Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the late eminent Marxist historian of, seemingly, every possible aspect of the English Revolution of the 17th century, Professor Christopher Hill.
COMMENTARY
As a devoted reader of the work of the late Professor Christopher Hill I can highly recommend the following article. I have reviewed a number of the professor's works in this space. When I have time I will place a short bibliography of the important works in the comment section of this entry. I can say here though that Hill's The World Turned Upside Down is mandatory reading for an overview of this period.
Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution
Abolish the Monarchy, the House of Lords and the Established Churches!
In Honor of Christopher Hill 1912–2003
We reprint below an article that originally appeared in Workers Hammer No. 184 (Spring 2003), the newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.
Speaking last month at a “People’s Assembly” convened to protest parliament’s support for the war on Iraq, “left” Labour MP [Member of Parliament] George Galloway complained that “we have a parliament that is not speaking for Britain,” a view echoed by Chris Nineham of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who moaned that Blair was “negating democracy.” The illusion that Her Majesty’s parliament ought to represent “the people” has been handed down for generations. But the question is, whose interest does Parliament serve? And what is the nature of the “democracy” that the British ruling class claims to have invented in Westminster and upheld since time immemorial?
The single most important event in British history was the seventeenth-century English Revolution. This shaped British capitalism, made possible the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century and laid the foundation for England, a small nation in the seventeenth century, to master the world in the nineteenth. As a result, by 1914 the British ruling class ruled over more than one-fifth of humanity. The British bourgeoisie came to power in a revolution that overthrew the feudal order—the monarchy, the old feudal landowning aristocracy and the established Anglican Church.
However the capitalist class that came to power never forgot that Cromwell’s army mobilised the “lower orders,” and that it was they who made sure the Civil War was fought to the finish, resulting in the defeat of the old order. To this day the British ruling class, aided by Her Majesty’s Labour Party, rewrites history to erase all trace of revolution and civil war, which according to them must never happen again. School students are taught that Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads fought King Charles I and his Cavaliers in the 1640s, and that the King’s head was cut off. But bloody civil war and regicide was an “excess.” The episode was merely a “constitutional” dispute between King and Parliament, in which Parliament triumphed and established its sovereignty over the monarchy. The period between the execution of the King in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 is described as an “interregnum.” The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 is so called because there was no bloodshed and no mobilisation of the lower classes. In reality it was the removal of a king (James II of England) who overstepped the mark and acted as though the revolution had never happened.
Ever since the Cromwellian revolution, “Her Majesty’s Parliament” has been an instrument of bourgeois rule and for the suppression of struggles for the emancipation of the working class. The capitalist order has long been obsolete, just as the feudal system had become outmoded by the seventeenth century. And in order for the proletariat to prepare its historic task—the overthrow of the capitalist order—there is much to be learned from the English bourgeois revolution. The old feudal ruling class did not exit gracefully from the scene, and neither will the capitalist class relinquish power without a fight. This will require class struggle on a mass scale, pursued to the end, and must culminate in a thoroughgoing socialist revolution.
To study the English Revolution is to read Christopher Hill, the outstanding historian of Cromwellian England who died in February. Hill devoted his life’s work to rescuing the history of the English Revolution from oblivion at the hands of those who churn out “gradualist” accounts of British history. Hill’s literary output began in 1940 with the essay, The English Revolution of 1640, which asserted that “the English Revolution of 1640-60 was a great social movement like the French revolution of 1789.” He argued that:
“Ever since then [1660] orthodox historians have done their utmost to stress the ‘continuity’ of English history, to minimise the revolutionary breaks, to pretend that the ‘interregnum’ (the word itself shows what they are trying to do) was an unfortunate accident, that in 1660 we returned to the old Constitution normally developing, that 1688 merely corrected the aberrations of a deranged King. Whereas, in fact, the period 1640-60 saw the destruction of one kind of state and the introduction of a new political structure within which capitalism could freely develop. For tactical reasons, the ruling class in 1660 pretended that they were merely restoring the old forms of the Constitution. But they intended by that restoration to give sanctity and social stamp to a new social order. The important thing is that the social order was new and would not have been won without revolution.”
—The English Revolution of 1640
Hill went on to become Master of Balliol College in Oxford, but stuck to his original thesis and published a variety of superb books. His commanding sweep of the social, political and cultural history of seventeenth-century England resulted in books such as: The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714; The World Turned Upside Down; God’s Englishman; a series called People and Ideas in 17th Century England and many more. Hill provides an orthodox Marxist account of the revolutionary period. He highlights the role played by radical democratic movements such as the Levellers and the Diggers (or True Levellers) whose programme expressed the most radical and enlightened views of their time. The Levellers represented the lower classes, who at the time were the lowest levels of the petty bourgeoisie, including the craftsmen and apprentices of London. Christopher Hill shows that, had it not been for the influence of the Levellers, it is unlikely that Charles I would have been beheaded in 1649.
