*****On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

*****On Passing Left-Wing Political “Wisdom” To The Next Generation-With The Lessons Of The 1960s In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman 

 

One of the worst excesses, and there were many although made mostly from ignorance and immaturity and were moreover minuscule compared to the conscious policies of those in power who we were opposing, that we who came of political age in the 1960s were culpable of was our sense that we had to reinvent the wheel of left-wing political struggle. Mostly a very conscious denial and rejection of those thinkers, cadre and organization who had come before us and whom were disqualified from the discourse by having been worn out, old-timey, or just ideas and methods that we had not thought of and therefore irrelevant. The expression “throwing out the baby with the bath water” may seem a cliché but serves a purpose here. Most of the time back then until fairly late, maybe too late when the tide had begun to ebb toward the end of the 1960s and the then current and fashionable anticommunist theories proved to be ridiculously inadequate, we turned our noses up at Marxism, and at Marxist-Leninist ways of organizing the struggle against the American beast.

I can remember more than a few times when somebody identified him or herself as a Marxist that I and the others in the room would groan audibly. Occasionally, as well, taking part in some of the shouting down exercises when the political disputes became heated. Part of the problem was that those who organizationally claimed to be Marxists-the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party and to some extent the Progressive Labor Party were following political lines that were far to the right (right being relative here in the context of the left-wing movement in this country) of the politics of those who considered themselves radical and revolutionary youth. Those organizations far too eager to traffic with what we called respectable bourgeois forces who were part of the problem since they helped control the governmental apparatus. (I won’t even mention the moribund Socialist/Social Democratic organizations that only old laborites and “old ladies in tennis sneakers,” although that might be a slander against those nice do-gooder ladies, followed as the expression went at the time.) I know, and I know that many others at the time,  had no time for a look at the history books, had nothing but a conscious disregard for the lessons of history, good and bad, that we thought was irrelevant in seeking to build the “newer world.” (Strangely, later after all our empirical experiment proved futile and counter-productive, quoting, quoting loudly and vehemently  from this or that book, by this or that thinker, this or that revolutionary or radical became the rage. Ah, the excesses of youth.)               

Of course not everybody who came through the 1960s passed through any left-wing political school. Despite the nostalgia, despite the now puffed-up claims that we had this or that decisive effect on history, especially these days with the commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the trotting out once again of the overblew claims that the American anti-war movement stopped the Vietnam War rather than the heroic struggles of the people of Vietnam, the number of the young who got catch up more than marginally was significantly smaller that the photographs, videos, and remembrances of the times would suggest. A case in point is my old friend Sam Lowell, from my growing in Carver times whose longtime political trajectory I want to highlight in this sketch.

Highlight to provide something, I am not sure what, perhaps a cautionary tale, to what appears to be the makings of the next “fresh breeze” coming through the land that another Carver corner boy, the late Peter Paul Markin, would harangue us with on lonely Friday nights was coming. The big turn in the environmental movement, the fight for better conditions for young workers (and old) epitomized by the “Fight for $15” movement and above all, the bedrock struggle of the “Black Lives Matter” movement portends some new awakening and we old-timers who have kept the political faith have something about all of that early experience which may push those struggles forward. Here’s Sam’s story and see what you think:   

 

Sam Lowell when he was young, when he was coming of age in the 1960s along with his hang around guys at Jimmy Jack’s Diner on Main Street in Carver, did not give a “tinker’s damn” (Sam’s term which he would endlessly utter especially when the late Peter Paul Markin would start talking about what was going on outside of the Jimmy Jack corner world) about politics, about the fate of the world, about the burning and pressing issues of that day nuclear disarmament, black civil rights down South (he if anything had the Northern white working class prejudices inherited from his parents and relatives using the “n” word to refer to blacks for a very long time), and the exploding war in Vietnam. Sam’s world, like many guys of that time, like now too as far as anybody can see, was about girls or sex or name the gender combinations, above all about the music of the times, about what is now called the classic age of rock and roll (the folk music minute of that period which Bart Webber tried to get him interested in was, is, a book sealed with seven seals and he still grinds his teeth when any of us who hang with him still mention that genre).

Sam, declared by his local draft board exempt from military service as the sole support of his mother and four younger sisters after he father had passed away suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1965, had pretty much kept his head in the sand about the war, probably supported the war against demon communism as much as anybody in town who was not directly involved in the escalation of the war. That is until one of his hang around guys, Freddie Callahan, Jack’s younger brother, had lain down his head in some rotted jungle in some unpronounceable hamlet in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in late 1967 and who would later have his name placed on that black granite down in Washington, D.C. which would bring a tear to Sam eye every time he visited it despite his complete change of heart about the war.

The war, the hellish flare-up and destructiveness of the war had not been Freddie’s fault, it had not been Freddie’s war as Sam was at pains to explain when he did get active in the anti-war movement and people around town thought that he was being disrespectful of Freddie’s memory and of the flag, actually probably more the flag until very late, maybe about 1972 when even the American Legion types in town saw the writing on the wall, some of them anyway.

Bart Webber was the first to take his slightly held anti-war feelings to the holding up the wall in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner night but he was facing the draft himself in 1966 so Sam had not taken his plight to heart. It really had been Freddie’s death that got him thinking, Freddie whom he had known since fifth grade when his own family had moved to Carver from North Adamsville when the shipbuilding trade there bottomed out and his father sought work in the new electronics plant just built up the road from Carver. Got him thinking about lots of things that did not add up in the world, the world of people just trying to get by without being shot at, or shot up by friend or foe.

One day, maybe in early spring 1968 in any case sometime before summer of that year, Sam had gone to Boston about thirty miles up the road from Carver on some business when he was walking near the Park Street subway station and a young guy about his age in regulation long hair (Sam’s was short although long for Carver young adults just then and commented on at Jimmy Jack’s by the older crowd going in for the old-timers’ blue plate specials and gung-ho guys who had no truck with “fairies” and “hippies”), unkempt beard, blue jeans and sandals, a picture of heaven’s own high priest hippie who handed him a leaflet for an anti-war rally sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society that was going to take place on the Common later that afternoon. (That was the notorious SDS that every right-thinking American believed, including Sam a little before Freddie’s death, as they could not understand kids who seemed to have everything going for them including draft exemptions were so rebellious unless some unknown source was prodding them, as the agents, paid or unpaid, of Moscow or China or someplace antagonistic to the interests of the United States. Every time an SDS rally was broken up by the cops, or mass arrests occurred, those believers breathed a short sigh of relief).     

The guy in hippie garb pressed the issue, something Sam thought was odd since in his experience these hippie types were too laid back doing dope and sex and listening to acid rock to bother about politics usually saying that to get involved only “encouraged” those politicians who had depended on free-wheeling unpaid volunteer youth to campaign for them. That drug, sex and rock and roll were okay with him although he had not been into the dope scene then but rather the traditional Carver Friday and Saturday night down by the cranberry bogs drinking cheap whiskey scene, a scene that Carver guys had been doing since time immemorial at the bogs from what he had heard.

