Click on the headline to link to a Website featuring the paintings, nude and non-nude of the great artist, Titian. Close your eyes if you are offended by the nudes. Okay.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1985 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
Down with the Reactionary Anti-Porn Crusade!
Granddaughters of Carry Nation in Bed with Jerry Falwell
Reprinted from Young Spartacus No. 123, December 1984/January 1985
MADISON— Formerly a hotbed of campus protest, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's "radical" reputation has given way in large part to smug, "me generation" liberalism. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), scabs on the anti-Vietnam War movement, carry a lot of weight in city and county government. With prudery that suits Madison's Protestant environs, "alternative" lifestylism has been institutionalized. You will live a wholesome life. Some manifestations are just plain silly: Madison was declared a "nuclear-free zone" and sandwiches come with beansprouts whether you order them or not. Some are absolutely infuriating: liquor stores close, at 9:00 p.m. and you can't buy cigarettes anywhere on the huge UW campus.
The latest target for moral uplift of the community is pornography—Penthouse and Playboy have been pulled from the Student Union newsstand on the dubious grounds of "low circulation." DSAer Kathleen Nichols, a Dane County supervisor, is proposing legislation modeled on Andrea Dworkin's Minneapolis ordinance to make pornography a civil rights violation. Material in which "people" are "reduced to body parts," "presented in postures of sexual submission" or "presented as whores by nature" would be outlawed (Badger-Herald, 8 November 1984)! Under this law, you can't consent to buy, sell, photograph or pose for pornographic pictures. As the Badger-Herald commented, "Groups normally in solidarity, such as pseudo-feminists and homosexuals, are at odds. Groups normally in opposition, such as pseudo-feminists and the local fundamentalist ministers, support the ordinance." Talk about obscene!
We print below a slightly edited version of the Spartacus Youth League statement submitted to the Madison Isthmus and UW Daily Cardinal. It appeared in a shortened version in the Isthmus (16 November 1984) while the Cardinal has refused to publish it.
Contrary to prevailing liberal opinion, Madison is part of Reagan's USA, albeit with a twist. Witness the New Right's drive to "clean up America." It's going strong in Madison. There's legislation to ban dirty pictures. On 19 October 1984, demonstrators picketed at a State Street porno store; someone stenciled "Burn Me Down" on the wall—and they mean it. Rampaging fundamentalists? Nope. This particular anti-sex crusade is led by Madison's "alternative" to the Army of God— the "radical" feminists.
Finding Robin Morgan in bed with Jerry Falwell may surprise some who thought feminism had something to do with women's liberation. After all, the '60s feminists posed as right-on revolutionaries. They rejected "male-defined" sex roles, denounced "family values" as scams to keep women isolated, dependent, condemned to domestic servitude. They worried about racism and poor people. But the feminists never opposed the oppressive capitalist system itself: their "program" consists of escapist lifestylism, "consciousness raising," "women's" vegetarian co-ops. That's why the feminist "movement" didn't move. It remained confined to rarefied microcosms like Madison, lily-white and middle-class.
What's left of the "movement" no longer even worries about real human oppression. While the feminists are busy trying to stamp out fishnet stockings and high heels, genuine assaults on women's rights go unanswered. Legalized abortion is seriously threatened; abortion clinics get firebombed, their patients harassed, but you don't hear a peep from the feminists. Then there's the case of Patricia Ridge—a single, black, working mother. Last year her five-year-old son was shot pointblank in her bedroom in a Los Angeles-area housing project by a white cop. The cop got off, but a grand jury tried to charge her with everything from child neglect to Murder Two. The Marxist Spartacist League came to her defense. But the organized feminists did nothing. For them, "women's oppression" equals nude photos: they're blind to real class and race oppression facing working-class and black women.
This "Take Back the Night" crusade is a slice of middle America at its worst—about as progressive as forbidding sex education. It dovetails with the current incitement of every backward, sexist, racist, jingoistic prejudice of American society in preparation for war against the USSR. The Democrats and Republicans have been humming "Onward Christian Soldiers" since Cold War II began under born-again Jimmy Carter; with Reagan the crusade has reached new lows. They both want a "prepared" society with social relations straight out of "Leave It To Beaver." No "extramarital" sex, no porn, no abortion, no gays.
The feminists even share Cold War/Moral Majority terminology (e.g., "Porn is the new terrorism"). And there's a certain ideological congruence. The feminists basically buy the Moral Majority's "me Tarzan, you Jane" view of human sexuality: women are gentle nurturers, children are "innocent" and asexual, while men are sexual aggressors. That's what "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice" boils down to: men are barely controlled rapists—all it takes is a little leg to set 'em off. In that case, why stop with censoring Penthouse? According to Annie Laurie Gaylor, editor of the Feminist Connection, Rubens and Titian can go too: they painted women ravished by swans! (Perhaps when Gaylor leaves the Connection, she can get a job at the Elvehjem Museum chiseling the genitals off classical statues.)
Then there's the touchy question of First Amendment rights. With the exception of the rabid crackpot Andrea Dworkin, most feminists try to squeak past it by making a snooty differentiation between pornography and "erotica." It works like this. "Erotica" is printed on expensive paper with "tasteful" hand-drawn illustrations; "pornography" goes for $2.50, with tacky overexposed photos. As the saying goes, "perversion" is what you aren't into.
As Marxists, the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth League oppose all attempts at puritanical censorship, whether launched by outright reactionaries or feminist ayatollahs. You can't legislate sexuality. We defend the right of consenting individuals in any combination of age, race, sex, in any number, to engage in the sexual activity of their choice—or look at the photos of their choice—without state intervention.
Pornography is not violence: it's fantasy. Rape is a form of violent criminal assault. Among other things, we advocate the repeal of gun control laws: women should have the right to carry arms and use them in self-defense. To argue that "porn is rape" or, like Robin Morgan, that any sex not initiated by a woman is rape, is—aside from being pretty damned presumptuous— to trivialize and confuse the issue. Capitalist society— its forced poverty, rigid family structure, hypocritical straitjacket morality—breeds the poisonous frustrations that explode in violence. The liberation of women requires getting rid of the repressive constraints imposed on women by the nuclear family, thus creating the possibility of new relationships based on social equality—free from compulsion and stultifying "moral" restrictions. In short, women's liberation requires socialist revolution.
While the feminist anti-porn crusaders rely on candlelight vigils, their Reaganite allies have access to systematic state repression and vigilante terror. And Reagan has launched a full-scale attack on democratic rights. Political opposition becomes "terrorism." Cop/ media hysteria about child abuse at daycare centers carries the message that the only safe place for kids is locked up at home with a non-working mom. If your sexual preference doesn't suit Jerry Falwell, you could be locked up for life.
That's no idle threat. The campaign for "decency" has been viciously anti-gay from the start. Vanessa Williams lost her crown not least because those photos were of lesbian sex. Boston-area photographer George Jacobs got 20 years for the "crime" of having consensual sex with his 14-year-old roommate. Jacobs was tested to determine if he was a "sexually dangerous person" and could have been put away in a mental hospital permanently. The cops and press went wild over NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association), an organization for the defense of civil rights of "men and boys involved in consensual sexual and other relationships with each other." NAMBLA members were beaten, framed and sent to psychiatric institutions. And that's nothing compared with the Justice Department's plan to research "behavior modification, chemical treatments, physiological stud¬ies of those suspected of psychosexual dysfunction—as evidenced by...their divorces or homosexuality" (Village Voice, 7 August 1984)!
The reactionary nature of anti-porn legislation masquerading as protection of "civil rights" is spelled out in a new law pending in Suffolk County, New York. The bill is identical to Dworkin's Minneapolis anti-porn law, minus feminist verbiage. It's sponsored by groups like the National Federation for Decency (an actual organization!) explicitly to "wipe out sodomy" and, according-to one supporter, "pornography [that] could cause social decay leading to a possible communist takeover"!
It's not like the feminists can't smell this anti-gay stench; far from it. Kathleen Nichols, lesbian activist member of the "Democratic" Socialists of America, is the Dane County supervisor behind the Madison censorship. This bigot told OUT! magazine that if the ordinance closes adult bookstores where gay men meet, all the better to stop AIDS because "that kind of anonymous sexual congress has resulted in 5500 cases of AIDS" (OUT!, September 1984). For this anti-democratic liberal, male gay sex is a health hazard. This is vile anti-gay bigotry. Do lesbians active in the anti-porn movement believe that once they outlaw everyone else's sexual practices, their own will be protected? They're on mighty thin ice. Check out Khomeini's Iran: no porn there—and they stone homosexuals to death.
Pornography reflects, and only reflects, some human behavior. In this violent, irrational society, those reflections sometimes aren't pretty: but you can't change society by changing its images on a screen. "Positive images" won't materially advance the cause of women's equality any more than those movies with Sidney Poitier as the black neurosurgeon changed the harsh reality of racist oppression. Socialist revolution alone can create the economic basis to replace the nuclear family and liberate women. We don't pretend to know what human relations in socialist society will be like. But we assume that, liberated from the artificial constraints currently imposed on human expression, sexuality under socialism will be more free, more open, more tolerant, more rich and more diverse. May the day come soon.
Carla Norris
for the Spartacus Youth League
Friday, May 05, 2006
Thursday, May 04, 2006
MR. GORBACHEV (OOPS!), MR. BUSH TEAR DOWN THAT WALL-FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR ALL IMMIGRANTS
SOME COMMENTARY ABOUT THE IMMIGRATION STRUGGLE AND A FOOLPROOF PLAN FOR SOLVING THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Forgive the writer for taking a page from the late, unlamented Ronald Reagan’s playbook but with all this talk on Capitol Hill about walling in the Southwest I got carried away. The point, however, is that such a scheme as is currently proposed in the House version of the immigration bill is flat out crazy. And that, my friends, is a true political statement. No militant can support any of the immigration bills before Congress and if we had workers party representatives in Congress we would emphatically vote such measures down.
A few thoughts on the struggle for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
As I write these lines there have been a couple of weeks of massive demonstrations for immigrant rights spearheaded by the Hispanic populations of the West and Southwest followed by a massive May Day boycott and further demonstrations. Noteworthy, in Chicago at least, were contingents of Polish, Irish and other nationalities. All these developments are steps in the right direction and points out the stark reality of immigration in America.
Let’s face it, one way or another, in the near or remote past, almost all of us came here as immigrants from someplace else. I will confess that, as far as I know, my father’s forbears were run out of England as horse thieves in the early 1800’s. My mother’s forbears came over from Ireland on the ‘famine ships’ in the 1840’s. Thus, my family tree is a little shaky on what passed for green cards in those days. The point is that people generally do not leave their countries of origin without extremely good reasons to leave. Those who want to shut the door on immigrants here, unless their surnames are Chief Joseph, Red Cloud or Sitting Bull, should be very, very circumspect about their positions. In fact, let us check THEIR green card history. Sorry, even arrival on the Mayflower is not good enough.
It is particularly important that the last waves of immigration gain the same rights that those of us who have been here longer. This is especially true for working class people who have been victimized by the same divide and conquer strategy by the capitalists who run this government and the country. Let’s put the onus where it belongs, on the capitalist who do benefit from such policies. Immigrants do not threaten our livelihoods. Failure to struggle against the bosses does.
One aspect of the current bills is the ‘guest worker’ plan. Let us be clear- THIS IS INDENTURED SERVITUDE- and must be opposed by militants. It is noteworthy that the major labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Coalition as well as such an august figure as the National Chairman of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean have expressed at least half-hearted opposition to this portion of the bills. They believe they are being progressive and pro-worker by such a stand. And such a position would be truly progressive- in the 1700’s. For militants today that is not nearly enough.
It is rather ironic that one of the most impoverished sections of the working class-Hispanics- is leading the struggle. This is not accidental, for many of the foreign born militants leading today’s struggles come from countries where they have participated in class struggles against their own boss class (and under less than democratic conditions, including loss of life). It is up to the American labor movement, especially the organized trade union movement, to lead the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants in its own self-interest and self-defense. Even a cursory look at the history of social struggles in this country demonstrates that to win any demands sharp class struggle methods are needed. Yesterday’s labor struggles to win union recognition in the 1930’s were not gifts but fought for in the streets, by strikes, sit-downs and other militant methods. The lesson-If you do not fight you cannot win. This battle can be won. Let’s win it.
The writer has been asked what type of immigration bill he would support. Well, I have a simple one point plan. Give each immigrant a local map, and depending on individual economic circumstances, bus fare, train fare or money for a car rental and head him or her to the nearest federal courthouse to be swore in as a citizen. Enough said.
FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR ALL THOSE WHO MAKE IT HERE. NO REPRISALS AGAINST DEMONSTRATORS! DROP CHARGES AGAINST ANY ARRESTEES!
BRING MOTIONS TO SUPPORT THESE DEMANDS BEFORE YOUR UNION, STUDENT GOVERNMENT, POLITCAL ORGANIZATIONS OR RELIGIOUS GROUPS. URGE A NO VOTE ON ALL CURRENT IMMIGRATION LEGISLATION BEFORE CONGRESS.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Forgive the writer for taking a page from the late, unlamented Ronald Reagan’s playbook but with all this talk on Capitol Hill about walling in the Southwest I got carried away. The point, however, is that such a scheme as is currently proposed in the House version of the immigration bill is flat out crazy. And that, my friends, is a true political statement. No militant can support any of the immigration bills before Congress and if we had workers party representatives in Congress we would emphatically vote such measures down.
A few thoughts on the struggle for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
As I write these lines there have been a couple of weeks of massive demonstrations for immigrant rights spearheaded by the Hispanic populations of the West and Southwest followed by a massive May Day boycott and further demonstrations. Noteworthy, in Chicago at least, were contingents of Polish, Irish and other nationalities. All these developments are steps in the right direction and points out the stark reality of immigration in America.
Let’s face it, one way or another, in the near or remote past, almost all of us came here as immigrants from someplace else. I will confess that, as far as I know, my father’s forbears were run out of England as horse thieves in the early 1800’s. My mother’s forbears came over from Ireland on the ‘famine ships’ in the 1840’s. Thus, my family tree is a little shaky on what passed for green cards in those days. The point is that people generally do not leave their countries of origin without extremely good reasons to leave. Those who want to shut the door on immigrants here, unless their surnames are Chief Joseph, Red Cloud or Sitting Bull, should be very, very circumspect about their positions. In fact, let us check THEIR green card history. Sorry, even arrival on the Mayflower is not good enough.
It is particularly important that the last waves of immigration gain the same rights that those of us who have been here longer. This is especially true for working class people who have been victimized by the same divide and conquer strategy by the capitalists who run this government and the country. Let’s put the onus where it belongs, on the capitalist who do benefit from such policies. Immigrants do not threaten our livelihoods. Failure to struggle against the bosses does.
One aspect of the current bills is the ‘guest worker’ plan. Let us be clear- THIS IS INDENTURED SERVITUDE- and must be opposed by militants. It is noteworthy that the major labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Coalition as well as such an august figure as the National Chairman of the Democratic Party, Howard Dean have expressed at least half-hearted opposition to this portion of the bills. They believe they are being progressive and pro-worker by such a stand. And such a position would be truly progressive- in the 1700’s. For militants today that is not nearly enough.
It is rather ironic that one of the most impoverished sections of the working class-Hispanics- is leading the struggle. This is not accidental, for many of the foreign born militants leading today’s struggles come from countries where they have participated in class struggles against their own boss class (and under less than democratic conditions, including loss of life). It is up to the American labor movement, especially the organized trade union movement, to lead the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants in its own self-interest and self-defense. Even a cursory look at the history of social struggles in this country demonstrates that to win any demands sharp class struggle methods are needed. Yesterday’s labor struggles to win union recognition in the 1930’s were not gifts but fought for in the streets, by strikes, sit-downs and other militant methods. The lesson-If you do not fight you cannot win. This battle can be won. Let’s win it.
The writer has been asked what type of immigration bill he would support. Well, I have a simple one point plan. Give each immigrant a local map, and depending on individual economic circumstances, bus fare, train fare or money for a car rental and head him or her to the nearest federal courthouse to be swore in as a citizen. Enough said.
FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR ALL THOSE WHO MAKE IT HERE. NO REPRISALS AGAINST DEMONSTRATORS! DROP CHARGES AGAINST ANY ARRESTEES!
BRING MOTIONS TO SUPPORT THESE DEMANDS BEFORE YOUR UNION, STUDENT GOVERNMENT, POLITCAL ORGANIZATIONS OR RELIGIOUS GROUPS. URGE A NO VOTE ON ALL CURRENT IMMIGRATION LEGISLATION BEFORE CONGRESS.
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
OF REVOLUTIONARIES, DILETTANTES AND SUCH
BOOK REVIEW
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1932-34- THE WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF JAMES P. CANNON, Monad Press, New York, 1985.
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes of the writings of James P. Cannon that were published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Cannon died in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.
In their introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, and the beginning of a long political collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the late 1920’s when he was expelled as leader of the American Communist Party to the early 1930’s and the start of the great labor upsurge which would bring wide spread unionization to the working class. Cannon won his spurs in this struggle to orient this organization toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime, which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
As an expelled faction of the American Communist Party, which continued to stand on the program of the defense of the Russian Revolution, the Cannon faction needed an orientation. That they considered themselves as an expelled but loyal faction of the Communist Party was the correct orientation for a small propaganda group. The party was where the vast bulk of the advanced political workers were. Immediately going to the “masses”, as has occurred with other expelled groupings then and now, would have proved disastrous. Cannon’s group needed to cohere a programmatic basis and recruit a cadre to win over workers and intellectuals from the party. Its Platform of the Communist Opposition, a generally good programmatic statement, was its key analysis and tool to win cadre.
That said, there are three related points of interest in this book for today’ militants; the necessity of a small propaganda group to struggle in order to cohere an authoritative leadership in the face of severe internal disputes and other difficulties; the necessity for it to break out of its isolation and intersect mass struggles when they develop; and, the necessity of following a policy of regroupment, splits and fusions to create at least a modest vanguard formation, when possible. The history of the American left political landscape is filled with long forgotten groupings that could not surmount these problems. Within limits Cannon dragged the Communist League of America into a modest vanguard formation.