The lessons of the English Revolution are as relevant for today’s new generation of political activists who despise Blair’s Labour Party and parliament as they were when Trotsky urged British workers to study Cromwell’s revolution, as an antidote to the Labourite view of British history as “gradualism.” Those youth who have no desire to be duped by the SWP, Workers Power or the Socialist Party into supporting parliamentary reformism through an alliance with Labour “lefts” ought to relish Trotsky’s 1925 essay Where Is Britain Going?, a delightfully savage polemic against Labourite gradualism. He evokes Carlyle, Cromwell’s biographer, who noted that his job was to drag out the Lord Protector from under a mountain of dead dogs, meaning a huge load of calumny and oblivion. Trotsky said that “British workers can learn incomparably more from Cromwell than from MacDonald, Snowden, Webb” (Labour leaders of the time) and added that:
“Cromwell was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without holding back at anything. This must be learnt from him, and the dead lion of the seventeenth century is in this sense immeasurably greater than many living dogs.”
—Where Is Britain Going?
Trotsky railed against “left” Labour leaders for their religiosity, cowardice and servility to the monarchy—as he put it, they “dare not refuse pocket money to the Prince of Wales.” The monarchy is an integral part of the “parliamentary democracy” that Labour leaders revere. One of the few Labour figures today who professes to oppose the monarchy is Tony Benn, and he’s a member (for life) of the Queen’s Privy Council, a secret body whose members swear “by Almighty God to be a true and faithful servant unto The Queen’s Majesty”! Benn’s “anti-monarchism” makes us Red Republicans look longingly on the day when Oliver Cromwell summoned his troops to disperse the Long Parliament with the words, “call them in, call them in.”
While he was a young student at Oxford in the mid 1930s, Christopher Hill joined the Communist Party, as indeed did many youth who were radicalised by the rise of the Nazis in Germany and by the Spanish Civil War. This was a time when the capitalist world was beset by the Great Depression, yet the Soviet Union was undergoing dramatic economic development. In Britain there was mass disaffection with Labour’s betrayals, precipitated by Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald joining a “National Government” in 1931. But while the British Communist Party that Hill joined was distrusted by the British bourgeoisie for its loyalty to the Kremlin, it nonetheless was a party of parliamentary reformism. Posthumously, Hill is being accused of having spied for the Soviet Union in the period during World War II when he worked in military intelligence and at the Foreign Office. For the British establishment and their Labour Party lackeys, this is the ultimate betrayal. Spying for the Soviet Union against an imperialist power, if indeed he did, is certainly no crime as far as we Trotskyists are concerned. The Soviet Union emerged out of the Bolshevik October 1917 revolution and continued to embody the gains of that revolution despite the political counterrevolution that took place in 1923-24 with the rise to power of the conservative Stalinist bureaucracy. For this reason we defended the Soviet Union and fought tooth and nail against the capitalist counterrevolution of 1991-92. We don’t know what Christopher Hill did in World War II. But given that he openly professed his Marxist sympathies, it seems unlikely that he could have played a role comparable to heroic Soviet spies Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, his contemporaries and comrades who were recruited at Cambridge.
Hill was outstanding even among Communist Party historians such as E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, A.L. Morton and Rodney Hilton who were his peers. He wrote cogent history because he mainly restricted his work to seventeenth-century England, on which there was no Stalinist line. One exception is Hill’s 1947 book Lenin and the Russian Revolution, which is inferior to any of his works on the English Revolution. He denies Trotsky’s role alongside Lenin as co-leader of the Russian Revolution while elevating Stalin to great heights.
Class Forces in the Civil War
Key to understanding the English Revolution is recognising the class forces in conflict. On the side of King Charles I were the old feudal landed aristocracy and the Anglican Church. The latter became the official church with the Reformation against the Catholic Church a century earlier, which also led to much political power (and land) passing to the Crown. The fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, in which overmighty and some mighty nobles killed each other, had the virtue of reducing the old feudal lords.
Outside of England, the Catholic Church dominated the feudal world and was the main bulwark against social, economic and scientific progress. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the nascent merchant capitalist class was forced into a collision with the feudal system. Friedrich Engels described the role of the Catholic Church:
“The great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organised its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully one-third of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had to be destroyed.”
—Introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892)
During his reign, Charles I connived with the Catholic absolutist monarchies of Europe, including through his queen, Henrietta Maria of France. The grip of the Crown and Church on the populace in England would be difficult to overstate: the king ruled by “Divine Right”; both Church and Crown operated their own courts; non-attendance at one’s local parish church was punishable by law and church taxes were levied in the amount of one-tenth (a tithe) of one’s produce or profit. The dominant force on the Parliamentary side was the rising Presbyterian bourgeoisie based on the City of London and the merchant capitalists who had been accumulating vast amounts of capital. This class dominated the House of Commons, which had become three times as rich as the House of Lords. But the feudal system was an enormous barrier to the expansion of trade and industry and thus the merchant capitalists were compelled to remove these fetters on their profit accumulation. Parallel with the rise of capitalism went developments in science, and the capitalists needed science, which gave them added impetus to rebel against the Established Church.
