Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Free Hugo Pinell Now!
We print below a letter sent by the Partisan Defense Committee to the California Board of Parole Hearings on 24 December 2010. Hugo Pinell, a recipient of PDC stipends for class-war prisoners, has a parole hearing scheduled for January 11. We urge our readers to send letters demanding Pinell’s release to Robert Doyle, Chairman, California Board of Parole Hearings, P.O. Box 4036, Sacramento, CA 95812-4036.
The Partisan Defense Committee writes in support of the release of Hugo L.A. Pinell. Mr. Pinell has been turned down for parole numerous times despite many letters of support and no disciplinary write-ups for over 28 years. At one of these hearings, a commissioner berated Mr. Pinell saying “you continue to show no remorse…” This is a common ruse for denying parole for political prisoners. Mr. Pinell has no reason for “remorse” for his commendable political convictions.
This courageous political prisoner has now spent over 45 years in incarceration, 20 of them in the notoriously repressive Pelican Bay Special Housing Unit in Crescent City. There he is subjected to high-tech sensory deprivation: 23 to 24 hours a day in a small cell, no windows, no natural light, no contact visits and prolonged isolation. This cruel and unusual punishment must stop.
Mr. Pinell was well known to prison officials as an anti-racist leader of prison-rights organizing in the 1960s and ’70s. Along with five others, known as the San Quentin Six, Mr. Pinell was framed up on charges stemming from the protests that followed the assassination of George Jackson by prison guards in August 1971. The last of the San Quentin Six still in prison, Mr. Pinell remains incarcerated for one, and only one reason: he remains true to his vision of a society finally rid of racist oppression.
At his last hearing, the Board vindictively overstepped their bounds and illegally attempted to deny Mr. Pinell another parole hearing for fifteen years. We demand the abuse by the parole board cease and that Mr. Pinell be released immediately and unconditionally.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-In Defense of Marxism and Science
Markin comment:
It would seem impossible that in the early years of the 21st century as we are now deep into the age of the Internet, instant communications, and about twelve million other discoveries, inventions and human-made technological delights (stuff way beyond the capacity of god to understand never mind create) that we still would be fighting the now hoary battle between science and superstition (religious, mainly, but other forms as well). Under any circumstances. But we are, and we will continue to do as an elementary duty. In fact, although we will have our share of “angel” believers as the Bolsheviks did in the early days of their revolution, we cannot be successful in making the American socialist revolution until we can break a critical mass of the working class and their allies from that dependence. Simple, right? I wish, but I will take my chances with the scientific method any day.
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Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
In Defense of Marxism and Science
We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by T. Marlow of the Spartacist League at a Chicago forum last July 24.
When the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace went to present a copy of his treatise on celestial mechanics to Napoleon, the latter is said to have stated: “M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace replied, “I had no need for that hypothesis.”
Two centuries later, any American politician caught on tape saying something like that would never be able to run for dogcatcher, let alone the Senate or presidency. The U.S. is peculiar among the advanced industrial countries in its level of religiosity—over three-fourths of respondents in an AP poll said they believed in angels. Worse still is an increase in the rejection of scientific thinking, from the millions seeking miracle cures from a panoply of snake-oil vendors to a politically cohesive and dangerous sector of religious fundamentalists out to turn the U.S. into a theocracy. I am not referring to the demented followers of Osama bin Laden. I am speaking of the Christian right, which has abortion and evolution as focus points of attack.
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels state: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Well, we have a ruling class that could be described as drunk with power. The collapse of Stalinism in East Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-92 was a world-historic defeat for the working class of the world. The American bourgeoisie declared the “death of Communism,” and even the “end of history.” With military power far greater than any of their imperialist rivals in Europe or Japan, the U.S. rulers have acted with little restraint on their predatory desires, as in Iraq and Afghanistan and recently in Haiti.
At the same time, the consciousness of the proletariat has been thrown back so far that even advanced workers and others involved in social struggle no longer identify their goal as building a socialist society. In the U.S. in particular, there is the question of race: black oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism; the notion of black people as being inferior, which survives to this day, was the ideological counterpart to black chattel slavery. America is if anything more segregated than 25 years ago.
Especially since the September 11 attacks, the “war on terror” has been used to beat the working class into submission and squelch opposition to the predations of U.S. imperialism across the globe. It is not just the linguistically challenged George W. Bush—Obama was made Commander-in-Chief in part to give the image of U.S. imperialism a needed facelift. But smoother words have not changed American military rampaging in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the extension of police-state measures at home. The American ruling class sees no reason why it cannot continue to literally get away with murder.
In these circumstances it is no wonder that religious reaction is ascendant and even the rationalism of the Enlightenment of the 18th century is under attack. You don’t have to be a Marxist to oppose things like creationism, but without a Marxist program you have no way out of the impasse in which society finds itself. Society is rent by class struggle, legal and extralegal, as the bourgeoisie seeks ever greater profit from the exploitation of labor and workers resist. As Marx showed, there is a fundamental contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and the further advance of productive forces. The rule of capital must be smashed by the working class, organized and led by a revolutionary Trotskyist party.
Part of the process of building that party is to educate the proletariat as to its historic role and responsibility for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. That means a Marxist understanding of society, and that in turn means an understanding of the work of science and its defense against the purveyors of mystical and medieval rubbish. So first we have to review a bit of history.
The Middle Ages and Renaissance
The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the birth of Leonardo da Vinci in 1452 (or the victorious siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks a year later) marked about a thousand years. That’s about one-fifth of the entire history of human civilization since the first example of writing (the cuneiform tablets of southern Mesopotamia from about 3000 BC). In West Europe this period is called the Middle or Dark Ages. Not coincidentally, the dominant political and economic institution in this period was the Roman Catholic church. Along with the nobility, the church was a major landowner. The vast majority of the population was made up of serfs tied to the land of their lord, to whom they owed service as a feudal obligation. Illiterate, disease-ridden, all but slaves to their temporal and spiritual masters, the peasant masses faced, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan [1651]).
The Renaissance, which began in the city-states of northern Italy and was spurred by the growth of trade with the East, helped engender a new class of merchants, later to become the bourgeoisie of modern capitalism. As these merchants’ ships went further out into the world, they needed better knowledge on the workings of the natural world and the cosmos. In his 1883 Introduction to Dialectics of Nature, Engels succinctly notes:
“The main work in the first period of natural science that now opened lay in mastering the material immediately at hand. In most fields a start had to be made from the very beginning. Antiquity had bequeathed Euclid and the Ptolemaic solar system; the Arabs had left behind the decimal notation, the beginnings of algebra, the modern numerals, and alchemy; the Christian Middle Ages nothing at all.”
The church dogma on what we would call astronomy was what Ptolemy wrote in the second century AD. In his system, the Earth formed the center of motion, around which the Sun and planets rotated. The stars were fixed on a celestial sphere further out from the Sun and planets. What was on Earth was corrupt; what was in Heaven was perfect.
What passed for medicine also came from the Greeks, in particular, Hippocrates, in the 5th century BC. Human health was determined by the interplay of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). Ill health meant an imbalance of the humors, which could require purging or bloodletting. These and other often fatal remedies continued to be used in the 18th and 19th centuries: George Washington himself died most likely as a result of bloodletting by his doctors when he fell ill in 1799.
In the 1500s, things started to crack for the feudal order and especially for the church. The Protestant Reformation is normally tagged to 1517, when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the cathedral door in Wittenberg. This doctrinal split would lead to no small amount of bloodletting not intended for medical purposes—for example, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Rather more unnerving to the feudal structure was the Peasant War in Germany, beginning about 1525. The same Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet on this occasion titled “Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants.”
Galileo was born in 1564 to a noble—but not rich—family. Like many children before and after, he was taken to church by his parents, and evidently the sermons were as boring then as now. Unlike other kids, he made some good use of the time. He observed the great chandelier in the church, which would swing when disturbed by a breeze. He timed the swings using his pulse and found that the period was independent of the amplitude of the oscillation. That’s now Physics 101, and laid the basis for the first accurate clocks based on pendulums.
Galileo was above all a keen observer and experimentalist. When he heard that spectacle lenses were being used in Holland to view distant objects, he immediately constructed a crude telescope. Spurred by the results, he worked out his own procedures for grinding lenses to the exquisite tolerances needed for higher magnification, and produced a relatively small 20X to 30X telescope. He viewed the Moon, and saw not a perfect luminous disk but a place with geologic features just like the Earth—mountains, valleys, plains. When he looked at Jupiter, he saw little stars nearby seeming to move across the planetary disk. He immediately realized these were moons. Subsequently he observed Venus and saw it go through phases like the Earth’s moon.
These observations shattered the Ptolemaic model of an Earth-centered system and convinced Galileo that Copernicus’ idea that the Sun was the center of motion was in fact correct. For publishing this belief, Galileo was tried by the church in 1633 and, not surprisingly, convicted of heresy. Threatened with torture by the Inquisition, he recanted and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. From there he wrote his Mathematical Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences and had it smuggled out of reach of the Vatican to Holland, where it was published in 1638. His observations on the motions of falling bodies anticipated Isaac Newton’s synthesis 48 years later.
Why did Galileo recant? One answer is that he was scared by what happened to Giordano Bruno, the itinerant ex-priest who supported Copernicus’ idea about the Sun at the center, and much else. He was accused of heresy, imprisoned and tortured for seven years during his trial and finally burned at the stake in 1600. And the man who had ordered Galileo to abandon Copernican ideas in 1616 was the same Cardinal Bellarmine who sent Bruno to the stake. From what I have read, it is unfair to say that Galileo was a coward. First, Galileo’s book, giving very thinly veiled support to Copernicus’ theory, had been published in 1632 and already had circulated throughout Europe. Second, he had no substantial religious differences with the church on matters of theology, so a refusal to recant would mean torture and death for no real purpose.
Giordano Bruno was another matter, and it is very doubtful whether his recantation would have saved his life—he actually offered to partially recant in an appeal to the Pope. Just to give you an idea, here are a few of the things with which he was charged: 1) erroneous opinions on the Trinity and the divinity of Christ; 2) belief in the reincarnation of souls in new bodies, human or animal; and (the kicker) 3) denial of the virginity of Mary. There are not a few Christians who would roast poor Bruno today for that! You can imagine how well it went down with the Pope in 1600.
Science and the Industrial Revolution
Following Galileo, Newton produced his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. Along with Gottfried Leibniz, he also invented differential calculus—the mathematics needed to solve the problems of moving bodies with forces such as gravity acting upon them. In biology, Carl Linnaeus introduced the systematic classification of animals and plants, based on form and structure. And in 1785, the Scot James Hutton laid the basis for modern geology and showed that the Earth had to be much, much older than the 6,000 years deduced by Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656) from a study of the biblical sources.
The middle to late 1700s was a period of tremendous advances in science and technology, driven by (and pushing forward) the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Science was held in high esteem by the rising entrepreneurs, and in the growing manufacturing city of Birmingham there arose an informal grouping called the Lunar Society, which coalesced around 1765 and lasted about 30 years.
The name came from their routine of evening dinner meetings on the Monday closest to the full moon, a practical idea since many had a trip of several miles on horseback to their homes, and there were no streetlights. That would change—one of the Lunatics (as the Society members jocularly called themselves) was William Murdoch, who was developing the production of gas from coal to use for illumination. Other notable members included James Watt, inventor of the condensing steam engine (which made steam power practical and efficient enough for its later use in locomotives); Joseph Priestley, the preacher and chemist credited with the discovery of oxygen; Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and an evolutionist; and Josiah Wedgewood, chemist and mineralogist who made a fortune by making fine ceramics and pottery. Benjamin Franklin was a corresponding member—he was celebrated throughout Europe as an eminent scientist for his work on electricity.
Politically the Lunatics were pretty progressive for their day. Many had favored the colonists during the American War of Independence and also supported the revolutionaries in France. In fact, on 14 July 1791 they were having a dinner in Birmingham to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille when the inn was threatened by a mob howling “Church and King!” The mob’s main target was Joseph Priestley, whose support for the National Assembly won him an offer of French citizenship. Priestley’s house was set on fire by the mob, but fortunately he and his family escaped. They later emigrated to the U.S.
It is literally inconceivable to envisage something like the Lunar Society today. An approximation would be for the heads of U.S. Steel and General Motors to have joined with the leading professors of MIT and Harvard to sign a petition supporting Fidel Castro in his struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba in 1958!
The Lunatics mirrored capitalism in its youth, breaking down the barriers of feudalism as part of the practical struggle of the marketplace. Capitalism did bring a large increase in the productivity of labor and a corresponding vast increase in the amount of goods produced. Some of this trickled down even to the working class, whose labor created the surplus value pocketed by the capitalist as profit. However, exploitation of the most brutal fashion remained the lot of the masses, and the next economic dislocation causing a reduction or cessation of industrial production would (and did) throw the workers on to the street with no means of support. The scientific unraveling of the basis of capitalist production and profit was presented in detail by Karl Marx in his work Capital in 1867. But the core of Marxism—dialectical materialism—had been enunciated 20 years earlier in the Communist Manifesto.
The Science of Marxism
In his 1883 preface to the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote:
“The basic thought running through the Manifesto—that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles—the basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.”
For the first time, the study of human society and its development had been given a firm scientific and materialist foundation. It is not surprising that Marx and Engels immediately appreciated the significance of Darwin’s Origin of Species, first published in 1859. The astounding variety of animals and plants in their myriad shapes and forms were not static sculptures made by a divine Creator, but had evolved from a common ancestor and differentiated over the expanse of geologic time. As Engels said in his 1883 speech at Marx’s grave:
“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”
The philosophical scaffold of Marxism is called dialectical materialism. Materialism, meaning that the world exists in reality; it was not created within the realm of the human mind. Dialectical in the fact that the essence of our world (indeed our universe) is matter in motion. All things exist not in stasis but in a process of development. An analogy is the difference between a still photograph and a motion picture. We know this almost by instinct when we look at plants and animals—consider the bud of a cherry tree, from emerging green speck in spring to flower to tasty fruit. But from birth in a class-divided society, we are made to accept the idea that the social structures and norms of human relations are essentially static—there are rulers and ruled, usually with God blessing the whole arrangement.
The genius of Marx was to apply the dialectical materialist method to the study of society and economy. In a 1914 piece titled “Karl Marx,” V.I. Lenin quotes Engels, adding his own interpolations:
“‘Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich [this was written before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!] and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature’s process is dialectical and not metaphysical.
“‘The great basic thought,’ Engels writes, ‘that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away…this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different things…. For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendency from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain.’ Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is ‘the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought’.”
The Dialectic of Science
Scientists seek to be as objective as possible, to eliminate systematic errors and to require that facts be established by experiments which can be repeated by others to confirm the results. Theories are built upon testable hypotheses, which lead to more experiments and further refinements of existing theory or creation of a new and better one. Science has its own dialectic—it is not static, but ever-changing. It is also materialist. Nature and her workings are to be explained using natural causes. Things happen for physical reasons, not the whim of a Zeus, Yahweh, tree spirit or water nymph. On one side science, on the other superstition, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
Any human activity such as science is subject to error, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. The human brain is very good at finding patterns. This was selected for by evolution. Our ancestors did not have the luxury of extended observation time to determine whether that shadowy figure in the grass was a grazing gazelle or a Smilodon with 7-inch fangs. But that pattern-seeking neural circuitry can also fool us. When I look at the sky I don’t immediately see bulls and crabs and hunters with studded belts. But given enough boredom, or perhaps eating the right mushrooms, one could certainly explain the constellations seen by Greek shepherds 2,500 years ago.
Another common fallacy is that correlation implies causality, which actually is an offshoot of seeking patterns where none really exist. An amusing example of correlation not being cause comes from an open letter to the Kansas School Board written by Bobby Henderson on behalf of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was set up as a satirical protest against creationism:
“You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.”
Above all, one must remember that scientists are human and work in the midst of a class-divided society. Even a religious physicist can be objective when measuring the distance between the Earth and Moon, but as one approaches social questions and research, ingrained bias emanating from the dominant social mores can sometimes overwhelm the best of objective intentions.
A striking case in point is given by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his book The Mismeasure of Man. He recounts the story of American physician Samuel George Morton, who had collected some 600 skulls representing populations on the continents of North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Morton measured the cranial volume of the skulls (a good measure of the brain size of the person when alive) and published his results, including the original data. Just as Morton would have expected, Anglo-Saxons had the highest average (92 cubic inches), followed by Asians in the middle and blacks on the bottom (83 cu in). When Gould re-analyzed Morton’s data he found biases built into the specimens used for each racial group. For example, the aboriginal sample was heavily represented by skulls from Peruvian people who are short. Similarly, the black sample included proportionally more women than the Caucasian. Smaller bodies means smaller brain mass—it has nothing to do with intelligence, and should have been corrected (but wasn’t). As Gould noted, this was done “without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.”
In medicine today, researchers use the double-blind randomized clinical trial to eliminate such subjective biases from influencing the results. Double-blind means that both the study subjects and those providing the treatment do not know whether any particular patient is receiving the actual medicine or a sham control. Blinding the patients by randomization helps correct for the placebo effect—people want to be cured or get some relief from illness or pain and will respond just to the soothing voice of a caregiver or to a sugar pill (especially if brightly colored!). Blinding the caregiver prevents unconscious cues being given to the patient that would allow the latter to guess that they are receiving real treatment rather than the control.
