As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its 4th Year-The Anti-War Resistance Builds- Leon Trotsky

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Fourth Year-The Anti-War Resistance Builds- Leon Trotsky   

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other industrial production). Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist  nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915 one wag pointed out that they could all fit in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple white-crossed graves dug). You see, and the logic is beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was built for peace-time but once the cannon roared then the “big tent” needed to be folded for the duration. Jesus.  

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long because “Long Live The Communist International,”  a new revolutionary international, would become the order of the day in the not distant future), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century (including forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                  

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

                  

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

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

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

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

    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leon Trotsky

OUR REVOLUTION

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The Lessons of the Great Year

(January 9th, 1905 – January 9th, 1917)

(January 1917)

Introductory Note
by MOISSAYE J. OLGIN

This essay was published in a New York Russian newspaper on January 2Oth, 1917, less than two months before the Second Russian Revolution. Trotzky then lived in New York. The essay shows how his contempt, even hatred, for the liberal parties in Russia had grown since 1905-6.

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Revolutionary anniversaries are not only days for reminiscence, they are days for summing up revolutionary experiences, especially for us Russians. Our history has not been rich. Our so-called “national originality” consisted in being poor, ignorant, uncouth. It was the revolution of 1905 that first opened before us the great highway of political progress. On January 9th the workingman of Petersburg knocked at the gate of the Winter Palace. On January 9th the entire Russian people knocked at the gate of history.

The crowned janitor did not respond to the knock. Nine months later, however, on October 17th, he was compelled to open the heavy gate of absolutism. Notwithstanding all the efforts of bureaucracy, a little slit stayed open – forever.
The revolution was defeated. The same old forces and almost the same figures now rule Russia that ruled her twelve years ago. Yet the revolution has changed Russia beyond recognition. The kingdom of stagnation, servitude, vodka and humbleness has become a kingdom of fermentation, criticism, fight. Where once there was a shapeless dough – the impersonal, formless people, “Holy Russia,” – now social classes consciously oppose each other, political parties have sprung into existence, each with its program and methods of struggle. January 9th opens a new Russian history.
It is a line marked by the blood of the people. There is no way back from this line to Asiatic Russia, to the cursed practices of former generations. There is no way back. There will never be.
Not the liberal bourgeoisie, not the democratic groups of the lower bourgeoisie, not the radical intellectuals, not the millions of Russian peasants, but the Russian proletariat has by its struggle started the new era in Russian history. This is basic. On the foundation of this fact we, Social-Democrats, have built our conceptions and our tactics.
On January 9th it was the priest Gapon who happened to be at the head of the Petersburg workers, – a fantastic figure, a combination of adventurer, hysterical enthusiast and impostor. His priest’s robe was the last link that then connected the workingmen with the past, with “Holy Russia.” Nine months later, in the course of the October strike, the greatest political strike history has ever seen, there was at the head of the Petersburg workingmen their own elective self-governing organization – the Council of Workmen’s Deputies. It contained many a workingman who had been on Gapon’s staff, – nine months of revolution had made those men grow, as they made grow the entire working class which the Soviet represented.
In the first period of the revolution, the activities of the proletariat were met with sympathy, even with support from liberal society. The Milukovs hoped the proletariat would punch absolutism and make it more inclined to compromise with the bourgeoisie. Yet absolutism, for centuries the only ruler of the people, was in no haste to share its power with the liberal parties. In October, 1905, the bourgeoisie learned that it could not obtain power before the back-bone of Tzarism was broken. This blessed thing could, evidently, be accomplished only by a victorious revolution. But the revolution put the working class in the foreground, it united it and solidified it not only in its struggle against Tzarism, but also in its struggle against capital. The result was that each new revolutionary step of the proletariat in October, November and December, the time of the Soviet, moved the liberals more and more in the direction of the monarchy. The hopes for revolutionary co6peration between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat turned out a hopeless Utopia. Those who had not seen it then and had not understood it later, those who still dream of a “national” uprising against Tzarism, do not understand the revolution. For them class struggle is a sealed book.
At the end of 1905 the question became acute. The monarchy had learned by experience that the bourgeoisie would not support the proletariat in a decisive battle. The monarchy then decided to move against the proletariat with all its forces. The bloody days of December followed. The Council of Workmen’s Deputies was arrested by the Ismailovski regiment which remained loyal to Tzarism. The answer of the proletariat was momentous: the strike in Petersburg, the insurrection in Moscow, the storm of revolutionary movements in all industrial centers, the insurrection on the Caucasas and in the Lettish provinces.
The revolutionary movement was crushed. Many a poor “Socialist” readily concluded from our December defeats that a revolution in Russia was impossible without the support of the bourgeoisie. If this be true, it would only mean that a revolution in Russia is impossible.
Our upper industrial bourgeoisie, the only class possessing actual power, is separated from the proletariat by an insurmountable barrieii of class hatred, and it needs the monarchy as a pillar of order. The Gutchkovs, Krestovnikovs and Ryabushinskys cannot fail to see in the proletariat their mortal foe.
Our middle and lower industrial and commercial bourgeoisie occupies a very insignificant place in the economic life of the country, and is all entangled in the net of capital. The Milukovs, the leaders of the lower middle class, are successful only in so far as they represent the interests of the upper bourgeoisie. This is why the Cadet leader called the revolutionary banner a “red rag”; this is why he declared, after the beginning of the war, that if a revolution were necessary to secure victory over Germany, he would prefer no victory at all.
Our peasantry occupies a tremendous place in Russian life. In 1905 it was shaken to its deepest foundations. The peasants were driving out their masters, setting estates on fire, seizing the land from the landlords. Yes, the curse of the peasantry is that it is scattered, disjointed, backward. Moreover, the interests of the various peasant groups do not coincide. The peasants arose and fought adroitly against their local slave-holders, yet they stopped in reverence before the all-Russian slave-holder. The sons of the peasants in the army did not understand that the workingmen were shedding their blood not only for their own sake, but also for the sake of the peasants. The army was an obedient tool in the hands of Tzarism. It crushed the labor revolution in December 1905.
Whoever thinks about the experiences of 1905, whoever draws a line from that year to the present time, must see how utterly lifeless and pitiful are the hopes of our Social-Patriots for revolutionary cobperation between the proletariat and the liberal bourgeoisie.
During the last twelve years big capital has made great conquests in Russia. The middle and lower bourgeoisie has become still more dependent upon the banks and trusts. The working class, which had grown in numbers since 1905, is now separated from the bourgeoisie by a deeper abyss than before. If a “national” revolution was a failure twelve years ago, there is still less hope for it at present.
It is true in the last years that the cultural and political level of the peasantry has become higher. However, there is less hope now for a revolutionary uprising of the peasantry as a whole than there was twelve years ago. The only ally of the urban proletariat may be the proletarian and half-proletarian strata of the village.
But, a skeptic may ask, is there then any, hope for a victorious revolution in Russia under these circumstances?
One thing is clear – if a revolution comes, it will not be a result of cooperation between capital and labor. The experiences of 1905 show that this is a miserable Utopia. To acquaint himself with those experiences, to study them is the duty of every thinking working-man who is anxious to avoid tragic mistakes. It is in this sense that we have said that revolutionary anniversaries are not only days for reimniscences, but also days for summing up revolutionary experiences.

