AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Sex and Consent on Campus Workers Vanguard No. 1056	14 November 2014

“Yes Means Yes” Law: Anti-Woman, Anti-Sex

Sex and Consent on Campus

Amid an ongoing debate over sex and consent on college campuses, in September California passed “affirmative consent” legislation, which was followed by a slew of similar initiatives nationwide. The pretext is to curb a purported epidemic of sexual violence and have college administrations come clean on reporting sexual assault complaints. But legislating one form of consent as the only acceptable variant and branding all else as assault—as these new policies do—means that these administrations now have even greater power to enforce what is acceptable sexual activity among students.

The new California code, known as “yes means yes,” dictates that “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” must be ongoing throughout an entire coupling. Acts without explicit agreement or while under the influence of drugs or alcohol are not considered consensual. As many young students are unskilled at both sex and drinking, this combination often results in morning-after misgivings and bad hangovers. In an American Spectator article online titled “In California, Every Love Scene Ever Filmed Is Rape” (2 October), one commentator aptly captured that state lawmakers have made “every drunken collegiate hookup a potential sexual assault.”

Like the “date rape” frenzy in the 1990s (see article, page 7), the current campaign invites campus bureaucrats into the bedroom to poke, pry and criminalize a range of customary sexual activity—from intoxicated make-out sessions to miscommunicated caresses or overly zealous groping. Regimenting sex is a morality drive, and laws dictating affirmative consent give the campus sex police an even freer hand to say what is immoral, much like former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s standard for pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Campus administrations, government out of the bedroom!

What might be in store for students is shown by a case from Occidental College in Los Angeles. In September 2013, after a day of binge drinking, two heavily intoxicated freshmen planned to have sex, exchanging text messages about having a condom. The next day, neither could recall what happened. The young woman was told by a sociology professor that she had been raped, evidenced by her difficulty sleeping and because the man “fit the profile of other rapists.” In police interviews, witnesses said both students were willing participants exercising bad judgment. But Occidental’s investigation determined that he violated school policy because she was drunk, i.e., he failed to recognize that her drunken consent was meaningless. Occidental found him guilty of sexual assault, rejected his appeal and expelled him. As a result of this botched one-night stand—details of which are in an 82-page report online—both lives are ruined. She dropped out of school and he has been rejected by other colleges and stigmatized as a rapist.

The suggestion that a misunderstanding—or for that matter, bad or unpleasant sex—is equivalent to rape is not only ludicrous but dangerously trivializing of actual sexual violence. Human sexual behavior is certainly complex, but it is not one broad continuum from the innocuous hookup to violent rape. Rape is a heinous crime of degradation and terror whose victims have every right to legal recourse. One much-discussed article in New York magazine (21 September) on student activists “starting a revolution against campus sexual assault” captures the effort to make all sexual acts suspect: “Frustration with hook-up culture is undeniably a part of the anti-rape movement. In some activists’ ideal world, there might be no trial, on campus or elsewhere, but instead a simple presumption of guilt.”

For us Marxists, the guiding principle in all sexual relations is that of effective consent, meaning nothing more and nothing less than mutual agreement and understanding, as opposed to coercion. The social norms surrounding sexuality—colored by shame, fear and religious mores, not to mention gender, class and racial inequalities—can complicate matters. But as long as those who take part agree at the time, nobody else, least of all the state, has the right to tell them how or if they can do it.

Sexual violence is an extreme reflection of the degraded status of women in this decaying capitalist social order. More often than not, going to the authorities who enforce that order, whether it be the police or the campus administration, adds more trauma on top of the sexual assault itself. It is a reflection of entrenched anti-woman bigotry that those looking for redress are subjected to indifference or “blame the victim” humiliation, or pressured into recanting.

The “yes means yes” campaign will do nothing to curtail actual rape, let alone address the social degradation and abuse perpetrated daily against women and children under this class system. Instead, the capitalist rulers have seized on the campaign to drum up fears among the population while reinforcing obedience to god and country and bolstering the bourgeois order. Whipping up social anxiety diverts attention from the madness of society, with deteriorating schools, massive unemployment, a failing health care system and perpetual war.

From an early age, youth are instilled with fear and loathing about sex—through everything from “abstinence only” moralism to “marriage is forever” straitjacket monogamy. As if getting past high school weren’t already difficult enough, the university administration and bourgeois state intervene as the guardians of moral order, infantilizing young adults who might just want to have fun. Crackdowns on harmless things like sexting or intergenerational relationships are a component of broader social regimentation, as are increasing restrictions on access to contraception and the rollback of abortion rights.

Sex, Race and Regimentation

To prove there is an epidemic of rape on campus, media outlets and activists recycle the deceptive statistic that one in five female college students is a victim of sexual assault. That statistic, which was obtained through dubious calculations and unclear questionnaires, counts regrettable or confusing sexual encounters, that is, the “gray area,” as assault. Over half of MIT students in a recent survey thought it possible for rape to “happen unintentionally,” i.e., by accident! The one-in-five figure is the same that was retailed two decades ago when campus “Take Back the Night” rallies were all the rage. College campuses are not the epicenter of rape in the U.S.; one need only look at the military or cops, institutions of the state, to find rampant sexual abuse.

A current hotbed of the campus “anti-rape movement” is Columbia University, where senior Emma Sulkowicz has gotten media attention for her Carry That Weight mattress project. Sulkowicz carries a mattress with her around campus to dramatize that the male student she alleges raped her has not been expelled. We do not know what happened in the incident in question. But after the fact, her experience reporting to cops and campus investigators appears to have been harrowing and patronizing, as is typical.

Sulkowicz’s case is the central focus of the group No Red Tape, which cosponsored an October 29 “Carrying the Weight Together” national day of action. Among the chants that day at Columbia was “rape culture is contagious,” conflating general sexist behavior or ideas with rape. Protesters also called for university president Lee Bollinger to “be the leader on our side.” Top campus officials are the people who oversee the exclusion of black and Latino students, persecute leftists and pro-Palestinian activists and put the squeeze on campus workers.

The pseudo-socialists of the International Socialist Organization, who tail anything that moves, are heavily active in No Red Tape. These reformists tout the need to “hold administrations directly responsible” while celebrating the fact that the demonstrations have brought “welcome attention” from the White House (socialistworker.org, 2 October).

In fact, from the outset the “offensive against campus sexual assault” has been pushed from the top. Obama recently set up a White House task force on the matter and enlisted Hollywood stars to take an “It’s On Us” pledge. In 2011, the federal government released a “Dear Colleague” letter to university administrations setting a lower standard for the burden of proof, so that a student can be disciplined for something that was only more likely than not to have occurred. The Department of Education has more than 70 colleges under federal investigation for mishandling cases alleging abuse. Colleges that do not put forward the proper sexual consent rules under Title IX are threatened with losing funding.

Title IX, which outlaws gender discrimination in federally financed institutions, was enacted over 40 years ago, like many other reforms ushered in by the social struggles of the civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements. Title IX not only benefited women’s participation in sports, but also opened doors to other educational programs and facilities. However, all reforms under capitalism can be reversed or perverted to serve a different purpose than intended.

The cast of characters backing this campaign is evidence in itself of the campaign’s repressive agenda. Take Janet Napolitano, former secretary of homeland security, top sheriff of the “war on terror,” now serving as University of California president. Napolitano demonstrates her touching concern for students by pushing a zero-tolerance policy toward sexual assault while jacking up tuition at the ten UC campuses.

Before his recent re-election as New York governor, Andrew Cuomo pushed for State University of New York campuses to adopt a uniform consent policy similar to “yes means yes,” and he now intends to codify that standard as state law. Democratic Party politicians package these new policies as advancing women’s rights (while, of course, barely lifting a finger to defend access to abortion or birth control). Posturing as “friends of women” is made all the easier by right-wing misogynist pundits, who consider women vessels to produce babies.

Some conservatives have noted the usefulness of the campus anti-sex campaign in promoting neo-Victorian modesty and chivalry, which fell out of favor with “sexual liberation.” Meanwhile, many people rightly oppose the ominous overreach of affirmative consent. Harvard’s latest sexual harassment policy came under fire from 28 of the university’s current and retired law school professors because it lacked “basic elements of fairness and due process” and was “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.”

Hailing the California law is old-school feminist Gloria Steinem. Preaching that “silence is not consent; it is the absence of consent,” Steinem welcomes a rule that “redefines that gray area” between yes and no (New York Times, 4 September). Offering perhaps the most blunt—but demented—rationale for affirmative consent laws is Ezra Klein of the online news site Vox, who remarked that “yes means yes” legislation is “terrible” but “necessary”! Presenting males as predators with an unrestrained libido, Klein wants all men to “feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.” Klein’s preferred sexual “culture” more closely resembles a scene from the Inquisition.

For Klein, a conscious policy of false accusations and convictions is a good thing. He accepts that innocent men are collateral damage, and in this racist capitalist society black men in particular will be on the receiving end. Accusations of rape have long been used to justify lynch mob “justice” and railroad black men to prison. In 1931, the Scottsboro Boys were framed up and imprisoned for rapes that never happened; in 1989, the Central Park Five were falsely convicted and thrown behind bars for the rape of a jogger in New York City.

Frenzy about black male sexuality is a common thread in American culture. The recent viral Hollaback YouTube video documenting “catcalling” in NYC was edited so that it showed no white males, only dark-skinned men. The clipped segments of a white actress being leered and jeered at while walking down the sidewalk treats non-threatening and threatening behavior equally, from being greeted with “How you doing today?” to being followed. Rightly chastising Hollaback’s portrayal of black and brown men “as congenital predators,” Liliana Segura noted in an Intercept article (3 November): “That this viral video had, in the span of five days, sparked such a sense of crisis that people would push for a legal ban on street harassment was, to me, the most damning indictment of its race politics.” In a city infamous for “stop and frisk,” any such law will only lead to more criminalization of minority youth at the hands of police thugs.

It is wrong in any case to place the burden of women’s oppression—of which daily discrimination such as sexual harassment is but a reflection—on the behavior of individual men. Sexist stereotyping and attitudes flow from women’s subjugation in the patriarchal family, the main social source of women’s oppression. Together with religion, the family serves as a key prop of the capitalist system: it instills subservience to authority and promotes a puritanical morality against anything that deviates from the family ideal—from premarital sex to gay sex. Working-class women shoulder a double burden, exploited at work and responsible for household drudgery and child rearing. The low status of women in this patriarchal society can only be ended through socialist revolution.

Feminist Puritanism and the State

It’s bad news when the ruling class is worried about what people do in their bedrooms. Anti-sex panics serve to bolster social conservatism and reinforce the family. In the 1980s and ’90s, people were force-fed the lie that there was an epidemic of child molestations and ritual abuse of children, with sexual predators supposedly lurking behind every teacher’s desk. Today, thousands of those engaging in private activities that do not harm anyone—such as possession of child porn—are criminalized as “sex offenders.” False allegations of sexual abuse have destroyed lives, torn up families and led to suicides.

In moral crusades against pornography, prostitution and youth sexuality, feminists have consistently found themselves in bed with the enemy of women: the state. Feminism works inside class society, seeking to give bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women a chance to compete in the male club of power and privilege. Feminist ideology presents women in a state of perpetual victimhood, needing government “protection.” Far from “empowering” them, feminism keeps young women activists wedded to the very puritanical and repressive order that oppresses them.

