***Ancient dreams, dreamed-What Peter Paul Markin Learned About His World- Magical Realism 101

A young, very young not ready for school young, tow-headed boy, Peter Paul Markin by name, fiery blue, ocean-spooned blue eyes, bulging out of his small head (later in frantic romantic times they would be called bedroom come hither eyes or, in bad times, also frantic romantic, Rasputin-like evil eyes or some such thing but just then they were just fiery innocent blue eyes) watched the still accumulating snow falling out the front window. His nose, childhood cold sniffling red nose, flattened against all caution on the frozen front window pane watching the snow fall as he wondered, and wondered. Cursed wondered. Although he did not know it then or if he did he could not name it except as gnaw, lifetime curse wondered what everything is this blessed universe was about and why, why to distraction, why. Maybe it was something sunken deep in those homeland ocean blue eyes, but there he was wondering.

Wondering, young as he was, why he was cooped up, and bundled up, quilt covering him (funny word he thought, all q-starting words were funny then except when he had to utter them which he had the devil’s own time doing and was constantly getting laughed at, laughed at by brothers and playmates, even Ma, jesus even Ma, to establish wonder hurts and maybe a clue to those Rasputin evil eyes). And under the quilt a blanket and under the blanket a sweater to cut down on precious heating expenses as he sat in front of that frozen front window in that cold-water flat down in the Adamsville Housing Authority apartment complex. (The “projects” that even as young as he was, too young for school young, understood and called the place and understood, and was made to understand, constantly understand, by a fuming maternal grandmother across town that it was no place for Mayfair swells, if he had known who or what those people were then.)

And wondering why, when it came right down to it, the projects or not, that he had to share a small crowded room with his brothers who shunned him over into some scarecrow corner and made him “like” it, or threatened to. And why his mother and father were always bickering (or what he thought was bickering because they sure were not happy when they were talking about not having enough money for this or that, especially for kids’ treat stuff like going to the Paragon Amusement Park up in Olde Saco like they did last summer).

But this day, this snowing January day, right after the New Year and just after one of his older brothers, Prescott, had returned to school, the first grade, over at Adamsville South Elementary School at the close of Christmas vacation he was wondering most about what it would be like when he is chance to go to school. There was no hint of the madnesses or crazes that he would later have cause to wonder about once he actually got there it was just wonder. Just brother kinship, brother gone loneliness, about it wondering. And about the great big world of books, and crayons, and pastes, and drawing, and learning letters (although he knew a few already) and singing songs and well, everything that Prescott told him about, with an air of “know it all” but also an air of “it is not all that it is cracked up to be.”

See what Peter Paul was wondering about really was not so much about what Prescott had to say when he came home from school each day and he peppered him with questions about what he did, or didn’t do, or about being a “know it all” or even about the shortcomings of knowing it all but when he would, counting the days in his head, be able to see for himself what it was all about and then be able to wonder some different wonder. Maybe some of that sing-song wonder or book wonder that he had heard so much about.

Oh maybe there was just a little hint of madness after all, or of crazes beyond that sadness, brother kinship sadness, sadness and not understanding of time marching as he, that older brother, had gone off to foreign places, foreign elementary school reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic places and, he, the nose flattened against the window brother, was left to ponder his own place in those kind of places, those foreign-sounding places, when his time came. If he has a time, had the time for the time of his time, in that red scare (but what knows he of red scares only brother scares), cold war, cold nose, dust particles in the clogging air 1950s night.

***Writer's Corner- Andre Malraux In His Prime

Markin comment:

Leon Trotsky, early on, praised Malraux's literary talents in "The Conquerors" and "Man's Fate", tales of the Chinese Revolution. He was, and would have been, less enamored of Malraux's later career as Stalin admirer and subsequently in the post World II era a minister of culture under France's strongman Charles DeGaulle. Oh, well, everyone familiar with the biographic sketches of past literary figures knows that that milieu is replete with writers who cannot resist being in the circles of power-no matter the political cost. Still, in his prime Malraux could write thoughtful novels and write circles around most of his contemporaries. Trotsky was not wrong on that score, although he also seemed to be aware of certain moral flabbiness in Malraux. He was not wrong there either.

***From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art: Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky (1938)

Guest Commentary

Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art: Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky (1938)

We can say without exaggeration that never before has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous, and so comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of Europe. But today we see world civilization, united in its historic destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology. We are by no means thinking only of the world war that draws near. Even in times of “peace,” the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific, or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity. Such creations cannot be slighted, whether from the standpoint of general knowledge (which interprets the existing world), or of revolutionary knowledge (which, to change the world for the better, requires an exact analysis of the laws which govern its movement). Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity take place, nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws which govern intellectual creation.

In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible. From this follows of necessity an increasingly manifest degradation not only of the work of art but also of the specifically “artistic” personality. The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty, however superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or brush to the statues of domestic servants of the regime, whose task it is to glorify it on order, according to the worst possible aesthetic conventions. If reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union, where Thermidorean reaction is now reaching its climax.

It goes without saying that we do not identify ourselves with the currently fashionable catchword: “Neither fascism nor communism!” a shibboleth which suits the temperament of the Philistine, conservative and frightened, clinging to the tattered remnants of the “democratic” past. True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind in its time--true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clear the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union, it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents not communism but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy.

The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the so-called “cultural” organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to ever sort of spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of the palliation of crime a source of pleasure. The official art of Stalinism mirrors with a blatancy unexampled in history their efforts to put a good face on their mercenary profession.

The repugnance which this shameful negation of the principles of art inspires in the artistic world--a negation which even slave states have never dared carry so far--should give rise to an active, uncompromising condemnation. The opposition of writers and artists is one of the forces which can usefully contribute to the discrediting and overthrow of regimes which are destroying, along with the right of the proletariat to aspire to a better world, every sentiment of nobility and even human dignity.

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play, and which psychoanalysis has analyzed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral “ego” and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the “ideal of self,” which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the “self,” which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity: the need for the emancipation of man.

The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. “The writer,” he declared, “naturally must take money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money. The writer by no means looks at his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work....The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity.” It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of end foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called “reasons of State,” the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his explorations--these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must, under no pretext, allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who would urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal, and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula: complete freedom for art.

We recognize, of course, that the revolutionary State has the right to defend itself against the counterattack of the bourgeoisie, even when this drapes itself in the flag of science or art. But there is an abyss between these enforced and temporary measures of revolutionary self-defense and the pretension to lay commands on intellectual creation. If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without the constraint from the outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

It should be clear by now that in defending freedom of thought we have no intention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-called “pure” art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

In the present period of the death agony of capitalism, democratic as well as fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to live and continue working. He sees all avenues of communication choked with the debris of capitalist collapse. Only naturally, he turns to the Stalinist organizations, which hold out the possibility of escaping from his isolation. But if he is to avoid complete demoralization, he cannot remain there, because of the impossibility of delivering his own message and the degrading servility which these organizations exact from him in exchange for certain material advantages. He must understand that his place is elsewhere, not among those who betray the cause of the revolution and of mankind, but among those who with unshaken fidelity bear witness to this revolution, among those who, for this reason, are alone able to bring it to fruition, and along with it the ultimate free expression of all forms of human genius.

The aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which may be reunited all revolutionary writers and artists, the better to serve the revolution by their art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers of the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical, and political tendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists can march here hand in hand with anarchists, provided both parties uncompromisingly reject the reactionary police-patrol spirit represented by Joseph Stalin and by his henchman, Garcia Oliver.