Our Revolution Index

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Fourth Year Of World War I Continues ... Some Remembrances-The Culturati’s Corner

As The 100th Anniversary Of The Fourth Year Of World War I Continues ... Some Remembrances-The Culturati’s Corner

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, To Be Very Young-With Bob Dylan’s Farewell Angelina In Mind

Ah, To Be Very Young-With Bob Dylan’s Farewell Angelina In Mind

 

By Zack James

Josh Breslin now that he is retired, well, not exactly retired since when do writers, you know guys who think that they have something to tell in three thousand words or more to a candid world, so let’s call it semi-retired had been more and more frequently thinking back to the days when he was young and free before the yoke of three failed marriages, a slew of kids along with a slew of bills weighted him down. (That “candid” in the first sentence Josh’s everlasting expression picked from the time he actually read the Declaration of Independence front to back in junior high school so you know right off what kind of guy we are dealing with.) Those memory thoughts some grim, some not were not just the meanderings of an old man regretting getting old but had been pushed upon him by a couple of things that had sparked his remembrances of late.

The first one, the good one, listening while working on his computer which had become of late his favorite way to listen to music to one of the never-ending bootleg series CDs of Bob Dylan where a version of his Farewell, Angelina came on. The second, the bad one, very bad for several days, an obituary in the New York Times which reported that the once well-known former 1970s and 1980s movie actress and commercial spoke-person Angelina Farrell had passed away at 70 after a long battle against cancer. That Angelina, his Angelina, Angelina Donnelly, when he knew her before she went into the movies and changed her name was that big affair from his youth that he was drifting back to in memory time. Sad days, very sad days.