This dippy hippie started yelling at him that it that it was his “duty” to attend the rally and help “stop the fucking war.”  Something in that common language “speech” made Sam take notice and he asked the hippie where he was from. He answered from Lynn, a very working class town on the North Shore of Boston, and told Sam, who blushed a little at the information, that he had already been in the Army, had served in Vietnam and had had enough of seeing his buddies killed or otherwise “fucked up.” Sam then out of the blue mentioned the death of Freddie Callahan, something he had never talked about except with the guys at Jimmy Jack’s, and the hippie told him that he had better get his ass to the rally before half their generation went up in smoke.

Sam pleaded business but that afternoon and early evening as the sun went down in Boston Sam was no longer “not political.” And Lance Jones, the hippie who had “recruited” him was there that afternoon and many times later to make sure that he did not backslide, and to give him the “skinny” on what was really going on in Vietnam and whose interests that commitment was serving. Sam and Lance (and others) would do many things together, sit-in at draft boards (Sam uneasy about that given his own status as exempt but Lance said everybody counted in the struggle), rallies, blocking highways and every other kind of civil protest against the damn war.

The defining moment, the moment Sam saw that the movement was ebbing, was becoming ineffective as a way to stop the “fucking war” as even he was prone to express his outrage at the constant bombings and constant lies about the situation, was down in Washington D.C. on May Day 1971 where there was a separation in the movement between those who wanted to endlessly built, presumably, larger mass rallies to show the people’s war weariness and those who decided it was time for more militant in-your-face tactics when the proposal was to “stop the government, if the government did not stop the war.” Sam had gone with the militants, a decision he has since never regretted although not for the outcome of the event itself which was an unmitigated failure but because of the enormity of that failure he had to think through things a bit more carefully, think more strategically.

He had been manhandled and arrested by the cops the first day out as the governmental forces far outnumbered and were more effective in containing the mass than that mass of people had been in evading the waiting cops and troops. Sam had spent a week in detention in RFK Stadium, a goddam football field as he would always tell everybody afterward, for his troubles (although he tempered his remarks about the stadium after the coup in Chile in 1973 where those militants were not merely harassed and detained but jailed for long periods or shot death out of hand in many cases). 

Sam, Lance, Jack Callahan, Frankie Riley, me, maybe a couple of other guys did other things too, things like taking those continent-wide hitchhikes to the West Coast, the rock concerts, all of the stuff that those who had broken from the old expected cookie-cutter, if in Sam’s case only partially and slowly since he was not sure that the whole thing had not been a dream, and he had those family responsibilities although they lessened as his sisters came of age and left the house and his mother re-married to a good guy who ran a tool and die shop in town and had government contracts for high precision machine work. But it was funny thing about Sam, a thing that was not apparent when he hung around Carver in high school but once he was convinced that he needed to do something he stuck with it (he would later tell anybody who would listen that “sticking with it” included his two drawn out failed marriages beyond repair).

Sam, after that debacle in Washington, had settled in for the long haul, had listened to what Lance had to say about needing to organize better, get more substantial allies. Gave a glance at Marx and some other thinkers who knew what they were talking about if you wanted to  effect real change and not just play at the thing for kicks, or for something to do while you are in school or on the loose, had read some and while for a long time he had his misgivings about taking his political cues from around the edges of rational politics, politics that he and his family, his neighbors, his corner boys had dismissed or worse stigmatized as “commie” talk which still hovered over his thinking. But Sam had been the first in the group to sense in the mid-1970s, particularly after the fall of Saigon and the close of the Vietnam era which had almost split the country in two, that the Garden of Eden was going to be postponed for a long time, that the tide had ebbed just as Bart Webber had sensed the rising tide in the mid-1960s.

But Sam stayed with the commitment to serious political change, to right some wrongs, to be a stand-up guy when some egregious governmental decision reared its ugly head. Stayed with it far longer that Lance who wound up going to school and becoming a CPA, longer than Bart who decided writing law briefs was easier than sitting around with about twelve people dedicated to changing the world and projecting when the next great mass upsurge would occur. Stayed with longer than Frankie Riley who also was drawn to writing legal briefs although he made a comeback in the lead-up to the first Iraq war in 1991. Longer than even the late Peter Paul Markin who had totally lost his moorings, let that “wanting habits” hunger that all the Jimmy Jack’s hang out guys had near the surface of their lives get the best of him and got caught up in the down side of the dope trade and wound up in a back alley face down under mysterious conditions in Sonora down in Mexico after a dope deal went bad. Yeah, those were not good years

So Sam faced the next few decades doing his best to keep up the good fight, working mainly with ad hoc committees that would rise and fall over specific issues like the effects of the “Reagan revolution” in this country, the struggles in Central America throughout the 1980s, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, that first Iraq war in 1991, and a laundry list of other causes great and small which filled his political life in hard times. But always kept his eyes open and ears to the ground to see if some new version of that 1960s experience would get some wind in its sails as new generations got caught up in the whirlwind of trying to right the world’s wrongs. He knew that the 1960s experience could never be exactly replicated, that each new generation would come to understandings in its own ways and forms, did not believe that a lot of 1960s stuff should be replicated but he did believe that another wave would come, believed in that vision for a long time. But when, damn it.

One of Sam’s worries as he got older and got more concerned about the future, especially in the post 9/11 world of the early 2000s, got much more concerned about the possibilities of a socialist future if not for him then for later generations as the American body politic took one of its prolonged turning in and against itself was that there would be no one to pass on whatever accumulated political wisdom he and his dwindling band of aging 1960s sisters and brothers had been through. No one to make sense of the political battles won and lost, no one to pick up the skills necessary to organize any effective opposition to the fierce predatory appetites of the American imperium, or maybe better said, any opposition at all as the post-2003 anti-war landscape demonstrated. Most importantly no one to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, mistakes made, unlike the American government, mostly out of willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris but certainly avoidable. Avoidable since a great if fairly obvious lesson from his own experiences had been that uprisings against the government, against the social norms of the day are short and precious opportunities not to be squandered by willful ignorance, foolhardiness and hubris.       

Sam’s youthfully derived certitudes had taken a hammering in the process of the reactionary counter-offensive that erupting in the mid-1970s as the spirit of the 1960s rapidly dissipated, and took a decisive turn right under the auspices of the Reagan Revolution. The self-serving, self-promoting, social Darwinist view of society systematically laid out in that period has held a full head of steam since then as everyone almost daily has his or her nose rubbed in the hard fact that most people are not getting ahead while the bourgeoisie, the economic royalists, what did one wag call them, oh yeah, “the one-percent” with all the guns, prosper with no sweat.  That ethos had never really abated despite a couple of promising uprising blips around opposition to the second Iraq war in 2003 which evaporated after the hellish bombs began to fall in earnest in Baghdad and after the world financial meltdown in 2008 and the subsequent short-lived and anarchistic Occupy movement of late 2011.