Medical Quackery
It is true that what is now called science-based medicine is rather a recent innovation. Voltaire is credited with the aphorism, “Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.” In 1891, the writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes acidly noted that if most of the drugs then in use were loaded on a ship and if it “could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”
Times do change, and procedures such as MRI or CT scans which are routine today would have seemed like science fiction a generation or two ago. As advances have been made in physics and chemistry, and especially molecular biology, they have dramatically affected the practice of medicine. Yet the popularity of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is great and rising. Many people can’t afford regular medical care, and patients will grasp at anything that promises a cure. I.e., CAM is a social problem.
What is alternative medicine? There are lots of definitions, but at bottom it is the same division that separates science from non-science. Real medicine is based on substances or procedures whose efficacy can be explained by purely natural causes. All the rest depends on something non-physical, be it divine intervention (prayer healing) or the invocation of some mysterious “energy” or “life force” outside the laws of physics. Medicine is real and the rest is faith-based, not unlike religion, though at times without the guy in the sky.
Buzzwords like “energy” and “life force,” which are at the heart of all alternative medicine nostrums, are really nothing but a cover for the idea of “vitalism”—i.e., that there is something unique about living systems. This was scientific mainstream until the 1820s when German chemist Friedrich Wöhler accidentally synthesized urea from inorganic compounds. This was the first time a molecule previously only obtained from living organisms had been created in the laboratory, and it marked the birth of organic chemistry. Actually the division of chemistry into organic and inorganic is itself a vestige of the vitalist era. The laws governing chemical reactions are the same.
Edzard Ernst, an MD and also practitioner of CAM, and Simon Singh, a British science journalist, have written a useful book, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine. If anything the authors bend over backwards to give CAM the widest latitude to show proof of some shred of benefit beyond the placebo effect. And what is the conclusion? Acupuncture and homeopathy: useless; chiropractic: maybe you could try it but only for lower back pain, though a physical therapist would be just as good, and cheaper; herbal medicines: a few have a mildly positive effect, but in most cases conventional drugs work as well or better.
So why is CAM still around? Here are 33.9 billion reasons: that is the number of dollars Americans spent out-of-pocket on alternative medicines in 2007, according to the National Institute of Health’s alternative medicine center. This does not even include charges to insurance. Out of that, about $15 billion went for supplements—that’s about one third of the out-of-pocket expenses for real prescription drugs. One possible reason is the odd belief that nature is this kind, gentle, holistic entity that has only your best interests at heart. This shows a profound ignorance of the natural world. I would suggest that those so believing pick up a good book on human parasitology, preferably with good color pictures!
Chiropractic Pseudoscience
I’ll pick on chiropractic. These guys not only fleece you but can cause great damage in the process. Chiropractic started in the 1890s when one Daniel David Palmer came up with the idea that diseases were caused by misalignments of the vertebrae that interfered with the flow of “innate intelligence” from the nervous system to the organs. These disruptions were called subluxations. Was this on the basis of systematic investigations of any kind? No. Palmer’s epiphany came one day when he claimed to have cured a person with hearing problems by adjusting his spine. One slight problem is that the cranial nerves controlling hearing and balance go directly from the lower brain to the middle ear—they do not emanate from the spinal cord at all. As for the “innate intelligence,” not a shred of physical proof has ever been given for its existence.
Chiropractors perform what they call manipulation to cure the subluxations in the vertebral column. This is a rapid acceleration thrust on the bone which moves it just past the point where muscles could conceivably move it on their own, but short of bone and tissue damage. Well, that’s the theory. For my book, it sounds more like what happens to your spine in an automobile accident. When applied to the cervical vertebrae—the seven vertebrae of the spinal column in your neck—the results can be vertebral arterial dissection. This can obstruct blood flow to the brain or throw a clot that leads to a stroke.
Chiropractors, like all purveyors of “alternative medicine,” like to portray themselves as little Davids struggling against the Goliaths of Big Pharma and the American Medical Association. But chiropractors pull in almost $4 billion a year—it’s a business, just like Big Pharma. Chiropractor Web sites are full of handy tips on “practice building”—roping in more patients, preferably for weekly or biweekly office visits. Even if you are well, they want you to get an adjustment—like a tune-up, I guess. Even cars only need an oil change every 6,000 miles, not every week!
Religious Obscurantism
Now we come to the granddaddy of all quackery: religion. I’m going to concentrate on the Christian fundamentalists, in particular the very political anti-science, anti-evolution movement now masquerading as Intelligent Design (ID). All three of the so-called Abrahamic faiths share a common creation myth. God created everything, and all the animals and plants have come from that creation pretty much unchanged. Some of the anti-evolution types allow for a bit of change within a species, but no speciation. So, it was no surprise that Darwin’s book was met with such hostility by the believers of theism: God was removed as the causative agent for the wonderful variety of living things, and man was an animal like the rest and descended from primate ancestors. And what the yahoos couldn’t stomach at all was Darwin’s speculation—now backed by overwhelming evidence—that the human ancestor had come out of Africa.
Intelligent Design is a relatively recent sprout on the Christian bush. Actually, it is an example of rapid speciation into a new environment. Prior to 1987, the creationists were touting “creation science” and demanding that it be taught in the public schools alongside evolution. That got shot down by a series of court decisions, starting with an Arkansas case in 1982, and then in the Supreme Court in 1987. So rather quickly—no evolution here!—“creation science” transformed itself into “intelligent design.”
Intelligent Design pretends that it is scientific, but its basic premises are very wrong and it is important to see why. Premise one is “irreducible complexity”—there exist things in nature like the eye, or with a nod to nanotech, cellular assemblages such as the bacterial flagellar motor. According to ID, such things have to be taken as a whole, with every part essential to function—remove one piece and it is non-functional. Supposedly there is no step-by-step way of building these structures, i.e., no Darwinian method. Since they are so complex, they couldn’t have come about by chance and therefore had to have been created by a Designer. They’re careful not to say God, but it’s pretty clear they are not referring to the Tooth Fairy.
In the Origin of Species, Darwin anticipated such problems, including the example of the vertebrate eye, and the creationists love to quote his sentence: “To suppose that the eye…could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” But they never mention his answer in the very next sentence of the passage: “If any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.” Think about it: would you rather have blurred vision, or be totally blind? Even an imperfect eye gives an organism a selective advantage compared with no sight at all.
The second premise is the Anthropic Principle. There is such vastness to the universe. There is the beautiful, intricate motion of the planets around the Sun, moons around the planets, of the stars and the galaxies—they now agree with Copernicus and Galileo—and here is Earth, just right for living things to exist on. If the Earth were closer to the Sun it would be too hot—look at Venus. Further away and it would be too cold. It looks like the whole universe was created or fine-tuned with human life in mind, so to speak. Hence, there must have been a Creator. Sir John Polkinghorne, a respected British physicist and also a Christian minister, stated: “The fundamental parameters of the universe are such as to permit the creation of observers within it.”
Sounds profound, right? But physicist Robert L. Park translated Polkinghorne into something less pretentious, more along the lines of what Yogi Berra might have said: “If things were different, things would not be the way things are.” There is another amusing argument put forward by the late author Douglas Adams, who, among other things, wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and was a script editor for the famous British series Doctor Who in 1979. He compared the Anthropic Principle to a “puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’”
Of course the whole geological record shows that the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, and that thousands of species have come and gone over the ages. Creationists used to wail on about the lack of transitional forms for whales—how could a terrestrial mammal smoothly evolve into one now at home only in the oceans? Well, in the last 15 or so years, a whole string of fossils have been discovered showing in beautiful detail all those “missing forms.” In any case, the creationists aren’t about to let facts get in the way. Henry Morris, founder of the modern creationist movement, stated: “No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture.”
While the creationists may seem fringe oddballs (comedian Lewis Black described them as the people who are “watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary”), they are very political and they have supporters with deep pockets. In 1998, the Discovery Institute, a major think tank for creationism/ID, produced an internal memo called the “Wedge Document.” It was called that because they considered their attack on Darwin and evolution as the “thin edge of the wedge” for their broader “Governing Goals”: “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”
Science and Communist Liberation
Human evolution happened in such a way that no hominid ancestor survived; it could have been otherwise but wasn’t. All humans are genetically members of the same species and there is no biological basis for the separation into races. It should be noted that Darwin was a staunch abolitionist, and during the U.S. Civil War hoped that the North would put emancipation on its banner and eliminate slavery no matter the cost in blood. As we wrote in “Hail Charles Darwin!” (WV No. 854, 16 September 2005):
“America’s other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.”
Liberals worry about the denigration of science and rationalism—how is the country to maintain a competitive position in the world if the next generation knows more about the Book of Numbers than about algebra? Marxists are materialists and take it as a given that science and religion are incompatible.
Here we come to the fundamental difference between Marxists and liberals. At bottom, liberals accept the existence of the capitalist order and their most radical demand is for reforms. Their high point was the French Revolution—liberty, fraternity, equality. All abstract ideals, behind which lurk the sanctity of private property and the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Liberals, it is true, will recognize the class struggle, but what they reject is that the proletariat should actually seize state power from the bourgeoisie.
The “liberty” so beloved by a capitalist is his liberty to make a profit, which necessarily comes through the exploitation of the workers he employs. Such exploitation is built into the capitalist system, a system that is at bottom irrational. Economic competition inevitably leads to military competition, and imperialist war. Imperialism can’t be reformed—the whole system of private property has to be overthrown. The goal of the Marxists is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which on a global scale can lay the basis for a classless communist society.
Science can open up as yet undreamt possibilities for humanity. But under capitalism today, vast resources devoted to research are for military purposes. The American ruling class was the first to own and so far the only one to use nuclear weapons, and the warheads in the U.S. arsenal are now each 20 or more times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Even a “limited” nuclear war could have catastrophic consequences, beyond the initial effects of the explosions. Climactic changes could wreak havoc on key agricultural areas, putting the survival of the human species at risk.
The imperialists have to be removed from power and disarmed by the workers before the rulers kill us all. That will require building a revolutionary workers party, independent of all the parties of capital, including the Democrats. Obama has continued to carry on all the essential policies of the administrations before him. That is actually why the bourgeoisie put him in power. The whole racist, murderous edifice of American imperialism has to be smashed by the multiracial working class, organized into democratically elected councils and led by its Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party.
As this talk has been in defense of Marxism and science, it is worth noting Marx’s words at the end of the preface to the first German edition of Capital: “The present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.” This dialectical mode of thought inspired Lenin, Trotsky and the whole Bolshevik Party that made the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. It remained a cornerstone of Trotsky’s thinking until the day he died.
In The Prophet Unarmed (1959) Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher cites a revealing sample of Trotsky’s vision of a future society, after capitalism’s demise: “The drudgery of feeding and bringing up children…will be lifted from the individual family by social initiative…. Woman will at last emerge from semi-slavery…. Socio-educational experiments…will evolve with a now inconceivable elan. The communist way of life will not grow up blindly like coral reefs in the sea. It will be built consciously. It will be checked by critical thought. It will be directed and corrected…. No sooner will one crust begin to form itself on the human existence than it will burst under the pressure of new inventions and achievements.”
The men and women of the future will no longer need religion, what Marx described as solace, the “opium of the people.” And the key to unlock human potential will be science, not superstition.
It would seem impossible that in the early years of the 21st century as we are now deep into the age of the Internet, instant communications, and about twelve million other discoveries, inventions and human-made technological delights (stuff way beyond the capacity of god to understand never mind create) that we still would be fighting the now hoary battle between science and superstition (religious, mainly, but other forms as well). Under any circumstances. But we are, and we will continue to do as an elementary duty. In fact, although we will have our share of “angel” believers as the Bolsheviks did in the early days of their revolution, we cannot be successful in making the American socialist revolution until we can break a critical mass of the working class and their allies from that dependence. Simple, right? I wish, but I will take my chances with the scientific method any day.
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Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
In Defense of Marxism and Science
We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by T. Marlow of the Spartacist League at a Chicago forum last July 24.
When the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace went to present a copy of his treatise on celestial mechanics to Napoleon, the latter is said to have stated: “M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace replied, “I had no need for that hypothesis.”
Two centuries later, any American politician caught on tape saying something like that would never be able to run for dogcatcher, let alone the Senate or presidency. The U.S. is peculiar among the advanced industrial countries in its level of religiosity—over three-fourths of respondents in an AP poll said they believed in angels. Worse still is an increase in the rejection of scientific thinking, from the millions seeking miracle cures from a panoply of snake-oil vendors to a politically cohesive and dangerous sector of religious fundamentalists out to turn the U.S. into a theocracy. I am not referring to the demented followers of Osama bin Laden. I am speaking of the Christian right, which has abortion and evolution as focus points of attack.
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels state: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Well, we have a ruling class that could be described as drunk with power. The collapse of Stalinism in East Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-92 was a world-historic defeat for the working class of the world. The American bourgeoisie declared the “death of Communism,” and even the “end of history.” With military power far greater than any of their imperialist rivals in Europe or Japan, the U.S. rulers have acted with little restraint on their predatory desires, as in Iraq and Afghanistan and recently in Haiti.
At the same time, the consciousness of the proletariat has been thrown back so far that even advanced workers and others involved in social struggle no longer identify their goal as building a socialist society. In the U.S. in particular, there is the question of race: black oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism; the notion of black people as being inferior, which survives to this day, was the ideological counterpart to black chattel slavery. America is if anything more segregated than 25 years ago.
Especially since the September 11 attacks, the “war on terror” has been used to beat the working class into submission and squelch opposition to the predations of U.S. imperialism across the globe. It is not just the linguistically challenged George W. Bush—Obama was made Commander-in-Chief in part to give the image of U.S. imperialism a needed facelift. But smoother words have not changed American military rampaging in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the extension of police-state measures at home. The American ruling class sees no reason why it cannot continue to literally get away with murder.
In these circumstances it is no wonder that religious reaction is ascendant and even the rationalism of the Enlightenment of the 18th century is under attack. You don’t have to be a Marxist to oppose things like creationism, but without a Marxist program you have no way out of the impasse in which society finds itself. Society is rent by class struggle, legal and extralegal, as the bourgeoisie seeks ever greater profit from the exploitation of labor and workers resist. As Marx showed, there is a fundamental contradiction between the private ownership of the means of production and the further advance of productive forces. The rule of capital must be smashed by the working class, organized and led by a revolutionary Trotskyist party.
Part of the process of building that party is to educate the proletariat as to its historic role and responsibility for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. That means a Marxist understanding of society, and that in turn means an understanding of the work of science and its defense against the purveyors of mystical and medieval rubbish. So first we have to review a bit of history.
The Middle Ages and Renaissance
The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the birth of Leonardo da Vinci in 1452 (or the victorious siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks a year later) marked about a thousand years. That’s about one-fifth of the entire history of human civilization since the first example of writing (the cuneiform tablets of southern Mesopotamia from about 3000 BC). In West Europe this period is called the Middle or Dark Ages. Not coincidentally, the dominant political and economic institution in this period was the Roman Catholic church. Along with the nobility, the church was a major landowner. The vast majority of the population was made up of serfs tied to the land of their lord, to whom they owed service as a feudal obligation. Illiterate, disease-ridden, all but slaves to their temporal and spiritual masters, the peasant masses faced, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan [1651]).
The Renaissance, which began in the city-states of northern Italy and was spurred by the growth of trade with the East, helped engender a new class of merchants, later to become the bourgeoisie of modern capitalism. As these merchants’ ships went further out into the world, they needed better knowledge on the workings of the natural world and the cosmos. In his 1883 Introduction to Dialectics of Nature, Engels succinctly notes:
“The main work in the first period of natural science that now opened lay in mastering the material immediately at hand. In most fields a start had to be made from the very beginning. Antiquity had bequeathed Euclid and the Ptolemaic solar system; the Arabs had left behind the decimal notation, the beginnings of algebra, the modern numerals, and alchemy; the Christian Middle Ages nothing at all.”
The church dogma on what we would call astronomy was what Ptolemy wrote in the second century AD. In his system, the Earth formed the center of motion, around which the Sun and planets rotated. The stars were fixed on a celestial sphere further out from the Sun and planets. What was on Earth was corrupt; what was in Heaven was perfect.
What passed for medicine also came from the Greeks, in particular, Hippocrates, in the 5th century BC. Human health was determined by the interplay of the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile). Ill health meant an imbalance of the humors, which could require purging or bloodletting. These and other often fatal remedies continued to be used in the 18th and 19th centuries: George Washington himself died most likely as a result of bloodletting by his doctors when he fell ill in 1799.
In the 1500s, things started to crack for the feudal order and especially for the church. The Protestant Reformation is normally tagged to 1517, when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the cathedral door in Wittenberg. This doctrinal split would lead to no small amount of bloodletting not intended for medical purposes—for example, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Rather more unnerving to the feudal structure was the Peasant War in Germany, beginning about 1525. The same Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet on this occasion titled “Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants.”