We know very well that thousands of isolated thinkers and artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small local magazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism as “degenerate.” Every free creation is called “fascist” by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution. It must proclaim aloud its right to exist. Such a union of forces is the aim of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art which we believe it is now necessary to form.

We by no means insist on every idea put forth in this manifesto, which we ourselves consider only a first step in the new direction. We urge every friend and defender of art, who cannot but realize the necessity for this appeal, to make himself heard at once. We address the same appeal to all those publications of the left-wing which are ready to participate in the creation of the International Federation and to consider its task and methods of action.
When a preliminary international contract has been established through the press and by correspondence, we will proceed to the organization of local and national congresses on a modest scale. the final step will be the assembling of a world congress which will officially mark the foundation of the International Federation.

Our aims:
The independence of art--for the revolution;
The revolution--for the complete liberation of art!

***Artist's Corner- Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto Of 1924

Click Below To Link To Wikipedia's Entry For Andre Breton's Surrealist Manifesto Of 1924. Additional Material About This Artist, Writer And Political Activist Can Be Found By Clicking On That Entry. More about Breton's life and work will be presented in this space in the future, especially as one would expect from this site, his relationship with the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_Manifesto

***From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- From The "Ancient Dreams, Dreamed" Sketches- "Hard Times In Babylon-Growing Up Poor In The 1950s"

Introduction
The following sketches, and that is all they pretend to be, flash-colored sketches, are based, mainly, on stories told to me by my old friend Peter Paul Markin, although I have taken the usual liberties with the truth to “jazz” some of the stories up. I might add that these sketches are more or less in chronological order (although exact dates or time periods may be off slightly, like all misty remembrances), although he told them to me in helter-skelter order time over many years, some under, well, let’s just call them trying circumstances and be done with it.

Markin and I first met long ago in the searching for the great American West 1960s good night the details of which are supplied in a few of the sketches from that period. This however, is not a “memoir” of that period, although we are both certified members in good standing of the generation of ’68 who at one time promised to fight for a “newer world.” The literary universe is thick with, and frankly I am sick unto death of, memoirs from that period, great or small.

What these things pretend to be in earnest, using Markin as a lightning rod, are looks at the extreme variety of human experiences that our wicked old world has spewed forth. Given the very long arduous human struggle to meet our immediate daily needs, they also underline the narrowness of human expression in facing the great tasks that confront us in living on this wicked old earth. Josh Breslin-2012
*************

One night, one early 2007 night, Peter Paul was in a pensive mood. He had just written, half-tear written for lost youth and fallen youth comrade a personal commentary about a childhood friend, Kenny Callahan, from back in the old neighborhood in North Adamsville where he grew up in the 1950s and who had passed away some time before. He had also at that time been re-reading the then recently deceased investigative journalist David Halberstam’s book, The Fifties, that covered that same basic period of his teary remembrance. Strangely Halberstam’s take on the trends of the period, in contrast to the reality of his own childhood experiences as a child of the working poor that missed most of the benefits of that ‘golden age,’ rekindled some memories, a few painful.

It was no exaggeration to say that those were hard times in Babylon. Not so much for individual lacks like a steady (and reliable) family car in order to break out of the cramped quarters, house on house, where he lived once in a while. Or the inevitable hand-me-down clothes (all the way through high school, almost), or worst the Bargain Center bargains that were no bargains (the local “Wal-Mart” of the day to give you an idea of what he meant). Or even the always house coldness in winter (in order to save on precious fuel even in those cheap-priced heating oil times) and hotness in summer (ditto, to save on electricity so no A/C, or fans).

Those, and other such lacks, he noted, all had their place in the poor man’s pantheon, no question. That was not the worst of it though, not by a long shot when he thought back on those red scare cold war times (but what knew he then of such connections). No, what, in the end, make things turn out badly for him and his kind, was the sense of defeat that hung, hung heavily and almost daily over the household, the street, the neighborhood at a time when others, visibly and not so far away, were getting ahead.

Some sociologist, some academic sociologist, for, sure, would call such a phenomenon the death of “rising expectations.” And for once they would be right, or at least on the right track. Thinking back on those times had also made him reflect on how the hard anti-communist politics of the period, the “red scare” had left people like his parents high and dry, although they were as prone to support those repressive governmental policies, as reflex action if nothing else, as any American Legion denizen. Moreover the defeat and destruction of the left-wing movement then, principally the pro-communist organizations of that period, has continued to leave a mark, and a gaping vacuum, on today’s political landscape, and on him.

There are many myths about the 1950’s to be sure, some media-drive, some simply misty time-driven. However, one cannot deny that the key public myth was that those who had fought World War II and were afterwards enlisted in the anti-Soviet Cold War fight against communism were entitled to some breaks. The overwhelming desire for personal security and comfort on the part of those who had survived the Great Depression and fought the war (World War II just so there is no question about which in the long line of wars we are talking about) was not therefore totally irrational. That it came at the expense of other things like a more just and equitable society is a separate matter. Moreover, despite the public myth not everyone benefited from the ‘rising tide.' The experience of his parents is proof of that. Thus this commentary is really about what happened to those, like his parents, who did not make it and were left to their personal fates without a rudder to get them through the rough spots. Yes, his parents (and mine) were of the now much ballyhooed and misnamed ‘greatest generation’ but they were not in it.

He did not want to go through all the details of his parents’ childhoods, courtship and marriage for such biographic details of the Depression and World War II were (and are) plentiful and theirs fits the pattern. (Moreover, he was uneasily aware that he did not know, know for sure, many of the specific details like where they first met and stuff like that.) One detail is, however, important and that is that his father grew up in the hills of eastern Kentucky, Hazard, near Harlan County to be exact, coal mining country made famous in song and story and by Michael Harrington in his 1960s book The Other America.. This was, and is, hardscrabble country by any definition. Among whites these “hillbillies” were the poorest of the poor. There can be little wonder, he emphasized (and made a little joke about it too, about his father telling him between the Pacific bloodbath and the mines he took his chances with the former) that when World War II began his father left the mines to join the Marines, did his fair share of fighting in the Pacific, settled in the Boston area and never looked back.

By all rights Peter Paul’s father should have been able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and have enjoyed home and hearth like the denizens of Levittown (New York and elsewhere) described in Halberstam’s book and shown on such classic 1950s television shows as Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver. But life did not go that way, not at all.

Why? He had virtually no formal education. Furthermore he had no marketable skills usable in the Boston labor market. There was (and is) no call for coal-miners here. And moreover he had three young sons born close together in the immediate post-war period. Peter related that his father was a good man. He was a hard-working man; when he was able find work. He was an upright man. But he never drew a break. Unskilled labor, to which he was reduced, is notoriously unstable, and so his work life was one of barely making ends meet. Thus, well before the age when the two-parent working family became the necessary standard to get ahead, his mother had gone to work to supplement the family income. She too was an unskilled laborer. Thus, even with two people working they were always “dirt poor.” I have already run through enough of the litany of lacks to give an idea of what dirt poor meant in those hard times so we need not retrace those steps as they apply to the Markin family...

