In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Six

In Honor Of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday (April 1870-Janaury 1924)-The Struggle Continues-Ivan Smilga’s Political Journey-Take Six        

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

For a number of years I have been honoring various revolutionary forbears, including the subject of this birthday tribute, the Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin architect (along with fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky) of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 in each January under the headline-Honor The Three L’s –Lenin, Luxemburg , Liebknecht. My purpose then was (and still is) to continue the traditions established by the Communist International in the early post-World War I period in honoring revolutionary forbears. That month has special significance since every January  

Leftists honor those three leading revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in his sleep after a long illness in 1924, and Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered in separate incidents after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin.

 

I have made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in which he eventually wound up in prison only to be released when the Kaiser abdicated (correctly went to jail when it came down to it once the government pulled the hammer down on his opposition), on some previous occasions. The key point to be taken away today, still applicable today as in America we are in the age of endless war, endless war appropriations and seemingly endless desires to racket up another war out of whole cloth every change some ill-begotten administration decides it needs to “show the colors”, one hundred years later in that still lonely and frustrating struggle to get politicians to oppose war budgets, to risk prison to choke off the flow of war materials.  

 

I have also made some special point in previous years about the life of Rosa Luxemburg, the “rose of the revolution.” About her always opposing the tendencies in her adopted party, the German Social-Democracy, toward reform and accommodation, her struggle to make her Polish party ready for revolutionary opportunities, her important contributions to Marxist theory and her willing to face and go to jail when she opposed the first World War.

 

This month, the month of his birth, it is appropriate, at a time when the young needs to find, and are in desperate need of a few good heroes, a few revolutionaries who contributed to both our theoretical understandings about the tasks of the international working class in the age of imperialism (the age, unfortunately, that we are still mired in) and to the importance of the organization question in the struggle for revolutionary power, to highlight the  struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, in order to define himself politically.

 

Below is a sixth and final sketch written as part of a series posted over several days before Lenin’s birthday on the American Left History blog starting on April 16^th (see archives) of a young fictional labor militant, although not so fictional in the scheme of the revolutionary developments in the Russia of the Tsar toward the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century which will help define the problems facing the working-class there then, and the ones that Lenin had to get a handle on.

******

Ivan Smilga trembled with exhaustion as he knocked on the door at 20 Wentworth Street in the city of London where he sought refuge after his long flight from the Siberian frost fields of Mother Russia. Exhausted too beside him was his “wife” Elena (nee Kassova), a very pregnant Elena, whom Ivan had just helped escape from those frost fields after a six month journey over several countries and many stops. He had been given the Wentworth Street address by reliable comrades in Germany after Berlin had become too hot for the couple to stay in as Russian refugees (political exiles but we will use the German governmental designation for effect) and needed to move on to continue the struggle for freedom back home while they were forced abroad. As Ivan stood there waiting for the door to open he reflected on just how fantastic the past six months, hell, the past year had been.   

He thought back to that time a couple of years before, a few days before New Year’s Day 1900 when he had fought with Elena over the very hot question then of whether they would just continue the trade-union organizing at the Putilov Iron Works in Saint Petersburg where they both worked as he wished having been burned before when he tried to act politically or expand as Elena wanted to make political demands of the Tsarist regime including public street demonstrations to make their point. Elena had been determined to pursue that course and had been planning along with a few fellow radical workers and a few students from the University such an action for New Year’s Day 1900 to symbolically bring Russia in the new century. After that argument Ivan had run off, left town for a retreat at the Finnish border and sulked. Finished sulking and filled with love (regular old romantic love) for his Elena he determined that he would help her after all. However by the time he returned to Saint Petersburg the Cossacks had done their dirty bloody sabre-wielding work and Elena had been rounded up and detained for trial and eventual transportation and exile in Siberia. Ivan had been ashamed that he had left  this love, his real love in the lurch by his actions and resolved to  go to the Siberian exile to be with her, or help her escape abroad depending on the circumstances.

Ivan having prior to meeting Elena at the Putilov Works had his own Siberian exile for some scatter-brained conspiracy against the Tsar that he had been talked in to, had no problem getting himself exiled to Siberia for the political crime of standing in front of the Winter Palace by himself calling for freedom for the Winter Palace Twenty (the number of those, including Elena, who were picked up at that New Year’s Day demonstration). Once he got to his place of exile at Yalov in the Siberian wilds (their place eventually since he had “married” Elena while in exile in order bring her with him from her place of exile at Alta Ata) he immediately began to plot their escape. She encouraged him in that pursuit since her days as effective street organizer inside Russia were over for now. That plan became more pressing when Elena shortly after joining him at Yalov became pregnant and didn’t want to have her child born in slave Russia (she had wanted to parent a revolutionary Ivan, just an old county bumpkin wayward backward farm boy at heart just wanted a child). Moreover Elena (and in her wake once Ivan began to attend the lively if sometimes arcane meetings of the local political exile groupings), a crackerjack organizer was needed by her organization, the fledgling Russian Social-Democratic Party, to go into foreign exile in order to help the organization from abroad now that her days inside Russia were numbered.            

Hence the escape by the pair in the dead of night and in the dead of winter, harrowing at times what with nature, wild animals, wild men and desperadoes ready to pounce on any weak thing out there, having to hide out under many furs on a sleigh in order not to freeze to make good their initial escape, then finally by rail to Saint Petersburg. From that location they moved clandestinely over the border and further passage out to Germany. They needed to move on again despite Elena’s weakened condition after Berlin when, at the Tsar’s request to the German government to deny all Russians exile status (the various reigning monarchs were inter-related) that place became too hot for them. From there they moved to Paris and then now exhausted to London. As the door opened and Elena brightened to see Vladmir Smirnov, an old party comrade of Elena’s Ivan finally realized that whatever else Elena’s and now his party work had become a family necessity. He felt he was ready now…               

[Of course the flight to London in the early years of the 20^th century were not the end of their political lives for Ivana and Elena (and son Vladimir) since they had to establish themselves in exile like the thousands of other refugees from the Tsar. Ivan eventually got a job in a blacksmith’s shop (the chief blacksmith seeing in Ivan what everybody else had seen in Russia, a big man who would work hard and do the heavy lifting especially as the shop turned from horses to automobiles toward 1910) and Elena raised Vladimir while doing party work. That work consisted of working with the immigrant community to put out newspapers and pamphlets for general consumption but also to be smuggles back into the Empire via well-known if dangerous land and sea routes. Ivan working long hours especially at the beginning was less likely to show at political events but he kept up with current events through Elena and made some in-road connections which would be helpful later after the 1917 revolution with British trade union militants and members of the fledgling Labor Party. 