Galileo was born in 1564 to a noble—but not rich—family. Like many children before and after, he was taken to church by his parents, and evidently the sermons were as boring then as now. Unlike other kids, he made some good use of the time. He observed the great chandelier in the church, which would swing when disturbed by a breeze. He timed the swings using his pulse and found that the period was independent of the amplitude of the oscillation. That’s now Physics 101, and laid the basis for the first accurate clocks based on pendulums.
Galileo was above all a keen observer and experimentalist. When he heard that spectacle lenses were being used in Holland to view distant objects, he immediately constructed a crude telescope. Spurred by the results, he worked out his own procedures for grinding lenses to the exquisite tolerances needed for higher magnification, and produced a relatively small 20X to 30X telescope. He viewed the Moon, and saw not a perfect luminous disk but a place with geologic features just like the Earth—mountains, valleys, plains. When he looked at Jupiter, he saw little stars nearby seeming to move across the planetary disk. He immediately realized these were moons. Subsequently he observed Venus and saw it go through phases like the Earth’s moon.
These observations shattered the Ptolemaic model of an Earth-centered system and convinced Galileo that Copernicus’ idea that the Sun was the center of motion was in fact correct. For publishing this belief, Galileo was tried by the church in 1633 and, not surprisingly, convicted of heresy. Threatened with torture by the Inquisition, he recanted and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. From there he wrote his Mathematical Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences and had it smuggled out of reach of the Vatican to Holland, where it was published in 1638. His observations on the motions of falling bodies anticipated Isaac Newton’s synthesis 48 years later.
Why did Galileo recant? One answer is that he was scared by what happened to Giordano Bruno, the itinerant ex-priest who supported Copernicus’ idea about the Sun at the center, and much else. He was accused of heresy, imprisoned and tortured for seven years during his trial and finally burned at the stake in 1600. And the man who had ordered Galileo to abandon Copernican ideas in 1616 was the same Cardinal Bellarmine who sent Bruno to the stake. From what I have read, it is unfair to say that Galileo was a coward. First, Galileo’s book, giving very thinly veiled support to Copernicus’ theory, had been published in 1632 and already had circulated throughout Europe. Second, he had no substantial religious differences with the church on matters of theology, so a refusal to recant would mean torture and death for no real purpose.
Giordano Bruno was another matter, and it is very doubtful whether his recantation would have saved his life—he actually offered to partially recant in an appeal to the Pope. Just to give you an idea, here are a few of the things with which he was charged: 1) erroneous opinions on the Trinity and the divinity of Christ; 2) belief in the reincarnation of souls in new bodies, human or animal; and (the kicker) 3) denial of the virginity of Mary. There are not a few Christians who would roast poor Bruno today for that! You can imagine how well it went down with the Pope in 1600.
Science and the Industrial Revolution
Following Galileo, Newton produced his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. Along with Gottfried Leibniz, he also invented differential calculus—the mathematics needed to solve the problems of moving bodies with forces such as gravity acting upon them. In biology, Carl Linnaeus introduced the systematic classification of animals and plants, based on form and structure. And in 1785, the Scot James Hutton laid the basis for modern geology and showed that the Earth had to be much, much older than the 6,000 years deduced by Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656) from a study of the biblical sources.
The middle to late 1700s was a period of tremendous advances in science and technology, driven by (and pushing forward) the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Science was held in high esteem by the rising entrepreneurs, and in the growing manufacturing city of Birmingham there arose an informal grouping called the Lunar Society, which coalesced around 1765 and lasted about 30 years.
The name came from their routine of evening dinner meetings on the Monday closest to the full moon, a practical idea since many had a trip of several miles on horseback to their homes, and there were no streetlights. That would change—one of the Lunatics (as the Society members jocularly called themselves) was William Murdoch, who was developing the production of gas from coal to use for illumination. Other notable members included James Watt, inventor of the condensing steam engine (which made steam power practical and efficient enough for its later use in locomotives); Joseph Priestley, the preacher and chemist credited with the discovery of oxygen; Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and an evolutionist; and Josiah Wedgewood, chemist and mineralogist who made a fortune by making fine ceramics and pottery. Benjamin Franklin was a corresponding member—he was celebrated throughout Europe as an eminent scientist for his work on electricity.
Politically the Lunatics were pretty progressive for their day. Many had favored the colonists during the American War of Independence and also supported the revolutionaries in France. In fact, on 14 July 1791 they were having a dinner in Birmingham to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille when the inn was threatened by a mob howling “Church and King!” The mob’s main target was Joseph Priestley, whose support for the National Assembly won him an offer of French citizenship. Priestley’s house was set on fire by the mob, but fortunately he and his family escaped. They later emigrated to the U.S.
It is literally inconceivable to envisage something like the Lunar Society today. An approximation would be for the heads of U.S. Steel and General Motors to have joined with the leading professors of MIT and Harvard to sign a petition supporting Fidel Castro in his struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba in 1958!
The Lunatics mirrored capitalism in its youth, breaking down the barriers of feudalism as part of the practical struggle of the marketplace. Capitalism did bring a large increase in the productivity of labor and a corresponding vast increase in the amount of goods produced. Some of this trickled down even to the working class, whose labor created the surplus value pocketed by the capitalist as profit. However, exploitation of the most brutal fashion remained the lot of the masses, and the next economic dislocation causing a reduction or cessation of industrial production would (and did) throw the workers on to the street with no means of support. The scientific unraveling of the basis of capitalist production and profit was presented in detail by Karl Marx in his work Capital in 1867. But the core of Marxism—dialectical materialism—had been enunciated 20 years earlier in the Communist Manifesto.
The Science of Marxism
In his 1883 preface to the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote:
“The basic thought running through the Manifesto—that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles—the basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.”
For the first time, the study of human society and its development had been given a firm scientific and materialist foundation. It is not surprising that Marx and Engels immediately appreciated the significance of Darwin’s Origin of Species, first published in 1859. The astounding variety of animals and plants in their myriad shapes and forms were not static sculptures made by a divine Creator, but had evolved from a common ancestor and differentiated over the expanse of geologic time. As Engels said in his 1883 speech at Marx’s grave:
“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”
The philosophical scaffold of Marxism is called dialectical materialism. Materialism, meaning that the world exists in reality; it was not created within the realm of the human mind. Dialectical in the fact that the essence of our world (indeed our universe) is matter in motion. All things exist not in stasis but in a process of development. An analogy is the difference between a still photograph and a motion picture. We know this almost by instinct when we look at plants and animals—consider the bud of a cherry tree, from emerging green speck in spring to flower to tasty fruit. But from birth in a class-divided society, we are made to accept the idea that the social structures and norms of human relations are essentially static—there are rulers and ruled, usually with God blessing the whole arrangement.
The genius of Marx was to apply the dialectical materialist method to the study of society and economy. In a 1914 piece titled “Karl Marx,” V.I. Lenin quotes Engels, adding his own interpolations:
“‘Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich [this was written before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!] and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature’s process is dialectical and not metaphysical.
“‘The great basic thought,’ Engels writes, ‘that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away…this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is now scarcely ever contradicted. But to acknowledge this fundamental thought in words and to apply it in reality in detail to each domain of investigation are two different things…. For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendency from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain.’ Thus, according to Marx, dialectics is ‘the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought’.”
The Dialectic of Science
Scientists seek to be as objective as possible, to eliminate systematic errors and to require that facts be established by experiments which can be repeated by others to confirm the results. Theories are built upon testable hypotheses, which lead to more experiments and further refinements of existing theory or creation of a new and better one. Science has its own dialectic—it is not static, but ever-changing. It is also materialist. Nature and her workings are to be explained using natural causes. Things happen for physical reasons, not the whim of a Zeus, Yahweh, tree spirit or water nymph. On one side science, on the other superstition, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
Any human activity such as science is subject to error, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. The human brain is very good at finding patterns. This was selected for by evolution. Our ancestors did not have the luxury of extended observation time to determine whether that shadowy figure in the grass was a grazing gazelle or a Smilodon with 7-inch fangs. But that pattern-seeking neural circuitry can also fool us. When I look at the sky I don’t immediately see bulls and crabs and hunters with studded belts. But given enough boredom, or perhaps eating the right mushrooms, one could certainly explain the constellations seen by Greek shepherds 2,500 years ago.
Another common fallacy is that correlation implies causality, which actually is an offshoot of seeking patterns where none really exist. An amusing example of correlation not being cause comes from an open letter to the Kansas School Board written by Bobby Henderson on behalf of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was set up as a satirical protest against creationism:
“You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.”
Above all, one must remember that scientists are human and work in the midst of a class-divided society. Even a religious physicist can be objective when measuring the distance between the Earth and Moon, but as one approaches social questions and research, ingrained bias emanating from the dominant social mores can sometimes overwhelm the best of objective intentions.
A striking case in point is given by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his book The Mismeasure of Man. He recounts the story of American physician Samuel George Morton, who had collected some 600 skulls representing populations on the continents of North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Morton measured the cranial volume of the skulls (a good measure of the brain size of the person when alive) and published his results, including the original data. Just as Morton would have expected, Anglo-Saxons had the highest average (92 cubic inches), followed by Asians in the middle and blacks on the bottom (83 cu in). When Gould re-analyzed Morton’s data he found biases built into the specimens used for each racial group. For example, the aboriginal sample was heavily represented by skulls from Peruvian people who are short. Similarly, the black sample included proportionally more women than the Caucasian. Smaller bodies means smaller brain mass—it has nothing to do with intelligence, and should have been corrected (but wasn’t). As Gould noted, this was done “without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action.”
In medicine today, researchers use the double-blind randomized clinical trial to eliminate such subjective biases from influencing the results. Double-blind means that both the study subjects and those providing the treatment do not know whether any particular patient is receiving the actual medicine or a sham control. Blinding the patients by randomization helps correct for the placebo effect—people want to be cured or get some relief from illness or pain and will respond just to the soothing voice of a caregiver or to a sugar pill (especially if brightly colored!). Blinding the caregiver prevents unconscious cues being given to the patient that would allow the latter to guess that they are receiving real treatment rather than the control.
Medical Quackery
It is true that what is now called science-based medicine is rather a recent innovation. Voltaire is credited with the aphorism, “Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.” In 1891, the writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes acidly noted that if most of the drugs then in use were loaded on a ship and if it “could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”
Times do change, and procedures such as MRI or CT scans which are routine today would have seemed like science fiction a generation or two ago. As advances have been made in physics and chemistry, and especially molecular biology, they have dramatically affected the practice of medicine. Yet the popularity of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is great and rising. Many people can’t afford regular medical care, and patients will grasp at anything that promises a cure. I.e., CAM is a social problem.
What is alternative medicine? There are lots of definitions, but at bottom it is the same division that separates science from non-science. Real medicine is based on substances or procedures whose efficacy can be explained by purely natural causes. All the rest depends on something non-physical, be it divine intervention (prayer healing) or the invocation of some mysterious “energy” or “life force” outside the laws of physics. Medicine is real and the rest is faith-based, not unlike religion, though at times without the guy in the sky.
Buzzwords like “energy” and “life force,” which are at the heart of all alternative medicine nostrums, are really nothing but a cover for the idea of “vitalism”—i.e., that there is something unique about living systems. This was scientific mainstream until the 1820s when German chemist Friedrich Wöhler accidentally synthesized urea from inorganic compounds. This was the first time a molecule previously only obtained from living organisms had been created in the laboratory, and it marked the birth of organic chemistry. Actually the division of chemistry into organic and inorganic is itself a vestige of the vitalist era. The laws governing chemical reactions are the same.
Edzard Ernst, an MD and also practitioner of CAM, and Simon Singh, a British science journalist, have written a useful book, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine. If anything the authors bend over backwards to give CAM the widest latitude to show proof of some shred of benefit beyond the placebo effect. And what is the conclusion? Acupuncture and homeopathy: useless; chiropractic: maybe you could try it but only for lower back pain, though a physical therapist would be just as good, and cheaper; herbal medicines: a few have a mildly positive effect, but in most cases conventional drugs work as well or better.
So why is CAM still around? Here are 33.9 billion reasons: that is the number of dollars Americans spent out-of-pocket on alternative medicines in 2007, according to the National Institute of Health’s alternative medicine center. This does not even include charges to insurance. Out of that, about $15 billion went for supplements—that’s about one third of the out-of-pocket expenses for real prescription drugs. One possible reason is the odd belief that nature is this kind, gentle, holistic entity that has only your best interests at heart. This shows a profound ignorance of the natural world. I would suggest that those so believing pick up a good book on human parasitology, preferably with good color pictures!
Chiropractic Pseudoscience
I’ll pick on chiropractic. These guys not only fleece you but can cause great damage in the process. Chiropractic started in the 1890s when one Daniel David Palmer came up with the idea that diseases were caused by misalignments of the vertebrae that interfered with the flow of “innate intelligence” from the nervous system to the organs. These disruptions were called subluxations. Was this on the basis of systematic investigations of any kind? No. Palmer’s epiphany came one day when he claimed to have cured a person with hearing problems by adjusting his spine. One slight problem is that the cranial nerves controlling hearing and balance go directly from the lower brain to the middle ear—they do not emanate from the spinal cord at all. As for the “innate intelligence,” not a shred of physical proof has ever been given for its existence.
Chiropractors perform what they call manipulation to cure the subluxations in the vertebral column. This is a rapid acceleration thrust on the bone which moves it just past the point where muscles could conceivably move it on their own, but short of bone and tissue damage. Well, that’s the theory. For my book, it sounds more like what happens to your spine in an automobile accident. When applied to the cervical vertebrae—the seven vertebrae of the spinal column in your neck—the results can be vertebral arterial dissection. This can obstruct blood flow to the brain or throw a clot that leads to a stroke.
Chiropractors, like all purveyors of “alternative medicine,” like to portray themselves as little Davids struggling against the Goliaths of Big Pharma and the American Medical Association. But chiropractors pull in almost $4 billion a year—it’s a business, just like Big Pharma. Chiropractor Web sites are full of handy tips on “practice building”—roping in more patients, preferably for weekly or biweekly office visits. Even if you are well, they want you to get an adjustment—like a tune-up, I guess. Even cars only need an oil change every 6,000 miles, not every week!
Religious Obscurantism
Now we come to the granddaddy of all quackery: religion. I’m going to concentrate on the Christian fundamentalists, in particular the very political anti-science, anti-evolution movement now masquerading as Intelligent Design (ID). All three of the so-called Abrahamic faiths share a common creation myth. God created everything, and all the animals and plants have come from that creation pretty much unchanged. Some of the anti-evolution types allow for a bit of change within a species, but no speciation. So, it was no surprise that Darwin’s book was met with such hostility by the believers of theism: God was removed as the causative agent for the wonderful variety of living things, and man was an animal like the rest and descended from primate ancestors. And what the yahoos couldn’t stomach at all was Darwin’s speculation—now backed by overwhelming evidence—that the human ancestor had come out of Africa.
Intelligent Design is a relatively recent sprout on the Christian bush. Actually, it is an example of rapid speciation into a new environment. Prior to 1987, the creationists were touting “creation science” and demanding that it be taught in the public schools alongside evolution. That got shot down by a series of court decisions, starting with an Arkansas case in 1982, and then in the Supreme Court in 1987. So rather quickly—no evolution here!—“creation science” transformed itself into “intelligent design.”
Intelligent Design pretends that it is scientific, but its basic premises are very wrong and it is important to see why. Premise one is “irreducible complexity”—there exist things in nature like the eye, or with a nod to nanotech, cellular assemblages such as the bacterial flagellar motor. According to ID, such things have to be taken as a whole, with every part essential to function—remove one piece and it is non-functional. Supposedly there is no step-by-step way of building these structures, i.e., no Darwinian method. Since they are so complex, they couldn’t have come about by chance and therefore had to have been created by a Designer. They’re careful not to say God, but it’s pretty clear they are not referring to the Tooth Fairy.
In the Origin of Species, Darwin anticipated such problems, including the example of the vertebrate eye, and the creationists love to quote his sentence: “To suppose that the eye…could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” But they never mention his answer in the very next sentence of the passage: “If any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.” Think about it: would you rather have blurred vision, or be totally blind? Even an imperfect eye gives an organism a selective advantage compared with no sight at all.
The second premise is the Anthropic Principle. There is such vastness to the universe. There is the beautiful, intricate motion of the planets around the Sun, moons around the planets, of the stars and the galaxies—they now agree with Copernicus and Galileo—and here is Earth, just right for living things to exist on. If the Earth were closer to the Sun it would be too hot—look at Venus. Further away and it would be too cold. It looks like the whole universe was created or fine-tuned with human life in mind, so to speak. Hence, there must have been a Creator. Sir John Polkinghorne, a respected British physicist and also a Christian minister, stated: “The fundamental parameters of the universe are such as to permit the creation of observers within it.”