As Marxists, we have always been outspoken opponents of anti-sex hysteria and state intrusion into private life. However, we do not offer a program on how to untangle the complexities of sex under capitalism. As we stated in our article titled “Rape and Bourgeois Justice,” (Young Spartacus No. 29, February 1975): “Only in a workers state will men and women stand in full equality before the law, the administration of which will be a part of the creation and maintenance of the social fabric of well-being for the population as a whole.” And while we cannot spell out what sexual relations will look like in a society liberated from religious anxieties and racial and class inequities, we know they will be far better.

On The West Coast The Class Struggle Continues....

Shipping Bosses Accuse ILWU of Tying Up Docks

Showdown Brewing at West Coast Ports

Workers Vanguard No. 1056	14 November 2014

Shipping Bosses Accuse ILWU of Tying Up Docks

Showdown Brewing at West Coast Ports

10 NOVEMBER—For over four months, some 14,000 members of the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) have been working without a contract. Now, the shipping and terminal bosses organized in the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) are screaming that the ILWU has “orchestrated work slowdowns” that are “crippling” ports from Seattle and Tacoma to Los Angeles/Long Beach. Charging that the union reneged on its agreement that “normal operations at West Coast ports would continue until an agreement could be reached,” the PMA is demanding an extension of the previous contract. The ILWU slammed the PMA’s claim as “a bold-faced lie,” pointing out that the union has never agreed to a definition of “normal operations.” What the union is up against is the “normal,” relentless drive of the companies to maximize profits by increasing productivity through attacks on hard-won union work rules and job conditions.

An ILWU press release issued today puts the blame on the bosses for creating the bottleneck at L.A./Long Beach through mismanaging port operations and undermanning the work at a time of increased volume. The squeeze on longshore labor is a matter of life and death. As the press release stated: “West Coast longshore work is extremely hazardous, with higher fatality rates than the work of firefighters or police officers, according to U.S. Department of Labor figures. The biggest factor causing accidents on the docks is the employers’ constant demand for increased production.”

With ships stacking up at ports that handle nearly 80 percent of container shipping on the West Coast, a group of more than 100 retail and transportation companies fired off a letter to President Barack Obama demanding that the government “use all of its available options” to head off the growing confrontation. They called for everything from sending in a federal mediator to invoking the union-busting Taft-Hartley law in the event of a strike or lockout. During the 2002 contract negotiations, the PMA locked out longshoremen for 11 days after accusing the ILWU of engaging in a “slowdown.” The Republican Bush administration—which had earlier warned that a strike would “threaten national security” and drawn up plans to militarize the docks—brought down Taft-Hartley, forcing longshoremen back to work under conditions dictated by the PMA.

There should be no illusion that things are different with a Democrat in the White House. Contrary to the trade-union bureaucracy’s promotion of the Democrats as the allies of labor, they represent the interests of American capitalism no less than the Republicans. That Obama will stand with the PMA is as obvious as the flotilla of armed Coast Guard ships his administration had readied to use in the ILWU’s 2011-12 battle against the union-busting EGT grain consortium in Longview, Washington. Federal mediators and other agencies like the National Labor Relations Board are merely the government’s advance men whose purpose is to bring the unions to heel.

The showdown between the PMA and the ILWU could become a critical class battle in which all labor has a stake. The ILWU has enormous potential social power. With the offshoring of much manufacturing and the just-in-time delivery system, a strike would quickly paralyze whole sectors of the U.S. economy. But the union has been weakened and is increasingly isolated as it faces a confrontation with the powerful conglomerate of shipping and terminal operators—and behind them the forces of the capitalist state.

Union Hiring Hall Under Attack

For months, the contract negotiations were portrayed as the smoothest in years. In late August, an agreement was announced on health benefits, which had been seen as a major hurdle. Details were left unsaid, and looming on the horizon in 2018 is a whopping $150 million annual Obamacare tax on the ILWU’s so-called “Cadillac” health plan. Even now, the union’s membership is left in the dark as to what’s on the table. Nevertheless, there are warning signs. A backdrop to the present confrontation is the ILWU’s recent contract agreement with major grain terminals in the Pacific Northwest, which are not part of the PMA. After a lengthy battle in which ILWU members working at United Grain in Vancouver, Washington, and Columbia Grain in Portland, Oregon, were locked out for well over a year while scabs did their jobs, the settlement essentially guts the union hiring hall.

The hiring hall was a key gain of the momentous 1934 West Coast longshore strike. Under the previous hated “shape-up” system, corrupt and brutal gang bosses in the service of the companies had total power to select who among the men desperately gathered at the ports each morning would be allowed to work. To win union control over hiring, the longshoremen fought an all-out battle against the companies, the cops and National Guard troops. The implementation of the rotary dispatch system was designed to equalize work opportunity among longshoremen, with the union having the decisive say in the system.

Ever since, this system has been a thorn in the side of West Coast shipping, terminal and export trade bosses, who bristle at the fact that they don’t have the same hiring prerogatives as employers in almost every other industry or workplace in capitalist America. In the 1960s, following the introduction of container shipping, the PMA got a foot in the door with a contract provision allowing for “steady men.” These skilled workers bypass the hiring hall, reporting directly to stevedoring companies. They are paid a premium and are also guaranteed a minimum of work each month. This subversion of the hiring hall has long been a dagger pointed at the heart of the union.

In longshore operations, “steady men” are restricted to crane operators, mechanics and certain heavy equipment operators. But the recent grain contracts give those companies the right to hire unlimited steady workers for all job categories at their terminals. Management has sole discretion over whether additional workers will be ordered on a day-to-day basis for terminal work. The hall crews formerly required for work on river barges have been eliminated, although gangs from the hall will still be dispatched to load the ships. However, if the hall cannot supply adequate “qualified” labor, management has the right to hire non-ILWU labor or use supervisors to do the work. The key terminal job of operating the console that controls the flow of grain was ceded to management, as was the job overseeing the loading of ships.

One of the gains of the mass struggles that built the ILWU was the six-hour day. Now, even the eight-hour day (long the norm) is a thing of the past in grain, as the companies are allowed to extend shifts up to 12 hours, an ominous threat to health and safety. At the same time, provisions allowing longshoremen to “stand by” (stop work) if they feel their safety is threatened have been vitiated. Not only is management allowed to work their jobs if the matter is not immediately resolved, but the workers can be subject to discipline up to and including firing if an arbitrator rules the safety claim was not made “in good faith.”

The trendsetter for these agreements was the 2012 contract at the new, multimillion-dollar EGT terminal in Longview. Early in the battle against EGT’s union-busting offensive, ILWU members and their allies fought back in class-struggle actions, the likes of which had not been seen in this country in years. But in the face of massive fines, the ILWU International backed off. With military forces mobilized by the Obama administration to escort the first shipment of scab grain out of the terminal, an agreement was signed. Subverting the hiring hall, it gave EGT complete control over which ILWU members would be approved to work at its terminal. In the new grain agreements, workers dispatched from the hall are not subject to company pre-approval, nor are there fines and other penalties for unauthorized work stoppages as at EGT. But this is small consolation.

No doubt the PMA sees the grain agreements as an opening to press its own advantage against the ILWU. Pointing to the tie-up at the container ports, an article in the shipping industry’s publication of record, the Journal of Commerce (5 November), argues that the grain companies “found a solution to the problems generated by such tactics” with contracts that “in effect give control of the hiring hall to the employers.”

What made the difference in the 1934 longshore strike that won the hiring hall—as well as the victory of other strikes that year by Minneapolis Teamsters and Toledo auto parts workers—was a leadership committed to a class-struggle policy. As we wrote in Part One of our article “Then and Now” (WV Nos. 1050 and 1051, 8 August and 5 September) contrasting these strikes with today’s devastation of organized labor:

“Unlike other strikes at the time, the militancy of the workers was not restrained by leaders who promoted the lie of a ‘partnership’ between labor and capital. Instead, the mass strength and solidarity of the workers was organized and politically directed by leaders who rejected any notion that the bosses are ‘reasonable’ or their state ‘neutral.’ Understanding the forces of the class enemy that would be arrayed against any union struggle, the leaders of these strikes were prepared for class war. And it was no easy fight.”

Not the Time to Be Making New Enemies

In August 2013, on the eve of the AFL-CIO’s convention, the ILWU split from the federation. At the time, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath pointed to escalating attacks on the West Coast longshore union by AFL-CIO affiliates. These charges were all too true. One of the more notorious examples was the strikebreaking role played by the Operating Engineers Local 701, which supplied scab labor during the ILWU’s fight against EGT.

Other attacks have come as part of the dirty game of jurisdictional warfare pitting union against union in a scramble to defend their own shrinking turf. Here the ILWU bureaucracy’s hands are no cleaner than those of the AFL-CIO tops. Faced with the PMA’s drive to increasingly mechanize operations on the docks, the ILWU leadership’s answer is to claim jurisdiction over maintenance and other mechanical service jobs, a number of which are currently done by the IAM machinists and other unions.

Turning its back on any fight to mobilize unity in action of all unions at the ports, including the East and Gulf Coast ILA longshoremen, the ILWU has only greased the skids for more backstabbing by the trade-union bureaucrats by splitting from the AFL-CIO. In a recent strike by some 130 recycling workers, organized by ILWU Local 6, at Oakland’s Waste Management plant, Teamsters truck drivers at the facility scabbed, herded across the picket lines by their union bureaucrats! ILWU Local 6 members chanted “Remember 2007,” referring to when they honored locked-out Teamsters pickets at the same facility. The bureaucrats’ alibi was that the Local 6 strike was not officially sanctioned by the Teamsters Joint Council or the Alameda Labor Council, the latter reportedly arguing that “sanction” could not be given to a union not affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

The strikebreaking actions of the Teamsters against mainly Latino immigrant workers, many of them women, fighting for a meager increase in their poverty-level wages were a crime against all labor. But the ILWU tops have done likewise, ordering their members to cross the picket lines of overwhelmingly immigrant, unorganized and viciously exploited port truckers in Oakland and more recently at the L.A./Long Beach port. Now locked in a showdown with the PMA, the ILWU finds itself with few friends and many real and potential enemies. Faced with the backstabbing moves of the trade-union misleaders, all workers had better understand that if a union with the strength of the ILWU goes down, it will be a savage body blow to labor as a whole.

For a Class-Struggle Leadership!

In his letter of disaffiliation from the AFL-CIO, McEllrath pointed to the ILWU’s “long and proud history of militant independence inside and outside the House of Labor.” The notion of the ILWU as the last remaining bastion of labor militancy is one readily belied by the actual history and practice of its leadership. In fact, the last coastwide ILWU strike was in 1971, more than 40 years ago. That strike was largely foisted on the union leadership, then under ILWU founder Harry Bridges, by a membership seething over the massive loss of jobs under the 1960 Mechanization and Modernization Agreement that he had negotiated and rammed down their throats.