So Sam had more recently begun to feel that feeling in the extreme,   the fear that there would be nobody to pass the torch to, nobody in the American body politic to learn a couple of things about past left-wing struggles and organizational efforts to attempt to “tame the monster.” Began to wonder if what he believed had not been an idle thought or some kind of self-induced paranoia.

Over the previous several years he had given the immediate reasons some thought as he began to realize that the generation after his which was the logical place to have passed that information onto never in the aggregate cared much about his kind of politics, had turn tail and gotten caught up in the “Reagan revolution” or after witnessing what happened to the ‘60s crowd ducked their heads, seriously ducked their heads when the deal went down. He had also become pretty sanguine about prospects for the generation after that, the grandkids, who seemed preoccupied with “Me” and with looking down toward the ground with their technological gadgetry and their ethereal “social networking” tweeter. But of late he was not so sure he should have been ready to throw in the towel but a new gathering storm, or what old Bart Webber, who he had run into recently in town for the funeral of a brother, had called “the fresh breeze” was still in its embryonic stage.

Sam had had to laugh at one point after a small demonstration of few hundred in Boston’s Park Street on the Common, the historic spot for such activities, against the escalation of the war in Afghanistan in the early days of the Obama administration  (one of the “surges” that was supposed to secure “victory” and which in the final analysis led to more doors in more villages being kicked in and the United States’ action acting, once again,  as a “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS-type organizations). That demonstration drew a cohort young people, people who had not previously been out in the public square but who were bewildered by a “peace” American President, a Nobel Peace Prize winner to boot, sending more boots on the ground after he had told the nation that the best American course was to withdraw from that benighted country. Of course the usual dwindling crew of AARP-worthy older types, the ones that his old friend Pete Markin had called when they were young the “little old ladies in tennis sneakers, Quakers up-tights, and assorted harmless do-gooders” back in the Carver days when he didn’t give a damn about politics and now here he was a “little old man in tennis sneakers” carrying on their seemingly utopian struggle.

An unusual combination indeed. The sly laugh part though was his realization that if there was any new action, any seeking of the “newer world” as that same Markin liked to called it comparable to the 1960s, that it would be the grandpas and grandmas and the grandkids linked up against the world. He was okay with that if that ever happened but after that initial burst of young energy faded he got increasingly more morose about that prospect, and the handing of that goddam torch.

Like with a lot of things in the world of politics, particularly left-wing politics where due to the smallness and isolation of those forces there is tendency to have to react to events not of your own making, the reaction by governments, particularly the United States, following 9/11 with its attempt to institutionalize the national security state and to seek vengeance at any target foreign or domestic that it considered dangerous. No question the scariest time of his political life, the only time he felt the full heat of physical threat from the average citizen whom he assumed usually view people demonstrating about anything as mere cranks and weirdoes was in the aftermath of the frenzied American bombing campaign and troop occupation in Afghanistan in 2001 right after 9/11 when he had with very few others had organized a small, a very small demonstration in opposition to the bombing campaign at Park Street and took more menacing guff from passers-by than he had ever encountered before. Those were dark days when some locally well-known committed peaceniks dependable in fair weather favored folding up the tent rather than face the hostile streets, and no question they were hostile, were suddenly not available to rally.

Like Sam said he hoped the later Occupy movement which arose phoenix-like out of the ashes of the world financial crisis but that fizzled fairly quickly and that sent Sam into another bout with what the hell, no who the hell was going to lead the struggle, who among the young who of necessity with their energy and sense of wonder drive all the great movements, was going to step forward. He felt at that time that he would have no problem taking a back sit in the struggle if the new blood came along.   

Here is a funny thing, a quirk of politics. Everybody Sam talked to, young and old, understood that the social tinder underlying American society only needed a little push to go wild. Knew that as a result of the vast increase in income inequality, knew the weight of the endless wars on the budget and human resources   was at a breaking point, knew that people, a lot of people, did not feel they were getting ahead in life always something that will steadily enflame people. So Sam, and they, the ones he talked to and talked to him knew something had to flare up. But didn’t, for a long time didn’t. Then in a rather quick succession the environment, the fight for a living wage and the fight against police brutality and the fight against the hard racism against black people were taken up by the young, or rather sections of the young from say late 2013 to now.

Not everything that has been proposed, not every action has made political sense but there is some motion toward upping the struggle, getting back into the street politics that Sam had been pushing for some time in various committee meetings since the portals of government seemed to be tone-deaf to what was going on down at the base of society. Here is the kicker though. The kicker for now as things are still in flux, still have a way to go before they are sifted out. Things may be in flux and need sifting out but Sam is starting to get and uneasy feeling already. Sam went to a meeting of those who wanted to respond to the various egregious police shootings of the past years around the country and tried to make some points, give some perspectives. He was rather unceremoniously dismissed by the young leaders there, both the young black and white leaders, as an old-timey too talkative guy.

The young, like in his generation, appear ready to seek to reinvent the wheel. Appear too as well to be as naïve about the enemies they are facing as they were in his generation. But what bothered Sam most of late has been that the young in their identity political way are “ageist” if such a term makes sense, are disrespectful of his right to have his say since when the deal goes down he will be on the barricades right beside them. Sam thought that even with the slights he could still say-“Ah, to young was very heaven” though as old Wordsworth had said in his sunnier days.    

How The West Was Won-Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”(1980)-A Film Review

How The West Was Won-Michael Cimino’s  “Heaven’s Gate”(1980)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Heavens’ Gate, starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walkens, Isabelle Huppert, John Hurt and many other now well-known actors, directed by “The Deer Hunter’s Michael Cimino, 1980

Almost everybody is, and should be, fascinated by how the West, the  part of the United States west of the Mississippi as a convenient if not totally accurate landmark was settled, how in my terms the West was “won.” The cinematic view of that process has changed dramatically over the years reflecting changing sensibilities and an attempt at a true depiction of what was going on back then. Taking my own life cycle as a benchmark there was quite a changeover from the 1950s television and film versions when the good guys wore white and the black guys black and the “only good injun was a dead one (except maybe the Lone Ranger’s companion Tonto).” Later during the 1970s there was a drastic turnaround in order to show that there were all kinds of people who fled to the west after striking out in the East and that not all of them were all good-or all bad. Showed that the rough and tumble overall lawlessness of the places staked out were peopled by those who shunned white. One of the most important although damned at the time for being overlong, over budget, over-scripted and under-acted was Michael Cimino’s tale Heaven’s Gate  which after a recent viewing of four hours I am ready to declare  one of the great Westerns of all time, maybe one of the great films too. So the screw turns.           

The basic plotline which was loosely, very loosely, based on what in Western history has been called the Johnson County War (in fair Wyoming). Some of the story is overblown but the tensions between the various interests in the West-say cattle raising versus small truck farming were real and documented. Naturally as well there is love story (or maybe better a thwarted love story) to spice up the four hours when the gunfights and doings in town get overwrought.         