In the countryside, the encroachment of capitalist economic relations meant higher rents for tenants. Lower sections of the landed gentry—from which Cromwell hailed—were being squeezed by the big feudal landowners. Also pitted against the feudal nobility were the yeomen—a stratum of independent farmers—who became the backbone of Cromwell’s army, as well as petty-bourgeois layers—small producers and craftsmen. The majority of wage-earners in England at the time were domestic servants and there was no industrial working class to speak of. The radical wing of the Parliamentary side, known as the “Independents,” came into conflict with the conservative Presbyterians, while Cromwell occupied an intermediate position between these two wings.
Cromwell’s Army, Instrument of Revolution
England in 1641 was crisis-ridden: the Royalists pulled out of Parliament because it would not do their bidding; a wave of riots against the enclosure of common land engulfed the countryside and an uprising in Ireland provoked a major crisis. In this context civil war between Parliamentarians and Royalists erupted in 1642. The Presbyterian bourgeois elements were alarmed by the social forces unleashed in the countryside against land seizures. The Royalists had created their own army, but the “Parliamentary” side tried to avoid doing likewise, hoping at first to leave the task of defeating the Royalists to the Scots, with whom Parliament signed a “Solemn League and Covenant” in 1643.
However in the course of battle Cromwell became convinced of the need for an army that would decisively defeat the Royalists. In 1645 he founded the New Model Army which became the decisive force in the revolution. In it he welded together yeomen, peasants and labouring classes of the cities—who had already engaged in effective battles against the Royalists—into a disciplined army. The New Model Army cut across aristocratic disdain for the “lower orders” by promoting men according to merit, up to the rank of general, which was normally the preserve of the nobility. Cromwell famously said: “I had rather have a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than what you call a gentleman and is nothing else” (quoted in God’s Englishman).
The “Protestant work ethic” played an enormous role in the rise of capitalism by providing an ideology that was tailor-made for the rise of a system based on private property. Calvinism was the clearest expression of this “work ethic” and Puritanism, the ideology of Oliver Cromwell and the yeomen, was heavily influenced by Calvinism. Puritanism emphasised the virtue of hard work, thrift, self-discipline and individual merit, over factors such as “noble birth.” The Puritans opposed the Presbyterians’ involvement in enclosures—the seizure of common lands from peasants by declaring it to be private property. Hill cites a Puritan tract urging Presbyterian gentlemen to “first go hang yourselves for your great thefts of enclosures and oppressions, and then afterwards you can go hang your poor brethren for petty thefts” (quoted in The World Turned Upside Down). A variety of small Protestant sects, tending to represent more radical social layers, emerged with the rise of capitalism. Because they favoured the right to choose one’s own religion and some regarded women as equal, they were persecuted as subversive. Within the army ranks there was considerable tolerance for these views and Cromwell’s army became a vehicle for major changes in many areas of social life.
The New Model Army inflicted crushing defeats on the Royalists, culminating in the battle of Naseby in 1645 in which they captured the King. With victory in their grasp, the conservative bourgeois elements in Parliament sought a compromise with the Royalists. This outraged the army ranks who, under the influence of the Levellers, were becoming politically independent. The Levellers organised a system of elected Agitators and acquired a substantial following in army regiments. With the King’s fate now hanging in the balance, Christopher Hill describes the situation as one in which: “Army and Parliament now existed side by side as rival powers in the State” (The English Revolution of 1640).
In June 1647 Parliament tried to disperse the army regiments, ordering them to enlist for Ireland or face immediate dismissal. The ranks mutinied, the Agitators seized the King, held him captive and led a march on London. This led to the ultimate nightmare scenario for every fat-headed Parliamentarian: the revolutionary army purged Parliament of its main conciliators, causing all the Presbyterians to flee from “the House.” Parliament subsequently assigned Oliver Cromwell to negotiate with the mutinous ranks. The Agitators met Cromwell and demanded that he should lead the army, while making clear that, if he chose not to, they “would go their own way without him.” Cromwell and the generals made a deal with the Levellers and Cromwell resumed command of the army.
Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1931) referred to this stage of the English Revolution, describing it as “dual power” between Parliament and the army. He noted:
“It would seem that the conditions are now created for the single rule of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie. But before the Royal power could be broken, the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the Independents, the pious and resolute petit bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully interferes in social life, not merely as an armed force, but as a Praetorian Guard, and as the political representative of a new class opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers’ and officers’ deputies (‘agitators’). A new period of ‘double sovereignty’ has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents’ army. This leads to open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves powerless to oppose with its own army the ‘model army’ of Cromwell—that is, the armed plebeians. The conflict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictatorship of Cromwell is established.”
Political debates between the Levellers and the generals raged within the army, most famously at Putney in London in November 1647. The very idea that soldiers could argue with their officers was unheard of. The Levellers argued for equality between rich and poor, expressed in the phrase by Colonel Rainborough that “the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he”; to which Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law responded: “liberty cannot be provided for in a general sense, if property be preserved” (quoted in The Century of Revolution). The Levellers’ most radical democratic demands were in advance of the social and economic conditions of the time and of the social forces that could realise them.