Key to reversing the erosion of the ILWU as an industrial power on the West Coast docks is defense of the union hiring hall. That means a fight to bring all the steady men back to the hall, with equal pay for equal work at the highest rate of pay. The answer to the job loss threatened by the increasing automation of the ports is to return to one of the union’s first achievements, the six-hour day, at no loss in pay to spread the available work among all longshoremen. There must be a fight to organize the port truckers, who are crucial to the movement of cargo. As a key link in the vast global cargo chain, the largely immigrant port truckers, many of whom have experiences in class battles and other struggles in their home countries, have tremendous potential social power to take on the trucking companies and, behind them, the international shipping and terminal bosses. Such an organizing effort, combined with the fight for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay, would also forge bonds with the black and Latino poor by opening up good-paying union jobs.

The road forward lies in the struggle to build a class-struggle labor leadership that will fight in opposition to the aims and interests of American capitalism, its government and political parties. For the workers to prevail over their exploiters, it is essential that labor’s fight be linked to the building of a multiracial revolutionary workers party capable of leading the struggle to do away with this entire system of wage slavery through socialist revolution. When those who labor rule, the means of production will be taken out of the hands of the rapacious capitalist owners and made the collective property of society, ultimately on an international scale. Then, advances in automation and other technology, which are now wielded as a club against the workers’ jobs and livelihoods, will be used to reduce their workload and vastly improve the conditions of life for the population as a whole.

U.S. Out Of The Middle East!

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Escalations-No New U.S. War In Iraq- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries! Stop The U.S. And Allied Bombings! –Stop The U. S. Arms Shipments …

Frank Jackman comment:

As the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, U.S. President Barack Obama, abetted by the usual suspects in the House and Senate as well as internationally, orders more air bombing strikes in the north and in Syria, sends more “advisers”, another fifteen hundred recently, to “protect” American outposts in Iraq, and sends arms shipments to the Kurds, supplies arms to the moderate Syrian opposition if it can be found to give weapons to, guys who served in the American military during the Vietnam War and who, like me, belatedly, got “religion” on the war issue as a kneejerk way to resolve the conflicts in this wicked old world might very well be excused for disbelief when the White House keeps pounding out the propaganda that these actions are limited when all signs point to the slippery slope of escalation. And all the time saying the familiar (Vietnam era familiar updated for the present)-“we seek no wider war”-meaning no American combat troops. Well if you start bombing places back to the Stone Age, cannot rely on the Iraqi troops who have already shown what they are made of and cannot rely on a now non-existent “Syrian Free Army” which you are willing to get whatever they want and will still come up short what do you think the next step will be? Now not every event in history gets exactly repeated but given the recent United States Government’s history in Iraq those old time vets might be on to something. In any case dust off the old banners, placards, and buttons and get your voices in shape- just in case. No New War In Iraq –Stop The Bombings- No Intervention In Syria!

***

Here is something to think about:

Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq or the victory of any side in Syria. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.

Workers Vanguard No. 1056

Down With U.S. War Against ISIS!

Syria/Iraq: Kurdish Nationalists Serve U.S. Imperialism

In his press conference the day after the midterm elections, President Barack Obama stated that he would seek Congressional authorization for his war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, three months after the U.S. imperialists started their bombing campaign against those reactionary Islamists. Two days later came the announcement that 1,500 American troops would soon be sent to Iraq, doubling the number of military “advisers” there. The insistence by the White House that there will be no U.S. “boots on the ground” to carry out the war against ISIS is sounding thinner by the day.

For the moment, the Obama administration continues to rely on bombing attacks and local proxies on the ground. In the battle for the predominantly Kurdish city of Kobani in northern Syria, the U.S. has carried out airstrikes against ISIS and dropped arms and other supplies to fighters, mainly from the People’s Protection Committees (YPG). The YPG—the military wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is allied to the nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) based in Turkey—is acting as both ground troops and spotters for the U.S. imperialists. YPG spokesman Polat Can described how a member of his organization in the joint operation command center transmits the coordinates for bomb attacks provided by YPG forces on site (civiroglu.net, 14 October).

The acceleration of U.S. “mission creep” in Iraq and Syria underscores the need for class-conscious workers everywhere, particularly in the U.S., to oppose the war against ISIS and all other imperialist depredations. Cynically carried out in the name of humanitarian assistance to the Yazidis, the Syrian Kurds and other victims of the ISIS cutthroats, the imperialist onslaught is aimed at reinforcing the U.S. hold over the Near East. The U.S.-led “coalition” hodgepodge includes Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have been among the main financial backers of ISIS, as well as other Persian Gulf monarchies. The public beheadings by ISIS shocked Americans, feeding into support for the bombing campaign. Not as publicized in the U.S. capitalist media are the numerous beheadings carried out by Washington’s Saudi allies, who execute people convicted of homosexuality, adultery, blasphemy, apostasy and sorcery.

In Kobani, the PKK-allied forces have tied the fortunes of the oppressed Kurdish population to U.S. imperialism’s war against ISIS. They are joined in this effort by Iraqi government forces and the Kurdish pesh merga of northern Iraq, who are conducting joint military operations with the U.S., just as they did during the American occupation of Iraq. As we stated last issue, “The fact that all these forces are ‘boots on the ground’ for imperialist intervention means that revolutionary Marxists have a military side with ISIS when it targets the imperialists and their proxies” (WV No. 1055, 31 October).

We are implacable opponents of the ultra-reactionary political and social program of ISIS, and we condemn communal atrocities on all sides. Prior to the U.S. military intervention, we insisted that the international proletariat must take no side in the raft of interethnic and inter-communal conflicts in the region, which are in no small part the legacy of imperialist subjugation. Where the working class must take a side is in opposition to the imperialists and their lackeys in Iraq and Syria.

Our military side with ISIS against the U.S.-led coalition and its local adjuncts today flows from our understanding that it is the imperialists who are the main enemy of the working people in the U.S. and the Near East. In its quest for profit and domination, the U.S. ruling class has slaughtered millions upon millions and constantly wreaked havoc around the world. In other circumstances, ISIS might well act as an agency of the imperialists, as its forebears did in the CIA-backed mujahedin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. More recently, U.S. backing for the opposition to Syria’s Assad regime in the early part of that country’s civil war gave much encouragement to Islamic fundamentalist forces, including what would become ISIS.

Laying the cards on the table, a New York Times (23 October) editorial titled “Why Kobani Must Be Saved” noted that the Kurdish town, “once dismissed as inconsequential by American commanders,” had become a test of the Obama administration’s strategy of airstrikes combined with reliance on local ground forces. “A setback in Kobani,” the Times declared, “would show the fragility of the American plan and hand the Islamic State an important victory.”

From the point of view of the international proletariat, a defeat of U.S.-backed forces in Kobani could throw a monkey wrench into imperialist designs for the region. It could also promote opposition domestically, where despite the uptick in support for the anti-ISIS campaign working people remain war-weary. Ground down by years of economic crisis, with a “recovery” that has overwhelmingly benefited the rich, much of the American population is distrustful of and disaffected from the government, including over its shredding of the right to privacy and other democratic rights under the rubric of the “war on terror.” We Marxists aim to turn such disillusionment and anger into class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home. It is through such struggle that the proletariat must be won to the program of socialist revolution to destroy the imperialist beast from within.

Kurdish Nationalists’ Ties to Imperialism

The PKK leadership’s current alliance with the U.S. is only the latest in a long history of maneuvers by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois Kurdish nationalists to ingratiate themselves with the imperialists and/or regional capitalist regimes. At all times, this program has meant betraying the just struggles of the Kurdish people.

The Kurdish nation is divided among Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey—a legacy of the carving up of the Near East by British and French imperialism out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The national liberation of the Kurdish people requires the proletarian overthrow of those states and the forging of a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan. Kurdish national aspirations must be linked to the struggles of the working class in Turkey and throughout the Near East and beyond. Centrally important to this perspective is the presence of as many as one million Kurds in Germany, where they are heavily integrated into the working class. These workers are a living bridge between the struggles of Near Eastern Kurds and those of the powerful German working class against its exploiters.

The Kurdish nationalist and tribal leaders have compiled a century-long record of betrayal, leading to one disaster after another for the Kurdish masses. When the Turkish Ottoman empire launched the genocidal campaign against the Armenians during World War I, in which as many as one million or more were massacred, it was assisted by Kurds mobilized by their tribal leaders. The Kurds were subsequently rewarded with merciless repression. In consolidating the modern Turkish state, Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) sought to destroy the Kurds’ national identity, banning the use of their language. Repeated Kurdish revolts were brutally suppressed, with hundreds of thousands deported to central and western Turkey.

It was the Soviet Union, created by the proletarian 1917 Russian Revolution, that showed the way out of this cycle of ethnic and communal slaughter and created the conditions for the Kurds to achieve their greatest degree of freedom. Under V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik regime, the 200,000 Kurds in the fledgling workers state were granted full political and language rights. Autonomous administration was granted to Kurdish districts in the Caucasus, with education and government business conducted in their language. It was in Soviet Armenia that a written Kurdish language first flourished (initially in the Armenian alphabet, followed by Latin and Cyrillic). The Armenian capital, Yerevan, became the first center of Kurdish publishing and literary development. The bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet state under J.V. Stalin did not erase these gains, even after Stalin dissolved “Red Kurdistan” in 1929. By the 1930s, all Soviet Kurds were literate, compared to a mere 1 percent before the Revolution.

The actions of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), today led by Massoud Barzani, and Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Iraq provide a textbook example of how looking for allies among local capitalist rulers and their imperialist godfathers spells defeat. After the Arab nationalist Ba’ath regime that was installed in Iraq in 1963 launched an attack on the Kurds, the KDP got support from an unholy alliance of the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and the Shah of Iran. In return, the KDP turned on the Iranian Kurds, hunting them down and turning them over to the Shah. After a cease-fire with the Ba’ath regime in 1970, the Kurds secured a large autonomous region in northern Iraq.

As always, the Kurds’ supposed benefactors turned on them. In 1975, the Shah made a separate peace with Hussein and cut off support to the Kurds, with the CIA quickly following suit. This allowed the Iraqi army to surge back into the Kurdish area. The subsequent wave of repression forced more than 100,000 Kurds to flee the region. Shortly afterward, during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), the KDP got support from Iran while the PUK made a cease-fire deal with Hussein. In 1983, the U.S. began a tilt toward Iraq in the conflict. With arms and other aid flowing in from the U.S. and Europe—including the technology to develop poison gas and biological weapons—the Iraqi regime was emboldened to move against the Kurdish population. The PUK then joined with the KDP and Iranian armed forces, which moved deep into Iraqi Kurdistan. Hussein responded by launching air bombardment and poison gas attacks, killing Kurds by the thousands.

During Operation Desert Storm, America’s first war on Iraq in 1991, the KDP and PUK sided with the imperialists. Following the war, the Kurds rose up in the vain expectation that the U.S. would back them. The uprising was brutally suppressed by the Iraqi government, and this time the number of refugees exceeded one million. Nevertheless, the Iraqi Kurds were able to set up their autonomous region as a result of a U.S.-enforced “no fly zone” in the north of the country. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, both the KDP and PUK operated under American command and then served as military auxiliaries to the occupation forces. For nearly a decade, Barzani has held office in the oil-rich north, and Talabani served as president of the Baghdad government from 2005 to July 2014.