Here’s the play. After a long scene at a Harvard graduation where two of the main characters, Jim, played by ruggedly handsome Kris Kristofferson and Billy, played by John Hurt, are part of the class the film cuts to the heart of the matter some twenty years later. By then Jim is a Marshall up in rugged Wyoming country, Johnson County, and Billy is in the entourage of a cattle baron. In between is Nate, played by Christopher Walken, who is an enforcer for the cattlemen. The controversy involved what a hoard of immigrants were doing by stealing cattle that offended the cattlemen enough to put out a hit list of the leading immigrants and hire men to do the job in the “killing fields”. That information given to them by then non-committal Jimled the immigrants to fight what essentially was a range war. The end result was many deaths on both sides and eventually intervention by the U.S. Army to stop the fighting.

Interspersed along the way was the love story-the love both Nate and Jim had for Ella, a bordello Madame, and a beauty played by Isabelle Huppert. She goes back and forth between the two-Nate wants to marry her and Jim wants her to leave with him since there was nothing left for her there. See she was on that cattlemen’s list. In the end everybody loses. Nate is killed in a raging inferno at his cabin after taking vengeance on the leading cattlemen’s crew who had raped Ella. Jim, after deciding to side with the immigrants and lead them against the cattlemen’s mercenaries, persuaded Ella to leave but before they could do so she was killed by some mercenaries. Jim is shown some years’ later Newport wealthy but seemingly cast adrift after Ella had passed away.

Along with way are some great scenes starting with a grand ballroom dance on the lawn at Harvard on graduation day, the rough and tumble of a new town being created, and the fighting between the two uneven forces. Yeah, whatever the critics thought in 1980 they missed out on watching one of the great Western film masterpieces.            

The 100th Anniversary Year Of The Bolshevik Revolution In Russia-Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Buffy-Sainte Marie’s “Universal Soldier”

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Donovan performing his cover of Buffy Sainte-Marie's Universal Soldier. 

In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
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Markin comment on the lyric here:
While I have always considered this a very good anti-war song the tone of the lyrics leave me a little off-put these days. There are, in this wicked old world, some just wars, the Northern side in the American Civil War, The American side in the struggle for independence, The Irish side in the struggle against the British on Easter, 1916 and so on. Thus, until we take the guns away from those cruel oppressors of the mass of humanity we had best keep our own guns at the ready-and our class struggle soldiers prepared. Then someday this song will be an interesting relic for archeologists to uncover and laugh about the follies of primitive humankind.


Universal Soldier-Buffy Sainte-Marie
He's five feet two and he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He's all of 31 and he's only 17
He's been a soldier for a thousand years

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn't kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he's fighting for Canada,
he's fighting for France,
he's fighting for the USA,
and he's fighting for the Russians
and he's fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way

And he's fighting for Democracy
and fighting for the Reds
He says it's for the peace of all
He's the one who must decide
who's to live and who's to die
and he never sees the writing on the walls

But without him how would Hitler have
condemned him at Dachau
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He's the one who gives his body
as a weapon to a war
and without him all this killing can't go on

He's the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can't you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.

The 100th Anniversary Year Of The Bolshevik Revolution In Russia-The Struggle For The Labor Party In The United States

Click on the headline to link to a Max Shachtman Internet Archives online copy of October was a true workers revolution

Markin comment on this series:

Obviously, for a Marxist, the question of working class political power is central to the possibilities for the main thrust of his or her politics- the quest for that socialist revolution that initiates the socialist reconstruction of society. But working class politics, no less than any other kinds of political expressions has to take an organization form, a disciplined organizational form in the end, but organization nevertheless. In that sense every Marxist worth his or her salt, from individual labor militants to leagues, tendencies, and whatever other formations are out there these days on the left, struggles to built a revolutionary labor party, a Bolshevik-style party.

Glaringly, in the United States there is no such party, nor even a politically independent reformist labor party, as exists in Great Britain. And no, the Democratic Party, imperialist commander-in-chief Obama's Democratic Party is not a labor party. Although plenty of people believe it is an adequate substitute, including some avowed socialists. But they are just flat-out wrong. This series is thus predicated on providing information about, analysis of, and acting as a spur to a close look at the history of the labor party question in America by those who have actually attempted to create one, or at to propagandize for one.

As usual, I will start this series with the work of the International Communist League/Spartacist League/U.S. as I have been mining their archival materials of late. I am most familiar with the history of their work on this question, although on this question the Socialist Workers Party's efforts run a close second, especially in their revolutionary period. Lastly, and most importantly, I am comfortable starting with the ICL/SL efforts on the labor party question since after having reviewed in this space in previous series their G.I. work and youth work (Campus Spartacist and the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter inside SDS) I noted that throughout their history they have consistently called for the creation of such a party in the various social arenas in which they have worked. Other organizational and independent efforts, most notably by the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party will follow.
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Markin comment on this article:
Max Shachtman knew how to "speak" Marxism back in the 1930s and believe it. Later he could speak that language only at Sunday picnics and the like as he drifted back into the warm embrace of American imperialism. This is an example of the latter.

The 100th Anniversary Year Of The Bolshevik Revolution In Russia-The Marxist C.L.R.James On The Russian Question-1941

Markin comment:

This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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C.L.R. James on the Russian Question

Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other C.L.R. James texts. Standard American spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication. We have supplied a subheading (1. Introduction) where this was not present in Scott’s version, but where something was obviously required.

Resolution submitted by C.L.R. James (writing as “J.R. Johnson”) to the 1941 convention of the Workers Party of the United States.


Resolution on the Russian Question
1. Introduction

For many years the fact that in Russia the means of production were state property was sufficient for the Fourth International to characterize the working class as ruling class and the Russian state as a workers state.

Today, however, 1941, side by side with a tremendous but declining rate of industrial expansion in Russia, the working class has been reduced to a state of pauperization, slavery, and degradation unequaled in modern Europe. The real wages of the workers are approximately one-half of what they were in 1913. A bureaucrat holds all economic and political power. To continue to call the Russian workers the ruling class is to make a statement without meaning.

Yet Trotsky never wavered from this position. It led him, the direct successor of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, into calling upon the workers of Russia to be the best soldiers in an army that was, according to his own statement, acting as the tool of an imperialist power. The Workers Party, in refusing to accept this position, and in calling upon the Russian workers in this war to turn the guns in the opposite direction, made a profound break not with all that we have thought on the Russian question, but with something far more important, with how we have thought about it. So profound a difference must convince the party that what we face is not a rehash or manipulation of our previous ideas but a fundamental revaluation of the method and equipment with which we previously approached the question. Unless this is absolutely and thoroughly done, the party will live in a state of continual uncertainty, confusion, and recurrent conflict about our fundamental aims. This explains the scope and method of this resolution.

2. The Marxian Theory of Society

Marx rests his theory of society upon the technical level of the instruments of production under given historical circumstances.

“Assume a particular state of development in the productive forces of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce, and consumption, and you will have a corresponding social order, a corresponding organization of the family and of the ranks and classes, in a word, the corresponding civil society.”

