As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-The Culturati’s Corner

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements (hell even the hide-bound Academy filled with its rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gazebo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man, putting another man to ground or laying their own heads down for some imperial mission.

They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course. 

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful poets like Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood, angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men, wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a blasted night that Great War time was.  

And as the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, artists, beautiful artists like Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes, prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves, dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night, Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes, circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells, like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like, Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to the tether too.          

And do not forget when the war drums intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate ….           

*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Larry Hoover

 

 

http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html

 

A link above to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.

Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month

Markin comment (reposted from 2010)

In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.

That last notion set me to the task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.

Note: This list, right now, is composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind 

 

 

 

Here is the drill. I started out life listening to singer like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby (and his brother Bob), Miss Patti Page, Miss Rosemary Clooney, Miss Peggy Lee, the Andrew, McGuire, Dooley sisters, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy who had his own band) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which my mother had always during the day to get her workaday daytime household world and on Saturday night when my father joined in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlin on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression and then when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. I am not saying that they should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly that stuff then (and now although less so) made me grind my teeth. But I was a captive audience then and so to this day I can sing off Rum and Coca Cola, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (the Glenn Miller version not the Andrew Sister) and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover from memory. But that was not my music, okay. 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which I “dug” seriously dug to the point of dreaming my own jailbreak dreams about rock futures (and girls) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for me to be able to unlike my older brother, Prescott, call that the music that I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through my mind and I can quote chapter and verse One Night With You (Elvis version, including the salacious One Night Of Sin original), Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck Berry, of course), Let’s Have A Party ( the much underrated  Wanda Jackson), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night but what a hit), Bo Diddley (Bo, of course), Peggy Sue (Buddy Holly) and a whole bunch more.   

The music that I can really call my own is the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with my coming of chronological, political and social age (that last in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside myself filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with which I did not connect with until later after getting out of my dinky hometown of Carver and off into the big cities and campus towns where just at that moment there were kindred by the thousands with the same maladies and same desire to turn  the world upside down). You know the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family coming out of Clinch Mountain, Buell Kazell (from Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music times), Jimmy Rodgers the Texas yodeler who found fame at the same time as the Carters in old Podunk Bristol, Tennessee, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country collected by Child in Cambridge in the 1850s and taken up in that town again one hundred years later in some kind of act historical affinity), the blue grass music (which grabbed me by the throat when Everett Lally, a college friend and member of the famed Lally Brothers blue grass band let me in on his treasure trove of music from that genre), and the protest songs, songs against the madnesses of the times, nuclear war, brushfire war in places like Vietnam, against Mister James Crows midnight ways, against the barbaric death penalty, against a lot of what songwriter Malvina Reynolds called the ticky-tack little box existences we were slated for by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. The latter songs being what drove a lot of my interest once I connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which I have written plenty about elsewhere where I hung on poverty nights, meaning many nights).

 

A lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that I kept hearing on my transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers and vapid young female-driven female singer stuff. (Of course being nothing but one of those alienated teenagers whom the high-brow sociologists were fretting about like we were what ailed the candid world I would not have characterized that trend that way it would take a few decades to see what was what then the music just gave me a a headache). Also to seek out roots music that I kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once I found a station (accidently) which featured such music and got intrigued by the sounds. Part of that search, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know, Chicago blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House the mad man preacher-sinner man, Skip James with that falsetto voice singing out about how he would rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man, Bukka White (sweating blood and  salt on that National Steel on Aberdeen Mississippi Woman and Panama Limited of course Creole Belle candy man Mississippi John Hurt.

But those guys basically stayed in the South went about their local business and vanished from big view until they were “discovered” by folk aficionados who headed south looking for, well, looking for roots, looking for something to hang onto  and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they too had made their own pacts with the devil. And made a lot of angst and alienation just a shade more bearable.  Praise be.               

From The Pages Of The Communist International- In Honor Of The 96th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919) -Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then

Click below to link to the Communist International Internet Archives"

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/index.htm

Markin comment from the American Left History blog (2007):

BOOK REVIEW

‘LEFT-WING’ COMMUNISM-AN INFANTILE DISORDER, V.I. LENIN, UNIVERSITY PRESS OF THE PACIFIC, CALIFORNIA, 2001

An underlying premise of the Lenin-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 was that success there would be the first episode in a world-wide socialist revolution. While a specific timetable was not placed on the order of the day the early Bolshevik leaders, principally Lenin and Trotsky, both assumed that those events would occur in the immediate post-World War I period, or shortly thereafter. Alas, such was not the case, although not from lack of trying on the part of an internationalist-minded section of the Bolshevik leadership.