While the Kurdish leaders have benefited handsomely from their services to the imperialists, the masses have paid with their blood. Throughout the Iraq occupation, the U.S. manipulated and reinforced sectarian divisions, including by mobilizing the Kurdish pesh merga along with Shi’ite militias to crush Sunni insurgents in Falluja in 2004 as American troops leveled that city. From encouraging Shi’ite death squads to rounding up Sunnis associated with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, the Shi’ite-dominated Baghdad government poured gas on the exploding sectarian powder keg. It was out of the ruins of such communal warfare that Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into ISIS, emerged and gained support from many aggrieved Sunnis.

The PKK, Syria and Turkey

The PKK, which used to pass off its nationalist program as a variant of “Marxism-Leninism,” got a foothold in Syrian Kurdistan in the late 1970s as a result of tensions between Turkey and Syria. At the time, Syria became a close ally of Iran, as it is today, and was also aligned with the Soviet Union. Seeking to use the Kurds against his Turkish rivals, then-president of Syria Hafez al-Assad (father of the current president) allowed the PKK to open offices in Damascus and establish training centers in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, which was under Syrian control. A high proportion of PKK fighters in Turkey—as many as a third by some estimates—were and are today Syrian Kurds.

At the same time, Hafez al-Assad’s Arab nationalist regime moved to deepen the oppression of the Kurdish people in Syria. He actively sought to settle Arab tribes on Kurdish land and continued to deny citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Kurds. Today, some 300,000 of them are stateless.

The destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991 increased Syria’s vulnerability to Turkey’s much greater military power. By 1998, facing the threat of military intervention by Turkey, Assad banned the PKK, imprisoned a number of its leaders and kicked out PKK founding leader Abdullah Öcalan. The following year, Öcalan was captured with the assistance of the CIA and imprisoned in Turkey. In subsequent years, PKK fighters in Syria and Lebanon were forced to relocate to northern Iraq.

The 2011 outbreak of the Syrian civil war provided the PKK/PYD with a new lease on life. The regime of Bashar alAssad and the Kurdish PYD shared an antipathy toward the Sunni Arab rebels. Even those Syrian Kurdish parties that were initially willing to play ball with the U.S., Turkey and others in setting up a united opposition in exile eventually withdrew from the main anti-Assad coalition because the non-Kurdish rebel groups rejected any form of autonomy for the Kurds. The PYD told Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces to stay away from Kurdish territory. The warning was generally heeded, although there have been intermittent clashes between the FSA and the YPG. Assad sought to encourage the tension by conciliating the Kurds, allowing some to have their citizenship restored and assenting to the transfer of around 1,000 PKK fighters from Iraq to Syria.

July 2012 marked an important pivot in the Syrian civil war, as rebel forces launched an offensive in Damascus (killing three members of Assad’s inner circle in a bomb attack). With rebels advancing on the outskirts of the capital, Assad reached a tacit agreement with the PYD. Syrian troops were withdrawn from Kurdish areas and PYD forces quickly moved in virtually without military confrontation. This freed up regime forces to fight the rebellion in Damascus and elsewhere.

The main foes of the PYD were now the Nusra Front and ISIS. A detailed on-site study earlier this year by the International Crisis Group (ICG), an advisory body to the imperialists, documented cases in which the YPG, while engaged in key battles with Islamists, received weapons as well as air support from the Assad regime. The ICG also reported that Damascus was supplying the PYD with financing and diesel fuel.

The creation of a semi-autonomous Kurdish region right on the border with Turkey was anathema to the regime in Ankara. Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Turkey had sought to head off the consolidation of a PYD/PKK-dominated area on its border. A glance at a map shows why this is considered so critical. The parts of Turkish Kurdistan where the PKK has centered its guerrilla war are located in eastern and southeastern Anatolia, while the Kurdish regions of Syria are more to the west. The threat to the Turkish government is that PKK fighters operating from bases in Syria could open a new front against Turkey in central Anatolia.

During the long, brutal war waged by capitalist Turkey against the PKK, in which 37,000 Kurds were slaughtered between 1984 and 1999, PKK fighters in Iraq were hunted down and killed by the KDP and PUK on behalf of Ankara. Today, to undercut PYD gains in Syria, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has again turned to his ally Barzani. The KDP first sought to consolidate a foothold in northern Syria by conciliating the PYD, but attempts to set up a joint administration of Syrian Kurdish areas have failed. To counter the growing influence of the PYD, Barzani then announced that hundreds of Kurdish defectors from the Syrian army, who had received training from the KDP in Iraqi Kurdistan, would be dispatched back into Syria. The PYD blocked their entry at the border. More recently, Ankara agreed to allow KDP forces to transit through Turkey to Syria, which Erdogan sees mainly as a police action against the PKK/PYD.

Behind such maneuvers are the strong economic ties between Iraqi Kurdistan and Turkey. Tens of billions of dollars in Turkish investment have poured into Erbil, the regional Kurdish capital, in recent years, transforming the city’s skyline while lining the pockets of the Barzani clan and other nationalist leaders. Turkey also has its eyes on the area’s oil resources, although Washington has so far opposed Barzani’s attempts to export oil directly to Turkey without giving the central government in Baghdad its cut.

The Turkish rulers consider Iraqi Kurdistan a gateway for projecting power in the Near East. This aim is also served by Turkey’s support to the anti-Assad opposition in Syria. Erdogan has pushed for tying assistance to the Kurds in Kobani to setting up a Turkish-dominated buffer zone inside Syria. This would include a no-fly zone that would clearly be aimed at the Assad regime, since ISIS lacks an air force.

Reformists Salute Imperialists’ Foot Soldiers

A victory for the U.S. and its underlings would further embolden the imperialists in their drive for domination and throw back the struggles of the Kurds and other oppressed peoples and communities. This understanding, which is elementary for Marxist opponents of the capitalist-imperialist order, is trampled on by reformist leftists internationally who are backing the Kurds in Kobani.

In the front ranks of the pro-imperialist chorus in France is the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA—affiliated with the United Secretariat), which calls on the French government to arm the Kurds in Kobani. In an October 9 statement, the NPA stated that it was “opposed to the catastrophic interventions of the armies of the great powers” against ISIS and called instead to “support the resistance of the local progressive forces.” In other words, the Mafia don should assign the hit to a junior foot soldier, the difference being that in the Mob that act might win initiation into the Family. The NPA’s line on Kobani is basically the same as its position on French imperialist intervention in Mali and other African neocolonies, where the NPA prefers arming local forces to sending in French soldiers.

In the U.S., the same reformist groups that a decade ago built an antiwar movement directed against the Republican Bush administration are keeping any opposition to the current U.S. intervention, directed by the Democratic Commander-in-Chief, sotto voce at best. Among the opportunists are those who claim to oppose U.S. intervention in Syria/Iraq while simultaneously backing the Kurdish forces that are acting as imperialist proxies. For example, a statement by Socialist Alternative (27 October) gushes over the possibility that “Kurdish militias in Kobane, currently supported by U.S. strikes and weapon supplies, will turn back the IS [Islamic State] offensive,” declaring that such an outcome would “underline the need for a united and mobilized movement from below to permanently defeat IS” (socialistalternative.net).

At least these reformists are straightforward in hailing the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. The centrists of the Internationalist Group try to have it both ways, calling in the Internationalist (October 2014): “Defend the Kurds, Defeat U.S./NATO Imperialism!” The simple fact, as we wrote last issue, is that “championing the Kurds in the current conflict can only mean lending support to imperialist plunder.”

In their publicity for the Kurdish nationalists, many reformist groups are pointing to the Kurdish regions of northern Syria as the site of a social revolution being carried out under the PKK and PYD. These are the same left groups that not too long ago were hailing the Syrian rebels, who were all—from a few more-secular types to the Islamists—as hostile to the idea of Kurdish national rights as they were to the Assad regime and who explicitly appealed to the imperialists for military intervention on their behalf.

The reality in what the PYD calls Rojava (western Kurdistan) is not quite so rosy. Far from putting forward the overturn of capitalist property relations, the PYD’s charter for self-rule in Rojava enshrines the right to private property. The PYD has set up its own apparatus of repression through its military, police and prisons—i.e., a fledgling bourgeois state apparatus. The members of the People’s Councils that have been established, to the cheers of the reformist left, are appointed by the PYD. While the councils include representatives of other parties and, in areas containing sizable non-Kurdish populations, members of other communities, these bodies have little real function beyond distributing humanitarian aid and other necessities. The ICG report said of the PYD: “Most often, it took over the [Assad regime’s] governance structures and simply relabeled them, rather than generating its own unique model as it claims.”

Belying the claims of autonomy, the Assad regime has not fully withdrawn its forces from the area, expecting to return en masse at the first opportunity. While Damascus has pulled back most of its security personnel, it continues to run administrative offices and to pay the salaries of state employees, including teachers (who continue to follow the Ba’ath Party-approved syllabus). In the largest Kurdish city, Qamishli, Syrian government forces remain at the border crossing with Turkey, at the airport and in the center of town, where the offices of the security services are located. Recent on-site reports by Human Rights Watch and the Washington Institute noted that Syrian soldiers and other security personnel move freely in Qamishli and surrounding villages. The bottom line is that whatever autonomy might have been achieved has been subordinated by the Kurdish nationalists to their service in the imperialist military campaign.

Marxists seek to break Kurdish militants from the nationalist politics that have time and again led to disaster and win them to a revolutionary proletarian internationalist program, which centrally includes unconditional opposition to imperialism. Forming a strategic part of the proletariat of Turkey, Iran and other Near Eastern societies as well as Germany, Kurdish workers possess the key to social and national liberation. As a Spartacist representative stated in greetings to a conference of Kurdish militants in Europe three decades ago:

“We understand that the struggle for a United Socialist Republic of Kurdistan will be shaped by and in turn shape the future of the revolutionary proletariat of the whole region toward a socialist federation of the Near East. Our model is Lenin’s Russia of 1917-1924 where the Bolsheviks offered the national minorities the option and the advantages of association with the Soviet Federation. For our part, we are dedicated to the forging of the internationalist party of worldwide proletarian revolution and speak to you in the understanding that the future of humanity depends on its construction.”

— WV No. 362, 14 September 1984

In Boston The Class Struggle Continues...

Defend Boston School Bus Union Leaders!

Workers Vanguard No. 1056	14 November 2014

Defend Boston School Bus Union Leaders!

On November 24, Boston school bus union leader Stevan Kirschbaum will face trial on bogus felony charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, as well as trespassing. This blatant attempt at a frame-up by state authorities acting at the behest of the employer, Veolia Transportation, recently renamed Transdev, is part of a concerted effort to break the back of the drivers’ union, United Steel Workers (USW) Local 8751. Ever since the school district tapped it to start operating the bus system in July 2013, Transdev has lived up to its reputation and embarked on a union-busting campaign, from imposing new work rules and harsh discipline to cheating drivers out of pay. Now the company wants to write these new terms of exploitation into the union contract. We demand: Drop the charges against Kirschbaum!

Transdev’s assault on the union came to a head on October 8 last year when management refused to meet with Local 8751 reps and locked out the workers, who responded with pickets at all four bus yards. After bringing in police to help clear the yards, management agreed to sit down with the union. The next day, with drivers back on their routes, Transdev refused to budge in those talks. In retaliation for the brief job action, it then moved to weaken the union by firing Local 8751 grievance committee chairman Kirschbaum, vice president Steve Gillis, recording secretary Andre Francois and shop steward Garry Murchison. A fifth worker, steward Richard Lynch, was suspended but not fired. Reinstate the school bus drivers!