These are Marx’s own words. The purely historical, i.e., the chronological analysis of society, places property first. The logical method of Marx examines the actual historical relations always as an expression of the logical analysis, which begins with the technical level of the instruments of production. This determines the relation of the people to each other and the division into classes, which then determine the relation of the classes to the instruments of production and the results of labor. These last, usually expressed in laws, are the relations of property, which, from his earliest writings, Marx always defined as an expression of the mode of production. This is the strict Marxian terminology and the strict Marxian sequence, as can be seen from a casual reading of the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy and The Communist Manifesto.

Applying this method to Russia we find that in 1941 the technical level of production, unsupported by one or more powerful socialist states, compels a social relation of exploited wage-laborers and appropriating capitalists. In order to achieve the bourgeois- democratic revolution in 1917 the proletariat was compelled to seize power. But this seizure of political power was due chiefly to the incapacity of the ruling class and the conjunctural historical circumstances. The working class lacked the maturity in production of a proletariat which was a majority of the population and had been trained and disciplined by large-scale capitalism. All political power rests in the last analysis upon and is determined by production relations. This was the reason for the insistence of Lenin and Trotsky that without the proletarian revolution on a worldwide scale, the Russian proletariat was doomed to sink back to the position of wage-slaves, i.e. the restoration of Russia to capitalism. This is exactly what has happened. The whole society has turned itself slowly over and once more the working class has been pushed back into that submissive role in production which is determined by the low technical level of the productive forces judged on a national scale. The bureaucracy is completely master in the productive process that is the bases of its political power.

No more convincing exposition of Marx’s theory of a society resting on the technical level of production can be wished for.

3. The Theory of Capitalist Society

Contrary to expectation, the role of managers of production has not been seized by members of the old ruling class. The definition of the class which is today master of Russia must rest on an analysis of the mode of production which now prevails. The historical conditions of capitalist production are as follows:

(1) the existence of the world market,
(2) the existence of a class of “nominally free” wage-laborers,
(3) the ownership or monopoly of the means of production by a class which rules production and disposes of the property,
(4) production by private persons for a free and uncertain market.

Such a society produces a certain type of product, the capitalist commodity, which has its own special commodity characteristics. The labor contained in it has the double aspect of both use-value and exchange-value. To use Marx’s own words, “all understanding of the facts depends upon this,” and any analysis of Russia which describes it as a society “unforeseen” by Marxists but yet omits a consideration of this and other aspects of the law of value is so inadequate as to be not only misleading but valueless. The law of value can be rejected. It cannot be ignored or allowed to go by default in a Marxist party.

The Marxian law of value, however, is merely an expression of a certain type of society. This society, contrary to all other societies we have known and expect to know, makes the extraction of surplus labor (called in this instance surplus value) the main aim of production. For Marx “the capitalist mode of production (is) essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labor.” This is crucial.

“It must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus value – the reconversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of the this production of surplus value – is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. It will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for capitalists. This would be overlooking the specific character of capitalist production, which reveals itself in its innermost essence.”

This is the main aim of production in Stalinist society, a capitalist society. All other societies produced for consumption and enjoyment.

All previous societies produced surplus labor, but except in isolated instances, wants or use-values were the main purpose of production. It is only in a society where labor is free of all contact with the means of production, within the environment of the world market, that the contradiction between production for use and for surplus value determines the whole society. Marx speaks of the difference between the use-value and the exchange-value of the commodity as the antithesis of the commodity. The contradictions and antagonisms of capitalistic society are merely embodiments of this antithesis, which is to be resolved in the synthesis of socialism, i.e., by the reuniting of the man of labor and the means of labor, and the abolition of the capitalist world market. International socialist society will produce surplus labor but it once more has as its sole aim the production of use-values.

Today this antithesis between production for use and production for surplus labor can be seen nowhere so clearly as in Stalinist Russia. And that stamps this society as being of the same inner essence as capitalism. Up to 1928, the use-value of the commodity predominated to the limited extent that this was possible in a backward society in the environment of the world market. The industrial proletariat in that year lived, at the very least, up to the standard of 1913. The first Five Year Plan predicted doubling of the subsistence of the working class by 1932.

But from 1929 a decisive change began. The lowering of agricultural prices in the world market threw the Russian plan into chaos. The competition on the world market, in its modern form of imperialist war, compelled the bureaucracy to reorganize the plan to meet the threat of Japan, at heavy cost; and with the coming to power of Hitler and his announcement that the main enemy was Russia, the change in Stalinist production and in Stalinist society became more uncontrollable. The bureaucracy was compelled to continue the process of industrialization at feverish speed. Under such circumstances, in a backward country, with an immature working class, the main aim of production inevitably must become the production of surplus labor, for the sake of more production, for the sake of still more production.

This economic necessity compelled an enormous increase in the repressive apparatus, the consolidation of the ruling bureaucracy by concrete privileges, honor, and authority, and the destruction of persons and ideology connected with the October Revolution. The necessity of autarchy, attempting to produce all that Russia needed within its own border, resulted in further disruption of production, and the mounting indices of production as a consequence represented large uneconomic investment, thus increasing the strain upon the workers. Stakhanovism was a perfect expression of the qualitative change in Russian society.

The climax came in 1936-1937 with the partial breakdown of the economy as exemplified by the charges of Trotskyite sabotage in every branch of production. In the historical circumstances of Russia, the antithesis between production of surplus value and use-value has reached a stage unknown in other capitalist economies. The state of world economy today precludes any thought of a cessation of this mode of production. The economic power of the bureaucracy precludes that this can be done otherwise than at the continued and growing expense of the working class. The system has developed in every essential of production into a capitalist system, and the parasitic bureaucracy has been transformed into an exploiting capitalist class. Henceforward its law of motion must be the same as that of other capitalist societies. An approximate date for the completion of the process is 1936, the year of the Stalinist constitution.

4. The Necessary Movement of Capital and Its Forms of Manifestation

That the laws inherent in capitalist production in Russia manifest themselves in unusual forms is obvious. But their unusualness in Russia is not unique. It is exceeded by the capitalism which Marx himself invented. To deduce the laws of capitalist production, Marx constructed a capitalism such as never existed and never could exist. In it labor, like every other commodity, was always sold at its value, the capitalist found on the market whatever he wished, consumption was always equated to production, fluctuations of prices there were none, no single capitalist enterprise advanced in front of the other in organic composition, unemployment and crisis were absent, all was in complete equilibrium; no capitalist could construct for himself a more ideal haven of peaceful accumulation. Yet this is the capitalism from which Marx drew his laws of motion, and even this capitalism Marx proved was bound to collapse. From this abstraction, which was the frame in which he worked in Volumes I and II, Marx then turned and in Volume III showed the devastating manifestation of the law of motion in capitalist society as it actually was. Thus the very method on which Capital was constructed is a warning to all hasty and ill-based attempts to baptize societies as never before seen, from a consideration of their external forms of manifestation, and not from an analysis of their laws of motion.

Marx dealt extensively with the crisis of over-production, but in 1886 Engels, in a preface to Capital, calmly stated that the decennial cycle of prosperity, overproduction, and crises, seemed to have come to an end, leaving a permanent depression. A few years later he wrote that perhaps this prolonged stagnation was only the prelude to a general world wide crisis, but he was not certain. That the continued absence of the cycle of prosperity, overproduction and crisis invalidated the law of motion of capitalist society was obviously far from his thought. For Marx crisis was an expression of the contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society. The crisis would express itself in different forms but the contradictions of the capital relations would continue.

