|
Happy
Birthday!
CHELSEA
MANNING
Free
her now!
|
 |
|
2.30-4pm.
Tue, 17 December 2014
VIGIL on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields
Trafalgar
Square, WC2N 4JJ Charing
Cross
(St
Martin’s requests that vigils on the steps are silent)
Other
actions so far include Berlin, Philadelphia and
San Francisco . . . If you organise an event, let us know and we will publicise it.
Chelsea
Manning is 27 years
old on this day. Formerly known as
Bradley, she is the transgender whistleblower, US soldier, Grand
Marshal at San
Francisco Pride 2014, who revealed US, UK and other governments’ war crimes and
corruption. She leaked hundred of
thousands of documents to Wikileaks exposing the
truth and therefore saving many lives. Imprisoned in 2010 and held for months under
torturous conditions, she was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013.
If this
stands, she’ll be out in 2045.
We cannot let
this happen – we have to get her out!
Sign
Amnesty International’s
petition
for
her immediate release.
For more info: Chelsea
Manning Support Network
US:
215 848 1120 UK: 020 7267 8698
| |
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Rally: No New U.S. War in Iraq & Syria!
Join
us Saturday Nov 15th
On Friday, President Obama doubled down on the war in Iraq and Syria, ordering 1500 more troops on the ground in Iraq and requesting over $5 billion in funding.
|
Saturday, Nov
15, 1:00 pm Park Street Station, Boston Rally and march to Downtown Crossing with a mock drone and die-in |
· Stop the Bombing in Syria and Iraq
· Bring the troops home now
· Stop sending weapons into the region which are leading to so much bloodshed
· Support humanitarian aid, through neutral institutions, for victims of the conflict
· Support self-determination and the demilitarization of the area
Armistice/Veterans Day has recently
past in the midst of a never ending war and yet another military intervention,
this time in Syria
and Iraq.
Washington has promised us
that this new war will last for years. But over the past 13 years, this country
has spent one trillion, five hundred billion dollars for wars in
Iraq,
Afghanistan,
Libya, and other parts
of the Middle East and
South Asia. These military
actions have brought hundreds of thousands of deaths, but neither peace nor
security. Meanwhile, these hundreds of billions of dollars could have been used
instead to provide for jobs, human needs, and renewable
energy.
The current campaign to sell this
war has nothing to do with protecting us or the people of the area but instead
is intended to secure control of the area by repressive governments and
sectarian militias allied with Washington. The current bombing
campaign is in violation of the U.N. Charter and the U.S. Constitution. In its
sweep through Syria and
Iraq,
ISIS is using modern
U.S. weapons that were
previously sent into the region in order to stabilize a corrupt and brutal
regime in Baghdad and to overthrow
Syria’s
government.
Is bombing an answer to these
sectarian conflicts? Do these actions reflect the interests of working people in
the U.S. or the peoples of
the Middle East? We should
not be involved in this sectarian conflict that the war in Iraq set off. Rather,
we should be supporting a policy of non-intervention and self-determination. Any
real and lasting solution to the problems in the region must come from the
peoples of that region themselves, not from the Pentagon.
Call Congress toll-free at 877-429-0678 and say:
“I want Congress to reconvene immediately to fully debate a new “Authorization for Use of Military Force” (AUMF) that deals with Syria, Iraq, and ISIS. And when the vote comes, I want you to vote no.”
Save the date for an educational forum on Syria and Iraq featuring Prof. Elaine Hagopian, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 7pm.
For more info or to help organize: United for Justice with Peace, 617-383-4857, info@justicewithpeace.org
 | ||
United for Justice with
Peace is a coalition of peace and justice organizations and community peace
groups in the Greater Boston region. The UJP Coalition, formed after September
11th, seeks global peace through social and economic justice. |
Friday, November 14, 2014
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poets’ Corner
In say 1912, 1913,
hell, even the beginning of 1914 before the war clouds got a full head of steam
in the summer they all profusely professed, artists who saw the disjointedness
of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put
twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other, writers of serious history
books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress, humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument
of policy, writers of not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden
gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that
man and woman had too much to do to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s
cry and the maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets, musicians whose
muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, and poets, ah, those
constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack
of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair
of another man, that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would
stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist, world and blast the
war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels.
And then the war
drums intensified and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out,
poets, artists, sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the
trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for….
OXFORD IN WAR-TIME
[The Boat Race will not be held this year (1915). The whole of last
year's Oxford Eight and the great majority of the cricket and football
teams are serving the King.]
Under the tow-path past the barges
Never an eight goes flashing by;
Never a blatant coach on the marge is
Urging his crew to do or die;
Never the critic we knew enlarges,
Fluent, on How and Why!
Once by the Iffley Road November
Welcomed the Football men aglow,
Covered with mud, as you'll remember,
Eager to vanquish Oxford's foe.
Where are the teams of last December?
Gone--where they had to go!
Where are her sons who waged at cricket
Warfare against the foeman-friend?
Far from the Parks, on a harder wicket,
Still they attack and still defend;
Playing a greater game, they'll stick it,
Fearless until the end!
Oxford's goodliest children leave her,
Hastily thrusting books aside;
Still the hurrying weeks bereave her,
Filling her heart with joy and pride;
Only the thought of you can grieve her,
You who have fought and died.
_W. Snow_
From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 97th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution- Leon Trotsky On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution
Workers Vanguard No. 968
5 November 2010
In Honor of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
For New October Revolutions!
