*Honor International Women's Day-A Workers' Holiday

Click on title to link to "A History In Words and Images Of International Women's Day".

This is a repost of a commentary for International Women's Day 2007

COMMENTARY

MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH-MARCH 8TH IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

MARCH 2007 (WESTERN DATES) MARKS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA STARTED ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY BY WOMEN TEXTILE WORKERS AND OTHER WOMEN DEMANDING BREAD AND PEACE, AMONG OTHER ISSUES DURING THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR I.

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the journal Women and Revolution in 1975

"Under the lead of the Third International, the day of the working women shall become a real fighting day; it shall take the form of practical measures which either solidify the conquests of Communism ...or prepare the way for the dictatorship of the working class."
-
Alexandra Kollontai (early Bolshevik leader)

Bourgeois feminists may celebrate it, but March 8 —International Women's Day—is a workers' holiday. Originating in 1908 among the female needle trades workers in Manhattan's Lower East Side, who marched under the slogans "for an eight hour day," "for the end of child labor" and "equal suffrage for women," it was officially adopted by the Second International in 1911.

International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women's oppression and the program for emancipation.

The following year the Bolsheviks not only agitated for International Women's Day in the pages of Pravda (then publishing under the name Put' Pravdy), but also made preparations to publish a special journal dealing with questions of women's liberation in Russia and internationally. It was called Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), and its first issue was scheduled to appear on International Women's Day, 1914.

Preparations for the holiday were made under the most hazardous conditions. Shortly before the long-awaited day the entire editorial board of Rabotnitsa— with one exception—as well as other Bolsheviks who had agitated for International Women's Day in St. Petersburg factories, were arrested by the Tsarist police. Despite these arrests, however, the Bolsheviks pushed ahead with their preparations. Anna Elizarova —Lenin's sister and the one member of the editorial board to escape arrest—single-handedly brought out the first issue of Rabotnitsa on March 8 (or, according to the old Russian calendar, February 23) as scheduled. Clara Zetkin, a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and in the international working women's movement, wrote:

"Greetings to you on your courageous decision to organize Women's Day, congratulations to you for not losing courage and not wanting to sit by with your hands folded. We are with you, heart and soul. You and your movement will be remembered at numerous meetings organized for Women's Day in Germany, Austria, Hungary and America."

—Quoted in A. Artiukhina, "Proidennyi Put',"
Zhenshehina v revoliutsii

By far the most important celebration ever of International Women's Day took place in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers of that city led a strike of over 90,000 workers—a strike which signaled the end of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. One week afterward, Pravda commented:

"The first day of the revolution—that is the Women's Day, the day of the Women Workers' International. All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on their day."


As the position of Soviet women degenerated under Stalin and his successors, as part of the degeneration of the entire Soviet workers state, International Women's Day was transformed from a day of international proletarian solidarity into an empty ritual which, like Mother's Day in the United States, glorifies the traditional role of women within the family.

But International Women's Day is a celebration neither of motherhood nor sisterhood; to ignore this fact is to ignore the most significant aspects of its history and purpose, which was to strengthen the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. Unlike the pre-war Mensheviks who wanted to conciliate the feminists of their day by limiting the celebration of International Women's Day to women only, the Bolsheviks insisted that it be a holiday of working women and working men in struggle together. As Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife and life-long political companion) wrote in the lead article of the first issue of Rabotnitsa:

"That which unites working women with working men is stronger than that which divides them. They are united by their common lack of rights, their common needs, their common condition, which is struggle and their common goal.... Solidarity between working men and working women, common activity, a common goal, a common path to this goal—such is the solution of the 'woman' question among workers."

We look forward to celebrating future International Women's Days not only through the dissemination of propaganda, but also through the initiation of the full range of activities traditionally associated with this proletarian holiday—general strikes, insurrections, revolution!

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The “Last Waltz”- The Never-Ending Classic Rock Review Tour

The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-The “Last Waltz”- The Never-Ending Classic Rock Review Tour

From The Archives Of Allan Jackson

[The attentive reader of this series may know already that there was an agreement negotiated by his (and my) old high school friend from their growing up days in the working class Acre section of North Adamsville Sam Lowell and the current site manager Greg Green about publicly acknowledging Allan Jackson, the previous site manager, as the driving force behind this classic days of rock and roll at the creation in the mid-1950s series. The “compromise” (thus far) is that Allan is now amorphously acknowledged to have had the works in his archives without specifying that the whole collection was of his inspiration and perspiration. What even the most attentive reader cannot know is that Sam has been in further negotiations with Greg about giving Allan full public credit with a by-line and including updated introductions by him.

The hook? Here is where politics in the Machiavellian raw, left-wing or not comes into play. Greg owes Sam a “favor.” Essentially Greg owes his job to Sam’s decisive vote in the fall of 2017 when there was a fierce internal struggle at this publication over its future direction and Sam sided with the younger writers to what everybody agrees was a purge of the Jackson leadership after many years of hard copy and on-line publication. To show what kind of guys we are dealing with (who I have been dealing with for fifty years so am not surprised at anything these two do) when Allan found out that Greg had initially rebooted the series using another old friend of ours Frank Jackman as a “front” he went crazy with rage. But also contacted Sam on the sly to get attribution for him on the series.

You have to know that these two had cut their teeth in politics back in their radical past 1960s when nobody thought anything of backstabbing one day and then going out for a long round of drinks the next to understand that even though Sam lost him his job, threw him to the exile woods by-gones were by-gones. Amazing. The hook on Greg’s side was that Sam now knew that Greg had been instrumental in “doing Allan in” in the publishing business after he went into exile. He had put the mark of Cain, had put the kiss of death on Allan telling all who inquired about Allan’s employability that he was “hard to work with.” That would explain as Sam and I found out after we discovered where Allan was hiding out up in old haunt Bar Harbor, Maine the source of a million wild rumors about his fate which will be discussed further below and in a couple more introductions since we, Sam, Allan and I, want the reader to read the sketch more than try to fathom the byzantine politics of the publishing business. In any case Sam and Greg are still negotiating about where Allan will ultimately land in this space.         

One of the most persistent rumors after Allan went “underground” (he, they, we are still addicted to the expressions and attitudes of those by-gone 60’s) was that he was in America Siberia out in Utah sucking up to the Mormons in order to get a by-line, to get work and later after U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch announced his retirement and Mitt Romney declared his candidacy that he attempted to get on the campaign as a press secretary or speechwriter. Sam, Phil, Josh, all the older writer here and some others who don’t but have known Allan for a long time dismissed the whole scheme out of hand especially knowing how he had skewered Mitt as a chameleon, a charlatan who would sell his soul if he had one to the highest bidder to get whatever political office he was looking for in 2008 and 2012 when he ran for the roses. Strangely that rumor proved to be the truest one of all although as usual not exactly as the rumor mill had it. Once Greg put the kiss of death on Allan with that “hard to work with” mantra he was frozen out of the East Coast media hub. Having spent time in California in his younger days he headed out there but also faced a stone wall trying to get a job, any job. Here is where the personal and the political sometimes come into conflict. Allan, despite his age and longtime in the business had over the years accumulated three ex-wives and a parcel of kids, mostly nice and bright and college bound. He is still paying alimony and costs of tuition so he needed, needs money. Hence his bright idea that he would go to out of the way Utah and try to hustle some work.