In the post-October Revolution period every serious revolutionary has had to confront the question of the organizational form of the vanguard workers party. The ideas put forth by Marxism have since the time of Marx and Engel held a certain fascination for young alienated intellectuals and others interested in changing the world. And this accrues to the benefit of the working class movement, as the movement needs intellectuals, sometimes desperately, to help formulate theoretical problems and write propaganda.
The problem, particularly acute under the conditions of the small propaganda group under discussion, is to find the right mix of revolutionary intellectuals and advanced workers in order to push the work forward. That means, in Trotsky’s famous phrase, that the revolutionary intellectuals have to, as he did, harness themselves to the work. Failing that intrigues, squabbles and merely literary propaganda prevail. The beginning section of this volume is filled with such doings. This is the axis that the Cannon-Shachtman struggle ran on here during this period. And that tension would later cause problems in the Socialist Workers Party when all hell broke loose over the question of defense of the Soviet Union became operative at the beginning of World War II. Whether this tension between intellectuals and workers can be solved short of the transition to socialism is an open question. In the final analysis the problem was not resolved by this group. Read on.
As an addition to the historical records of this period this book is a very good companion to Cannon’s own THE LEFT OPPOSITION IN THE U.S., 1928-31, Monad Press, New York, 1981 and DOG DAYS: JAMES P. CANNON vs. MAX SHACHTMAN IN THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1931-1933, PROMETHEUS RESEARCH LIBRARY, Spartacist Publishing Co., New York, 2002.
SOME OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE AT LOCAL LIBRARIES OR BOOKSTORES. CHECK AMAZON.COM FOR AVAILABILITY THERE, BOTH NEW AND USED. YOU CAN ALSO GOOGLE THE JAMES P. CANNON INTERNET ARCHIVES.
THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1932-34- THE WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF JAMES P. CANNON, Monad Press, New York, 1985.
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes of the writings of James P. Cannon that were published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Cannon died in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.
In their introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, and the beginning of a long political collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the late 1920’s when he was expelled as leader of the American Communist Party to the early 1930’s and the start of the great labor upsurge which would bring wide spread unionization to the working class. Cannon won his spurs in this struggle to orient this organization toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime, which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
As an expelled faction of the American Communist Party, which continued to stand on the program of the defense of the Russian Revolution, the Cannon faction needed an orientation. That they considered themselves as an expelled but loyal faction of the Communist Party was the correct orientation for a small propaganda group. The party was where the vast bulk of the advanced political workers were. Immediately going to the “masses”, as has occurred with other expelled groupings then and now, would have proved disastrous. Cannon’s group needed to cohere a programmatic basis and recruit a cadre to win over workers and intellectuals from the party. Its Platform of the Communist Opposition, a generally good programmatic statement, was its key analysis and tool to win cadre.
That said, there are three related points of interest in this book for today’ militants; the necessity of a small propaganda group to struggle in order to cohere an authoritative leadership in the face of severe internal disputes and other difficulties; the necessity for it to break out of its isolation and intersect mass struggles when they develop; and, the necessity of following a policy of regroupment, splits and fusions to create at least a modest vanguard formation, when possible. The history of the American left political landscape is filled with long forgotten groupings that could not surmount these problems. Within limits Cannon dragged the Communist League of America into a modest vanguard formation.
In the post-October Revolution period every serious revolutionary has had to confront the question of the organizational form of the vanguard workers party. The ideas put forth by Marxism have since the time of Marx and Engel held a certain fascination for young alienated intellectuals and others interested in changing the world. And this accrues to the benefit of the working class movement, as the movement needs intellectuals, sometimes desperately, to help formulate theoretical problems and write propaganda.
The problem, particularly acute under the conditions of the small propaganda group under discussion, is to find the right mix of revolutionary intellectuals and advanced workers in order to push the work forward. That means, in Trotsky’s famous phrase, that the revolutionary intellectuals have to, as he did, harness themselves to the work. Failing that intrigues, squabbles and merely literary propaganda prevail. The beginning section of this volume is filled with such doings. This is the axis that the Cannon-Shachtman struggle ran on here during this period. And that tension would later cause problems in the Socialist Workers Party when all hell broke loose over the question of defense of the Soviet Union became operative at the beginning of World War II. Whether this tension between intellectuals and workers can be solved short of the transition to socialism is an open question. In the final analysis the problem was not resolved by this group. Read on.
As an addition to the historical records of this period this book is a very good companion to Cannon’s own THE LEFT OPPOSITION IN THE U.S., 1928-31, Monad Press, New York, 1981 and DOG DAYS: JAMES P. CANNON vs. MAX SHACHTMAN IN THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1931-1933, PROMETHEUS RESEARCH LIBRARY, Spartacist Publishing Co., New York, 2002.
SOME OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE AT LOCAL LIBRARIES OR BOOKSTORES. CHECK AMAZON.COM FOR AVAILABILITY THERE, BOTH NEW AND USED. YOU CAN ALSO GOOGLE THE JAMES P. CANNON INTERNET ARCHIVES.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
A HANDBOOK ON WHAT IS TO BE DONE- STARTING OVER
BOOK REVIEW
THE LEFT OPPOSITION IN THE U.S. 1928-31; JAMES P. CANNON, WRITINGS AND SPEECHES, 1928-31, MONAD PRESS, NEW YORK, 1981
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes of the writings of James P. Cannon that were published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Cannon died in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.
In their introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, and the beginning of a long political collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the late 1920’s when he was expelled as leader of the American Communist Party to the early 1930’s and the start of the great labor upsurge which would bring wide spread unionization to the working class. Cannon won his spurs in this struggle to orient those organizations toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure-in his prime, which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
As an expelled faction of the American Communist Party, which continued to stand on the program of the defense of the Russian Revolution, the Cannon group needed an orientation. That they considered themselves as an expelled but loyal faction of the Communist Party was the correct orientation for a small propaganda group. The party was where the vast bulk of the advanced political workers were. Immediately going to the “masses”, as has occurred with other expelled groupings then and now, would have proved disastrous. Cannon’s group needed to cohere a programmatic basis and recruit a cadre to win over workers and intellectuals from the party. Its Platform of the Communist Opposition, a generally good programmatic statement, was its key analysis and tool to win cadre. There are two points in that document that should be of interest to today’s militants. Those are the slogans for a workers party and for the right of national self-determination for blacks (at that time called Negroes).
In a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary period a revolutionary workers organization would recruit militants directly to the party. Other events like the labor upheavals in the United States in the 1930’s fall in the same category. Thus, using some algebraic formula for drawing workers to a broader revolutionary formation is not necessary. At other times, and the late 1920’s and early 1930’s was such a period in the United States, the call for a workers party, presumably based on less than the full program, by a propaganda group would be appropriate. In short, propaganda and agitation in favor of a generic workers party is a tactic. The call for such a formation today by militants in the United States is appropriate. In any case, no militant makes such a call for a workers party based, for example, on the model of the British Labor Party, then or now.
The left-wing movement in America, including the Communist Party and its offshoots has always had problems with what has been called the Black Question. The Communist Opposition’s position on this question reflects that misconception, taken over from the party. This position has always been associated with American Communist Party member Harry Haywood (see his book Black Bolshevik reviewed elsewhere in this space at February 2008 archives). Marxists have always considers support to the right of national self-determination to be a wedge against nationalists and to attempt to take the national question off the agenda and put a working class resolution on the agenda. In any case, that programmatic point has always been predicated on there being a possibility for a defined group to form a nation. Absent that, other methods of struggle are necessary to deal with the special oppression, in this case, of black people.
Part of the problem with the American Communist position was that the conditions which would have created the possibility of a black state were being destroyed with the mechanization of agriculture, the migration of blacks to the Northern industrial centers and the overwhelming need to fight for black people’s rights to survive under the conditions of the Great Depression. If one really thinks about it the only realistic time that this slogan could have been apropriately raised or supported would have been shortly after the American Civil War when the black population was more compacted geographically and there might have been some political will by Radical Republicans to back such a scheme. This misconception on the viability (or desirability) of a black nation would later came back to haunt Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party when the civil rights struggles of the 1950’s and 1960’s presented opportunities for intervention in the black struggle. That organization stood aside at the time rather than recruit blacks to communism.
The Cannon faction was not the only group expelled from the American Communist Party during the period under review. One cannot understand this period inside the Communist movement if one does not understand which ways the winds were blowing from Moscow. A furious struggle for power in the Russian Communist Party, reflected also in the Communist International, was under way during this period. First, the Stalin faction defeated the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, and then shortly thereafter the Bukharin-led Right Opposition was defeated. In America, this was reflected in the expulsion of the Lovestone group, previously the leadership of the Party. The political shakeout from these events was a certain pressure to unite the two expelled factions. Trotsky, and through his influence Cannon argued strenuously that such a combination was unprincipled and unworkable.
Most parliamentary parties, and here this reviewer includes reformist workers parties, do not confront the question such of these abovementioned left-right blocs for the simple reason they are not, and do not want to, carry out a revolution. Therefore, such parties, will freely bloc with any other organization under any advantageous conditions for any reason. Not so a revolutionary party. While it may unite, for the moment, with a wide range of organizations for general democratic demands it must have a fairly homogeneous program if it is to lead a revolution. The program of the Right Opposition, in effect, was a transmission belt for reformism. In short, if you unite you have two parties, at least in embryo, in one organization. The experences of the Russian Revolution and later the Communist International in its better days should have put that right-left unification question to rest for good. However, it continues today and not just as a matter of historical speculation.
For Trotsky, Cannon and the International Left Opposition this necessary separation was shown most dramatically in Spain when the formerly Trotskyist Left Opposition led by Andreas Nin fused with the Right Opposition led by his friend Maurin in 1935. The result, the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), while being the most honest revolutionary party in the Spanish Civil War floundered over revolutionary strategy due to its confused orientation on the popular front, political rather military support to the bourgeois government and a whole range of questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics. The POUM experience is the textbook example of what not to do in a revolutionary period. Unfortunately, for his confusion on this issue Nin lost his life at the hands of the Stalinists, the POUM leadership was arrested after the May Days in Barcelona and the Spanish Revolution was derailed.
In Communist history, the period under review is called the ‘Third Period’, in theory allegedly the period of the final crisis of capitalism. The conclusions drawn by the Stalinists from this theory was that revolution was on the immediate agenda everywhere and that it was not necessary, and in fact, was counterrevolutionary to make alliances with other forces. This writer has read a fair amount of material about this ‘Third Period’, mainly at the level of high policy in the Communist International, especially in regard to Germany in the pre-Hitler period where it was a disaster. This volume gives a very nice appreciation by Cannon in a number of articles of how that policy worked at the base, in the trade unions and among the unemployed. It is painful to see how the Stalinists withdrew from the organized trade union movement and set up their own “red” unions composed mainly of Communist sympathizers. That the Stalinist did not suffer more damage and isolation after this flawed policy was changed later during the great labor battles of the 1930’s testifies more to the desperate nature of those struggles than any wisdom learned by the Stalinists. Read this book for more on how to build a workers organization in tough times.
As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to Cannon’s own THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1932-34 and DOG DAYS: JAMES P. CANNON vs. MAX SHACHTMAN IN THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1931-1933, PROMETHEUS RESEARCH LIBRARY, Spartacist Publishing Co., New York, 2002.
SOME OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE AT LOCAL LIBRARIES OR BOOKSTORES. CHECK AMAZON.COM FOR AVAILABILITY THERE, BOTH NEW AND USED. YOU CAN ALSO GOOGLE THE JAMES P. CANNON INTERNET ARCHIVES.
THE LEFT OPPOSITION IN THE U.S. 1928-31; JAMES P. CANNON, WRITINGS AND SPEECHES, 1928-31, MONAD PRESS, NEW YORK, 1981
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past lessons of our history concerning the socialist response to various social and labor questions this book is for you. This book is part of a continuing series of volumes of the writings of James P. Cannon that were published by the organization he founded, the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Cannon died in 1974. Look in this space for other related reviews of this series of documents on and by an important American Communist.
In their introduction the editors motivate the purpose for the publication of the book by stating the Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party so their perspective is obvious. What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, and the beginning of a long political collaboration working with Trotsky. The period under discussion- from the late 1920’s when he was expelled as leader of the American Communist Party to the early 1930’s and the start of the great labor upsurge which would bring wide spread unionization to the working class. Cannon won his spurs in this struggle to orient those organizations toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure-in his prime, which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
As an expelled faction of the American Communist Party, which continued to stand on the program of the defense of the Russian Revolution, the Cannon group needed an orientation. That they considered themselves as an expelled but loyal faction of the Communist Party was the correct orientation for a small propaganda group. The party was where the vast bulk of the advanced political workers were. Immediately going to the “masses”, as has occurred with other expelled groupings then and now, would have proved disastrous. Cannon’s group needed to cohere a programmatic basis and recruit a cadre to win over workers and intellectuals from the party. Its Platform of the Communist Opposition, a generally good programmatic statement, was its key analysis and tool to win cadre. There are two points in that document that should be of interest to today’s militants. Those are the slogans for a workers party and for the right of national self-determination for blacks (at that time called Negroes).
In a pre-revolutionary or revolutionary period a revolutionary workers organization would recruit militants directly to the party. Other events like the labor upheavals in the United States in the 1930’s fall in the same category. Thus, using some algebraic formula for drawing workers to a broader revolutionary formation is not necessary. At other times, and the late 1920’s and early 1930’s was such a period in the United States, the call for a workers party, presumably based on less than the full program, by a propaganda group would be appropriate. In short, propaganda and agitation in favor of a generic workers party is a tactic. The call for such a formation today by militants in the United States is appropriate. In any case, no militant makes such a call for a workers party based, for example, on the model of the British Labor Party, then or now.
The left-wing movement in America, including the Communist Party and its offshoots has always had problems with what has been called the Black Question. The Communist Opposition’s position on this question reflects that misconception, taken over from the party. This position has always been associated with American Communist Party member Harry Haywood (see his book Black Bolshevik reviewed elsewhere in this space at February 2008 archives). Marxists have always considers support to the right of national self-determination to be a wedge against nationalists and to attempt to take the national question off the agenda and put a working class resolution on the agenda. In any case, that programmatic point has always been predicated on there being a possibility for a defined group to form a nation. Absent that, other methods of struggle are necessary to deal with the special oppression, in this case, of black people.
Part of the problem with the American Communist position was that the conditions which would have created the possibility of a black state were being destroyed with the mechanization of agriculture, the migration of blacks to the Northern industrial centers and the overwhelming need to fight for black people’s rights to survive under the conditions of the Great Depression. If one really thinks about it the only realistic time that this slogan could have been apropriately raised or supported would have been shortly after the American Civil War when the black population was more compacted geographically and there might have been some political will by Radical Republicans to back such a scheme. This misconception on the viability (or desirability) of a black nation would later came back to haunt Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party when the civil rights struggles of the 1950’s and 1960’s presented opportunities for intervention in the black struggle. That organization stood aside at the time rather than recruit blacks to communism.
The Cannon faction was not the only group expelled from the American Communist Party during the period under review. One cannot understand this period inside the Communist movement if one does not understand which ways the winds were blowing from Moscow. A furious struggle for power in the Russian Communist Party, reflected also in the Communist International, was under way during this period. First, the Stalin faction defeated the Trotsky-led Left Opposition, and then shortly thereafter the Bukharin-led Right Opposition was defeated. In America, this was reflected in the expulsion of the Lovestone group, previously the leadership of the Party. The political shakeout from these events was a certain pressure to unite the two expelled factions. Trotsky, and through his influence Cannon argued strenuously that such a combination was unprincipled and unworkable.
Most parliamentary parties, and here this reviewer includes reformist workers parties, do not confront the question such of these abovementioned left-right blocs for the simple reason they are not, and do not want to, carry out a revolution. Therefore, such parties, will freely bloc with any other organization under any advantageous conditions for any reason. Not so a revolutionary party. While it may unite, for the moment, with a wide range of organizations for general democratic demands it must have a fairly homogeneous program if it is to lead a revolution. The program of the Right Opposition, in effect, was a transmission belt for reformism. In short, if you unite you have two parties, at least in embryo, in one organization. The experences of the Russian Revolution and later the Communist International in its better days should have put that right-left unification question to rest for good. However, it continues today and not just as a matter of historical speculation.
For Trotsky, Cannon and the International Left Opposition this necessary separation was shown most dramatically in Spain when the formerly Trotskyist Left Opposition led by Andreas Nin fused with the Right Opposition led by his friend Maurin in 1935. The result, the Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), while being the most honest revolutionary party in the Spanish Civil War floundered over revolutionary strategy due to its confused orientation on the popular front, political rather military support to the bourgeois government and a whole range of questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics. The POUM experience is the textbook example of what not to do in a revolutionary period. Unfortunately, for his confusion on this issue Nin lost his life at the hands of the Stalinists, the POUM leadership was arrested after the May Days in Barcelona and the Spanish Revolution was derailed.
In Communist history, the period under review is called the ‘Third Period’, in theory allegedly the period of the final crisis of capitalism. The conclusions drawn by the Stalinists from this theory was that revolution was on the immediate agenda everywhere and that it was not necessary, and in fact, was counterrevolutionary to make alliances with other forces. This writer has read a fair amount of material about this ‘Third Period’, mainly at the level of high policy in the Communist International, especially in regard to Germany in the pre-Hitler period where it was a disaster. This volume gives a very nice appreciation by Cannon in a number of articles of how that policy worked at the base, in the trade unions and among the unemployed. It is painful to see how the Stalinists withdrew from the organized trade union movement and set up their own “red” unions composed mainly of Communist sympathizers. That the Stalinist did not suffer more damage and isolation after this flawed policy was changed later during the great labor battles of the 1930’s testifies more to the desperate nature of those struggles than any wisdom learned by the Stalinists. Read this book for more on how to build a workers organization in tough times.
As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to Cannon’s own THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1932-34 and DOG DAYS: JAMES P. CANNON vs. MAX SHACHTMAN IN THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1931-1933, PROMETHEUS RESEARCH LIBRARY, Spartacist Publishing Co., New York, 2002.
SOME OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE AT LOCAL LIBRARIES OR BOOKSTORES. CHECK AMAZON.COM FOR AVAILABILITY THERE, BOTH NEW AND USED. YOU CAN ALSO GOOGLE THE JAMES P. CANNON INTERNET ARCHIVES.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
THE WILD BOYS ARE LOOSE AGAIN-U.S.HANDS OFF IRAN!!