(From the Archives of Marxism)
November 7 (October 25 by the calendar used in Russia at the time) marks the 93rd anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Led by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the workers’ seizure of power in Russia gave flesh and blood reality to the Marxist understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Despite the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet workers state, culminating in its counterrevolutionary destruction in 1991-92, the October Revolution was and is the international proletariat’s greatest victory; its final undoing, a world-historic defeat. The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fought to the bitter end in defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, while calling for workers political revolutions to oust the parasitic nationalist Stalinist bureaucracies that ruled these states. This is the same program we uphold today for the remaining workers states of China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
Having been expelled from the USSR in 1929 by Stalin, Trotsky spent the remainder of his life in exile. In November 1932, he gave a speech to a Danish social-democratic student group in Copenhagen. He outlined the political conditions and the social forces that drove the Russian Revolution, stressing the decisive role of the Bolshevik Party. Illuminating the worldwide impact of the Russian Revolution and its place in history, Trotsky underlined the necessity of sweeping away the decaying capitalist order and replacing it with a scientifically planned international socialist economy that will lay the material basis for human freedom.
The ICL fights to forge workers parties modeled on Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks to lead the struggle for new October Revolutions around the globe.
* * *
Revolution means a change of the social order. It transfers the power from the hands of a class which has exhausted itself into those of another class, which is on the rise....
Without the armed insurrection of November 7, 1917, the Soviet state would not be in existence. But the insurrection itself did not drop from Heaven. A series of historical prerequisites was necessary for the October revolution.
1. The rotting away of the old ruling classes—the nobility, the monarchy, the bureaucracy.
2. The political weakness of the bourgeoisie, which had no roots in the masses of the people.
3. The revolutionary character of the peasant question.
4. The revolutionary character of the problem of the oppressed nations.
5. The significant social weight of the proletariat.
To these organic pre-conditions we must add certain conjunctural conditions of the highest importance:
6. The Revolution of 1905 was the great school, or in Lenin’s words, the “dress rehearsal” of the Revolution of 1917. The Soviets, as the irreplaceable organizational form of the proletarian united front in the revolution, were created for the first time in the year 1905.
7. The imperialist war sharpened all the contradictions, tore the backward masses out of their immobility and thereby prepared the grandiose scale of the catastrophe.
But all these conditions, which fully sufficed for the outbreak of the Revolution, were insufficient to assure the victory of the proletariat in the Revolution. For this victory one condition more was needed:
8. The Bolshevik Party....
In the year 1883 there arose among the emigres the first Marxist group. In the year 1898, at a secret meeting, the foundation of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party was proclaimed (we all called ourselves Social-Democrats in those days). In the year 1903 occurred the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the year 1912 the Bolshevist fraction finally became an independent Party.
It learned to recognize the class mechanics of society in struggle, in the grandiose events of twelve years (1905-1917). It educated cadres equally capable of initiative and of subordination. The discipline of its revolutionary action was based on the unity of its doctrine, on the tradition of common struggles and on confidence in its tested leadership.
Thus stood the Party in the year 1917. Despised by the official “public opinion” and the paper thunder of the intelligentsia press, it adapted itself to the movement of the masses. Firmly it kept in hand the control of factories and regiments. More and more the peasant masses turned toward it. If we understand by “nation,” not the privileged heads, but the majority of the people, that is, the workers and peasants, then Bolshevism became in the course of the year 1917 a truly national Russian Party.
In September 1917, Lenin, who was compelled to keep in hiding, gave the signal, “The crisis is ripe, the hour of the insurrection has approached.” He was right. The ruling classes had landed in a blind alley before the problems of the war, the land and national liberation. The bourgeoisie finally lost its head. The democratic parties, the Mensheviks and social-revolutionaries, wasted the remains of the confidence of the masses in them by their support of the imperialist war, by their policy of ineffectual compromise and concession to the bourgeois and feudal property-owners. The awakened army no longer wanted to fight for the alien aims of imperialism. Disregarding democratic advice, the peasantry smoked the landowners out of their estates. The oppressed nationalities at the periphery rose up against the bureaucracy of Petrograd. In the most important workers’ and soldiers’ Soviets the Bolsheviki were dominant. The workers and soldiers demanded action. The ulcer was ripe. It needed a cut of the lancet.
Only under these social and political conditions was the insurrection possible. And thus it also became inevitable. But there is no playing around with the insurrection. Woe to the surgeon who is careless in the use of the lancet! Insurrection is an art. It has its laws and its rules.
The Party carried through the October insurrection with cold calculation and with flaming determination. Thanks to this, it conquered almost without victims. Through the victorious Soviets the Bolsheviki placed themselves at the head of a country which occupies one sixth of the surface of the globe....
Let us now in closing attempt to ascertain the place of the October Revolution, not only in the history of Russia but in the history of the world. During the year 1917, in a period of eight months, two historical curves intersect. The February upheaval—that belated echo of the great struggles which had been carried out in past centuries on the territories of Holland, England, France, almost all of Continental Europe—takes its place in the series of bourgeois revolutions. The October Revolution proclaims and opens the domination of the proletariat. It was world capitalism that suffered its first great defeat on the territory of Russia. The chain broke at its weakest link. But it was the chain that broke, and not only the link.
Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential mission, the increase of human power and human wealth. Humanity cannot stand still at the level which it has reached. Only a powerful increase in productive force and a sound, planned, that is, Socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity—all humanity—of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom with respect to its own economy. Freedom in two senses—first of all, man will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of his life to physical labor. Second, he will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is, on the blind and dark forces which have grown up behind his back. He will build up his economy freely, that is, according to a plan, with compass in hand. This time it is a question of subjecting the anatomy of society to the X-ray through and through, of disclosing all its secrets and subjecting all its functions to the reason and the will of collective humanity. In this sense, Socialism must become a new step in the historical advance of mankind. Before our ancestor, who first armed himself with a stone axe, the whole of nature represented a conspiracy of secret and hostile forces. Since then, the natural sciences, hand in hand with practical technology, have illuminated nature down to its most secret depths. By means of electrical energy, the physicist passes judgment on the nucleus of the atom. The hour is not far when science will easily solve the task of the alchemists, and turn manure into gold and gold into manure. Where the demons and furies of nature once raged, now rules ever more courageously the industrial will of man.