In the great dispute between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in 1903 Elena, bringing Ivan along with her although his temperament shaded toward the Bolsheviks, had originally sided with the Mensheviks. Basically Elena used to the free-wheeling broad-based movement that she had been part of in Saint Petersburg had been attracted to that more open, less polemical tendency with its less demanding definition of party membership and they went through the Revolution of 1905 with that grouping. Although they were forced by exile to watch the events of 1905 they keenly watched what all the parties were up to and to take note of who did and did not perform well under revolutionary circumstances. Being at some distance they sure that as the events unrolled that this was the revolution, finally, that everybody knew was coming, new had to come (even some very pro-Tsar bureaucrats saw the writing on the wall, knew their days were numbered).  Toward the end of the revolutionary period, once the Saint Petersburg Soviet had been dismantled, the leaders, including the big figure of Trotsky, arrested, tried and exiled they pulled more toward the Bolsheviks who had been more wary of the bourgeois democrats than the Mensheviks and had a better sense of what the still slumbering peasants needed to be prodded onto the political stage. (Although both had heard about Trotsky’s summation of the 1905 and his understanding that the bourgeois forces in Russia were played and that the working class would be the dominant force in any future revolution they had been put off by Trotsky’s aloofness and seeming distain for organization work.) Mainly though they adjusted to their new lives until the Great War broke out in 1914 and they had been threatened with deportation if they persisted in their public displays of hostility to the Allied side (the way the British authorities saw the issue), taking as good coin all the international proclamations by the Second International that militants should oppose their own governments if war broke out, proclamations mainly torn up in the actuality of war. This drew them even closer to the Bolsheviks than previously especially when a large number of Menshevik leaders like Plekhanov were siding with the Tsar or keeping their heads down on the war issue.   

When the February Revolution broke out in 1917 Ivan decided to return to Saint Petersburg to see what was happening and in March after the situation became clear, once the Tsar had abdicated and the first Provisional Government established he sent for Elena and Vladimir and they expected to take up some party work in the city alive with politics in every direction while they were there. They found a small, crowded apartment in the Vyborg district, the heart of the revolution at that time, and began to work helping put on the local workers’ newsletter and taking part in the debates of the Petersburg Soviet. In July though, after the big pro-Bolshevik demonstration by the city and soldier hot-heads they had been caught up in the dragnet put out by the Provisional Government and Ivan found himself with Trotsky and others in the Peter and Paul prison where they were held for period. Elena held in the women’s prison was, as a mother with responsibilities shortly thereafter released. Ivan was released in September and both were active during the great October Bolshevik uprising. Elena helping to organize a women’s new sheet. Ivan, always the obviously choice for the heavy work, physical or logistical had been put in charge of a red worker detachment by Trotsky himself that helped storm the Winter Palace and insure the victory of the Soviets.

Eventually toward December Ivan was elected to the Petrograd Soviet after a seat had been vacated by the sitting delegate. Still later when the dreaded civil war started he, responding to a direct plea from then-War Commissar Trotsky, led a Red Guard detachment sent from Saint Petersburg by rail before Kazan when the revolution was most in danger from the rampaging Czech Legions. Ivan Smilga, “Big Ivan” fell before Kazan leading his men helping to recapture the city. Elena, despondent over his death, withdrew from party work for a while and continued to raise young Vladimir. Several years later, after having gotten over her grief and finding work in the Woman’s Department of the All-Russia Soviet, she passed away from an undiagnosed illness. Vladimir then in his late twenties, having gone through the various Red youth organizations went on to become a mid-level Soviet official in the Commissariat of Agriculture and a rabid supporter of all of Stalin’s actions in liquidating the Bolshevik Old Guard and whomever he wished to eliminate, something that it would not have sat well with Elena and Ivan. Vladimir was eventually purged when Khrushchev took over after Stalin’s death.]   

 

 

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-The 99th Anniversary Of The February Revolution In Russia

Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

Queen Marie-Antoinette Approximately-With Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun In Mind

Queen Marie-Antoinette Approximately-With Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun In Mind   

By Zack James

 

“You know I knew about Madame Vigee-LeBrun from many years ago when I read a review of a biography of her in the New York Review Of Books and heard that she was the official portrait artist for the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette who went to the guillotine with her husband Louis XVI and got lost in history except that ill-advised “let them eat cake” mumbo-jumbo which whether truly attributable to her or not put her on cheap street. Here the Madam she is again in good odor. Carole told me that she is right now having a big retrospective of her work, mostly portraits for which she is most famous, at the Metropolitan in New York,” Sam Lowell was saying to his companion Melinda Loring as they walked quickly through Washington’s National Museum of Women in the Arts where the museum was staging a small retrospective of 18^th century Salon art which naturally would include Vigee-LeBrun.  

Sam and Melinda, at Sam’s prompting, had decided to take a short trip to Washington from their home in Massachusetts to see some museums, see some national monument sites, have a couple of nice dinners since Melinda had not been to Washington in a long time. Sam, although over the past few years he had been there many times, was always hurried with some conference or another when in town and so only got a chance to glance at the works of art in the National Gallery or the National Portrait Gallery so this was a treat for the pair.

Sam had assumed that the lure of a major retrospective of the photography holdings of the National Gallery would entice the rather-stay-at-home Melinda to take the trip since photography was one of her favorite avocations but unfortunately that exhibit had ended in early March. Not being impressed, or rather having seen plenty of modern art and Impressionism at various museums around Boston she was “antsy” (her term) to get away from that august museum once they found out the important exhibit had been dismantled.  Looking for another place of interest to go Melinda, an inveterate pourer-over of guide books and local maps noticed the Women in the Arts Museum in one of those brochures and so on that intermittent rainy overcast day they headed up to New York Avenue although they were on the late side since most of the museums in the city closed at 5 PM for some unknown reason. When they got there after paying their admissions (most museums in D.C. are free) they headed to the Salon/Vigee-Lebrun exhibition since Sam was under the spell of both Carol’s description of the Met exhibit and of a recent edition of the New York Review Of Books which had reviewed that exhibit at the Met.        

“It’s funny how many of the old-time women artists were the daughters or some relative of male artists as if the only way that women could be encouraged to draw and paint was through that familial relationship,” Melinda said to Sam as she finished reading an inscription about how Madame Vigee-LeBrun had got her start through her father and a couple of his friends and with a marriage of convenience to LeBrun who encouraged and advised her who all saw her talent early on. (That family observation would hold true for a number of other women artists as well-Thomas Moran’s daughter, Eva, and John Sloan’s daughter, Marie, as well as others.) It must have been hard then as it is now still from what I read and what Jane Austin told me for women to get ahead in the art world as artists,” she continued.