That little family started life in the Adamsville housing projects, at that time not the notorious hell-holes of crime and deprivation that they later became but still a mark of being low, very low, on the social ladder at a time when others were heading to the Valhalla of the newly emerging suburbs. By clawing and scratching his parents had eventually saved enough money to buy an extremely modest single-family house. Hell, Peter shouted to me while relating this part, why pussyfoot about it, a shack. The house, moreover, was in a neighborhood that was, and is, one of those old working class neighborhoods where the houses are small, cramped, and seedy, the leavings of those who have moved on to bigger and better things. The neighborhood nevertheless reflected the desire of the working poor in the 1950’s, his parents and others, to own their own homes and not be shunted off into decrepit apartments or dilapidated housing projects, the fate of those just below them on the social ladder.

But suddenly Peter Paul said enough of all that. Where in this story though is there a place for militant left-wing political class-consciousness to break the trap? Not the sense of social inferiority of the poor before the rich (or the merely middle class). Damn, there was plenty of that kind of consciousness in his house (and painfully mine as well). A phrase from the time, and maybe today although I don’t hear it much, said it all “keeping up with the Jones.’” Or else. But where was there an avenue in the 1950’s, when it could have made a difference, for a man like Peter’s father to have his hurts explained and have something done about them?

Nowhere, nada nunca nada. So instead it went internally into the life of the family and it never got resolved. One of his sons, Peter Paul, has had luxury of being able to fight essentially exemplary propaganda battles in small left-wing socialist circles and felt he has done good work in his life. His father’s hurts needed much more. The "red scare" aimed mainly against the American Communist Party but affecting wider layers of society decimated any possibility that he could get the kind of redress he needed. That dear reader, in a nutshell, is why Peter Paul made a point, made a big point, as we ended our talk of saying that he proudly bore the name communist today. And the task for him today? To insure that future young workers, unlike his parents in the 1950’s, will have their day of justice. Good luck, Peter Paul. 

***A Small Slice Of The Spanish Civil War- From The Pen Of Ernest Hemingway-For WhomThe Bells Toll

 

BOOK REVIEW

FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL, ERNEST HEMINGWAY
I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War since I was a teenager. What initially perked my interest, and remains of interest, is the passionate struggle of the Spanish working class to create its own political organization of society, its leadership of the struggle against Spanish Fascism and the romance surrounding the entry of the International Brigades, particularly the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade, into the struggle.

Underlying my interests has always been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working class. The Spanish proletariat certainly was capable of both heroic action and the ability to create organizations that reflected its own class interests i.e. the worker militias and factory committees. Of all modern working class uprisings after the Russian revolution Spain showed the most promise of success. Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted in one of his writings on Spain that the Spanish proletariat at the start of its revolutionary period had a higher political consciousness than the Russian proletariat in 1917.

That understanding of the political consciousness of the Spanish proletariat calls into question the strategies put forth by the parties of the Popular Front, including the Spanish Communist Party- defeat Franco first, and then make the social transformation of society. Ernest Hemingway in his novel For Whom the Bells Toll weighs in on that question here. Whatever value the novel had or has as a narrative of a small slice of the Spanish events one must look elsewhere to discovery the causes of the Republican defeat.

Ernest Hemingway most definitively was in love with Spain and always, lurking just below, the surface was his love affair with death. That combination placed in the context of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 makes for an explosive, dramatic tale. The hero is an American, Robert Jordan, aka Ernest Hemingway, of fizzy politics but a desire to help the Spanish people. Additionally Jordan, if expediency demands it, is willing to face danger and death at the command of the Communist-dominated International Brigades (although it is not always clear whether he is an American Lincoln Brigade volunteer or a freelancer). Hemingway's critique of the Stalinist domination of the military command and therefore authors of the military strategy that led to defeat at times overwhelms the story. His skewering of Andre Marty, leader of the International Brigades, also has that same effect. In short, Hemingway believed that 'outside forces’ meddling in Spanish affairs led to death for Jordan and disaster for the Spanish people. Well, nobody expects nor is it mandatory for a novelist to be politically astute or correct. Here Hemingway joins that crowd.

The one subject that Ernest Hemingway seemed consistently to excel at was the telling of war stories. And whatever else might be true of For Whom the Bell Tolls it is preeminently a war story. A classic war romance if you have also seen the movie treatment of the book starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. It might be a male thing, it might be a Hemingway thing, or it might be that the nature of war lends itself to dramatic tension that holds a story together. Today, in some literary circles, it is not considered politically correct to laud works by such dead, white males as Hemingway but the flat out truth is that the man could write. If his work stands outside the current canon of American literary efforts then something is wrong with the new canon.

To make matters worst the current leftist-oriented literary establishment, grizzled, hard-bitten academic warriors that they are, has not been the only force that has taken aim at Hemingway's head. At the time of publication in 1940 the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, those who actually fought in Spain, and the various Communist Parties throughout the world were unhappy with the novel. Why? Hemingway was too harsh on the deficiencies of the Communists, the International Brigades and the Republican forces in general. Above I mentioned that writers were not expected to be politically astute. That is one thing. But to say that Hemingway was essentially sabotaging the exiled Republican efforts to aid the refugees by the thrust of his novel is also politically wrong. The man did materially and militarily aid the Republican side (financially aiding volunteers and supplying ambulances). That accrues to his honor. In short, Hemingway's writings-yes. Hemingway's politics-no.

From The Archives  (2006)-A MODEST PROPOSAL-RECRUIT, RUN INDEPENDENT LABOR MILITANTS IN THE 2006 ELECTIONS

COMMENTARY

IN THIS TIME OF THE ‘GREAT FEAR’ WE NEED CANDIDATES TO FIGHT FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT.


FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!
All “anti-parliamentarian”, “anti-state”, “non-political” anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist brothers and sisters need read no further. This writer does not want to sully the purity of your politics with the taint of parliamentary electoral politics. Although I might remind you, as we remember the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, that your political ancestors in Spain were more than willing to support the state and enter the government when they got the chance- the bourgeois state and the bourgeois government. But, we can fight that issue out later. We will, hopefully, see you then on the same side of the barricades.

As for other militants- here is my modest proposal. Either recruit fellow labor militants or present yourselves as candidates to run for public office, especially for Congress, during the 2006 election cycle. Why? Even a quick glance at the news of the day is calculated to send the most hardened politico screaming into the night. The quagmire in Iraq, immigration walls, flag-burning amendments, anti same-sex marriage amendments, the threat to separation of church state raised by those who would impose a fundamentalist Christian theocracy on the rest of us, and the attacks on the hard fought gains of the Enlightenment posed by bogus theories such as ‘intelligent design’. And that is just an average day. Therefore, this election cycle provides militants, at a time when the dwindling electorate is focused on politics, a forum to raise our program and our ideas. We use this as a tool, like leaflets, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, etc. to get our message across. Why should the Donkeys, Elephants, and Greens have a monopoly on the public square?

I mentioned in the last paragraph the idea of program. Let us face it if we do not have a program to run on then it makes no sense for militants to run for public office. Given the political climate our task at this time is to fight an exemplary propaganda campaign. Our program is our banner in that fight. The Democrats and Republicans DO NOT RUN on a program. The sum of their campaigns is to promise not to steal from the public treasury (or at least not too much), beat their husbands or wives or grossly compromise themselves in any manner. On second thought, given today’s political climate, they may not promise not to beat their husbands or wives. You get the point. Damn, even the weakest neophyte labor militant can make a better presentation before working people than that. In any case, this writer presents a five point program that labor militants can run on (you knew this was coming, right?). As point five makes clear this is not a ‘minimum’ program but a program based on our need to fight for power.