The basis of that idea that he could get some work from the hard shell Mormons came from a couple of articles he had done during one of the Romney runs for President concerning the ritual of their wearing white underwear and a secret admiration for either Romney’s grandfather or great-grandfather who had five wives at one time and survived tell the tale in the days when the Mormons were seriously polygamous. He did write am OpEd piece for the Salt Lake Star which got printed and some good comments on the sly from a couple of Romney’s aides who thought the polygamy article was “cute.” Of course none of that went anywhere since the secret of Mormonism, of Romney, is that you keep it in the family, hire Mormons. Allan would never have survived a vetting in any case either about his radical past or some other articles about old Mitt which put had put him on the skewer and lit the fire. More later but read this sketch now. Jack Callahan]       

************

Sam Lowell had several years before, maybe in about the middle of 2010, done an extensive survey of a commercially-produced Oldies But Goodies series (this series had fifteen separate CDs, more about its mass in a minute, in twenty to thirty song compilations and had torn his ear off from the endless listening. He had begged for a little gangsta hip-hop to soothe his ravaged soul although he was strictly a white-bread blues guy around that kind of music, around black-burst out roots is the toots music) and he had selected one song in each CD to highlight the music. He sought to highlight in particular the music that he and his corner boys, Frankie Riley the acknowledged leader, Pete Markin (also known as the “Scribe” for his endless “publicity” for the group, especially the fountain of wisdom put forth by one Frankie Riley, who later when the drug craze hit full blossom in the late 1960s went over the edge down in Mexico trying to rip off a couple of bricks of cocaine from the hard boys and Pete got two slugs and a face down in a dusty Sonora back alley for his efforts), Jimmy Jenkins, Rats McGee, Johnny Callahan, and other guys like Luke the Juke, Stubby Kincaid, and Hawk Healey who walked in and out of the group at various high school points, had grown up with. Better, had come of age with the music in Adamsville, that is in Massachusetts (Sam had been born in Clintondale a few towns over before moving to Adamsville, a similar town, in junior high school and taken under Frankie Riley’s corner boy wing but had decidedly not been corner boy in that town for the simple reason that there were, unlike in Adamsville at Doc’s Drugstore and later Benny’s bowling alleys, no stand-out corner to be a corner boy in, for good or evil). Yeah, the music of the great jail-break rock and roll 1950s and early 1960s when Sam and the guys came of age had driven his memory bank at that time, some of that material had been placed in a blog, Rock and Roll Will Never Die, dedicated to classic rock and roll music (the classic period now being deemed to have been between about the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s although Sam flinched every time he heard some young guy, some guy who might be an aficionado but was nevertheless not splashed by that tide, called his time the “classic age,” yeah, that rubbed him raw).

Sam had received some comments at the time, mostly from his generational brethren inquiring about this or that song, asking about where they could get a copy of the song they were seeking and he would inform them of the monstrous beauties of YouTube if you could stand the damn commercials that notoriously plague that site to get to your selection, especially Elvis and Jerry Lee stuff. Asked about whether he knew where a 45 RPM vinyl copy could be had, had at any price, a tougher task and asked about the fate that had befallen various one hit johnnies and janies whose single song had been played unto death at the local hang-out jukebox or on the family record player thus driving some besotted mother to the edge. Many though, with almost the same “religious” intensity that Sam brought to his efforts, wanted to vividly describe how this or that song had impacted their lives. Sam had presumed then, presumed a passing fancy but a few apparently had been in a time warp and should have sought some medical attention (although Sam was too much the gentleman to openly make that suggestion). A lot of times though it came down purely to letting  Sam know what song did they first dance to, a surprising number listing Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock  and Danny and the Juniors At The Hop as the choice, surprising since that would have meant a very early introduction not only to rock and roll but to the social etiquettes of dancing with the opposite sex, to speak nothing of the sweaty palms, broken nerves and two left feet which blocked the way, which Sam had not done until he was a freshman in high school. Or what song in what situation had they gotten, or given, their first kiss and to whom, not surprisingly in the golden age of the automobile generation that frequently took place in the back seat of some borrowed car (a few over-the-edgers had gone into more graphic detail than necessary for adults to go into about what happened after that kiss in that backseat). Yeah, got in the back seat of some Chevy to go down to the local lovers’ lane (some very unusual places, the lovers’ lanes not the backseats which were one size fits all) Or had their first fight and make-up to, stuff like that.

As the shelf-life these days for all things Internet is short Sam thought no more about that series, the article or the comments until recently when a young guy (he had presumed a young guy since most devotees of classic rock fall into that demographic, although his moniker of Doo-Wop Dee could have signaled a young woman) who had Googled the words “rock and roll will never die” and had come upon the blog and the article. He sent an e-mail which challenged Sam to tell a candid world (Sam’s expression not Doo-Wop Dee’s who probably would not have known the genesis of that word) why the age of the Stones, Beatles, Animals, Yardbirds, etc., the 1960s age of the big bad guitars, heavy metal, and big backbeat did not do more for classic rock than Elvis (Presley), Chuck (Berry), Roy (Orbison), Bo (Diddley), Buddy (Holly), Jerry Lee (Lewis) and the like did all put together.

Well Sam is a mild-mannered guy usually, has mellowed out some since his rock and roll corner boy slam bang jail-break days, his later “on the road” searching for the great blue-pink great American West night hippie days and his later fighting against his demon addictions days (drugs, con artist larceny, cigarettes, whiskey, hell, even sex, no forget that, drop that from the addiction list) and he had decided, not without an inner murmur, to let the comment pass, to move on to new things, to start work on an appreciation of electric blues in his young life. Then one night late one night he and his lady friend, Melinda (and the reason to forget about that sex addiction stuff above), were watching an old re-run on AMC (the old-time movies channel, featuring mostly black and white films also a relic from his youth and his high school time at the retro-Strand Theater that existed solely to present two such beauties every Saturday afternoon, with or without popcorn) and saw as the film started one ghost from the past Jerry Lee Lewis sitting (hell maybe he had been standing, twirling whirling whatever other energy thing he could do back then to add to the fury of his act) on the back of a flat-bed truck, piano at the ready, doing the title song of the movie, High School Confidential, and then and there Sam had decided that he needed to put old Doo-Wop right. The rest of the movie, by the way, a classic 1950s cautionary tale about the pitfalls of dope, you know marijuana automatically leading to heroin, complete with some poor hooked girl strung out by her fiendish dealer/lover, and of leading an unchaste life, you know that sex addiction stuff that Sam had not been addicted to along his life’s way, as a result was actually eminently forgettable but thanks Jerry Lee for the two minute bailout blast. Here is what Sam had to say to his errant young friend and a candid world:       

First off the term “last waltz” used in the headline is used here as a simple expression of the truth. But that expression will also give Doo Wop and anybody else who asks an idea of the huge amount of material from the classic rock period, like I said in my blog sketch from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, which was good enough, had rung our running home after school to check out the latest dance moves and the cute guys and girls American Bandstand hearts enough, to make the cut. (And that really was true, out of over four hundred songs at least one hundred, a very high percentage, could have had a shot at the one hundred best popular songs of all times lists. When I had started that Oldies But Goodies series a few years ago in a fit of nostalgia related to reconnecting with guys like Frankie Riley, Johnny Callahan and Frank Jackman from the old hometown I had assumed that I had completed the series at Volume Ten.  I then found out that this was a fifteen, fifteen count ‘em, volume series. I flipped out.