“Look how strong though Madame’s hand is, how attentive she is to detail and light just like Rueben and Van Dyck. Funny though how a poor artist’s daughter was able to rise in the world in those days through her artwork even if she got short shrift for being tied to the Marie Antoinette patron label. Although she was shrew enough to blow town before the knife came down on her to use your odd-ball expression. I wonder too from all I have heard about the vanity of the vacuous Queen and her foibles whether these are good and accurate likenesses or just the 18^th century version of art brushed. (See above.) What do you think?” asked Melinda as same as reading some other inscription.  

Sam answered, “I think like with Singer Sargent and that whole line of serious portrait painters that she did what she had to do to make a buck, to please the customer, and to save her neck but the look of her work shows so much exquisite detail that like Sargent she was not likely to ‘mail it in.’ That isn’t to say that the sitter like the Queen or like the fabled Madame X liked the end result but there you have it.”

“Well Vigee-LeBrun must have had something going for her, some invisible hand because she lived to be a ripe old age, painted half the old regime royalty of Europe and made a name for herself, Melinda bantered back. “Here is the funny thing going through this museum totally dedicated to women in the arts, the too few women in the arts until very recently, they follow certain trends in the art world just like the men, you know from painting Madonnas and Child like the male Renaissance painters to Pop-Art of Warhol and the gang. Maybe not the same attention (or money) but the same styles. I wonder if that will be as true in the future once more women take up the brush.” Sam and Melinda agreed they would think about that some more. And think too about how this little gem of a museum made their trip.             

*****From The Pages Of The Communist International- In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The CI (1919)

From The Pages Of The Communist International- In Honor Of The 97th 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.

In Boston- UP-COMING COMMITTEE FOR INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE (C-ILD) SUPPORTED EVENTS

In Boston- UP-COMING COMMITTEE FOR INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE (C-ILD) SUPPORTED EVENTS  

 

 

C-ILD will have a table at this year’s Boston Socialist Unity Project-“Building Socialism, Building Our Movements”-Saturday April 30^th-9:00 AM -4:00 PM, Old South Church, 645 Boylston St., Boston. Stop by and talk to us. For more information about the conference-check out- bostonsocialistunity.org        

The Committee for International Labor Defense is proud to endorse this year’s May Day event in Boston:

May 1st is celebrated around the world as International Workers Day to honor the struggle for workers’ rights.

This year’s celebration comes as workers and families of all backgrounds face unprecedented political challenges on issues ranging from budget cuts and the fight for unions to housing justice and the struggle for undocumented workers.

Workers across the globe are standing together to unite all of our struggles because an injury to one, is an injury to all

Join us Sunday May 1^st -

Gather at Chelsea City Hall at 2:30PM-March to Piers Park at 3PM

 95 Marginal St. East Boston-Rally at 5PM

Sponsored by the May 1st Coalition   

Monthly C-ILD Business/Educational Meeting-Wednesday May 11^th-

Business Meeting (all are invited) 6:30-7:00; Educational 7:00-8:00-Update and Discussion on heroic Wiki-leak whistle-blower and political prisoner Chelsea Manning’s case as the sixth anniversary of her incarceration approaches. Speaker Al Johnson, Chelsea Manning Support Network-with contributions by Susan McLucas         

Chelsea Manning Solidarity Rally-Saturday May 21^st –Park Street Station- Downtown Boston- 1:00 PM     

 

 

C-ILD is proud to endorse the Chelsea Manning Solidarity Rally to commemorate and publicize the case of this heroic political prisoner who on May 27^th will have been incarcerated by the American government for six years and who is now serving an unconscionable 35 years sentence at the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Join the Boston Chelsea Manning Support Network, the Committee for Peace and Human Rights, Veterans for Peace and others to honor Chelsea. We will not leave our sister behind. For more information on the case check out -https://www.chelseamanning.org/ 

The Evening to Celebrate Ten Years of Encuentro Cinco (E5) and raise funds for an important center in downtown Boston for social activists to work in originally scheduled for May has been postponed to a later date. More information as it becomes available.      

Finally-the original ILD (1925-1946) which we model C-ILD on provided financial aid support various events like the May Day celebration and Manning rally, to support adequate defense for political prisoners awaiting trial, and provide stipends for the class-war prisoners behind the walls. In the future we plan to raise funds via fund-raising events and social media in order in to continue those traditions. Look for those events in this space and consider making a contribution to help further our work.     

 

******One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane

******One More Time Down 1950s Record Memory Lane

 

Sam Lowell, considered himself a corner boy from the time in the early 1960s when in the working-class neighborhoods of America were filled to the brim with such guys hanging out on the corners, in his case North Adamsville not far from urban Boston at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys. Places like South Boston (an all Irish enclave then where even those who like Sam’s maternal grandparents had moved out of the enclave to an Irish neighborhood in North Adamsville were considered suspect, were looked at with jaundiced eye even by the relatives left behind), Main Street in Nashua (at the time a dying city what with the mills heading south to cheaper labor and eventually overseas and so a tough place to dream in), New Hampshire, 125^th Street in high Harlem (with all the excitement of jazz and be-bop but with all the high segregation of the South except for the formality of Mister James Crow’s laws), New York City, any of a million spots on Six Mile Road in Detroit (never a place of dreams but of steady work in the golden age of the American automobile from Delta Mister James Crow black refugees and the Okie/Arkie white rabble coming out of the hills and dustbowls), the same on Division Street in Chi town (the beat street divide of many of Nelson Algren’s tales of drugs, urban lost-ness, and disappointments), the lower end of North Beach beyond where the “beats” of a few years before did their beat thing (the places where the longshoremen and waterfront workers did their heavy drinking after work and where the sailors off their Pacific ocean ships fought all comers.

At least Jack Slack’s was the last port of call for the crowd, for that motley collection of corner boys picked up and discarded along the way although the core of Frankie, Jack, Jimmy, Allan, Markin and Five-Fingers held throughout which had started at Doc’s Drugstore complete with sofa fountain and shiny glass penny candy-case to draw selections from after  school to energize up for the real world activities of kid-dom in elementary school, Miller’s Diner for the jukebox in junior high when they were just becoming aware of girls, maybe having to dance with them, and maybe trying to figure out, the eternal trying to figure out how to approach them without them giggling back and Salducci’s Pizza Parlor in early high school before the new owners decided that unlike Tonio, the previous owner who sold out to go back to Italy from when he came as a boy they did not want rough-necked boys standing one knee against the wall in front of their family friendly establishment. That time, those early 1960s times for some reason known only to them, was time that you had best have had corner boy comrades when you hung out on date-less, girl-less, dough-less Friday and Saturday nights to have your back if trouble brewed (that “comrade” not a word to be used then in the tail end of the height of the red scare Cold War night not if you want knuckle sandwiches from the unthinking patriotic guys but that does convey the sense of “having your back” critical to your place in those woe begotten streets.