COMMENTARY
YOU DON’T NEED SEYMOUR HERSH TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
In the wake of Seymour Hersh’s revelations in the New Yorker concerning the Bush administration’s potential military plans, including a possible nuclear option, toward Iran there has been a hue and cry in political circles against some of the rasher aspects of such action. From the traditional opponents of such an action plan -the Left? No! From liberal politicians? No! If anything those types have been more belligerent and to the right on the issue of Iran than the Bush administration. The cry has come from conservative think tank magazines and hawkish political commentators like New York Times writer Thomas Friedman. After the disastrous consequences of their support for the adventure in Iraq as least a few of the more rational conservatives have learned something. Whether they continue to hold out once the onslaught of patriotism and so-called national interest comes into play remains to be seen. However, their self-made dilemma is not what interests me.
As I write these lines the paint has not even dried on my poster in opposition to the continuing Iraq occupation for an anti-war rally. Now that the newest plans of the Wild Boys in the basements of the White House, Pentagon and State Department have been “leaked” I have to add another slogan to that banner- Hands Off Iran! Overreacting one might say. No!! If we have learned anything in the last few years from the Bush Administration it is that the distance from “war games” and “zero sum game theory” to front page newspaper and television screen casualty counts is a very, very short elevator ride away.
That, however, begs the question of whether the current Islamic leadership in Iran is a threat. Damn right it is a threat. This writer opposed the Shah of Iran when he was an agent of American imperialist interests in the Persian Gulf. This writer also opposed the rise and takeover by the Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 when many Western leftists were, overtly or covertly, supporting these elements as ‘anti-imperialist’ agents of change. Unfortunately, many Iranian militants also supported these same fundamentalists. That did not stop the mullahs from rounding up and executing or imprisoning every leftist or militant worker they could get their hands on. The fate of the Western leftist supporters of the ‘anti-imperialist’ mullahs was almost as tragic. They, at great personal sacrifice, mainly went on to careers in the academy, media or parliament.
So let us have no illusions about the women- hating, anti-Enlightenment, anti- post 8th century hating regime in Teheran (Except apparently, nuclear technology. Did anyone else find it surreal when a recent photograph showed several thousand heavily-veiled Iranian women demonstrating in defense of a nuclear facility?). However, do we really want to outsource “regime change” there to the Bush Administration (or any administration in Washington)? No!!! Just as working people cannot outsource “regime change” in Washington to the liberals here this job of ousting the mullahs belongs to the Iranian workers, students, poor slum dwellers and peasants.
Let’s be clear here though. If the United States, or an agent of the United States, moves militarily against Iran all militants, here and worldwide, are duty bound to defend Iran against such imperialist aggression. Even with the current mullah leadership? Yes. We will hold our noses and do our duty. Their ouster is a separate political battle. We will settle accounts with them in due course.
The anarchists and others have it all wrong when they confine their slogan to Class Against Class in a conflict between capitalist states. Yes, in the final analysis it will come down to that. The problem is today we are dealing with the most powerful military power, relatively and absolutely, the world has ever known against a smaller, almost militarily defenseless country. A victory for American imperialism is not in the interest of the international working class and its allies. Thus, we have a side under those circumstances. And we certainly do not take some ‘third camp’ pacifist position of a plague on both your houses. IMMEDIATE UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ! U.S.HANDS OFF IRAN!! BETTER YET- HANDS OFF THE WORLD!!!
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY.
YOU DON’T NEED SEYMOUR HERSH TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS.
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
In the wake of Seymour Hersh’s revelations in the New Yorker concerning the Bush administration’s potential military plans, including a possible nuclear option, toward Iran there has been a hue and cry in political circles against some of the rasher aspects of such action. From the traditional opponents of such an action plan -the Left? No! From liberal politicians? No! If anything those types have been more belligerent and to the right on the issue of Iran than the Bush administration. The cry has come from conservative think tank magazines and hawkish political commentators like New York Times writer Thomas Friedman. After the disastrous consequences of their support for the adventure in Iraq as least a few of the more rational conservatives have learned something. Whether they continue to hold out once the onslaught of patriotism and so-called national interest comes into play remains to be seen. However, their self-made dilemma is not what interests me.
As I write these lines the paint has not even dried on my poster in opposition to the continuing Iraq occupation for an anti-war rally. Now that the newest plans of the Wild Boys in the basements of the White House, Pentagon and State Department have been “leaked” I have to add another slogan to that banner- Hands Off Iran! Overreacting one might say. No!! If we have learned anything in the last few years from the Bush Administration it is that the distance from “war games” and “zero sum game theory” to front page newspaper and television screen casualty counts is a very, very short elevator ride away.
That, however, begs the question of whether the current Islamic leadership in Iran is a threat. Damn right it is a threat. This writer opposed the Shah of Iran when he was an agent of American imperialist interests in the Persian Gulf. This writer also opposed the rise and takeover by the Islamic fundamentalists in 1979 when many Western leftists were, overtly or covertly, supporting these elements as ‘anti-imperialist’ agents of change. Unfortunately, many Iranian militants also supported these same fundamentalists. That did not stop the mullahs from rounding up and executing or imprisoning every leftist or militant worker they could get their hands on. The fate of the Western leftist supporters of the ‘anti-imperialist’ mullahs was almost as tragic. They, at great personal sacrifice, mainly went on to careers in the academy, media or parliament.
So let us have no illusions about the women- hating, anti-Enlightenment, anti- post 8th century hating regime in Teheran (Except apparently, nuclear technology. Did anyone else find it surreal when a recent photograph showed several thousand heavily-veiled Iranian women demonstrating in defense of a nuclear facility?). However, do we really want to outsource “regime change” there to the Bush Administration (or any administration in Washington)? No!!! Just as working people cannot outsource “regime change” in Washington to the liberals here this job of ousting the mullahs belongs to the Iranian workers, students, poor slum dwellers and peasants.
Let’s be clear here though. If the United States, or an agent of the United States, moves militarily against Iran all militants, here and worldwide, are duty bound to defend Iran against such imperialist aggression. Even with the current mullah leadership? Yes. We will hold our noses and do our duty. Their ouster is a separate political battle. We will settle accounts with them in due course.
The anarchists and others have it all wrong when they confine their slogan to Class Against Class in a conflict between capitalist states. Yes, in the final analysis it will come down to that. The problem is today we are dealing with the most powerful military power, relatively and absolutely, the world has ever known against a smaller, almost militarily defenseless country. A victory for American imperialism is not in the interest of the international working class and its allies. Thus, we have a side under those circumstances. And we certainly do not take some ‘third camp’ pacifist position of a plague on both your houses. IMMEDIATE UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ! U.S.HANDS OFF IRAN!! BETTER YET- HANDS OFF THE WORLD!!!
THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY.
Friday, April 28, 2006
*FREE LEONARD PELTIER!!-He Must Not Die In Prison!
Click on the title to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee Web site.
THIS ARTICLE FROM PARTISAN DEFENSE NOTES WAS PASSED ON TO THE WRITER BY THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTTEE, P.O. BOX 99 CANAL STREET STATION, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10013.
THERE IS NOTHING THAT I NEED TO ADD EXCEPT THAT HISTORIANS OVER THE LAST GENERATION HAVE STEPPED OVER ALL OVER THEMSELVES TO CORRECT THE PREVIOUS FALSE ROLE ASSIGNED TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLES. THAT IS TO THE GOOD. BUT THE WRITER HAS ONE QUESTION –WHY IS THIS NATIVE AMERICAN LEADER STILL IN JAIL? ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
Thirty years ago, on 6 February 1976, American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier was seized by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in western Canada. Peltier had fled there after a massive U.S. government attack the previous June—by FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agents, SWAT cops and white vigilantes—on South Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation during which two FBI agents were killed. After Canadian authorities held Peltier for ten months in solitary confinement in Oakalla Prison, he was extradited to the U.S. on the basis of fabricated FBI testimony. In 1977, Peltier, a member of the Anishinabe and Lakota Nations, was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences on frame-up murder charges stemming from the shooting of the two FBI agents.
While Peltier had sought refuge in Canada, two others charged in the agents' killings were acquitted in a federal court in Iowa. Jurors stated that they did not believe the government witnesses and that it seemed "pretty much a clear-cut case of self-defense" against the FBI invasion. In Peltier's trial the prosecution concealed ballistics tests showing that his gun could not have been used in the shooting, while the trial judge ruled out any chance of another acquittal on self-defense grounds by barring any evidence of government terror against the Pine Ridge activists. At a 1985 appeal hearing, a government attorney admitted, "We can't prove who shot those agents."
AIM had been in the Feds' gun sights because of its efforts to fight the enforced poverty of Native Americans and the continued theft of their lands by the government and energy companies, which were intent on grabbing rich uranium deposits under Sioux land in South Dakota. The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee stated in 2004: "Virtually every known AIM leader in the United States was incarcerated in either state or federal prisons since (or even before) the organization's formal emergence in 1968, some repeatedly." Between 1973 and 1976, thugs of the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOON), armed and trained by the hated BIA and FBI, carried out more than 300 attacks in and around Pine Ridge, killing at least 69 people.
As we wrote during the fight against Peltier's threatened deportation, "The U.S. case against Peltier is political persecution, part of a broader attempt by the FBI to smash AIM through piling up criminal charges against its leaders, just as was done against the Black Panthers" (PTFNo. 112, 4 June 1976). AIM and Peltier were targeted by the FBI's deadly Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of disruption, frame-up and murder of the left, black militants and others. Under COINTELPRO, 38 Black Panthers were killed by the FBI and local cops. Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) spent 27 years in prison for a crime the FBI knew he could not have committed before finally winning release in 1997. Mumia Abu-Jamal—also an innocent man— remains on Pennsylvania's death row today.
In November 2003, a federal appeals court ruled, "Much of the government's behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed." But the court still refused to open the prison doors for Peltier. Last year, U.S. District Court judge William Skretny turned down Peltier's request for documents suppressed by the government, even while acknowledging that he could have been acquitted had the government not improperly withheld them. Peltier attorney Michael Kuzma stated that the evidence withheld by the government amounts to a staggering 142,579 pages!
On February 24, Skretny again ruled that the FBI can keep part of its records secret in the name of "national security." Peltier noted in a message to the March 18 protests against the Iraq occupation, "Our government uses the words 'national security' and fighting the war on transnational terrorism as a smoke screen to cover up further crimes and misconduct by the FBI." Also this February, defense attorney Barry Bachrach argued in St. Louis federal court that the federal government had no jurisdiction in Peltier's case, since the shootings occurred on a reservation.
Millions of people have signed petitions for Peltier over the years, including by 1986 some 17 million people in the former Soviet Union. His frame-up, like that of Geronimo ji Jaga and Mumia Abu-Jamal, demonstrates that there is no justice in the capitalist courts of America. While supporting all possible legal proceedings on behalf of the class-war prisoners, we place no faith whatever in the "justice" of the courts and rely solely on the power of mass protest centered on the integrated labor movement.
After Peltier's third appeal for a new trial was denied in 1993, thousands of prominent liberals, celebrities and others—ranging from Willie Nelson to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa—called for a presidential pardon. In a recent column titled "Free Leonard Peltier!" (5 February), Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote: "Many Peltier supporters put their trust in a politician named Bill Clinton, who told them that when he got elected he 'wouldn't forget' about the popular Native American leader. Their trust (like that of so many others) was betrayed once Clinton gained his office, and the FBI protested. In the waning days of his presidency, he issued pardons to folks like Marc Rich, and other wealthy campaign contributors. Leonard Peltier was left in his chains!"
Peltier is one of 16 class-war prisoners to whom the Partisan Defense Committee sends monthly stipends. For more information on his case, or to contribute to Peltier's legal defense, write to: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, 2626 North Mesa #132, El Paso, TX 79902. Free Leonard Peltier and all class-war prisoners!
THIS ARTICLE FROM PARTISAN DEFENSE NOTES WAS PASSED ON TO THE WRITER BY THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTTEE, P.O. BOX 99 CANAL STREET STATION, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10013.
THERE IS NOTHING THAT I NEED TO ADD EXCEPT THAT HISTORIANS OVER THE LAST GENERATION HAVE STEPPED OVER ALL OVER THEMSELVES TO CORRECT THE PREVIOUS FALSE ROLE ASSIGNED TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLES. THAT IS TO THE GOOD. BUT THE WRITER HAS ONE QUESTION –WHY IS THIS NATIVE AMERICAN LEADER STILL IN JAIL? ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
Thirty years ago, on 6 February 1976, American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Leonard Peltier was seized by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in western Canada. Peltier had fled there after a massive U.S. government attack the previous June—by FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) agents, SWAT cops and white vigilantes—on South Dakota's Pine Ridge reservation during which two FBI agents were killed. After Canadian authorities held Peltier for ten months in solitary confinement in Oakalla Prison, he was extradited to the U.S. on the basis of fabricated FBI testimony. In 1977, Peltier, a member of the Anishinabe and Lakota Nations, was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences on frame-up murder charges stemming from the shooting of the two FBI agents.
While Peltier had sought refuge in Canada, two others charged in the agents' killings were acquitted in a federal court in Iowa. Jurors stated that they did not believe the government witnesses and that it seemed "pretty much a clear-cut case of self-defense" against the FBI invasion. In Peltier's trial the prosecution concealed ballistics tests showing that his gun could not have been used in the shooting, while the trial judge ruled out any chance of another acquittal on self-defense grounds by barring any evidence of government terror against the Pine Ridge activists. At a 1985 appeal hearing, a government attorney admitted, "We can't prove who shot those agents."
AIM had been in the Feds' gun sights because of its efforts to fight the enforced poverty of Native Americans and the continued theft of their lands by the government and energy companies, which were intent on grabbing rich uranium deposits under Sioux land in South Dakota. The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee stated in 2004: "Virtually every known AIM leader in the United States was incarcerated in either state or federal prisons since (or even before) the organization's formal emergence in 1968, some repeatedly." Between 1973 and 1976, thugs of the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOON), armed and trained by the hated BIA and FBI, carried out more than 300 attacks in and around Pine Ridge, killing at least 69 people.
As we wrote during the fight against Peltier's threatened deportation, "The U.S. case against Peltier is political persecution, part of a broader attempt by the FBI to smash AIM through piling up criminal charges against its leaders, just as was done against the Black Panthers" (PTFNo. 112, 4 June 1976). AIM and Peltier were targeted by the FBI's deadly Counter-intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of disruption, frame-up and murder of the left, black militants and others. Under COINTELPRO, 38 Black Panthers were killed by the FBI and local cops. Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) spent 27 years in prison for a crime the FBI knew he could not have committed before finally winning release in 1997. Mumia Abu-Jamal—also an innocent man— remains on Pennsylvania's death row today.
In November 2003, a federal appeals court ruled, "Much of the government's behavior at the Pine Ridge Reservation and in its prosecution of Mr. Peltier is to be condemned. The government withheld evidence. It intimidated witnesses. These facts are not disputed." But the court still refused to open the prison doors for Peltier. Last year, U.S. District Court judge William Skretny turned down Peltier's request for documents suppressed by the government, even while acknowledging that he could have been acquitted had the government not improperly withheld them. Peltier attorney Michael Kuzma stated that the evidence withheld by the government amounts to a staggering 142,579 pages!
On February 24, Skretny again ruled that the FBI can keep part of its records secret in the name of "national security." Peltier noted in a message to the March 18 protests against the Iraq occupation, "Our government uses the words 'national security' and fighting the war on transnational terrorism as a smoke screen to cover up further crimes and misconduct by the FBI." Also this February, defense attorney Barry Bachrach argued in St. Louis federal court that the federal government had no jurisdiction in Peltier's case, since the shootings occurred on a reservation.
Millions of people have signed petitions for Peltier over the years, including by 1986 some 17 million people in the former Soviet Union. His frame-up, like that of Geronimo ji Jaga and Mumia Abu-Jamal, demonstrates that there is no justice in the capitalist courts of America. While supporting all possible legal proceedings on behalf of the class-war prisoners, we place no faith whatever in the "justice" of the courts and rely solely on the power of mass protest centered on the integrated labor movement.
After Peltier's third appeal for a new trial was denied in 1993, thousands of prominent liberals, celebrities and others—ranging from Willie Nelson to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa—called for a presidential pardon. In a recent column titled "Free Leonard Peltier!" (5 February), Mumia Abu-Jamal wrote: "Many Peltier supporters put their trust in a politician named Bill Clinton, who told them that when he got elected he 'wouldn't forget' about the popular Native American leader. Their trust (like that of so many others) was betrayed once Clinton gained his office, and the FBI protested. In the waning days of his presidency, he issued pardons to folks like Marc Rich, and other wealthy campaign contributors. Leonard Peltier was left in his chains!"
Peltier is one of 16 class-war prisoners to whom the Partisan Defense Committee sends monthly stipends. For more information on his case, or to contribute to Peltier's legal defense, write to: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, 2626 North Mesa #132, El Paso, TX 79902. Free Leonard Peltier and all class-war prisoners!
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
*The Dog Days Of The American Communist Left Opposition (1930s Version)- James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman
Click on title to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archive for an article by James P. Cannon relating to the subject of the tasks for the American Communist Left Opposition in the early 1930s, "The Dog Days Of The Left Opposition".
BOOK REVIEW
DOG DAYS: JAMES P. CANNON vs. MAX SHACHTMAN IN THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1931-1933, PROMETHEUS RESEARCH LIBRARY, Spartacist Publishing Co., New York, 2002
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past mistakes of our history ( and some of the things that went right) and want to know some of the problems that confronted the early 20th century American Communist movement this book is for you. This book documents the struggle of the Communist League of America (hereafter, CLA), an offshoot of the American Communist Party, expelled in 1928 for supporting the Leon Trotsky-led Russian Left Opposition in its fight in the Russian Communist Party and the Communist International against the growing Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
At first glance one can question the need to publish, in 2002, a book of documentation about the internal struggle of now obscure propaganda group in the early Depression era. After all, who but historians of the American Left or unrepentant left communists would be interested in such material? However, you would be wrong. With all historical proportions guarded, differences of period taken into account and accumulated defeats for the international working class recognized, the CLA’s trials and tribulations presented in this book has more than one lesson helpful concerning the tasks of militants today.