Thereafter I whipped off those last five CDs in one day, including individual reviews of each CD and a summing up for another blog, and was done with it. Working frantically all the while under this basic idea; how much can we rekindle, endlessly rekindle, memories from a relatively short, if important, part of our lives, even for those who lived and died by the songs (or some of the songs) in those compilations. How many times could one read about wallflowers, sighs, certain shes (or hes), the moonlight of high school dances (if there was any) and hanging around to the bitter end for that last dance of the night to prove... what. Bastante! Enough! Until Doo-Wop decided that my coming of age era paled, paled if you can believe this, in comparison to Johnny-come-lately rockers like Mick and Keith, John and Paul, Jerry, Neil, Roger and the like.

No, a thousand times no, as right this minute I am watching a YouTube film clip of early Elvis performing Good Rockin’ Tonight at what looks like some state fairgrounds down south and the girls are going crazy tearing their hair out and crying like crazy because the new breeze they had been waiting for in the death-dry red scare Cold War 1950s night just came through and not soon enough. If Doo-Wop had paid attention to anything that someone like Mick Jagger said all the over whelming influence, the foundation for their efforts it might have held his tongue, or been a bit more circumspect. Guys like Mick, and they were mainly guys just like their 1950s forebears know that much. Yeah, it was mainly guys since I admit the only serious female rocker that I recall was Wanda Jackson whereas Doo-Wop’s time frame had Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Grace Slick, Janis Joplin, just to name a few. If he had argued on the basis of female rockers I would have no argument that the 1960s was a golden age for female rockers but his specified only the generic term “rockers.”

Like I said part of what got me going on the re-tread trail had been that nostalgia thing with my old corner boys and all our nights dropping dimes and quarters in Doc’s or Benny’s jukeboxes, listening on our transistors until our ears turned to cauliflower, and swaying at too many last change dance to mention but I also had been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere at the time on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s. You know the age of our own Jack Kennedy, the age of the short-lived Camelot when our dreams seemingly were actually within our grasp, and of the time we began realizing the need for serious struggles against all kinds of wars, and all kinds of discriminations, including getting a fair shake for the working people, those who labor, the people who populated our old time neighborhoods, our parents for chrissakes, in this benighted world. But here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing as the former.

No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s were truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes from Oklahoma, South Pacific and the like and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the transistor radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a transistor radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please. Or look it up on Wikipedia if you are too embarrassed to not know ancient history things. Join the bus.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all staid arm in arm music that one’s parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.

Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. Think Elvis almost any place where there were more than five girls, hell more than one girl, or Jerry Lee and that silly film high school cautionary film that got this whole comment started where he stole the show at the beginning from that flatbed throne or Bill Haley just singing Rock Around The Clock in front of the film Blackboard Jungle. Here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that wallflower fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, that left many a sad sack teenage boy, girls can speak for themselves, waking up in the middle of the night with cold sweats worrying about sweaty hands, underarms, course breathe, stubble, those damn feet (and her dainty ones mauled), and bravery, bravery to ask that she (or he for shes) for a dance, especially the last dance that you waited all night to have that chance to ask her about, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.

So what still sounded good to a current AARPer, and perhaps some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such 1950s compilation “speak” to (and some early 60s songs as well). Carl Perkins original Blue Suede Shoes (covered by, made famous by, and made millions for, Elvis). Or the Hank William’s outlaw country classic I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. Naturally, in a period of classic rock numbers, Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue (or, like Chuck Berry and Fat Domino from this period, virtually any other of about twenty of his songs).

But what about the now seeming mandatory to ask question the inevitable end of the night high school dance (or maybe even middle school) song that seemed to be included in each of those CD compilations? The song that you, maybe, waited around all night for just to prove that you were not a wallflower, and more importantly, had the moxie to, mumbly-voiced, parched-throated, sweaty-handed, ask a girl to dance (women can relate their own experiences, probably similar). Here Elvis’ One Night With You fills the bill. Hey, I did like this one, especially the soulful, snappy timing and voice intonation. And, yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven, that you didn’t destroy your partner’s shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world if for no other reason than to “impress” that certain she (or he for shes, or nowadays, just mix and match your preferences) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you? Touche Doo-Wop!

Poets' Corner- Langston Hughes- “Dream Boogie”

Poets' Corner- Langston Hughes- “Dream Boogie”

…he, Sam Walker, and just this moment, this Saturday night high-kicking moment being called by his moniker reflecting his Saturday night time, Sidewalk Slim (known as such ever since his corner boy days around 125^th Street when he was really slim and when he ruled, ruled for a moment in time, the sidewalk in front of Sadie Barker’s Pool Hall), was, as always on Saturday night, dressed to the nines, yes, the nines. Resplendent in his now well-worn, although serviceable, wide lapel dark brown suit that had seeable pants creases, and off-pink collared shirt to highlight the brown (also well- worn but like the suit serviceable, serviceable Saturday night especially after a few drinks, or some reefer madness kicks, dimmed the lights), a signature string tie reflecting a local hip trend, shoe-shine black shoes, ready to dance almost by themselves. And to top off that resplendent as he walked in the front door of the Red Fez (red to make one think of sunsets, of flaming heats, and fez to make one think back to Mother Africa times and some eternal birth mysteries) was his woman, his lady, Miss Molly, fully gowned, new, new and freely given by a, a, gentleman friend to show some appreciation for her kindnesses. Sidewalk Slim didn’t like the fact that it was new, that he had not purchased it, and that someone else had. They had argued about it for a bit but as usual Slim was at the losing end of a Molly argument when it came to her looks. Finished.

Moreover, this night, the Molly Red Fez night, Slim was eager to have Molly around as his arm piece because none other than the man, Be-Bop Benny and his quartet, Benny from his old corner boy days, who looked like he and his crew were ready to break out, break out big in the emerging swing bing bang bing jazz night, maybe like the Count or the Duke, were playing the house that night and he needed to show he fit in, fit in nicely with the new be-bop, with the hip. So reefer loaded, feeling a little mellow as he sat down at the front table Benny had reserved for him, ordering some high-shelf liquor, a bottle, as befit the occasion Slim for once felt that old time corner boy king of the hill walking daddy feeling that he used to feel around 125^th Street. And the night, really the night and the next morning because he and Molly stayed after hours when Benny and other guys from around town after finishing their money gigs for the Mayfair swells and that crowd came by to really blast, worked out just that way. He was beat, beat to hell and back and slept most of the Sunday away.