Sounds profound, right? But physicist Robert L. Park translated Polkinghorne into something less pretentious, more along the lines of what Yogi Berra might have said: “If things were different, things would not be the way things are.” There is another amusing argument put forward by the late author Douglas Adams, who, among other things, wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and was a script editor for the famous British series Doctor Who in 1979. He compared the Anthropic Principle to a “puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’”
Of course the whole geological record shows that the Earth is much older than 6,000 years, and that thousands of species have come and gone over the ages. Creationists used to wail on about the lack of transitional forms for whales—how could a terrestrial mammal smoothly evolve into one now at home only in the oceans? Well, in the last 15 or so years, a whole string of fossils have been discovered showing in beautiful detail all those “missing forms.” In any case, the creationists aren’t about to let facts get in the way. Henry Morris, founder of the modern creationist movement, stated: “No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture.”
While the creationists may seem fringe oddballs (comedian Lewis Black described them as the people who are “watching The Flintstones as if it were a documentary”), they are very political and they have supporters with deep pockets. In 1998, the Discovery Institute, a major think tank for creationism/ID, produced an internal memo called the “Wedge Document.” It was called that because they considered their attack on Darwin and evolution as the “thin edge of the wedge” for their broader “Governing Goals”: “to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”
Science and Communist Liberation
Human evolution happened in such a way that no hominid ancestor survived; it could have been otherwise but wasn’t. All humans are genetically members of the same species and there is no biological basis for the separation into races. It should be noted that Darwin was a staunch abolitionist, and during the U.S. Civil War hoped that the North would put emancipation on its banner and eliminate slavery no matter the cost in blood. As we wrote in “Hail Charles Darwin!” (WV No. 854, 16 September 2005):
“America’s other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.”
Liberals worry about the denigration of science and rationalism—how is the country to maintain a competitive position in the world if the next generation knows more about the Book of Numbers than about algebra? Marxists are materialists and take it as a given that science and religion are incompatible.
Here we come to the fundamental difference between Marxists and liberals. At bottom, liberals accept the existence of the capitalist order and their most radical demand is for reforms. Their high point was the French Revolution—liberty, fraternity, equality. All abstract ideals, behind which lurk the sanctity of private property and the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Liberals, it is true, will recognize the class struggle, but what they reject is that the proletariat should actually seize state power from the bourgeoisie.
The “liberty” so beloved by a capitalist is his liberty to make a profit, which necessarily comes through the exploitation of the workers he employs. Such exploitation is built into the capitalist system, a system that is at bottom irrational. Economic competition inevitably leads to military competition, and imperialist war. Imperialism can’t be reformed—the whole system of private property has to be overthrown. The goal of the Marxists is the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which on a global scale can lay the basis for a classless communist society.
Science can open up as yet undreamt possibilities for humanity. But under capitalism today, vast resources devoted to research are for military purposes. The American ruling class was the first to own and so far the only one to use nuclear weapons, and the warheads in the U.S. arsenal are now each 20 or more times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Even a “limited” nuclear war could have catastrophic consequences, beyond the initial effects of the explosions. Climactic changes could wreak havoc on key agricultural areas, putting the survival of the human species at risk.
The imperialists have to be removed from power and disarmed by the workers before the rulers kill us all. That will require building a revolutionary workers party, independent of all the parties of capital, including the Democrats. Obama has continued to carry on all the essential policies of the administrations before him. That is actually why the bourgeoisie put him in power. The whole racist, murderous edifice of American imperialism has to be smashed by the multiracial working class, organized into democratically elected councils and led by its Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party.
As this talk has been in defense of Marxism and science, it is worth noting Marx’s words at the end of the preface to the first German edition of Capital: “The present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.” This dialectical mode of thought inspired Lenin, Trotsky and the whole Bolshevik Party that made the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. It remained a cornerstone of Trotsky’s thinking until the day he died.
In The Prophet Unarmed (1959) Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher cites a revealing sample of Trotsky’s vision of a future society, after capitalism’s demise: “The drudgery of feeding and bringing up children…will be lifted from the individual family by social initiative…. Woman will at last emerge from semi-slavery…. Socio-educational experiments…will evolve with a now inconceivable elan. The communist way of life will not grow up blindly like coral reefs in the sea. It will be built consciously. It will be checked by critical thought. It will be directed and corrected…. No sooner will one crust begin to form itself on the human existence than it will burst under the pressure of new inventions and achievements.”
The men and women of the future will no longer need religion, what Marx described as solace, the “opium of the people.” And the key to unlock human potential will be science, not superstition.
From The Bolshevik Archives-Soviet Publication of Secret Treaties-From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky
Markin comment:
The slogans featured in the headline to the article also posted here today and that is also the subject here, open diplomacy, are simply the beginning of wisdom for leftists- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange! We anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist leftists have not interest, no interest whatsoever, in letting the bourgeois state keep its state secrets secret. Although reading some of the material leaked one can understand why they would want to keep this stuff secret. More to the point is that some of the documentation of sophomoric antics of the “august” international diplomatic community should be placed in books sealed with seven seals-in the interest of human progress-now that we have had our “look-see.”
The key point though, as noted in the article, is our commitment to open diplomacy under the same principles as we have on opening the company books during trade union negotiations. The more we know about the conditions the other side operates under the better we can fight them.
I would also underscore here the point made in the article about the distinction between today’s Wikileaks’ basically ultra-liberal journalistic approach to “shaming” the international bourgeoisie to be less imperialistic and the policy of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early revolutionary period of the 1917 revolution to give ammunition to the international working class to order to help them rise up against their oppressors. That “open diplomacy, openly arrived at,” my friends, should be the norm, under conditions of a world federation of workers republics, in our struggle for an international socialist order.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Soviet Publication of Secret Treaties
(Quote of the Week)
Two weeks after the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky, then the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, announced the Soviet government’s publication of secret treaties, exposing the machinations of the prior tsarist and Provisional Government regimes and their imperialist allies. Published after the Soviet government had declared Russia’s withdrawal from the carnage of World War I, a war of competing imperialist powers for redivision of the world, the revelations helped foment a wave of struggle by the imperialists’ colonial victims. Most importantly, the Bolsheviks advanced the fight to end the war through proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries.
In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition. Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.
The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice. That is precisely why, while openly proposing an immediate armistice to all the belligerent peoples and their Governments, we are at the same time publishing these treaties and agreements, which have lost all binding force for the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants who have taken power into their own hands.
The bourgeois politicians and journalists of Germany and Austria-Hungary may try to make use of the documents published in order to present the diplomacy of the Central Empires in a more advantageous light. But any such attempt would be doomed to pitiful failure, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we intend quickly to place before the tribunal of public opinion secret documents which treat sufficiently clearly of the diplomacy of the Central Empires. Secondly, and more important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as universal as imperialist robbery. When the German proletariat enters the revolutionary path leading to the secrets of their chancelleries, they will extract documents no whit inferior to those which we are about to publish. It only remains to hope that this will take place quickly.
The workers’ and peasants’ Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our programme expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want peace as soon as possible on the basis of decent coexistence and collaboration of the peoples. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as soon as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: “Proletarians of all countries, unite.”
—“Statement by Trotsky on the Publication of the Secret Treaties,” 22 November 1917,
reprinted in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, Vol. 1 (1917-1924), edited by Jane Degras (1951)
The slogans featured in the headline to the article also posted here today and that is also the subject here, open diplomacy, are simply the beginning of wisdom for leftists- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange! We anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist leftists have not interest, no interest whatsoever, in letting the bourgeois state keep its state secrets secret. Although reading some of the material leaked one can understand why they would want to keep this stuff secret. More to the point is that some of the documentation of sophomoric antics of the “august” international diplomatic community should be placed in books sealed with seven seals-in the interest of human progress-now that we have had our “look-see.”
The key point though, as noted in the article, is our commitment to open diplomacy under the same principles as we have on opening the company books during trade union negotiations. The more we know about the conditions the other side operates under the better we can fight them.
I would also underscore here the point made in the article about the distinction between today’s Wikileaks’ basically ultra-liberal journalistic approach to “shaming” the international bourgeoisie to be less imperialistic and the policy of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early revolutionary period of the 1917 revolution to give ammunition to the international working class to order to help them rise up against their oppressors. That “open diplomacy, openly arrived at,” my friends, should be the norm, under conditions of a world federation of workers republics, in our struggle for an international socialist order.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Soviet Publication of Secret Treaties
(Quote of the Week)
Two weeks after the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky, then the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, announced the Soviet government’s publication of secret treaties, exposing the machinations of the prior tsarist and Provisional Government regimes and their imperialist allies. Published after the Soviet government had declared Russia’s withdrawal from the carnage of World War I, a war of competing imperialist powers for redivision of the world, the revelations helped foment a wave of struggle by the imperialists’ colonial victims. Most importantly, the Bolsheviks advanced the fight to end the war through proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries.
In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition. Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.
The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice. That is precisely why, while openly proposing an immediate armistice to all the belligerent peoples and their Governments, we are at the same time publishing these treaties and agreements, which have lost all binding force for the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants who have taken power into their own hands.
The bourgeois politicians and journalists of Germany and Austria-Hungary may try to make use of the documents published in order to present the diplomacy of the Central Empires in a more advantageous light. But any such attempt would be doomed to pitiful failure, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we intend quickly to place before the tribunal of public opinion secret documents which treat sufficiently clearly of the diplomacy of the Central Empires. Secondly, and more important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as universal as imperialist robbery. When the German proletariat enters the revolutionary path leading to the secrets of their chancelleries, they will extract documents no whit inferior to those which we are about to publish. It only remains to hope that this will take place quickly.
The workers’ and peasants’ Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our programme expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want peace as soon as possible on the basis of decent coexistence and collaboration of the peoples. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as soon as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: “Proletarians of all countries, unite.”
—“Statement by Trotsky on the Publication of the Secret Treaties,” 22 November 1917,
reprinted in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, Vol. 1 (1917-1924), edited by Jane Degras (1951)
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Free Private Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!-WikiLeaks, Imperialist Lies and Retribution
Markin comment:
The slogans featured in the headline to this article are simply the beginning of wisdom for leftists- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange! We anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist leftists have not interest, no interest whatsoever, in letting the bourgeois state keep its state secrets secret. Although reading some of the material leaked one can understand why they would want to keep this stuff secret. More to the point is that some of the documentation of sophomoric antics of the “august” international diplomatic community should be placed in books sealed with seven seals-in the interest of human progress-now that we have had our “look-see.”
The key point though, as noted in the article, is our commitment to open diplomacy under the same principles as we have on opening the company books during trade union negotiations. The more we know about the conditions the other side operates under the better we can fight them.
I would also underscore here the point made in the article about the distinction between today’s Wikileaks’ basically ultra-liberal journalistic approach to “shaming” the international bourgeoisie to be less imperialistic and the policy of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early revolutionary period of the 1917 revolution to give ammunition to the international working class to order to help them rise up against their oppressors. That “open diplomacy, openly arrived at,” my friends, should be the norm, under conditions of a world federation of workers republics, in our struggle for an international socialist order.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Free Private Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!
WikiLeaks, Imperialist Lies and Retribution
The release by WikiLeaks of some 250,000 State Department cables has provoked a vicious campaign of retaliation by the rulers of U.S. imperialism against Julian Assange, the Web site’s founder, and Army Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking secret material. Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly preparing criminal charges against Assange, an Australian citizen, possibly under the Espionage Act of 1917. Manning faces a court martial and up to 52 years in prison if convicted. He incurred Washington’s wrath when a video of a U.S. war crime in Baghdad was posted last April by WikiLeaks. It showed an Apache helicopter gunning down and killing at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, while the pilots gloated over the carnage.
Manning—if he was, indeed, the source of the leaks—and Assange are courageous individuals who have performed a laudable service by lifting, however slightly, the veil of secrecy and lies that enshrouds the imperialists’ machinations. They richly deserve to be defended by workers and the oppressed throughout the world. Protests in defense of Assange have been held in a number of countries, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions has spoken out for him. It is crucial for the international working class to defend WikiLeaks and Assange and also to demand freedom for Private Manning, who is being held under torturous conditions of solitary confinement at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia.
Though one would hardly guess it from the Obama administration’s frenzied reaction to the latest leaks, they actually contain little in the way of dramatic revelations. The imperialists are, simply, enraged at the slightest light being shed on their workings. A number of the cables are, to be sure, somewhat embarrassing for the U.S. and its client regimes. Thus, the leaked cables reveal that NATO has developed a secret military plan for defense of Poland and the Baltic states against Russia. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Arab countries are revealed to be pressing the U.S. to stage a military attack targeting Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, showing yet again that Iran needs nukes to deter attack by the U.S. or its Israeli proxy. And the Palestinian Authority and Lebanese government are shown to be working with Israel to target, respectively, Hamas and Hezbollah.
The cables also provide an insider’s view of U.S. imperialism’s high-handed operations within the borders of its client states. They show U.S. participation in the operational command of the “drug war” in Mexico, from developing overall strategy to selecting individuals to be targeted. American officials in Yemen negotiated a scheme with that country’s president to disguise U.S. air strikes on suspected Al Qaeda camps as being carried out by the Yemeni government, including when civilians get blown away. Such exposures are not, to say the least, to the benefit of the imperialists or their lackeys. The cables also include a report from the U.S. ambassador to Honduras on the June 2009 overthrow of populist president Manuel Zelaya characterizing the actions of “the military and/or whoever ordered the coup” as “illegal.” Whatever the case, the Obama administration has backed the government brought to power by the coup.
A particularly noteworthy subject covered by a number of the leaked cables is the case of torture victim Khaled el-Masri. A German citizen of Lebanese descent, el-Masri was seized in late 2003 while on vacation in Macedonia and shipped off to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan where he was held in solitary confinement, interrogated and beaten. Even after the CIA established that el-Masri was not the man they thought he was (his name is similar to that of a suspect in the 9/11 attacks), they continued to hold him incommunicado because “he knew too much.” Finally, after nearly five months’ detainment, el-Masri was dumped in a remote part of Albania, never having been charged with a crime.
The cables about el-Masri, which were sent from the U.S. embassies in Germany, Spain and Macedonia in 2006 and 2007, confirm what was long suspected: Berlin did not enforce arrest warrants against 13 CIA operatives accused of involvement in the kidnapping of this German citizen because Washington exerted intense pressure, warning of “potential negative implications for our bilateral relationship” if the case was pursued.
Obama White House: Vicious and Vindictive
Following the release of the video of the helicopter attack in Baghdad, WikiLeaks made public some 76,000 classified military field reports from the Afghanistan occupation that document the brutality inflicted by imperialist forces upon civilians, including by CIA-led forces operating out of bases along the border with Pakistan. Then in October, WikiLeaks published nearly 400,000 field reports on the Iraq war and occupation detailing more than 109,000 deaths, mostly of civilians.
The Obama administration has lashed out in fury against Private Manning by subjecting him to inhuman prison conditions that are clearly intended to break his will. Since his arrest last May, Manning has been held in solitary confinement. He is prohibited from exercising or watching television news programs; guards check on him every five minutes; a light is kept on in his cell, including when he tries to sleep. According to journalist David House, the only person to visit Manning in prison other than his lawyer: “He is being kept in a kind of punitive fashion before his trial and it is definitely weakening his mental state” (BBC News, 24 December 2010).
Manning is, as Assange correctly noted, a political prisoner. Assange, meanwhile, is under house arrest in Britain as he fights a Swedish extradition order citing allegations of “rape” and “sexual molestation.” Those accusations—which boil down to charges of unprotected sex in what were by all accounts consensual relations—are patently trumped-up. Prosecutors in Sweden initially opened, then dropped, then reopened an investigation into the accusations, which were made by a couple of WikiLeaks groupies. In fact, Assange has not been charged with any crime.
As Assange has pointed out, the real threat he faces is the possibility of extradition to the U.S., where both Democratic and Republican politicians are screaming for his head on a pike. Vice President Joe Biden was joined by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in branding Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” The implied threat behind this smear was made explicit by Tom Flanagan, former adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, who declared that Assange “should be assassinated.”
Assange is, basically, an ardent liberal critic of imperialist policy. In the late 1990s, he co-authored an encryption program called Rubberhose that activists in places like East Timor, Russia, Kosovo, Guatemala, Iraq, Sudan and Congo could use to protect sensitive data. In 2009, Amnesty International gave Assange its media award for a WikiLeaks investigation of the killing of hundreds of young men in Kenya by government forces. The fact that U.S. government spokesmen are discussing hitting Assange with the 1917 Espionage Act is a crystal-clear demonstration of how “national interests” are invoked by the capitalist rulers to clamp down on their critics. Meanwhile, Bank of America, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa Europe have done what they can to help shut down Assange’s Web site by blocking payments to WikiLeaks.
The Espionage Act was one of an array of repressive measures adopted after U.S. imperialism’s entry into the First World War to criminalize antiwar activity. It mandated imprisonment for any act deemed to interfere with the recruitment of troops. Haunted by the spectre of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which ripped Russia from the capitalist market and ended its participation in the war, in 1918 Congress passed the Sedition Act that made criticizing the “U.S. form of government” a felony.