In an act of solidarity with their victimized brothers, Local 8751 members elected Kirschbaum and the other fired workers to the union committee negotiating a new contract with Transdev. At the conclusion of a union rally at the Freeport bus yard on the day the contract expired, June 30, the workers and their supporters went to the break room for a briefing on the contract battle. When a member of management tried to block the doorway with a table, it was allegedly shoved against her legs. This supposed assault with a “dangerous weapon” is what the Boston prosecutor is now trying to pin on Kirschbaum.

Hundreds of the heavily Haitian and Cape Verdean drivers in Local 8751 and their supporters packed a Dorchester courtroom for Kirschbaum’s pre-trial hearing on October 6, at which two charges (breaking and entering and destruction of property) were dismissed. Importantly, a number of other unions in Boston and beyond have expressed support for the “School Bus 5,” with some of these union members turning out to the court. The attacks on the poorly paid school bus drivers are representative of what the bosses have served up to labor across the country, not least in public education. The government agency overseeing the Philadelphia schools moved to junk the teachers’ contract last month; unionized school bus drivers and matrons in New York City were stripped of job protections, provoking a bitter strike in 2013 that was sold out after one month. Kirschbaum’s supporters, including the Workers World Party (WWP), are calling to pack the courtroom again on November 24. An injury to one is an injury to all!

Standing behind Transdev, the school board and city officials are gunning for Local 8751. Early last year, shortly before giving that employer control over its bus fleet, Boston Public Schools scrapped the last remnants of a busing plan first imposed in 1974 under a federal court desegregation order. The racist contempt that the city rulers have for the membership of Local 8751 is matched only by their animus toward the students in the public schools, a full 75 percent of whom are black or Latino.

In the name of cost savings, the notion of busing kids across town to achieve integration is entirely out the window, and with it the jobs of the bus drivers, whose union was forged in the struggles to integrate Boston public schools four decades ago. School bus service was ended earlier this year for eighth-graders, who were given MBTA transit passes instead, with the school board planning to extend this program to sixth- and seventh-graders. The local NAACP president denounced the cutback in bus service, expressing fears that it “will only serve to further separate our children into racially isolated schools as families opt to keep their students close to home rather than send them on the T” (Boston Globe, 18 June). Here is a graphic example of how labor rights and black rights are bound together.

The 1974 busing plan was effectively killed long ago by the one-two punch of howling racists in the streets and, later, liberals in Congress who made certain that black youth were not bused to the comparatively privileged suburban schools (see article in WV No. 921, 26 September 2008). The Spartacist League actively intervened in the Boston busing crisis, agitating for mass, integrated labor/black defense guards to protect the black children. We also called for low-rent, racially integrated public housing; for quality, integrated education for all and for the implementation of the minimal measure of busing and its extension to the suburbs. The WWP, among other reformist left groups, channeled the fight to defend busing into dead-end appeals to black Democratic Party politicians.

The labor officialdom’s embrace of the Democratic Party, which no less than the Republicans is a party of the capitalist class enemy, has paved the way to the wholesale destruction of unionized jobs nationwide. Boston mayor Martin J. Walsh, a former head of the city’s Building and Construction Trades Council elected last year with heavy union support, alibied the firings of the school bus union leaders as a “private matter.” Other Democratic politicians, most prominently black city councilman Charles Yancey, have denounced the firings. But what all these Democrats have in common is an aversion for even the slightest whiff of working-class struggle, expressed in their condemnations of Local 8751’s pickets last October 8. Revitalizing the unions as fighting organizations against the bosses must proceed independently from and in opposition to the Democrats.

The Partisan Defense Committee has written to the Suffolk County D.A. protesting the prosecution of Stevan Kirschbaum and has contributed to his defense fund. We encourage WV readers to do likewise. Donations can be sent to Friends of the School Bus 5, P.O. Box 141, Stoughton, MA 02072 or online at tinyurl.com/schoolbus4.

From The Marxist Archives- In Honor Of The 97^th Anniversary Of The Russian October Revolution- V. I. Lenin On The Lessons Of The Russian Revolution (1917)

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.

Lessons of the Revolution

Written: The article was written at the end of July, the Afterword on September 6 (19), 1917
Published: The article was published on September 12 and 13 (August 30 and 31), 1917, in the newspaper Rabochy Nos. 8 and 9. The Afterword was published in 1917 in the pamphlet: N. Lenin, Lessons of the Revolution, Priboi Publishers. Signed: N–kov in No. 8 and N. Lenin in No. 9.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 25, pages 227-243.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and C. Farrell
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive. 2000 You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work, as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README

Every revolution means a sharp turn in the lives of a vast number of people. Unless the time is ripe for such a turn, no real revolution can take place. And just as any turn in the life of an individual teaches him a great deal and brings rich experience and great emotional stress, so a revolution teaches an entire people very rich and valuable lessons in a short space of time.

During a revolution, millions and tens of millions of people learn in a week more than they do in a year of ordinary, somnolent life. For at the time of a sharp turn in the life of an entire people it becomes particularly clear what aims the various classes of the people are pursuing, what strength they possess, and what methods they use.

Every class-conscious worker, soldier and peasant should ponder thoroughly over the lessons of the Russian revolution, especially now, at the end of July, when it is clear that the first phase of our revolution has failed.

I

Let us see, in fact, what the workers and peasants were striving for when they made the revolution. What did they expect of the revolution? As we know, they expected liberty, peace, bread and land.

But what do we see now?

Instead of liberty, the old tyranny is coming back. The death penalty is being introduced for the soldiers at the front.^[2] Peasants are prosecuted for the unauthorised seizure of landed estates. Printing presses of workers’ newspapers are wrecked. Workers’ newspapers are closed down without trial. Bolsheviks are arrested, often without any charge or upon blatantly trumped-up charges.

It may be argued that the persecution of Bolsheviks does not constitute a violation of freedom, for only certain individuals are being prosecuted and on certain charges. Such an argument, however, would be a deliberate and obvious lie; for how can anyone wreck printing presses and close down newspapers for the crimes of individuals, even if these charges were proved and established by a court of law? It would be a different thing if the government had legally declared the whole party of the Bolsheviks, their very trend and views, to be criminal. But everybody knows that the government of free Russia could not, and did not, do anything of the kind.

What chiefly exposes the libelous character of the charges against the Bolsheviks is that the newspapers of the landowners and capitalists furiously abused the Bolsheviks for their struggle against the war and against the landowners and capitalists, and openly demanded the arrest and prosecution of the Bolsheviks even when not a single charge against a single Bolshevik had been trumped up.

The people want peace. Yet the revolutionary government of free Russia has resumed the war of conquest on the basis of those very same secret treaties which ex-Tsar Nicholas II concluded with the British and French capitalists so that the Russian capitalists might plunder other nations. Those secret treaties remain unpublished. The government of free Russia resorted to subterfuges, and to this day has not proposed a just peace to all nations.

There is no bread. Famine is again drawing near. Everybody sees that the capitalists and the rich are unscrupulously cheating the treasury on war deliveries (the war is now costing the nation fifty million rubles daily), that they are raking in fabulous profits through high prices, while nothing whatsoever has been done to establish effective control by the workers over the production and distribution of goods. The capitalists are becoming more brazen every day; they are throwing workers out into the street, and this at a time when the people are suffering from shortages.

A vast majority of the peasants, at congress after congress, have loudly and clearly declared that landed proprietorship is an injustice and robbery. Meanwhile, a government which calls itself revolutionary and democratic has been leading peasants by the nose for months and deceiving them by promises and delays. For months the capitalists did not allow Minister Chernov to issue a law prohibiting the purchase and sale of land. And when this law was finally passed, the capitalists started a foul slander campaign against Chernov, which they are still continuing. The government has become so brazen in its defense of the landowners that it is beginning to bring peasants to trial for “unauthorised” seizures of land.

They are leading the peasants by the nose, telling them to wait for the Constituent Assembly. The convocation of the Assembly, however, is being steadily postponed by the capitalists. Now that owing to Bolshevik pressure it has been set for September 30, the capitalists are openly clamouring about this being “impossibly” short notice, and are demanding the Constituent Assembly’s postponement. The most influential members of the capitalist and landowner party, the “Cadet”, or "people’s freedom", Party, such as Panina, are openly urging that the convocation of the Constituent Assembly be delayed until after the war.

As to land, wait until the Constituent Assembly. As to the Constituent Assembly, wait until the end of the war. As to the end of the war, wait until complete victory. That is what it comes to. The capitalists and landowners, having a majority in the government, are plainly mocking at the peasants.

But how could this happen in a free country, after the overthrow of the tsarist regime?

In a non-free country, the people are ruled by a tsar and a handful of landowners, capitalists and bureaucrats who are not elected by anybody.

In a free country, the people are ruled only by those who have been elected for that purpose by the people themselves. At the elections the people divide themselves into parties, and as a rule each class of the population forms its own party; for instance, the landowners, the capitalists, the peasants and the workers all form separate parties. In free countries, therefore, the people are ruled through an open struggle between parties and by free agreement between these parties.

For about four months after the overthrow of the tsarist regime on February 27, 1917, Russia was ruled as a free country, i.e., through an open struggle between freely formed parties and by free agreement between them. To understand the development of the Russian revolution, therefore, it is above all necessary to study the chief parties, the class interests they defended, and the relations among them all.

III

After the overthrow of the tsarist regime state power passed into the hands of the first Provisional Government, consisting of representatives of the bourgeoisie, i.e., the capitalists, who were joined by the landowners. The “Cadet” Party, the chief capitalist party, held pride of place as the ruling and government party of the bourgeoisie.

It was no accident this party secured power, although it was not the capitalists, of course, but the workers and peasants, the soldiers and sailors, who fought the tsarist troops and shed their blood for liberty. Power was secured by the capitalist party because the capitalist class possessed the power of wealth, organisation and knowledge. Since 1905, and particularly during the war, the class of the capitalists, and the landowners associated with them, have made in Russia the greatest progress in organising.

The Cadet Party has always been monarchist, both in 1905 and from 1905 to 1917. After the people’s victory over tsarist tyranny it proclaimed itself a republican party. The experience of history shows that whenever the people triumphed over a monarchy, capitalist parties were willing to become republican as long as they could uphold the privileges of the capitalists and their unlimited power over the people.

The Cadet Party pays lip-service to "people’s freedom". But actually it stands for the capitalists, and it was immediately backed by all the landowners, monarchists and Black Hundreds. The press and the elections are proof of this. After the revolution, all the bourgeois papers and the whole Black Hundred press began to sing in unison with the Cadets. Not daring to come out openly, all the monarchist parties supported the Cadet Party at the elections, as, for example, in Petrograd.

Having obtained state power, the Cadets made every effort to continue the predatory war of conquest begun by Tsar Nicholas II, who had concluded secret predatory treaties with the British and French capitalists. Under these treaties, the Russian capitalists were promised, in the event of victory, the seizure of Constantinople, Galicia, Armenia, etc. As to the people, the government of the Cadets put them off with empty subterfuges and promises, deferring the decision of all matters of vital and essential importance to the workers and peasants until the Constituent Assembly met, without appointing the date of its convocation.