1. FIGHT FOR THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST NOW (OR BETTER YET, YESTERDAY)! U.S. HANDS OFF THE WORLD! VOTE NO ON THE WAR BUDGET! The quagmire in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East (Palestine, Iran) is the fault line of American politics today. Every bourgeois politician has to have his or her feet put to the fire on this one. Not on some flimsy ‘sense of the Congress’ softball motion for withdrawal next, year, in two years, or (my favorite) when the situation is stable. Moreover, on the parliamentary level the only real vote that matters is the vote on the war budget. All the rest is fluff. Militants should make a point of trying to enter Congressional contests where there are so-called anti-war Democrats or Republicans (an oxymoron, I believe) running to make that programmatic contrast vivid.

But, a young militant might argue, that would split the ‘progressive’ forces. Grow up, please! That argument has grown stale since it was first put forth in the ‘popular front’ days of the 1930’s. If you want to end the war in Iraq fight for this position on the war budget. Otherwise the same people (ya, those progressive Democrats) who unanimously voted for the last war budget get a free ride on the cheap. Senator Hillary “Hawk” Clinton desperately needs to be opposed by labor militants. Closet Republican, Democratic Senator Lieberman of Connecticut should not take his richly deserved beating on the war issue from a dissident Democrat. By rights this is our issue. Let us take it back.

2. FIGHT FOR A LIVING WAGE AND WORKING CONDITIONS-UNIVERSAL FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL. It is a ‘no-brainer’ that no individual, much less a family, can live on the minimum wage of $5/hr. (or proposed $7/hr). What planet do these politicians live on? We need an immediate fight for a living wage, full employment and decent working conditions. We need universal free health care for all. End of story. The organized labor movement must get off its knees and fight to organize Wal-Mart and the South. A boycott of Wal-Mart is not enough. A successful organizing drive will, like in the 1930’s, go a long way to turning the conditions of labor around.

3. FIGHT THE ATTACKS ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT. Down with the Death Penalty! Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants who make it here! Stop the Deportations! For the Separation of Church and State! Defend abortion rights! Down with ant-same sex marriage legislation! Full public funding of education! Stop the ‘war on drugs’, basically a war on blacks and minority youth-decriminalize drugs! Defend political prisoners! This list of demands hardly exhausts the “culture war” issues we defend. It is hard to believe that in the year 2006 over 200 years after the American Revolution and the French Revolution we are fighting desperately to preserve many of the same principles that militants fought for in those revolutions. But, so be it.

4. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS PARTY. The Donkeys, Elephants and Greens have had their chance. Now is the time to fight for our own party and for the interests of our own class, the working class. Any campaigns by independent labor militants must highlight this point. And any such campaigns can also become the nucleus of a workers party network until we get strong enough to form at least a small party. None of these other parties, and I mean none, are working in the interests of working people and their allies. The following great lesson of politic today must be hammered home. Break with the Democrats, Republicans and Greens!

5. FIGHT FOR A WORKERS AND XYZ GOVERNMENT. THIS IS THE DEMAND THAT SEPARATES THE MILITANTS FROM THE FAINT-HEARTED REFORMISTS. We need our own form of government. In the old days the bourgeois republic was a progressive form of government. Not so any more. That form of government ran out of steam about one hundred years ago. We need a Workers Republic. We need a government based on workers councils with a ministry (I do not dare say commissariat in case any stray anarchists are still reading this) responsible to it. Let us face it if we really want to get any of the good and necessary things listed above accomplished we are not going to get it with the current form of government.

Why the XYZ part? What does that mean? No, it is not part of an algebra lesson. What it reflects is that while society is made up mainly of workers (of one sort or another) there are other classes (and parts of classes) in society that we seek as allies who could benefit from a workers government. Examples- small independent contractors, intellectuals, the dwindling number of small farmers, and some professionals like dentists. Ya, I like the idea of a workers and dentists government. The point is you have got to fight for it.

Obviously any campaign based on this program will be an exemplary propaganda campaign for the foreseeable future. But we have to start now. Continuing to support or not challenging the bourgeois parties does us no good now. That is for sure. While bourgeois electoral laws do not favor independent candidacies at this late date write-in campaigns are possible. ROLL UP YOUR SHEEVES! GET THOSE PETITIONS SIGNED! PRINT OUT THE LEAFLETS! PAINT THOSE BANNERS! GET READY TO SHAKE HANDS AND KISS BABIES.


THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS, GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

***From the Marxist Internet Archives- The 'May Days' in Barcelona 1937

Commentary

This is the second of a projected series of occasional commentaries on documents found on the Internet site-Marxist Internet Archives (MIA). For those not familiar with that site it features an incredible range of material by virtually any leftist, or anyone with leftist pretensions, who has put pen to paper over the last one hundred and fifty plus years. Today’s offering is a short article by well-known French Marxist historian and Trotsky biographer Pierre Broue concerning the events of May 1937 in Barcelona, the last chance to save the Spanish Revolution. It is fitting that as we approach the end of the year of the 70th Anniversary of that event we once again draw the lessons of that failed effort. Broue’s represents an orthodox Marxist view of the situation and of the role of the POUM, the most honest party on the scene. Despite it numerous defenders, then and now, the POUM, in the end was an obstacle to revolution. I have added below as my commentary on that situation parts of a review of Trotsky’s book on the Spanish Revolution posted in 2006. Read it and weep.


...The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 has been the subject of innumerable works from every possible political and military perspective possible. A fair number of such treatises, especially from those responsible for the military and political policies on the Republican side, are merely alibis for the disastrous policies that led to defeat. Trotsky's complication of articles, letters, pamphlets, etc. which make up the volume reviewed here is an exception. Trotsky was actively trying to intervene in the unfolding events in order to present a program of socialist revolution that most of the active forces on the Republican side were fighting, or believed they were fighting for. Thus, Trotsky's analysis brings a breath of fresh air to the historical debate. That in the end Trotsky could not organize the necessary cadres to carry out his program or meaningfully impact the unfolding events in Spain is one of the ultimate tragedies of that revolution. Nevertheless, Trotsky had a damn good idea of what forces were acting as a roadblock to revolution. He also had a strategic conception of the road to victory. And that most definitely was not through the Popular Front.

The central question Trotsky addresses throughout the whole period under review here was the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the proletarian forces. That premise entailed, in short, a view that the objective conditions for the success of a socialist program for society had ripened. Nevertheless, until that time, despite several revolutionary upheavals elsewhere, the international working class had not been successful anywhere except in backward Russia. Trotsky thus argued that it was necessary to focus on the question of forging the missing element of revolutionary leadership that would assure victory or at least put up a fight to the finish.
This underlying premise was the continuation of an analysis that Trotsky developed in earnest in his struggle to fight the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the mid-1920's. The need to learn the lessons of the Russian Revolution and to extend that revolution internationally was thus not a merely a theoretical question for Trotsky. Spain, moreover, represented a struggle where the best of the various leftist forces were in confusion about how to move forward. Those forces could have profitably heeded Trotsky's advice. I further note that the question of the crisis of revolutionary leadership still remains to be resolved by the international working class.