Among the first and most prominent targets of the Espionage Act was Socialist Party spokesman Eugene Debs, who was jailed for a June 1918 speech at a workers rally in Canton, Ohio, where he denounced the war as capitalist slaughter and paid tribute to the Bolshevik leaders of the October Revolution. The same law was used in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of spying for the Soviets during World War II, when the U.S. and the USSR were allies. As their son Robert Meeropol declared in a December 29 statement in defense of Assange, the Espionage Act “transformed dissent into treason.” In the early 1970s, the Nixon government tried, unsuccessfully, to use the law to go after Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times shed light on the history of U.S. imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.
While no one knows exactly what the Obama administration is cooking up against Assange, there is no question that the vendetta against him threatens an ominous further attack on free speech, press freedoms and other democratic rights. Commenting on the case of an intelligence consultant hit with the Espionage Act for exposing what he considered wasteful expenditures on eavesdropping programs, the New York Times (11 June 2010) noted that “the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.” As we have repeatedly stressed, Barack Obama, who came into office with broad support from liberals and the left, is simply carrying out his duties as U.S. imperialism’s Commander-in-Chief—from expanding the murderous occupation of Afghanistan to stepping up attacks on democratic rights in the name of the “war on terror.”
The Bolsheviks vs. Secret Diplomacy
The furious reaction of the Obama administration to the WikiLeaks exposures points to the importance the rulers of capitalist imperialism place on secret diplomacy, which, as revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky explained in November 1917, “is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests.” Trotsky made this point in a statement he issued as Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet workers state that had just issued out of the October Revolution. Trotsky was announcing the publication and abrogation of secret treaties hatched by the prior tsarist regime and the bourgeois Provisional Government with their imperialist allies.
Prior to the proletariat’s seizure of power, the Bolshevik Party had demanded the abolition of secret diplomacy and the publication of secret treaties as part of its revolutionary proletarian opposition to World War I, a conflict between competing imperialists for redivision of the world. This demand was raised against the Provisional Government, which, coming to power after the overthrow of the tsar in the February Revolution of 1917, continued Russia’s participation in the war.
Immediately following the October Revolution, the workers state issued a decree on peace removing Russia from the war and demanding of the belligerents a “just, democratic” peace without annexations or indemnities. Two weeks later, the Soviet newspaper Izvestia began publication of treaties concluded during the war. Historian E.H. Carr noted in Volume Three of The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 that publication of the treaties in English in the Manchester Guardian galvanized British radicals and “created a sensation in the United States.” In his Canton speech, Debs declared, “When the Bolsheviki came into power and went through the archives they found and exposed the secret treaties—the treaties that were made between the Czar and the French government, the British government and the Italian government, proposing, after the victory was achieved, to dismember the German Empire and destroy the Central Powers. These treaties have never been denied nor repudiated.”
The October Revolution was a beacon of liberation for the exploited and the oppressed in the advanced capitalist countries and in the colonial and semicolonial world. Along with the Soviet government’s renunciation of predatory agreements reached by prior regimes, publication of the treaties helped spark waves of struggle by those under the boot heel of the imperialists, whose dirty deals were now laid bare.
One of the first treaties to be exposed was the May 1916 agreement between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot, which plotted the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in anticipation of its defeat, along with Germany in WWI. Tsarist Russia approved this pact on condition that it receive part of eastern Anatolia and Constantinople (Istanbul) with its Straits of Dardanelles, a critically strategic passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The exposure of this deal, which was revised at the end of the war in favor of Britain, had an electrifying effect in the Near East, whose peoples expected that the Ottomans’ defeat would result in their self-determination. Strikes and demonstrations swept Egypt in 1919, and the following year in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) the masses stood up to the more than 130,000 British troops deployed to occupy the territory. The Soviet government also disowned plans by the tsarist regime and the imperialists to divide up Persia (Iran).
A similar impact was seen in China, whole chunks of which had been carved up by the Western and Japanese imperialists. The Soviets published a secret treaty signed by Japan and Russia in 1916 that upheld a series of prior secret agreements dividing Manchuria in northeast China into Japanese and Russian spheres of influence. Other areas, such as Inner Mongolia, were similarly demarcated. The Bolsheviks’ renunciation of tsarist annexations and machinations in China made a deep impression on key radical intellectuals and among students returning to China after the war. Many of the students had illusions in U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s promises of “self-determination” and social justice for all peoples. However, with the 1919 Versailles Treaty, the U.S. and other imperialists awarded all of defeated Germany’s territory in China to the Japanese Empire, sparking a wave of mass protest known as the May 4th Movement, some of whose leaders went on to help found the Chinese Communist Party.
A Revolutionary Perspective
A number of reformist “socialist” organizations around the world have referred positively to the Soviets’ publication of secret treaties in light of the WikiLeaks exposures, only to draw a continuum between the two. While performing a valuable service to the exploited and the oppressed, Julian Assange is what he is: a bourgeois liberal who vainly seeks to rid the imperialist system of its worst excesses through exposure of its crimes. The Bolsheviks had a different purpose. By exposing the deeds of the previous Russian rulers and their imperialist patrons and allies, they helped educate the working class in Russia and internationally. Their program was to extend the October Revolution internationally, which they knew was the only road to achieving a socialist society. However, the revolutionary wave that accompanied and followed the end of World War I in Germany and elsewhere in Europe failed to overthrow the rule of capital, centrally due to the lack of the kind of steeled vanguard party that V.I. Lenin had built in Russia.
While maintaining its revolutionary internationalist perspective and program, the early Soviet workers state itself needed to engage in diplomatic dealings with the capitalist world. Thus it signed the Rapallo Pact, which arranged for the German military and its industrial suppliers to set up operations on Soviet territory. While this gave the German militarists a chance to rearm, it also provided the means to begin the mechanization and modernization of the Red Army and related branches of Soviet industry. This part of the Rapallo Pact had to be kept secret from the victorious Entente powers. As Trotsky wrote of the revolutionary Bolshevik regime: “Wherever it could, it, of course, deceived the class enemies; on the other hand it told the toilers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Only thanks to this did it succeed in winning their trust to a degree never before achieved by any other party in the world” (Their Morals and Ours, 1938).
With the defeat of the 1923 German Revolution, the Soviet workers state, which had suffered greatly from the effects of the interimperialist war and the Civil War that followed the revolution, found itself isolated. Under conditions of scarcity, a new conservative and bureaucratized layer in the party and state apparatus led by Joseph Stalin came to the fore, usurping political power beginning in 1923-24. In place of the banner of world socialist revolution, Stalin in 1924 put forward the false dogma of “socialism in one country,” out of which the corollary of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism inevitably developed. Over time, and against the opposition of Trotsky and his followers who fought to maintain the program of the October Revolution, the Communist Parties were transformed from instruments of revolution into instruments of class collaboration.
Trotsky observed in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), his classic analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy, that “foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals. The degeneration of the governing stratum in the Soviet Union could not but be accompanied by a corresponding change of aims and methods in Soviet diplomacy.” While unconditionally defending the degenerated Soviet workers state against imperialism and domestic capitalist counterrevolution, Trotskyists fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy and return to the road of the October Revolution.
The bureaucracy’s betrayals led to the ultimate undoing of the October Revolution through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. In the aftermath, the imperialists who crow about the “death of communism” are ever more brazen in their rampages from Iraq to Afghanistan and in their assault on democratic rights and the livelihood of workers “at home.” Liberals and the reformist left seize upon revelations of the (everyday) workings of the capitalist rulers—disinformation, secret political police, assassination, etc.—to pressure the imperialists to adopt more “humane” policies. Our aim is to build a workers party of the Bolshevik type. Imperialism and its savage wars and occupations, sold through systematic lying and duplicity, will be defeated only through victorious proletarian revolution which, extended internationally, will lay the basis for the liberation of all humanity in a future communist world.
The slogans featured in the headline to this article are simply the beginning of wisdom for leftists- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange! We anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist leftists have not interest, no interest whatsoever, in letting the bourgeois state keep its state secrets secret. Although reading some of the material leaked one can understand why they would want to keep this stuff secret. More to the point is that some of the documentation of sophomoric antics of the “august” international diplomatic community should be placed in books sealed with seven seals-in the interest of human progress-now that we have had our “look-see.”
The key point though, as noted in the article, is our commitment to open diplomacy under the same principles as we have on opening the company books during trade union negotiations. The more we know about the conditions the other side operates under the better we can fight them.
I would also underscore here the point made in the article about the distinction between today’s Wikileaks’ basically ultra-liberal journalistic approach to “shaming” the international bourgeoisie to be less imperialistic and the policy of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early revolutionary period of the 1917 revolution to give ammunition to the international working class to order to help them rise up against their oppressors. That “open diplomacy, openly arrived at,” my friends, should be the norm, under conditions of a world federation of workers republics, in our struggle for an international socialist order.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Free Private Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!
WikiLeaks, Imperialist Lies and Retribution
The release by WikiLeaks of some 250,000 State Department cables has provoked a vicious campaign of retaliation by the rulers of U.S. imperialism against Julian Assange, the Web site’s founder, and Army Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking secret material. Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly preparing criminal charges against Assange, an Australian citizen, possibly under the Espionage Act of 1917. Manning faces a court martial and up to 52 years in prison if convicted. He incurred Washington’s wrath when a video of a U.S. war crime in Baghdad was posted last April by WikiLeaks. It showed an Apache helicopter gunning down and killing at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, while the pilots gloated over the carnage.
Manning—if he was, indeed, the source of the leaks—and Assange are courageous individuals who have performed a laudable service by lifting, however slightly, the veil of secrecy and lies that enshrouds the imperialists’ machinations. They richly deserve to be defended by workers and the oppressed throughout the world. Protests in defense of Assange have been held in a number of countries, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions has spoken out for him. It is crucial for the international working class to defend WikiLeaks and Assange and also to demand freedom for Private Manning, who is being held under torturous conditions of solitary confinement at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia.
Though one would hardly guess it from the Obama administration’s frenzied reaction to the latest leaks, they actually contain little in the way of dramatic revelations. The imperialists are, simply, enraged at the slightest light being shed on their workings. A number of the cables are, to be sure, somewhat embarrassing for the U.S. and its client regimes. Thus, the leaked cables reveal that NATO has developed a secret military plan for defense of Poland and the Baltic states against Russia. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Arab countries are revealed to be pressing the U.S. to stage a military attack targeting Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, showing yet again that Iran needs nukes to deter attack by the U.S. or its Israeli proxy. And the Palestinian Authority and Lebanese government are shown to be working with Israel to target, respectively, Hamas and Hezbollah.
The cables also provide an insider’s view of U.S. imperialism’s high-handed operations within the borders of its client states. They show U.S. participation in the operational command of the “drug war” in Mexico, from developing overall strategy to selecting individuals to be targeted. American officials in Yemen negotiated a scheme with that country’s president to disguise U.S. air strikes on suspected Al Qaeda camps as being carried out by the Yemeni government, including when civilians get blown away. Such exposures are not, to say the least, to the benefit of the imperialists or their lackeys. The cables also include a report from the U.S. ambassador to Honduras on the June 2009 overthrow of populist president Manuel Zelaya characterizing the actions of “the military and/or whoever ordered the coup” as “illegal.” Whatever the case, the Obama administration has backed the government brought to power by the coup.
A particularly noteworthy subject covered by a number of the leaked cables is the case of torture victim Khaled el-Masri. A German citizen of Lebanese descent, el-Masri was seized in late 2003 while on vacation in Macedonia and shipped off to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan where he was held in solitary confinement, interrogated and beaten. Even after the CIA established that el-Masri was not the man they thought he was (his name is similar to that of a suspect in the 9/11 attacks), they continued to hold him incommunicado because “he knew too much.” Finally, after nearly five months’ detainment, el-Masri was dumped in a remote part of Albania, never having been charged with a crime.
The cables about el-Masri, which were sent from the U.S. embassies in Germany, Spain and Macedonia in 2006 and 2007, confirm what was long suspected: Berlin did not enforce arrest warrants against 13 CIA operatives accused of involvement in the kidnapping of this German citizen because Washington exerted intense pressure, warning of “potential negative implications for our bilateral relationship” if the case was pursued.
Obama White House: Vicious and Vindictive
Following the release of the video of the helicopter attack in Baghdad, WikiLeaks made public some 76,000 classified military field reports from the Afghanistan occupation that document the brutality inflicted by imperialist forces upon civilians, including by CIA-led forces operating out of bases along the border with Pakistan. Then in October, WikiLeaks published nearly 400,000 field reports on the Iraq war and occupation detailing more than 109,000 deaths, mostly of civilians.
The Obama administration has lashed out in fury against Private Manning by subjecting him to inhuman prison conditions that are clearly intended to break his will. Since his arrest last May, Manning has been held in solitary confinement. He is prohibited from exercising or watching television news programs; guards check on him every five minutes; a light is kept on in his cell, including when he tries to sleep. According to journalist David House, the only person to visit Manning in prison other than his lawyer: “He is being kept in a kind of punitive fashion before his trial and it is definitely weakening his mental state” (BBC News, 24 December 2010).
Manning is, as Assange correctly noted, a political prisoner. Assange, meanwhile, is under house arrest in Britain as he fights a Swedish extradition order citing allegations of “rape” and “sexual molestation.” Those accusations—which boil down to charges of unprotected sex in what were by all accounts consensual relations—are patently trumped-up. Prosecutors in Sweden initially opened, then dropped, then reopened an investigation into the accusations, which were made by a couple of WikiLeaks groupies. In fact, Assange has not been charged with any crime.
As Assange has pointed out, the real threat he faces is the possibility of extradition to the U.S., where both Democratic and Republican politicians are screaming for his head on a pike. Vice President Joe Biden was joined by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in branding Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” The implied threat behind this smear was made explicit by Tom Flanagan, former adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, who declared that Assange “should be assassinated.”
Assange is, basically, an ardent liberal critic of imperialist policy. In the late 1990s, he co-authored an encryption program called Rubberhose that activists in places like East Timor, Russia, Kosovo, Guatemala, Iraq, Sudan and Congo could use to protect sensitive data. In 2009, Amnesty International gave Assange its media award for a WikiLeaks investigation of the killing of hundreds of young men in Kenya by government forces. The fact that U.S. government spokesmen are discussing hitting Assange with the 1917 Espionage Act is a crystal-clear demonstration of how “national interests” are invoked by the capitalist rulers to clamp down on their critics. Meanwhile, Bank of America, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa Europe have done what they can to help shut down Assange’s Web site by blocking payments to WikiLeaks.
The Espionage Act was one of an array of repressive measures adopted after U.S. imperialism’s entry into the First World War to criminalize antiwar activity. It mandated imprisonment for any act deemed to interfere with the recruitment of troops. Haunted by the spectre of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which ripped Russia from the capitalist market and ended its participation in the war, in 1918 Congress passed the Sedition Act that made criticizing the “U.S. form of government” a felony.
Among the first and most prominent targets of the Espionage Act was Socialist Party spokesman Eugene Debs, who was jailed for a June 1918 speech at a workers rally in Canton, Ohio, where he denounced the war as capitalist slaughter and paid tribute to the Bolshevik leaders of the October Revolution. The same law was used in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of spying for the Soviets during World War II, when the U.S. and the USSR were allies. As their son Robert Meeropol declared in a December 29 statement in defense of Assange, the Espionage Act “transformed dissent into treason.” In the early 1970s, the Nixon government tried, unsuccessfully, to use the law to go after Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times shed light on the history of U.S. imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.
While no one knows exactly what the Obama administration is cooking up against Assange, there is no question that the vendetta against him threatens an ominous further attack on free speech, press freedoms and other democratic rights. Commenting on the case of an intelligence consultant hit with the Espionage Act for exposing what he considered wasteful expenditures on eavesdropping programs, the New York Times (11 June 2010) noted that “the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.” As we have repeatedly stressed, Barack Obama, who came into office with broad support from liberals and the left, is simply carrying out his duties as U.S. imperialism’s Commander-in-Chief—from expanding the murderous occupation of Afghanistan to stepping up attacks on democratic rights in the name of the “war on terror.”
The Bolsheviks vs. Secret Diplomacy
The furious reaction of the Obama administration to the WikiLeaks exposures points to the importance the rulers of capitalist imperialism place on secret diplomacy, which, as revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky explained in November 1917, “is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests.” Trotsky made this point in a statement he issued as Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet workers state that had just issued out of the October Revolution. Trotsky was announcing the publication and abrogation of secret treaties hatched by the prior tsarist regime and the bourgeois Provisional Government with their imperialist allies.
Prior to the proletariat’s seizure of power, the Bolshevik Party had demanded the abolition of secret diplomacy and the publication of secret treaties as part of its revolutionary proletarian opposition to World War I, a conflict between competing imperialists for redivision of the world. This demand was raised against the Provisional Government, which, coming to power after the overthrow of the tsar in the February Revolution of 1917, continued Russia’s participation in the war.
Immediately following the October Revolution, the workers state issued a decree on peace removing Russia from the war and demanding of the belligerents a “just, democratic” peace without annexations or indemnities. Two weeks later, the Soviet newspaper Izvestia began publication of treaties concluded during the war. Historian E.H. Carr noted in Volume Three of The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 that publication of the treaties in English in the Manchester Guardian galvanized British radicals and “created a sensation in the United States.” In his Canton speech, Debs declared, “When the Bolsheviki came into power and went through the archives they found and exposed the secret treaties—the treaties that were made between the Czar and the French government, the British government and the Italian government, proposing, after the victory was achieved, to dismember the German Empire and destroy the Central Powers. These treaties have never been denied nor repudiated.”