Making use of liberty, the people began to organise independently. The chief organisation of the workers and peasants, who form the overwhelming majority of the population of Russia, was the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. These Soviets already began to be formed during the February Revolution, and within a few weeks all class-conscious and advanced workers and peasants were united in Soviets in most of the larger cities of Russia and in many rural districts.

The Soviets were elected in an absolutely free way. They were genuine organisations of the people, of the workers and peasants. They were genuine organisations of the vast majority of the people. The workers and peasants in soldiers’ uniforms were armed.

It goes without saying that the Soviets could and should have taken over state power in full. Pending the convocation of the Constituent Assembly there should have been no other power in the state but the Soviets. Only then would our revolution have become a truly popular and truly democratic revolution. Only then could the working people, who are really striving for peace, and who really have no interest in a war of conquest, have begun firmly and resolutely to carry out a policy which would have ended the war of conquest and led to peace. Only then could the workers and peasants have curbed the capitalists, who are making fabulous profits “from the war" and who have reduced the country to a state of ruin and starvation. But in the Soviets only a minority of the deputies were on the side of the revolutionary workers’ party, the Bolshevik Social Democrats, who demanded that all state power should be transferred to the Soviets. The majority of the deputies to the Soviets were on the side of the parties of the Menshevik Social-Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who were opposed to the transfer of power to the Soviets. Instead of removing the bourgeois government and replacing it by a government of the Soviets, these parties insisted on supporting the bourgeois government, compromising with it and forming a coalition government with it. This policy of compromise with the bourgeoisie pursued by the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties, who enjoyed the confidence of the majority of the people, is the main content of the entire course of development of the revolution during the five months since it began.

Let us first see how this compromising of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks with the bourgeoisie proceeded, and then let us try to explain why the majority of the people trusted them.

The Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries have compromised with the capitalists in one way or another at every stage of the Russian revolution.

At the very close of February 1917, as soon as the people had triumphed and the tsarist regime had been overthrown, the capitalist Provisional Government admitted Kerensky as a “socialist”. As a matter of fact, Kerensky has never been a socialist; he was only a Trudovik,^[3] and he enlisted himself with the “Socialist-Revolutionaries” only in March 1917, when it was already safe and quite profitable to do so. Through Kerensky, as Deputy Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, the capitalist Provisional Government immediately set about gaining control of and taming the Soviet. The Soviet, i.e., the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks who predominated in it, allowed itself to be tamed, agreeing immediately after the formation of the capitalist Provisional Government to "support it" – "to the extent" that it carried out its promises.

The Soviet regarded itself as a body verifying and exercising control over the activities of the Provisional Government. The leaders of the Soviet established what was known as a Contact Commission to keep in touch with the government.^[4] Within that Contact Commission, the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders of the Soviet held continuous negotiations with the capitalist government, holding, properly speaking, the status of Ministers without portfolio or unofficial Ministers.

This state of affairs lasted throughout March and almost the whole of April. Seeking to gain time, the capitalists resorted to delays and subterfuges. Not a single step of any importance to further the revolution was taken by the capitalist government during this period. It did absolutely nothing even to further its direct and immediate task, the convocation of the Constituent Assembly; it did not submit the question to the localities or even set up a central commission to handle the preparations. The government was concerned with only one thing, namely, surreptitiously renewing the predatory international treaties concluded by the tsar with the capitalists of Britain and France, thwarting the revolution as cautiously and quietly as possible, and promising everything without fulfilling any of its promises. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in the Contact Commission acted like simpletons who were fed on fancy phrases, promises, and more promises. Like the crow in the fable, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks succumbed to flattery and listened with pleasure to the assurances of the capitalists that they valued the Soviets highly and did not take a single step without them.

But time passed and the capitalist government did absolutely nothing for the revolution. On the contrary, during this period it managed, to the detriment of the revolution, to renew the secret predatory treaties, or, rather, to reaffirm them and “vitalise” them by supplementary and no less secret negotiations with Anglo-French imperialist diplomats. During this period it managed, to the detriment of the revolution, to lay the foundations of a counter-revolutionary organisation of (or at least of a rapprochement among) the generals and officers in the army in the field. To the detriment of the revolution it managed to start the organisation of industrialists, of factory-owners, who, under the onslaught of the workers, were compelled to make concession after concession, but who at the same time began to sabotage (damage) production and prepare to bring it to a standstill when the opportunity came.

However, the organisation of the advanced workers and peasants in the Soviets made steady progress. The foremost representatives of the oppressed classes felt that, in spite of the agreement between the government and the Petrograd Soviet, in spite of Kerensky’s pompous talk, in spite of the "Contact Commission", the government remained an enemy of the people, an enemy of the revolution. The people felt that unless the resistance of the capitalists was broken, the cause of peace, liberty and the revolution, would inevitably be lost. The impatience and bitterness of the people kept on growing.

It burst out on April 20–21. The movement flared up spontaneously; nobody had cleared the ground for it. The movement was so markedly directed against the government that one regiment even appeared fully armed at the Marinsky Palace to arrest the ministers. It became perfectly obvious to everybody that the government could not retain power. The Soviets could (and should) have taken over power with out meeting the least resistance from any quarter. Instead, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks supported the collapsing capitalist government, entangled themselves even further in compromises with it and took steps that were even more fatal to the revolution, that tended to lead to its doom.

Revolution enlightens all classes with a rapidity and thoroughness unknown in normal, peaceful times. The capitalists, better organised and more experienced than anybody else in matters of class struggle and politics, learnt their lesson quicker than the others. Realising that the government’s position was hopeless, they resorted to a method which for many decades, ever since 1848, has been practised by the capitalists of other countries in order to fool, divide and weaken the workers. This method is known as a “coalition” government, i.e., a joint cabinet formed of members of the bourgeoisie and turncoats from socialism.

In countries where freedom and democracy have long existed side by side with a revolutionary labour movement, in Britain and France, the capitalists have repeatedly and very successfully resorted to this method. When the “socialist” leaders entered a bourgeois cabinet, they invariably proved to be figureheads, puppets, screens for the capitalists, instruments for deceiving the workers. The "democratic and republican" capitalists of Russia resorted to this very method. The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks let themselves be fooled at once, and the “coalition” cabinet, joined by Chernov, Tsereteli and Co., became a fact on May 6.

The simpletons of the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties were jubilant and fatuously bathed in the rays of the ministerial glory of their leaders. The capitalists gleefully rubbed their hands at having found helpers against the people in the persons of the "leaders of the Soviets" and at having secured their promise to support "offensive operations at the front", i.e., a resumption of the imperialist predatory war, which had come to a standstill for a while. The capitalists were well aware of the puffed-up impotence of these leaders, they knew that the promises of the bourgeoisie – regarding control over production, and even the organisation of production, regarding a peace policy, and so forth – would never be fulfilled.

And so it turned out. The second phase in the development of the revolution, May 6 to June 9, or June 18, fully corroborated the expectations of the capitalists as to the ease with which the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks could be fooled.

While Peshekhonov and Skobelev were deceiving themselves and the people with florid speeches to the effect that one hundred per cent of the profits of the capitalists would be taken away from them, that their "resistance was broken", and so forth, the capitalists continued to consolidate their position. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was undertaken during this period to curb the capitalists. The ministerial turncoats from socialism proved to be mere talking machines for distracting the attention of the oppressed classes, while the entire apparatus of state administration actually remained in the hands of the bureaucracy (the officialdom) and the bourgeoisie. The notorious Palchinsky, Deputy Minister for Industry, was a typical representative of that apparatus, blocking every measure against the capitalists. While the ministers prated everything remained as of old.

The bourgeoisie used Minister Tsereteli in particular to fight the revolution. He was sent to “pacify” Kronstadt when the local revolutionaries had the audacity to remove an appointed commissar.^[5] The bourgeoisie launched in their newspapers an incredibly vociferous, violent and vicious campaign of lies, slander and vituperation against Kronstadt, accusing it of the desire "to secede from Russia", and repeating this and similar absurdities in a thousand ways to intimidate the petty bourgeoisie and the philistines. A most typically stupid and frightened philistine, Tsereteli, was the most “conscientious” of all in swallowing the bait of bourgeois slander; he was the most zealous of all in "smashing up and subduing" Kronstadt, without realising that he was playing the role of a lackey of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. He turned out to be the instrument of the “compromise” arrived at with revolutionary Kronstadt, whereby the commissar for Kronstadt was not simply appointed by the government, but was elected locally and was confirmed by the government. It was on such miserable compromises that the ministers who had deserted socialism for the bourgeoisie wasted their time.

Wherever a bourgeois minister could not appear in defence of the government, before the revolutionary workers or in the Soviets, Skobelev, Tsereteli, Chernov or some other “socialist” Minister appeared (or, to be precise, was sent by the bourgeoisie) and faithfully performed their assignment; he would do his level best to defend the Cabinet, whitewash the capitalists and fool the people by making promise after promise and by advising people to wait, wait and wait.

Minister Chernov particularly was engaged in bargaining with his bourgeois colleagues; down to July, to the new "crisis of power" which began after the movement of July 3-4, to the resignation of the Cadets from the Cabinet, Minister Chernov was continuously engaged in the useful and interesting work, so beneficial to the people, of “persuading” his bourgeois colleagues, exhorting them to agree at least to prohibition of the purchase and sale of land. This prohibition had been most solemnly promised to the peasants at the All-Russia Congress of Peasant Deputies in Petrograd. But the promise remained only a promise. Chernov proved unable to fulfil it either in May or in June, until the revolutionary tide, the spontaneous outbreak of July 3-4, which coincided with the resignation of the Cadets from the Cabinet, made it possible to enact this measure. Even then, however, it proved to be an isolated measure, incapable of promoting to any palpable extent the struggle of the peasants against the landowners for land.

Meanwhile, at the front, the counter-revolutionary, imperialist task of resuming the imperialist, predatory war, a task which Guchkov, so hated by the people, had been unable to accomplish, was being accomplished successfully and brilliantly by the "revolutionary democrat" Kerensky, that new-baked member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. He revelled in his own eloquence, incense was burned to him by the imperialists, who were using him as a pawn, he was flattered and worshipped – all because he served the capitalists faithfully, trying to talk the "revolutionary troops" into agreeing to resume the war being waged in pursuance of the treaties concluded by Tsar Nicholas II with the capitalists of Britain and France, a war waged so that Russian capitalists might secure Constantinople and Lvov, Erzurum and Trebizond.

So passed the second phase of the Russian revolution – May 6 to June 9. Shielded and defended by the “socialist” Ministers, the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie grew in strength, consolidated their position and prepared an offensive both against the external enemy and against the internal enemy, i.e., the revolutionary workers.

VII

On June 9, the revolutionary workers’ party, the Bolsheviks, was preparing for a demonstration in Petrograd to give organised expression to the irresistibly growing popular discontent and indignation. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders, entangled in compromises with the bourgeoisie and bound by the imperialist policy of an offensive, were horrified, feeling that they were losing their influence among the masses. A general howl went up against the demonstration, and the counter-revolutionary Cadets joined in this howl, this time together with the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. Under their direction, and as a result of their policy of compromise with the capitalists, the swing of the petty-bourgeois masses to an alliance with the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie became quite definite and strikingly obvious. This is the historical significance and class meaning of the crisis of June 9.