Despite the tremendous numbers who rallied in opposition to the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq there has been no subsequent accrual of political or organizational power to the American Left. If anything there is more political fragmentation and lower political consciousness than in the early 1930’s (or the 1960’s for that matter). Thus, our task is not now to pretend to lead the masses in the struggle for governmental power but to build a stable fighting programmatically- based propaganda group to open the way to leading the masses we keep talking about. That was the CLA’s task and, within limits, it was successful. The Cannon-Shachtman factional struggle, if Trotsky had not successfully intervened to end it, would have produced under a victorious Shachtman’s direction a very different kind of organization than that which grew under Cannon’s direction. And not for the better.
The documentation presented here highlights material, in some instances for the first time, the problems that this organization led by James P. Cannon and his fellow expelled factional associates from the Communist Party, chiefly Max Shachtman, wrangled over as they tried to act first as an expelled faction of the Party and then after the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933 in creating a new party. Implicit in the title of the book and in the presentation of the material is that while program for a revolutionary organization is decisive Marxists have never denied the role of personal conflict as an element, sometimes an important element, of political struggle. Such is the case here.
In the introduction the editors motivate one of the purposes for the publication of the book by stating that James P. Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Communist League of America and then through a series of regroupments , splits and entries into other socialist formations to the creation of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. Thus, their perspective is open and obvious.
What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, despite the bruising factional struggles of the 1920’s in the Communist Party and the hardships of political and sometimes personal isolation after his expulsion. I believe that Cannon’s long collaboration working with Trotsky ultimately provides the key to the correctness of the editors’ observation. The period under discussion started with Cannon’s leadership of the fight to orient the CLA toward internal stability and then, as opportunities arose, toward leadership of exemplary actions of a section of the American working class such as the great Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934. Cannon won his spurs in those fights and in his struggle to orient the CLA toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
At the beginning of the 21st century after the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent ‘death of communism’ it may seem fantastic and utopian to today’s militants that early in the 20th century many anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and other working class militants of this country coalesced to form an American Communist Party to fight against the American colossus. For the most part, these militants honestly did so in order to organize an American socialist revolution patterned on and influenced by the Russian October Revolution of 1917. James P. Cannon represents one of the important individuals and faction leaders in that effort and later in the CLA. Whatever his political mistakes at the time, or later, one could certainly use such an experienced militant leader today. Cannon’s mistakes were the mistakes of a man looking for a revolutionary path.
And what of the other leading participant in the internal factional struggle, Max Shachtman? Throughout the 1920’s Shachtman was a key junior associate of Cannon’s faction in the Communist Party and did yeoman’s work, and sometimes more than yeoman's work, as a journalist and editor when Cannon was assigned by the Party to run the International Labor Defense. There is the rub. Although a revolutionary workers’ organization needs intellectuals (and needs them desperately, at times) those intellectuals it does recruit must come over fully to the side of the working class. The documentation presented here clearly shows that the Shachtman faction had more in common with a gossipy literary society, a variant, if more serious, of the literary Trotskyism fashionable in some intellectual circles, particularly in New York, in the 1930’s, than a vanguard nucleus organized as a fighting propaganda league.
I have long held the view that, after Lenin and Trotsky’s theoretical guidance and leadership of the Russian Revolution it was not absolutely necessary to have party leaderships equipped with that level of theoretical capacity. Needed were a few good people who had fully assimilated the lessons of revolutionary history and wanted to act on those lessons. Alas, we have been plagued by not having such leaders available when opportunities arose, for example, the Brandler leadership of the German Communist Party in 1923. Or, as in Cannon’s case, the opportunity never arose to test his leadership capacity. Shachtman career does not show such a desire. He has far more in common with Brandler’s associate and 'theoretican' August Thalheimer. Shachtman’s later personal history leading the fight in 1939-40 in the Socialist Workers Party away from defense of the Soviet Union (when it became really operative and necessary) to eventual ‘State Department’ socialism and worst bears this out. From what I can gather the only people who admired him at the end were his factional partner Albert Glotzer and the hacks around the union headquarters of the late Cold Warrior American Federation of Teachers leader, Albert Shanker. Enough said.
As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to Cannon’s own The Left Opposition in the U.S, 1928-31 (Monad Press, New York, 1981) and The Communist League of America, 1932-34 (Monad Press, New York, 1985). These volumes contain articles and letters written in Cannon’s usually masterly expository form in defense of the revolutionary socialist perspective. In contrast, Shachtman (and Glotzer) have nothing important to say on this period except dismay at the stifling of their intellectual talents by the boorish Cannon. That comparison says it all.
This book was published at a time when the demise of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had been fully completed and anything related to Communist studies was deeply discounted. Nevertheless, for better or worse, the early American Communist movement (and its offshoots) needs to be studied in order for today’s militants to take up its mission to create a radical version of society in America. Now is the time to study this history.
SOME OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE AT LOCAL LIBRARIES OR BOOKSTORES. CHECK AMAZON.COM FOR AVAILABILITY THERE, BOTH NEW AND USED. YOU CAN ALSO GOOGLE THE JAMES P. CANNON INTERNET ARCHIVES.
BOOK REVIEW
DOG DAYS: JAMES P. CANNON vs. MAX SHACHTMAN IN THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE OF AMERICA, 1931-1933, PROMETHEUS RESEARCH LIBRARY, Spartacist Publishing Co., New York, 2002
If you are interested in the history of the American Left or are a militant trying to understand some of the past mistakes of our history ( and some of the things that went right) and want to know some of the problems that confronted the early 20th century American Communist movement this book is for you. This book documents the struggle of the Communist League of America (hereafter, CLA), an offshoot of the American Communist Party, expelled in 1928 for supporting the Leon Trotsky-led Russian Left Opposition in its fight in the Russian Communist Party and the Communist International against the growing Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
At first glance one can question the need to publish, in 2002, a book of documentation about the internal struggle of now obscure propaganda group in the early Depression era. After all, who but historians of the American Left or unrepentant left communists would be interested in such material? However, you would be wrong. With all historical proportions guarded, differences of period taken into account and accumulated defeats for the international working class recognized, the CLA’s trials and tribulations presented in this book has more than one lesson helpful concerning the tasks of militants today.
Despite the tremendous numbers who rallied in opposition to the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq there has been no subsequent accrual of political or organizational power to the American Left. If anything there is more political fragmentation and lower political consciousness than in the early 1930’s (or the 1960’s for that matter). Thus, our task is not now to pretend to lead the masses in the struggle for governmental power but to build a stable fighting programmatically- based propaganda group to open the way to leading the masses we keep talking about. That was the CLA’s task and, within limits, it was successful. The Cannon-Shachtman factional struggle, if Trotsky had not successfully intervened to end it, would have produced under a victorious Shachtman’s direction a very different kind of organization than that which grew under Cannon’s direction. And not for the better.
The documentation presented here highlights material, in some instances for the first time, the problems that this organization led by James P. Cannon and his fellow expelled factional associates from the Communist Party, chiefly Max Shachtman, wrangled over as they tried to act first as an expelled faction of the Party and then after the victory of fascism in Germany in 1933 in creating a new party. Implicit in the title of the book and in the presentation of the material is that while program for a revolutionary organization is decisive Marxists have never denied the role of personal conflict as an element, sometimes an important element, of political struggle. Such is the case here.
In the introduction the editors motivate one of the purposes for the publication of the book by stating that James P. Cannon was the finest Communist leader that America had ever produced. This an intriguing question. The editors trace their political lineage back to Cannon’s leadership of the early Communist Party and later after his expulsion to the Trotskyist Communist League of America and then through a series of regroupments , splits and entries into other socialist formations to the creation of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938. Thus, their perspective is open and obvious.
What does the documentation provided here show? This certainly is the period of Cannon’s political maturation, despite the bruising factional struggles of the 1920’s in the Communist Party and the hardships of political and sometimes personal isolation after his expulsion. I believe that Cannon’s long collaboration working with Trotsky ultimately provides the key to the correctness of the editors’ observation. The period under discussion started with Cannon’s leadership of the fight to orient the CLA toward internal stability and then, as opportunities arose, toward leadership of exemplary actions of a section of the American working class such as the great Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934. Cannon won his spurs in those fights and in his struggle to orient the CLA toward a revolutionary path. One thing is sure- in his prime which includes this period- Cannon had the instincts to want to lead a revolution and had the evident capacity to do so. That he never had an opportunity to lead a revolution is his personal tragedy and ours as well.
At the beginning of the 21st century after the demise of the Soviet Union and the apparent ‘death of communism’ it may seem fantastic and utopian to today’s militants that early in the 20th century many anarchist, socialist, syndicalist and other working class militants of this country coalesced to form an American Communist Party to fight against the American colossus. For the most part, these militants honestly did so in order to organize an American socialist revolution patterned on and influenced by the Russian October Revolution of 1917. James P. Cannon represents one of the important individuals and faction leaders in that effort and later in the CLA. Whatever his political mistakes at the time, or later, one could certainly use such an experienced militant leader today. Cannon’s mistakes were the mistakes of a man looking for a revolutionary path.
And what of the other leading participant in the internal factional struggle, Max Shachtman? Throughout the 1920’s Shachtman was a key junior associate of Cannon’s faction in the Communist Party and did yeoman’s work, and sometimes more than yeoman's work, as a journalist and editor when Cannon was assigned by the Party to run the International Labor Defense. There is the rub. Although a revolutionary workers’ organization needs intellectuals (and needs them desperately, at times) those intellectuals it does recruit must come over fully to the side of the working class. The documentation presented here clearly shows that the Shachtman faction had more in common with a gossipy literary society, a variant, if more serious, of the literary Trotskyism fashionable in some intellectual circles, particularly in New York, in the 1930’s, than a vanguard nucleus organized as a fighting propaganda league.
I have long held the view that, after Lenin and Trotsky’s theoretical guidance and leadership of the Russian Revolution it was not absolutely necessary to have party leaderships equipped with that level of theoretical capacity. Needed were a few good people who had fully assimilated the lessons of revolutionary history and wanted to act on those lessons. Alas, we have been plagued by not having such leaders available when opportunities arose, for example, the Brandler leadership of the German Communist Party in 1923. Or, as in Cannon’s case, the opportunity never arose to test his leadership capacity. Shachtman career does not show such a desire. He has far more in common with Brandler’s associate and 'theoretican' August Thalheimer. Shachtman’s later personal history leading the fight in 1939-40 in the Socialist Workers Party away from defense of the Soviet Union (when it became really operative and necessary) to eventual ‘State Department’ socialism and worst bears this out. From what I can gather the only people who admired him at the end were his factional partner Albert Glotzer and the hacks around the union headquarters of the late Cold Warrior American Federation of Teachers leader, Albert Shanker. Enough said.
As an addition to the historical record of this period this book is a very good companion to Cannon’s own The Left Opposition in the U.S, 1928-31 (Monad Press, New York, 1981) and The Communist League of America, 1932-34 (Monad Press, New York, 1985). These volumes contain articles and letters written in Cannon’s usually masterly expository form in defense of the revolutionary socialist perspective. In contrast, Shachtman (and Glotzer) have nothing important to say on this period except dismay at the stifling of their intellectual talents by the boorish Cannon. That comparison says it all.
This book was published at a time when the demise of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had been fully completed and anything related to Communist studies was deeply discounted. Nevertheless, for better or worse, the early American Communist movement (and its offshoots) needs to be studied in order for today’s militants to take up its mission to create a radical version of society in America. Now is the time to study this history.
SOME OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED HERE MAY NOT BE READILY AVAILABLE AT LOCAL LIBRARIES OR BOOKSTORES. CHECK AMAZON.COM FOR AVAILABILITY THERE, BOTH NEW AND USED. YOU CAN ALSO GOOGLE THE JAMES P. CANNON INTERNET ARCHIVES.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
COMMENTARY
THE ELECTIONS ARE COMING! THE ELECTIONS ARE COMING! THAT THOUGHT SHOULD HAVE EVERY HARDENED MILITANT AND THOSE NEW MILITANTS WHO ARE CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT TO DO RUNNING FOR COVER. IT WILL NOT BE PRETTY AND DEFINITELY NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED. THIS SPACE UNDER THIS HEADLINE WILL COMMENT ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE. HOLD ON TO YOUR WALLETS.
IN THE CASE OF ONE DONALD RUMSFELD-RESIGNATION IS NOT ENOUGH!
In the normal course of events leftists, including this writer, have no particular need to comment on much less advocate or support a call for the resignation of one of the ministers of a capitalist government. In this case, we are talking about the controversy over the possible resignation of one Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, Minister of War in the Bush Cabinet. Let the capitalist politicians sort it out among themselves is this writer’s usual stance on such matters. Let the beady-eyed “talking head” liberal and conservative media pundits spout forth on behalf of the best interests of “their” system. After all this is not exactly like the summer of 1917 in Russia where the Bolsheviks were agitating for –“Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers”- as a stopgap slogan against the Popular Front Provisional Government on the way to overthrowing that government. This controversy, however, has my interest.
The case of Mr. Rumsfeld is special. Every once in a while a politician comes along in American public life whom leftists can use to personalize everything that is wrong with the capitalist system. And epitomize what the rest of the world has come to fear and loathe as the dark side of the American spirit. One Richard M. Nixon, once President of the United and now residing in one of Dante’s circles of hell, comes to mind from an earlier generation. In that sense we need our Donalds. Hell, I have enjoyed politically kicking Mr. Rumsfeld around when he was riding high. And, excuse my manners; I enjoy kicking him around when he is down. (To give credit where credit is due, the late two lines were inspired by the late Dr. Hunter Thompson.) Nevertheless this specimen must go as, unfortunately, there are many candidates to replace him.
Many liberals , and some not so liberal, in Congress looking to rehabilitate their sorry records on Iraq, including the key question of voting for the war budget, are having a cheap field day on this one. However, in any moderately effective European parliamentary system guys like Rumsfeld and Bush would have been long gone. Although I should qualify that statement since the august members of the British Labor Party could not muster enough votes to vote no confidence in Mr. Rumsfeld’s fellow hawkish crony, Mr. Anthony Blair.
I must admit that I am a little uncomfortable when all manner of retired general are coming out of the woodwork aiming at Mr. Rumsfeld’s head. We are respectable people and THESE are certainly not our kind of people. Except under normal circumstances these types, despite an occasional candidate for the role of American Napoleon Bonaparte like General Douglas MacArthur, keep quiet and take their consultant fees. Things must be far, far worst than we suspect in Iraq if the chiefs are abandoning ship already. Moreover, the thrust of the former generals’ criticism is that Mr. Rumsfeld did not adequately provision them with enough troops to get the job done. This is a veiled, and maybe not so veiled, call for escalation. There are differences between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War which we need to appreciate but escalation in Iraq would dramatically close the gap between those differences. We could go from the Big Muddy of Vietnam to the Big Sandy of Iraq. Watch out.
Finally, and to get back on the left on this issue, if there is any justice in this world Mr. Rumsfeld, despite his probable cabinet immunity defense, clearly should be tried as a war criminal. He exceeds by orders of magnitude the standards necessary for such an indictment. However, my vision is not to have him tried before some bogus Court of International Criminal Justice. My suggestion is that he be sent, alone (or with a few of his neo-con conspirators), to Baghdad, without armor. There he should be tried by a tribunal of the victims of his war crimes. Resignation is not enough- Indeed!!
THIS IS THE FIRST ARTICLE OF OCCASIONAL COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
THE ELECTIONS ARE COMING! THE ELECTIONS ARE COMING! THAT THOUGHT SHOULD HAVE EVERY HARDENED MILITANT AND THOSE NEW MILITANTS WHO ARE CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT TO DO RUNNING FOR COVER. IT WILL NOT BE PRETTY AND DEFINITELY NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED. THIS SPACE UNDER THIS HEADLINE WILL COMMENT ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE. HOLD ON TO YOUR WALLETS.
IN THE CASE OF ONE DONALD RUMSFELD-RESIGNATION IS NOT ENOUGH!
In the normal course of events leftists, including this writer, have no particular need to comment on much less advocate or support a call for the resignation of one of the ministers of a capitalist government. In this case, we are talking about the controversy over the possible resignation of one Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, Minister of War in the Bush Cabinet. Let the capitalist politicians sort it out among themselves is this writer’s usual stance on such matters. Let the beady-eyed “talking head” liberal and conservative media pundits spout forth on behalf of the best interests of “their” system. After all this is not exactly like the summer of 1917 in Russia where the Bolsheviks were agitating for –“Down with the Ten Capitalist Ministers”- as a stopgap slogan against the Popular Front Provisional Government on the way to overthrowing that government. This controversy, however, has my interest.
The case of Mr. Rumsfeld is special. Every once in a while a politician comes along in American public life whom leftists can use to personalize everything that is wrong with the capitalist system. And epitomize what the rest of the world has come to fear and loathe as the dark side of the American spirit. One Richard M. Nixon, once President of the United and now residing in one of Dante’s circles of hell, comes to mind from an earlier generation. In that sense we need our Donalds. Hell, I have enjoyed politically kicking Mr. Rumsfeld around when he was riding high. And, excuse my manners; I enjoy kicking him around when he is down. (To give credit where credit is due, the late two lines were inspired by the late Dr. Hunter Thompson.) Nevertheless this specimen must go as, unfortunately, there are many candidates to replace him.
Many liberals , and some not so liberal, in Congress looking to rehabilitate their sorry records on Iraq, including the key question of voting for the war budget, are having a cheap field day on this one. However, in any moderately effective European parliamentary system guys like Rumsfeld and Bush would have been long gone. Although I should qualify that statement since the august members of the British Labor Party could not muster enough votes to vote no confidence in Mr. Rumsfeld’s fellow hawkish crony, Mr. Anthony Blair.
I must admit that I am a little uncomfortable when all manner of retired general are coming out of the woodwork aiming at Mr. Rumsfeld’s head. We are respectable people and THESE are certainly not our kind of people. Except under normal circumstances these types, despite an occasional candidate for the role of American Napoleon Bonaparte like General Douglas MacArthur, keep quiet and take their consultant fees. Things must be far, far worst than we suspect in Iraq if the chiefs are abandoning ship already. Moreover, the thrust of the former generals’ criticism is that Mr. Rumsfeld did not adequately provision them with enough troops to get the job done. This is a veiled, and maybe not so veiled, call for escalation. There are differences between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War which we need to appreciate but escalation in Iraq would dramatically close the gap between those differences. We could go from the Big Muddy of Vietnam to the Big Sandy of Iraq. Watch out.