Come Monday morning, early, in a different suit, the green khaki uniform, complete with his Sam Walker name in white label above the shirt pocket, of the Barclay Cleaning Company, taking the old A-train to work he thought about the day ahead, the long day ahead, and about how his supervisor, Harry, would probably yell to him for the millionth time “Did you clean that women’s toilet on the fifth floor?”or something like that. Jesus.

********
Dream Boogie …

Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?

Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a -

You think
It's a happy beat?

Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a -

What did I say?

Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!

Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!

Y-e-a-h!

Langston Hughes

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-*From The Pages Of The Communist International-"To the I.W.W.-A Special Message from the Communist International." (1920)

Click on the headline to link to the The Communist International Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.


Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.

From the Archives of Marxism-“Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”-by V.I. Lenin

Frank Jackman comment: with not too much addition and taking into consideration the almost one hundred year  time difference these theses read like they could have been written today by Brother Lenin.

Workers Vanguard No. 1098	21 October 2016

From the Archives of Marxism-“Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”-by V.I. Lenin

We reprint below Theses by Lenin that counterpose the soviet system of workers democracy established by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia to the fraud of capitalist democracy. Lenin presented the Theses to the First Congress of the Third (Communist) International in March 1919, while Europe was being shaken by revolutionary working-class upheavals. In January of that year a workers uprising in Berlin was crushed and Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were assassinated.

The Communist International was founded in opposition to the Second (Socialist) International. Most of the parties of the Second International had betrayed the working class by supporting their own imperialist ruling classes in the slaughter of World War I. The Communist International won substantial numbers of workers from the old Socialist (Social Democratic) parties to revolutionary communism.

This translation of the Theses is taken from Lenin’s Collected Works. The Berne International Conference that Lenin references sought to re-establish the Second International, which had collapsed at the start of WWI.

*   *   *

1. Faced with the growth of the revolutionary workers’ movement in every country, the bourgeoisie and their agents in the workers’ organisations are making desperate attempts to find ideological and political arguments in defence of the rule of the exploiters. Condemnation of dictatorship and defence of democracy are particularly prominent among these arguments. The falsity and hypocrisy of this argument, repeated in a thousand strains by the capitalist press and at the Berne yellow International Conference in February 1919, are obvious to all who refuse to betray the fundamental principles of socialism.

2. Firstly, this argument employs the concepts of “democracy in general” and “dictatorship in general,” without posing the question of the class concerned. This non-class or above-class presentation, which supposedly is popular, is an outright travesty of the basic tenet of socialism, namely, its theory of class struggle, which socialists who have sided with the bourgeoisie recognise in words but disregard in practice. For in no civilised capitalist country does “democracy in general” exist; all that exists is bourgeois democracy, and it is not a question of “dictatorship in general,” but of the dictatorship of the oppressed class, i.e., the proletariat, over its oppressors and exploiters, i.e., the bourgeoisie, in order to overcome the resistance offered by the exploiters in their fight to maintain their domination.

3. History teaches us that no oppressed class ever did, or could, achieve power without going through a period of dictatorship, i.e., the conquest of political power and forcible suppression of the resistance always offered by the exploiters—a resistance that is most desperate, most furious, and that stops at nothing. The bourgeoisie, whose domination is now defended by the socialists who denounce “dictatorship in general” and extol “democracy in general,” won power in the advanced countries through a series of insurrections, civil wars, and the forcible suppression of kings, feudal lords, slaveowners and their attempts at restoration. In books, pamphlets, congress resolutions and propaganda speeches socialists everywhere have thousands and millions of times explained to the people the class nature of these bourgeois revolutions and this bourgeois dictatorship. That is why the present defence of bourgeois democracy under cover of talk about “democracy in general” and the present howls and shouts against proletarian dictatorship under cover of shouts about “dictatorship in general” are an outright betrayal of socialism. They are, in fact, desertion to the bourgeoisie, denial of the proletariat’s right to its own, proletarian, revolution, and defence of bourgeois reformism at the very historical juncture when bourgeois reformism throughout the world has collapsed and the war has created a revolutionary situation.

4. In explaining the class nature of bourgeois civilisation, bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system, all socialists have expressed the idea formulated with the greatest scientific precision by Marx and Engels, namely, that the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists. There is not a single revolutionary, not a single Marxist among those now shouting against dictatorship and for democracy who has not sworn and vowed to the workers that he accepts this basic truth of socialism. But now, when the revolutionary proletariat is in a fighting mood and taking action to destroy this machine of oppression and to establish proletarian dictatorship, these traitors to socialism claim that the bourgeoisie have granted the working people “pure democracy,” have abandoned resistance and are prepared to yield to the majority of the working people. They assert that in a democratic republic there is not, and never has been, any such thing as a state machine for the oppression of labour by capital.

5. The Paris Commune [of 1871, when the Parisian working class briefly seized power]—to which all who parade as socialists pay lip service, for they know that the workers ardently and sincerely sympathise with the Commune—showed very clearly the historically conventional nature and limited value of the bourgeois parliamentary system and bourgeois democracy—institutions which, though highly progressive compared with medieval times, inevitably require a radical alteration in the era of proletarian revolution. It was Marx who best appraised the historical significance of the Commune. In his analysis, he revealed the exploiting nature of bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois parliamentary system under which the oppressed classes enjoy the right to decide once in several years which representative of the propertied classes shall “represent and suppress” (ver- und zertreten) the people in parliament. And it is now, when the Soviet movement is embracing the entire world and continuing the work of the Commune for all to see, that the traitors to socialism are forgetting the concrete experience and concrete lessons of the Paris Commune and repeating the old bourgeois rubbish about “democracy in general.” The Commune was not a parliamentary institution.

6. The significance of the Commune, furthermore, lies in the fact that it endeavoured to crush, to smash to its very foundations, the bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucratic, judicial, military and police machine, and to replace it by a self-governing, mass workers’ organisation in which there was no division between legislative and executive power. All contemporary bourgeois-democratic republics, including the German republic, which the traitors to socialism, in mockery of the truth, describe as a proletarian republic, retain this state apparatus. We therefore again get quite clear confirmation of the point that shouting in defence of “democracy in general” is actually defence of the bourgeoisie and their privileges as exploiters.

7. “Freedom of assembly” can be taken as a sample of the requisites of “pure democracy.” Every class-conscious worker who has not broken with his class will readily appreciate the absurdity of promising freedom of assembly to the exploiters at a time and in a situation when the exploiters are resisting the overthrow of their rule and are fighting to retain their privileges. When the bourgeoisie were revolutionary, they did not, either in England in 1649 or in France in 1793, grant “freedom of assembly” to the monarchists and nobles, who summoned foreign troops and “assembled” to organise attempts at restoration. If the present-day bourgeoisie, who have long since become reactionary, demand from the proletariat advance guarantees of “freedom of assembly” for the exploiters, whatever the resistance offered by the capitalists to being expropriated, the workers will only laugh at their hypocrisy.