That corner boy business extended through the 1960s after high for a couple of years when in addition to being a corner boy he became a “flower child” along with his long mourned and lamented friend the late Peter Paul Markin (who met a horrible end down in sunny Mexico after the fresh breeze of the 1960s turned in on itself and he got flat-footed by the backlash and could no longer hold back his “from hunger”  wanting habits and made the fatal, very fatal, mistake of trying to broker an independent drug deal and got two slugs to the back of his head for the attempt) heading out west on the hitchhike roads when the world turned upside down later in the decade. Sam, now a sedate grandfatherly semi-retired lawyer filled with respectability and memories had to laugh about how much he of late had been thinking about the 1950s, about not just those corner boy days but about the music that drove every corner boy, including Markin, make that perhaps most of all Markin, to distraction as they tried to eke out a sound that they could call their own.

Thinking about the 1950s when he came of age, came of musical age, an age very mixed up with that corner boy comradery, that hanging at Doc’s and Miller’s Diner when he started noticing girls and their charms, started his life-long journey of trying to figure out what made them tick, what they wanted, wanted of him, from a girl-less family making everything that much harder, noticing that they too hung around Miller’s in order to play that fantastic jukebox which had all the latest tunes and plenty of oldies too (oldies being let’s say we are talking about 1958 then maybe 1955 hits like Eddie, My Love, Rock Around The Clock, and Bo Diddley showing that teen time, youth time anyway is measured differently from old man lawyerly time) drawing away from the music on his parents’ family living room radio and their cranky old record player music. Music   emphatically not on Miller’s jukebox or there would have been a civil war no question, a civil war avoided in the home after his parents had bought, to insure domestic peace and tranquility if he remembered correctly, his first transistor radio down at the now long gone Radio Shack store and he could sit up in his room and dream of whatever coming of age boys dreamed about, mainly how those last year bothersome girls became this year’s interesting objects of discussion (by the way in that small crowded room, shared with his two brothers, he found out he could discover the beauty of the “hold up to your ear”  transistor radio and drown out the world of brotherly scuffings). 

More than that though, more than just thinking about the old days like every old guy probably does, even guys who had not been lawyers as a professional career, guys who you see sitting on park benches, a little disheveled, maybe some crumbs in their unkempt beards, feeding the birds and half-muttering to themselves about how when FDR was around everybody stood tall, every country bent it knees in homage to America, or else, or old bag ladies rummaging through trash barrels looking for long lost lovers or their faded beauty Sam had been purchasing compilations of what are commercially called “oldies but goodies” CD. Doing so via the user-friendly confines of the Internet, at Amazon if you need a name like today anybody, except maybe three people up in heathen Alaska or the Artic,  doesn’t know that is the site to get such material these days instead of traipsing over half the East Coast trying to cadge a few examples, and  purchasing several record compilations of the “best of” that period from a commercial distributor (and also keeping up to date on various versions of the songs on YouTube) and through his friend and old corner boy Frankie Riley been spilling plenty of cyber-ink on Frankie’s blog, In The Be-Bop ‘50s Night, going back to the now classic age of rock and roll.

Sam had to laugh about that situation back then as well since he had been well known back on the corner, back holding up the wall in front of Salducci’s Pizza Parlor, on many of those date-less, date-less because although he might have been all “hail fellow, well met” hard-assed corner boy full of bluster and blah he was sister-less and hence baffled by girls and their ways and very shy around the question of asking for dates although he was quite willing to tell each and every girl who would listen to him about ten thousand fact on any of sixteen subjects, not excluding science, philosophy, and the poor fate of the Red Sox then. Although those ten thousand facts would come in handy when he got to college a couple of years later and he had girls hanging off the walls in debate class waiting for him to ask them out then those precious facts did not add up to a date by osmosis but rather incomprehension even by girls like Patty Lewis and Mary Shea who liked him and would have be glad if he asked them for a date without the ten thousand facts, thank you. Here though in something about the mores of the time that young people today might not comprehend girls just waited for guys to make a move, or moved on to the next guy who would, especially if he had a boss ’55 Chevy, like Patty and Mary did). Also girl-less (already explained but here the question is having a serious girl and the just mentioned facts will hold here as well), and dough-less (self-explanatory in working-class North Adamsville, the sorry fate of the working poor, the marginally employed like his father, no money when the rent was due and Ma had not money for the damn rent collector much less discretionary money for dates with girls) on Friday and Saturday nights when he  proclaimed to all who would listen (mainly Frankie, Markin, Jimmy Jenkins, Jack Callahan, Kenny Hogan and Johnny “Thunder” Thornton and an occasional girl who wondered what he was talking about) that “rock and roll will never die.”

Mainly, through the archival marvels of modern technology, pay-per-song, look on YouTube, check out Amazon Sam had been right, rock and roll had not died although it clearly no longer provided the same fuel for later generations more into hip-hop-ish, techno music, or edge city rock. But Sam always though it funny when kids, his grandkids, for example, heard (and saw) Elvis, all steamy, smoldering and swiveling in some film clip to make the older almost teenage girls among them almost react like the girls in his time did when they saw him on the Ed Sullivan Show and had half-formed girlish dreams about personally erasing that snarl from his face, especially that flip clip of the prison number in Jailhouse Rock. Bo Diddley proclaiming to the whole wide world that he in fact had put the rock in rock and roll and who could dispute that claim when he went bongers in some Afro-Carib number with that rectangular guitar. Say too Chuck Berry telling a candid world, a candid teenage world which after all was all that counted then, now too from what he had heard, that Mister Beethoven from the old fogy music museum had better take himself and his cronies and move over because a new be-bop daddy, a new high sheriff was in town was taking the reins, making the kids jump on jump street. Ditto curl-in-hair Buddy Holly pining away for his Peggy Sue. Better mad monk swamp rat Jerry Lee Lewis sitting, maybe standing for all Sam knew telling that same candid world that Chuck was putting on fire everybody had to do the high school hop bop, confidentially. And how about Wanda Jackson proclaiming that it was party time and an endless host of one hit wonders and wanna-bes they went crazy over. Yeah, those kids, those for example grandkids jumping around just like the young Sam who could not believe his ears when he had come of age and, yeah, jumping around for those same guys who formed his musical tastes back in the 1950s when he had come of age, musical age anyway. Jesus, Jesus too when he came of teenage age and all that meant of angst and alienation something no generation seems to be able to escape since the world had no less dangerous, no less incomprehensible today.