Finally, and to get back on the left on this issue, if there is any justice in this world Mr. Rumsfeld, despite his probable cabinet immunity defense, clearly should be tried as a war criminal. He exceeds by orders of magnitude the standards necessary for such an indictment. However, my vision is not to have him tried before some bogus Court of International Criminal Justice. My suggestion is that he be sent, alone (or with a few of his neo-con conspirators), to Baghdad, without armor. There he should be tried by a tribunal of the victims of his war crimes. Resignation is not enough- Indeed!!
THIS IS THE FIRST ARTICLE OF OCCASIONAL COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY
Friday, April 14, 2006
*From The Archives- Black Oppression And The Great Mississippi Flood Of 1927
Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.
Monday, April 10, 2006
AMERICAN LABOR MUST LEAD THE FIGHT FOR FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR IMMIGRANTS
COMMENTARY
FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR IMMIGRANTS. NO SUPPORT FOR ANY CURRENT LEGISLATION BEFORE CONGRESS. THE LABOR MOVEMENT MUST USE ITS OWN METHODS IN THIS STRUGGLE.
A few thoughts on the struggle for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. As I write these lines there have been a couple of weeks of massive demonstrations for immigrant rights spearheaded by the Hispanic populations of the West and Southwest. This is a step in the right direction for several reasons. Let’s face it, one way or another, in the near or remote past, all of us came here as immigrants from someplace. So it is particularly important that the last waves of immigration gain the same rights that those of us who have been here longer. No, we will not have the last current American citizen close the door for us. This is especially true for working class people who have been victimized by the same divide and conquer strategy by the capitalist who run this government and this country. Let’s put the onus where it belongs. Immigrants do not threaten our livelihoods. Failure to struggle against the bosses does.
It is rather ironic that one of the most impoverished sections of the working class is leading the struggle. This is not accidental, for many of the foreign born militants leading today’s struggles come from countries where they have participated in class struggles against their own boss class (and under less than democratic conditions, including threats to life and limb). It is up to the American labor movement, especially the organized trade union movement, to lead the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants in its own self-interest and self-defense. None of the various pieces of legislation currently before Congress is supportable on this issue. Even a cursory look at the history of social struggles in this country demonstrates that to win any demands sharp class struggle methods are needed. Yesterday’s labor struggles to win union recognition in the 1930’s were not gifts but fought for in the streets, by strikes, sit-downs and other militant methods. The lesson-If you do not fight, you cannot win. This battle can be won. Let’s win it. FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR ALL THOSE WHO MAKE IT HERE. FOR STARTERS-BRING MOTIONS TO SUPPORT THIS DEMAND BEFORE YOUR UNION, SCHOOL OR POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS.
FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR IMMIGRANTS. NO SUPPORT FOR ANY CURRENT LEGISLATION BEFORE CONGRESS. THE LABOR MOVEMENT MUST USE ITS OWN METHODS IN THIS STRUGGLE.
A few thoughts on the struggle for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. As I write these lines there have been a couple of weeks of massive demonstrations for immigrant rights spearheaded by the Hispanic populations of the West and Southwest. This is a step in the right direction for several reasons. Let’s face it, one way or another, in the near or remote past, all of us came here as immigrants from someplace. So it is particularly important that the last waves of immigration gain the same rights that those of us who have been here longer. No, we will not have the last current American citizen close the door for us. This is especially true for working class people who have been victimized by the same divide and conquer strategy by the capitalist who run this government and this country. Let’s put the onus where it belongs. Immigrants do not threaten our livelihoods. Failure to struggle against the bosses does.
It is rather ironic that one of the most impoverished sections of the working class is leading the struggle. This is not accidental, for many of the foreign born militants leading today’s struggles come from countries where they have participated in class struggles against their own boss class (and under less than democratic conditions, including threats to life and limb). It is up to the American labor movement, especially the organized trade union movement, to lead the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants in its own self-interest and self-defense. None of the various pieces of legislation currently before Congress is supportable on this issue. Even a cursory look at the history of social struggles in this country demonstrates that to win any demands sharp class struggle methods are needed. Yesterday’s labor struggles to win union recognition in the 1930’s were not gifts but fought for in the streets, by strikes, sit-downs and other militant methods. The lesson-If you do not fight, you cannot win. This battle can be won. Let’s win it. FULL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS FOR ALL THOSE WHO MAKE IT HERE. FOR STARTERS-BRING MOTIONS TO SUPPORT THIS DEMAND BEFORE YOUR UNION, SCHOOL OR POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM COMES HOME TO ROOST
COMMENTARY
‘Globalization’ has come home to roost in the West. Now is the time to fight back. Support the French workers, students and immigrants in their struggle against the French version of the two-tier wage system.
Not for the first time in its history the French working class, including the important immigrant and second generation immigrant sections, students and other supporters have massively demonstrated their opposition to the imposition by the Chirac government of a French version of the what we in the United States know as the two (or more)-tier wage and hiring system. This system is not uncommon in the United States where it effectively pits younger workers against older workers, white workers against black, Hispanic and other minority workers for the small piece of the pie. Under the terms of the French law, not fully worked out yet but in effect as I write, youth under the age of 26 face extended probationary periods and lesser protections against layoff and victimization. This is nothing new under the imperatives of international capitalism (or to use the more fashionable but less effective term- ‘globalization’) in its search for maximization of profits.
What is unusual is that this imperative mechanism of the capitalist system has dramatically hit the metropolitan centers of world capitalism ( the German and other European governments are trying to impose like terms on its working class, as well) where a modicum of social legislation has existed as protection against extreme exploitation rather than some outposts where workers receive a dollar a day from these same major international capitalist corporations in their race to the bottom line of their wage bill. Not fighting back will only embolden those who want to increase their unrestricted assess to a ‘free’ labor market. One only has to look at the condition of the working class in the United States as major sections of it watch helplessly (and passively) as their pensions benefits are eroded or taken away, their health care benefits are decreased or eliminated, their wages decreased or eaten up by inflation or their jobs taken away by those same capitalist forces that want ‘their government’ to pass even more restrictive legislation. Enough is enough.
LET THE STRUGGLE IN THE UNITED STATES START HERE AND NOW. SUPPORT THE FRENCH WORKERS AND STUDENTS IN THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CHIRAC LEGISLATION. FIGHT FOR IMMIGRANT RIGHTS WHEREVER THEY ARE ENDANGERED. CHRIAC- NO REPRISALS AGAINST DEMONSTRATORS. FREE ALL THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN ARRESTED. CALL ON YOUR UNION, SCHOOL OR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION TO SUPPORT THE DEMANDS OF THE FRENCH WORKERS AND STUDENTS. FIGHT FOR THE OLD LABOR PRINCIPAL-EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL PAY- WORLDWIDE. FIGHT FOR WORKERS GOVERNMENTS.
UPDATE-APRIL 12, 2006. AS OF TODAY CHRIAC HAS SHELVED HIS CFE PLAN. THAT IS A VICTORY. OTHER ASPECTS OF THIS LEGISLATION ARE, HOWEVER, STILL IN EFFECT AND NEED TO BE FOUGHT. THE FUNDAMENTAL PREMISE ON MY ARTICLE STILL HOLDS TRUE THAT THE EUROPEON CAPITALISTS, LIKE THEIR AMERICAN COUNTERPARTS, ARE COMPELLED TO SLASH THEIR WAGE BILLS TO SURVIVE IN THE 'GLOBAL' MARKET. BE READY TO FIGHT AGAIN ON THESE SAME ISSUES UNDER DIFFERENT LEGISLATION.
‘Globalization’ has come home to roost in the West. Now is the time to fight back. Support the French workers, students and immigrants in their struggle against the French version of the two-tier wage system.
Not for the first time in its history the French working class, including the important immigrant and second generation immigrant sections, students and other supporters have massively demonstrated their opposition to the imposition by the Chirac government of a French version of the what we in the United States know as the two (or more)-tier wage and hiring system. This system is not uncommon in the United States where it effectively pits younger workers against older workers, white workers against black, Hispanic and other minority workers for the small piece of the pie. Under the terms of the French law, not fully worked out yet but in effect as I write, youth under the age of 26 face extended probationary periods and lesser protections against layoff and victimization. This is nothing new under the imperatives of international capitalism (or to use the more fashionable but less effective term- ‘globalization’) in its search for maximization of profits.
What is unusual is that this imperative mechanism of the capitalist system has dramatically hit the metropolitan centers of world capitalism ( the German and other European governments are trying to impose like terms on its working class, as well) where a modicum of social legislation has existed as protection against extreme exploitation rather than some outposts where workers receive a dollar a day from these same major international capitalist corporations in their race to the bottom line of their wage bill. Not fighting back will only embolden those who want to increase their unrestricted assess to a ‘free’ labor market. One only has to look at the condition of the working class in the United States as major sections of it watch helplessly (and passively) as their pensions benefits are eroded or taken away, their health care benefits are decreased or eliminated, their wages decreased or eaten up by inflation or their jobs taken away by those same capitalist forces that want ‘their government’ to pass even more restrictive legislation. Enough is enough.
LET THE STRUGGLE IN THE UNITED STATES START HERE AND NOW. SUPPORT THE FRENCH WORKERS AND STUDENTS IN THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CHIRAC LEGISLATION. FIGHT FOR IMMIGRANT RIGHTS WHEREVER THEY ARE ENDANGERED. CHRIAC- NO REPRISALS AGAINST DEMONSTRATORS. FREE ALL THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN ARRESTED. CALL ON YOUR UNION, SCHOOL OR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION TO SUPPORT THE DEMANDS OF THE FRENCH WORKERS AND STUDENTS. FIGHT FOR THE OLD LABOR PRINCIPAL-EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL PAY- WORLDWIDE. FIGHT FOR WORKERS GOVERNMENTS.
UPDATE-APRIL 12, 2006. AS OF TODAY CHRIAC HAS SHELVED HIS CFE PLAN. THAT IS A VICTORY. OTHER ASPECTS OF THIS LEGISLATION ARE, HOWEVER, STILL IN EFFECT AND NEED TO BE FOUGHT. THE FUNDAMENTAL PREMISE ON MY ARTICLE STILL HOLDS TRUE THAT THE EUROPEON CAPITALISTS, LIKE THEIR AMERICAN COUNTERPARTS, ARE COMPELLED TO SLASH THEIR WAGE BILLS TO SURVIVE IN THE 'GLOBAL' MARKET. BE READY TO FIGHT AGAIN ON THESE SAME ISSUES UNDER DIFFERENT LEGISLATION.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
*Free The Last Of The Ohio Seven- Jaan Laaman And Tom Manning Must Not Die In Prison!
Click on title to link to the Partisan Defense Committee web site. The Partisan Defense Committee has defended the Ohio Seven, and particularly through the annual Holiday Appeal has provided stipends for Brothers Laaman and Manning over the years.
COMMENTARY
ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON. THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.
The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution.
In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.
The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.
YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.
COMMENTARY
ONE OF THE OHIO SEVEN -RICHARD WILLIAMS- RECENTLY DIED IN PRISON. THAT LEAVES JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.
The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants, some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution.
In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and also by desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.
The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionist Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- the Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.
YOU CAN GOOGLE THE ORGANIZATIONS MENTIONED ABOVE- THE PARTISAN DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE OHIO 7 DEFENSE COMMITTEE- THE JAAN LAAMAN DEFENSE FUND.
Friday, March 31, 2006
*Full Citizen Rights For All Immigrants- A Guest Commentary
Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.
Monday, March 27, 2006
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-"The Trouble With Sexual Utopias" A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedi" entry for the early 19th century, pre-Marxist utopian socialist mentioned in the article below, Charles Fourier.
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Winter 1986-87 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
Additionally, when the issue of sex comes up, as it does in various disguises even in the left labor movement, I like to remind militants of the following. The left labor movement has set its main task among the three great human tragedies: hunger, sex, and death as the struggle against hunger. I like to remember the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, and his words about his hope that once the struggle against hunger is victorious and that condition is overcome in our communist future sex and death will be less frightening and perilous. From personal experience, I sure hope so.
**************
Fourier's Phalanx, Reich's Sex-Pol:
The Trouble with Sexual Utopias
By Jack Shapiro
"It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes in to the foreground. With one set of people as a revolutionary progress, as a shaking off of old traditional fetters, no longer necessary; with others as a welcome doctrine, comfortably covering all sorts of free and easy practices between man and woman," Frederick Engels noted in an article on the biblical "Book of Revelation" (printed in Progress: A Monthly Magazine of Advanced Thought, Vol. 1.2, 1883). Certainly the early, pre-Marxian socialists projected in elaborate detail what life, including sexual life, would be like in their ideal society of the future. The New Left of the 1960s, too, revived a radicalism centering on changing lifestyles. Herbert Marcuse, for example, criticized Marx as insufficiently radical for not directly linking the overthrow of capitalism to individual sexual fulfillment. Marx and Engels adamantly refused to engage in speculation on this question, however, insisting that their position was essentially negative, aimed at eliminating economic and social coercion in personal relations. As Engels stated in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884):
"Thus, what we can conjecture at present about the regulation of sex relationships after the impending efracement of capitalist production is, in the main, of a negative character, limited mostly to what will vanish. But what will be added? That will be settled after a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in all their lives have had occasion to purchase a woman's surrender either with money or with any other means of social power; and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love, or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences. Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about what we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each individual—and that's the end of it."
This position was not a matter of intellectual modesty on Marx's or Engels' part. Rather it flowed organically from the dialectical materialist outlook. Under communism people will be genuinely and truly free to reshape their interpersonal relations. Of course, this freedom is not absolute. Man cannot transcend his biological make-up and relation to the natural environment. Communist man, too, will grow old and die. Neither can mankind sweep the slate totally clean and build society anew. Communist humanity will inherit for good and ill the accumulated cultural heritage of our species:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and trans¬mitted from the past.
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851)
Nonetheless, men do make their own history, including the history of their sexual practices. We cannot know the sexual practices of communist society because these will be determined in the future. Any attempt to project, much less to prescribe, such sexual practices is an expression of attitudes, values and prejudices shaped by a repressive class society.
Consider two representative figures who sought to combine socialism with a positive program of sexual libertarianism: Charles Fourier and Wilhelm Reich. One of the greatest of the early socialist thinkers, Fourier developed a program for an ideal community— the phalanx—which would gratify all human passions. Wilhelm Reich, as a member of the Austrian and then German Communist parties in the late 1920s-early 1930s, attempted to fuse Marx and Freud both in theory and in practice.
Fourier and Reich were passionate and often insightful in denouncing the sexual repressiveness of bourgeois society. Yet as soon as they sought to positively prescribe codes of presumably liberated social/sexual relations, they went off the rails. They believed they knew what "human nature" is, but their efforts to establish lifestyles appropriate for free men of the future only shows that Fourier and Reich each brought to the notion of "human nature" a lot of the ideological baggage of his own particular time and circumstances, shaped by repressive, class-divided society. Fourier's phalanx, to eliminate sexual frustration, would institute mechanisms of sexual slavery. And Reich's "non-repressive" society would have sexual activities monitored by a central agency of bureaucrats.
Fourier: A Utopia Based on Passionate Attraction
Fourier described himself as being "born and raised in the mercantile shops." He existed in the netherworld of French commerce (traveling salesman, correspon¬dence clerk for an American firm, unlicensed stock¬broker). While never absolutely destitute, Fourier knew poverty. He lived in cheap travelers' pensions, boarding houses, dingy apartments. He was a recluse and may well have been a life-long celibate. Added to his personal isolation was his political isolation. His first work calling for the total reorganization of society was published in 1808. For the next 20 years he was totally ignored, a prophet unhonored and unacknowledged. Only in the last decade of his life did Fourier attract a small band of devoted followers. Fourier's was a lonely and miserable life. In his ideas of Utopia one sees the pent-up longings of this deeply frustrated man. This gives to his vision its passionate force and imaginative vividness. It also accounts for his fantastical and often downright weird ideas.
In this age of Penthouse and "adult" home videos, it is easy to be condescending toward old Fourier. Yet this neurotic dreamer was a towering figure in the struggle for social and sexual emancipation. Early in the 19th century it became apparent to those still committed to the ideals of the French Revolution that liberty, equality and fraternity were not compatible with private property in a competitive market economy. Fourier, the most incisive of the pioneer socialists, noted, "Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized society liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations" (quoted in Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu [Eds.], The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier [1971]).
The status of women represented the most acute and manifest expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. The importance Fourier gave to women's liberation is exemplified in his famous statement:
"Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a result of a
diminution in the liberty of women In summary, the
extension of the privileges of women is the fundamen¬tal cause of all social progress." —Ibid.
At a time when women were universally regarded and treated as nothing more than babymakers, Fourier championed not only complete social and political equality for women but also their right to sexual fulfillment. He was uniquely responsible for making the demand for the liberation of women from the oppressive nuclear family an integral part of the socialist program, a penetrating insight which the young Marx and Engels embraced. At a time when fathers exercised total authority over their families, especially their daughters, Fourier spoke for the freedom of children.
Even today reading Fourier would give Jerry Falwell or Pope John Paul Wojtyla apoplexy. He exposed the sexual boredom of monogamous marriage with a hitherto unheard-of savagery:
"This is the normal way of life among the mass of the people. Dullened, morose couples who quarrel all day long are reconciled to each other on the bolster be¬cause they cannot afford two beds, and contact, the sudden pin-prick of the senses, triumphs for a moment over conjugal satiety. If this is love it is the most material and the most trivial."
—quoted in Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (1962)
He flayed the petty tyranny of the patriarchal family, especially the stifling of the sexual needs of children and adolescents:
"The children at the age of puberty think only of escaping the insipidity of the household: the young girl lives only for an evening when she is at a ball; the young man, preoccupied with parties, returns to his paternal home as to a place of exile. As to the children below the age of puberty, they are not satisfied except when they manage to escape the eye of the father and the eye of the tutor to enjoy everything that is forbidden to them."