But while he wrestled victoriously with nature, man built up his relations to other men blindly, almost like the bee or the ant. Belatedly and most undecidedly he approached the problems of human society. He began with religion, and passed on to politics. The Reformation represented the first victory of bourgeois individualism and rationalism in a domain which had been ruled by dead tradition. From the church, critical thought went on to the state. Born in the struggle with absolutism and the medieval estates, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and of the rights of man and the citizen grew stronger. Thus arose the system of parliamentarism. Critical thought penetrated into the domain of government administration. The political rationalism of democracy was the highest achievement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
But between nature and the state stands economic life. Technology liberated man from the tyranny of the old elements—earth, water, fire and air—only to subject him to its own tyranny. Man ceased to be a slave to nature, to become a slave to the machine, and, still worse, a slave to supply and demand. The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how man, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who rises up to the stratosphere, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature remains a slave to the blind forces of his own economy. The historical task of our epoch consists in replacing the uncontrolled play of the market by reasonable planning, in disciplining the forces of production, compelling them to work together in harmony and obediently serve the needs of mankind. Only on this new social basis will man be able to stretch his weary limbs and—every man and every woman, not only a selected few—become a full citizen in the realm of thought.
—“Leon Trotsky Defends the October Revolution” (Militant, 21 January 1933)
In Defense Of The October Russian
Revolution Of 1917- Comrade Markham’s Tale-Take
One
From The Pen Of Frank
Jackman
Comrade
Markham had been born a “red diaper baby.” I will explain what that means in a
minute but first to that Comrade Markham moniker. That name is the only name I have
known him by ever since I ran into him at an anti-war planning session over in
Cambridge a couple of years back, back in the fall of 2012, when we were
trying, people like Comrade Markham, the guys from Veterans for Peace, guys and
gals from some socialist groups and the usual Quakers, traditional peace
activists who always sign on to these efforts, to organize against the latest
governmental war cries. Although the previous decade or so had seen anti-war
mobilizations, great and small, mainly small, this session was planning a rally
to oppose President Obama’s then latest attempt to intervene in the civil war
in Syria. Comrade Markham, then eighty-seven years old and still trying to
change this wicked old world for the better rather than sitting in some
assisted living hellhole wasting away, had introduced himself to the group under
that moniker and although I had not seen him around before, had no sense of his
history then, others greeted and addressed him by that name without a snicker.
Of course as
I found out later that moniker was not his real name but had been the one that
he had used in his long-time membership in the old American Communist Party,
not the current version which is kind of out in limbo, but the one that we who
came of age in the 1960s had cut our teeth on as the great “red menace,” who
were taking “Moscow gold,” taking Stalin and his progeny’s gold, in order to undermine the American way of
life and so we had to be ever vigilant in the red scare Cold War night. He had
used the name so long that he knew no other to be called and in my associations
with him as he told me his story that is what I always called him. Someday I
suppose we will find out his real name but his story, an unusual American story,
is what matters and what will be forever his memorial.
But back to
that “red diaper baby” designation I promised to tell you about. Now I had
heard that designation before, back in the late 1960s when Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) was cutting a big swath through the political
landscape, especially among students. That was the time when even some of us
who came straight from the working-classes to be the first in our families to
go to college believed that students comfortably ensconced in ivory tower “red”
universities had replaced the working class and oppressed of the world as the
center of progressive action. A fair number of the emerging leaders, again some
who also were out of working class neighborhoods in places like Chicago,
Detroit, New York City and Oakland, had had parents who belonged to the
Communist Party or some other left-wing organization and were not like many of
us the first generation of radicals in our families. Thus the “red diaper baby”
designation which in some cases gave those who had grown up in that political milieu
an unwarranted standing based on some usually long past affiliation by their now
bourgeois (or better for working class kids bourgeoisified) parents. What has
made Comrade Markham unique in my
experience is that he was a red diaper baby from parents who had helped establish
the Communist Party in America back around 1920 (or one of the two that emerged
from the old Socialist Party but that story of the hows and whys of the
existence of two parties are beyond what I want to tell you about here except
in passing).
That thread
of history intrigued me, his whole story intrigued me as I pieced it together
in bits and pieces, and so after a couple of those planning sessions I asked
him to sit down with me wherever he liked and tell me his story. We did so in
several sessions most of them held in the Boston Public Library where he liked
go and check out books, magazines and newspapers about the old days, about the
time of his activist political prime. What I did not expect to get was an
almost chemically pure defense of the Soviet Union, of the Soviet experience,
through thick and thin until the end in 1990 or so. And of a longing for the
days when such questions mattered to a candid world. I admit I shared some of
his nostalgia, some of his sense that while this wicked old world needs a new
way of social relations to the means of production we are a bit wistful in our
dreams right now. That is why his story appears here as a running personal commentary
on this 97th anniversary year of the Russian October Revolution of
1917.