The workers know perfectly well, too, that even in the most democratic bourgeois republic “freedom of assembly” is a hollow phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and enough leisure to assemble at meetings, which are protected by the bourgeois machine of power. The rural and urban workers and the small peasants—the overwhelming majority of the population—are denied all these things. As long as that state of affairs prevails, “equality,” i.e., “pure democracy,” is a fraud. The first thing to do to win genuine equality and enable the working people to enjoy democracy in practice is to deprive the exploiters of all the public and sumptuous private buildings, to give the working people leisure and to see to it that their freedom of assembly is protected by armed workers, not by scions of the nobility or capitalist officers in command of downtrodden soldiers.

Only when that change is effected can we speak of freedom of assembly and of equality without mocking at the workers, at working people in general, at the poor. And this change can be effected only by the vanguard of the working people, the proletariat, which overthrows the exploiters, the bourgeoisie.

8. “Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy.” And here, too, the workers know—and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times—that this freedom is a deception while the best printing-presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example. The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed. The capitalists have always used the term “freedom” to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death. In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion. In this respect, too, the defenders of “pure democracy” prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people, who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement. Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system which the Communists are building, and in which there will be no opportunity for amassing wealth at the expense of others, no objective opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect power of money, and no impediments in the way of any workingman (or groups of workingmen, in any numbers) for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing-presses and public stocks of paper.

9. The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrated, even before the war, what this celebrated “pure democracy” really is under capitalism. Marxists have always maintained that the more developed, the “purer” democracy is, the more naked, acute and merciless the class struggle becomes, and the “purer” the capitalist oppression and bourgeois dictatorship. The Dreyfus case [witchhunt against Jewish army officer in the 1890s] in republican France, the massacre of strikers by hired bands armed by the capitalists in the free and democratic American republic—these and thousands of similar facts illustrate the truth which the bourgeoisie are vainly seeking to conceal, namely, that actually terror and bourgeois dictatorship prevail in the most democratic of republics and are openly displayed every time the exploiters think the power of capital is being shaken.

10. The imperialist war of 1914-18 conclusively revealed even to backward workers the true nature of bourgeois democracy, even in the freest republics, as being a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Tens of millions were killed for the sake of enriching the German or the British group of millionaires and multimillionaires, and bourgeois military dictatorships were established in the freest republics. This military dictatorship continues to exist in the Allied countries even after Germany’s defeat. It was mostly the war that opened the eyes of the working people, that stripped bourgeois democracy of its camouflage and showed the people the abyss of speculation and profiteering that existed during and because of the war. It was in the name of “freedom and equality” that the bourgeoisie waged the war, and in the name of “freedom and equality” that the munition manufacturers piled up fabulous fortunes. Nothing that the yellow Berne International does can conceal from the people the now thoroughly exposed exploiting character of bourgeois freedom, bourgeois equality and bourgeois democracy.

11. In Germany, the most developed capitalist country of continental Europe, the very first months of full republican freedom, established as a result of imperialist Germany’s defeat, have shown the German workers and the whole world the true class substance of the bourgeois-democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg is an event of epoch-making significance not only because of the tragic death of these finest people and leaders of the truly proletarian, Communist International, but also because the class nature of an advanced European state—it can be said without exaggeration, of an advanced state on a world-wide scale—has been conclusively exposed. If those arrested, i.e., those placed under state protection, could be assassinated by officers and capitalists with impunity, and this under a government headed by social-patriots [Social Democrats], then the democratic republic where such a thing was possible is a bourgeois dictatorship. Those who voice their indignation at the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but fail to understand this fact are only demonstrating their stupidity, or hypocrisy. “Freedom” in the German republic, one of the freest and advanced republics of the world, is freedom to murder arrested leaders of the proletariat with impunity. Nor can it be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy sharpens rather than dampens the class struggle which, by virtue of all the results and influences of the war and of its consequences, has been brought to boiling point.

Throughout the civilised world we see Bolsheviks being exiled, persecuted and thrown into prison. This is the case, for example, in Switzerland, one of the freest bourgeois republics, and in America, where there have been anti-Bolshevik pogroms, etc. From the standpoint of “democracy in general,” or “pure democracy,” it is really ridiculous that advanced, civilised, and democratic countries, which are armed to the teeth, should fear the presence of a few score men from backward, famine-stricken and ruined Russia, which the bourgeois papers, in tens of millions of copies, describe as savage, criminal, etc. Clearly, the social situation that could produce this crying contradiction is in fact a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

12. In these circumstances, proletarian dictatorship is not only an absolutely legitimate means of overthrowing the exploiters and suppressing their resistance, but also absolutely necessary to the entire mass of working people, being their only defence against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is preparing new wars.

The main thing that socialists fail to understand and that constitutes their shortsightedness in matters of theory, their subservience to bourgeois prejudices and their political betrayal of the proletariat is that in capitalist society, whenever there is any serious aggravation of the class struggle intrinsic to that society, there can be no alternative but the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dreams of some third way are reactionary, petty-bourgeois lamentations. That is borne out by more than a century of development of bourgeois democracy and the working-class movement in all the advanced countries, and notably by the experience of the past five years. This is also borne out by the whole science of political economy, by the entire content of Marxism, which reveals the economic inevitability, wherever commodity economy prevails, of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that can only be replaced by the class which the very growth of capitalism develops, multiplies, welds together and strengthens, that is, the proletarian class.

13. Another theoretical and political error of the socialists is their failure to understand that ever since the rudiments of democracy first appeared in antiquity, its forms inevitably changed over the centuries as one ruling class replaced another. Democracy assumed different forms and was applied in different degrees in the ancient republics of Greece, the medieval cities and the advanced capitalist countries. It would be sheer nonsense to think that the most profound revolution in human history, the first case in the world of power being transferred from the exploiting minority to the exploited majority, could take place within the time-worn framework of the old, bourgeois, parliamentary democracy, without drastic changes, without the creation of new forms of democracy, new institutions that embody the new conditions for applying democracy, etc.

14. Proletarian dictatorship is similar to the dictatorship of other classes in that it arises out of the need, as every other dictatorship does, to forcibly suppress the resistance of the class that is losing its political sway. The fundamental distinction between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of other classes—landlord dictatorship in the Middle Ages and bourgeois dictatorship in all the civilised capitalist countries—consists in the fact that the dictatorship of the landowners and bourgeoisie was the forcible suppression of the resistance offered by the vast majority of the population, namely, the working people. In contrast, proletarian dictatorship is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, i.e., an insignificant minority of the population, the landowners and capitalists.

It follows that proletarian dictatorship must inevitably entail not only a change in democratic forms and institutions, generally speaking, but precisely such a change as provides an unparalleled extension of the actual enjoyment of democracy by those oppressed by capitalism—the toiling classes.

And indeed, the form of proletarian dictatorship that has already taken shape, i.e., Soviet power in Russia, the Räte [council]-System in Germany, the Shop Stewards Committees in Britain and similar Soviet institutions in other countries, all this implies and presents to the toiling classes, i.e., the vast majority of the population, greater practical opportunities for enjoying democratic rights and liberties than ever existed before, even approximately, in the best and the most democratic bourgeois republics.