The King’s Head Rolls
The immediate possibility of a split in the army was averted when the King escaped (or was freed) which re-ignited the civil war. Throughout 1648 Cromwell’s army inflicted defeats on the Royalists in England and Wales; they also defeated a pro-Royalist army from Scotland that threatened to invade. Once again, Colonel Thomas Pride purged Parliament of those who continued to seek a compromise with the King. However this time the army leadership in London, in alliance with the Levellers, also decided to put the King on trial, which meant he would be sentenced to death. This was done while Cromwell was finishing off the military campaign in the north of England. Upon his return, Cromwell hesitated before endorsing the regicide, although hardly out of principle—he is reputed to have told his soldiers earlier that he “would as soon discharge his pistol upon [the King] as at any other private person” (quoted in God’s Englishman). When Cromwell made his mind up, he wholeheartedly supported the execution of Charles I, declaring: “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown on it.”
On 30 January 1649 the King was executed, along with other leading Royalists. The regicide marked the decisive defeat for the feudal order in England. And as the first revolution of its kind, the significance of this victory was enormous. In March the monarchy and House of Lords were formally abolished and England became a republic. Compared to later revolutions, it had many limitations but judged by the conditions of its time, it was unprecedented. Common Law was adopted and although this was no equivalent of the Code Napoleon introduced by the French Revolution it was a major advance from “Royal Prerogative.” The Star Chamber court was abolished and although separation of church and state was not achieved, a measure of Protestant religious dissent was allowed. Christopher Hill eloquently captured what was meant by religious toleration, and how it was achieved, saying: “Cromwell, [by] stabling in cathedrals the horses of the most disciplined and most democratic cavalry the world had yet seen, won a victory which for ever stopped men being flogged and branded for having unorthodox views about the Communion service” (The English Revolution of 1640).
Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658, as Lord Protector, having refused the Crown. However, the revolution and civil war had established bourgeois rule and even though the monarchy was restored in 1660 there would be no going back to the situation where the feudal nobles ruled over the bourgeoisie. The power of the monarchy that was restored had been drastically curbed. Trotsky pointed out that, underneath the struggles between Cromwell and Parliament, Cromwell had created a new society and that this could not be undone by decrees of parliament. He explained:
“In dispersing parliament after parliament Cromwell displayed as little reverence toward the fetish of ‘national’ representation as in the execution of Charles I he had displayed insufficient respect for a monarchy by the grace of God. Nevertheless it was this same Cromwell who paved the way for the parliamentarism and democracy of the two subsequent centuries. In revenge for Cromwell’s execution of Charles I, Charles II swung Cromwell’s corpse up on the gallows. But pre-Cromwellian society could not be re-established by the restoration. The works of Cromwell could not be liquidated by the thievish legislation of the Restoration because what is written by the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen.”
—Where Is Britain Going?
Having Brought Revolution to England, Cromwell Brings Tyranny to Ireland
The execution of Charles I so alarmed the bourgeoisie that within days they re-opened negotiations with the Royalists. The latter were regrouping and were actively engaged in battle in Ireland. In March 1649 Parliament nominated Cromwell to command an invasion of Ireland. The prospect of being shipped to Ireland provoked a Leveller revolt in the army, as had happened in 1647, but this time on a much larger scale. However this time Cromwell and his generals did not side with the mutineers. As Hill says the generals “were now the government; and the government decided Ireland had to be subdued once and for all” (God’s Englishman). Cromwell and the generals crushed the Levellers at Burford; Leveller leaders were arrested and four were executed.
This was a turning point in Cromwell’s revolution. The bourgeoisie heartily endorsed Cromwell’s suppression of the Levellers: he was given an honorary degree by Oxford University, heretofore a bastion of Royalism, and the City Fathers in London threw a banquet in his honour. Rooting out the Levellers from the ranks of the army was seen by the bourgeoisie as necessary preparation for the upcoming invasion of Ireland. This showed that the bourgeois revolution was progressive when it was ascendant because, however reluctantly, the capitalists were pitted against feudalism and backwardness. But when the bourgeoisie took power, the progressive content soon gave way to reaction as the capitalist class consolidated its hold on power.
In September 1649, when Cromwell invaded Ireland, Royalist forces from outside were also converging there. Charles Stuart—who would later become Charles II of England—arrived in Jersey en route for Ireland and leading Royalist general Prince Rupert, nephew of Charles I, was waiting off the Irish coast. However, Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland was not only carried out to defeat the Royalists and was not simply an extension of the English Civil War on Irish terrain. From the time of the 1641 uprising in Ireland—before the Civil War—both Royalists and Parliament agreed that Ireland must be subordinated to England, the only question was which side would command the English army that would carry this out. As an added incentive for a military conquest, Parliament had passed an “Adventurers Act” in 1642 inviting English moneymen to “invest” in the army, in return for which they were guaranteed Irish land. Under this scheme Cromwell himself had loaned over 2,000 pounds and had been promised land in Leinster.