The October Revolution was a beacon of liberation for the exploited and the oppressed in the advanced capitalist countries and in the colonial and semicolonial world. Along with the Soviet government’s renunciation of predatory agreements reached by prior regimes, publication of the treaties helped spark waves of struggle by those under the boot heel of the imperialists, whose dirty deals were now laid bare.
One of the first treaties to be exposed was the May 1916 agreement between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot, which plotted the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in anticipation of its defeat, along with Germany in WWI. Tsarist Russia approved this pact on condition that it receive part of eastern Anatolia and Constantinople (Istanbul) with its Straits of Dardanelles, a critically strategic passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The exposure of this deal, which was revised at the end of the war in favor of Britain, had an electrifying effect in the Near East, whose peoples expected that the Ottomans’ defeat would result in their self-determination. Strikes and demonstrations swept Egypt in 1919, and the following year in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) the masses stood up to the more than 130,000 British troops deployed to occupy the territory. The Soviet government also disowned plans by the tsarist regime and the imperialists to divide up Persia (Iran).
A similar impact was seen in China, whole chunks of which had been carved up by the Western and Japanese imperialists. The Soviets published a secret treaty signed by Japan and Russia in 1916 that upheld a series of prior secret agreements dividing Manchuria in northeast China into Japanese and Russian spheres of influence. Other areas, such as Inner Mongolia, were similarly demarcated. The Bolsheviks’ renunciation of tsarist annexations and machinations in China made a deep impression on key radical intellectuals and among students returning to China after the war. Many of the students had illusions in U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s promises of “self-determination” and social justice for all peoples. However, with the 1919 Versailles Treaty, the U.S. and other imperialists awarded all of defeated Germany’s territory in China to the Japanese Empire, sparking a wave of mass protest known as the May 4th Movement, some of whose leaders went on to help found the Chinese Communist Party.
A Revolutionary Perspective
A number of reformist “socialist” organizations around the world have referred positively to the Soviets’ publication of secret treaties in light of the WikiLeaks exposures, only to draw a continuum between the two. While performing a valuable service to the exploited and the oppressed, Julian Assange is what he is: a bourgeois liberal who vainly seeks to rid the imperialist system of its worst excesses through exposure of its crimes. The Bolsheviks had a different purpose. By exposing the deeds of the previous Russian rulers and their imperialist patrons and allies, they helped educate the working class in Russia and internationally. Their program was to extend the October Revolution internationally, which they knew was the only road to achieving a socialist society. However, the revolutionary wave that accompanied and followed the end of World War I in Germany and elsewhere in Europe failed to overthrow the rule of capital, centrally due to the lack of the kind of steeled vanguard party that V.I. Lenin had built in Russia.
While maintaining its revolutionary internationalist perspective and program, the early Soviet workers state itself needed to engage in diplomatic dealings with the capitalist world. Thus it signed the Rapallo Pact, which arranged for the German military and its industrial suppliers to set up operations on Soviet territory. While this gave the German militarists a chance to rearm, it also provided the means to begin the mechanization and modernization of the Red Army and related branches of Soviet industry. This part of the Rapallo Pact had to be kept secret from the victorious Entente powers. As Trotsky wrote of the revolutionary Bolshevik regime: “Wherever it could, it, of course, deceived the class enemies; on the other hand it told the toilers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Only thanks to this did it succeed in winning their trust to a degree never before achieved by any other party in the world” (Their Morals and Ours, 1938).
With the defeat of the 1923 German Revolution, the Soviet workers state, which had suffered greatly from the effects of the interimperialist war and the Civil War that followed the revolution, found itself isolated. Under conditions of scarcity, a new conservative and bureaucratized layer in the party and state apparatus led by Joseph Stalin came to the fore, usurping political power beginning in 1923-24. In place of the banner of world socialist revolution, Stalin in 1924 put forward the false dogma of “socialism in one country,” out of which the corollary of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism inevitably developed. Over time, and against the opposition of Trotsky and his followers who fought to maintain the program of the October Revolution, the Communist Parties were transformed from instruments of revolution into instruments of class collaboration.
Trotsky observed in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), his classic analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy, that “foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals. The degeneration of the governing stratum in the Soviet Union could not but be accompanied by a corresponding change of aims and methods in Soviet diplomacy.” While unconditionally defending the degenerated Soviet workers state against imperialism and domestic capitalist counterrevolution, Trotskyists fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy and return to the road of the October Revolution.
The bureaucracy’s betrayals led to the ultimate undoing of the October Revolution through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. In the aftermath, the imperialists who crow about the “death of communism” are ever more brazen in their rampages from Iraq to Afghanistan and in their assault on democratic rights and the livelihood of workers “at home.” Liberals and the reformist left seize upon revelations of the (everyday) workings of the capitalist rulers—disinformation, secret political police, assassination, etc.—to pressure the imperialists to adopt more “humane” policies. Our aim is to build a workers party of the Bolshevik type. Imperialism and its savage wars and occupations, sold through systematic lying and duplicity, will be defeated only through victorious proletarian revolution which, extended internationally, will lay the basis for the liberation of all humanity in a future communist world.
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War(1915)
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War
Published: Sotsial-Demorkrat No. 43, July 26, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demorkrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 275-280.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
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During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.
This is axiomatic, and disputed only by conscious partisans or helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists. Among the former, for instance, is Semkovsky of the Organising Committee (No. 2 of its Izvestia), and among the latter, Trotsky and Bukvoyed,[2] and Kautsky in Germany. To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105).
This is an instance of high-flown phraseology with which Trotsky always justifies opportunism. A “revolutionary struggle against the war” is merely an empty and meaning less exclamation, something at which the heroes of the Second International excel, unless it means revolutionary action against one’s own government even in wartime. One has only to do some thinking in order to understand this. Wartime revolutionary action against one’s own government indubitably means, not only desiring its defeat, but really facilitating such a defeat. ("Discerning reader”: note that this does not mean “blowing up bridges”, organising unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and ·in general helping the government defeat the revolutionaries.)
The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany. (Bukvoyed and Semkovsky give more direct expression to the “thought”, or rather want of thought, which they share with Trotsky.) But Trotsky regards this as the “methodology of social-patriotism"! To help people that are unable to think for themselves, the Berne resolution (Sotsial Demokrat No. 40)[1] made it clear, that in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its own government. Bukvoyed and Trotsky preferred to avoid this truth, while Semkovsky (an opportunist who is more useful to the working class than all the others, thanks to his naively frank reiteration of bourgeois wisdom) blurted out the following: “This is nonsense, because either Germany or Russia can win” (Izvestia No. 2).
Take the example of the Paris Commune. France was defeated by Germany but the workers were defeated by Bismarck and Thiers! Had Bukvoyed and Trotsky done a little thinking, they would have realised that they have adopted the viewpoint on the war held by governments and the bourgeoisie, i.e., that they cringe to the “political methodology of social-patriotism”, to use Trotsky’s pretentious language.
A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war is, on the one hand, facilitated by military reverses ("defeats") of governments; on the other hand, one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby facilitating defeat.
The reason why the chauvinists (including the Organising Committee and the Chkheidze group) repudiate the defeat “slogan” is that this slogan alone implies a consistent call for revolutionary action against one’s own government in wartime. Without such action, millions of ultra-revolutionary phrases such as a war against “the war and the conditions, etc." are not worth a brass farthing.
Anyone who would in all earnest refute the “slogan” of defeat for one’s own government in the imperialist war should prove one of three things: (1) that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary, or (2) that a revolution stemming from that war is impossible, or (3) that co-ordination and mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries. The third point is particularly important to Russia, a most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible. That is why the Russian Social-Democrats had to be the first to advance the “theory and practice” of the defeat “slogan”. The tsarist government was perfectly right in asserting that the agitation conducted by the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group in the Duma—the sole instance in the International, not only of parliamentary opposition but of genuine revolutionary anti-government agitation among the masses—that this agitation has weakened Russia’s “military might” and is likely to lead to its defeat. This is a fact to which it is foolish to close one’s eyes.
The opponents of the defeat slogan are simply afraid of themselves when they refuse to recognise the very obvious fact of the inseparable link between revolutionary agitation against the government and helping bring about its defeat.
Are co-ordination and mutual aid possible between the Russian movement, which is revolutionary in the bourgeois- democratic sense, and th socialist movement in the West? No socialist who has publicly spoken on the matter during the last decade has doubted this, the movement among the Austrian proletariat after October 17, 1905,[3] actually proving it possible.
Ask any Social-Democrat who calls himself an internationalist whether or not he approves of an understanding between the Social-Democrats of the various belligerent countries on joint revolutionary action against all belligerent governments. Many of them will reply that it is impossible, as Kautsky has done (Die Neue Zeit, October 2, 1914), thereby fully proving his social-chauvinism. This, on the one hand, is a deliberate and vicious lie, which clashes with the generally known facts and the Basle Manifesto. On the other hand, if it were true, the opportunists would be quite right in many respects!
Many will voice their approval of such an understanding. To this we shall say: if this approval is not hypocritical, it is ridiculous to think that, in wartime and for the conduct of a war, some “formal” understanding is necessary, such as the election of representatives, the arrangement of a meeting, the signing of an agreement, and the choice of the day and hour! Only the Semkovskys are capable of thinking so. An understanding on revolutionary action even in a single country, to say nothing of a number of countries, can be achieved only by the force of the example of serious revolutionary action, by launching such action and developing it. However, such action cannot be launched without desiring the defeat of the government, and without contributing to such a defeat. The conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war cannot be “made”, any more than a revolution can be “made”. It develops out of a number of diverse phenomena, aspects, features, characteristics and consequences of the imperialist war. That development is impossible without a series of military reverses and defeats of governments that receive blows from their own oppressed classes.
To repudiate the defeat slogan means allowing one’s revolutionary ardour to degenerate into an empty phrase, or sheer hypocrisy.
What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of “neither victory nor defeat” (Semkovsky in Izvestia No. 2; also the entire Organising Committee in No. 1). This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, “retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”. “The significance of our August 4 vote was that we are not for war but against defeat," David, a leader of the opportunists, writes in his book. The Organising Committee, together with Bukvoyed and Trotsky, stand on fully the same ground as David when they defend the “neither-victory nor-defeat” slogan.
On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.
When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.
Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an -enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing ·governments, of the present-day ruling classes.
Let us look at the question from yet another angle. The war cannot but evoke among the masses the most turbulent sentiments, which upset the usual sluggish state of mass mentality. Revolutionary tactics are impossible if they are not adjusted to these new turbulent sentiments.
What are the main currents of these turbulent sentiments? They are: (1) Horror and despair. Hence, a growth of religious feeling. Again the churches are crowded, the reactionaries joyfully declare. “Wherever there is suffering there is religion," says the arch-reactionary Barr s. He is right, too. (2) Hatred of the “enemy”, a sentiment that is carefully fostered by the bourgeoisie (not so much by the priests), arid is of economic and political value only to the bourgeoisie. (3) Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie—the sentiment of all class-conscious workers who understand, on the one hand, that war is a “continuation of the politics” of imperialism, which they counter by a “continuation” of their hatred of their class enemy, and, on the other hand, that “a war against war” is a banal phrase unless it means a revolution against their own government. Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie cannot be aroused unless their defeat is desired; one cannot be a sincere opponent of a civil (i.e., class) truce without arousing hatred of one’s own government and bourgeoisie!
Those who stand for the “neither-victory-nor-defeat” slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of inter national revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task. It is the proletariat in the most backward of the belligerent. Great Powers which, through the medium of their party, have had to adopt—especially in view of the shameful treachery of the German and French Social-Democrats— revolutionary tactics that are quite unfeasible unless they “contribute to the defeat” of their own government, but which alone lead to a European revolution, to the permanent peace of socialism, to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] See p. 163 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] Bukvoyed-D. Ryazanov.
[3] This refers to the tsar’s manifesto promulgated on October 17 (30), 1905. It promised "civil liberties" and a “legislative Duma”. The manifesto was a concession wrested from the tsarist regime by the revolution, but that concession by no means decided the fate of the revolution as the liberals and Mensheviks claimed, The Bolsheviks exposed the real meaning of the Manifesto and called upon the masses to continue the struggle and overthrow the autocracy.
The first Russian revolution exerted a great revolutionising influence on the working-class movement in other countries, in particular in Austria-Hungary. Lenin pointed out that the news about the tsar’s concession and his manifesto, with its promise of “liberties”, “played a decisive part in the final victory of universal suffrage in Austria”.
Mass demonstrations took place in Vienna and other industrial cities in Austria-Hungary. In Prague barricades were put up. As a result, universal suffrage was introduced in Austria.
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War
Published: Sotsial-Demorkrat No. 43, July 26, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demorkrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 275-280.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.
This is axiomatic, and disputed only by conscious partisans or helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists. Among the former, for instance, is Semkovsky of the Organising Committee (No. 2 of its Izvestia), and among the latter, Trotsky and Bukvoyed,[2] and Kautsky in Germany. To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105).
This is an instance of high-flown phraseology with which Trotsky always justifies opportunism. A “revolutionary struggle against the war” is merely an empty and meaning less exclamation, something at which the heroes of the Second International excel, unless it means revolutionary action against one’s own government even in wartime. One has only to do some thinking in order to understand this. Wartime revolutionary action against one’s own government indubitably means, not only desiring its defeat, but really facilitating such a defeat. ("Discerning reader”: note that this does not mean “blowing up bridges”, organising unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and ·in general helping the government defeat the revolutionaries.)
The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany. (Bukvoyed and Semkovsky give more direct expression to the “thought”, or rather want of thought, which they share with Trotsky.) But Trotsky regards this as the “methodology of social-patriotism"! To help people that are unable to think for themselves, the Berne resolution (Sotsial Demokrat No. 40)[1] made it clear, that in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its own government. Bukvoyed and Trotsky preferred to avoid this truth, while Semkovsky (an opportunist who is more useful to the working class than all the others, thanks to his naively frank reiteration of bourgeois wisdom) blurted out the following: “This is nonsense, because either Germany or Russia can win” (Izvestia No. 2).
Take the example of the Paris Commune. France was defeated by Germany but the workers were defeated by Bismarck and Thiers! Had Bukvoyed and Trotsky done a little thinking, they would have realised that they have adopted the viewpoint on the war held by governments and the bourgeoisie, i.e., that they cringe to the “political methodology of social-patriotism”, to use Trotsky’s pretentious language.
A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war is, on the one hand, facilitated by military reverses ("defeats") of governments; on the other hand, one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby facilitating defeat.
The reason why the chauvinists (including the Organising Committee and the Chkheidze group) repudiate the defeat “slogan” is that this slogan alone implies a consistent call for revolutionary action against one’s own government in wartime. Without such action, millions of ultra-revolutionary phrases such as a war against “the war and the conditions, etc." are not worth a brass farthing.
Anyone who would in all earnest refute the “slogan” of defeat for one’s own government in the imperialist war should prove one of three things: (1) that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary, or (2) that a revolution stemming from that war is impossible, or (3) that co-ordination and mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries. The third point is particularly important to Russia, a most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible. That is why the Russian Social-Democrats had to be the first to advance the “theory and practice” of the defeat “slogan”. The tsarist government was perfectly right in asserting that the agitation conducted by the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group in the Duma—the sole instance in the International, not only of parliamentary opposition but of genuine revolutionary anti-government agitation among the masses—that this agitation has weakened Russia’s “military might” and is likely to lead to its defeat. This is a fact to which it is foolish to close one’s eyes.
The opponents of the defeat slogan are simply afraid of themselves when they refuse to recognise the very obvious fact of the inseparable link between revolutionary agitation against the government and helping bring about its defeat.
Are co-ordination and mutual aid possible between the Russian movement, which is revolutionary in the bourgeois- democratic sense, and th socialist movement in the West? No socialist who has publicly spoken on the matter during the last decade has doubted this, the movement among the Austrian proletariat after October 17, 1905,[3] actually proving it possible.
Ask any Social-Democrat who calls himself an internationalist whether or not he approves of an understanding between the Social-Democrats of the various belligerent countries on joint revolutionary action against all belligerent governments. Many of them will reply that it is impossible, as Kautsky has done (Die Neue Zeit, October 2, 1914), thereby fully proving his social-chauvinism. This, on the one hand, is a deliberate and vicious lie, which clashes with the generally known facts and the Basle Manifesto. On the other hand, if it were true, the opportunists would be quite right in many respects!