The “free and uncertain” market of “pure” capitalism has been abolished before now in a national society. Lenin in 1917, before the revolution, stated that the immense majority of the capitalists in Russia were not producing for the market at all but for the state, which advanced them money. It was not commodity production for a free and uncertain market: it was not “pure” capitalism (the quotes are his own) but “a special kind of national economy.” In Germany today that process Lenin described is immensely more advanced than it was in Russia. It would be a perversion to assert that production in Germany is for a free and open market. It would be equally disastrous to see in the abolition of the traditionally free capitalist market, a basic change in the society. The law of motion is not thereby altered. To the contrary, it is the nature of the law of motion to abolish the free market. In Russia the commodity is no longer the product of private individuals. But it is, however, the law of capitalist production to abolish the private character of capital.

That Marx expected the revolution to occur before this was completed alters not one thing in his analysis of the movement of the society. The joint-stock company is “the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production.” The concentration of all available capital in the hands of the Bank of England “does away with the private character of capital and implies in itself, to that extent, the abolition of capital.” The climax of this process is the ownership of all capital in the hands of the State. The bourgeoisie continues to draw dividends, but the drawing of dividends does not make a system capitalist. The dividends can be drawn from a Workers’ State. It is the fact that the state acts as the entrepreneur and exploits the workers that is decisive. “Interest-bearing capitals represents capital as ownership compared to capital a ‘function’.” And, still more clear, “The investing capitalist derives his claim to profits of enterprise and consequently the profit of enterprise itself not from his ownership of capital, but from its production function as distinguished from its form, in which it is only inert property.” Marx in scores of other places pointed out the distinction between production and property. It is one of his great contributions to economic theory.

But all this type of argument shows not only a complete incapacity to understand Russia, but a narrowness of view which will prevent any clear understanding of further developments in traditional capitalist society. Marx’s definitions are both precise and sweeping. In all previous societies, land was the main factor in production. In capitalist society the main factor is accumulated labor, within the environment of the world market. If the laborer controls the accumulated labor we have socialism. Wherever it controls him we have capitalism. “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of Capital.” Marx repeatedly wrote these definitions. The most famous of them, just as this last, applies literally to Stalinist society:

“Capital is a definite interrelation in social production belonging to a definite historical formation of society. This interrelation expresses itself through a certain thing and gives to this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production converted into capital and means of production by themselves are no more capital than gold or silver are money in themselves. Capital signifies the means of production monopolized by a certain part of society, the products and material requirements of labor made independent of labor power in living human beings and antagonistic to them, and personified in capital by this antagonism.”

Such a society, whatever differences it may and must develop from classical capitalism, will move in a certain direction and in a certain way. That is the heart of the problem.

5. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

If the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is the pivot of the Marxian political economy, its second distinctive character is, on Marx’s own evaluation, his method of analyzing surplus value, i. e. surplus labor in the modern historical condition. This he treats as an entity, and his deliberate refusal in theoretical analysis to take into consideration its subdivisions into industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, rent, taxes, etc. is a fundamental of his system. It would be presumptuous to attempt to state it in words other than his own.

“With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, 8:1, so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8 is transformed into labor-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production . . . With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labor incorporated in it also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion.”

The disproportion between constant and variable capital increases and, ultimately, such will be the strain on the worker to produce the necessary surplus that, as Marx says in one place, at a certain stage, if the laborer worked all 24 hours a day, and the capitalist took all the labor instead of merely the surplus over subsistence, it would still not be sufficient. Here in the process of production, and not in the process of circulation (the market) lies the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production. This is the basis of Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit.

“The fact that this analysis is made independently of the subdivisions of profit, which fall to the share of different categories of persons, shows in itself that this law, in its general workings, is independent of those subdivisions and of the mutual relations of the resulting categories of profit. The profit to which we are here referring is but another name for surplus value itself, which is merely observed in relation to the variable capital from which it arises. The fall in the rate of profit therefore expresses the falling relation of surplus value itself to the total capital, and is for this reason independent of any division of this profit among various participants.”

Here is the key to the understanding of the growing crisis in Russia. Part of the annual product goes for necessary wages. Part of it goes to replace the constant capital used up. If as has been estimated the means of production have to be renewed every ten years, then the workers have to produce, yearly, beside their wages, one-tenth of a constantly increasing capital. The rest is the surplus labor. As the mass of capital increases, the mass of surplus labor becomes proportionally less and less. The worker, with no control over the process of production, receives less and less of the product. At a certain stage, in order to make the decreasing mass of surplus value approximately adequate to its task, the capitalist has no alternative but to lower the wages and increase the exploitation of the worker. The worker resists. The capitalist class is then compelled to enslave him. Ultimately, says Engels, the worker will be driven to the level of a Chinese coolie. This is the inevitable enslavement of the worker which Marx prophesies so persistently.

If today when we see the enslavement we begin to see it in a worker no longer “free,” but attached to the factory as the slave or the serf was attached to the land, then the Party will have definitely left the road of Marxism for the most vicious and vulgar empiricism. It is on this movement in the direct process of production that is based the theoretical certainty of the collapse of capitalist production. The competition on the world market, the enormous expenses of an exploiting society, with its military apparatus, bureaucracy, clergy, police, etc., the decreasing productivity of the individual laborer, the millions who do work which can only be called work “under a miserable mode of production,” all this compels such a society to make surplus labor and surplus labor alone, the compelling force of production.

Thus at a certain stage, as in Germany in 1932, the magnificent productive apparatus stands crippled. Such is the size of the means of production and the organic composition of capital, that the enormous quantity of surplus labor necessary for the progressive functioning of a capitalist society cannot be produced. The “functioning capital” available to make this productive apparatus work is too little. It appears to be a plethora of capital, but Marx says this “so-called plethora of capital” is always a capital whose mass does not atone for the fall in the rate of profit. Capitalist production comes to a standstill, first and foremost because the system demands that surplus labor be produced, and sufficient surplus labor cannot be produced. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value has reached its apotheosis. The troubles of the market are merely the reverse side, the result of the contradictions in production.

An identical process of production in Russia moves inevitably to a similar result. The laws of capitalist production, always immanent in an isolated Workers’ State and more so in a backward economy, have been forced into action, in the environment of the world market. The organic composition of capital in Russia mounts with the growth of industrialization. Year by year, however, the mass of surplus labor must grow proportionally less and less. Marx worked out his final theory of accumulation on the basis of the total social capital in the country and denied that this altered the economic and historical characteristics of the society. The expenses of an exploiting class within the environment of the world market, the privileges necessary to differentiate the classes, a vast military apparatus, increasing degradation and slavery of the worker, the lowering of his individual productivity at a stage when it needs to be increased, all these features of Russia are rooted in the capital-wage labor relation and the world-market environment. The advantages that Russia alone enjoyed in 1928, centralization of the means of production, capacity to plan, have today been swamped by the disadvantages of the quest for surplus value.