Trotsky's polemics in this volume are highlighted by the article ‘The Lessons of Spain-Last Warning’, his definitive assessment of the Spanish situation in the wake of the defeat of the Barcelona uprising in May 1937. Those polemics center on the failure of the Party of Marxist Unification (hereafter, POUM) to provide revolutionary leadership. That party, partially created by cadre formerly associated with Trotsky in the Spanish Left Opposition, failed on virtually every count. Those conscious mistakes included, but were not limited to, the creation of an unprincipled bloc between the former Left Oppositionists and the former Right Oppositionists (Bukharinites) of Maurin to form the POUM in 1935; political support to the Popular Front including entry into the government coalition by its leader; creation of its own small trade union federation instead of entry in the anarchist led-CNT; creation of its own militia units reflecting a hands-off attitude toward political struggle with other parties; and, fatally, an at best equivocal role in the Barcelona uprising of 1937.

Trotsky had no illusions about the roadblock to revolution of the policies carried out by the old-time Anarchist, Socialist and Communist Parties. Unfortunately the POUM did. Moreover, despite being the most honest revolutionary party in Spain it failed to keep up an intransigent struggle to push the revolution forward. The Trotsky - Andreas Nin (key leader of the POUM and former Left Oppositionist) correspondence in the Appendix makes that problem painfully clear.
The most compelling example of this failure - As a result of the failure of the Communist Party of Germany to oppose the rise of Hitler in 1933 and the subsequent decapitation and the defeat of the Austrian working class in 1934 the European workers, especially the younger workers, of the traditional Socialist Parties started to move left. Trotsky observed this situation and told his supporters to intersect that development by an entry, called the ‘French turn’, into those parties. Nin and the Spanish Left Opposition, and later the POUM failed to do that. As a result the Socialist Party youth were recruited to the Communist Party en masse. This accretion formed the basic for its expansion as a party and the key cadre of its notorious security apparatus that would, after the Barcelona uprising, suppress the more left ward organizations. For more such examples of the results of the crisis of leadership in the Spanish Revolution read this book.



The ‘May Days’ of 1937 in Barcelona, Pierre Broue

from Revolutionary History magazine, Vol.1 No.2, Summer 1988. Used
by permission.

This article first appeared in the January 1988 issue of La Verite and is translated by John Archer.

Every workers' revolution in the twentieth century bears the characteristic mark that a situation of duality of power appears at its beginning. This is between the old organs of the state, whether rejuvenated or not, which have generally passed into the control of a government of 'conciliators' with the first phase, and the organs of the mass movement, organisations of struggle which have become the organs of a new power.

Our readers will know the analyses which Trotsky made on this matter in the History of the Russian Revolution, about the duality of power created by the first revolution in February 1917, between the old state, with the Provisional Government at its head, and the new workers' state in the process of formation, that of the Soviets.

The appearance of the duality of power marks only the beginning of the struggle between them, the struggle which ends in the victory of either the revolution or the counter-revolution, through the victory of one power or the other. Study of the revolutions in the period since October 1917 reveals the decisive role of the general staffs on the side of the revolution, of their party, of the party which fights for the victory of the new power. That party has neither provoked nor engineered the revolution, any more than it can stop it, without joining the counter-revolution. The authority of the party may be widely recognised, even by a majority of the masses, but it enables it only to act as a brake on an offensive which may be premature or isolated - this was the case of the July Days of 1917 in Petrograd - or, on the contrary, to clear the way for the final assault, by helping the masses to overcome the obstacles on their road to power. This is the case of the insurrection of October 1917 in Russia. *

What has been called the 'May Days of 1937' in Barcelona are an event of this kind, independently of the fact that the event took place within one of the two opposing camps in the course of a civil war, the Spanish Civil War. In fact, the duality of powers began in July 1936, with the victorious counter-stroke of the workers in a number of large cities, including Barcelona, against the military coup d'etat of General Franco.

In May 1937 it was the Popular Front government of the Generalidad of Catalonia - under the pressure of the Stalinists in the PSUC - which took the counter-offensive. It tried to seize a telephone exchange, which was in the hands of the militia of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. The latter resisted, arms in hand, and the workers in Barcelona replied to the attempt by a general strike. Several days of street fighting followed in the Catalan capital.

The supporters and agents of Stalin speak of a 'Fascist putsch'. Other elements in the Popular Front speak of a 'tragic misunderstanding'. The Trotskyists agree on the general significance of what happened, but are divided in their appreciation of the incident itself. Trotsky believed that victory was possible and that, therefore, we have here an 'October' which failed, because there was no revolutionary leadership which wanted to fight to win. His comrade, the Italian Blasco (Pietro Tresso), regarded the event as 'July Days' ending badly for lack of a firm leadership, which could have prevented the retreat from turning into a rout.
In this month of May 1937, the atmosphere was tense. In the last days of April there had been violent incidents at Molins de Llobregat, where a PSUC leader was killed. Eight CNT militants were killed at Puigcerda in the course of an attack by armed police to recover control of the frontier for the government. On 1 May the government prohibited street demonstrations, which might provoke the outburst of workers' anger which it feared, or might give to that anger the means to bring them together to hit back.

At the Telephonica

The explosion came on 3 May. That afternoon the Barcelona police chief, an active member of the PSUC named Eusebio Rodriguez Salas, presented himself in front of the central telephone exchange, the Telephonica, in the Square of Catalonia in Barcelona. The exchange belonged to the American Telegraph and Telephone Company; it had been seized during the revolutionary days, and was under the control of a committee and of members of the CNT militia. It is located in the heart of the Catalan capital, and what happened to it came to be a symbol for the fate of the revolution and the workers' positions. The initiative by Rodriguez did not get a green light from the government, which had not been consulted, but it had the approval of the government's public order adviser, who, as everyone knew, was completely devoted to the PSUC.

The police chiefs escort got into the building by surprise and disarmed the militiamen whom it caught unawares on the ground floor. The militiamen on the upper floors were warned and began to resist this unexpected attack and to fire on the attackers. Two senior police officers, members of the CNT named Asens and Eroles, were warned at once and rushed to the Telephonica to stop the shooting. They did their utmost to convince their comrades not to keep up their resistance, which, they said, would only make things worse. In response to their persuasion, the militiamen agreed to vacate the Telephonica, which remained in the hands of the police.

But the peace-making efforts of the two mediators were in vain. The sound of shots had alerted the people of Barcelona, who were in a state of extreme tension and were, in fact, expecting some move to be made, if not by the government, at any rate by the extremists of the PSUC. The news of the attack on the Telephonica spread like a trail of gunpowder. The workers went on strike in order to paralyse the advance of the counter-revolution. They erected barricades to prevent the government's forces of repression from moving freely around. The branches of the CNT at its base, particularly its 'defence committees' were also there, and their members were armed.
George Orwell, in his book Homage to Catalonia, bears witness to having experienced the early hours of these 'Days' as acts of aggression against the working people of Barcelona, carried out by those whom he calls by their old name, the 'Civil Guard', former policemen who had been integrated into the new police forces which their chiefs were now throwing into attacks on the workers' barricades in Barcelona. The Barcelona workers were led by the elements organised in the 'control patrols' - the last vestiges of the workers' militias for maintaining order in the rear - and by the defence committees. They counter-attacked and came out of the workers' districts. The battle raged in the centre of the city against the forces of order, which had their headquarters in the Karl Marx barracks of the PSUC. Their spearhead, directed towards the Ramblas, was located in the Hotel Colon, in Square of Catalonia, at the top end of the Ramblas.