Angelina, ah Angelina, how he had known her, known her intimately well before she because an actress and ad person. He had known her when he was seeking what a guy he met out in California called the search for the great blue-pink American West night, searching for a place in the sun but also a new way of doing things and so the news of her passing hit doubly hard since for a while, several months their relationship had a lot to do with whether that search was going to be successful or not. He, they were living proof that things had not worked out as they had planned.            

Of the face of it the meeting of Josh Breslin and Angelina Donnelly spoke both to the wild winds of the 1960s and to what a lot of people in what Josh had called in more than one article written in his small attempt to give voice to what had happened to what he called the “generation of ’68,” that ‘68 a very consequential year in the turmoil and upturns of the 1960s and so a useful term of art to designate the whole period. Josh had been restless in the spring of 1967 up in Olde Saco, Maine where he had grown up. He had just graduated from high school and was waiting for the fall to attend State U, the first in his working-class family to attend college so a source of some family pride. But he had been itchy all spring because he kept hearing about lots of stuff young people like him were doing in places like Cambridge, Greenwich Village, Ann Arbor, and above all California. Listening to new forms of music, or rather old folk forms brought up to date or discovered by avid archivists, trying every drug known to creation (collectively of course but some, including Josh, had on more than one occasion been “ripped” to the root from overindulgence if not quite overdose. Some of it just then was around the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam which was causing many to doubt what they learned from childhood about the virtues of the American way they all had been nurtured on. More of it though was about looking at things very differently than their parents’ vision of marriage, job, family and keeping your head down. That was what was bothering Josh just then. Something undefined but something gnawing at him which he could not quite shake. (Something that still gnawed at him when he summed up his life, his so-called legacy and the feeling that his old late friend, Pete Markin, had first articulated long ago on the hitchhike and yellow brick road bus caravans West, that the “wanting habits” of youth would   never be satisfied this side of the grave. Markin’s fate was grim testimony to that thought.)  

One day in early June of that year though he had run into a guy, Remmy Renoir, on Olde Saco Beach who had been out in California and had imbibed in the whole youth culture there, the “youth nation” he had called it as Josh vividly remembered the fresh wind up ocean swells rising day. Remmy had told Josh stories about how young people were trying to create an alternative universe out of all the craziness that was going on in regular uptight society. Some of it was the usual political stuff that had been going on for a long time, stuff that guys like Marcuse, Sartre, Whyte, Mills,  and a bunch of guys that he would read later and be surprised how they were able to articulate what he was feeling well before his own understandings (and even Markin’s who was way ahead of a lot of his own guys in that regard). Additionally there was music (more rock than gentle folk stuff which would later be given the name “acid” rock), drugs (that cornucopia which would have matched what was available in any drugstore in those times), lots of drugs, communal living in houses, parks and in vans and buses and a new spirit of cooperation among people to try to keep themselves together against the tidal wave that was washing against them.

Josh found himself talking to Remmy for hours and it was mainly as a result of that conversation that he decided to forgo the summer job that his father had gotten for him at the textile factory he worked in and head west to see what the whole show was all about. That decision was met, as anyone from that time, maybe now too, could suspect by condemnation by Josh’s parents especially his father on the job issue. His mother on the first in the extended family, both sides, to go to college in a family where a significant number of members dropped out of high school to go work in the mills, mills that were beginning  to shut down and head south for cheaper labor and which would ultimately go off-shore. But he was determined to go and so that was that (there was more to that “that” but for our story that is enough said since it is what happened on the road and afterwards that matters here) 

Josh didn’t have much money for the trip most of his earnings from various jobs in high school being saved for college expenses since his parents with five boys had little extra money for anything but household expenses so he decided to hitchhike out. Of course he did not tell his parents that he was hitchhiking because they would have really freaked out so he said to them he was taking a bus out. But that hitching idea was more that for saving money. Remmy had told him that day at Olde Saco beach that he had hitched several times to California and had some wild times along the way (and a few tough times too, especially remembering being stranded in places like Moline, Deadwood, Hard Rock all real places, too real, and waiting for hours for some lonesome cross-country truck hauler to stop, remembering too a few close calls being picked up and let off in strange places by homosexuals after being rebuffed by him).