Many will voice their approval of such an understanding. To this we shall say: if this approval is not hypocritical, it is ridiculous to think that, in wartime and for the conduct of a war, some “formal” understanding is necessary, such as the election of representatives, the arrangement of a meeting, the signing of an agreement, and the choice of the day and hour! Only the Semkovskys are capable of thinking so. An understanding on revolutionary action even in a single country, to say nothing of a number of countries, can be achieved only by the force of the example of serious revolutionary action, by launching such action and developing it. However, such action cannot be launched without desiring the defeat of the government, and without contributing to such a defeat. The conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war cannot be “made”, any more than a revolution can be “made”. It develops out of a number of diverse phenomena, aspects, features, characteristics and consequences of the imperialist war. That development is impossible without a series of military reverses and defeats of governments that receive blows from their own oppressed classes.
To repudiate the defeat slogan means allowing one’s revolutionary ardour to degenerate into an empty phrase, or sheer hypocrisy.
What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of “neither victory nor defeat” (Semkovsky in Izvestia No. 2; also the entire Organising Committee in No. 1). This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, “retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”. “The significance of our August 4 vote was that we are not for war but against defeat," David, a leader of the opportunists, writes in his book. The Organising Committee, together with Bukvoyed and Trotsky, stand on fully the same ground as David when they defend the “neither-victory nor-defeat” slogan.
On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.
When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.
Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an -enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing ·governments, of the present-day ruling classes.
Let us look at the question from yet another angle. The war cannot but evoke among the masses the most turbulent sentiments, which upset the usual sluggish state of mass mentality. Revolutionary tactics are impossible if they are not adjusted to these new turbulent sentiments.
What are the main currents of these turbulent sentiments? They are: (1) Horror and despair. Hence, a growth of religious feeling. Again the churches are crowded, the reactionaries joyfully declare. “Wherever there is suffering there is religion," says the arch-reactionary Barr s. He is right, too. (2) Hatred of the “enemy”, a sentiment that is carefully fostered by the bourgeoisie (not so much by the priests), arid is of economic and political value only to the bourgeoisie. (3) Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie—the sentiment of all class-conscious workers who understand, on the one hand, that war is a “continuation of the politics” of imperialism, which they counter by a “continuation” of their hatred of their class enemy, and, on the other hand, that “a war against war” is a banal phrase unless it means a revolution against their own government. Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie cannot be aroused unless their defeat is desired; one cannot be a sincere opponent of a civil (i.e., class) truce without arousing hatred of one’s own government and bourgeoisie!
Those who stand for the “neither-victory-nor-defeat” slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of inter national revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task. It is the proletariat in the most backward of the belligerent. Great Powers which, through the medium of their party, have had to adopt—especially in view of the shameful treachery of the German and French Social-Democrats— revolutionary tactics that are quite unfeasible unless they “contribute to the defeat” of their own government, but which alone lead to a European revolution, to the permanent peace of socialism, to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] See p. 163 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] Bukvoyed-D. Ryazanov.
[3] This refers to the tsar’s manifesto promulgated on October 17 (30), 1905. It promised "civil liberties" and a “legislative Duma”. The manifesto was a concession wrested from the tsarist regime by the revolution, but that concession by no means decided the fate of the revolution as the liberals and Mensheviks claimed, The Bolsheviks exposed the real meaning of the Manifesto and called upon the masses to continue the struggle and overthrow the autocracy.
The first Russian revolution exerted a great revolutionising influence on the working-class movement in other countries, in particular in Austria-Hungary. Lenin pointed out that the news about the tsar’s concession and his manifesto, with its promise of “liberties”, “played a decisive part in the final victory of universal suffrage in Austria”.
Mass demonstrations took place in Vienna and other industrial cities in Austria-Hungary. In Prague barricades were put up. As a result, universal suffrage was introduced in Austria.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917) -Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism-HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED (1914)
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism
HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 35, December 12, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 94-101.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For decades, German Social-Democracy was a model to the Social-Democrats of Russia, even somewhat more than to the Social-Democrats of the whole world. It is therefore clear that there can be no intelligent, i.e., critical, attitude towards the now prevalent social-patriotism or “socialist” chauvinism, without a most precise definition of one’s attitude towards German Social-Democracy, What was it in the past? What is it today? What will it be in the future?
A reply to the first of these questions may be found in Der Weg zur Macht, a pamphlet written by K. Kautsky in 1909 and translated into many European languages. Containing a most complete exposition of the tasks of our times, it was most advantageous to the German Social-Democrats (in the sense of the promise they held out), and moreover came from the pen of the most eminent writer of the Second International. We shall recall the pamphlet in some detail; this will be the more useful now since those forgotten ideals are so often barefacedly cast aside.
Social-Democracy is a “revolutionary party” (as stated in the opening sentence of the pamphlet), not only in the sense that a steam engine is revolutionary, but “also in another sense”. It wants conquest of political power by the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Heaping ridicule on “doubters of the revolution”, Kautsky writes: “In any important movement and uprising we must, of course, reckon with the possibility of defeat. Prior to the struggle, only a fool can consider himself quite certain of victory.” However, to refuse to consider the possibility of victory would he “a direct betrayal of our cause”. A revolution in connection with a war, he says, is possible both during and after a war. It is impossible to determine at which particular moment the sharpening of class antagonisms will lead to revolution, but, the author continues, “I can quite definitely assert that a revolution that war brings in its wake, will break out either during or immediately after the war”; nothing is more vulgar, we read further, than the theory of “the peaceful growing into socialism”. “Nothing is more erroneous,” he continues, “than the opinion that a cognition of economic necessity means a weakening of the will ... . The will, as a desire for struggle,” he says, “is determined, first, by the price of the struggle, secondly, by a sense of power, and thirdly, by actual power.” When an attempt was made, incidentally by Vorwärts, to interpret Engels’s famous preface to The Class Struggles in France in the meaning of opportunism, Engels became indignant, and called shameful any assumption that he was a “peaceful worshipper of legality at any price”.[1] “We have every reason to believe,” Kautsky goes on to say, “that we are entering upon a period of struggle for state power.” That struggle may last for decades; that is something we do not know, but “it will in all probability bring about, in the near future, a considerable strengthening of the proletariat, if not its dictatorship, in Western Europe”. The revolutionary elements are growing, Kautsky declares: out of ten million voters in Germany in 1895, there were six million proletarians and three and a half million people interested in private property; in 1907 the latter grew by 0.03 million, and the former by 1.6 million! “The rate of the advance becomes very rapid as soon as a time of revolutionary ferment comes.” Class antagonisms are not blunted but, on the contrary, grow acute; prices rise, and imperialist rivalry and militarism are rampant. “A new era of revolution” is drawing near. The monstrous growth of taxes would “long ago have led to war as the only alternative to revolution ... had not that very alternative of revolution stood closer after a war than after a period of armed peace...”. “A world war Is ominously imminent,” Kautsky continues, “and war means also revolution.” In 1891 Engels had reason to fear a premature revolution in Germany; since then, however, “the situation has greatly changed”. The proletariat “can no longer speak of a premature revolution” (Kautsky’s italics). The petty bourgeoisie is downright unreliable and is ever more hostile to the proletariat, but in a time of crisis it is “capable of coming over to our side in masses”. The main thing is that Social-Democracy “should remain unshakable, consistent, and irreconcilable”. We have undoubtedly entered a revolutionary period.
This is how Kautsky wrote in times long, long past, fully five years ago. This is what German Social-Democracy was, or, more correctly, what it promised to be. This was the kind of Social-Democracy that could and had to be respected.
See what the selfsame Kautsky writes today. Here are the most important statements in his article “Social-Democracy in Wartime” (Die Neue Zeit No. 1, October 2, 1914): “Our Party has far more rarely discussed the question of how to behave in wartime than how to prevent war .... Never is government so strong, never are parties so weak, as at the outbreak of war .... Wartime is least of all favourable to peaceful discussion .... Today the practical question is: victory or defeat for one’s own country.” Can there be an understanding among the parties of the belligerent countries regarding anti-war action? “That kind of thing has never been tested in practice. We have always disputed that possibility ....” The difference between the French and German socialists is “not one of principle” (as both defend their fatherlands) .... “Social-Democrats of all countries have an equal right or an equal obligation to take part in the defence of the fatherland: no nation should blame the other for doing so ....” “Has the International turned bankrupt?” “Has the Party rejected direct defence of its party principles in wartime?” (Mehring’s questions in the same issue.) “That is an erroneous conception .... There are no grounds at all for such pessimism .... The differences are not fundamental .... Unity of principles remains .... To disobey wartime laws would simply lead to suppression of our press.” Obedience to these laws “implies rejection of defence of party principles just as little as similar behaviour of our party press under that sword of Damocles—the Anti-Socialist Law.”
We have purposely quoted from the original because it is hard to believe that such things could have been written. It is hard to find in literature (except in that coming from downright renegades) such smug vulgarity, such shameful departure from the truth, such unsavoury subterfuge to cover up the most patent renunciation both of socialism in general and of precise international decisions unanimously adopted (as, for instance, in Stuttgart and particularly in Basic) precisely in view of the possibility of a European war just like the present! It would be disrespectful towards the reader were we to treat Kautsky’s arguments in earnest and try to analyse them: if the European war differs in many respects from a simple “little” anti-Jewish pogrom, the “socialist” arguments in favour of participation in such a war fully resimhle the “democratic” arguments in favour of participation in an anti-Jewish pogrom. One does not analyse arguments in favour of a pogrom; one only points them out so as to put their authors to shame in the sight of all class-conscious workers.
But how could it have come to pass, the reader will ask, that the leading authority in the Second International, a writer who once defended the views quoted at the beginning of this article, has sunk to something that is worse than being a renegade? That will not be understood, we answer, only by those who, perhaps unconsciously, consider that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and that it is not difficult to “forgive and forget”, etc., i.e., by those who regard the matter from the renegade’s point of view. Those, however, who have earnestly and sincerely professed socialist convictions and have held the views set forth in the beginning of this article will not be surprised to learn that “Vorwdrts is dead” (Martov’s expression in the Paris Gobs) and that Kautsky is “dead”. The political bankruptcy of individuals is not a rarity at turning points in history. Despite the tremendous services he has rendered, Kautsky has never been among those who, at great crises, immediately take a militant Marxist stand (recall his vacillations on the issue of Millerandism[2]).
It is such times that we are passing through. “You shoot first, Messieurs the Bourgeoisie!”[3] Engels wrote in 1891, advocating, most correctly, the use of bourgeois legality by us, revolutionaries, in the period of so-called peaceful constitutional development. Engels’s idea was crystal clear: we class-conscious workers, he said, will be the next to shoot; it is to our advantage to exchange ballots for bullets (to go over to civil war) at the moment the bourgeoisie itself has broken the legal foundation it has laid down. In 1909 Kautsky voiced the undisputed opinion held by all revolutionary Social-Democrats when he said that revolution in Europe cannot now be premature and that war means revolution.
“Peaceful” decades, however, have not passed without leaving their mark. They have of necessity given rise to opportunism in all countries, and made it prevalent among parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other “leaders”. There is no country in Europe where, in one form or another, a long and stubborn struggle has not been conducted against opportunism, the latter being supported in a host of ways by the entire bourgeoisie, which is striving to corrupt and weaken the revolutionary proletariat. Fifteen years ago, at the outset of the Bernstein controversy, the selfsame Kautsky wrote that should opportunism turn from a sentiment into a trend, a split would be imminent. In Russia, the old Iskra,[4] which created the Social-Democratic Party of the working class, declared, in an article which appeared in its second issue early in 1901, under the title of “On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century”, that the revolutionary class of the twentieth century, like the revolutionary class of the eighteenth century—the bourgeoisie, had its own Gironde and its own Mountain.[5]
The European war is a tremendous historical crisis, the beginning of a new epoch. Like any crisis, the war has aggravated deep-seated antagonisms and brought them to the surface, tearing asunder all veils of hypocrisy, rejecting all conventions and deflating all corrupt or rotting authorities. (This, incidentally, is the salutary and progressive effect of all crises, which only the dull-witted adherents of “peaceful evolution” fail to realise.) The Second International, which in its twenty-five or forty-five years of existence (according to whether the reckoning is from 1870 or 1889) was able to perform the highly important and useful work of expanding the influence of socialism and giving the socialist forces preparatory, initial and elementary organisation, has played its historical role and has passed away, overcome, not so much by the von Kiucks as by opportunism. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the empty-headed busy-bodies (if not the intriguing lackeys of the chauvinists and the opportunists) labour at the task of bringing together Vandervelde and Sembat with Kautsky and Haase, as though we had another Ivan Ivanovich, who has called Ivan Nikiforovich a “gander”, and has to he urged by his friends to make it up with his enemy.[6] An International does not mean sitting at the same table and having hypocritical and pettifogging resolutions written by people who think that genuine internationalism consists in German socialists justifying the German bourgeoisie’s call to shoot down French workers, and in French socialists justifying the French bourgeoisie’ call to shoot down German workers in the name of the “defence of the fatherland”! The International consists in the coming together (first ideologically, then in due time organisationally as well) of people who, in these grave days, are capable of defending socialist internationalism in deed, i.e., of mustering their forces and “being the next to shoot” at the governments and the ruling classes of their own respective “fatherlands”. This is no easy task; it calls for much preparation and great sacrifices and will be accompanied by reverses. However, for the very reason that it, is no easy task, it must be accomplished only together with those who wish to perform it and are not afraid of a complete break with the chauvinists and with the defenders of social-chauvinism.
Such people as Pannekoek are doing more than anyone else for the sincere, not hypocritical restoration of a socialist, not a chauvinist, International. In an article entitled “The Collapse of the International”, Pannekoek said: “If the leaders get together in an attempt to patch up their differences, that will be of no significance at all.”
Let us frankly state the facts; in any case the war will compel us to do so, if not tomorrow, then the day after. Three currents exist in international socialism: (1) the chauvinists, who are consistently pursuing a policy of opportunism; (2) the consistent opponents of opportunism, who in all countries have already begun to make themselves heard (the opportunists have routed most of them, but “defeated armies learn fast”), and are capable of conducting revolutionary work directed towards civil war; (3) confused and vacillating people, who at present are following in the wake of the opportunists and are causing the proletariat most harm by their hypocritical attempts to justify opportunism, something that they do almost scientifically and using the Marxist (sic!) method. Some of those who are engulfed in the latter current can be saved and restored to socialism, but only through a policy of a most decisive break and split with the former current, with all those who are capable of justifying the war credits vote, “the defence of the fatherland”, “submission to wartime laws”, a willingness to be satisfied with legal means only, and the rejection of civil war. Only those who pursue a policy like this are really building up a socialist International. For our part, we, who have established links with the Russian Collegium of the Central Committee and with the leading elements of the working-class movement in St. Petersburg, have exchanged opinions with them and become convinced that we are agreed on the main points, are in a position, as editors of the Central Organ, to declare in the name of our Party that only work conducted in this direction is Party work and Social-Democratic work.
The idea of a split in the German Social-Democratic movement may seem alarming to many in its “unusualness”. The objective situation, however, goes to show that either the unusual will come to pass (after all, Adler and Kautsky did declare, at the last session of the International Socialist Bureau[7] in July 1914, that they did not believe in miracles, and therefore did not believe in a European war!) or we shall witness the painful decomposition of what was once German Social-Democracy. In conclusion, we would like to remind those who are too prone to “trust” the (former) German Social-Democrats that people who have been our opponents on a number of issues have arrived at the idea of such a split. Thus Martov has written in Gobs: “Vorwarts is dead .... A Social-Democracy which publicly renounces the class struggle would do better to recognise the facts as they are, temporarily disband its organisation, and close down its organs.” Thus Plekhanov is quoted by Gobs as having saidin a report: “I am very much against splits, but if principles are sacrificed for the integrity of the organisation, then better a split than false unity.” Plekhanov was referring to the German radicals: he sees a mote in the eye of the Germans, but not the beam in his own eye. This is an individual feature in him; over the past ten years we have all grown quite used to Plekhanov’s radicalism in theory and opportunism in practice. However, if even persons with such “oddities” begin to talk of a split among the Germans, it is a sign of the times.
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Notes
[1] In its issue of March 30, 1895, Vorwärts published a summary and several extracts from Engels’s preface to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, omitting very important propositions on the revolutionary role of the proletariat, which evoked a vehement protest from Engels. In his letter to Kautsky of April 1, 1895, he wrote: “To my astonishment I see in the Vorwärts today an extract from my ‘Introduction’, printed without my prior knowledge and trimmed in such a fashion that 1 appear as a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price” (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 568).
Engels insisted on the “Introduction” being published in full. In 1895 it was published in the journal Die Neue Zeit, but with considerable deletions, these at the instance of the German Social-Democratic Party leadership. Seeking to justify their reformist tactics, the leaders of German Social-Democracy subsequently began to interpret their version of the “Introduction” as Engels’s renunciation of revolution, armed uprisings and barricade fighting. The original text of the “Introduction” was first published in the Soviet Union in 1955 (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962,Vol. I, pp. 118-38).
[2] Millerandtsm—an opportunist trend named after the French "socialist" Millerand, who in 1899 joined the reactionary bourgeois government of France and helped the bourgeoisie in conducting its policy.
The admissibility of socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments was discussed at the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900. The Congress adopted Kautsky’s conciliatory resolution condemning socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments but permitting it in certain “exceptional” cases. The French socialists used this proviso to justify their joining the bourgeois government at the beginning of the First World War.