Several victorious attacks were directed against the police strong-points in the Exhibition Palace and the American cinema. The Anarchists even found some tanks, which enabled them to break the encirclement of the workers' fighting nuclei.
The leaders of the CNT maintained their policy of pacification, while at the same time they defended the militants, who, they said, were the victims of an act of aggression and of provocation. The same evening, 3 May, there was a meeting of the leaders of the CNT, the POUM and their youth organisations. One of the POUM leaders, Gorkin, declared:

Either we place ourselves at the head of this movement to destroy the enemy within, or the movement will collapse, and this enemy will destroy us.
No one denies that the situation was favourable for liquidating the undertaking and the forces of the PSUC. However, despite the enthusiasm of its youth section (Young Libertarians), the CNT maintained its waiting stance of 'protestation', and the POUM did not want to be isolated from it.

The fighting continued on 4 May, with sudden silences following brutal outbursts. La Batalla, the newspaper of the POUM, spoke of 'the provocations with which the counter-revolution is testing the pulse of the ability of the working masses to resist' and 'the preparations for a thorough-going attack on the conquests of the revolution'. The article goes on:

But the counter-attack by the proletariat could not be more powerful. Thousands of workers have taken to the streets, arms in hand. Factories, workshops and shops have ceased work. The barricades have gone up again in every part of the city. The majority of places in Catalonia have copied the gesture of its capital. The working class is strong and will know how to crush every effort by the counter-revolution. We must live on the alert, rifle in hand. We must maintain the magnificent spirit of resistance and of struggle, which guarantees our victory. We must prevent counter-revolution from raising its head again.

The POUM journal also demanded that Rodriguez Salas be dismissed, that the decrees be annulled, that 'public order be in the hands of the working class' and that a workers' revolutionary junta be formed, with the creation of 'committees to defend the revolution in every quarter, every place and every workplace'.
All the evidence goes to show that in this article we have a policy made up on the spot. Victor Alba, the historian of the POUM, assures us that this is not what the POUM wanted to do, but only what it could do, bearing in mind that it was determined not to cut itself off from the CNT! Indeed, the leader of the CNT, Garcia Oliver, appealed on the radio for a ceasefire; he called on people not to speak any more about 'provocations' or to 'go on about the dead'.

Companys, the president of the Generalidad, called for calm. He denounced the initiative of Rodriguez Salas, but he demanded that the workers must leave the streets and return to their homes before peace could be restored. The regional committee of the CNT, between two attacks by the forces of order on its premises, called for a truce and for calm. All the personalities of the 'left' of the Popular Front rushed to its help on the radio.
State terror

On 5 May the forces of order mounted what was nothing less than a terrorist attack. Armed groups of men in uniform arrested the Italian Anarchist, Berneri, who criticised the policy of class collaboration of his Anarchist comrades with the Popular Front. His dead body was found the next day. But, during this time, the CNT was working with the UGT (the reformist trade union federation) to issue a joint appeal for work to be resumed, explaining that the cessation of industry in 'these moments of anti-Fascist war is equivalent to collaborating with the common enemy by weakening ourselves'.

The Friends of Durutti, an organisation of dissident Anarchists, who had opposed the absorption of the militias into the army, issued an appeal for the formation of a 'revolutionary junta' to include the POUM. It criticised the leaders of the CNT who called for a ceasefire, and demanded that the 'provocateurs' be executed. Every leading organ of the CNT repudiated this declaration and the organisation which issued it, in extremely violent terms. Barcelona was vibrating with rumours. The 29th Division, commanded by the Anarchist Jover, and the 26th, under the POUMist Rovira, were forbidden to march on the capital. In fact these commanders had thought of doing so, but were dissuaded by their organisations. Leaders of the JCI (Jeunesses Communistes Internationalistes) and the committee for defence in north Barcelona organised a column, based on officer-cadets from the military academy, to seize the central headquarters of the PSUC and of the Generalidad. It was the POUM leader, Andres Nin, who put a stop to this operation. British warships were anchoring in the roadstead.

Federica Montseny, the Minister for Health in the Popular Front government at Valencia, which was headed by Largo Caballero, protested against the fact that all the ceasefire negotiations took it for granted that the Telephonica had been taken over by the forces of order. The UGT in Catalonia decided to exclude from its ranks all those members of the POUM who did not expressly repudiate their comrades who were taking part in the insurrection!

The death of another minister, a member of the PSUC and of the UGT, named Antonio Sese, who was shot by unknown murderers as he was going to take up his appointment, perhaps gave the central government a pretext for taking public order out of the hands of the Catalan Generalidad. From that time onwards, public order was entrusted to General Pozas, a professional soldier, former head of the Civil Guard, who appears to have been linked to the PSUC by connections of a hardly political nature. There was total confusion. Both the arrival of troops sent by the Valencia government and a possible foreign intervention were expected. The new government included none of the PSUC people who had played a role in the provocation.
On 6 May the body of Berneri was found; he had been well and truly assassinated. The workers who followed the CNT were disorientated by the disorder and confusion, as well as by the appeals from their leaders. They began to desert the barricades in large numbers. The POUM, in its own way, buried the movement, with comments about 'these three magnificent days' and 'this tremendous experience'. It put on record that it had been with the masses in the streets at the beginning, and observed that 'under the repeated injunctions of their leaders, the masses have begun to withdraw from the struggle'. Yet it presented the result as being largely positive:

Beyond any doubt it [the proletariat] has won a great, partial victory. It has defeated the counter-revolutionary provocation. It has won the dismissal of all those who were directly responsible for the provocation. It has struck a serious blow at the bourgeoisie and reformism. It could have won more, much more, if those in the leadership of the organisations which stand at the head of the working class of Catalonia could have risen to the level of the masses.

On 7 May the police took over the abandoned barricades, which were to be demolished amid great publicity by girls belonging to the PSUC. The trams began to run again. Two hundred militants were freed from jail. Shots were fired at the car of Federica Montseny, the Anarchist minister. The issue of La Batalla for 8 May once again urged a return to work. At the same time, the local committee of the POUM in Barcelona sharply criticised the executive of its party, which it accused of having 'capitulated' in the course of those days, in the face of the counter-revolution, under the pressure of the conciliatory leaders of the CNT.
Little by little we are now uncovering the long list of revolutionary militants with whom the specialised groups in the service of Stalin settled their accounts in the course of these 'days' - Berneri and his friend Barbieri, Alfredo Martinez, the leader of the Libertarian Youth, and the German Trotskyist Freund, known as Moulin, who was the link between the small group of Trotskyists and the Friends of Durutti - and 'disappeared'. This was only the beginning of the repression.

POUM nonsense

There can be no doubt that La Batalla was publishing complete nonsense on 6 May, when it presented the May Days as having turned out positively. These days were the first stage in the unfolding of a counterrevolution, the first victims of which, a few weeks later, were to be the POUM itself and, in particular, its principal leader, the old revolutionary, Andres Nin.

How can this mistaken appreciation be explained if we consider the extraordinary strength which the huge movement of the working class of Barcelona had revealed a few days, indeed a few hours, earlier?

The fresh memory of that movement hovers over the discussion which opened within the POUM in the following days, in preparation for a congress which the Stalinist repression prevented from ever being held.

We have little information about the attitude of the right wing in the POUM, apart from an editorial of 15 May in its Valencia newspaper, El Communista. This condemned the workers in Barcelona and even the leaders of the POUM on the grounds that 'one cannot swim against the stream with impunity' and denounced, 'after the provocateurs', 'those who played their game and cleared the ground in front of them'. We also know that the POUM organisation in Sabadell issued a manifesto condemning the action of the workers in Barcelona, and that Luis Portel, a member of its executive, judged the attitude of the leadership during these May Days to have been 'adventuristic'.