It is
probably hard today at least three generations removed from the time of the
great Russian October Revolution of 1917 to understand, to understand in depth.
the strong pro-revolutionary feeling that that event brought forth in the
world- the first fitful workers’ state, a state for the international
working-class to call its own, to defend against all the international
reaction. Of course that strong pro-revolutionary response also has its
opposite effect on the international bourgeoisie which was ready to move might
and main to break the back of the revolution and did so, did actively attempt,
one way or another, supporting one native anti-revolutionary faction or
another, or intervening directly. (The international bourgeoisie had as its
allies as well some of the reformist leaderships and better off segments of the
Western working class who were as fearful of revolution as any bourgeois). This
was the heady atmosphere in which Comrade Markham’s parents, known in the party
as Comrade Curtis and Comrade Rosa (after the late martyred Polish
revolutionary liked after the failed Spartacist uprising in Germany in late
1918, Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution), moved in the early days of
the party formed here in America.
See Curtis
and Rosa had a long socialist past, had grown up respectively in a Kansas farm
belt (him) and a Chicago steel belt (her), had worked individually to build the
pre-World War I Socialist Party in their respective places of birth and had met
in Chicago when Curtis moved there to work on the 1912 presidential campaign
for the revered Eugene V. Debs (who amassed over one million votes that years,
a watershed year for socialist votes, gathered in large part by activists like
Curtis and Rosa who worked overtime for his election). They had been aligned
with the left-wing of the party in most of its internal debates and votes,
especially as President Woodrow Wilson and his administration started beating
the war drums to go to the aid of the Allies in the utterly stalemated World
War I. A war where the flower of the European youth had laid down their heads
for no apparent reason and Wilson was preparing the same fate for American
youth. Segments of the party wanted to support those efforts or to “duck” the
issue. So they were strongly for him and his supporters when Debs decided to
outright oppose the war entry publicly in 1917. Naturally they were rounded up
and went to jail for a time (at this time they also had also gotten married in
order to be able to visit whichever one was in jail at any given time) and
became more closely associated with the left-wing that was forming to defiantly
oppose American entry into the war but also a myriad of policies that the
right-wing leadership (socialist right-wing not generic right-wing) had imposed
on the party.
The pre-war
Socialist Party in America like a lot of socialist parties around the world
then had been based on the working class but had also been reliant on other
classes like farmers and urban professionals, especially during electoral
periods. So the American organization was a loose organization. Loose until
faction fight time, or when the leadership felt some threat and pulled the
hammer down on party discipline usually gunning for elements to their left but
sometimes just any opposition that might vie for party power which encompassed
many divergent elements. Elements that were not always on the same page. Comrades
Curtis and Rosa had to laugh when the old time Socialist Party leadership used
as its calling-card its looseness as against the Bolshevik iron vice. They knew
first-hand that leadership did not play second fiddle to anyone where
bureaucratic abuse occurred.
The biggest
organizations, better to say federations, were the Midwestern farmers, those
sturdy wheat and corn farmers from Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma who had moved over
from the defunct Populist and Greenback parties who could not keep up with the
times, the foreign language federations which included both American citizens
and recent immigrants who were merely transferring their socialist loyalties from
their native parties to the American one , and a smaller grouping of what I
would call “natives” who had been around America for a few generations and who
were city dwellers or worked in city professions like lawyering, journalism,
medicine and the like. These three rather heterogeneous groups and what
happened to them later are important to Comrade Markham’s parents’ story since
they were both native born and his father had been a law clerk (after he left
the farm and got some clerkship for a lawyer in Kansas City) and his mother a
school teacher (her steelworker father working overtime to put her through
Chicago Normal School as the first of her family to go to college).
A fair
number of the foreign language federations were opposed to American entry into
the war, as were farmers and the professionals and as noted a fair number were
rounded up and went to jail (or like with the IWW, Industrial Workers of the
World, Wobblies, anarchist workers were deported quickly if their immigration
status was shaky). What started the big fights inside the party, what got
Comrades Curtis and Rosa up in arms, was what attitude to take toward the
Russian revolution. Not so much the February 1917 revolution which overthrew
the useless Czar but the Bolshevik-led October revolution which its leaders,
Lenin and Trotsky, proclaimed as the first victory in the international battle
to make socialism the new way to produce and distribute the world’s goods. The
party split into several factions over this issue but what is important is that
Curtis and Rosa found themselves working with other “natives,” guys like Jim
Cannon, John Reed, Earl Browder, Jack Johnstone, some of the New York union
leaders, and many party writers who saw the Russian October as the new wave for
humankind and were ready to move might and main to defend that revolution
against all comers. That is the baptism of fire that the as yet unborn Comrade
Markham had in his genes.
Some say
that the events around the left-wing’s expulsion from the Socialist Party, or
rather what those leftist did, or did not do, to get themselves expelled, did
not bode well for those who would go on to form the American Communist parties
(yes, plural as two separate parties, one based roughly on the foreign language
federations, especially the Russian, Finnish, and Slavic, and the other around
the “natives,” the faction Curtis and Rosa worked with as noted above). There
is always a tension when great events occur and there is an impassable division
of the house over the issues and so whether the split/expulsion was premature
or necessary was not under the control of the ousted faction. Sure, staying in
would have produced a better, clearer explanation for why a split was necessary
in the post-October world. But the Russians were setting up a Communist
International in which they recognized, taking their own experiences in Russian
socialist politics as a guide, that in the age of imperialism, that the “party
of the whole class,” the socialist “big tent” where everybody who called
themselves socialists found a home was no longer adequate as a revolutionary
instrument to seize state power and begin the socialist agenda. Comrades Curtis
and Rosa had done yeoman’s work in Chicago and New York to round up all the
supporters of the Russian revolution they could before the hammer came down.
Although they were not in the first rank of left-wing leaders they were just
below that and had a certain authority having served jail time for their
anti-war views. Some of the few “natives” who faced that choice.