The Bolsheviks called off the demonstration, having no wish to lead the workers at that moment into a losing fight against the united Cadets, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks. The latter, however, so as to retain at least a vestige of the people’s confidence, were compelled to call a general demonstration for June 48. The bourgeoisie were beside themselves with rage, rightly discerning in this a swing of the petty-bourgeois democrats towards the proletariat, and they decided to paralyse the action of the democrats by an offensive at the front.

In fact, June 18 was marked by an impressive victory for the slogans of the revolutionary proletariat, the slogans of Bolshevism, among the people of Petrograd. And on June 19 the bourgeoisie and the Bonapartist ^[1] Kerensky solemnly announced that the offensive at the front had begun on June 18.

The offensive meant in effect the resumption of the predatory war in the interests of the capitalists and against the will of the vast majority of the working people. That is why the offensive was inevitably accompanied, on the one hand, by a gigantic growth of chauvinism and the transfer of military power (and consequently of state power) to the military gang of Bonapartists, and, on the other, by the use of violence against the masses, the persecution of the inter nationalists, the abolition of freedom of agitation, and the arrest and 9hooting of those who were against the war.

Whereas May 6 bound the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks to the triumphal chariot of the bourgeoisie with a rope, June 19 shackled them, as servants of the capitalists, with a chain.

VIII

Owing to the resumption of the predatory war, the bitterness of the people naturally grew even more rapidly and intensely. July 3–4 witnessed an outburst of their anger which the Bolsheviks attempted to restrain and which, of course, they had to endeavour to make as organised as possible.

The Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, being slaves of the bourgeoisie, shackled by their master, agreed to everything: dispatching reactionary troops to Petrograd, bringing back the death penalty, disarming the workers and revolutionary troops, arresting and hounding, and closing down newspapers without trial. The power which the bourgeoisie in the government were unable to take entirely, and which the Soviets did not want to take, fell into the hands of the military clique, the Bonapartists, who, of course, were wholly backed by the Cadets and the Black Hundreds, by the landowners and capitalists.

Down the ladder, step by step. Having once set foot on the ladder of compromise with the bourgeoisie, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks slid irresistibly downwards, to rock bottom. On February 28, in the Petrograd Soviet, they promised conditional support to the bourgeois government. On May 6 they saved it from collapse and allowed themselves to be made its servants and defenders by agreeing to an offensive. On June 9 they united with the counter revolutionary bourgeoisie in a campaign of furious rage, lies and slander against the revolutionary proletariat. On June 19 they approved the resumption of the predatory war. On July 3 they consented to the summoning of reactionary troops, which was the beginning of their complete surrender of power to the Bonapartists. Down the ladder, step by step.

This shameful finale of the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties was not fortuitous but a consequence of the economic status of the small owners, the petty bourgeoisie, as has been repeatedly borne out by experience in Europe.

Everybody, of course, has seen the small owner bend every effort and strain every nerve to "get on in the world", to become a real master, to rise to the position of a “strong” employer, to the position of a bourgeois. As long as capitalism rules the roost, there is no alternative for the small owner other than becoming a capitalist (and that is possible at best in the case of one small owner out of a hundred), or becoming a ruined man, a semi-proletarian, and ultimately a proletarian. The same is true in politics: the petty-bourgeois democrats, especially their leaders, tend to trail after the bourgeoisie. The leaders of the petty-bourgeois democrats console their people with promises and assurances about the possibility of reaching agreement with the big capitalists; at best, and for a very brief period, they obtain certain minor concessions from the capitalists for a small upper section of the working people; but on every decisive issue, on every important matter, the petty-bourgeois democrats have always tailed after the bourgeoisie as a feeble appendage to them, as an obedient tool in the hands of he financial mangates. The experience of Britain and France has proved this over and over again.

The experience of the Russian revolution from February to July 1917, when events developed with unusual rapidity, particularly under the influence of the imperialist war and the deep-going crisis brought about by it, has most strikingly and palpably confirmed the old Marxist truth that the position of the petty bourgeoisie is unstable.

The lesson of the Russian revolution is that there can be no escape for the working people from the iron grip of war, famine, and enslavement by the landowners and capitalists unless they completely break with the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties and clearly understand the latter’s treacherous role, unless they renounce all compromises with the bourgeoisie and resolutely side with the revolutionary workers. Only the revolutionary workers, if supported by the peasant poor, are capable of smashing the resistance of the capitalists and leading the people in gaining land with out compensation, complete liberty, victory over famine and the war, and a just and lasting peace.

Afterword

This article was written at the end of July, as is apparent from the text.

The history of the revolution during August has fully corroborated what is said in this article. Then, at the end of August, the Kornilov revolt ^[6] caused a new turn in the revolution by clearly demonstrating to the whole people that the Cadets, in alliance with the counter-revolutionary generals, were striving to disband the Soviets and restore the monarchy. The near future will show how strong this new turn of the revolution is, and whether it will succeed in putting an end to the fatal policy of compromise with the bourgeoisie.

N. Lenin

September 6, 1917

Notes

[1] Bonapartism (from Bonaparte, the name of the two French emperors) is a name applied to a government which endeavours to appear non-partisan by taking advantage of a highly acute struggle between the parties of the capitalists and the workers. Actually serving the capitalists, such a government dupes the workers most of all by promises and petty concessions. —Lenin

[2] On July 12 (25) the Provisional Government introduced capital punishment at the front. The divisional “military revolutionary tribunals” that were set up passed sentences which became effective immediately and were executed without delay.

[3] The Trudoviks (Trudovik group) were a Duma group of petty-bourgeois democrats—peasants and intellectuals with Narodnik leanings. The group was formed by the peasant Deputies to the First Duma in April 1906. In the Duma it wavered between the Cadets and the revolutionary Social-Democrats. During the First World War most of the Trudoviks adhered to a social-chauvinist position.

After the February revolution the Trudoviks, expressing the interests of the kulaks, actively supported the Provisional Government. Their reaction to the October Revolution was hostile and they took part in the counter-revolutionary activities of the bourgeoisie.

[4] The Contact Commission was formed by decision of the compromising Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet on March 8 (21) to “influence” and “exercise control over” the activity of the Provisional Government. Its members were M. I. Skobelev, Y. M. Steklov, N. N. Sukhanov, V. N. Filippovsky and N. S. Chkheidze (subsequently V. M. Chernov and I. G. Tsereteli were included). The Commission helped the Provisional Government take advantage of the prestige of the Petrograd Soviet to disguise its counter-revolutionary policies. The Mensheviks and Socialist– Revolutionaries hoped with its aid to keep the people from revolutionary action aimed at effecting the transfer of power to the Soviets. The Commission was abolished in the middle of April 1917, its functions being handed over to the Executive Committee’s Bureau.

[5] On May 17 (30), 1917, in view of a conflict between the Kronstadt Soviet and Pepelayev, the Provisional Government Commissar, the non-affiliated section of the Soviet passed a resolution abolishing the office of government commissar and investing the Kronstadt Soviet with full powers. The resolution, supported by the Bolsheviks, said that the only authority in Kronstadt was the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which should enter into direct contact with the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on all matters affecting the state.

The bourgeois, S.R. and Menshevik press launched a slander campaign against the people of Kronstadt and the Bolsheviks, alleging that Russia had begun to disintegrate, that a state of anarchy was in, that Kronstadt had seceded, and so on.

First the Petrograd Soviet and then the Provisional Government sent delegations (Chkheidze, Gotz and others in the former case and the Ministers Skobelev and Tsereteli in the latter) to deal with the Kronstadt incident. In the Kronstadt Soviet the two Ministers succeeded in putting through a compromise decision stipulating that the commissar be elected by the Soviet and his election confirmed by the Provisional Government. A political resolution was also passed, saying that the Kronstadt Soviet recognised the authority of the Provisional Government but adding that this “recognition certainly does not rule out criticism and the desire that the revolutionary democrats should form a new central authority and transfer all power to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”. = The resolution expressed the hope that the Bolsheviks would achieve this by exerting ideological influence. It ended with an emphatic protest against attempts to attribute to the Kronstadt Bolsheviks “the intention of severing Kronstadt from the rest of Russia”.

[6] The Kornilov revolt against the revolution was organised by the bourgeoisie and landowners in August 1917. It was led by the tsarist general Kornilov, then Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The conspirators aimed at capturing Petrograd, smashing the Bolshevik Party, disbanding the Soviets, establishing a military dictatorship, and paving the way for the restoration of the monarchy. A. F. Kerensky, head of the Provisional Government, joined in the conspiracy. However, when the revolt began, ho dissociated himself from Kornilov, fearing that he might be swept away with Kornilov, and declared Kornilov to be a rebel against the Provisional Government.

The revolt began on August 25 (September 7). Kornilov marched the Third Cavalry Corps against Petrograd. In Petrograd itself, the counter-revolutionary organisations of Kornilov’s backers were getting ready for action.

The Bolshevik Party led the people against Kornilov as it continued, in accordance with Lenin’s recommendation, to expose the Provisional Government and its S.R. and Menshevik hangers-on. In response to the call of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee, the workers of Petrograd and the revolutionary soldiers and sailors rose to fight the rebels. The Petrograd workers promptly formed Red Guard units. Revolutionary committees were set up in several localities. The advance of the Kornilov troops was checked and Bolshevik propaganda began to demoralise them.

The Kornilov revolt was put down by the workers and peasants under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Under pressure from the people, the Provisional Government had to order the arrest and trial of Kornilov and his accomplices.

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

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 97^th 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.

The late 1920s and early 1930s, the time of the great world-wide economic Depression were hard times for Comrades Curtis, Rosa and their son although not because of the direct effects of that sore (everybody needs law clerks and teachers) but because it portended a change in party doctrine as mandated by the Communist International. They had always been public activists and thus ran into other left-wing groupings in their work, especially the still influential Socialist Party (mainly with the urban labor bureaucracy and the beset farmers out in the prairies). Got along with such groups, excepting of course the now banished counter-revolutionary Trotskyites who were to be beaten down if possible and an occasional Wobblie who still hadn’t gotten over the demise of that organization.

The new policy, which came down in Communist International history as the “third period” (the first being the immediate revolutionary period after World War I and the second, the mid-1920s stabilization of world capitalism), dictated that the world-wide Depression signaled the “final conflict” with capitalism and therefore any truck with non-communist forces now deemed to be “social-fascists” was forbidden. Moreover communist trade union cadre were told to create out of whole cloth “revolutionary unions.” Since party influence except in a few cities and a few unions, mainly in New York City, was minimal those policies only added to that isolation and with the exception of some stellar labor defense work and black defense work (the Scottsboro boys) done in spite of the party dictates this was an unfruitful period. The only other bright spot was in 1933 when the newly-elected Roosevelt (himself earlier a “social-fascist” as well) formally recognized the Soviet Union.

