where Curtis had found a job as a law clerk and started taking
stenographic courses to bring some income into the household rather than
depending on parents and the party dole.
Comrades
Curtis and Rosa had in the first few years of Comrade Markham’s life, the late
1920s, not been as attentive to what was going on in Russia as previously. Were
unaware of the details of the internal struggle started after the death of
Lenin in 1924 between Stalin and Trotsky at first and then eventually the whole
of the old Bolshevik Party, those who had actually made the revolution rather
that those who were emerging as Stalin’s allies, those who had sat on the
sidelines (or on the other side) or who were Johnny-come-latelies and had no
sense of party history. Although they had adhered to various factional line-ups
lashed together by the Cannon-Dunne section of the party leadership they had
not been as attuned during the mid to late 1920s of the way that the changes in
the political situation in Moscow was reflected in the changes in the American
party. It was almost as if once they had genuflected before their duty to the
defense of the Soviet Union the rest of the situation there receded into vague
rumors and esoteric theory.
Although
early on they had been admirers of the Red Army leader, Leon Trotsky, once he
became anathema in party circles in Russia they took their cues from the newly
installed Lovestone leadership in the American party (and the Cannon faction as
well) and were as adamant in their ritualistic denunciations of the person of
Trotsky and of the Trotskyite menace as anyone. His criticism of the Stalin
regime seemed like sour grapes to them and his rantings about the failure of
leadership in the British trade union crisis and second Chinese revolution did
not resonate with them being in a country like America where the possibilities
of revolution for the foreseeable future seemed extremely remote and therefore
it was impolitic for others to speak about such matters in other countries.
They would pass on these same pieces of wisdom to Comrade Markham when he came
of age.
They were thus
shocked, shocked but not moved, when it was discovered that one of the main
leaders of their faction, Jim Cannon, who had been sent to Moscow for the Sixth
Congress of the Communist International in1928 came back and proved to be, or
have been all along, a closet Trotskyite “wreaker.” Here too they made their ritualistic
denunciations of the counter-revolutionary Cannon and would spent the rest of
their political lives denouncing him and whatever political formations he
helped organize to spread Trotsky’s words. This hatred too they passed on to
their son.
The late
1920s and early 1930s, the time of the great world-wide economic Depression
were hard times for Comrades Curtis, Rosa and their son although not because of
the direct effects of that sore (everybody needs law clerks and teachers) but
because it portended a change in party doctrine as mandated by the Communist
International. They had always been public activists and thus ran into other
left-wing groupings in their work, especially the still influential Socialist
Party (mainly with the urban labor bureaucracy and the beset farmers out in the
prairies). Got along with such groups, excepting of course the now banished
counter-revolutionary Trotskyites who were to be beaten down if possible and an
occasional Wobblie who still hadn’t gotten over the demise of that organization.
The new
policy, which came down in Communist International history as the “third
period” (the first being the immediate revolutionary period after World War I
and the second, the mid-1920s stabilization of world capitalism), dictated that
the world-wide Depression signaled the “final conflict” with capitalism and
therefore any truck with non-communist forces now deemed to be
“social-fascists” was forbidden. Moreover communist trade union cadre were told
to create out of whole cloth “revolutionary unions.” Since party influence
except in a few cities and a few unions, mainly in New York City, was minimal
those policies only added to that isolation and with the exception of some
stellar labor defense work and black defense work (the Scottsboro boys) done in
spite of the party dictates this was an unfruitful period. The only other bright spot was in 1933 when
the newly-elected Roosevelt (himself earlier a “social-fascist” as well)
formally recognized the Soviet Union.
These were
trying and mainly isolated times for the party, for the comrades and, frankly,
for the gullible like Comrade Curtis and Rosa who would nightly talk about the
nearness of their socialist dreams. Well, no question the period was bleak but
the hard reality was that those Communist International doctrines (dictated by
the now all-powerful Stalin and his cronies) led in their own way to the
victory of the Nazis in Germany which would within the decade cause many tough
nights worrying about the fate of the Soviet Union. Here is where the gullible
part came in. Instead of blaming Stalin (or Earl Browder who took charge of the
party as a well-known hack ready to do anything to advance himself although in
his youth he had been an ardent militant and fervent anti-war supporter)
Comrades Curtis and Rosa did somersaults to blame everybody and everything on
socialists, Trotskyites, anybody. They never said word one about what happened
in Germany and whose policies let Hitler in. Comrade Markham heard that kind of
talk around the house as he grew up, as he became a Young Pioneer when he came
of age.
The early 1930s,
years of party-imposed self-isolation from the main political arenas, the “third
period” years mentioned above, were hard years for Comrades Curtis and Rosa.
They had been used to a useful and somewhat productive political life since they
had moved to New York City in the 1920s. They did not get back to that normalcy
until well after the Hitler threat to the Soviet Union or, better, the perceived
threat since Hitler made no bones about liquidating the “Bolshevik menace” and hence
made Stalin and his coterie change course dramatically with the policy which
would later be codified as the “popular front.” For all practical purposes that
“third period” policy had been shelved well before, probably in America with the
great Communist-led general strike in San Francisco for a goodly part of 1934.
The
implications were rather dramatic. Now yesterday’s “social-fascists,” including
certain bourgeois elements were to be courted and the theory of the “catastrophic”
end of world capitalism put on the back burner. Of course the damn Trotskyites,
who had led their own general strike in backwater Minneapolis, were still to be
beaten down and no party meeting (or Young Pioneer meeting either) was complete
without some ritualistic denunciation of the bastards. No question though that
the “thaw” as Comrade Curtis called it was welcome to that family and no more
fervent supporters of the new policy in the city rank and file could be found
than that pair. They took on more party responsibilities as this decade moved
on (and as Comrade Markham became older and could travel with them to paper sales,
meetings, and contact sessions, sessions to gain new recruits). This new energy
came in handy with the outbreak of civil war in Spain where the popular front
government was besieged by an armed Army/Fascist uprising and the Soviet Union was the only country willing
to send military aid to drive the reactionaries back. Those were the days when
Comrade Rosa would help the young activist Ethel Greenglass (later Ethel Rosenberg
martyred along with her husband Julius in the Cold War 1950s executed as Soviet
spies) collecting funds for Spain in Times Square while Ethel performed the
tarantula. Yes those who supported the Spanish Republic were kindred in those days
and the young Comrade Markham got his first taste of public communist work.
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