To its traditionally capitalist troubles the bureaucracy adds one of its own, an excessive waste due to the bureaucratic administration. But Stalin today, like Hitler, contends essentially with the falling relation of the mass of surplus value to the total social capital. That is the economic basis of the constantly growing persecution of the workers by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is no worse than any other ruling class. It behaves as it does because it must. This is the law of motion of Stalinist society. Ultimately the productive apparatus of Russia will stand as impotent as Germany’s in 1932, and for the same reason, its incapacity to produce the necessary surplus labor which is the compelling motive of production for any modern class society. The struggle in Russia is not over consumption, as Trotsky thought, but over production, and the Stalinist state is organized nine-tenths, not for stealing, but for production. The Party must make this clear in all its propaganda and agitation and correct this serious error.

This is the reply to all who see some new type of society superseding capitalism and solving its contradictions. All of these theories are distinguished by their absence of economic analysis, or by the flimsiness of their assumptions. If the Party should adopt the same empirical method in its own analysis, it will completely emasculate its own capacity to answer and destroy the arguments of those who herald the managerial society, the “new” Fascist order, the garrison State, etc. This theory is the heritage that Marx left for the proletarian movement. And it is here that we must be clear or always be in confusion.

6. The Theory of Imperialism

Modern imperialism is a quest for markets in an attempt to check the always declining relation of surplus value to the total social capital. So that Lenin, following Marx, bases his theory of imperialism on production and not on circulation. The circulation process of capital, however, is important for one’s understanding of a particular manifestation of imperialism. In Volume II, Marx repeats in almost every chapter that the capitalist has to set aside some capital year after year until it is large enough for the purpose of reorganizing this enterprise on the necessary scale. Individual capitals may accumulate quickly. What is important is the total accumulation in regard to the social capital as a whole. This mass of surplus labor, embodied in money capital and waiting until it is large enough, forms a substantial part of the capital in the hands of banks, and as capitalist production develops it becomes larger and larger. This money-capital also increases as capital is withdrawn from the production of commodities through its incapacity to produce profits. This is the money-capital of which Lenin writes.

But all imperialism was not necessarily of the particular type Lenin analyzed. Japan and Russia were not, as he said, “modern, up-to-date finance-capitals,” but as he explained, their military power, their domination of colonial countries, their plunder of China, etc., made them imperialist. By 1914 imperialism was therefore a struggle for all or any kind of territory, for the sake of the territory and in order to prevent rivals from getting hold of it. This was done to control raw materials, to export capital, to expand the commodity-market, for strategic purposes, in fact for any purpose which would contribute to the increase of surplus value. That is the obvious economic basis of Stalinist imperialism. Like Hitlerism, it will seize fixed capital or agrarian territory, tin-mines or strategic ports and transport manpower. Within its own borders the bureaucracy mercilessly exploits the subject nationalities. Should it emerge victorious in the coming war, it will share in all the grabbings of its partners, and for the same reason. Trotsky’s idea that the bureaucracy seeks foreign territory merely to expand its power, prestige, and revenues lays the emphasis on the consumption of the bureaucracy. That is false. The “greed” of the capitalist class is a result of the process of production, and the greed of the bureaucracy has the same roots. With a productivity of labor as slow as it is in Russia, and the overhead expenses of an exploiting society within the environment of the world market as large as they are, equal to that of the most highly developed capitalist states, it is not possible for the bureaucracy to escape the same fundamental problems of production as an advanced capitalist state, and to move towards the same attempts at solution.

7. Fascism

If the relations of production in Russia are capitalist then the state is Fascist. Fascism is a mass petty-bourgeois movement, but the Fascist state is not a mass petty-bourgeois state. It is the political reflection of the drive towards complete centralization of production which distinguishes all national economies today.

Finance capital and interlocking directorates are a result of the growing concentration of capital and the increasing socialization of production. The contradiction between this socialization and the appropriation of the product for the benefit of a few, drives the few into a position where to survive they must act as one, against the workers and against the external bourgeoisie.

The Fascist state has deeper economic roots than we have hitherto acknowledged. In this respect the development of Russia is a sign-post as to the future of capitalist society. In 1878 Engels (and Marx approved) made a statement of the most profound social significance for the modern world: that the growing socialization of production would compel the capitalists to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far as that was possible within the framework of capitalist relations. How far is that possible? Today life and Marx’s Capital teach us the probable extent and limits of this process. Marx treated in Volume I the direct process of production, and all the essentials of his doctrine are contained in that volume. In the next volume he treated circulation, as part of the process of production, but as “secondary” and supplementary to production. The “one fundamental condition” of the capitalist mode of production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, he tells us himself that he abstracted from circulation and treated in Volume I.

Then in Volume III, his abstract analysis complete, he for the first time, and only late in the volume, subdivided surplus-value into profit, interest, rent, etc. Today the capitalist class, impelled to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far has left the property relations intact, but the group in control manipulates the surplus value more and more as a whole. Less and less capital is apportioned to production by competition. In Germany today capital is consciously directed to different branches of production. The process will continue. The capitalists abolish the free market and shape circulation as far as possible to their own purposes, rationing every commodity, including labor-power. But the one fundamental condition of capitalist production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, and the process of production (Volume I), that they cannot alter without destroying themselves. Lenin (in the last two pages of Imperialism) as early as 1916, saw that with the increasing socialization of production, “private economic relations and private property relations constitute a shell which is no longer suitable for its contents, a shell which must of necessity begin to decay if its destruction is postponed by artificial means.” The Communist Manifesto of the Third International was written around the same thesis in the most pronounced form.

If Russia today has differences with a capitalist economy where the private property relations have decayed and production is nationalized, these points are not to be detailed for their own sake as being different. Nobody denies their difference. What is to be proved is that these differences alter the law of motion of the society. And this cannot be done, because the contradictions of the whole society are rooted in the class relations of production, which are identical and determine all other relations. What was formerly private and uncontrolled by the very development of capitalist production becomes more and more state-controlled.

It is from there, where Marx placed his basic contradictions, that all capitalist troubles spring. More and more, capitalist society, in Engels’ phrase, will capitulate to the necessity for planning of the invading socialist society. We must be prepared for strange transformations. But as long as wage-labor exists, the capitalist class will have what Engels called not more than the “technical elements” of a solution. “Technically,” Hitler and Stalin have more control of the means of production and are able to do anything. In reality the social relations of production inside the country in the environment of the world market make them merely vain fighters against the general current of world economy. It is this economic necessity of organizing production as a whole (the invading socialist society) but yet the interests of a few (the old capitalist society) that finds political expression in Fascism. Whatever the method, capitalist economy forces the formation of the totalitarian state owing to the needs of production.