—quoted in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Teaching of Charles Fourier (1969)
Fourier's Phalanx: Outlawing Sexual Frustration
Fourier's answer to the repressiveness of bourgeois civilization was a system called Harmony, based on the phalanx. The phalanx was a basically self-contained social and economic unit of approximately 1,700 people. It would contain roughly two each of 810 basic psychological types. This would insure the necessary variety and complementarities. Life in a Fourierist phalanx is attractive. All work is voluntary and not for monetary reward. There is a great deal of sexual freedom and variety. Children especially are intended to enjoy life in a phalanx. They would be subject to little parental or other authority, and would spend most of the day with peer groups (the Little Bands and Little Hordes). Returning to the bosom of his parents at night, the child is overwhelmed with love and affection.
Yet Fourier's Utopia has oppressive and sexually abusive features. Fourier believed that homosexuality, both male and female, would disappear under his system of the phalanx. In the phalanx, "harmonious armies" of young men and women would engage in nonviolent warfare. The losers would for a brief time serve as slaves to the victors. These youthful captives would be expected to meet the sexual needs of older members of the phalanx so that "no age capable of love is frustrated in its desire." Fourier's difficulties arise from two interrelated factors: the problem of work and the guarantee of sexual satisfaction, not merely the pursuit of such happiness as Thomas Jefferson (Fouri¬er's older contemporary) put it in the American Declaration of Independence.
In the Fourierist phalanx, work is not only voluntary but positively pleasurable as well as more productive than under capitalism: "in a societary state varied work will become a source of varied pleasures."Yet this work is crude manual labor, mainly agricultural. One of the great advances of scientific socialism (Marxism) was the understanding that technological progress, which under capitalism is used by the ruling class to further enslave and immiserate the working people, will when freed from the fetter of private property provide the material basis for human freedom.
Fourier, with his passion for mathematical exactitude, projects that the phalanx economy will be four-fifths agriculture and one-fifth manufacturing. And by manufacturing he means literally production by hand: "The industrial revolution passes Fourier by; he failed completely to appreciate its significance.... [Division of labor meant to him the simple form well illustrated in market-gardening, not the complex form associated with the machine technique" (E.S. Mason, "Fourier and Anarchism," Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1928).
The pre-industrial nature of Fourier's Utopia is not simply a reflection of the relative economic backward¬ness of France in his day. His great French contempo¬rary Henri de Saint-Simon projected a socialized system based on continual technological progress. Fourier, however, deliberately rejected this program: "The Saint-Simonian vision, as well as the subsequent Marxist dream, of mechanized socialist mankind wresting a bountiful living from a stingy and hostile environment would have seemed a horrible nightmare of rapine to Fourier, for he knew that the natural destiny of the globe was to become a horticultural paradise, an ever-varying English garden" (Introduction to Beecher and Bienvenu [Eds.], The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier). In addition Fourier feared that, scientists and technical experts would exercise a new guardianship over society, establishing a new theocracy.
Given the primitive nature of work in the phalanx, Fourier could only offer variety, satisfying the "butterfly passion" to flit from one thing to another. In a typi¬cal day a member of the phalanx would care for the animals, engage in forestry, vegetable gardening, beekeeping and so on. Nicholas Riasanovsky, himself a sympathetic student of Fourier's doctrines, has nonetheless pointed out: "In general Charles Fourier's promise of most enthusiastic and most fruitful work by all in Harmony has aroused much skepticism— [Sjwitching in rapid succession from one unpleasant job to another would hardly improve anyone's productivity."
Marx's view of work is directly counterposed to Fourier's. For Marx, socialist economic planning would lead to a fully automated economy in which the "human factor is restricted to watching and supervising the production process" (Crundn'sse). Work then becomes increasingly creative artistic and scientific activity. At the same time, Marx insisted: "This does not mean that work can be made merely a joke, or amusement, as Fourier naively expressed it in shop-girl terms. Really free work, the composing of music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort" (ibid.). We see here the difference between the Rousseauian and the Marxist outlooks. For Fourier, happiness meant a return to the spontaneous playfulness of childhood. Marx recognized that mankind had developed a real need to fully utilize and extend all its capacities. Artistic and scientific work is not and cannot be made fun in the sense that sex, eating good food and playing games are fun. But this kind of work has also become an object of passionate attraction.
It is not true, as Riasanovsky implies, that Fourier offered no motivation for enthusiastic work effort in the phalanx. In part, he solved this problem in his usual manner: by asserting that there is a psychological type in sufficient numbers to perform any and every needed social role. Who, for example, would do dirty work like collecting the garbage and spreading manure on the fields? Fourier's answer—little boys:
"Two-thirds of all boys have a penchant for filth. They love to wallow in the mire and play with dirty things— These children will enroll in the Little Hordes whose task it is to perform, dauntlessly and as a point of honor, all those loathsome tasks that ordinary workers would find debasing."
—Beecner and Bienvenu, op cit.
Fourier himself was city born and bred and so sentimentalized rural life. Children actually raised on farms, who have milked cows at 4 a.m. and slopped the pigs, can hardly wait to escape to urban civilization.
More fundamentally and generally, Fourier replaced money with sex as a reward for work effort. Sexually integrated work groups (the series) were to be an occasion for amorous dalliance. The connection between sexual fulfillment and work effort is especially clear and important in the recruitment and maintenance of industrial armies, huge bodies of tens of thousands which would clear new land, drain swamps, build dams and the like. Accompanying these industrial armies would be beautiful virgins (!) (the Vestals) of both sexes. Work performance in the industrial army would be the primary form of courtship: "the female Vestal is surrounded by her suitors, and she can watch them displaying their talents in the work sessions and the public games of the army." One can hardly imagine work conditions better designed to create anxiety and frustration than this intense, public sexual competition.
Nonetheless, Fourier assures us that the rejected suitors would not suffer sexual frustration. Indeed, eliminating sexual frustration is a basic principle of Harmony. Also accompanying the industrial armies are young women and men (the Bacchantes and Bacchants) who freely give their sexual favors to those wounded in love. Thus this passionate believer in women's equality is led by the logic of his system to project a class of free whores to meet the sexual needs of men. Fourier of course insisted: "Most women of twenty-five have a temperament suited to this role, which will then become a noble one." At the same time, he chastises attractive women who want a life¬long monogamous relation with their loved one:
"What is reason in the state of harmony? It is the employment of any method which multiplies relationships and satisfies a great number of individuals without injuring anybody. A beautiful woman operates in contradiction of this rule if she wants to remain faithful and to belong exclusively to one man all her life. She might have contributed to the happiness of ten thousand men in thirty years of philanthropic service, leaving fond memories behind among these ten thousand."
—quoted in Manuel, op cit.
Sexual libertarianism here becomes its opposite: social pressure toward promiscuity in the name of satisfying everyone's desires.
Sexual coercion outright enters Harmony through the problem of old people, something Fourier felt keenly. He once wrote, "life, after the end of love affairs, is nothing but a prison to which one becomes more or less adjusted according to the favors of fortune." Fourier was realistic enough to recognize that while old people still sexually desired the young, the reverse was not usually the case. His system therefore contains elaborate measures to solve this problem. As we have seen, the youthful captives in the nonviolent war games serve for a short while as slaves to older members of the phalanx. Sexually servicing the aged was also a penalty for transgressing the rules of Harmony. While Fourier's Utopia contains what we would call open marriage, there are also by mutual consent monogamous relations. If one partner in these engages in secret infidelity, he is brought before a "court of love." To expiate this transgression, he orshe may be sentenced to a few nights with older members of the phalanx.
Fourier's "ideal" society was certainly shaped by his own neurotic idiosyncracies. But his views also directly reflect the assumptions of his time. Fourier (and Reich)held that human passions or, in Freudian terms, instinctual drives, were unchanging and unchangeable. Fourier and, more narrowly and dogmatically, Reich believed they knew what was natural and healthy sexuality and what was depravity and perversion. Their program was to adjust social institutions around an emotional make-up conceived as unvarying. Fourier wrote to his disciple Victor ConsideVant: "I am the only reformer who has rallied round human nature by accepting it as it is and devising the means of utilizing it with all the defects which are inseparable from man."
Fourier and Reich belong to the intellectual tradition of Enlightenment naturalism, whose greatest represen¬tative was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Late in life Rousseau wrote that all his doctrines were based on the "great principle that nature made man happy and good, but that society depraves him and makes him miserable." Fourier constantly counterposes the happy and natural man in the phalanx society to the artificial and miserable creature of existent civilization. For Reich, the Freudian concept of id corresponds to Rousseau's "state of nature," man not yet depraved by repressive civilization.
Social Utopias based on Rousseauian naturalism have an inherent tendency toward totalitarianism. If man is naturally good, then "unnatural" social orders can be maintained only through false ideas and ideologies (e.g., religion). Fourier insisted that a society based on the phalanx could have been established any time in the past two millennia—if only someone had thought of it before. Social liberation thus becomes a struggle against bad ideas—rooting them out and preventing recontamination.
The first attempt to establish a Fourierist phalanx was made in what is now Romania in the 1830s by a noble landowner for his serfs. Local Moral Majority types were outraged and launched an armed attack to destroy the phalanx. The peasants valiantly defended their "free love" commune though in the end they were overwhelmed by superior force. The Socialist Republic of Romania has built a historical monument to commemorate the last stand of the Fourierist peasants of Scani.
Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol
Wilhelm Reich died in 1957 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania federal penitentiary. He was imprisoned for violating a court order on a charge brought by the Food and Drug Administration that he had transported an empty box, the Orgone Energy Accumulator, across state lines. Medically, Reich had become a quack. Politically he was a rabid red-baiter, an outspoken supporter of McCarthyism.
Yet a quarter century earlier, Wilhelm Reich had attempted to fuse Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Reich was simultaneously a member of Freud's inner circle of followers and of the German Communist Party, a mass workers party, at a critical moment in modern history: the rise to power of Nazism. In the 1960s the New Left rediscovered the early Reich and made him into a minor cult figure. A selection of his writings between 1929 and 1934, entitled Sex-Pol, was published in English in 1966, edited by Lee Baxandall of the defunct Studies on the Left. An introduction by Marxoid academic Bertell Oilman declared: "The revolutionary potential of Reich's teachings is as great as ever—perhaps greater, now that sex is accepted as a subject for serious discussion and complaint virtually everywhere."
Many of the activities of Reich and his supporters (who called themselves the Sex-Pol movement) within the Austrian and German Communist parties were entirely commendable. They agitated against sexually repressive legislation and campaigned for the greater economic independence of youth. The Reichian clinics in Vienna and Berlin provided working-class youth with information about contraception and preventing venereal disease, and doubtless performed useful individual counseling. Some of his early writings on character analysis and "body language" remain today standard texts for practicing analysts. Reich became attracted to Marxism by his work in the free psychoanalytic clinic in Vienna, where he became convinced that poverty and oppression contributed to neuroses, and thus that their cure demanded the restructuring of society.
In a 1932 work written for the German Communist Party's youth group he concluded: "In capitalist society there can be no sexual liberation of youth, no healthy, satisfying sex life; if you want to be rid of your sexual troubles, fight for socialism. Only through socialism can you achieve sexual joie de vivre.... Socialism will putan end to the power of those who gaze up toward heaven as they speak of love while they crush and destroy the sexuality of youth." This bouncy, bombastic rhetoric endeared Reich to the New Left. Rejecting the Marxist understanding that sexual life is essentially a private matter, Reich insisted that the Communist movement must struggle for a "satisfying sex life" both for its own members and for society at large.
Reich's basic message can be baldly stated as follows. The sexual repression practiced by the patriarchal, nuclear family (e.g., preventing children from masturbating) produces submissive adults, fearful of bour¬geois authority. Thus the struggle against sexual repression—itself a deep-felt source of discontent throughout society—is of strategic importance in releasing the revolutionary energy of the masses.
In opposition to orthodox Freudianism, Reich refused to accept the patriarchal, nuclear family as a cultural given. The Oedipus complex, the frustrated desire of a child to possess the parent of the opposite sex, he wrote,
"must disappear in a socialist society because its social basis—the patriarchal family—will itself disappear, having lost its raison d'etre. Communal upbringing, which forms part of the socialist program, will be so unfavorable to the forming of psychological attitudes as they exist within the family today—the relationship of children to one another and to the persons who bring them up will be so much more many-sided, complex and dynamic—that the Oedipus complex with its specific content of desiring the mother and wishing to destroy the father as a rival will lose its meaning."
—"Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" (1929)
Reich's particular recipe for "a satisfying sex life" was rigid and bizarre. At the core of his psychoanalytic theory was the function of the orgasm as the sole release for dammed up sexual energy. The failure of the orgasm to perform this function produced mental illness. He maintained that orgastic impotency was the sole cause of all neurotic and psychotic behavior.
Reich's fellow psychoanalysts objected that many neurotics had quite normal sex lives. But, to paraphrase George Orwell, for Reich some orgasms are more equal than others. To fulfill its function an orgasm must be heterosexual, without irrelevant fantasies and of sufficient duration:
"Orgastic potency is the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the damned-up [sic] sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body.'
—The Function of the Orgasm (1927)
In 1939 Reich invented the Orgone Energy Field Meter to measure sexual energy and its discharge. He had long since abandoned both Marx and Freud for the realms of science fiction.
Reich's reasoning is circular. He hypothesizes that mental illness is produced by undischarged sexual energy. But, since the latter is unmeasurable, he then deduces genital incapacity from psychological distress: "Not a single neurotic is orgastically potent, and the character structure of the overwhelming majority of me'n and women are neurotic." The psychoanalyst thus becomes the supreme arbiter of sexual health and unhealth. This opens the door to subjective arbitrari¬ness and outright bigotry.
For example, Reich maintained the orthodox Freudian position that homosexuality is arrested development, the failure of the child to overcome primary narcissism and develop love objects outside himself. He went further than Freud and also identified homosexuality with political reaction:
"The more clearly developed the natural heterosexual inclinations of a juvenile are, the more open he will be to revolutionary ideas; the stronger the homosexual tendency within him and also the more repressed his awareness of sexuality in general, the more easily he will be drawn toward the right."
—"What is Class Consciousness?" (1934)
His New Left admirers understandably turn a blind eye to this aspect of Reich's sexual theories. (To its credit, the Sex-Pol movement continued to call for an end to state laws against homosexuality.)
Like Fourier, Reich's view of what people are "really" like was shaped by the particularities of his time. Reich's brief career in the Communist movement coincided with the greatest defeat for the world proletariat in modern history: the triumph of fascism in Germany, then the strongest industrial power in Europe. Reich's analysis of Nazism was his only effort to apply his theories to a contemporary political problem—and the results are revealing.
Reich's response to Hitler's coming to power was the direct cause of his break with both Marxism and Freudianism. The Mass Psychology of Fascism, published a few months after Hitler became chancellor in early 1933, was denounced by the official Communist leadership as "counterrevolutionary." The official psychoanalytic movement likewise disavowed this work, and Reich was secretly expelled from the German Psychoanalytic Association in 1933.
Everyone in Germany recognized that the social base of the Nazi movement was the lower middle classes— small tradesmen, farmers, civil servants, white-collar workers. The German industrial proletariat remained loyal to the Social Democracy and, to a lesser extent, the Communist Party right up until and a good while after Hitler was appointed chancellor by the old Prussian aristocrat von Hindenburg.
Reich thus begins his famous The Mass Psychology of Fascism with an attempt at a class analysis. He maintains that children from a petty-bourgeois background are subject to a more authoritarian and sexually repressive upbringing than proletarian children. A typical German petty-bourgeois family—on the farm or running a small shop—was also an economic unit. The father was literally a boss who directed and supervised his children at work. Subjectively, a proletarian father might be as authoritarian and sexually repressive, but he had far less control over his children. He left the home for work while they went to school. In adolescence working-class children escaped into the factory, exchanging the tyranny of the family for the rigors of wage-slavery. Obviously such an analysis, even if valid, produced no useful course of action. The millions of Nazi supporters could hardly be psychoanalyzed to remove the neurotic character structure imposed by their upbringing.
A socialist revolution—if it is to be made at all—has to be made by people as they are shaped by an oppressive class society with all its deforming effects. Rejecting the possibility of progressive social struggle by such people, and positing individual psychic health as the precondition for collective political struggle for liberation, Reich was profoundly fatalistic.
In the critical year of 1923 the German petty-bourgeois masses veered sharply to the left and would have followed an aggressive Communist leadership. At that time fascist influence was marginal. Witness the almost comic-opera debacle of Hitler's "beer hall putsch" in Munich. The failure of the German Communist Party to provide genuine revolutionary leadership during the stormy years of the early 1920s left a strong residue of distrust among both the more conservative workers who supported Social Democracy and the petty-bourgeois masses, who turned to fascism under the catastrophic impact of the Great Depression.
That is not to imply that the German Communist Party in the early 1930s was helpless to prevent Hitler's eventual triumph. While Reich is highly critical of the official Communist leadership in many respects, he has little to say about the insane and suicidal policies of the so-called "third period" as laid down by Stalin. The German Communists not only opposed united-front actions with the Social Democrats to combat the fascist terror squads; they labeled the mass reformist party of the German proletariat as "social fascist" and at times treated the Social Democrats as the main enemy.
In 1934 Reich did retrospectively criticize the Communists' refusal to engage in united actions with the Social Democrats against the fascists, but he treated this as a question of third- or fourth-rate importance. One gets no sense reading The Mass Psychology of Fascism that there were millions of German workers, Social Democratic as well as Communist supporters, who were prepared to resist Hitler by civil war if necessary. On the contrary, Reich is obsessed with the "submissiveness" of the working class no less than of the petty bourgeoisie, with its respect for authority and fear of revolt:
"From (he standpoint of the psychology of the masses, Social Democracy is based on the conservative structures of its followers. As in the case of fascism, the problem here lies not so much in the policies pursued by the party leadership as it does in the psychological basis in the workers." (emphasis in original)
Within months after Reich wrote this, the Austrian working class, overwhelmingly supporters of SocialDemocracy, rose in armed insurrection against the clerical-fascist regime of Dollfuss.
In the course of writing and constantly revising The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich moved further and further from any kind of Marxism. Increasingly, a class analysis gives way to a mass-psychological approach. The terms worker and petty bourgeois are replaced by "the average unpolitical person," the proverbial man-in-the-street:
"Experience teaches that the majority of these 'nonpolitical' people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. How is this to be explained? It is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility."