That information, fairly current along with having read Jack Kerouac’s dated information, dated since his travels occurred in the late 1940s before the superhighways, the Interstate made the backroads unnecessary, in On The Road.  That book above all others, a book by a fellow Franco-American (on his mother side LeBlanc) from a mill town like his made a powerful impression on him (and most of the rest of the generation of ’68 as well from mill-towns or the leafy suburbs) at a time when he was particularly fidgety about what he wanted his life to look like (the only thing that he was sure of was that he didn’t want to replicate his parents’ experience, no way).

With Remmy and Jack at his back he took off one June summer day heading west. Or rather trying to head west. He had to laugh to think that if it was not for the accident of grabbing a ride from a seasoned long haul truck-driver Denver Slim (who even today when he recounts that time to friends or whoever will listen he always points out that that his first long haul ride had been by a guy who was neither from Denver nor was he slim, more like about five feet eight and two hundred and forty pounds although his look when Josh entered the cab of the big sixteen-wheeler gave a clear message that nobody better fuck with him) that he would never have met Angelina. Denver Slim, who had picked Josh up at a then classic hitchhiking stop on Cambridge side of the Charles River where there was a truck depot at the entrance to the Massachusetts Turnpike was heading with west with a load. A load of what he did not know what nor care as long as it was a load to California via Chicago (he had told Josh it was better not to know because most time the load was overweight and who knows it could have been illegal goods being carried so a career driver’s best defense was to plead ignorance and pay the fines).

Somewhere short of Buffalo though Denver Slim got all misty eyed for his girlfriend who lived in Steubenville on the Ohio River and he decided that he would veer off in that direction first before heading west. Josh not very sure of his geography then, or now for that matter, and when Denver Slim asked if wanted to head that way Josh said sure, he was in no hurry. (By the way something Josh also told his listeners when he rolled out the hitchhike stories in order to show the nature of the times but also to show that in their own ways those who were not in the least influenced by the new mores that the “hippies” were bringing into the land Denver Slim had a wife and family in Toledo whom he said he loved but he had to have that Pamela he kept Josh clued in about for the duration of the trip).      

So that was exactly the reason that Josh found himself walking into Jimmy Jake’s Diner, a famous truck stop close by the Ohio River after Denver Slim had let him off to go chase the satin sheets with his Pamela. That is where Angelina was serving them off the arm for the summer before heading back to her second year at Barley’s Business School in Muncie Indiana in the fall. Angelina had been so straight, so out of touch with what was happening in her generation she had naturally thought it was quite an adventure to head east for her summer kicks while everybody else was heading west if not to California then New Mexico or Arizona, places like that. They had been immediately attracted to each other, her boss, Jake the cook had yelled at her when she spent more time talking to Josh at the counter where he landed when he entered the front door and refilling his coffee cup than serving the regular clientele. Later that very first night they made the roof of the small cabin that Angelina was staying in up the road from the diner “shake” to the foundation (something he generally left out when telling his Angelina stories later out of a sense of propriety, or something.) A few days later Josh having spent some time “diving for pearls” as a dishwasher at Jimmy Jakes’ to make a few extra dollars and Angelina who worked double shifts to grab a stake headed out of the parking lot at Jimmy Jakes and began their short, tempestuous love affair.    

The affair proceeded famously for several weeks before thing started to go awry, started to show Josh that whatever else Angelina had going for her she was not built for the road. The showdown came in not so sweet dead-end Moline out in the Illinois plains, came when a several day rain and poor ride prospects among the farm folk who looked at the “new folk” with all the suspicion of their urban counterparts, forced them into a woe-begotten dead ass motel for a few days when their funds were low and it looked like California might have well have been the Japan seas.

They had barely resolved that crisis, Angelina a bit drawn from lack of on the road sleep and food that tended to disagree with her, but decided to keep going for a while longer although Angelina was complaining more each day about the weight of her backpack, the infrequent rides, her hungers and so on. Yeah, Josh prepared himself for an Angelina jail-break. (About the lack of rides out in the Midlands Josh had been somewhat wrong, or had been led by Remmy up the wrong path. See Remmy had told Josh that day at Olde Saco Beach that having a young woman, he had called her a girl in the indiscriminate talk of the times, alongside of you dramatically increased your chances of getting a ride by some normal people. Not fags, you know homosexuals in the parlance of the times among guys, even hippie guys, but ordinary Joes or truck-drivers who sensed less trouble that if some long-haired, long-bearded, who knows smelly hippie guy was standing there with his bedroll on one shoulder and knapsack on the other. Out in lots of farm country the gentile folk looked at any such pairings as Satan’s work and showed the proper distain as they either stared to perdition passing by or averted their eyes passing by, the operative words being passing by.)            