These were trying and mainly isolated times for the party, for the comrades and, frankly, for the gullible like Comrade Curtis and Rosa who would nightly talk about the nearness of their socialist dreams. Well, no question the period was bleak but the hard reality was that those Communist International doctrines (dictated by the now all-powerful Stalin and his cronies) led in their own way to the victory of the Nazis in Germany which would within the decade cause many tough nights worrying about the fate of the Soviet Union. Here is where the gullible part came in. Instead of blaming Stalin (or Earl Browder who took charge of the party as a well-known hack ready to do anything to advance himself although in his youth he had been an ardent militant and fervent anti-war supporter) Comrades Curtis and Rosa did somersaults to blame everybody and everything on socialists, Trotskyites, anybody. They never said word one about what happened in Germany and whose policies let Hitler in. Comrade Markham heard that kind of talk around the house as he grew up, as he became a Young Pioneer when he came of age.

The early 1930s, years of party-imposed self-isolation from the main political arenas, the “third period” years mentioned above, were hard years for Comrades Curtis and Rosa. They had been used to a useful and somewhat productive political life since they had moved to New York City in the 1920s. They did not get back to that normalcy until well after the Hitler threat to the Soviet Union or, better, the perceived threat since Hitler made no bones about liquidating the “Bolshevik menace” and hence made Stalin and his coterie change course dramatically with the policy which would later be codified as the “popular front.” For all practical purposes that “third period” policy had been shelved well before, probably in America with the great Communist-led general strike in San Francisco for a goodly part of 1934.

The implications were rather dramatic. Now yesterday’s “social-fascists,” including certain bourgeois elements were to be courted and the theory of the “catastrophic” end of world capitalism put on the back burner. Of course the damn Trotskyites, who had led their own general strike in backwater Minneapolis, were still to be beaten down and no party meeting (or Young Pioneer meeting either) was complete without some ritualistic denunciation of the bastards. No question though that the “thaw” as Comrade Curtis called it was welcome to that family and no more fervent supporters of the new policy in the city rank and file could be found than that pair. They took on more party responsibilities as this decade moved on (and as Comrade Markham became older and could travel with them to paper sales, meetings, and contact sessions, sessions to gain new recruits). This new energy came in handy with the outbreak of civil war in Spain where the popular front government was besieged by an armed Army/Fascist uprising and the Soviet Union was the only country willing to send military aid to drive the reactionaries back. Those were the days when Comrade Rosa would help the young activist Ethel Greenglass (later Ethel Rosenberg martyred along with her husband Julius in the Cold War 1950s executed as heroic Soviet spies) collecting funds for Spain in Times Square while Ethel performed the tarantula. Yes those who supported the Spanish Republic were kindred in those days and the young Comrade Markham got his first taste of public communist work.

The time of the new Communist International policy, the popular front against fascism with all anti-fascist forces, including bourgeois forces, was a fruitful time for the now aging Comrades Curtis and Rosa who whatever they saw in that strategy in terms of defense of the Soviet Union also saw as a way to mix with kindred in the various committees that the party was forming with other organizations. For them it was a breath of fresh air after the “third period.” Comrade Markham also got immersed in the new milieu, mixing with members of other student organizations to fight against fascism and the threat of a new war that seemed almost imminent by 1939 with the defeat in Spain hanging over everybody.

War would come soon enough, soon enough in Europe, in September 1939 and before that Comrades Curtis and Rosa spared no efforts to rally the anti-Nazi forces and to berate the isolationists who wanted nothing to do with the war in Europe.

Then the other shoe fell, fell as it had several times before when the announcement came that Stalin and Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact, and had agreed to divide Poland up. Overnight, maybe faster, the anti-fascist front was abandoned, the new slogan was peace and non-intervention. The Communist Party could now join hands with the anti-interventions America First-ers to keep America out of a European war. Overnight as well the Comrades lost many friends who could not understand the switch in policy. Worse there was an exodus from the party of many intellectuals and others who had joined the party in the spirit of the popular front who wanted no truck with Hitler alliances. Those withdrawals would not help them later when the post-war red scare came but then reflected their disgust with Soviet foreign policy.

Comrade Curtis and Rosa having been through the previous twists and turns of the party did not question the switch in fact thought that it was a clever move by Stalin to protect the Soviet Union against the British and French imperialists. All Comrade Markham knew was that he was laughed at or scorned at school but he too although only a young teenager thought Stalin had acted correctly even if he could not have articulated that feeling as well as his parents. He would learn.

“That bastard Hitler and his damn Nazis have invaded the Soviet Union, can you believe that after all Comrade Stalin did to try to keep the socialist fatherland out of the second European conflagration which had been going on for almost two years now,” cried out Comrade Curtis to his son, his now teenage son, who would probably bear the family brunt of this new world catastrophe on that fateful June 1941 when the world, the world communist world anyway, was turned upside down.

When Rosa came home from work she was beside herself since she had stopped by the Brooklyn party headquarters to see what the latest grim news was from the quickly folding and crumbling Russian front as the Nazi troops made their familiar quick work of attacking with lightning speed leaving the totally unprepared Red Army prostrate. It would only come out later, at least Comrades Curtis and Rosa did not find out about until after Stalin’s death in 1953, that Comrade Stalin and his staff had been forewarned of the attack by the international Soviet spy network that the Nazi attack was imminent and one source had actually given exact date. The damn Trotskyists over in the Village would have a field day with that since they had been saying for years that the purge of the Red Army in the late 1930s and that failure to heed the spies warnings proved, if further proof was necessary, that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of many millions at the hands of the on-rushing Nazis.

But in June 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the debacle the comrades had no time (or inclination) to question the wisdom of Soviet foreign policy moves as the socialist fatherland was in danger, must be defended at all costs, a call that both the long time comrades had paid especial heed to. So instead of calling for vague appeals to world peace, instead of calling for the American government to stay out of the European conflict, a position the party had shared prior to June, 1941 with the American First movement which included many of the most reactionary and ant-Soviet elements in American ruling and elite circles, they were urging FDR to extend Lend-Lease to the Soviets. Their world that month had indeed turned upside down.

During the period before the American entry into what would be called World War II, before Pearl Harbor Curtis, Rosa and the now politically maturing Markham were among the most active advocates of American entry into the war, of extending Lend-Lease to the Soviets for they were quite fearful that the Soviet experiment was finished after reading the daily reports of defeat and retreat. That short period came to an end quickly enough and having earlier in the year been the most fervent advocates in the streets of New York for non-intervention they now declared that everybody, everything had to go to the American war effort, that, in essence, the class struggle had to be suspended for the duration. They willingly parroted the party line that every good trade unionist should be supporting the “no strike” pledge (ironically the party had boosted its credentials by leading, or helping to lead, strikes right up until June, 1941. Personally they all followed the news from the Russian front all through the war but certainly breathed a sigh of relief when the Soviets would retreat no further and in the winter of 1943 the German forces were broken before Stalingrad. They also were out on the streets of New York calling for the opening of a “second front” to relieve the Soviets who were bearing the bulk of the burden on the eastern (that second front, a western front, would come as Normandy).

The gloom of 1941 was turning around by 1943 as even non-military types like our comrades could see that the Germans were overextended.

Closer to home in 1943 as Markham drew closer to his eighteenth birthday he as a good young communist wanted to join the American Army to go fight the Nazis (while his parents would soften up their language and call the main enemy Germans rather than Nazis Markham would always, even when I interviewed him, refer to the main enemy as Nazis with a certain twist like the German people even today could be tarred with that long ago brush). Curtis and Rosa had been able to talk him out of going in at seventeen (when they would have had to sign off on his enlistment) saying that he should finish high school so that he would have more to offer to the defense of the Soviet Union but they now had to accept the inevitable that their son would be enlisting soon and like any parents, Soviet defense or not, they feared for his fate. So in late 1943 Markham was down in Fort Dix (nor far from home anyway Rosa said, with a lurking hope that maybe the war would be over before the year was out) where he was a model soldier (that Pioneer and Young Communist League training had paid off). Then after the initial thrusts of the Normandy invasion had eaten up men and materials at prodigious rates Markham shipped out on the troop transports as a member of a unit of the Big Red One-First Division. He saw enough fighting in Europe to garner a fistful of medals (and as he told me he had had enough of fighting for those many months to last a life time). He said he would always point to that service as decisive in his commitment to defend the Soviet Union. Yeah, Markham said that those were good times with the camaraderie, and the join efforts to knock off the Nazis.

Curtis and Rosa expected, finally expected, that an “era of good feeling” would accompany the end of the war in Europe after all the Americans and Russians had been allies. Believed that, finally, the damn capitalists, the damn imperialists, would leave the Soviet Union alone. Markham was more sanguine, knew that the way the war had ended with their “spheres of interest” intact after much bargaining that the temporary allies could not go on as such forever. (Markham, having had plenty of time to read away from New York and the campaign-a-day atmosphere, read the classic Marxist texts, including lots of Lenin and was living in the world of realpolitik unlike his parents who had been buffered by every turn in the world situation.)

And then the other shoe, other shoes began to fall. First the reds were being purged from the trade unions that they had helped build, then loyalty oaths were being required in the professions (“are you now, or have you ever been a “red”)and wherever else they could intimidate and cower any leftists. The freeze, what became known as the Cold War, came fast and furious and almost swept up everybody before it, especially party leaders who were being rounded up like America was some latter day Germany.

Then, just when it seemed that things could not get any more frosty, old party members who had been recruited when the popular front “good fellows, well met” policy was in effect, had not flinched at the Hitler-Stalin Pact and left, were proud to be party members during the war saw the writing on the wall, saw that the new world order had no place for them as party members started leaving the party. Worse, worst of all, many of the intellectuals (although not just them) rather than just fade to academia, the union bureaucracies, or the professions, turned renegade, “dropped the dime,” snitched on their fellows. Many times without even being asked. No those were not good times and Curtis and Rosa took it hard, harder than in the 1920s when they had their youth going for them. They were so disheartened that in 1950, the start of a new decade, saw them burying their Marxist books out in the Bronx so that maybe someday somebody would find them and the struggle could continue. Yeah, it was a tough time to be a communist in America.

1953 was a tough year for Markham and his parents. First Comrade Stalin passed on, left a big hole in the world communist movement. Although Curtis and Rosa had been early party members, first as rank and filers and then as secondary local leaders, they had not, other than to accept every twist and turn of the Communist International line, Soviet foreign policy, and whatever came with the Moscow winds followed the internal events in Moscow very much from the beginning until Stalin’s end and so they were able to survive, were never accused of anti-party behavior, never threatened with expulsion. In some senses that was a remarkable feat for political people who had spent the previous forty or so years in political struggle. Markham from very early on in his life had been wrapped up with the latest controversies, had definite opinions about what the party should, and should not, do (and before that the policies of the Pioneers and Young Communist League) and was unstinting in his admiration for Stalin. No question he was until 1953 anyway looking for some paid party position in his quest to be a professional revolutionary. His parents, knowing that he had that appetite, encouraged him to keep away from too many controversies since once you were tied to a position you could be pushed out very quickly when the winds changed (they were probably thinking of the toady, Earl Browder, who right after the war made the mistake of trying to live popular front politics when the freeze was coming and was dumped in about two seconds when the deal went down). With Stalin’s death lots of things might change, despite the continuing freeze in world politics.

AMERICAN LEFT HISTORY

Saturday, November 22, 2014

As Obama, His House And Senate Allies, His “Coalition Of The Willing” Ramp Up The War Drums-Again- Stop The Escalations-No New U.S. War In Iraq- Immediate Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops And Mercenaries! Stop The U.S. And Allied Bombings! –Stop The U. S. Arms Shipments …

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