As mentioned
above some of the organizations which had been affiliated with the Socialist
Party were not on the same page. That fact was equally true of the groupings
who would try to form an American Communist Party. This is the place where the
differences between the foreign language federations and the “natives” came to
the fore (again these are rough divisions of the social basis of the
antagonistic groupings as there was some overlap as usual). So for a few years
there were two parties, both underground at the beginning given the heat from
the American bourgeoisie who were apoplectic about the revolution in Russia
(including armed intervention there) and unleased the Palmer Raids to round up
every red under every bed and kill them through vigilante action, deport them
or jail them (named after the Attorney-General of the time). Mostly Curtis and
Rosa kept a low profile, worked clandestinely (having already seen American
jails they were leery of going back and one could not blame them, especially
Rosa who had a hard time having been placed with the common criminal women for
lack of other facilities and who had to fend off one woman who wanted to make
Rosa her “girl”), tried to keep the press published and distributed, and tried
to fight against all the various “theories” that basically ignorant American
comrades had about the “virtues” of an underground party which the foreign
language federations were in favor of. The issue of the legal/underground party
finally after a few years of controversy had to be resolved by the Russians, by
the Communist International, hell, by Trotsky himself. So for a time Comrades
Curtis and Rosa had a very high opinion of that Russian leader, that victorious
leader of the Red Army, especially after Jim Cannon came back with the favorably
verdict and how it was arrived at. If anything, according to Comrade Markham’s recollections of what his parents told him
about the founding days of the party they became even more fervent about
defense of the Russian revolution and spent a great deal of time during the
early years propagandizing for American governmental recognition of the Soviet
Union.
The early
1920s say up to about 1924 were hectic for the American Communist Party, hectic
until the Communist International straightened out that dispute between the
“legal” party and “underground” party factions noting that the changed
political climate allowed the party to act more openly (the frenzy of the red
scare Palmer raid days abated in the “lost generation,” “Jazz Age ”days but
where the “dog days” of political struggle of the 1920s in the labor movement were
then also descending on the American landscape). The hard “under-grounders” had
departed leaving those who wanted to increase the public face of the party able
to do so without rancor (of course other disputes would rise up to enflame the
factions but that is another story). Still the party in many ways was
rudderless, had not kept pace with what was going on in the Communist
International. Nowhere was this problem more apparent than the whole question
of supporting a farmer-labor party in the 1924 presidential elections, in
short, to support that old progressive Republican, Robert Lafollette, in his
independent campaign.
The impulse
was to make a big public splash on the national scene with the advantages that
the exposure of a national campaign would bring. Both Comrades Curtis and Rosa
having been public activists and strong supporters of the idea pushed Jim
Cannon and his co-thinker, Bill Dunne, toward support for the idea. Cannon and
Dunne a little more knowledgeable about American bourgeois organizations were
lukewarm after the Chicago labor leaders balked and began a red-baiting
campaign. Curtis and Rosa saw that campaign as a way to publicize the campaign
for American recognition of the Soviet Union. The problem with support for a
farmer-labor party, a two-class party is that the thing is a bourgeois
formation, an early version of what in the 1930s would become the “popular
front” policy. The name and reputation of Lafollette should have been the
tip-off. So most of the year 1924 was spent in trying to iron out the problem
of whether to support a farmer-labor party or just a labor party. The internal
politics of this dispute are important. No less an authority on the early party
than Cannon said later that a wrong decision (to support Lafollette or some
version of that idea) would have destroyed the party right then. The CI stepped
in and changed the policy not without controversy. Comrades Curtis and Rosa
were not happy, certainly not happy with Cannon then but deferred to the
factional leadership’s judgment. They spent most of that year doing trade union
support work for William Z. Foster’s Trade Union Education League drawing closer
to that leader as a result although still aligned with the Cannon faction.
Comrade
Markham was a “love” baby. (He had his parents word on this when he asked some
child’s question about it later when he was first learning about sex.) A “love baby” in the days when most ideas of
contraception, even among knowledgeable revolutionaries connected with the
Village and other places where such things might be discussed, was some
variation of the old Catholic “rhythm” method dealing with a woman’s cycle
(both Curtis and Rosa had been brought up as Catholics). After the hectic times
around the farmer-labor question the pair decided to bring a child into the
world, into their world and so Rosa stopped counting the days in her cycle. And
in the fall of 1925 Markham was born, born and nurtured by two happy parents.
Part of
Comrade Curtis and Rosa’s decision to have a child was determined by the low
level of class struggle in America at the time (and world-wide especially after
the aborted German revolution of 1923 which while they were not familiar with
the details had sensed that something big had been missed). Labor strikes were
few and far between, the party message was not getting much of a hearing
outside the New York area, and the Coolidge administration was adamant about
not recognizing “red” Russia. Moreover after the death of Lenin and the
struggle for power in the Soviet party between Stalin and Trotsky (and in the
Communist International where Zinoviev was in a bloc with Stalin against Trotsky)
some of the wind went out of the sails for Comrade Curtis and Rosa, a not
unknown phenomenon in the “dog days” of any movement. So while they remained
good party members, paid their dues and sold the paper on Saturdays, remained
loyal to the defense of Soviet Russia they were less active in those years when
they were raising Markham over in Brooklyn after moving from Chicago looking
for work where Curtis had found a job as a law clerk and started taking
stenographic courses to bring some income into the household rather than
depending on parents and the party dole.