Another underlying premise, developed by the Leninists as part of their opposition to the imperialist First World War, was the need for a new revolutionary labor international to replace the compromised and moribund Socialist International (also known as the Second International) which had turned out to be useless as an instrument for revolution or even of opposition to the European war. The Bolsheviks took that step after seizing power and established the Communist International (also known as the Comintern or Third International) in 1919. As part of the process of arming that international with a revolutionary strategy (and practice) Lenin produced this polemic to address certain confusions, some willful, that had arisen in the European left and also attempted to instill some of the hard-learned lessons of the Russian revolutionary experience in them.

The Russian Revolution, and after it the Comintern in the early heroic days, for the most part, drew the best and most militant layers of the working-class and radical intellectuals to their defense. However, that is not the same as drawing experienced Bolsheviks to that defense. Many militants were anti-parliamentarian or anti-electoral in principle after the sorry experiences with the European social democracy. Others wanted to emulate the old heroic days of the Bolshevik underground party or create a minority, exclusive conspiratorial party.

Still others wanted to abandon the reformist bureaucratically-led trade unions to their then current leaderships, and so on. Lenin’s polemic, and it nothing but a flat-out polemic against all kinds of misconceptions of the Bolshevik experience, cut across these erroneous ideas like a knife. His literary style may not appeal to today’s audience but the political message still has considerable application today. At the time that it was written no less a figure than James P. Cannon, a central leader of the American Communist Party, credited the pamphlet with straightening out that badly confused movement (Indeed, it seems every possible political problem Lenin argued against in that pamphlet had some following in the American Party-in triplicate!). That alone makes it worth a look at.

I would like to highlight one point made by Lenin that has currency for leftists today, particularly American leftists. At the time it was written many (most) of the communist organizations adhering to the Comintern were little more than propaganda groups (including the American party). Lenin suggested one of the ways to break out of that isolation was a tactic of critical support to the still large and influential social-democratic organizations at election time. In his apt expression- to support those organizations "like a rope supports a hanging man".

However, as part of my political experiences in America around election time I have run into any number of ‘socialists’ and ‘communists’ who have turned Lenin’s concept on its head. How? By arguing that militants needed to ‘critically support’ the Democratic Party (who else, right?) as an application of the Leninist criterion for critical support. No, a thousand times no. Lenin’s specific example was the reformist British Labor Party, a party at that time (and to a lesser extent today) solidly based on the trade unions- organizations of the working class and no other. The Democratic Party in America was then, is now, and will always be a capitalist party. Yes, the labor bureaucrats and ordinary workers support it, finance it, drool over it but in no way is it a labor party. That is the class difference which even sincere militants have broken their teeth on for at least the last seventy years. And that, dear reader, is another reason why it worthwhile to take a peek at this book.

Desperately Seeking Revolutionary Intellectuals-Now, And Then

Commentary

No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon the founder of The Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined.

The conclusion that I drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders to lead the fight for state power.

In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spend a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. That position stands in need of some amendment now.

Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.


It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question, religion, special racial and gender oppressions) and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.

Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky.

As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the ‘new’ working class or a ‘new’ vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an ideas that goes back to the days of Marx himself.

And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on , frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray ( in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960’s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?

The Ink Spots - Prisoner Of Love 1946

Roger McGuinn - "Ballad of Easy Rider"

Enough- One Final Time-All Honor To The Waldensian Heretics! (Or For Sticklers Followers Of Peter Waldo)- A Smidgen Of Justice Finally!

Enough- One Final Time-All Honor To The Waldensian Heretics! (Or For Sticklers Followers Of Peter Waldo)- A Smidgen Of Justice Finally!

 

Peter Waldo

Light glows in the darkness

 

Sam Lowell comment:

Sometimes you have to take things into your own hands, take a stand against the yahoos and yokels who have nothing better to do that sit at their computer keyboards and spew forth, yes that is exactly the right word, spew forth whatever angers they have been harboring on innocent cyberspace. Or rather this innocent blogosphere. Well maybe not innocent but nothing said here calls for some endless diatribe with  those self-same what are they called, oh yeah, trolls. Trolls who in another time, say about fifty years ago late at night with a head full of speed or some other drug of choice to while away the hours before dawn I would have been happy to engage in conversation about such worthy topics as how many angles a can fit on the head of a needle. But not now, not when I have more pressing concerns like the struggle against war, the struggle against the death penalty, the struggle against the one percent, the struggle against every kind of social injustice except these days mercifully those who would deny the right of gay marriage, That one can now at least be put to rest.   