The thesis of the executive was drafted by Nin. He drew a parallel with the 'July Days':

In July 1917 the workers in the Russian capital took to the streets arms in hand, rising up against the policies of the democrat, Kerensky. The Bolshevik Party considered this movement to be ill-timed and dangerous. None the less, the Bolsheviks played an active part in it, placed themselves at its head, led it and guided it in such a way as to prevent it from becoming a disaster for the revolutionary proletariat.

Nin started from the provocation by the forces of the police. He declared that the workers had defended the interests of the proletariat in the streets. As to the policy of his party, he wrote:

If it had all depended on us to start things off, we would not have given the order for insurrection. The moment was not favourable for a decisive action, but the revolutionary workers, rightly indignant at the provocation of which they were the victims, flung themselves into battle, and we could not leave them to their fate. To act otherwise would have been an unpardonable betrayal.

Nin declared that the activity of the POUM aimed at 'canalising a movement which, because it was spontaneous, had many chaotic aspects, and to avoid its transforming itself into a fruitless putsch, which would have fatal consequences for the proletariat. It was necessary to provide limited slogans for the movement.'
A third position, that of J. Rebull and of Cell 72, reproaches the leadership of the POUM for having 'run after the events' and having 'once again waited on the opinion of the opportunist elements in the confederal leadership'. Their counter-theses declared:

The first results of the workers' insurrections are a defeat for the working class and a new victory for the pseudo-democratic bourgeoisie.

Trotsky's verdict

Trotsky devoted a number of writings to the Spanish Revolution and several times discussed the May Days. He conceded to the defenders of the policies of the POUM that there was a superficial resemblance between the movement of the masses before the July Days in Petrograd and that of May 1937 in Barcelona. However, he was concerned in particular to emphasise the deep differences between the two — according to him, the essential differences lay in the fact that in 1937 the Spanish masses had a more serious experience of their revolution than those had in Russia in 1917. Trotsky wrote:

In Spain, the May events took place not after four months, but after six years of revolution. The masses of the whole country have had a gigantic experience. A long time ago they lost the illusions of 1931, as well as the warmed-over illusions of the Popular Front. Again and again they have shown to every part of the country that they were ready to go through to the end. If the Catalan proletariat had seized power in May 1937 - as it had really seized it in July 1936 - they would have found support throughout all of Spain. The bourgeois-Stalinist reaction would not even have found two regiments with which to crush the Catalan workers. In the territory occupied by Franco not only the workers but also the peasants would have turned toward the Catalan proletariat, would have isolated the Fascist army and brought about its irresistible disintegration. It is doubtful whether under these conditions any foreign government would have risked throwing its regiments onto the burning soil of Spain. Intervention would have become materially impossible, or at least extremely dangerous.

Naturally, in every insurrection, there is an element of uncertainty and risk. But the subsequent course of events has proved that even in the case of defeat the situation of the Spanish workers would have been incomparably more favourable than now, to say nothing of the fact that the revolutionary party would have assured its future (L Trotsky, A test of ideas and individuals through the Spanish experience,
The Spanish Revolution 1931-1939, New York, 1973, p278-279)

In Trotsky's opinion, it was a revolutionary party which was lacking in May 1937. This is the reason for his ferocious criticism, not merely of the Anarchists but also of the policies of the POUM, and what he calls its 'indecision, its equivocations, its hesitations and its lack of a clear programme', which prevented it from providing for the masses 'the revolutionary leadership without which victory was not possible'.

Perhaps a little more light can be shed on Trotsky's position on the insurrection, which failed in May 1937 for lack of a revolutionary party, and on his divergences with his comrade Blasco, which were never expressed in writing in a direct debate, if we look back to his preface to Volume Three of the Russian edition of his works, which we know under the title The Lessons of October.

There we find that Trotsky directed precisely the same criticisms against what he called the 'right wing' of the Bolshevik Party, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who opposed the insurrection which Lenin proposed, as those which he directed against the POUM in 1937 or the German Communist Party at the time of its failed insurrection in 1923:
A party which has been carrying on revolutionary agitation for a long time, tearing the proletariat little by little from the influence of the conciliators, and which, once it is lifted to the height of events by the confidence of the proletariat, begins to hesitate, to look for midday at two o'clock, to turn its back and to tack about, paralyses the activity of the masses, provokes disappointment and disorganisation among them and leads the revolution to defeat...

He analysed the position of the 'Old Bolsheviks', who advanced against Lenin in April 1917 the old formula of 'the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry', which they counterposed to that of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the struggle for Soviet power: Their method ... consisted in exerting on the leading bourgeoisie a pressure which did not go outside the framework of the bourgeois democratic regime. If this policy had been victorious, the development of the revolution would have proceeded outside our part y, and we would have, in the end, had an insurrection of the masses of workers and peasants which was not led by the party, in other words, July Days on a vast scale, that is, a catastrophe.

It seems to us that this formula permits conclusions to be drawn about the May Days by settling at least the ambiguities which may have survived in the historic debate about the analogies with the Russian Revolution. About these ambiguities, Trotsky himself took pleasure in emphasising that he himself had not introduced them, though he was often blamed for doing so, and he made clear that, for his part, he had been very deeply convinced that 'Spain was not Russia', a conclusion which did not in the slightest justify the policy which led to catastrophe.

Pierre Broue

***Out In The 1950s Film Night- Marilyn Monroe’s Don’t Bother To Knock- A Film Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

 Don’t Bother To Knock, starring Marilyn Monroe, Richard Widmark,  1952  

You know how your mother, when you were ready to go out on your own, set up your own household and family, always harped at you to make sure to get references when you hired anybody for a service. Well maybe that advice was not so far-fetched. Maybe better references would have stopped things from going awry in the film under review, a minor Marilyn Monroe black and white film, Don’t Bother to Knock.  In any case one should not rely on the recommendations of a sniveling hotel elevator operator trying to get a wayward niece gainful employee. And the minute that I saw that the referring party here, the elevator guy, was Elisha Cook, Jr., last seen as a no –account cheap gunsel in the 1941 film adaption of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon I knew mother was onto something.       

Here’s the skinny. A couple staying in a New York hotel, not the Plaza from the look of it, needed a baby-sitter for the night in order  for hubby to receive some newspaper award. Presto. Elisha volunteers his niece, Nell (played by a young not blonde, Marilyn Monroe), and the deal is done. No problem right. Wrong, wrong about six different ways. I will not get into the issue of baby-sitters getting a bad rap in film, either as social monsters or as incompetents, but this Nell as it turned out had just come east from a three year stay at a mental institution. Reason; terrible parents and devastation over the loss of her World War II flyboy lover killed in a crash out in the deep.

As the film progresses Nell acts more and more erratically especially when cross-court neighbor Jed, a commercial pilot, comes a courting after a certain amount of telephone and window flirtation. Acts more erratically toward the helpless if precocious child, Bunny, in her care. Jed is strictly on the rebound since his honey, a torch-singer (played by Anne Bancroft) playing downstairs at the lounge, has called the whole thing off, saw him as just another love ‘em and leave ‘em guy and she wanted something more. So Jed is gloomy although once he copped to Nell’s condition, or at least that he wanted no part of someone who was that disturbed he decided to flee back to his torch-singer, and that something more she was talking about. But not before Nell tried to vicariously seduce Jed thinking he was her dead flyboy, bopped the nervous Elisha on the head when he checked up on her, tied up the poor child, had a fight with the child’s mother when she checked up, and then tried to do herself in with razorblades before she is checked and taken away (that was not her first time with the blades she had it out West and got that three year stay for her efforts). So you can what I mean about that reference thing.