At every level Reich shifts historic responsibility from political leaderships and social elites to the neurotic character structure of the masses. Paul A. Robinson, who is,generally sympathetic to Reich in his Marxist perio'd, observes that his view of fascism dovetails with that of certain German bourgeois rightists: "Ironically, Reich's mass-psychological analysis of the German problem bore a striking resemblance to the apologies of such German conservatives as Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter, who, in their anxiety to excuse the German e"lite (whether cultural, political, or military), were quick to put the blame on the hoi polloi" (The Freudian Left [1969]). In a 1942 preface to The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich accepted fascism as essentially inevitable: "'fascism' is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life." In fact, Reich's prescription for a supposedly nonrepressive society provided his own version of totalitarian Big Brother: "sexologically well-trained functionaries" to supervise sexual life "in conjunction with a central sexological agency."
Freud and Marx on Work and Love
Paul Robinson, in The Freudian Left, has stated that there was an underlying logic to Reich's break with both Freud and Marx in the mid-1930s. Freud believed that socialized man was beset by basic instinctual conflict; Marx saw civilization as it existed as funda¬mentally riven by class conflict. Reich, says Robinson, tended to regard man as naturally both sociable and productive, and therefore came to view both psychological distress and social conflict as easily and immediately solvable. Robinson concluded, "Freud and Marx may indeed have been fellow-revolutionaries, as Reich had argued in 1929, but they were also realists. Reich, on the other hand, was a romantic, as much in his politics as in his psychology."
While Robinson is probably correct about Reich, his coupling of Marx and Freud as fellow revolutionary realists is misleading. Freud was a historical pessimist; Marx was not. To understand the difference it is necessary to consider Freud's theory of instinctual conflict, or, rather, his two different theories of instinctual conflict.
Freud's original theory was the conflict between the pleasure and the reality principles. A child's striving for the immediate gratification of his needs and wants is blocked by social reality, initially represented by his parents. His desire to monopolize the affection and attention of his parents is frustrated with the birth of a sibling. His desire to defecate whenever he feels like is suppressed through toilet training. To live in society a child is taught to postpone immediate gratification. The socialized human being has learned to pursue by roundabout paths the satisfaction of his needs, especially his sexual needs.
The Marxist response to this Freudian concept is twofold. To a considerable extent we can change social reality to accommodate instinctual gratification. And to the extent there is an ineradicable tension between instinctual gratification and organized social life, why should this be a barrier to psychological well-being? Marxists have never believed that this is or can be made into the best of all possible worlds. But neither do we assume that the price of civilization is universal neurosis.
In 1920 Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which he posited the existence of innate aggression or "the death instinct." The dating of this work is anything but accidental. A mood of profound historical pessimism swept over European bourgeois intellectuals in the wake of the First World War, which shattered their seemingly stable civilization. This was especially pronounced in German-speaking Central Europe which had lost the war. Beyond the Pleasure Principle was written in the same intellectual climate as, for example, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Writing several years later to Albert Einstein, who was a pacifist, Freud maintained that a major cause of war was "a lust for aggression and destruction," that is, "the death instinct."
Freud's "discovery" of a death instinct in man was thus not simply, or even primarily, based on clinical experience with individual therapy but was rather an attempt to explain mass destruction on a political and historical plane. For Marxists, the explanation is class and national conflict ultimately rooted in economic scarcity. We thus do not accept that the human species has an inner drive toward self-destruction. Reich, incidentally, never accepted the death instinct and squarely based his own theories on the original Freudian concept of the pleasure versus reality principles.
Freud's most developed and comprehensive statement of historical pessimism is Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930. Reich maintained this work was a direct response to his own views. Whether or not this is the case, it does contain a polemic against communists, to whom Freud attributes the view that "man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature." In opposition to this he insists "that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man...."Therefore he concludes that even the most radical and far-reaching changes in social institutions cannot alter the human psyche:
"If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there."
However, even if we set aside the concept of innate aggression and "the death instinct," Freud still remains a historical pessimist toward the goals of communism. He was convinced there was a fundamental conflict between the enjoyment of sexual love and the work effort needed to create and sustain civilization. "When a love-relationship is at its height," he wrote, "there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have in common to make them happy." By contrast, he maintained:
"... as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems."
What kind of work is Freud here talking about-plowing a field in the broiling sun,operating a machine on an assembly line, typing business letters at a hundred words a minute? Naturally people don't strive after this kind of work as a path to happiness.
The debate between Reich and Freud in the late 1920s over love and work was scholastic in the sense that the vast majority of people have neither the option of a rich, fulfilling sexual life nor of creative, self-expressing work. Most people have to do dull, tiring and often body-destroying labor. It is entirely illegitimate to speculate about communist man on the basis of the few, exceptional, creative individuals—a Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin or Sigmund Freud—in oppressive, class-divided society. At the same time, most people cannot lead a gratifying erotic life. This is prevented not simply by repressive laws, ideologies (e.g., religion) and mores but also by basic economic factors—being physically exhausted after long hours of labor; youth forced to live with their parents long after puberty; the practical burdens of raising children.
For the Communist Future
Marx and Engels did not counterpose human nature to civilization, the individual to society. The individual's capacity for gratification and fulfillment is based upon the development and wealth of society. The oppression and degradation of the individual in class society has its roots in economic scarcity, ultimately in man's lack of sufficient control over nature, including his own nature:
"...it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 'Liberation' is an historical and not a mental act—"
—Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (1845-46)
It is this understanding which separates Marxism from the radical advocates of sexual liberation here and now.
Only under communism, when people have access to creative work and a rich erotic life, will it be possible to determine the relation between these two spheres of human activity. Is work always and necessarily a deflection of sexual energy as Freud believed? Or is a satisfying love life in the long run a necessary condition for work capacity as Reich insisted? Let's create a society in which we can find out.
The great 19th century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui had little patience for the disputes among the Utopian radicals of his day. He once wrote that the debate between Cabet and Proudhon over the future ideal organization of society is like two men who "stand by a river bank, quarrelling over whether the field on the other side is wheat or rye. Let us cross and see."
March Is Women's History Month
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Winter 1986-87 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest, for old "new leftists", perhaps. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
Additionally, when the issue of sex comes up, as it does in various disguises even in the left labor movement, I like to remind militants of the following. The left labor movement has set its main task among the three great human tragedies: hunger, sex, and death as the struggle against hunger. I like to remember the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, and his words about his hope that once the struggle against hunger is victorious and that condition is overcome in our communist future sex and death will be less frightening and perilous. From personal experience, I sure hope so.
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Fourier's Phalanx, Reich's Sex-Pol:
The Trouble with Sexual Utopias
By Jack Shapiro
"It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of 'free love' comes in to the foreground. With one set of people as a revolutionary progress, as a shaking off of old traditional fetters, no longer necessary; with others as a welcome doctrine, comfortably covering all sorts of free and easy practices between man and woman," Frederick Engels noted in an article on the biblical "Book of Revelation" (printed in Progress: A Monthly Magazine of Advanced Thought, Vol. 1.2, 1883). Certainly the early, pre-Marxian socialists projected in elaborate detail what life, including sexual life, would be like in their ideal society of the future. The New Left of the 1960s, too, revived a radicalism centering on changing lifestyles. Herbert Marcuse, for example, criticized Marx as insufficiently radical for not directly linking the overthrow of capitalism to individual sexual fulfillment. Marx and Engels adamantly refused to engage in speculation on this question, however, insisting that their position was essentially negative, aimed at eliminating economic and social coercion in personal relations. As Engels stated in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884):
"Thus, what we can conjecture at present about the regulation of sex relationships after the impending efracement of capitalist production is, in the main, of a negative character, limited mostly to what will vanish. But what will be added? That will be settled after a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in all their lives have had occasion to purchase a woman's surrender either with money or with any other means of social power; and of women who have never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any consideration other than that of real love, or to refrain from giving themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences. Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about what we today think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each individual—and that's the end of it."
This position was not a matter of intellectual modesty on Marx's or Engels' part. Rather it flowed organically from the dialectical materialist outlook. Under communism people will be genuinely and truly free to reshape their interpersonal relations. Of course, this freedom is not absolute. Man cannot transcend his biological make-up and relation to the natural environment. Communist man, too, will grow old and die. Neither can mankind sweep the slate totally clean and build society anew. Communist humanity will inherit for good and ill the accumulated cultural heritage of our species:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and trans¬mitted from the past.
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851)
Nonetheless, men do make their own history, including the history of their sexual practices. We cannot know the sexual practices of communist society because these will be determined in the future. Any attempt to project, much less to prescribe, such sexual practices is an expression of attitudes, values and prejudices shaped by a repressive class society.
Consider two representative figures who sought to combine socialism with a positive program of sexual libertarianism: Charles Fourier and Wilhelm Reich. One of the greatest of the early socialist thinkers, Fourier developed a program for an ideal community— the phalanx—which would gratify all human passions. Wilhelm Reich, as a member of the Austrian and then German Communist parties in the late 1920s-early 1930s, attempted to fuse Marx and Freud both in theory and in practice.
Fourier and Reich were passionate and often insightful in denouncing the sexual repressiveness of bourgeois society. Yet as soon as they sought to positively prescribe codes of presumably liberated social/sexual relations, they went off the rails. They believed they knew what "human nature" is, but their efforts to establish lifestyles appropriate for free men of the future only shows that Fourier and Reich each brought to the notion of "human nature" a lot of the ideological baggage of his own particular time and circumstances, shaped by repressive, class-divided society. Fourier's phalanx, to eliminate sexual frustration, would institute mechanisms of sexual slavery. And Reich's "non-repressive" society would have sexual activities monitored by a central agency of bureaucrats.
Fourier: A Utopia Based on Passionate Attraction
Fourier described himself as being "born and raised in the mercantile shops." He existed in the netherworld of French commerce (traveling salesman, correspon¬dence clerk for an American firm, unlicensed stock¬broker). While never absolutely destitute, Fourier knew poverty. He lived in cheap travelers' pensions, boarding houses, dingy apartments. He was a recluse and may well have been a life-long celibate. Added to his personal isolation was his political isolation. His first work calling for the total reorganization of society was published in 1808. For the next 20 years he was totally ignored, a prophet unhonored and unacknowledged. Only in the last decade of his life did Fourier attract a small band of devoted followers. Fourier's was a lonely and miserable life. In his ideas of Utopia one sees the pent-up longings of this deeply frustrated man. This gives to his vision its passionate force and imaginative vividness. It also accounts for his fantastical and often downright weird ideas.
In this age of Penthouse and "adult" home videos, it is easy to be condescending toward old Fourier. Yet this neurotic dreamer was a towering figure in the struggle for social and sexual emancipation. Early in the 19th century it became apparent to those still committed to the ideals of the French Revolution that liberty, equality and fraternity were not compatible with private property in a competitive market economy. Fourier, the most incisive of the pioneer socialists, noted, "Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized society liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations" (quoted in Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu [Eds.], The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier [1971]).
The status of women represented the most acute and manifest expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. The importance Fourier gave to women's liberation is exemplified in his famous statement:
"Social progress and changes of period are brought about by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a result of a
diminution in the liberty of women In summary, the
extension of the privileges of women is the fundamen¬tal cause of all social progress." —Ibid.
At a time when women were universally regarded and treated as nothing more than babymakers, Fourier championed not only complete social and political equality for women but also their right to sexual fulfillment. He was uniquely responsible for making the demand for the liberation of women from the oppressive nuclear family an integral part of the socialist program, a penetrating insight which the young Marx and Engels embraced. At a time when fathers exercised total authority over their families, especially their daughters, Fourier spoke for the freedom of children.
Even today reading Fourier would give Jerry Falwell or Pope John Paul Wojtyla apoplexy. He exposed the sexual boredom of monogamous marriage with a hitherto unheard-of savagery:
"This is the normal way of life among the mass of the people. Dullened, morose couples who quarrel all day long are reconciled to each other on the bolster be¬cause they cannot afford two beds, and contact, the sudden pin-prick of the senses, triumphs for a moment over conjugal satiety. If this is love it is the most material and the most trivial."
—quoted in Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (1962)
He flayed the petty tyranny of the patriarchal family, especially the stifling of the sexual needs of children and adolescents:
"The children at the age of puberty think only of escaping the insipidity of the household: the young girl lives only for an evening when she is at a ball; the young man, preoccupied with parties, returns to his paternal home as to a place of exile. As to the children below the age of puberty, they are not satisfied except when they manage to escape the eye of the father and the eye of the tutor to enjoy everything that is forbidden to them."
—quoted in Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Teaching of Charles Fourier (1969)
Fourier's Phalanx: Outlawing Sexual Frustration
Fourier's answer to the repressiveness of bourgeois civilization was a system called Harmony, based on the phalanx. The phalanx was a basically self-contained social and economic unit of approximately 1,700 people. It would contain roughly two each of 810 basic psychological types. This would insure the necessary variety and complementarities. Life in a Fourierist phalanx is attractive. All work is voluntary and not for monetary reward. There is a great deal of sexual freedom and variety. Children especially are intended to enjoy life in a phalanx. They would be subject to little parental or other authority, and would spend most of the day with peer groups (the Little Bands and Little Hordes). Returning to the bosom of his parents at night, the child is overwhelmed with love and affection.
Yet Fourier's Utopia has oppressive and sexually abusive features. Fourier believed that homosexuality, both male and female, would disappear under his system of the phalanx. In the phalanx, "harmonious armies" of young men and women would engage in nonviolent warfare. The losers would for a brief time serve as slaves to the victors. These youthful captives would be expected to meet the sexual needs of older members of the phalanx so that "no age capable of love is frustrated in its desire." Fourier's difficulties arise from two interrelated factors: the problem of work and the guarantee of sexual satisfaction, not merely the pursuit of such happiness as Thomas Jefferson (Fouri¬er's older contemporary) put it in the American Declaration of Independence.
In the Fourierist phalanx, work is not only voluntary but positively pleasurable as well as more productive than under capitalism: "in a societary state varied work will become a source of varied pleasures."Yet this work is crude manual labor, mainly agricultural. One of the great advances of scientific socialism (Marxism) was the understanding that technological progress, which under capitalism is used by the ruling class to further enslave and immiserate the working people, will when freed from the fetter of private property provide the material basis for human freedom.
Fourier, with his passion for mathematical exactitude, projects that the phalanx economy will be four-fifths agriculture and one-fifth manufacturing. And by manufacturing he means literally production by hand: "The industrial revolution passes Fourier by; he failed completely to appreciate its significance.... [Division of labor meant to him the simple form well illustrated in market-gardening, not the complex form associated with the machine technique" (E.S. Mason, "Fourier and Anarchism," Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1928).
The pre-industrial nature of Fourier's Utopia is not simply a reflection of the relative economic backward¬ness of France in his day. His great French contempo¬rary Henri de Saint-Simon projected a socialized system based on continual technological progress. Fourier, however, deliberately rejected this program: "The Saint-Simonian vision, as well as the subsequent Marxist dream, of mechanized socialist mankind wresting a bountiful living from a stingy and hostile environment would have seemed a horrible nightmare of rapine to Fourier, for he knew that the natural destiny of the globe was to become a horticultural paradise, an ever-varying English garden" (Introduction to Beecher and Bienvenu [Eds.], The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier). In addition Fourier feared that, scientists and technical experts would exercise a new guardianship over society, establishing a new theocracy.
Given the primitive nature of work in the phalanx, Fourier could only offer variety, satisfying the "butterfly passion" to flit from one thing to another. In a typi¬cal day a member of the phalanx would care for the animals, engage in forestry, vegetable gardening, beekeeping and so on. Nicholas Riasanovsky, himself a sympathetic student of Fourier's doctrines, has nonetheless pointed out: "In general Charles Fourier's promise of most enthusiastic and most fruitful work by all in Harmony has aroused much skepticism— [Sjwitching in rapid succession from one unpleasant job to another would hardly improve anyone's productivity."
Marx's view of work is directly counterposed to Fourier's. For Marx, socialist economic planning would lead to a fully automated economy in which the "human factor is restricted to watching and supervising the production process" (Crundn'sse). Work then becomes increasingly creative artistic and scientific activity. At the same time, Marx insisted: "This does not mean that work can be made merely a joke, or amusement, as Fourier naively expressed it in shop-girl terms. Really free work, the composing of music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort" (ibid.). We see here the difference between the Rousseauian and the Marxist outlooks. For Fourier, happiness meant a return to the spontaneous playfulness of childhood. Marx recognized that mankind had developed a real need to fully utilize and extend all its capacities. Artistic and scientific work is not and cannot be made fun in the sense that sex, eating good food and playing games are fun. But this kind of work has also become an object of passionate attraction.
It is not true, as Riasanovsky implies, that Fourier offered no motivation for enthusiastic work effort in the phalanx. In part, he solved this problem in his usual manner: by asserting that there is a psychological type in sufficient numbers to perform any and every needed social role. Who, for example, would do dirty work like collecting the garbage and spreading manure on the fields? Fourier's answer—little boys:
"Two-thirds of all boys have a penchant for filth. They love to wallow in the mire and play with dirty things— These children will enroll in the Little Hordes whose task it is to perform, dauntlessly and as a point of honor, all those loathsome tasks that ordinary workers would find debasing."
—Beecner and Bienvenu, op cit.
Fourier himself was city born and bred and so sentimentalized rural life. Children actually raised on farms, who have milked cows at 4 a.m. and slopped the pigs, can hardly wait to escape to urban civilization.
More fundamentally and generally, Fourier replaced money with sex as a reward for work effort. Sexually integrated work groups (the series) were to be an occasion for amorous dalliance. The connection between sexual fulfillment and work effort is especially clear and important in the recruitment and maintenance of industrial armies, huge bodies of tens of thousands which would clear new land, drain swamps, build dams and the like. Accompanying these industrial armies would be beautiful virgins (!) (the Vestals) of both sexes. Work performance in the industrial army would be the primary form of courtship: "the female Vestal is surrounded by her suitors, and she can watch them displaying their talents in the work sessions and the public games of the army." One can hardly imagine work conditions better designed to create anxiety and frustration than this intense, public sexual competition.
Nonetheless, Fourier assures us that the rejected suitors would not suffer sexual frustration. Indeed, eliminating sexual frustration is a basic principle of Harmony. Also accompanying the industrial armies are young women and men (the Bacchantes and Bacchants) who freely give their sexual favors to those wounded in love. Thus this passionate believer in women's equality is led by the logic of his system to project a class of free whores to meet the sexual needs of men. Fourier of course insisted: "Most women of twenty-five have a temperament suited to this role, which will then become a noble one." At the same time, he chastises attractive women who want a life¬long monogamous relation with their loved one:
"What is reason in the state of harmony? It is the employment of any method which multiplies relationships and satisfies a great number of individuals without injuring anybody. A beautiful woman operates in contradiction of this rule if she wants to remain faithful and to belong exclusively to one man all her life. She might have contributed to the happiness of ten thousand men in thirty years of philanthropic service, leaving fond memories behind among these ten thousand."