The substance of Soviet government is that the permanent and only foundation of state power, the entire machinery of state, is the mass-scale organisation of the classes oppressed by capitalism, i.e., the workers and the semi-proletarians (peasants who do not exploit the labour of others and regularly resort to the sale of at least a part of their own labour power). It is the people, who even in the most democratic bourgeois republics, while possessing equal rights by law, have in fact been debarred by thousands of devices and subterfuges from participation in political life and enjoyment of democratic rights and liberties, that are now drawn into constant and unfailing, moreover, decisive, participation in the democratic administration of the state.

15. The equality of citizens, irrespective of sex, religion, race, or nationality, which bourgeois democracy everywhere has always promised but never effected, and never could effect because of the domination of capital, is given immediate and full effect by the Soviet system, or dictatorship of the proletariat. The fact is that this can only be done by a government of the workers, who are not interested in the means of production being privately owned and in the fight for their division and redivision.

16. The old, i.e., bourgeois, democracy and the parliamentary system were so organised that it was the mass of working people who were kept farthest away from the machinery of government. Soviet power, i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat, on the other hand, is so organised as to bring the working people close to the machinery of government. That, too, is the purpose of combining the legislative and executive authority under the Soviet organisation of the state and of replacing territorial constituencies by production units—the factory.

17. The army was a machine of oppression not only under the monarchy. It remains as such in all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic ones. Only the Soviets, the permanent organisations of government authority of the classes that were oppressed by capitalism, are in a position to destroy the army’s subordination to bourgeois commanders and really merge the proletariat with the army; only the Soviets can effectively arm the proletariat and disarm the bourgeoisie. Unless this is done, the victory of socialism is impossible.

18. The Soviet organisation of the state is suited to the leading role of the proletariat as a class most concentrated and enlightened by capitalism. The experience of all revolutions and all movements of the oppressed classes, the experience of the world socialist movement teaches us that only the proletariat is in a position to unite and lead the scattered and backward sections of the working and exploited population.

19. Only the Soviet organisation of the state can really effect the immediate break-up and total destruction of the old, i.e., bourgeois, bureaucratic and judicial machinery, which has been, and has inevitably had to be, retained under capitalism even in the most democratic republics, and which is, in actual fact, the greatest obstacle to the practical implementation of democracy for the workers and working people generally. The Paris Commune took the first epoch-making step along this path. The Soviet system has taken the second.

20. Destruction of state power is the aim set by all socialists, including Marx above all. Genuine democracy, i.e., liberty and equality, is unrealisable unless this aim is achieved. But its practical achievement is possible only through Soviet, or proletarian, democracy, for by enlisting the mass organisations of the working people in constant and unfailing participation in the administration of the state, it immediately begins to prepare the complete withering away of any state.

21. The complete bankruptcy of the socialists who assembled in Berne, their complete failure to understand the new, i.e., proletarian, democracy, is especially apparent from the following. On February 10, 1919, [Swedish Social-Democratic leader Hjalmar] Branting delivered the concluding speech at the international Conference of the yellow International in Berne. In Berlin, on February 11, 1919, Die Freiheit, the paper of the International’s affiliates, published an appeal from the Party of “Independence” to the proletariat. The appeal acknowledged the bourgeois character of the [German Social Democrat Philipp] Scheidemann government, rebuked it for wanting to abolish the Soviets, which it described as Träger und Schützer der Revolution—vehicles and guardians of the revolution—and proposed that the Soviets be legalised, invested with government authority and given the right to suspend the operation of National Assembly decisions pending a popular referendum.

That proposal indicates the complete ideological bankruptcy of the theorists who defended democracy and failed to see its bourgeois character. This ludicrous attempt to combine the Soviet system, i.e., proletarian dictatorship, with the National Assembly, i.e., bourgeois dictatorship, utterly exposes the paucity of thought of the yellow socialists and Social-Democrats, their reactionary petty-bourgeois political outlook, and their cowardly concessions to the irresistibly growing strength of the new, proletarian democracy.

22. From the class standpoint, the Berne yellow International majority, which did not dare to adopt a formal resolution out of fear of the mass of workers, was right in condemning Bolshevism. This majority is in full agreement with the Russian Mensheviks [social democrats] and [peasant-based] Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the Scheidemanns in Germany. In complaining of persecution by the Bolsheviks, the Russian Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries try to conceal the fact that they are persecuted for participating in the Civil War on the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Similarly, the Scheidemanns and their party have already demonstrated in Germany that they, too, are participating in the civil war on the side of the bourgeoisie against the workers.

It is therefore quite natural that the Berne yellow International majority should be in favour of condemning the Bolsheviks. This was not an expression of the defence of “pure democracy,” but of the self-defence of people who know and feel that in the civil war they stand with the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

That is why, from the class point of view, the decision of the yellow International majority must be considered correct. The proletariat must not fear the truth, it must face it squarely and draw all the necessary political conclusions

*Happy Birthday Townes -The Hard Times And Great Lyrics Of A Troubled Man- A Townes Van Zandt Documentary-"Be Here To Love Me"

Click On Title To Link To YouTube Film Clip Of The Trailer To "Be Here To Love Me"

DVD Review

Be Here To Love Me, Townes Van Zandt and other musicians, directed by Margaret Brown, Palm Pictures, 2006

The main points of this review have been used to review Townes Van Zandt CDs in this space. They can serve here as well in this very well done documentary by Margaret Brown on the hard times and great lyrics of a very troubled man.

Readers of this space are by now very aware that I am in search of and working my way through various types of American roots music. In shorthand, running through what others have termed "The American Songbook". Thus I have spent no little time going through the work of seemingly every musician who rates space in the august place. From blues giants, folk legends, classic rock `n' roll artists down through the second and third layers of those milieus out in the backwoods and small, hideaway music spots that dot the American musical landscape.I have also given a nod to more R&B, rockabilly and popular song artists then one reasonably need to know about. I have, however, other than the absolutely obligatory passing nods to the likes of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline spent very ink on more traditional Country music, what used to be called the Nashville sound. What gives?

Whatever my personal musical preferences there is no question that the country music work of, for example, the likes of George Jones, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette in earlier times or Garth Brooks and Faith Hill a little later or today Keith Urban and Taylor Swift (I am cheating on these last two since I do not know their work and had to ask someone about them) "speak" to vast audiences out in the heartland. They just, for a number of reasons that need not be gone into here, do not "speak" to me. However, in the interest of "full disclosure" I must admit today that I had a "country music moment" about thirty years ago. That was the time of the "outlaws" of the country music scene. You know, Waylon (Jennings) and Willie (Nelson). Also Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and Jerry Jeff Walker. Country Outlaws, get it? Guys and gals ( think of Jesse Colter)who broke from the Nashville/ Grand Old Opry mold by drinking hard, smoking plenty of dope and generally raising the kind of hell that the pious guardians of the Country Music Hall Of Fame would have had heart attacks over (at least in public). Oh, and did I say they wrote lyrics that spoke of love and longing, trouble with their "old ladies" (or "old men"), and struggling to get through the day. Just an ordinary day's work in the music world but with their own outlandish twists on it.