[3] See F. Engels, Socialism in Germany, Section I.
[4] Iskra (The Spark)-the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in 1900. It played a decisive part in the establishmeat of the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class. The first issue appeared in Leipzig in December 1900; it was subsequently published in Munich, in London (from July 1902) and in Geneva (from the spring of 1903). On Lenin’s initiative and with his direct participation,the fskra editorial hoard drew up the Party programme, which was published in Iskra No. 21, and prepared the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. which marked the beginning of a revolutionary Marxist party in Russia. Soon after the Congress, the Mensheviks, helped by Plekhanov, gained control of Iskra, so that, beginning with issue No. 52, Iskra ceased being an organ of revolutionary Marxism.
[5] The Mountain (Montagne) and the Gironde-the two political groups of the bourgeoisie during the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. The Montagnards, or Jacobins, was the name given to the more resolute representatives of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary class of the time, who stood for the abolition of absolutism and the feudal system. Unlike the Jacobins, the Girondists vacillated between revolution and counter-revolution, and sought agreement with the monarchy.
Lenin called the opportunist trend in Social-Democracy the “socialist Gironde” , and the revolutionary Social-Democrats the “proletarian Jacobins” , “the Mountain”. After the R.S.D.L.P. split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin frequently stressed that the Mensheviks epresented the Girondist trend in the working-class movement.
[6] Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich-characters in Gogol’s Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Iran Nikiforovich. The quarrel between these two provincial landowners, whose names have become proverbial, started on a most insignificant pretext, and dragged on endlessly.
[7] The International Socialist Bureau-the executive body of the Second International, established by decision of the ParisCongressof 1900. From 1905 Lenin was member of the LS.B. as representative of the R.S.D.L.P.
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
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V. I. Lenin
Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism
HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 35, December 12, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 94-101.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
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For decades, German Social-Democracy was a model to the Social-Democrats of Russia, even somewhat more than to the Social-Democrats of the whole world. It is therefore clear that there can be no intelligent, i.e., critical, attitude towards the now prevalent social-patriotism or “socialist” chauvinism, without a most precise definition of one’s attitude towards German Social-Democracy, What was it in the past? What is it today? What will it be in the future?
A reply to the first of these questions may be found in Der Weg zur Macht, a pamphlet written by K. Kautsky in 1909 and translated into many European languages. Containing a most complete exposition of the tasks of our times, it was most advantageous to the German Social-Democrats (in the sense of the promise they held out), and moreover came from the pen of the most eminent writer of the Second International. We shall recall the pamphlet in some detail; this will be the more useful now since those forgotten ideals are so often barefacedly cast aside.
Social-Democracy is a “revolutionary party” (as stated in the opening sentence of the pamphlet), not only in the sense that a steam engine is revolutionary, but “also in another sense”. It wants conquest of political power by the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Heaping ridicule on “doubters of the revolution”, Kautsky writes: “In any important movement and uprising we must, of course, reckon with the possibility of defeat. Prior to the struggle, only a fool can consider himself quite certain of victory.” However, to refuse to consider the possibility of victory would he “a direct betrayal of our cause”. A revolution in connection with a war, he says, is possible both during and after a war. It is impossible to determine at which particular moment the sharpening of class antagonisms will lead to revolution, but, the author continues, “I can quite definitely assert that a revolution that war brings in its wake, will break out either during or immediately after the war”; nothing is more vulgar, we read further, than the theory of “the peaceful growing into socialism”. “Nothing is more erroneous,” he continues, “than the opinion that a cognition of economic necessity means a weakening of the will ... . The will, as a desire for struggle,” he says, “is determined, first, by the price of the struggle, secondly, by a sense of power, and thirdly, by actual power.” When an attempt was made, incidentally by Vorwärts, to interpret Engels’s famous preface to The Class Struggles in France in the meaning of opportunism, Engels became indignant, and called shameful any assumption that he was a “peaceful worshipper of legality at any price”.[1] “We have every reason to believe,” Kautsky goes on to say, “that we are entering upon a period of struggle for state power.” That struggle may last for decades; that is something we do not know, but “it will in all probability bring about, in the near future, a considerable strengthening of the proletariat, if not its dictatorship, in Western Europe”. The revolutionary elements are growing, Kautsky declares: out of ten million voters in Germany in 1895, there were six million proletarians and three and a half million people interested in private property; in 1907 the latter grew by 0.03 million, and the former by 1.6 million! “The rate of the advance becomes very rapid as soon as a time of revolutionary ferment comes.” Class antagonisms are not blunted but, on the contrary, grow acute; prices rise, and imperialist rivalry and militarism are rampant. “A new era of revolution” is drawing near. The monstrous growth of taxes would “long ago have led to war as the only alternative to revolution ... had not that very alternative of revolution stood closer after a war than after a period of armed peace...”. “A world war Is ominously imminent,” Kautsky continues, “and war means also revolution.” In 1891 Engels had reason to fear a premature revolution in Germany; since then, however, “the situation has greatly changed”. The proletariat “can no longer speak of a premature revolution” (Kautsky’s italics). The petty bourgeoisie is downright unreliable and is ever more hostile to the proletariat, but in a time of crisis it is “capable of coming over to our side in masses”. The main thing is that Social-Democracy “should remain unshakable, consistent, and irreconcilable”. We have undoubtedly entered a revolutionary period.
This is how Kautsky wrote in times long, long past, fully five years ago. This is what German Social-Democracy was, or, more correctly, what it promised to be. This was the kind of Social-Democracy that could and had to be respected.
See what the selfsame Kautsky writes today. Here are the most important statements in his article “Social-Democracy in Wartime” (Die Neue Zeit No. 1, October 2, 1914): “Our Party has far more rarely discussed the question of how to behave in wartime than how to prevent war .... Never is government so strong, never are parties so weak, as at the outbreak of war .... Wartime is least of all favourable to peaceful discussion .... Today the practical question is: victory or defeat for one’s own country.” Can there be an understanding among the parties of the belligerent countries regarding anti-war action? “That kind of thing has never been tested in practice. We have always disputed that possibility ....” The difference between the French and German socialists is “not one of principle” (as both defend their fatherlands) .... “Social-Democrats of all countries have an equal right or an equal obligation to take part in the defence of the fatherland: no nation should blame the other for doing so ....” “Has the International turned bankrupt?” “Has the Party rejected direct defence of its party principles in wartime?” (Mehring’s questions in the same issue.) “That is an erroneous conception .... There are no grounds at all for such pessimism .... The differences are not fundamental .... Unity of principles remains .... To disobey wartime laws would simply lead to suppression of our press.” Obedience to these laws “implies rejection of defence of party principles just as little as similar behaviour of our party press under that sword of Damocles—the Anti-Socialist Law.”
We have purposely quoted from the original because it is hard to believe that such things could have been written. It is hard to find in literature (except in that coming from downright renegades) such smug vulgarity, such shameful departure from the truth, such unsavoury subterfuge to cover up the most patent renunciation both of socialism in general and of precise international decisions unanimously adopted (as, for instance, in Stuttgart and particularly in Basic) precisely in view of the possibility of a European war just like the present! It would be disrespectful towards the reader were we to treat Kautsky’s arguments in earnest and try to analyse them: if the European war differs in many respects from a simple “little” anti-Jewish pogrom, the “socialist” arguments in favour of participation in such a war fully resimhle the “democratic” arguments in favour of participation in an anti-Jewish pogrom. One does not analyse arguments in favour of a pogrom; one only points them out so as to put their authors to shame in the sight of all class-conscious workers.
But how could it have come to pass, the reader will ask, that the leading authority in the Second International, a writer who once defended the views quoted at the beginning of this article, has sunk to something that is worse than being a renegade? That will not be understood, we answer, only by those who, perhaps unconsciously, consider that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and that it is not difficult to “forgive and forget”, etc., i.e., by those who regard the matter from the renegade’s point of view. Those, however, who have earnestly and sincerely professed socialist convictions and have held the views set forth in the beginning of this article will not be surprised to learn that “Vorwdrts is dead” (Martov’s expression in the Paris Gobs) and that Kautsky is “dead”. The political bankruptcy of individuals is not a rarity at turning points in history. Despite the tremendous services he has rendered, Kautsky has never been among those who, at great crises, immediately take a militant Marxist stand (recall his vacillations on the issue of Millerandism[2]).
It is such times that we are passing through. “You shoot first, Messieurs the Bourgeoisie!”[3] Engels wrote in 1891, advocating, most correctly, the use of bourgeois legality by us, revolutionaries, in the period of so-called peaceful constitutional development. Engels’s idea was crystal clear: we class-conscious workers, he said, will be the next to shoot; it is to our advantage to exchange ballots for bullets (to go over to civil war) at the moment the bourgeoisie itself has broken the legal foundation it has laid down. In 1909 Kautsky voiced the undisputed opinion held by all revolutionary Social-Democrats when he said that revolution in Europe cannot now be premature and that war means revolution.
“Peaceful” decades, however, have not passed without leaving their mark. They have of necessity given rise to opportunism in all countries, and made it prevalent among parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other “leaders”. There is no country in Europe where, in one form or another, a long and stubborn struggle has not been conducted against opportunism, the latter being supported in a host of ways by the entire bourgeoisie, which is striving to corrupt and weaken the revolutionary proletariat. Fifteen years ago, at the outset of the Bernstein controversy, the selfsame Kautsky wrote that should opportunism turn from a sentiment into a trend, a split would be imminent. In Russia, the old Iskra,[4] which created the Social-Democratic Party of the working class, declared, in an article which appeared in its second issue early in 1901, under the title of “On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century”, that the revolutionary class of the twentieth century, like the revolutionary class of the eighteenth century—the bourgeoisie, had its own Gironde and its own Mountain.[5]
The European war is a tremendous historical crisis, the beginning of a new epoch. Like any crisis, the war has aggravated deep-seated antagonisms and brought them to the surface, tearing asunder all veils of hypocrisy, rejecting all conventions and deflating all corrupt or rotting authorities. (This, incidentally, is the salutary and progressive effect of all crises, which only the dull-witted adherents of “peaceful evolution” fail to realise.) The Second International, which in its twenty-five or forty-five years of existence (according to whether the reckoning is from 1870 or 1889) was able to perform the highly important and useful work of expanding the influence of socialism and giving the socialist forces preparatory, initial and elementary organisation, has played its historical role and has passed away, overcome, not so much by the von Kiucks as by opportunism. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the empty-headed busy-bodies (if not the intriguing lackeys of the chauvinists and the opportunists) labour at the task of bringing together Vandervelde and Sembat with Kautsky and Haase, as though we had another Ivan Ivanovich, who has called Ivan Nikiforovich a “gander”, and has to he urged by his friends to make it up with his enemy.[6] An International does not mean sitting at the same table and having hypocritical and pettifogging resolutions written by people who think that genuine internationalism consists in German socialists justifying the German bourgeoisie’s call to shoot down French workers, and in French socialists justifying the French bourgeoisie’ call to shoot down German workers in the name of the “defence of the fatherland”! The International consists in the coming together (first ideologically, then in due time organisationally as well) of people who, in these grave days, are capable of defending socialist internationalism in deed, i.e., of mustering their forces and “being the next to shoot” at the governments and the ruling classes of their own respective “fatherlands”. This is no easy task; it calls for much preparation and great sacrifices and will be accompanied by reverses. However, for the very reason that it, is no easy task, it must be accomplished only together with those who wish to perform it and are not afraid of a complete break with the chauvinists and with the defenders of social-chauvinism.
Such people as Pannekoek are doing more than anyone else for the sincere, not hypocritical restoration of a socialist, not a chauvinist, International. In an article entitled “The Collapse of the International”, Pannekoek said: “If the leaders get together in an attempt to patch up their differences, that will be of no significance at all.”
Let us frankly state the facts; in any case the war will compel us to do so, if not tomorrow, then the day after. Three currents exist in international socialism: (1) the chauvinists, who are consistently pursuing a policy of opportunism; (2) the consistent opponents of opportunism, who in all countries have already begun to make themselves heard (the opportunists have routed most of them, but “defeated armies learn fast”), and are capable of conducting revolutionary work directed towards civil war; (3) confused and vacillating people, who at present are following in the wake of the opportunists and are causing the proletariat most harm by their hypocritical attempts to justify opportunism, something that they do almost scientifically and using the Marxist (sic!) method. Some of those who are engulfed in the latter current can be saved and restored to socialism, but only through a policy of a most decisive break and split with the former current, with all those who are capable of justifying the war credits vote, “the defence of the fatherland”, “submission to wartime laws”, a willingness to be satisfied with legal means only, and the rejection of civil war. Only those who pursue a policy like this are really building up a socialist International. For our part, we, who have established links with the Russian Collegium of the Central Committee and with the leading elements of the working-class movement in St. Petersburg, have exchanged opinions with them and become convinced that we are agreed on the main points, are in a position, as editors of the Central Organ, to declare in the name of our Party that only work conducted in this direction is Party work and Social-Democratic work.
The idea of a split in the German Social-Democratic movement may seem alarming to many in its “unusualness”. The objective situation, however, goes to show that either the unusual will come to pass (after all, Adler and Kautsky did declare, at the last session of the International Socialist Bureau[7] in July 1914, that they did not believe in miracles, and therefore did not believe in a European war!) or we shall witness the painful decomposition of what was once German Social-Democracy. In conclusion, we would like to remind those who are too prone to “trust” the (former) German Social-Democrats that people who have been our opponents on a number of issues have arrived at the idea of such a split. Thus Martov has written in Gobs: “Vorwarts is dead .... A Social-Democracy which publicly renounces the class struggle would do better to recognise the facts as they are, temporarily disband its organisation, and close down its organs.” Thus Plekhanov is quoted by Gobs as having saidin a report: “I am very much against splits, but if principles are sacrificed for the integrity of the organisation, then better a split than false unity.” Plekhanov was referring to the German radicals: he sees a mote in the eye of the Germans, but not the beam in his own eye. This is an individual feature in him; over the past ten years we have all grown quite used to Plekhanov’s radicalism in theory and opportunism in practice. However, if even persons with such “oddities” begin to talk of a split among the Germans, it is a sign of the times.
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Notes
[1] In its issue of March 30, 1895, Vorwärts published a summary and several extracts from Engels’s preface to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, omitting very important propositions on the revolutionary role of the proletariat, which evoked a vehement protest from Engels. In his letter to Kautsky of April 1, 1895, he wrote: “To my astonishment I see in the Vorwärts today an extract from my ‘Introduction’, printed without my prior knowledge and trimmed in such a fashion that 1 appear as a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price” (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 568).
Engels insisted on the “Introduction” being published in full. In 1895 it was published in the journal Die Neue Zeit, but with considerable deletions, these at the instance of the German Social-Democratic Party leadership. Seeking to justify their reformist tactics, the leaders of German Social-Democracy subsequently began to interpret their version of the “Introduction” as Engels’s renunciation of revolution, armed uprisings and barricade fighting. The original text of the “Introduction” was first published in the Soviet Union in 1955 (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962,Vol. I, pp. 118-38).
[2] Millerandtsm—an opportunist trend named after the French "socialist" Millerand, who in 1899 joined the reactionary bourgeois government of France and helped the bourgeoisie in conducting its policy.
The admissibility of socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments was discussed at the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900. The Congress adopted Kautsky’s conciliatory resolution condemning socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments but permitting it in certain “exceptional” cases. The French socialists used this proviso to justify their joining the bourgeois government at the beginning of the First World War.
[3] See F. Engels, Socialism in Germany, Section I.
[4] Iskra (The Spark)-the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in 1900. It played a decisive part in the establishmeat of the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class. The first issue appeared in Leipzig in December 1900; it was subsequently published in Munich, in London (from July 1902) and in Geneva (from the spring of 1903). On Lenin’s initiative and with his direct participation,the fskra editorial hoard drew up the Party programme, which was published in Iskra No. 21, and prepared the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. which marked the beginning of a revolutionary Marxist party in Russia. Soon after the Congress, the Mensheviks, helped by Plekhanov, gained control of Iskra, so that, beginning with issue No. 52, Iskra ceased being an organ of revolutionary Marxism.
[5] The Mountain (Montagne) and the Gironde-the two political groups of the bourgeoisie during the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. The Montagnards, or Jacobins, was the name given to the more resolute representatives of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary class of the time, who stood for the abolition of absolutism and the feudal system. Unlike the Jacobins, the Girondists vacillated between revolution and counter-revolution, and sought agreement with the monarchy.
Lenin called the opportunist trend in Social-Democracy the “socialist Gironde” , and the revolutionary Social-Democrats the “proletarian Jacobins” , “the Mountain”. After the R.S.D.L.P. split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin frequently stressed that the Mensheviks epresented the Girondist trend in the working-class movement.
[6] Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich-characters in Gogol’s Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Iran Nikiforovich. The quarrel between these two provincial landowners, whose names have become proverbial, started on a most insignificant pretext, and dragged on endlessly.
[7] The International Socialist Bureau-the executive body of the Second International, established by decision of the ParisCongressof 1900. From 1905 Lenin was member of the LS.B. as representative of the R.S.D.L.P.
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