Comrades
Curtis and Rosa had in the first few years of Comrade Markham’s life, the late
1920s, not been as attentive to what was going on in Russia as previously. Were
unaware of the details of the internal struggle started after the death of Lenin
in 1924 between Stalin and Trotsky at first and then eventually the whole of
the old Bolshevik Party, those who had actually made the revolution rather that
those who were emerging as Stalin’s allies, those who had sat on the sidelines
(or on the other side) or who were Johnny-come-latelies and had no sense of
party history. Although they had adhered to various factional line-ups lashed
together by the Cannon-Dunne section of the party leadership they had not been
as attuned during the mid to late 1920s of the way that the changes in the political
situation in Moscow was reflected in the changes in the American party. It was almost
as if once they had genuflected before their duty to the defense of the Soviet
Union the rest of the situation there receded into vague rumors and esoteric theory.
Although
early on they had been admirers of the Red Army leader, Leon Trotsky, once he
became anathema in party circles in Russia they took their cues from the newly
installed Lovestone leadership in the American party (and the Cannon faction as
well) and were as adamant in their ritualistic denunciations of the person of
Trotsky and of the Trotskyite menace as anyone. His criticism of the Stalin
regime seemed like sour grapes to them and his rantings about the failure of leadership
in the British trade union crisis and second Chinese revolution did not resonate
with them being in a country like America where the possibilities of revolution
for the foreseeable future seemed extremely remote and therefore it was
impolitic for others to speak about such matters in other countries. They would
pass on these same pieces of wisdom to Comrade Markham when he came of age.
They were thus
shocked, shocked but not moved, when it was discovered that one of the main
leaders of their faction, Jim Cannon, who had been sent to Moscow for the Sixth
Congress of the Communist International in1928 came back and proved to be, or
have been all along, a closet Trotskyite “wreaker.” Here too they made their ritualistic denunciations
of the counter-revolutionary Cannon and would spent the rest of their political
lives denouncing him and whatever political formations he helped organize to
spread Trotsky’s words. This hatred too they passed on to their son.
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Socialist Future
Logo Of The Communist Youth International
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this blog is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past, spotty and incomplete as they may be, here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. Historically these lessons would be centrally derived from the revolution of 1848 in Europe, especially in France, the Paris Commune of 1871, and most vividly under the impact of the Lenin and Trotsky-led Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, a world historic achievement for the international working class whose subsequent demise was of necessity a world-historic defeat for that same class. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over.
More importantly, for the long haul, and unfortunately given that same spotty and incomplete past the long haul is what appears to be the time frame that this old militant will have to concede that we need to think about, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. An education that masses of previous generations of youth undertook gladly but which now is reduced to a precious few. That is beside the question of numbers in any case no small or easy task given the differences of generations (the missing transmission generation problem between the generation of ’68 who tried unsuccessfully to turn the world upside down and failed, the missing in between generation raised on Reagan rations and today’s desperate youth in need of all kinds of help; differences of political milieus worked in (another missing link situation with the attenuation of the links to the old mass socialist and communist organizations decimated by the red scare Cold War 1950s night of the long knives through the new old New Left of the 1960s and little notable organizational connections since); differences of social structure to work around (the serious erosion of the industrial working class in America, the rise of the white collar service sector, the now organically chronically unemployed, and the rise of the technocrats); and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses (today’s computer, cellphone, and social networking savvy youth using those assets as tools for organizing).
There is no question that back in my youth in the 1960s I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
**********
The Communist International and the Communist Youth Movement
Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
12 July 1921
1 The young socialist movement came into existence as a result of the steadily increasing capitalist exploitation of young workers and also of the growth of bourgeois militarism. The movement was a reaction against attempts to poison the minds of young workers with bourgeois nationalist ideology and against the tendency of most of the social-democratic parties and the trade unions to neglect the economic, political and cultural demands of young workers.
In most countries the social-democratic parties and the unions, which were growing increasingly opportunist and revisionist, took no part in establishing young socialist organisations, and in certain countries they even opposed the creation of a youth movement. The reformist social-democratic parties and trade unions saw the independent revolutionary socialist youth organisations as a serious threat to their opportunist policies. They sought to introduce a bureaucratic control over the youth organisations and destroy their independence, thus stifling the movement, changing its character and adapting it to social-democratic politics.
2 As a result of the imperialist war and the positions taken towards it by social democracy almost everywhere, the contradictions between the social-democratic parties and the international revolutionary organisations inevitably grew and eventually led to open conflict. The living conditions of young workers sharply deteriorated; there was mobilisation and military service on the one hand, and, on the other, the increasing exploitation in the munitions industries and militarisation of civilian life. The most class-conscious young socialists opposed the war and the nationalist propaganda. They dissociated themselves from the social-democratic parties and undertook independent political activity (the International Youth Conferences at Berne in 1915 and Jena in 1916).
In their struggle against the war, the young socialist organisations were supported by the most dedicated revolutionary groups and became an important focus for the revolutionary forces. In most countries no revolutionary parties existed and the youth organisations took over their role; they became independent political organisations and acted as the vanguard in the revolutionary struggle.
3 With the establishment of the Communist International and, in some countries, of Communist Parties, the role of the revolutionary youth organisations changes. Young workers, because of their economic position and because of their psychological make-up, are more easily won to Communist ideas and are quicker to show enthusiasm for revolutionary struggle than adult workers. Nevertheless, the youth movement relinquishes to the Communist Parties its vanguard role of organising independent activity and providing political leadership. The further existence of Young Communist organisations as politically independent and leading organisations would mean that two Communist Parties existed, in competition with one another and differing only in the age of their membership.
4 At the present time the role of the Young Communist movement is to organise the mass of young workers, educate them in the ideas of Communism, and draw them into the struggle for the Communist revolution.
The Communist youth organisations can no longer limit themselves to working in small propaganda circles. They must win the broad masses of workers by conducting a permanent campaign of agitation, using the newest methods. In conjunction with the Communist Parties and the trade unions, they must organise the economic struggle.