Cromwell’s military campaign in Ireland was designed to colonise Ireland with settlers, by seizing land from Catholic landowners, who were sent to Connaught. Tenants were offered the choice of going with the landlord, or remaining to serve the new lord as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” Cromwell also instituted severe repression for the 1641 uprising. For sheer brutality his campaign is regarded to this day as the most repressive English invasion ever. It has also been seized upon ever since by supporters of Catholic reaction and Royalism, as an example of the barbarity of what they termed the “regicide republic.” A Jesuit historian, Father Denis Murphy, became the leading Irish authority on Cromwell’s campaign. In 1883 he published fabricated tales about Cromwell’s indiscriminate slaughter of women and children, to inflate the death toll of this already bloody campaign. Judged by military standards of the day, and of the Civil War battles in England and Scotland, Cromwell’s policy was ruthless (though not indiscriminate). His army demanded the surrender of the garrisons at Drogheda and Wexford and when this was refused he took no prisoners but put to death all men at arms, including Catholic clergy.
Christopher Hill aptly describes Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland as “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy” (The English Revolution of 1640). In this he echoes Karl Marx who said in 1869 that “English reaction in Ireland (as in Cromwell’s time) had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland” (Letter to Engels, 10 December 1869). Cromwell’s army conquered Ireland, crushed the resistance and seized two-thirds of the land. In addition, Cromwell encouraged colonial settlement of Ireland, particularly from among Leveller-influenced regiments in his army, as a way of dispersing troublemakers.
The fact that Cromwell’s army had brought progress and liberation from the yoke of absolutism to England, yet offered nothing but brutal colonisation to Ireland, seems contradictory at first. But the same phenomenon can be seen for example when we look at the impact of the French revolutionary regime in Haiti, a French colony. The French Revolution itself had inspired a slave rebellion in Haiti that struck fear into the slavemasters and property-owning classes. However, the class that came to power in France under the banner of “liberty, equality and fraternity” was the bourgeoisie and the new rulers were horrified at the prospect of abolishing slavery in Haiti, because the wealth of the leading capitalists in France depended on the enormous profits that flowed out of the Antilles. For the same reason, the relationship of Cromwellian England to Ireland would necessarily be oppressive because the determining factor was the profit the English capitalists raked in from its Irish colony, where the London-Derry Company had been established before Cromwell’s reign.
The fact that the bulk of the Irish poor were Catholic certainly added to the hatred displayed by Cromwell’s troops. It is true that the struggle against feudalism had to be conducted in the first instance against the Catholic Church, the centre of feudal reaction. In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, English and Irish fought on the Royalist side against Cromwell. But there was little incentive for Catholics to fight on the Parliamentary side, since Cromwell’s Puritanism condemned all Catholics as enemies. In Cromwell’s England, Jews returned for the first time since they were driven out in 1290, but there was no religious tolerance for Catholics.
Hill also points to the prevalence of anti-Irish prejudice in England, saying: “The hatred and contempt which propertied Englishmen felt for the Irish is something which we may deplore but should not conceal” (God’s Englishman), adding that this was shared even by the poet Milton, who was far from a reactionary. Milton was a leading ideologue whose poem Paradise Lost refers to the wave of reaction that accompanied the end of the republic and the restoration of the monarchy. For his defence of the regicides, Milton himself risked execution.
The Levellers often expressed solidarity with the people of Ireland—William Walwyn was of the view that, “the cause of the Irish natives in seeking their just freedoms...was the very same with our cause here in endeavouring our own rescue and freedom from the power of oppressors” (quoted in The World Turned Upside Down). The Levellers had a radical-democratic programme calling for abolition of the monarchy and House of Lords; free trade, freedom from monopolies, freedom from conscription, opening of enclosed lands, disestablishment of the church, abolition of tithes. The Diggers, who also had popular support, opposed private property and called for the abolition of wage labour while experimenting with communal farming. But the yeomen and craftsmen who were the base of the Levellers and Diggers were petty-bourgeois, and therefore lacked the cohesion and social power to take on and defeat the bourgeoisie. The birth of the factory proletariat was still far in the future. However, the Levellers earned their place in history for what they did achieve—it was thanks to their radical programme that the bourgeois revolution achieved what was possible at the time, namely the execution of the King, the abolition of the monarchy and establishment of a democratic republic.
Paradoxically, the bourgeois revolution would lead to the destruction of the yeomen who fought most valiantly for its victory. As Friedrich Engels explained in 1892, this applies to the bourgeois revolutions in France and Germany as well. He says:
“Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for the yeomanry and for the plebeian element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further—exactly as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.”
—Introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
Following a war with the Dutch republic in the early 1650s, England took control of shipping to and from the colonies, which now included Jamaica. The Navigation Acts of the early 1650s laid the foundation for British domination of the seas. Cromwell’s rule paved the way for development of British capitalism over the next two centuries to the point where it would become the “world’s number one superpower.” Beginning around the end of the nineteenth century, British capitalism went into steep decline relative to its rivals in the United States and Germany. In its prolonged decline, British imperialism has been preserved by Labour reformism, which has been implacably hostile to every revolutionary movement of the proletariat. But they cannot bury the revolutionary traditions.