All of the above is an extremely round about way to introduce the "max daddy" of my 'country music moment', Townes Van Zandt. For those who the name does not ring a bell perhaps his most famous work does, the much-covered "Pancho And Lefty". In some ways his personal biography exemplified the then "new outlaw" (assuming that Hank Williams and his gang were the original ones). Chronic childhood problems, including a stint in a mental hospital, drugs, drink, and some rather "politically incorrect" sexual attitudes. Nothing really new here, except out of this mix came some of the most haunting lyrics of longing, loneliness, depression, sadness and despair. And that is the "milder" stuff. Not exactly the stuff of Nashville. That is the point. The late Townes Van Zandt "spoke" to me (he died in 1997) in a way that Nashville never could. And, in the end, the other outlaws couldn't either. That, my friends, is the saga of my country moment. Listen up to any of the CDs listed below for the reason why Townes did.

Townes Van Zandt was, due to personal circumstances and the nature of the music industry, honored more highly among his fellow musicians than as an outright star of "outlaw" country music back in the day. That influence was felt through the sincerest form of flattery in the music industry- someone well known covering your song. Many of Townes' pieces, especially since his untimely death in 1997, have been covered by others, most famously Willie Nelson's cover of "Pancho and Lefty". However, Townes, whom I had seen a number of times in person in the late 1970's, was no mean performer of his own darkly compelling songs.

Poets' Corner- A Poem To While The Class Struggle By- Claude Mckay's "If We Must Die" -In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March 1919)

Poets' Corner- A Poem To While The Class Struggle By- Claude Mckay's "If We Must Die" -In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March 1919)


Markin comment:

Sometimes a poem (or a song, play, or picture, but usually a poem) says more in a few lines than all the "high" communist propaganda we throw out about the stakes for our side in the class struggle. Claude McKay's If We Must Die is one of them.

If We Must Die by Claude McKay

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Four-For Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht

In Honor Of The 98^th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International-Take Four-For Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht          

The cops, the hated Federals, and their allies the Freikorps, were hunting down every Red, hell every leftist or trade union militant that would not bow his head they could find in all of stinking Bavaria after they crushed the Commune. It was awful, savage, something out of what Otto Schmidt thought it must have been like when Thiers and his hatchet-men led by the notorious General Gallifit who wound up in a later government right next to the bastard socialist traitor Alexander Millerand pulled the hammer down on the Paris Commune. He had read plenty, plenty as a schoolboy, as a proud member of the Socialist Youth, about those heroic events back in 1871 even though most of them were anarchists or just independent radicals living off their reputations from the past or ones which they had picked up on the dusty barricades so he knew that if they, they the working people did not win, then the blood would flow in the streets. And it had come to that after some bloody street fighting.

Worse those Whites (every counter-revolutionary force in the world since the Bolshevik Revolution and the damn civil war there was now called White in his and every militant socialist’s book, and rightly so since they were all kindred of the Russian Whites) they had grabbed their leader, Eugene Levine, and who knows what had happened to him (executed as it turned out later-an outcome he maybe portended with his desperate and fatalistic “communists are dead men on leave” saying which while true as long as the struggle had to continue was unnerving to hear and to think through). Hell, Otto had just barely gotten out of Munich himself and had been hiding in a small apartment of a sympathizer in the outer suburbs of Munich and only now had a chance to think about the events of the past several months since the damn Kaiser had abdicated, the war had come to a crashing halt, and working people like him, honest socialists trying to figure out a way to change this rotten old world, had unbowed their heads for once and taken some action.

Otto knew, although he was not theoretician, not even really a leader, not a big leader anyway, although he was respected among the youth for his militancy and his willingness to stick his neck out, that they, the revolutionaries, the real revolutionaries had made mistakes, made bad mistakes about what to do, and with whom. Sure they were young, mostly, hot-headed, mad as hell had never before, unlike the Russians they were trying to emulate, ever had a part in a revolution. Their leaders, their Social-Democratic leaders mostly, had told them to organize, organize, organize and vote, vote, vote, and when they had done enough of both then they would just ease into the socialist republic of their dreams, his dreams. Conveniently forgetting that as Marx himself and all the big leaders after him had said that no ruling class in history has ever thrown in the towel as long as they had one gun left to shoot workers and peasants with. They had to be swept out- a bitter lesson to learn just then.  

Then when the chance actually came those leaders, those august bootblack black-hearted leaders, just filled the governmental seats and left everybody else standing high and dry. Worse those bastards had done the bosses’ work for them; they had suppressed everything, every armed attempt to get some worker justice. Those damn leaders were just as bad as Thiers and his French companions in suppressing the Commune. Otto burned with an inner rage when he thought about what they, Ebert, that fat pig, and Noske, that goddam hangman, had done, done with glee from what he had heard, to Rosa, Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution, and courageous Karl Liebknecht, bright shining Karl who had in the flames of war stood up and called down every kind of damnation on the German war aims (and the other side too but he aimed at his own fellow Germans first). And had paid the price. Poor Levine, poor beautiful Levine with the soul of a poet probably was slated for that same fate, a martyr’s fate.

Yes, Otto could see where the big mistakes lie, trusting those parlor socialists gotten fat and lazy off of hard-earned workingmen’s dues once they took over the bourgeois government. Somebody, he forgot who it was and some of the details but a comrade who had been to Russia or had talked to a Russian Bolshevik while he was in Germany, one night in Munich when it looked like they would win, had said when the revolution was at its hottest then the struggle against the reform socialists (in Russia the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries and here the Social-Democrats) has to most merciless. They had forgotten that, forgotten that to their regret.  He had heard that same night that in Moscow earlier in the spring the Bolsheviks and their international allies had formed a new International, a Communist International to fight against the Social –Democrats tooth and nail for the allegiance of the working masses. He had had not had time to investigate that statement more since all hell had broken out a week or so after that, to sign up or anything but he knew this, knew it deep in his young bones, that he wished the effort well. He also wished that they, and he, could find some way, some righteous way to avenge those deaths of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.  And now probably Levine too.

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Communist International Archives-Leon Trotsky's 1921 Speech To The Second World Conference Of Communist Women

Leon Trotsky
The First Five Years of the Communist International
Volume 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Speech Delivered at the Second World
Conference of Communist Women

COMRADES! We are now convening your Conference of Communist Women and the current Congress of the Communist International – we are now convening and carrying on our work at a moment which does not seem to have that definitiveness, that clarity and those graphic fundamental features which appeared, at first sight, as the distinguishing traits of the First World Congress when it met directly following the war. Our enemies and our opponents are even saying that we have been completely and utterly mistaken in our calculations. We Communists had supposed and hoped, so say our opponents, that the world proletarian revolution would break out either during the war or immediately afterwards. But now the third year since the war is already ending, and while during this interval many revolutionary movements have taken place, it is only within one country, namely, in our own economically, politically and culturally backward Russia, that the revolutionary movement has led to the dictatorship of the proletariat – a dictatorship which has been able to maintain itself to the present day and which I hope will continue to maintain itself for a long time to come. In other countries the revolutionary movements have led only to the replacement of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg regimes by bourgeois regimes, in the form of bourgeois republics. Finally, in a whole number of countries the movement ebbed away in strikes, demonstrations and isolated uprisings which were crushed. In general, the mainstays of the capitalist regime have been preserved throughout the whole world, with the sole exception of Russia.