8. Socialism

The antithesis of Stalinist society and capitalistic society being the same, the solution of their contradictions is the same. It can be stated in a sentence. The workers must take control of the process of production on a national scale and international scale; this achieved, automatically, according to the technical development and the relations with the world market, use-values will begin to predominate. But with reasonable speed the same must take place on an international scale, or the quest for surplus labor in the world as a whole will drag down the socialist state, unless it commands an exceptionally well-developed and extensive area. “We live,” said Lenin, “not in a state but in a system of states.” The consequences of this transformation will be:

(1) The individual development of the laborer. It is in this that Marx depends with unwearying insistence for the higher productivity of labor which will be characteristic of the new society. “Variable Capital” will now, and only now, meet “Constant Capital” in coordination. In no sphere has our party been so guilty as in its utter neglect of this phase of production during the last ten years. The necessary expansion of production will take place and be maintained in socialist society through the fact that the material and intellectual advantages of society, now the prerogative of a few, will be the prerogative of all, and this, for Marx, means the certainty of an enormous development, not in the worker getting more to eat, but primarily as an agent in the process of production. The creative capacity of the worker, the joy in labor and service, hitherto seen only in the process of revolution, will be applied for the first time to production by the emancipated working class. That is the only way to solve the antithesis between use-value and exchange-value. To presume that Stalinist society has solved it is a monstrous absurdity. The degradation of the Russian worker is an economic fact. Man is the greatest of all productive forces, and once his potentialities are released, the era of human freedom will begin. “Its fundamental premise is the shortening of the working day.” Until then society will be increasingly like Russia and Germany, and plunging to destruction.

(2) This release of the workers for creative labor in production will be immensely encouraged by the entry into productive labor of the millions of idlers and unproductive laborer who infest modern society – the bourgeoisie, the lawyers, the publicity men, the distributors, domestic servants, agitators, storm-troopers, police, etc. All will be trained and placed in productive labor. They are the overwhelming overhead expenses of a class society, in Russia as well as in Germany.

(3) Production will be for social needs and not for millions of non-productive consumers in the army, navy, air-force, and their useless and criminal expenditure. The international division of labor will become a source not of enormous expenditure and autarchy, but a source of cooperation and continuous advance.

It is necessary to emphasize this today. For if it were understood some of the notions now prevalent in the Party could not exist. The idea that if the bourgeoisie should nationalize production and property, the hope for Socialism is utopia – that is a misunderstanding of the contradictions of capitalism which must be driven out of our movement. Such a transformation will solve nothing. The three points outlined above will be as far from realization as ever. A new society begins when the workers take power or when the world market is abolished by the domination of one capitalist state which would be an unspeakable barbarism. Marxism knows no other “new” society, far less any progressive new society. Either the emancipation of labor or increasing barbarism. Only in the most abstract sense can state-property be said the be a higher form, as monopoly capitalism was a higher form than pre- monopoly capitalism. Today we have reached a turning point. The pauperization of the worker, which was formerly relative, is now, on a world scale, absolute. Today in the most advanced capitalist societies, he is on his way to slavery. In its present state, capitalism, whatever its form, except in a few areas and for declining periods, can no longer maintain the worker even in the conditions of his previous slavery. Without the proletarian revolution the state-property form can be the vehicle of barbarism and the destruction of human society. Such terms as higher and lower forms have no meaning in the concrete circumstances. It is not the form of property but the social relations of production which are decisive. Today if the working class is master, the form is progressive. If it is not, the form is reactionary. “In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.” Any society today, in which the aim is not to promote the existence of the laborer is doomed to crisis and disorder and will go always closer to barbarism until the workers take power. That is all there is to Marx, and as he himself states, on an understanding of this, all comprehension of the facts depends.

9. Political Conclusions

On the basis of the above analysis certain political conclusions follow automatically.

They are:

(a) No defense of Russia under any circumstances.

The first condition for working out a long-term policy about Russia is to define the economic nature of the society and the historic character of the bureaucracy. It is bourgeois, and therefore has no rights over the struggles of the workers for their democratic rights. The struggle for socialism is the struggle for democracy, before, or after, the expropriation of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in Russia has to be expropriated, driven away from its stranglehold over the process and the means of production. To do this the proletariat mobilizes all the poor and all the oppressed of Russia. It is prepared without hesitation to restore private property to those peasants who wish it. It rejects a united front with Kerensky and all his scores of followers in Russia who ask the proletariat to fight with them so that they may each get a factory for themselves. With Mensheviks, and with any section of the working class movement, or any other section of society, it forms a united front for what it considers to be working class demands, and for nothing else; it forms these on its own conditions, and the revolutionary proletariat keeps its hands free and makes or breaks these attempts at united action as it sees fit in the interests of the struggle for power. Nothing in Marxism compels the proletariat to form a united front with any group at any time except it thinks to the advantage of the proletariat to do so in its struggle for power.

(b) Denunciation of the CP as the agent of a Fascist power.

It appears that in the minds of some this excludes a United Front with the CP on a specific issue. The contention is not only stupid but dangerous. A United Front is formed with a section of American workers mainly on their intentions against the American bourgeoisie, or the world bourgeoisie, not on account of its belief in Stalinism. If it is not to be formed with them because the CP is the agent of a reactionary bureaucracy which is the enemy of the workers and of socialism, that excludes the United Front with the CP for all those who do not believe that the working class is still the ruling class in Russia. In the case of Browder whom the American government attacked, for obvious reasons the Party will offer a United Front. If the CP, however had called for a mass protest against the War in 1939, then with our present policy the Party should have refused. But even that refusal is not definitive. For according to the temper of the American proletariat, the strength of the Party, the stage of development or disintegration of the CP, the strength of the bourgeoisie, the Party may even, under similar circumstances, decide even to support a specific anti-war action by the CP even though the call was dictated originally by the interests of the Russian bureaucracy. The sophistry which indulges in superficial arguments of the above type must be rigorously rejected. It would be most dangerous for the Party if it allowed itself to be driven into considering the United Front as a collection of fixed laws, instead of a tactical orientation within given circumstances toward a fixed goal.

(c) Propaganda for socialism.

The Party must make it a first task, in its press and all other propaganda and agitation, to preach the necessity of socialism, to explain that no modern society of any kind offers any solution to the problems of modern society, except a society in which the workers hold power. It must with special vigor denounce and expose the ideas that Fascism, managerial society, or bureaucratic state-socialism are in any concrete sense progressive societies or even could be, and it must do this by challenging their proponents on the fundamental economic categories and analysis of Marx.

(d) The Party must initiate a serious study of Marxian economics, and devote a section of The New International regularly to studies in Capital, The Critique of Political Economy, etc. Many of the important points in Capital are still controversial, but it is certain that the development of society offers this generation an opportunity to elucidate by an observation of life many of the problems which were objects merely of speculation by previous theoreticians. This must be the basis of our theoretical work in the future. It is as an example of what we have to do, and how we have to do it, that this resolution has been written. Whatever our conclusions, the uncertainly of the present and the crises of the future demand that we solidly establish our fundamentals. If even we shall decide to abandon the Marxian law of value in the analysis of any modern society, then we should now exactly and concretely why. For it is only from there that we could develop a new method, as will be necessary for any new society.

September 19, 1941