In the nineteenth century, the young proletariat produced a revolutionary movement known as the Chartists, who picked up many of the ideas of the Levellers and Diggers. In 1848 Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto, a programme for proletarian revolution. Subsequently they came to understand the vital importance of the fight against the colonial oppression of Ireland to the emancipation of the proletariat in England. Summarising his conclusion, Karl Marx described how his appreciation of this question changed over time:
“It is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present connection with Ireland.... For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always took this viewpoint in the New-York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.”
—Letter to Engels, 10 December 1869
The programme for proletarian revolution outlined by Marx and Engels was carried forward, developed and implemented by Lenin’s Bolshevik Party who led the great revolution of October 1917 in the Russian Empire, the first workers revolution in history. The Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the capitalists, landlords and the tsarist autocracy and set up a new state power based on working-class rule, supported by the peasantry. To paraphrase Gerard Winstanley, a leader of the Diggers, the Bolshevik Revolution “turned the world upside down.” And our job is to build a party that will again turn the capitalist order upside down. The revolutionary proletariat in Britain will recognise its debt to Oliver Cromwell as it establishes workers republics in Britain and in Ireland, and fights to extend working-class rule internationally. The revolutionary proletariat will take care of unfinished business: the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords and the established churches!
Our demands also include: British troops out of Northern Ireland and for the right of self-determination for Scotland and Wales. Together with our comrades in Ireland who fight for an Irish workers republic, our aim is a voluntary federation of workers republics in the British Isles. This will open up the possibility of social and economic development far surpassing the English Revolution and the industrial revolution. We cannot say in advance how quickly the proletarian revolution will dissolve Parliament, but we concur with Trotsky that:
“Whether the proletarian revolution will have its own ‘long’ parliament we do not know. It is highly likely that it will confine itself to a short parliament. However it will the more surely achieve this the better it masters the lessons of Cromwell’s era.”
—Where Is Britain Going?
We are indebted to Christopher Hill for making these lessons more accessible to us.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Saturday, November 08, 2008
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Adolph Joffe
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary leader and early Soviet diplomat Adoph Joffe. He, later, was a central figure in the Russian Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky that tried to save the gains of the Bolshevik revolution. His suicide was a political act and a spur to Trotsky's later greater opposition to Stalin's rule. His suicide note, the political parts, is must reading and posted below.
Adolph Joffe, suicide letter sent to Leon Trotsky (16th November, 1927)
I have never doubted the rightness of the road you pointed out, and as you know, I have gone with you for more than twenty years, since the days of 'permanent revolution'. But I have always believed that you lacked Lenin unbending will, his unwillingness to yield, his readiness even to remain alone on the path that he thought right in the anticipation of a future majority, of a future recognition by everyone of the rightness of his path.
Politically, you were always right, beginning with 1905, and I told you repeatedly that with my own ears I had heard Lenin admit that even in 1905, you, and not he, were right. One does not lie before his death, and now I repeat this again to you. But you have often abandoned your rightness for the sake of an overvalued agreement or compromise. This is a mistake. I repeat: politically you have always been right, and now more right than ever. Some day the party will realize it, and history will not fail to accord recognition. Then don't lose your courage if someone leaves you know, or if not as many come to you, and not as soon, as we all would like.
You are right, but the guarantee of the victory of your rightness lies in nothing but the extreme unwillingness to yield, the strictest straightforwardness, the absolute rejection of all compromise; in this very thing lay the secret of Lenin's victories. Many a time I have wanted to tell you this, but only now have I brought myself to do so, as a last farewell.
Adolph Joffe, suicide letter sent to Leon Trotsky (16th November, 1927)
I have never doubted the rightness of the road you pointed out, and as you know, I have gone with you for more than twenty years, since the days of 'permanent revolution'. But I have always believed that you lacked Lenin unbending will, his unwillingness to yield, his readiness even to remain alone on the path that he thought right in the anticipation of a future majority, of a future recognition by everyone of the rightness of his path.
Politically, you were always right, beginning with 1905, and I told you repeatedly that with my own ears I had heard Lenin admit that even in 1905, you, and not he, were right. One does not lie before his death, and now I repeat this again to you. But you have often abandoned your rightness for the sake of an overvalued agreement or compromise. This is a mistake. I repeat: politically you have always been right, and now more right than ever. Some day the party will realize it, and history will not fail to accord recognition. Then don't lose your courage if someone leaves you know, or if not as many come to you, and not as soon, as we all would like.
You are right, but the guarantee of the victory of your rightness lies in nothing but the extreme unwillingness to yield, the strictest straightforwardness, the absolute rejection of all compromise; in this very thing lay the secret of Lenin's victories. Many a time I have wanted to tell you this, but only now have I brought myself to do so, as a last farewell.