Sam had thought recently about going back to those various commercially-produced compilations put out by demographically savvy media companies that he had purchased on Amazon to cull out the better songs, some which he had on the tip of his tongue almost continuously since the 1950s (the Dubs Could This Be Magic the great last chance dance song that bailed him out of being shut out of more than one dance night although his partner’s feet borne the brunt of the battle, and the Teen Queens Eddie My Love, where Eddie took advantage of the girl and she is wondering when he is coming back, a great love ‘em and leave ‘em song and the answer is still he’s never coming back, are two examples that quickly came to his mind). Others like Johnny Ace’s Pledging My Love or The Crows Oh-Gee though needed some coaxing by listening to the compilations to be remembered.

But Sam, old lawyerly Sam, had finally found a sure-fire method to aid in that memory coaxing. Just go back in memory’s mind and picture scenes from teenage days and figure the songs that went with such scenes (this is not confined to 1950s aficionados anybody can imagine their youth times and play). But even using that method Sam believed that he was cheating a little, harmlessly cheating but still cheating. When he (or anybody familiar with the times) looked at the artwork on most of the better 1950s CD compilations one could not help but notice the excellent artwork that highlights various institutions illustrated back then. The infamous drive-in movies where you gathered about six people (hopefully three couples but six anyway) and paid for two the other four either on the back seat floor or in the trunk. They always played music at intermission when that “youth nation” cohort gathered at the refreshment stand to grab inedible hot dogs, stale popcorn, or fizzled out sodas, although who cared, especially if that three couples thing was in play, and that scene had always been associated in Sam’s mind with Frankie Lyman and the Teenager’s Why Do Fools Fall In Love.

That is how Sam played the game. Two (or more) can play so he said he would just set the scenes and others could fill in their own musical selections. Here goes: the first stirrings of interest in the opposite sex at Doc’s Drugstore with his soda fountain AND jukebox; the drive-in restaurant with you and yours in the car, yours or father borrowed for an end of the night bout with cardboard hamburgers, ultra-greasy french fries and diluted soda; the Spring Frolic Dance (or name your seasonal dance) your hands all sweaty, trying to disappear into the wall, waiting, waiting to perdition for that last dance so that you could ask that he or she that you had been eyeing all evening to dance that slow one  all dreamy; down at the beach on day one of out of school for the summer checking out the scene between the two boat clubs where all the guys and gals who counted hung out; the night before Thanksgiving football rally where he or she said they would be there, how about you; on poverty nights sitting up in your bedroom listening to edgy WMEX on your transistor radio away from prying adult eyes; another poverty night you and your boys, girls, boys and girls sitting in the family room spinning platters; that first sixth grade “petting” party (no more explanation needed right); cruising Main Street with your boys or girls looking for, well, you figure it out listening to the radio in that “boss” Chevy, hopefully; and, sitting in the balcony “watching” the double feature at the Strand Theater on Saturday afternoon when you were younger and at night when older. Okay, Sam has given enough cues. Fill in the dots, oops, songs and add scenes too.                      

  
 

May Day 2016 In Boston-Sunday May 1st- Join Us In Celebration

May Day 2016 In Boston-Sunday May 1st-Join Us In Celebration

From the Archives of Marxism-“Communism and the Family”-by Alexandra Kollontai

Workers Vanguard No. 1086	25 March 2016

From the Archives of Marxism-“Communism and the Family”-by Alexandra Kollontai

We print below excerpts from a 1918 speech by Alexandra Kollontai delivered to the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women. This translation is taken from a pamphlet titled “Communism and the Family,” published in London by the Workers’ Socialist Federation sometime between 1918 and 1920. At the time, Kollontai was a leading Bolshevik, though she later fell into line with Stalinism. She was the only woman on the Bolshevik Central Committee on the eve of the October Revolution. Kollontai served in the first workers and peasants government as Commissar of Social Welfare and was a leader of Zhenotdel, the department that oversaw party work among women.

In her speech, Kollontai vividly described the early Soviet workers state’s perspective to eradicate women’s oppression, which is based on the institution of the family. She pointed to the immense possibilities for the emancipation of women in a communist future in which socialized domestic services as well as collectivized care and responsibility for all children would liberate woman and child alike from the chains of the family.

Bolshevik legislation provided women with a level of equality and freedom that had yet to be attained in advanced “democratic” capitalist countries, freeing them from the medieval grip of the Russian Orthodox church and rigid patriarchal hierarchy. The Bolsheviks sought to implement the promise of women’s emancipation and bring women into full participation in economic, social and political life. But at every step their efforts were confronted with the grim poverty and social and economic backwardness in mainly peasant Russia. In addition, the country’s economy had been devastated by World War I and by the Civil War (1918-1920), in which the Bolshevik regime fought against the armies of counterrevolution and imperialist intervention. As Leon Trotsky explained:

“The real resources of the state did not correspond to the plans and intentions of the Communist Party. You cannot ‘abolish’ the family; you have to replace it. The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis of ‘generalized want.’ Experience soon proved this austere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before.”

—The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

Recognizing that the full emancipation of women is only possible on the basis of material abundance, the Bolsheviks looked to the extension of the revolution to the advanced capitalist countries, especially Germany. In 1923, the Communist International (Comintern) leadership and the German Communist Party failed to seize a revolutionary opportunity, ignominiously calling off a planned insurrection, after which demoralization swept Russia. By 1923-24, the failure to extend the revolution, the evisceration of the Russian working class in the Civil War and continuing economic scarcity enabled a bureaucratic caste, headed by Stalin, to usurp control of the Bolshevik Party, the workers state and the Comintern.

Through its futile pursuit of accommodation with imperialism, the Stalinist bureaucracy abandoned the fight for international revolution. The equality of women as envisioned by the Bolsheviks never fully came about as the Stalinists ultimately abandoned the communist fight for women’s liberation. In 1930, announcing that the woman question had been officially resolved, Zhenotdel was liquidated. The revised Family Code of 1936 criminalized abortion, made divorce more difficult to obtain and the bureaucracy called for a “reconstruction of the family on a new socialist basis.” (For more details, see “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006.)

While the parasitic bureaucracy undermined the revolution, the USSR remained a workers state with a collectivized economy, and the gains achieved by Soviet women could not be wholly erased. Capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR in 1991-92, the door to which had been opened by Stalinist misrule, ushered in untold misery for the peoples of the former Soviet Union, not least women.

In this speech, Kollontai loosely used the term “Communist State,” sometimes in reference to the Soviet workers state and other times referring to a future communist society. The Marxist understanding of a workers state is one, like the Soviet Union, in which capitalist rule has been overthrown and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat. To speak of a “communist state” is erroneous because under communism, a classless global society of material abundance based on generations of economic and social development, the state (and also the institution of the family) will have withered away.

*   *   *

The Woman No Longer Dependent on the Man.