—quoted in Manuel, op cit.
Sexual libertarianism here becomes its opposite: social pressure toward promiscuity in the name of satisfying everyone's desires.
Sexual coercion outright enters Harmony through the problem of old people, something Fourier felt keenly. He once wrote, "life, after the end of love affairs, is nothing but a prison to which one becomes more or less adjusted according to the favors of fortune." Fourier was realistic enough to recognize that while old people still sexually desired the young, the reverse was not usually the case. His system therefore contains elaborate measures to solve this problem. As we have seen, the youthful captives in the nonviolent war games serve for a short while as slaves to older members of the phalanx. Sexually servicing the aged was also a penalty for transgressing the rules of Harmony. While Fourier's Utopia contains what we would call open marriage, there are also by mutual consent monogamous relations. If one partner in these engages in secret infidelity, he is brought before a "court of love." To expiate this transgression, he orshe may be sentenced to a few nights with older members of the phalanx.
Fourier's "ideal" society was certainly shaped by his own neurotic idiosyncracies. But his views also directly reflect the assumptions of his time. Fourier (and Reich)held that human passions or, in Freudian terms, instinctual drives, were unchanging and unchangeable. Fourier and, more narrowly and dogmatically, Reich believed they knew what was natural and healthy sexuality and what was depravity and perversion. Their program was to adjust social institutions around an emotional make-up conceived as unvarying. Fourier wrote to his disciple Victor ConsideVant: "I am the only reformer who has rallied round human nature by accepting it as it is and devising the means of utilizing it with all the defects which are inseparable from man."
Fourier and Reich belong to the intellectual tradition of Enlightenment naturalism, whose greatest represen¬tative was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Late in life Rousseau wrote that all his doctrines were based on the "great principle that nature made man happy and good, but that society depraves him and makes him miserable." Fourier constantly counterposes the happy and natural man in the phalanx society to the artificial and miserable creature of existent civilization. For Reich, the Freudian concept of id corresponds to Rousseau's "state of nature," man not yet depraved by repressive civilization.
Social Utopias based on Rousseauian naturalism have an inherent tendency toward totalitarianism. If man is naturally good, then "unnatural" social orders can be maintained only through false ideas and ideologies (e.g., religion). Fourier insisted that a society based on the phalanx could have been established any time in the past two millennia—if only someone had thought of it before. Social liberation thus becomes a struggle against bad ideas—rooting them out and preventing recontamination.
The first attempt to establish a Fourierist phalanx was made in what is now Romania in the 1830s by a noble landowner for his serfs. Local Moral Majority types were outraged and launched an armed attack to destroy the phalanx. The peasants valiantly defended their "free love" commune though in the end they were overwhelmed by superior force. The Socialist Republic of Romania has built a historical monument to commemorate the last stand of the Fourierist peasants of Scani.
Wilhelm Reich's Sex-Pol
Wilhelm Reich died in 1957 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania federal penitentiary. He was imprisoned for violating a court order on a charge brought by the Food and Drug Administration that he had transported an empty box, the Orgone Energy Accumulator, across state lines. Medically, Reich had become a quack. Politically he was a rabid red-baiter, an outspoken supporter of McCarthyism.
Yet a quarter century earlier, Wilhelm Reich had attempted to fuse Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Reich was simultaneously a member of Freud's inner circle of followers and of the German Communist Party, a mass workers party, at a critical moment in modern history: the rise to power of Nazism. In the 1960s the New Left rediscovered the early Reich and made him into a minor cult figure. A selection of his writings between 1929 and 1934, entitled Sex-Pol, was published in English in 1966, edited by Lee Baxandall of the defunct Studies on the Left. An introduction by Marxoid academic Bertell Oilman declared: "The revolutionary potential of Reich's teachings is as great as ever—perhaps greater, now that sex is accepted as a subject for serious discussion and complaint virtually everywhere."
Many of the activities of Reich and his supporters (who called themselves the Sex-Pol movement) within the Austrian and German Communist parties were entirely commendable. They agitated against sexually repressive legislation and campaigned for the greater economic independence of youth. The Reichian clinics in Vienna and Berlin provided working-class youth with information about contraception and preventing venereal disease, and doubtless performed useful individual counseling. Some of his early writings on character analysis and "body language" remain today standard texts for practicing analysts. Reich became attracted to Marxism by his work in the free psychoanalytic clinic in Vienna, where he became convinced that poverty and oppression contributed to neuroses, and thus that their cure demanded the restructuring of society.
In a 1932 work written for the German Communist Party's youth group he concluded: "In capitalist society there can be no sexual liberation of youth, no healthy, satisfying sex life; if you want to be rid of your sexual troubles, fight for socialism. Only through socialism can you achieve sexual joie de vivre.... Socialism will putan end to the power of those who gaze up toward heaven as they speak of love while they crush and destroy the sexuality of youth." This bouncy, bombastic rhetoric endeared Reich to the New Left. Rejecting the Marxist understanding that sexual life is essentially a private matter, Reich insisted that the Communist movement must struggle for a "satisfying sex life" both for its own members and for society at large.
Reich's basic message can be baldly stated as follows. The sexual repression practiced by the patriarchal, nuclear family (e.g., preventing children from masturbating) produces submissive adults, fearful of bour¬geois authority. Thus the struggle against sexual repression—itself a deep-felt source of discontent throughout society—is of strategic importance in releasing the revolutionary energy of the masses.
In opposition to orthodox Freudianism, Reich refused to accept the patriarchal, nuclear family as a cultural given. The Oedipus complex, the frustrated desire of a child to possess the parent of the opposite sex, he wrote,
"must disappear in a socialist society because its social basis—the patriarchal family—will itself disappear, having lost its raison d'etre. Communal upbringing, which forms part of the socialist program, will be so unfavorable to the forming of psychological attitudes as they exist within the family today—the relationship of children to one another and to the persons who bring them up will be so much more many-sided, complex and dynamic—that the Oedipus complex with its specific content of desiring the mother and wishing to destroy the father as a rival will lose its meaning."
—"Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" (1929)
Reich's particular recipe for "a satisfying sex life" was rigid and bizarre. At the core of his psychoanalytic theory was the function of the orgasm as the sole release for dammed up sexual energy. The failure of the orgasm to perform this function produced mental illness. He maintained that orgastic impotency was the sole cause of all neurotic and psychotic behavior.
Reich's fellow psychoanalysts objected that many neurotics had quite normal sex lives. But, to paraphrase George Orwell, for Reich some orgasms are more equal than others. To fulfill its function an orgasm must be heterosexual, without irrelevant fantasies and of sufficient duration:
"Orgastic potency is the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the damned-up [sic] sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body.'
—The Function of the Orgasm (1927)
In 1939 Reich invented the Orgone Energy Field Meter to measure sexual energy and its discharge. He had long since abandoned both Marx and Freud for the realms of science fiction.
Reich's reasoning is circular. He hypothesizes that mental illness is produced by undischarged sexual energy. But, since the latter is unmeasurable, he then deduces genital incapacity from psychological distress: "Not a single neurotic is orgastically potent, and the character structure of the overwhelming majority of me'n and women are neurotic." The psychoanalyst thus becomes the supreme arbiter of sexual health and unhealth. This opens the door to subjective arbitrari¬ness and outright bigotry.
For example, Reich maintained the orthodox Freudian position that homosexuality is arrested development, the failure of the child to overcome primary narcissism and develop love objects outside himself. He went further than Freud and also identified homosexuality with political reaction:
"The more clearly developed the natural heterosexual inclinations of a juvenile are, the more open he will be to revolutionary ideas; the stronger the homosexual tendency within him and also the more repressed his awareness of sexuality in general, the more easily he will be drawn toward the right."
—"What is Class Consciousness?" (1934)
His New Left admirers understandably turn a blind eye to this aspect of Reich's sexual theories. (To its credit, the Sex-Pol movement continued to call for an end to state laws against homosexuality.)
Like Fourier, Reich's view of what people are "really" like was shaped by the particularities of his time. Reich's brief career in the Communist movement coincided with the greatest defeat for the world proletariat in modern history: the triumph of fascism in Germany, then the strongest industrial power in Europe. Reich's analysis of Nazism was his only effort to apply his theories to a contemporary political problem—and the results are revealing.
Reich's response to Hitler's coming to power was the direct cause of his break with both Marxism and Freudianism. The Mass Psychology of Fascism, published a few months after Hitler became chancellor in early 1933, was denounced by the official Communist leadership as "counterrevolutionary." The official psychoanalytic movement likewise disavowed this work, and Reich was secretly expelled from the German Psychoanalytic Association in 1933.
Everyone in Germany recognized that the social base of the Nazi movement was the lower middle classes— small tradesmen, farmers, civil servants, white-collar workers. The German industrial proletariat remained loyal to the Social Democracy and, to a lesser extent, the Communist Party right up until and a good while after Hitler was appointed chancellor by the old Prussian aristocrat von Hindenburg.
Reich thus begins his famous The Mass Psychology of Fascism with an attempt at a class analysis. He maintains that children from a petty-bourgeois background are subject to a more authoritarian and sexually repressive upbringing than proletarian children. A typical German petty-bourgeois family—on the farm or running a small shop—was also an economic unit. The father was literally a boss who directed and supervised his children at work. Subjectively, a proletarian father might be as authoritarian and sexually repressive, but he had far less control over his children. He left the home for work while they went to school. In adolescence working-class children escaped into the factory, exchanging the tyranny of the family for the rigors of wage-slavery. Obviously such an analysis, even if valid, produced no useful course of action. The millions of Nazi supporters could hardly be psychoanalyzed to remove the neurotic character structure imposed by their upbringing.
A socialist revolution—if it is to be made at all—has to be made by people as they are shaped by an oppressive class society with all its deforming effects. Rejecting the possibility of progressive social struggle by such people, and positing individual psychic health as the precondition for collective political struggle for liberation, Reich was profoundly fatalistic.
In the critical year of 1923 the German petty-bourgeois masses veered sharply to the left and would have followed an aggressive Communist leadership. At that time fascist influence was marginal. Witness the almost comic-opera debacle of Hitler's "beer hall putsch" in Munich. The failure of the German Communist Party to provide genuine revolutionary leadership during the stormy years of the early 1920s left a strong residue of distrust among both the more conservative workers who supported Social Democracy and the petty-bourgeois masses, who turned to fascism under the catastrophic impact of the Great Depression.
That is not to imply that the German Communist Party in the early 1930s was helpless to prevent Hitler's eventual triumph. While Reich is highly critical of the official Communist leadership in many respects, he has little to say about the insane and suicidal policies of the so-called "third period" as laid down by Stalin. The German Communists not only opposed united-front actions with the Social Democrats to combat the fascist terror squads; they labeled the mass reformist party of the German proletariat as "social fascist" and at times treated the Social Democrats as the main enemy.
In 1934 Reich did retrospectively criticize the Communists' refusal to engage in united actions with the Social Democrats against the fascists, but he treated this as a question of third- or fourth-rate importance. One gets no sense reading The Mass Psychology of Fascism that there were millions of German workers, Social Democratic as well as Communist supporters, who were prepared to resist Hitler by civil war if necessary. On the contrary, Reich is obsessed with the "submissiveness" of the working class no less than of the petty bourgeoisie, with its respect for authority and fear of revolt:
"From (he standpoint of the psychology of the masses, Social Democracy is based on the conservative structures of its followers. As in the case of fascism, the problem here lies not so much in the policies pursued by the party leadership as it does in the psychological basis in the workers." (emphasis in original)
Within months after Reich wrote this, the Austrian working class, overwhelmingly supporters of SocialDemocracy, rose in armed insurrection against the clerical-fascist regime of Dollfuss.
In the course of writing and constantly revising The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich moved further and further from any kind of Marxism. Increasingly, a class analysis gives way to a mass-psychological approach. The terms worker and petty bourgeois are replaced by "the average unpolitical person," the proverbial man-in-the-street:
"Experience teaches that the majority of these 'nonpolitical' people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. How is this to be explained? It is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility."
At every level Reich shifts historic responsibility from political leaderships and social elites to the neurotic character structure of the masses. Paul A. Robinson, who is,generally sympathetic to Reich in his Marxist perio'd, observes that his view of fascism dovetails with that of certain German bourgeois rightists: "Ironically, Reich's mass-psychological analysis of the German problem bore a striking resemblance to the apologies of such German conservatives as Friedrich Meinecke and Gerhard Ritter, who, in their anxiety to excuse the German e"lite (whether cultural, political, or military), were quick to put the blame on the hoi polloi" (The Freudian Left [1969]). In a 1942 preface to The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich accepted fascism as essentially inevitable: "'fascism' is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life." In fact, Reich's prescription for a supposedly nonrepressive society provided his own version of totalitarian Big Brother: "sexologically well-trained functionaries" to supervise sexual life "in conjunction with a central sexological agency."
Freud and Marx on Work and Love
Paul Robinson, in The Freudian Left, has stated that there was an underlying logic to Reich's break with both Freud and Marx in the mid-1930s. Freud believed that socialized man was beset by basic instinctual conflict; Marx saw civilization as it existed as funda¬mentally riven by class conflict. Reich, says Robinson, tended to regard man as naturally both sociable and productive, and therefore came to view both psychological distress and social conflict as easily and immediately solvable. Robinson concluded, "Freud and Marx may indeed have been fellow-revolutionaries, as Reich had argued in 1929, but they were also realists. Reich, on the other hand, was a romantic, as much in his politics as in his psychology."
While Robinson is probably correct about Reich, his coupling of Marx and Freud as fellow revolutionary realists is misleading. Freud was a historical pessimist; Marx was not. To understand the difference it is necessary to consider Freud's theory of instinctual conflict, or, rather, his two different theories of instinctual conflict.
Freud's original theory was the conflict between the pleasure and the reality principles. A child's striving for the immediate gratification of his needs and wants is blocked by social reality, initially represented by his parents. His desire to monopolize the affection and attention of his parents is frustrated with the birth of a sibling. His desire to defecate whenever he feels like is suppressed through toilet training. To live in society a child is taught to postpone immediate gratification. The socialized human being has learned to pursue by roundabout paths the satisfaction of his needs, especially his sexual needs.
The Marxist response to this Freudian concept is twofold. To a considerable extent we can change social reality to accommodate instinctual gratification. And to the extent there is an ineradicable tension between instinctual gratification and organized social life, why should this be a barrier to psychological well-being? Marxists have never believed that this is or can be made into the best of all possible worlds. But neither do we assume that the price of civilization is universal neurosis.
In 1920 Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which he posited the existence of innate aggression or "the death instinct." The dating of this work is anything but accidental. A mood of profound historical pessimism swept over European bourgeois intellectuals in the wake of the First World War, which shattered their seemingly stable civilization. This was especially pronounced in German-speaking Central Europe which had lost the war. Beyond the Pleasure Principle was written in the same intellectual climate as, for example, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Writing several years later to Albert Einstein, who was a pacifist, Freud maintained that a major cause of war was "a lust for aggression and destruction," that is, "the death instinct."
Freud's "discovery" of a death instinct in man was thus not simply, or even primarily, based on clinical experience with individual therapy but was rather an attempt to explain mass destruction on a political and historical plane. For Marxists, the explanation is class and national conflict ultimately rooted in economic scarcity. We thus do not accept that the human species has an inner drive toward self-destruction. Reich, incidentally, never accepted the death instinct and squarely based his own theories on the original Freudian concept of the pleasure versus reality principles.
Freud's most developed and comprehensive statement of historical pessimism is Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930. Reich maintained this work was a direct response to his own views. Whether or not this is the case, it does contain a polemic against communists, to whom Freud attributes the view that "man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature." In opposition to this he insists "that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man...."Therefore he concludes that even the most radical and far-reaching changes in social institutions cannot alter the human psyche:
"If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there."
However, even if we set aside the concept of innate aggression and "the death instinct," Freud still remains a historical pessimist toward the goals of communism. He was convinced there was a fundamental conflict between the enjoyment of sexual love and the work effort needed to create and sustain civilization. "When a love-relationship is at its height," he wrote, "there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have in common to make them happy." By contrast, he maintained:
"... as a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems."
What kind of work is Freud here talking about-plowing a field in the broiling sun,operating a machine on an assembly line, typing business letters at a hundred words a minute? Naturally people don't strive after this kind of work as a path to happiness.
The debate between Reich and Freud in the late 1920s over love and work was scholastic in the sense that the vast majority of people have neither the option of a rich, fulfilling sexual life nor of creative, self-expressing work. Most people have to do dull, tiring and often body-destroying labor. It is entirely illegitimate to speculate about communist man on the basis of the few, exceptional, creative individuals—a Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin or Sigmund Freud—in oppressive, class-divided society. At the same time, most people cannot lead a gratifying erotic life. This is prevented not simply by repressive laws, ideologies (e.g., religion) and mores but also by basic economic factors—being physically exhausted after long hours of labor; youth forced to live with their parents long after puberty; the practical burdens of raising children.
For the Communist Future
Marx and Engels did not counterpose human nature to civilization, the individual to society. The individual's capacity for gratification and fulfillment is based upon the development and wealth of society. The oppression and degradation of the individual in class society has its roots in economic scarcity, ultimately in man's lack of sufficient control over nature, including his own nature:
"...it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. 'Liberation' is an historical and not a mental act—"
—Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (1845-46)
It is this understanding which separates Marxism from the radical advocates of sexual liberation here and now.
Only under communism, when people have access to creative work and a rich erotic life, will it be possible to determine the relation between these two spheres of human activity. Is work always and necessarily a deflection of sexual energy as Freud believed? Or is a satisfying love life in the long run a necessary condition for work capacity as Reich insisted? Let's create a society in which we can find out.
The great 19th century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui had little patience for the disputes among the Utopian radicals of his day. He once wrote that the debate between Cabet and Proudhon over the future ideal organization of society is like two men who "stand by a river bank, quarrelling over whether the field on the other side is wheat or rye. Let us cross and see."
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