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Yevgeni Preobrazhensky
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Yevgeni Preobrazhensky. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Preobrazhensky's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Soviet Culture Commissar Anatol Lunacharsky
Click on title to link to "Wikipedia"'s entry for the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary leader and agitator and later early Soviet Culture and Education commissar, Anatol Lunacharsky. No added comment is needed in this space for the work, life and deeds of this man as his "Revolutionary Silhouettes" posted here today speak for that work.
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Georgy Pyatakov
Click on title to link to “Wikipedia”'s entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Georgy Pyatakov. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Pyatakov's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Alexandra Kollontai
Click on title to link to the Alexandra Kollontai Internet Archives for the works of 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Alexandra Kollantai. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Kollontai's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Antonov-Ovseyenko's caliber. Although he did Stalin's dirty work Spain in the 1930s his military bravado during the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 is what he is being saluted for here. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.
*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Inessa Armand
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Inessa Armand.
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Armand's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Armand's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
*Professor Bill Ayers For Secretary Of State ?
Commentary
Today, Very Definitely, You Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.
Now that the elections are mercifully over everyone and their brother or sister with any political pull is scrambling for jobs in Washington under the new Obama administration. As is now well-known (or at least known) this year I have changed my position on the old previously unresolved question of whether revolutionaries could, on principle, run for executive offices in the bourgeois state (of course, even under the old standard with the proviso that they not take office if successful). (See blog entry If Drafted I Will Not Run, If Elected I Will Not Serve, dated June 15, 2008).
That position does not preclude supporting other organizations or individuals for such offices, assuming that they have some program or fragment of a program that represents a real class struggle alternative. Nor does it preclude “daydreaming” about possible choices of candidates for various offices in the executive branch of this government. In all fairness, after all the abuse (none of it justified from the sources that it was coming from) this writer thinks that some poetic justice (if not political justice) would be done by nominating one Professor William Ayers as the next Secretary of State (and Professor Bernadine Dohrn can be some kind of Deputy Secretary). After all without Brother Ayers being used as a punching bag by McCain and his ilk at time when the economy was going in the tank then Obama would be just another kid on the block today.
Moreover, as Brother Ayers has stated (in his memoirs and at other times) he has no regrets over his actions (as a “terrorist”, washed up or otherwise) against the American military machine during the Vietnam War (nor should he have) he might be the voice of wisdom against this troop escalation (10,000) in Afghanistan that Obama has cooked up. Sorry, "Joe the Plumber" (if that is what you are) that position as Secretary of Labor is out of the question. In the time -honored banalities of politics-you lost, you stay home. Stay tuned for more as this “drama” unravels. Meanwhile a little forgotten slogan is appropriate here. Immediate Withdrawal Of American/Allied Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan Now!
Today, Very Definitely, You Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows.
Now that the elections are mercifully over everyone and their brother or sister with any political pull is scrambling for jobs in Washington under the new Obama administration. As is now well-known (or at least known) this year I have changed my position on the old previously unresolved question of whether revolutionaries could, on principle, run for executive offices in the bourgeois state (of course, even under the old standard with the proviso that they not take office if successful). (See blog entry If Drafted I Will Not Run, If Elected I Will Not Serve, dated June 15, 2008).
That position does not preclude supporting other organizations or individuals for such offices, assuming that they have some program or fragment of a program that represents a real class struggle alternative. Nor does it preclude “daydreaming” about possible choices of candidates for various offices in the executive branch of this government. In all fairness, after all the abuse (none of it justified from the sources that it was coming from) this writer thinks that some poetic justice (if not political justice) would be done by nominating one Professor William Ayers as the next Secretary of State (and Professor Bernadine Dohrn can be some kind of Deputy Secretary). After all without Brother Ayers being used as a punching bag by McCain and his ilk at time when the economy was going in the tank then Obama would be just another kid on the block today.
Moreover, as Brother Ayers has stated (in his memoirs and at other times) he has no regrets over his actions (as a “terrorist”, washed up or otherwise) against the American military machine during the Vietnam War (nor should he have) he might be the voice of wisdom against this troop escalation (10,000) in Afghanistan that Obama has cooked up. Sorry, "Joe the Plumber" (if that is what you are) that position as Secretary of Labor is out of the question. In the time -honored banalities of politics-you lost, you stay home. Stay tuned for more as this “drama” unravels. Meanwhile a little forgotten slogan is appropriate here. Immediate Withdrawal Of American/Allied Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan Now!
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
*From The Pages Of "Women And Revolution"-"The Roots Of Bolshevism: The Russian Revolutionary Tradition"-A Guest Commentary
Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the heroic 19th century early Russian revolutionary, Vera Figner, mentioned in the article below.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Summer/Autumn 1992 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest for all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
The Roots Of Bolshevism:The Russian Revolutionary Tradition
W&R is pleased to present the edited transcript of a talk given by a member of our editorial board, Joseph Seymour, at an educational conference of the Spartacist League/US, held in the Bay Area on 2 May 1992.