Will the family be maintained in the Communist State? Will it be just as it is today? That is a question which is tormenting the women of the working class, and which is likewise receiving attention from their comrades, the men. In recent days this problem has particularly been agitating all minds among the working women, and this should not astonish us: Life is changing under our very eyes; former habits and customs are gradually disappearing; the entire existence of the proletarian family is being organised in a manner that is so new, so unaccustomed, so “bizarre,” as to have been impossible to foresee. That which makes women at the present day all the more perplexed is the fact that divorce has been rendered easier in Soviet Russia. As a matter of fact, by virtue of the decree of the People’s Commissaires of December 18th, 1917, divorce has ceased to be a luxury accessible only to the rich; henceforth the working woman will not have to petition for months, or even for years, for a separate credential entitling her to make herself independent of a brutish or drunken husband, accustomed to beat her. Henceforth, divorce may be amicably obtained within the period of a week or two at most. But it is just this ease of divorce which is a source of such hope to women who are unhappy in their married life, which simultaneously frightens other women, particularly those who have become accustomed to considering the husband as the “provider,” as the only support in life, and who do not yet understand that woman must become accustomed to seek and to find this support elsewhere, no longer in the person of the man, but in the person of society, of the State.

From the Genetic Family to the Present Day.

There is no reason for concealing the truth from ourselves: the normal family of former days, in which the man was everything and the woman nothing—since she had no will of her own, no money of her own, no time of her own—this family is being modified day by day; it is almost a thing of the past. But we should not be frightened by this condition. Either through error or through ignorance we are quite ready to believe that everything about us may remain immutable while everything is changing. It has always been so, and it will always be so. There is nothing more erroneous than this proverb! We have only to read how people lived in the past, and we shall learn immediately that everything is subject to change and that there are no customs, nor political organisations, nor morals, which remain fixed and inviolable. And the family in the various epochs in the life of humanity has frequently changed in form; it was once quite different from what we are accustomed to behold today. There was a time when only one form of family was considered normal, namely, the genetic family; that is to say, a family with an old mother at its head, around whom were grouped, in common life and common work, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. The patriarchal family was also once considered the sole norm; it was presided over by a father-master whose will was law for all the other members of the family; even in our days, such peasant families may still be found in Russian villages. In fact, in those places the morals and the family laws are not those of the city worker; in the country there still are a large number of customs no longer found in the family of a city proletarian. The form of the family, its customs, vary according to race. There are peoples, such as, for instance, the Turks, Arabs, Persians, among whom it is permitted by law for a husband to have many wives. There have been, and there still are at present, tribes which tolerate the contrary custom of permitting a wife to have several husbands. The habitual morality of the present-day man permits him to demand of a young girl that she remain a virgin until legitimate marriage; but there were tribes among whom the woman, on the contrary, made it a matter of pride to have had many lovers, decorating her arms and legs with rings to indicate their number.... Such practices, which could not but astonish us, practices which we might even qualify as immoral, are found among other peoples to have the sanction of holiness, peoples who in their turn consider our laws and customs to be “sinful.” Therefore there is no reason for our becoming terrified at the fact that the family is undergoing a modification, that gradually the traces of the past which have become outlived are being discarded, and that new relations are being introduced between man and woman. We have only to ask: “What is it that has become outlived in our family system and what, in the relations of the working man and working woman and the peasant and peasant woman, are their respective rights and duties which would best harmonize with the conditions of life in the new Russia, in the worker’s Russia which our Soviet Russia now is?” Everything compatible with this new condition would be maintained; all the rest, all the superannuated rubbish which has been bequeathed to us by the cursed epoch of servitude and domination which was characteristic of the landed proprietors and the capitalists, all this shall be swept aside together with the exploiter class itself, with these enemies of the proletariat and of the poor.

Capitalism Destroyed the Old Family Life.

The family in its present form is also simply one of the legacies of the past. Formerly solid, compact in itself, indissoluble—for such was considered to be the character of marriage that had been sanctified by the priest in person—the family was equally necessary to all its members. Were it not for the family, who would have nourished, clothed, and trained the children, who would have guided them in life? The orphans’ lot in those days was the worst that could befall one. In the family such as we have become accustomed to it is the husband who earns and supports wife and children. The wife, on her part, is occupied with the housekeeping and the bringing up of the children, as she understands it. But already for a century this customary form of the family has been undergoing a progressive destruction in all the countries in which capitalism is dominant, in which the number of factories is rapidly growing, as well as other capitalist enterprises which employ working men. The family customs and morals are being formed simultaneously with the general conditions of the life surrounding them. What contributed most of all to change the family customs in a radical manner was without doubt the universal spread of wage labor on the part of woman. Formerly, it was only the man who was considered to be the support of the family. But for the past fifty or sixty years we have beheld in Russia (in other countries even somewhat earlier) the capitalist regime obliging women to seek remunerative work outside of the family, outside of the house.

30,000,000 Women Bearing a Double Burden.

The wages of the “providing” man being insufficient for the needs of the family, the wife in her turn found herself obliged to look for work that was paid for; the mother was obliged also to knock at the door of the factory offices. And year by year the number of women of the working class who left their homes in order to swell the ranks of the factory, to take up work as day labourers, saleswomen, office help, washerwomen, servants, increased day by day. According to an enumeration made before the beginning of the world war, in the countries of Europe and America there were counted about sixty million women earning a living by their own work. During the war this number increased considerably. Almost half of these women are married, but it is easy to see what sort of family life they must have—a family life in which the wife and mother goes to work outside of the house, for eight hours a day, ten if you include the trip both ways! Her home is necessarily neglected, the children grow up without any maternal care, left to themselves and all the dangerous risks of the street, in which they spend the greater part of their time. The wife, the mother, who is a worker, sweats blood to fill three tasks at the same time: to give the necessary working hours as her husband does, in some industry or commercial establishment, then to devote herself as well as she can to her household and then also to take care of her children. Capitalism has placed on the shoulders of the woman a burden which crushes her: it has made of her a wage-worker without having lessened her cares as a housekeeper and mother. We therefore find the woman crushed under her triple, insupportable burden, forcing from her often a swiftly smothered cry of pain, and more than once causing the tears to mount to her eyes. Care has always been the lot of woman, but never has woman’s lot been more unfortunate, more desperate than that of millions of working women under the capitalist yoke to-day, while industry is in its period of greatest expansion.

Workers Learn to Exist Without the Family Life.