Oh yah, Marilyn’s performance seemed strictly out of that method acting school she belonged to, a little wooden, coming out of the blocks. A little wooden like the storyline and action of this film. If you want Monroe at her height then you had better see Some Like It Hot or The Misfits this one is strictly a rising star learning her craft.          

From The Marxist Archives-In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The John Brown-Led Raid On Harpers Ferry- Those Who Labor Must Rule! 

STRIKE THE BLOW-THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN

Reclaiming John Brown for the Left

BOOK REVIEW

JOHN BROWN, ABOLITIONIST, DAVID S. REYNOLDS, ALFRED A. KNOPF, NEW YORK, 2005
From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harpers Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic- had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown and that Union soldiers marched to that song as they headed south. I was then, however, neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown’s (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas ‘proxy’ wars against the expansion of slavery. Later study filled in some of those gaps and has only strengthened my strong bond with his memory. Know this, as I reach the age at which John Brown was executed,I still retain my youthful admiration for him. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in America. Almost 150 years after his death this writer is proud to stand in the tradition of John Brown.

That said, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I can recommend Mr. Reynolds’s book detailing the life, times and exploits of John Brown, warts and all. Published in 2005, this is an important source (including helpful end notes) for updating various controversies surrounding the John Brown saga. While I may disagree with some of Mr. Reynolds’s conclusions concerning the impact of John Brown’s exploits on later black liberation struggles and to a lesser extent his position on Brown’s impact on his contemporaries, particularly the Transcendentalists, nevertheless on the key point of the central place of John Brown in American revolutionary history there is no dispute. Furthermore, Mr. Reynolds has taken pains to provide substantial detail about the ups and downs of John Brown’s posthumous reputation.

Most importantly, he defends the memory of John Brown against all-comers-that is partisan history on behalf of the ‘losers’ of history at its best. He has reclaimed John Brown to his proper position as an icon for the left against the erroneous and outrageous efforts of modern day religious and secular terrorists to lay any claim to his memory or his work. Below I make a few comments on some of controversies surrounding John Brown developed in Mr. Reynolds’s study.

If one understands the ongoing nature, from his early youth, of John Brown’s commitment to the active struggle against slavery, the scourge of the American Republic in the first half of the 19th century, one can only conclude that he was indeed a man on a mission. As Mr. Reynolds’s points out Brown took every opportunity to fight against slavery including early service as an agent of the Underground Railroad spiriting escaped slaves northward, participation as an extreme radical in all the key anti-slavery propaganda battles of the time as well as challenging other anti-slavery elements to be more militant and in the 1850’s, arms in hand, fighting in the ‘proxy’ wars in Kansas and, of course, the culmination of his life- the raid on Harpers Ferry. Those exploits alone render absurd a very convenient myth by those who supported slavery or turned a blind eye to it and their latter-day apologists for his so-called ‘madness’. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one.

For those who like their political heroes ‘pure’, frankly, it is better to look elsewhere than the life of John Brown. His personal and family life as a failed rural capitalist would hardly lead one to think that this man was to become a key historical figure in any struggle, much less the great struggle against slavery. Some of his actions in Kansas (concerning the murder of some pro-slavery elements under his direction) also cloud his image. However, when the deal went down in the late 1850’s and it was apparent for all to see that there was no other way to end slavery than a fight to the death-John Brown rose to the occasion. And did not cry about it. And did not expect others to cry about it. Call him a ‘monomaniac’ if you like but even a slight acquaintance with great historical figures shows they all have this ‘disease’- that is why they make the history books. No, the ‘madness’ argument will not do.

Whether or not John Brown knew that his military strategy for the Harper’s Ferry raid would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s plan, however, was essentially a combination of slave revolt modeled after the maroon experiences in Haiti, Nat Turner’s earlier Virginia slave rebellion and rural guerrilla warfare of the ‘third world’ type that we have become more familiar with since that time. 150 years later this strategy does not look so foolhardy in an America of the 1850’s that had no real standing army, fairly weak lines of communications, virtually uninhabited mountains to flee to and the North at their backs.

The execution of the plan is another matter. Brown seemingly made about every mistake in the book in that regard. However, this is missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. A few more fighting abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and better propaganda work among freedman with connections to the plantations would not have hurt the chances for success at Harpers Ferry.

What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist avenging angel in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years. It is possible that if Brown did not have this, by 19th century standards as well as our own, old-fashioned Calvinist determination that he would not have been capable of militant action. Certainly other anti-slavery elements never came close to his militancy, including the key Transcendentalist movement led by Emerson and Thoreau and the Concord ‘crowd’ who supported him and kept his memory alive in hard times.

In their eyes he had the heroic manner of the Old Testament prophet. Now this animating spirit is not one that animates modern revolutionaries and so it is hard to understand the depths of his religious convictions on his actions but they were understood, if not fully appreciated, by others in those days. It is better today to look at Brown more politically through his hero (and mine, as well) Oliver Cromwell-a combination of Calvinist avenger and militant warrior. Yes, I can get behind that picture of him.

By all accounts Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920’s. There other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown’s actions should be measured by history.

Militarily defeated at Harpers Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a ‘madman’ still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have also misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy which led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming American military superiority. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.

From a modern prospective Brown’s strategy for black liberation, even if the abolitionist goal he aspired to was immediately successful, reached the outer limits within the confines of capitalism. Brown’s actions were meant to make black people free. Beyond that goal he had no program except the Chatham Charter which seems to have replicated the American constitution but with racial and gender equality as a cornerstone. Unfortunately the Civil War did not provide fundamental economic and political freedom. That is still our fight. Moreover, the Civil War, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the reign of ‘Jim Crow’ and the subsequent waves of black migration to the cities changed the character of black oppression in the U.S. from Brown’s time. Black people are now a part of "free labor," and the key to their liberation is in the integrated fight of labor against the current one-sided class war and establishing a government of workers and their allies. Nevertheless, we can stand proudly in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown (and of his friend Frederick Douglass). We need to complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, not by emulating Brown’s exemplary actions but to moving the multi-racial American working class to power. Finish the Civil War.
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Workers Vanguard No. 989 28 October 2011 TROTSKY LENIN Those Who Labor Must Rule! (Quote of the Week) Emerging in the first half of the 19th century as a mass independent workers movement, the British Chartists advanced revolutionary republican principles while leading the workers in class struggle. James Bronterre O’Brien, an Irish-born leader of the movement, gave voice to the need for the working class to fight in its own interests instead of begging its oppressors. I hate long discussions and disquisitions upon the rights and privileges of the oppressed. I hate such arguments as go to prove that hawks should not prey upon doves; wolves on lambs; or the idlers of society upon the productive classes; I hate all appeals to the morality of monsters.... We have had enough of moral and learned strictures upon abstract rights and duties, which have left the respective parties in statu quo—the one plundering, the other being plundered.... My motto is...“What you take you may have.” I will not attempt to deal with the abstract question of right, but will proceed to show that it is POWER, solid, substantial POWER, that the millions must obtain and retain, if they would enjoy the produce of their own labour and the privileges of freemen. —James Bronterre O’Brien (1837), quoted in Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (1984)