Let me explain and you will see how right I am to make this the last post on this subject this side of paradise. Recently, although the way this issue has been hammered into my brain it seems like an eternity, I made a comment, a short comment, in this space about how the Roman Catholic church’s Pope Francis had made a pilgrimage to Turin, I believe, in order to offer, or maybe beg, forgiveness of the ancient Waldensese religious community there. This small sect and its confederates around the world had been  persecuted by a number of his predecessors beginning in the 13^th century when one radicalized ex-merchant named Peter of Waldo began to act, well, Christian. Doing such outlandish things as giving alms to the poor, living a simple life, and challenging some of the odd-ball customs and traditions of the church like that saying the Mass in Latin which the poor illiterates of the time were clueless to understand, going through the bread and wine communion ceremony (body and blood of Jesus called transubstantiation if I recall) at every Mass and, get this if you want to know why he got in hot water then, today too probably, doing away with the priesthood as special body of interpreters and of indulgences too. Yes, the Church authorities would want to hang that Brother, hang him high, then.

Stuff in short though that represented some sort of “premature” Protestant break-out and would, or should not, ruffle feather one these days. And the Twitter Pope decided that as a good-will gesture to make amends for the rough handling of dissenters during the Counter-Reformation where they tried to kill every Waldo-ite (don’t even think about calling me on what this sect is called I have seen a number of names so take that dispute off the table please) in the realm he would ask forgiveness.           

I got into trouble though with one lapsed and one non-lapsed Catholic (they not knowing that in ancient times I was a Catholic Worker-influenced boy, influenced by my Grandmother Riley who was a distant follower of Dorothy Day and that movement and so knew a thing or two about the Catholic mission in the world, or the theory behind it anyway). The former taking umbrage (saying I had "smacked down" the Pope) that I thought that Pope Francis was a few hundred years too late, especially since I did not hear anything about reparations or the like, you know, some dough from the Vatican vaults. The latter well let me put it in the words of my reply- “The commenter a “non-lapsed Catholic” from what I could gather blasted me (at least he did not use the “smack down” term, mercifully) for putting today’s standard of religious tolerance back to that time, a time when the Church was in danger from every corner. You could not have a group, even an isolated group not bothering anybody whom Rome saw as a threat doing whatever they pleased.” So you could see what I was up against.       

So to finally put this whole thing to merciful rest, put it back in the pages of history where it belongs now duly corrected I did not as the lapsed Catholic said try to “smack down” the Pope by asking a perfectly legitimate question about why the wheels of the church bureaucracy grind exceeding slow with this business of admitting errors or at least why it did not just leave “freethinkers” alone who posed no threat to Holy Rome. I do not accept that Peter of Waldo and his followers were some early form Bolsheviks ready to lay the church low and sack the Holy See in the interest of international communism. I do not accept that Peter of Waldo was anything but a righteous Catholic and that the later papal bull (that’s is what it is called okay) against his future followers was over the top. And I heartily do not accept as a subsequent third commenter insinuated that I am a mere apologist for the actions of a “fellow-traveler” when I casually stated at the end of my reply that I was on old Peter’s side in his dispute with Rome. I still am. Enough said.     

In the interest of full disclosure, my full disclosure anyway since I am not authorized to post what others have said in this space below is the original posting and the subsequent reply:      

Here is the original post and you decide whether I was being blasphemous, sacrilegious, or a heathen:

You have probably heard the news lately that the Roman Catholic Church’s Pope Francis has asked the Waldenese community of hearty and alive irreverent Protestants to accept the church’s forgiveness for attempting to exterminate their forbears in the late 15^th century by order of the then pope, get this, Pope Innocent VIII (eight, right). And they almost succeeded, with now a small remnant still living in small enclaves in various spots around the world. By the way doing nobody harm just like when they were started by a renegade merchant named, well, Waldo, who  thought that piety, poverty and doing good works were worthy endeavors. Get this too though Waldo and his gang thought that everybody would be just as well off if there was not a clergy separate from the congregation, that everybody could  be a priest (maybe women too?). And you wonder why Rome had the stakes piled up high and the flames on big time. Well, I know everybody studied this group in Western History class in passing, I know I did, as precursors of the Protestant Reformation and martyrs to the cause of enlightenment so I will just leave a link to Wikipedia on the subject for you to look at-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians        

 Here is my problem though and maybe not so much a reflection on the current pope as on the church bureaucracy and inertia but isn’t several hundred years later for forgiveness and reconciliation in the case of Galileo just a little too late to do those fallen martyrs any good. What took so long? This may be a Tweeter Pope but you guys have got to push harder to come into the 18^th century, the age of enlightenment. Okay.   