The more widespread becomes the wage labor of woman, the further progresses the decomposition of the family. What a family life, in which the man and wife work in the factory in different departments; in which the wife has not even the time to prepare a decent meal for her offspring! What a family life when father and mother out of the twenty-four hours of the day, most of which are spent at hard labor, cannot even spend a few minutes with their children! It was quite different formerly; the mother, mistress of the house, remained at home, occupied with her household duties and her children, whom she did not cease to watch with her attentive eye—to-day, from early in the morning until the factory whistle blows, the working woman hastens to her work, and when evening has come, again, at the sound of the whistle, she hurries home to prepare the family’s soup and to do the most pressing of her household duties; after an all too scant sleep, she begins on the next day her regular grind. It is a real workhouse, this life of the married working woman! There is nothing surprising, therefore, in the fact that under these conditions the family ties loosen and the family itself disintegrates more and more. Little by little all that formerly made the family a solid whole is disappearing, together with its stable foundation. The family is ceasing to be a necessity for its members as well as for the State. The ancient forms of the family are becoming merely a hindrance.

What was it that made the family strong in the days of old? In the first place, the fact that it was the husband and father who supported the family; in the second place, that the home was a thing equally necessary to all the members of the family; and in the third and last place, that the children were brought up by the parents. What is left of all this to-day? The husband, we have just seen, has ceased to be the sole support of the family. The wife, who goes to work, has become the equal of her husband in this respect. She has learned to earn her own living and often also that of her children and her husband. This still leaves us as the function of the family the bringing-up and the support of the children while very young. Let us now see whether the family is not about to be relieved also even of this task just mentioned....

The Dawn of Collective Housekeeping.

The individual household has passed its zenith. It is being replaced more and more by collective housekeeping. The working woman will sooner or later need to take care of her own dwelling no longer; in the Communist society of tomorrow this work will be carried on by a special category of working women who will do nothing else. The wives of the rich have long been freed from these annoying and tiring duties. Why should the working woman continue to carry out these painful duties? In Soviet Russia the life of the working woman should be surrounded with the same ease, with the same brightness, with the same hygiene, with the same beauty, which has thus far surrounded only the women of the richer classes. In a Communist society the working woman will no longer have to spend her few, alas, too few hours of leisure, in cooking, since there will be in Communist society public restaurants and central kitchens to which everybody may come to take his meals.

These establishments have already been on the increase in all countries, even under the capitalist regime. In fact, for half a century the number of restaurants and cafes in all the great cities of Europe increased day by day; they sprang up like mushrooms after an autumn rain. But while under the capitalist system only people with well-lined purses could afford to take their meals in a restaurant, in the Communist city, anyone who likes may come to eat in the central kitchens and restaurants. The case will be the same with washing and other work: the working woman will no longer be obliged to sink in an ocean of filth or to ruin her eyes in darning her stockings or mending her linen; she will simply carry these things to the central laundries each week, and take them out again each week already washed and ironed. The working woman will have one care less to face. Also, special clothes-mending shops will give the working women the opportunity to devote their evenings to instructive readings, to healthy recreations, instead of spending them as at present in exhausting labor. Therefore, the four last duties still remaining to burden our women, as we have seen above, will soon also disappear under the triumphant Communist regime. And the working women will surely have no cause to regret this. Communist society will only have broken the domestic yoke of woman in order to render her life richer, happier, freer, and more complete.

The Child’s Upbringing Under Capitalism.

But what will remain of the family after all these labors of individual housekeeping have disappeared? We still have the children to deal with. But here also the state of the working comrades will come to the rescue of the family by substituting for the family; society will gradually take charge of all that formerly was on parents. Under the capitalist regime, the instruction of the child has ceased to be the duty of the parents. The children were taught in schools. Once the child had attained school age, the parents breathed more freely. Beginning with this moment the intellectual development of their child ceased to be an affair of theirs. But all the obligations of the family toward the child were not therefore finished. There was still the duty of feeding the child, buying it shoes, clothing it, making skilled and honest workers of them, who might be able when the time came to live by themselves and to feed and support their parents in their old age. However, it was very unusual when a worker’s family was able to fulfil entirely all these obligations towards their children; their low wages did not permit them even to give the children enough to eat, while lack of leisure prevented the parents from devoting to the education of the rising generation the full attention which it demanded for this duty. The family was supposed to bring up the children. But did it really? As a matter of fact, it is the street which brings up the children of the proletariat. The children of the proletarians are ignorant of the amenities of family life, pleasures which we still shared with our own fathers and mothers.

Furthermore, the low wages of the parents, insecurity, even hunger, frequently bring it about that when hardly ten years of age, the son of the proletarian already becomes in his turn an independent worker. Now, as soon as the child (boy or girl) begins to earn money, he considers himself the master of his own person to such an extent that the words and counsels of his parents cease having any effect upon him, the authority of the parents weakens and obedience is at an end. As the domestic labors of the family die out one by one, all obligations of support and training will be filled by society in place of the parents. Under the capitalist regime the children were frequently, too frequently, a heavy and unbearable burden to the proletarian family.

The Child and the Communist State.

Here also the Communist society will come to the aid of the parents. In Soviet Russia, owing to the care of the Commissariats of Public Education and of Social Welfare, great advances are being made, and already many things have been done in order to facilitate for the family the task of bringing up and supporting the children. There are homes for very small babies, day nurseries, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, infirmaries, and health resorts for sick children, restaurants, free lunches at school, free distribution of text books, of warm clothing, of shoes to the pupils of the educational establishments—does all this not sufficiently show that the child is passing out of the confines of the family and being placed from the shoulders of the parents on those of collectivity?

The care of children by the parents consisted of three distinct parts: (1) the care necessarily devoted to the very young babies; (2) the bringing up of the child; (3) the instruction of the child. As for the instruction of children in primary schools and later in gymnasiums [European secondary school] and universities, it has become a duty of the State, even in capitalist society. The other occupations of the working class, its conditions of life, imperatively dictated, even to capitalist society, the creation for the purposes of the young, of playgrounds, infants’ schools, homes, etc., etc. The more the workers became conscious of their rights, the better they were organised in any specific State, the more society would show itself to be concerned with relieving the family of the care of the children. But bourgeois society was afraid of going too far in this matter of meeting the interests of the working class, lest it contribute in this way to the disintegration of the family. The capitalists themselves are not unaware of the fact that the family of old, with the wife a slave and the man responsible for the support and well-being of the family, that the family of this type is the best weapon to stifle the proletarian effort toward liberty, to weaken the revolutionary spirit of the working man and working woman. Worry for his family takes the backbone out of the worker, obliges him to compromise with capital. The father and the mother, what will they not do when their children are hungry? Contrary to the practice of capitalist society, which has not been able to transform the education of youth into a truly social function, a State work, Communist society will consider the social education of the rising generation, as the very basis of its laws and customs, as the corner-stone of the new edifice. Not the family of the past, petty and narrow, with its quarrels between the parents, with its exclusive interests in its own offspring, will mould for us the man of the society of to-morrow. Our new man, in our new society, is to be moulded by Socialist organisations such as playgrounds, gardens, homes, and many other such institutions, in which the child will pass the greater part of the day and where intelligent educators will make of him a Communist who is conscious of the greatness of this sacred motto: solidarity, comradeship, mutual aid, devotion to the collective life.