The new tasks of the Communist youth organisations require that their educational work be extended and intensified. The members of the youth movement receive their Communist education on the one hand through active participation in all revolutionary struggles and on the other through a study of Marxist theory.
Another important task facing the Young Communist organisations in the immediate future is to break the hold of centrist and social-patriotic ideas on young workers and free the movement from the influences of the social-democratic officials and youth leaders. At the same time, the Young Communist organisations must do everything they can to ‘rejuvenate’ the Communist Parties by parting with their older members, who then join the adult Parties.
The Young Communist organisations participate in the discussion of all political questions, help build the Communist Parties and take part in all revolutionary activity and struggle. This is the main difference between them and the youth sections of the centrist and socialist unions.
5 The relations between the Young Communist organisations and the Communist Party are fundamentally different from those between the revolutionary young socialist organisations and the social-democratic parties. In the common struggle to hasten the proletarian revolution, the greatest unity and strictest centralisation are essential. Political leadership at the international level must belong to the Communist International and at the national level to the respective national sections.
It is the duty of the Young Communist organisations to follow this political leadership (its programme, tactics and political directives) and merge with the general revolutionary front. The Communist Parties are at different stages of development and therefore the Executive Committee of the Communist International and the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International should apply this principle in accordance with the circumstances obtaining in each particular case.
The Young Communist movement has begun to organise its members according to the principle of strict centralisation and in its relations with the Communist International – the leader and bearer of the proletarian revolution – it will be governed by an iron discipline. All political and tactical questions are discussed in the ranks of the Communist youth organisation, which then takes a position and works in the Communist Party of its country in accordance with the resolutions passed by the Party, in no circumstance working against them.
If the Communist youth organisation has serious differences with the Communist Party, it has the right to appeal to the Executive Committee of the Communist International.
Loss of political independence in no way implies loss of the organisational independence which is so essential for political education.
Strong centralisation and effective unity are essential for the successful advancement of the revolutionary struggle, and therefore, in those countries where historical development has left the youth dependent upon the Party, the dependence should be preserved; differences between the two bodies are decided by the EC of the Communist International and the Executive Committee of the Communist Youth International.
6 One of the most immediate and most important tasks of the Young Communist organisations is to fight the belief in political independence inherited from the period when the youth organisations enjoyed absolute autonomy, and which is still subscribed to by some members. The press and organisational apparatus of the Young Communist movement must be used to educate young workers to be responsible and active members of a united Communist Party.
At the present time the Communist youth organisations are beginning to attract increasing numbers of young workers and are developing into mass organisations; it is therefore important that they give the greatest possible time and effort to education.
7 Close co-operation between the Young Communist organisations and the Communist Parties in political work must be reflected in close organisational links. It is essential that each organisation should at all times be represented at all levels of the other organisation (from the central Party organs and district, regional and local organisations down to the cells of Communist groups and the trade unions) and particularly at all conferences and congresses.
In this way the Communist Parties will be able to exert a permanent influence on the movement and encourage political activity, while the youth organisations, in their turn, can influence the Party.
8 The relations established between the Communist Youth International and the Communist International are even closer than those between the individual Parties and their youth organisations. The Communist Youth International has to provide the Communist youth movement with a centralised leadership, offer moral and material support to individual unions, form Young Communist organisations where none has existed and publicise the Communist youth movement and its programme. The Communist Youth International is a section of the Communist International and, as such, is bound by the decisions of its congresses and its Central Committee. The Communist Youth International conducts its work within the framework of these decisions and thus passes on the political line of the Communist International to all its sections. A well-developed system of reciprocal representation and close and constant co-operation guarantees that the Communist Youth International will make gains in all the spheres of its activity (leadership, agitation, organisation and the work of strengthening and supporting the Communist youth organisations).
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Several years ago, I guess about three years now, in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement with the shutting down of its campsites across the country (and the world) I wrote a short piece centered on the need for revolutionary intellectuals to take their rightful place on the left, on the people’s side, and to stop sitting on the academic sidelines (or wherever they were hiding out). One of the reasons for that piece was that in the aftermath of the demise of the Occupy movement a certain stock-taking was in order. A stock-taking at first centered on those young radical and revolutionaries that I ran into in the various campsites and on the flash mob marches who were disoriented and discouraged when their utopian dreams went up in smoke without a murmur of regret from the masses. Now a few years later it is apparent that they have, mostly, moved back to the traditional political ways of operating or have not quite finished licking their wounds.
Although I initially addressed my remarks to the activists still busy I also had in mind those intellectuals who had a radical streak but who then hovered on the sidelines and were not sure what to make of the whole experiment although some things seemed very positive like the initial camp comradery. In short, those who would come by on Sunday and take a lot of photographs and write a couple of lines but held back. Now in 2014 it is clear as day that the old economic order (capitalism if you were not quite sure what to name it) that we were fitfully protesting against (especially the banks who led the way downhill) has survived another threat to its dominance. The old political order, the way of doing political business now clearly being defended by one Barack Obama with might and main is still intact. The needs of working people although now widely discussed (the increasing gap between the rich, really the very rich, and the poor, endlessly lamented and then forgotten, the student debt death trap, and the lingering sense that most of us will never get very far ahead in this wicked old world especially compared to previous generations) have not been ameliorated. All of this calls for intellectuals with any activist spark to come forth and help analyze and plan how the masses are to survive, how a new social order can be brought forth. Nobody said, or says, that it will be easy but this is the plea. I have reposted the original piece with some editing to bring it up to date.