And the subsequent reply:

Sometimes in the cyberspace, the blogosphere, hell, maybe in life you can’t win. Recently, very recently, I posted a short mention in this space honoring the old time formerly heretical grouping persecuted, no more than persecuted, almost exterminated by the Roman Catholic Church, the Waldensians (alternatively Waldenese which is the way they were presented in Western Civ class and which I like better since Waldensian makes me think they might be followers of Henry David Thoreau, a different kind of Protestant later or even better so nobody can mistake them, followers of the pious 12^th century ex-merchant Peter Waldo although that Waldo part has problems too). To make some kind of historical amends (although as far as I know no dough from the Vatican coffers) the Roman Catholic Church’s leader, Pope Francis, had asked, maybe begged for all I know since he did it in foreign language (not English anyway) and his gestures may be subject to some differences of interpretation, the small scattered Waldensese community of formerly heretical “premature” Protestants for forgiveness. Particularly for the egregious acts a 15^th century former pope’s bull (that is what they call the thing when the pope orders something done, or not done, I am not making it up or trying to be sarcastic so do not sent comments on this please), get this Innocent VIII by name, telling every true believer in the apostolic works of the Church to smite them down like vermin. And they did.        

Here is where I got into trouble or rather in two types of trouble from a couple of separate commenters who got hot under the collar about how they interpreted what I said as a some kind of “smack down” of the Roman Church and/or its leader (the word one commenter actually used as in “smacked down Pope Francis”). This from a person who said she was a “lapsed Catholic” whatever that is, and as if that was some kind of talisman for what she accused me of doing.

The reason for that negative comment was that I had mentioned that this Roman Catholic Church, or rather its bureaucracy, is a little slow on the uptake when it comes to trying to right various crimes in its long and sometimes seedy past although I notice they zip right along with this making saints out of whole cloth business especially of former popes. Take Galileo and his simple proposition that the earth was not flat and that the earth went around the sun like we all learned in about second grade. It took another bull ( I think) a few years back to get the Church to recognize that maybe Galileo was right or at least they should have treated him better.

Now comes the case of the Waldenese, a small grouping not doing anything to hurt mighty Rome back in the days from about the 12^th to the 16^th century when they had plenty to say in Europe and elsewhere about who was to believe in what doctrine or face what kind of hell on earth at the stake for their misbegotten ways. Maybe Rome was a little off from its glory “caesaro-papist” days but they could put serious hurt on dissenters, no question. Now a few centuries later all is forgiven. At that rate serious current “errors” like the dive the Vatican took on trying to save the Jews during World War II or more recently the sexual ravaging of their innocent youth by very disturbed and nasty priests should be “rectified” by some Pope Innocent LXIII sometime after 2400. So, no, I did not “smack down” the current pope but just stated what was what.      

The more serious comment, or at least I took it more seriously, was one of cultural relativism I suppose. The commenter a “non-lapsed Catholic” from what I could gather blasted me (at least he did not use the ‘smack down” term, mercifully) for putting today’s standard of religious tolerance back to that time, a time when the Church was in danger from every corner. You could not have a group, even an isolated group not bothering anybody whom Rome saw as a threat doing whatever they pleased. This thought is what galled the commenter most when I wrote “Get this too though Waldo and his gang thought that everybody would be just as well off if there was not a clergy separate from the congregation, that everybody could  be a priest (maybe women too?). And you wonder why Rome had the stakes piled up high and the flames on big time.” He went off about the need for a clergy to mediate between God and the congregation, that the mediation should be by a man since the original followers (of Jesus) were men, and indiscriminate giving of alms and other such communal actions were, well, “communistic.” So you can see where he was going.     

Look I suggested that everybody who was interested check with the very informative article in the on-line Wikipedia if you didn’t have time to go to the library (or the expense of ordering a book on the subject from Amazon) to brush up on exactly what these people were up to and why Rome’s nose got bent out of shape about the matter. It is usually fruitless to argue religion but a doctrine of giving alms to the poor, leading a simple life, having the religious ceremony done in the vernacular, buying into the idea of the priesthood of all believers, giving up of the ceremonial body and blood (bread and wine) idea (called transubstantiation, I think) and forgetting about that Church raking in the dough money-maker purgatory look very simple, look very pre-organized Church to me. So cultural relativism or not that Catholic commenter seems to have missed out on the Reformation, maybe more. I’ll stick with old Waldo on this one.      

From the Archives of Marxism-James P. Cannon on the Legacy of the IWW

Workers Vanguard No. 1070	12 June 2015

From the Archives of Marxism-James P. Cannon on the Legacy of the IWW

On The 110th Anniversary-When The Wobblies Bloomed

 

Sam Eaton comment:

Everybody, or practically everybody, knows the story of how my old friend Ralph Morris from Troy, New York and I met on May Day 1971 so I will just give the highlights since what I want to really talk about is what we discussed and decided to do as a result of what happened that day. See I had gone down to Washington D.C. with several groups (collectives, was what we called them) of red-hot “reds” and radicals from Cambridge in order to “capture” the White House. That is not as weird as it sounds now since what we were trying to do along with thousands of others who opposed the Vietnam War (and shared similar positions on other social questions as well) was to “shut down the government, if it did not shut down the war.” We were angry, we were desperate and some of us, not me then anyway, were acting under the impression that we were opening a second front here in America in aid of the liberation fighters in Vietnam.   