The big break-up came in Neola out in the Iowas at Aunt Betty’s Diner where Angelina had taken a job serving them off the arm after they had spent the previous couple of days sleeping just off the road outside of town in a cow pasture for crying out loud. Aunt Betty like all the Aunt Betty’s of the world took Angelina in tow a bit and told her that she should go home and finish school, give up the quest for the great blue-pink great American West night (neither Angelina nor Josh, who wound up working at Aunt Betty’s “diving for pearls” as a dishwasher ever mentioned that concept to anybody but some freaks whom they ran into in a recreational campsite outside of Louisville since they were carrying enough “baggage” trying to get to that great blue-pink American West night. In any case Aunt Betty’s encouragement was all Angelina needed to bail out. So after a few days of figuring out how they would meet in California since Angelina still had never seen the ocean, East or West, when she got her school winter break she headed back east to Indiana and he headed to Denver where he was to meet some guys they had met on the road earlier (that was the thin-layer way of the times, a few telephones numbers, a street address and welcome one and all).

As it turned out Angelina to Josh’s surprise did meet him out in LA during her winter break. They headed to the ocean campsite at Point Magoo about fifty miles up the coast. Both agreed they had a great time, especially Angelina’s frolicking in the new found ocean where she nearly went under in a riptide before gallant Josh “saved” her and having her first tokes of marihuana, but after a couple of weeks Josh knew she would head back home and he would be heading north to Alaska, maybe or at least Seattle, so that their time was done. Strangely Angelina would eventually settle in California a couple of years later after staying for a while at a director friend of Captain Crunch, the leader of the yellow brick road bus that Josh would wind up travelling  on for a few years and become something of a well-known screen actress and later commercial spokeswoman. Josh, who loved the West Coast, saw it as his homeland, would eventually after a few years head back East, and a nasty divorce, and settle in various East Coast towns but they never met again in person and Josh had lost track of her before he read of her passing in the Times. He shed a tear for his, their lost youth but also for the fact that if he could have bent a little, could have met her half-way as she had asked repeatedly, could have had the sense that God gave geese he could have saved himself much anguish in his life. All that day Dylan’s Farewell, Angelina kept bubbling through his brain. Sad day, very sad.        

Playwright-Actor Sam Sheppard Passes At 73

Playwright-Actor Sam Sheppard Passes At 73

Zack James comment:

If one wanted the perfect image of a man of the modern West (not the Left Coast West but, you know, the Montana, Dakota, Wyoming, and the square states as the writer Thomas Wolfe called them), a long, lanky, good-looking, cowboy good-looking, straight-talking on the screen then for many years the image that came to my mind first was that of Sam Sheppard. Knew his work as a playwright first, a series of plays dealing with the foibles of modern life. But that screen image of a modern Western man for a guy who spent a good part of his youth back in 1970s looking for the great blue-pink American West Night after his oldest brother had hipped him to the hard fact that there was something different about that West than Eastern city boys had to contend with. RIP, Brother Sheppard, RIP     

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- *From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- Communism and Syndicalism (October 1929)

Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?


Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist ( I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding.); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive and found a niche for himself in the literary milieu, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-The First World War and the Struggle for Proletarian Power

The100^thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-The First World War and the Struggle for Proletarian Power    