From this our enemies have drawn the conclusion that since capitalism hasn’t collapsed as a result of the World War in the course of the first two to three postwar years when the balance sheets were being drawn, it follows that the world proletariat has demonstrated its incapacity, while, conversely, world capitalism has demonstrated its capacity and power to retain its positions, to reestablish its equilibrium.

And at this very moment the International is discussing the question: Will the period immediately ahead, the next few years, entail the reestablishment of capitalist rule on new and higher foundations? or will it entail a mounting assault by the proletariat upon capitalism, an assault which will bring about the dictatorship of the working class? This is the fundamental question for the world proletariat and, consequently, also for its women’s section. Of course, Comrades, I can’t even attempt here to give a complete answer to this question. The time at my disposal is too brief. I shall attempt to do this, as assigned by the ECCI, at the Congress. But one thing, I believe, is completely clear to us, to Communists, to Marxists. We know that history and its movement are determined by objective causes but we also know that history is accomplished by human beings and through huthan beings. The revolution is accomplished through the working class. Essentially history thus poses the question before us in the following way: Capitalism prepared the World War; the World War erupted and destroyed millions of lives and billions of dollars’ worth of national wealth. It has shaken everything. And here on this half-ruined foundation, two basic classes are locked in struggle – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie seeks to restore capitalist equilibrium and its class rule; the proletariat seeks to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie.

It is impossible to settle this matter with pencil in hand, like adding up a list of groceries. It is impossible to say: History has taken a turn toward the reestablishment of capitalism. It is only possible to say that if the lessons of the entire preceding development – the lessons of the war, the lessons of the Russian Revolution, the lessons of the semi-revolutions in Germany, Austria and elsewhere – if these lessons go for nought, if the working class once again agrees to keep its neck within the capitalist yoke, then, perhaps, the bourgeoisie will be able to restore its equilibrium, by destroying the civilization of Western Europe and by transferring the center of world development to America, to Japan, to Asia. Entire generations would have to be destroyed in order to create this new equilibrium. To this end the diplomats, the military men, the strategists, the economists, the brokers of the bourgeoisie are now directing all their efforts. They know that while history has its profound causes, it is nonetheless made through human beings, through their organizations and through their parties; and, consequently, our Congress and your Women’s Conference have gathered here precisely in order to introduce into this unsettled historical situation the certainty of the consciousness and the will of the revolutionary class. This is the gist of the moment through which we are living and herein is the gist of its tasks as well.

We can say that the assumption of power no longer appears so simple a matter as it did to many of us two or three years ago. On the world scale this business of conquering power is extremely difficult and complicated. One must be aware that within the proletariat itself there are diverse layers, diverse levels of historical development and even diverse temporary interests. All this inevitably makes itself felt in its own due time. Layer after proletarian layer is drawn into the revolutionary struggle, passes through its own school, burns its fingers, retreats to the rear. They are followed by another layer, in whose wake comes still another and all of them are not drawn in simultaneously but at different periods; they pass through the kindergarten, the first, the second, and other grades of revolutionary development. And to combine all this into a unity – ah, this is a colossally difficult task! The example of Germany has already shown us this. There, in Central Germany, that section of the proletariat which prior to the war was the most backward and the most devoted to the Hohenzollerns, that section has today become the most revolutionary and dynamic.

The same thing happened in our country when the most backward proletarian section – the Ural proletariat – owing to a whole number of causes became at a certain moment the most revolutionary. They underwent a major inner crisis. And on the other hand, turning back to Germany, let us take for example the advanced workers of Berlin and Saxony who entered upon the road of the revolution early, and immediately succeeded in burning their fingers; not only did they fail to take power, but they suffered a defeat and have therefore since then become much more cautious. At the same time the workers’ movement in Central Germany, a very revolutionary movement which began with such great enthusiasm – this movement failed to coincide with the movement of those workers who were much more highly developed, but who were more cautious and, in some ways, more conservative. From this example alone you can already see, Comrades, how difficult it is to combine the disparate manifestations among workers of different trades and on different levels of development and culture. In the progress of the world labor movement, women proletarians play a colossal role. I say this not because I am addressing a women’s conference but because sheer numbers indicate what an important part the woman worker plays in the mechanism of the capitalist world – in France, in Germany, in America, in Japan, in every capitalist country ... Statistics inform me that in Japan there are many more women than men workers; and consequently, if the data at my disposal is credible, in the labor movement of Japan they, the proletarian women, are destined to play the decisive role and to occupy the decisive place. And generally speaking, in the world labor movement the woman worker stands closest precisely to the section of the proletariat represented by the miners of Central Germany to whom I have just referred; that is, that section of labor which is the most backward, the most oppressed, the lowliest of the lowly. And just because of this, in the years of the colossal world revolution this section of the proletariat can and must become the most active, the most revolutionary, and the most initiative section of the working class.

Naturally, mere energy, mere readiness to attack are not enough. But at the same time history is filled with instances such as these: that during a more or less protracted epoch prior to the revolution, within the male section of the working class, especially among its more privileged layers, there accumulates excessive caution, excessive conservatism, too much opportunism and over-much adaptivity. And the reaction to their own backwardness and degradation which is evinced by women, that reaction, I repeat, can play a colossal role in the revolutionary movement as a whole. There is added reason to believe that we have at present come up against a kink in history, a temporary stoppage. Three years after the imperialist war capitalism remains in existence. This is a fact. This stoppage shows how slowly the object lessons of events and facts make their impress upon human minds, upon the psychology of the masses. Consciousness lags tardily behind the objective events. We see this before our very eyes. Nevertheless the logic of history will cut its way through to the consciousness of the woman toiler both in the capitalist world and in the Asiatic East. And once again it will be the task of our Congress not only to reaffirm anew but also to formulate factually and precisely that the awakening of the toiling masses in the East is today an integral part of the world revolution, just as much so as the rising of the proletarians in the West. And the reason for it is this: If English capitalism, the most powerful capitalism in weakened Europe, has succeeded in maintaining itself, it is precisely because it rests not alone on the scarcely revolutionary English workers, but also upon the inertia of the toiling masses of the East.

In general and on the whole, despite the fact that events are unfolding much more slowly than we had expected and wished, we can say that we have grown stronger in the interval since the First World Congress. True enough, we have shed certain illusions, but by way of compensation we have taken note of our mistakes and have learned a few things; and in place of illusions we have acquired a clearer perception. We have grown up; our organizations have become stronger. Nor have our enemies wasted this interval. All this goes to show that the struggle will be fierce and hard. This struggle sums up the significance of the work of your conference. Henceforth woman will be to a far lesser degree than ever in the past a “sister of mercy,” in the political sense of the term, that is. She will become a far more direct participant on the main revolutionary battlefront. And that is why from the bottom of my heart, even if somewhat tardily, I hail your Women’s World Conference and cry out together with you: Long Live the World Proletariat! Long Live the Women Proletarians of the World!

July 15, 1921