Ralph, an ex-veteran with eighteen months under his belt in Vietnam, had become totally disgusted with what he had done there, what his buddies had done there, and what the American government had made them do to people who were not bothering anybody, at least nobody in America.  He had joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization and had come down to Washington with a group from New York state who were going to shut down their old boss, the Pentagon, as part of that same May Day action. They at least had enough sense, unlike us, to realize that this would be a symbolic action. In either case what we all got for our troubles was tear-gassed, billy-clubbed and as Ralph put it once, sent to the bastinado, the RFK football stadium then being used as a holding pen for all those arrested that day. And there is where Ralph and I met when he saw I had a VVAW supporter button on (in respect for my friend Jeff Mullins from my hometown of Carver, Massachusetts who got blown away in Vietnam and got me out in the streets as a result).      

Like I said what was important was not so much that we met, although that did start a lifetime personal friendship and politically active association, but that we began what would be a several years stretch of activity and study in order to see what had gone wrong that day, and what we really needed to do when the government went to war and we needed to stop it in its tracks. After we left RFK and hitchhiked back up North we continued to talk and to make study plans which due to one thing or another didn’t get a big boost until the summer of 1972. That summer I had been living in a Cambridge commune, a very common living arrangement during those years for comradery and to share the bills among people who had little dough. I invited Ralph over from Troy to stay with me and to join a study group/ action group run by one of the many “red collectives” that were sprouting up around Cambridge in those days. He came and spent the summer, although his father who ran a high precision electrical shop was furious since Ralph had been cheap labor for him.

Not everything that we learned that summer, or later when we studied with other groups or on our own, was etched in gold, had a lot of relevance to what we were trying to do but a lot did. A grounding in the basics of classical Marxism except for the book sealed with seven seals Das Capital, the experiences of the Bolsheviks and the three Russian revolutions, the work of Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky on colonial revolutions, closer to home the American Civil War, and the early labor movement here. And of course a drill through of what were called questions, questions with a big “Q” like the black question, the Russian question, the women question, the gay question, the labor party question and so on.         

We wound up not joining any particular group, including not joining the Socialist Workers Party that we were interested in because of its connection with the heroic figure of Leon Trotsky and his windmill facing tasks to save the Russian revolution and because of James P. Cannon whose work in the political prisoner field, especially when he was with the International Labor Defense and its central involvement in the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s. While we had political disagreements with most groups we were in contact with (and disagreements between us especially on the Labor Party question since I was red-hot to try and use the Democratic Party as a way to change things and Ralph would have none of that since it was a Democrat, LBJ, who sent his “young ass” [his term] to Vietnam) would join and unjoin various ad hoc groups around particular issues much preferring that avenue to joining a hard political organization. The real reason though was that sometime in the mid-1970s while we were still deep in trying to figure things out the glow of the big 1960s jail break-out was beginning to lose steam. And we were beginning to lose steam as well wanting to get on with careers and starting families.

Ralph, who still lives in Troy as I still live around Boston, since we are both practically retired and the kids are grown have gotten together more recently when he makes periodic trips to Boston. One night not long ago we were sitting in our favorite bar, Jack Higgins’ Grille down by the Financial District downtown, talking about this and that, you know of course political this and that, when Ralph mentioned that he had run into Hugo Gans, the old Industrial Workers of the World organizer (IWW, Wobblies) who was out there trying to organize some small restaurant in Saratoga Springs. That got us talking about those old study groups and about the process we went through trying to figure out what group we would join in order to do more effective political work (remember we wound up not joining any on-going group).          

No question we were under the sway of Che and Leon Trotsky and that it would be hard to see ourselves in an organization hostile to the work of either men but we paid very close attention in one study class run by an anarchist who went root and branch through the virtues of the old time Wobblies. We caught some of the fever he put out, if only as an historical moment. We stood in thrall to guys like Big Bill Haywood and his Western miners who went through hell to get what they wanted. We admired Frank Little and the others who were martyred to the cause and the heroic struggle against great odds of the IWWs opposition to World War I which put the organization right in the cross-hairs of the government bent on war and which basically crushes organization as an effective pole of attraction for young labor militants. We admired Jim Cannon as well for making the big move from the Wobblies but shared his old time sentimental feeling that the organization grabbed some very good cadre in the early days.

And of course there was Hugo who could always be counted on to bring whoever he could round-up to add bodies to whatever protest we were planning. So it was something of a treat to pick up a copy of a newspaper from one of the young earnest Marxists hocking their wares at an anti-war Iraq and Syria rally that featured some words by Cannon on the subject of the Wobblies. He had a good sense of their strengths in the early day and their limitations when things changed and the deal went down. Read on.            