The Mother’s Livelihood Assured.

But now, with the bringing up gone and with the instruction gone, what will remain of the obligations of the family toward its children, particularly after it has been relieved also of the greater portion of the material cares involved in having a child, except for the care of a very small baby while it still needs its mother’s attention, while it is still learning to walk, clinging to its mother’s skirts? Here again the Communist State hastens to the aid of the working mother. No longer shall the child-mother be bowed down with a baby in her arms! The Workers’ State charges itself with the duty of assuring a livelihood to every mother, whether she be legitimately married or not, as long as she is suckling her child, of creating all over maternity houses, of establishing in all the cities and all the villages, day nurseries and other similar institutions in order thus to permit the woman to serve the State in a useful manner and simultaneously to be a mother.

Marriage No Longer a Chain.

Let the working mothers be re-assured. The Communist Society is not intending to take the children away from the parents nor to tear the baby from the breast of its mother; nor has it any intention of resorting to violence in order to destroy the family as such. No such thing! Such are not the aims of the Communist Society. What do we observe to-day? The outworn family is breaking. It is gradually freeing itself from all the domestic labors which formerly were as so many pillars supporting the family as a social unit. Housekeeping? It also appears to have outlived its usefulness. The children? The parent-proletarians are already unable to take care of them; they can assure them neither subsistence nor education. This is the situation from which both parents and children suffer in equal measure. Communist Society therefore approaches the working woman and the working man and says to them:

“You are young, you love each other. Everyone has the right to happiness. Therefore live your life. Do not flee happiness. Do not fear marriage, even though marriage was truly a chain for the working man and woman of capitalist society. Above all, do not fear, young and healthy as you are, to give to your country new workers, new citizen-children. The society of the workers is in need of new working forces; it hails the arrival of every newborn child in the world. Nor should you be concerned because of the future of your child; your child will know neither hunger nor cold. It will not be unhappy nor abandoned to its fate as would have been the case in capitalist society. A subsistence ration and solicitous care are assured to the child and to the mother by the Communist Society, by the Workers’ State, as soon as the child arrives in the world. The child will be fed, it will be brought up, it will be educated by the care of the Communist Fatherland; but this Fatherland will by no means undertake to tear the child away from such parents as may desire to participate in the education of their little ones. The Communist Society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child, but the paternal joys, the maternal satisfaction—such will not be taken away from those who show themselves capable of appreciating and understanding these joys.”

Can this be called a destruction of the family by means of violence? Or a forcible separation of child and mother?

The Family a Union of Affection and Comradeship.

There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has seen its day. It is not the fault of the Communist State, it is the result of the changed conditions of life. The family is ceasing to be a necessity of the State, as it was in the past; on the contrary, it is worse than useless, since it needlessly holds back the female workers from a more productive and far more serious work. Nor is it any longer necessary to the members of the family themselves, since the task of bringing up the children, which was formerly that of the family, is passing more and more into the hands of the collectivity. But, on the ruins of the former family we shall soon behold rising a new form which will involve altogether different relations between men and women, and which will be a union of affection and comradeship, a union of two equal persons of the Communist Society, both of them free, both of them independent, both of them workers. No more domestic “servitude” for women! No more inequality within the family. No more fear on the part of the woman to remain without support or aid with little ones in her arms if her husband should desert her. The woman in the Communist city no longer depends on her husband but on her work. It is not her husband but her robust arms which will support her. There will be no more anxiety as to the fate of her children. The State of the Workers will assume responsibility for these. Marriage will be purified of all its material elements, of all money calculations, which constitute a hideous blemish on family life in our days. Marriage is henceforth to be transformed into a sublime union of two souls in love with each other, each having faith in the other; this union promises to each working man and to each working woman simultaneously, the most complete happiness, the maximum of satisfaction which can be the lot of creatures who are conscious of themselves and of the life which surrounds them. This free union, which is strong in the comradeship with which it is inspired, instead of the conjugal slavery of the past—that is what the Communist Society of to-morrow offers to both men and women. Once the conditions of labor have been transformed, and the material security of the working women has been increased, and after marriage such as was performed by the Church—this so-called indissoluble marriage which was at bottom merely a fraud—after this marriage has given place to the free and honest union of men and women who are lovers and comrades, another shameful scourge will also be seen to disappear, another frightful evil which is a stain on humanity and which falls with all its weight on the hungry working woman: prostitution.

No More Prostitution.

This evil we owe to the economic system now in force, to the institution of private property. Once the latter has been abolished, the trade in women will automatically disappear.

Therefore let the woman of the working class cease to worry over the fact that the family as at present constituted is doomed to disappear. They will do much better to hail with joy the dawn of a new society which will liberate the woman from domestic servitude, which will lighten the burden of motherhood for woman, and in which, finally, we shall see disappear the most terrible of the curses weighing upon women, known as prostitution.

The woman who is called upon to struggle in the great cause of the liberation of the workers—such a woman should know that in the New State there will be no more room for such petty divisions as were formerly understood: “These are my own children; to them I owe all my maternal solicitude, all my affection; those are your children, my neighbour’s children; I am not concerned with them. I have enough to do with my own.” Henceforth the worker-mother, who is conscious of her social function, will rise to a point where she no longer differentiates between yours and mine; she must remember that there are henceforth only our children, those of the Communist State, the common possession of all the workers.

Social Equality of Men and Women.

The Workers’ State has need of a new form of relation between the sexes. The narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it embraces all the children of the great proletarian family. In place of the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of woman, we shall see rise the free union, fortified by the love and the mutual respect of the two members of the Workers’ State, equal in their rights and in their obligations. In place of the individual and egotistic family, there will arise a great universal family of workers, in which all the workers, men and women, will be, above all, workers, comrades. Such will be the relation between men and women in the Communist Society of to-morrow. This new relation will assure to humanity all the joys of the so-called free love ennobled by a true social equality of the mates, joys which were unknown to the commercial society of the capitalist regime.

Make way for healthy, blossoming children; make way for a vigorous youth that clings to life and to its joys, which is free in its sentiments and in its affections. Such is the watchword of the Communist Society. In the name of equality, of liberty, and of love, we call upon the working women and the working men, peasant women and peasants, courageously and with faith to take up the work of the reconstruction of human society with the object of rendering it more perfect, more just, and more capable of assuring to the individual the happiness which he deserves. The red flag of the social revolution which will shelter, after Russia, other countries of the world also, already proclaims to us the approach of the heaven on earth to which humanity has been aspiring for centuries.