Workers Vanguard No. 1106 24 February 2017 TROTSKY LENIN The First World War and the Struggle for Proletarian Power (Quote of the Week) Sparked by an International Women’s Day demonstration on 8 March 1917 (February 23 by the old Julian calendar), the February Revolution in Russia toppled the autocratic rule of Tsar Nicholas II amid the interimperialist First World War. But the Provisional Government that came to power—and was supported by the Mensheviks and petty-bourgeois Socialist-Revolutionaries—was a bourgeois government that continued to prosecute the war. At the same time, Soviets (councils) of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies were formed, posing a situation of dual power—i.e., whether it would be the proletariat or the bourgeoisie that would ultimately rule. Writing before his return from exile in Switzerland, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin outlined a course to turn the imperialist war into a fight for working-class power. Lenin’s struggle for this strategy was vital for the victory of the Bolshevik-led proletarian socialist October Revolution. To achieve peace (and still more to achieve a really democratic, a really honourable peace), it is necessary that political power be in the hands of the workers and poorest peasants, not the landlords and capitalists. The latter represent an insignificant minority of the population, and the capitalists, as everybody knows, are making fantastic profits out of the war. The workers and poorest peasants are the vast majority of the population. They are not making profit out of the war; on the contrary, they are being reduced to ruin and starvation. They are bound neither by capital nor by the treaties between the predatory groups of capitalists; they can and sincerely want to end the war. If political power in Russia were in the hands of the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, these Soviets, and the All-Russia Soviet elected by them, could, and no doubt would, agree to carry out the peace programme which our Party (the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party) outlined as early as October 13, 1915, in No. 47 of its Central Organ, Sotsial-Demokrat (then published in Geneva because of the Draconic tsarist censorship). This programme would probably be the following: 1) The All-Russia Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies (or the St. Petersburg Soviet temporarily acting for it) would forthwith declare that it is not bound by any treaties concluded either by the tsarist monarchy or by the bourgeois governments. 2) It would forthwith publish all these treaties in order to hold up to public shame the predatory aims of the tsarist monarchy and of all the bourgeois governments without exception. 3) It would forthwith publicly call upon all the belligerent powers to conclude an immediate armistice. 4) It would immediately bring to the knowledge of all the people our, the workers’ and peasants’, peace terms: liberation of all colonies; liberation of all dependent, oppressed and unequal nations. 5) It would declare that it expects nothing good from the bourgeois governments and calls upon the workers of all countries to overthrow them and to transfer all political power to Soviets of Workers’ Deputies. 6) It would declare that the capitalist gentry themselves can repay the billions of debts contracted by the bourgeois governments to wage this criminal, predatory war, and that the workers and peasants refuse to recognise these debts.... For these peace terms the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies would, in my opinion, agree to wage war against any bourgeois government and against all the bourgeois governments of the world, because this would really be a just war, because all the workers and toilers in all countries would work for its success. —V.I. Lenin, “Letters from Afar, Fourth Letter: How to Achieve Peace” (March 1917)

Everybody Loves A Con Man-Except-Ryan and Tatum O’Neal’s “Paper Moon” (1973)-A Film Review

Everybody Loves A Con Man-Except-Ryan and Tatum O’Neal’s “Paper Moon” (1973)-A Film Review     

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Paper Moon, starring Ryan O’Neil, Tatum O’Neal,directed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1973

Every theater-goer, at least I am going to assume so, likes a “feel good” storyline. Maybe not as first choice but in the basket. I confess to that feeling. But as an old corner boy from the working class neighborhoods where I grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire I also appreciate a good “con” storyline. Not con as in convict but as in con artist and although we had plenty of both in the old Acre neighborhood I gravitated toward the latter, except when the con was on me which it was a few times. The film under review Paper Moon with the father-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal going through their paces gives us that combination I have mentioned.            

Here’s the spiel. Here’s basis of the con in this one.  Moses Pray (great name given the grift he is working) is a Bible salesmen in Great Depression-era Kansas and Missouri (that Great Depression the one in the 1930s not the more recent one this century). His grift, check out the obituary columns of the local newspapers to see what men had passed to the great beyond recently (in the days when such publications were plentiful) and head out to the bereaved widow and hustle her into paying for a Bible, a deluxe edition Bible, which the late breadwinner had ordered prior to passing away. Since the Bible was inscribed to the vulnerable widow they usually paid for the thing. Nice steady work. Later when times were tough Moses would step up in class and do the classic sell (bootleg whiskey in the specific case) the owner his own goods con (with untoward results). But the basic style of Moses had been etched in that Bible hustle.       

  

The “feel good” parts in when Moses attends the funeral in Kansas of a woman friend with whom he had been intimate. That is when he met his nemesis (and maybe his on-screen daughter) Addie, played by Ryan’s real life daughter Tatum. She is an orphan with no place to go except her mother’s sister’s house in Missouri. Moses gets corralled into taking her to the sister’s house and the bulk of the film is centered on the adventures and misadventures of the pair on the way there. The most important part to note of this pairing is that Addie has almost as larcenous a heart as Moses. Maybe it was genetic if the suspicions about Addie’s unknown father had any basis. Through a series of events, cons, including that ill-fated hustle of that irate bootlegger Moses and Addie bond, bond as thick as thieves. Yeah, a con and “feel good” that is the ticket.