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Workers Vanguard No. 1070	12 June 2015

From the Archives of Marxism

James P. Cannon on the Legacy of the IWW

 

To mark the 110th anniversary of the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), we excerpt below James P. Cannon’s critical tribute to the revolutionary syndicalist IWW, first published by the Socialist Workers Party in the Fourth International (Summer 1955). Cannon recounted a history he knew well, having served his political apprenticeship as a “Wobbly” before becoming a founding member of the American Communist and later Trotskyist movements.

Formed in direct opposition to the craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor, the IWW drew its membership largely from young workers who took to the road to find work where they could—as railroad construction workers, lumberjacks, metal miners and seamen. Taught by harsh experience that the bosses could not be overpowered at the ballot box, those who formed the IWW called for “One Big Union” that would serve as the instrument to seize the means of production from the capitalist class. This reflected healthy disdain for the parliamentary reformism dominating many of the parties of the Second International. But it confused the role of the unions, which must embrace the mass of the workers, with that of a programmatically-based revolutionary party.

The IWW’s conception was transcended by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which demonstrated that what the working class needs to overthrow capitalism is a Leninist vanguard party. Following the 1917 Revolution, some of the best elements of the IWW and other left-syndicalist organizations were recruited to the newly founded parties of the Third (Communist) International, although most did not make the leap.

*   *   *

The Bold Design

When the Founding Convention of the IWW—the Industrial Workers of the World—assembled in Chicago in June, 1905, the general strike movement initiating the first Russian revolution was already under way, and its reverberations were heard in the convention hall. The two events coincided to give the world a preview of its future. The leaders at Chicago hailed the Russian revolution as their own. The two simultaneous actions, arising independently with half a world between them, signalized the opening of a revolutionary century. They were the anticipations of things to come.

The defeated Russian revolution of 1905 prepared the way for the victorious revolution of 1917. It was the “dress rehearsal,” as Lenin said, and that evaluation is now universally recognized. The Founding Convention of the IWW was also a rehearsal; and it may well stand out in the final account as no less important than the Russian action at the same time.

The founders of the IWW were indubitably the original inspirers and prime movers of the modern industrial unions in the mass production industries. That is commonly admitted already, and that’s a lot. But even such a recognition of the IWW, as the precursor of the present CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations], falls far short of a full estimate of its historic significance. The CIO movement, at its present stage of development, is only a small down payment on the demands presented to the future by the pioneers who assembled at the 1905 Convention to start the IWW on its way.

The Founding Convention of the IWW brought together on a common platform the three giants among our ancestors—[Eugene] Debs, [Big Bill] Haywood and [Daniel] De Leon. They came from different backgrounds and fields of activity, and they soon parted company again. But the things they said and did, that one time they teamed up to set a new movement on foot, could not be undone. They wrote a Charter for the American working class which has already inspired and influenced more than one generation of labor militants. And in its main essentials it will influence other generations yet to come.

They were big men, and they all grew taller when they stood together. They were distinguished from their contemporaries, as from the trade-union leaders of today, by the immensity of their ambition which transcended personal concerns, by their far-reaching vision of a world to be remade by the power of the organized workers, and by their total commitment to that endeavor.

The great majority of the other delegates who answered the call to the Founding Convention of the IWW were people of the same quality. They were the non-conformists, the stiff-necked irreconcilables, at war with capitalist society. Radicals, rebels and revolutionists started the IWW, as they have started every other progressive movement in the history of this country.

In these days when labor leaders try their best to talk like probationary members of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, it is refreshing to turn back to the reports of men who spoke a different language. Debs, Haywood and De Leon, and those who stood with them, did not believe in the partnership of capital and labor, as preached by [American Federation of Labor head Samuel] Gompers and Co. at the time. Such talk, they said in the famous “Preamble” to the Constitution of the IWW, “misleads the workers.” They spoke out in advance against the idea of the permanent “co-existence” of labor unions and the private ownership of industry, as championed by the CIO leaders of the present time.

The men who founded the IWW were pioneer industrial unionists, and the great industrial unions of today stem directly from them. But they aimed far beyond industrial unionism as a bargaining agency recognizing the private ownership of industry as right and unchangeable. They saw the relations of capital and labor as a state of war.

Brissenden puts their main idea in a nutshell in his factually correct history of the movement: “The idea of the class conflict was really the bottom notion or ‘first cause’ of the IWW. The industrial union type was adopted because it would make it possible to wage this class war under more favorable conditions.” (The I.W.W.: A Study of American Syndicalism, by Paul Frederick Brissenden, p. 108.)