******No, this is not a Personals section ad, although it qualifies as a Help Wanted ad in a sense. On a number of occasions over past several years, in reviewing books especially those by James P. Cannon, a founding member of the American Communist Party and the founder of the Socialist Workers Party in America, I have mentioned that building off of the work of the classical Marxists, including that of Marx and Engels themselves, and later that of Lenin and Trotsky the critical problem before the international working class in the early part of the 20th century was the question of creating a revolutionary leadership to lead imminent uprisings. Armed with Lenin’s work on the theory of the imperialist nature of the epoch and the party question and Trotsky’s on the questions of permanent revolution and revolutionary timing the tasks for revolutionaries were more than adequately defined. A century later with some tweaking, unfortunately, those same theories and the same need for organization are still on the agenda although, as Trotsky once said, the conditions are overripe for the overthrow of capitalism as it has long ago outlived its progressive character in leading humankind forward.
The conclusion that I originally drew from that observation was that the revolutionary socialist movement was not as desperately in need of theoreticians and intellectuals as previously (although having them, and plenty of them, especially those who can write, is always a good thing). It needed leaders steeped in those theories and with a capacity to lead revolutions. We needed a few good day-to-day practical leaders, guys like Cannon, like Debs from the old Socialist Party, like Ruthenberg from the early Communist Party, to lead the fight for state power.
In that regard I have always held up, for the early part of the 20th century, the name Karl Liebknecht the martyred German Communist co-leader (along with Rosa Luxemburg) of the aborted Spartacist uprising of 1919 as such an example. He led the anti-war movement in Germany by refusing to vote for the Kaiser’s war budgets, found himself in jail as a result, but also had tremendous authority among the left-wing German workers when that mattered. In contrast the subsequent leadership of the German Communists in the 1920’s Paul Levi, Henrich Brandler and Ernest Thaelmann did not meet those qualifications. For later periods I have, as mentioned previously, held up the name James P. Cannon, founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (to name only the organization that he was most closely associated with), as a model. Not so Communist Party leaders like William Z. Foster and Earl Browder (to speak nothing of Gus Hall from our generation) or Max Shachtman in his later years after he broke with Cannon and the SWP. That basically carries us to somewhere around the middle of the 20th century. Since I have spent a fair amount of time lately going back to try to draw the lessons of our movement I have also had occasion to think, or rather to rethink my original argument on the need for revolutionary intellectuals. I find that position stands in need of some amendment now.
Let’s be clear here about our needs. The traditional Marxist idea that in order to break the logjam impeding humankind’s development the international working class must rule is still on the historic agenda. The Leninist notions that, since the early part of the 20th century, we have been in the imperialist era and that a ‘hard’ cadre revolutionary party is necessary to lead the struggle to take state power are also in play. Moreover, the Trotskyist understanding that in countries of belated development the working class is the only agency objectively capable of leading those societies to the tasks traditionally associated with the bourgeois revolution continues to hold true. That said, rather than some tweaking, we are seriously in need of revolutionary intellectuals who can bring these understandings into the 21st century.
It is almost a political truism that each generation will find its own ways to cope with the political tasks that confront it. The international working class movement is no exception in that regard. Moreover, although the general outlines of Marxist theory mentioned above hold true such tasks as the updating of the theory of imperialism to take into account the qualitative leap in its globalization is necessary (as is, as an adjunct to that, the significance of the gigantic increases in the size of the ‘third world’ proletariat). Also in need of freshening up is work on the contours of revolutionary political organization in the age of high speed communications, the increased weight that non-working class specific questions play in world politics (the national question which if anything has had a dramatic uptick since the demise of the Soviet Union), religion (the almost universal trend for the extremes of religious expression to rear their ugly heads which needs to be combated), special racial and gender oppressions, and various other tasks that earlier generations had taken for granted or had not needed to consider. All this moreover has to be done in a political environment that sees Marxism, communism, even garden variety reform socialism as failed experiments. To address all the foregoing issues is where my call for a new crop of revolutionary intellectuals comes from.
Since the mid- 20th century we have had no lack of practical revolutionary leaders of one sort or another - one thinks of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and even Mao in his less rabid moments. We have witnessed any number of national liberation struggles, a few attempts at political revolution against Stalinism, a few military victories against imperialism, notably the Vietnamese struggle. But mainly this has been an epoch of defeats for the international working class. Moreover, we have not even come close to developing theoretical leaders of the statue of Lenin or Trotsky. As a case in point, recently I made some commentary about the theory of student power in the 1960’s and its eventual refutation by the May 1968 General Strike lead by the working class in France. One of the leading lights for the idea that students were the “new” working class or a “new” vanguard was one Ernest Mandel. Mandel held himself out to be an orthodox Marxist (and Trotskyist, to boot) but that did not stop him from, periodically, perhaps daily, changing the focus of his work away from the idea of the centrality of the working class in social struggle an idea that goes back to the days of Marx himself.
And Mandel, a brilliant well-spoken erudite scholar probably was not the worst of the lot. The problem is that he was the problem with his impressionistic theories based on, frankly, opportunistic impulses. Another example, from that same period, was the idea of Professor Regis Debray (in the service of Fidel at the time ) that guerrilla foci out in the hills were the way forward ( a codification of the experience of the Cuban Revolution for which many subjective revolutionary paid dearly with their lives). Or the anti-Marxist Maoist notion that the countryside would defeat the cities that flamed the imagination of many Western radicals in the late 1960s. I could go on with more examples but they only lead to one conclusion- we are, among other things, in a theoretical trough. The late Mandel’s students from the 1960s have long gone on to academia and the professions (and not an inconsiderable few in governmental harness-how the righteous have fallen). Debray’s guerilla foci have long ago buried their dead and gone back to the cities. The “cities” of the world now including to a great extent China had broken the third world countryside. This, my friends, is why today I have my Help Wanted sign out. Any takers?
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