The founders of the IWW regarded the organization of industrial unions as a means to an end; and the end they had in view was the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a new social order. This, the heart and soul of their program, still awaits its vindication in the revolution of the American workers. And the revolution, when it arrives, will not neglect to acknowledge its anticipation at the Founding Convention of the IWW. For nothing less than the revolutionary goal of the workers’ struggle was openly proclaimed there 50 years ago.

The bold design was drawn by Bill Haywood, General Secretary of the Western Federation of Miners, who presided at the Founding Convention of the IWW. In his opening remarks, calling the convention to order, he said:

“This is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism.” (Proceedings of the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, p. 1.)

The trade unions today are beginning to catch up with the idea that Negroes are human beings, that they have a right to make a living and belong to a union. The IWW was 50 years ahead of them on this question, as on many others. Many of the old Gompers unions were lily-white job trusts, barring Negroes from membership and the right to employment in their jurisdictions. Haywood, in his opening speech, indignantly denounced the policy of those unions “affiliated with the A. F. of L., which in their constitution and by-laws prohibit the initiation of or conferring the obligation on a colored man.” He followed, in his speech at the public ratification meeting, with the declaration that the newly-launched organization “recognizes neither race, creed, color, sex or previous condition of servitude.” (Proceedings, p. 575.)

And he wound up with the prophetic suggestion that the American workers take the Russian path. He said he hoped to see the new movement “grow throughout this country until it takes in a great majority of the working people, and that those working people will rise in revolt against the capitalist system as the working class in Russia are doing today.” (Proceedings, p. 580.)...

The Duality of the IWW

One of the most important contradictions of the IWW, implanted at its first convention and never resolved, was the dual role it assigned to itself. Not the least of the reasons for the eventual failure of the IWW—as an organization—was its attempt to be both a union of all workers and a propaganda society of selected revolutionists—in essence a revolutionary party. Two different tasks and functions, which, at a certain stage of development, require separate and distinct organizations, were assumed by the IWW alone; and this duality hampered its effectiveness in both fields. All that, and many other things, are clearer now than they were then to the leading militants of the IWW—or anyone else in this country.

The IWW announced itself as an all-inclusive union; and any worker ready for organization on an everyday union basis was invited to join, regardless of his views and opinions on any other question. In a number of instances, in times of organization campaigns and strikes in separate localities, such all-inclusive membership was attained, if only for brief periods. But that did not prevent the IWW agitators from preaching the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in every strike meeting.

The strike meetings of the IWW were in truth “schools for socialism.” The immediate issues of the strike were the take-off point for an exposition of the principle of the class struggle, for a full-scale indictment of the capitalist system all up and down the line, and the projection of a new social order of the free and equal.

The professed “non-political” policy of the IWW doesn’t stand up very well against its actual record in action. The main burden of its energies was devoted to agitation and propaganda—in soap-box speeches, press, pamphlets and songbooks—against the existing social order; to defense campaigns in behalf of imprisoned workers; and to free-speech fights in numerous localities. All these activities were in the main, and in the proper meaning of the term, political.

The IWW at all times, even during strikes embracing masses of church-going, ordinarily conservative workers, acted as an organization of revolutionists. The “real IWW’s,” the year-round activists, were nicknamed Wobblies—just when and why nobody knows—and the criterion of the Wobbly was his stand on the principle of the class struggle and its revolutionary goal; and his readiness to commit his whole life to it.

In truth, the IWW in its time of glory was neither a union nor a party in the full meaning of these terms, but something of both, with some parts missing. It was an uncompleted anticipation of a Bolshevik party, lacking its rounded-out theory, and a projection of the revolutionary industrial unions of the future, minus the necessary mass membership. It was the IWW....

The Turning Point

The whole record of the IWW—or at any rate, the best part of it, the positive revolutionary part—was all written in propaganda and action in its first 15 years. That is the enduring story. The rest is anti-climax.

The turning point came with the entrance of the United States into the First World War in the spring of 1917, and the Russian Revolution in the same year. Then “politics,” which the IWW had disavowed and cast out, came back and broke down the door.

These two events—again coinciding in Russia and America, as in 1905—demonstrated that “political action” was not merely a matter of the ballot box, subordinate to the direct conflict of the unions and employers on the economic field, but the very essence of the class struggle. In opposing actions of two different classes the “political state,” which the IWW had thought to ignore, was revealed as the centralized power of the ruling class; and the holding of the state power showed in each case which class was really ruling.

From one side, this was shown when the Federal Government of the United States intervened directly to break up the concentration points of the IWW by wholesale arrests of its activists. The “political action” of the capitalist state broke the back of the IWW as a union. The IWW was compelled to transform its principal activities into those of a defense organization, striving by legal methods and propaganda, to protect the political and civil rights of its members against the depredations of the capitalist state power.

From the other side, the same determining role of political action was demonstrated positively by the Russian Revolution. The Russian workers took the state power into their own hands and used that power to expropriate the capitalists and suppress all attempts at counter-revolution. That, in fact, was the first stage of the revolution, the pre-condition for all that was to follow. Moreover, the organizing and directing center of the victorious Revolution had turned out to be, not an all-inclusive union, but a party of selected revolutionists united by a program and bound by discipline.

The time had come for the IWW to remember Haywood’s prophetic injunction at the Founding Convention in 1905: that the American workers should look to Russia and follow the Russian example. By war and revolution, the most imperative of all authorities, the IWW was put on notice to bring its theoretical conceptions up to date; to think and learn, and change a little.

First indications were that this would be done; the Bolshevik victory was hailed with enthusiasm by the members of the IWW. In their first reaction, it is safe to say, they saw in it the completion and vindication of their own endeavors. But this first impulse was not followed through.

Some of the leading Wobblies, including Haywood himself, tried to learn the lessons of the war and the Russian Revolution and to adjust their thinking to them. But the big majority, after several years of wavering, went the other way. That sealed the doom of the IWW. Its tragic failure to look, listen and learn from the two great events condemned it to defeat and decay.

The governing role of theory here asserted itself supremely, and in short order. While the IWW was settling down in ossification, converting its uncompleted conceptions about the real meaning of political action and political parties into a sterile anti-political dogma, the thinking of others was catching up with reality, with the great new things happening in the world. The others, the young left-wing socialists, soon to call themselves Communists, lacked the battle-tested cadres of the IWW. But they had the correct program. That proved to be decisive.

The newly formed Communist Party soon outstripped the IWW and left it on the sidelines. It was all decided within the space of two or three years. By the time of its fifteenth anniversary in 1920 the IWW had already entered the irreversible road of decline. Its strength was spent. Most of its cadres, the precious human material selected and sifted out in heroic struggle, went down with the organization. They had borne persecution admirably, but the problems raised by it, and by all the great new events, overwhelmed them. The best militants fell into inactivity and then dropped out. The second-raters took over and completed the wreck and the ruin....

The Heritage

The working class can be really united only when it becomes a class for itself, consciously fighting the exploiters as a class. The ruling bureaucrats, who preach and practice class collaboration, constitute in effect a pro-capitalist party in the trade unions. The party of the socialist vanguard represents the consciousness of the class. Its organization signifies not a split of the class movement of the workers, but a division of labor within it, to facilitate and effectuate its unification on a revolutionary basis; that is, as a class for itself.

As an organization of revolutionists, united not simply by the immediate economic interests which bind all workers together in a union, but by doctrine and program, the IWW was in practice, if not in theory, far ahead of other experiments along this line in its time, even though the IWW called itself a union and others called themselves parties.

That was the IWW’s greatest contribution to the American labor movement—in the present stage of its development and in those to come. Its unfading claim to grateful remembrance will rest in the last analysis on the pioneering role it played as the first great anticipation of the revolutionary party which the vanguard of the American workers will fashion to organize and lead their emancipating revolution.

This conception of an organization of revolutionists has to be completed and rounded out, and recognized as the most essential, the most powerful of all designs in the epoch of imperialist decline and decay, which can be brought to an end only by a victorious workers’ revolution. The American revolution, more than any other, will require a separate, special organization of the revolutionary vanguard. And it must call itself by its right name, a party.

The experimental efforts of the IWW along this line remain part of the permanent capital of those who are undertaking to build such a party. They will not discard or discount the value of their inheritance from the old IWW; but they will also supplement it by the experience and thought of others beyond our borders.

The coming generation, which will have the task of bringing the class struggle to its conclusion—fulfilling the “historic mission of the working class,” as the “Preamble” described it—will take much from the old leaders of the IWW—Debs, Haywood, De Leon and [Vincent] St. John, and will glorify their names. But in assimilating all the huge experiences since their time, they will borrow even more heavily from the men who generalized these experiences into a guiding theory. The Americans will go to school to the Russians, as the Russians went to school to the Germans, Marx and Engels.

Haywood’s advice at the Founding Convention of the IWW still holds good. The Russian way is the way to our American future, to the future of the whole world. The greatest thinkers of the international movement since Marx and Engels, and also the greatest men of action, were the Russian Bolsheviks. The Russian Revolution is there to prove it, ruling out all argument. That revolution still stands as the example; all the perversions and betrayals of Stalinism cannot change that.

The Russian Bolsheviks—Lenin and Trotsky in the first place—have inspired every forward step taken by the revolutionary vanguard in this country since 1917. And it is to them that the American workers will turn for guidance in the next stages of their evolving struggle for emancipation. The fusion of their “Russian” ideas with the inheritance of the IWW is the American workers’ prescription for victory.