The origins of this talk go back a few years to conversations I had with two comrades who were most directly and actively involved in seeking to build a section of the International Communist League in the Soviet Union. We talked about how wretched the present-day Russian intelligentsia was, both the pro-Wall Street self-styled "democrats" and the Stalinist self-described "patriots." Particularly disturbing was the depth of women's oppression and the pervasive¬ness of male chauvinism, not only in Soviet societyat large but even amongpeople who considered themselves communists, Leninists, would-be Trotskyists.
As we were talking, it occurred to me that the present-day Russian intelligentsia is not only profoundly alienated from Bolshevism, but from the many generations of Russian revolutionaries who preceded and culminated in Bolshevism. If the ghost of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who was the greatest Russian socialist of the pre-Marxist era—a man who had a profound influence on Lenin—could return to his old intellectual haunts in the universities and editorial offices of Russia today, he would not be able to understand how anyone who called himself a democrat could want to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism. For him, to be a democrat meant to be for social equality. It meant to be for the rule of the lower classes in society. The Russian revolutionaries despised the bourgeoisie, both the Russian version and the Western version.
Chernyshevsky would be even more uncomprehending about how anyone could call himself a communist and yet be a Russian nationalist, a male chauvinist and an anti-Semite. Because to be a communist meant by definition that you were an internationalist, you were an extreme partisan of women's equality and liberation, and you welcomed Jews as equals and as comrades. From the 1870s onward, Jews played a prominent role in all of the Russian radical movements, all of the wings of populism and later all wings of Marxism.
And women played a far more prominent role in the Russian revolutionary movement than they did in any other country in the world. Women like Vera Zasulich and Sofia Bardina of Land and Liberty, which was the principal populist organization, were hard, tough, dedicated revolutionaries. From the shooting of the police commandant Trepov in 1878 to the assassination of the tsarist general Luzhenovsky by Maria Spiridonova in 1906, Russian women carried out some of the most spectacular acts of terrorism. After the
Revolution of 1905 a tsarist prison official in his own way recognized the equality of women: "Experience shows that women, in terms of criminality, ability, and possession of the urge to escape, are hardly distinguishable from men."
If we could get into a time machine and go back to the world of Chernyshevsky and Land and Liberty, we would have big fights about peasant socialism and the efficacy of terrorism. But at a deeper level we would feel ourselves among comrades. So what we are trying to do is to reinstill in Russia today its own great revolutionary tradition, a tradition which has been perverted and degraded or simply forgotten after decades of Stalinist rule and the pressure of Western imperialism on the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state.
French Jacobins and Russian Decembrists
That tradition begins with the Decembrists, a group of revolutionary democratic military officers who sought to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. But the Decembrists themselves begin with the French Revolution, which is the fountainhead of radicalism in the modern world. It is one of the ironies of history that the Russian army which the tsar sent into West Europe to crush the French Revolution in its Napoleonic phase became a transmission belt back into Russia for the ideals of that revolution. One of the Decembrists later wrote:
"During the campaigns through Germany and France our young men became acquainted with European civilization, which produced upon them the strongest impression. They were able to compare all that they had seen abroad with what confronted them at every step at home: slavery of the majority of Russians, cruel treatment of subordinates by superiors, all sorts of government abuses, and general tyranny."
So the Decembrists were a belated attempt to extend the French Revolution into Russia. One of their principal leaders had been the son of the Russian ambassador to Napoleonic France; he grew up in a milieu shot through with former Jacobin revolutionaries, among them Napo¬leon himself. Another prominent Decembrist, when he was stationed in Paris in 1815, went around to the leading intellectuals, among them Henri Saint-Simon, a pioneer
theorist of socialism. Saint-Simon attempted to convince this young Russian nobleman to introduce socialism into his homeland.
The most radical of the Decembrists, Pavel Pestel, had not personally been to France although he identified himself wholeheartedly with the French revolutionaries. But he went beyond Jacobinism. By the 1820s the ideas of socialism were beginning to gain currency among the European intelligentsia. Pestel attempted to combine a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution with elements of socialism. He proposed that the land be taken from the nobility and given to the peasants—half given to the peasants to farm privately, the other half to farm collectively so that no peasant family would go hungry. And Pestel called this the Russian Law. After the insurrection was suppressed, the tsarist authorities discovered the Russian Law among Pestel's private papers. Instead of publicizing it at his trial, they thought it was so inflammatory and attractive that they buried it in a secret archive. It did not see the light of day for almost 100 years.
An old reactionary general was on his deathbed when he heard of the Decembrist uprising, and it perplexed him. He said: before we have had uprisings of peasants who want to become noblemen; now we have an uprising of noblemen who want to become shoemakers. The Decembrists did not want to become shoemakers; they were not concerned with their future personal status. But this old reactionary understood something: that this was a movement of an elite, isolated from the peasant masses in whose interests they spoke and attempted to act. And this would be true of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia throughout the 19th century. Initially this milieu consisted mainly of the sons of noblemen, later on the sons and daughters of what was called the "middle class," the children of tsarist bureaucrats or like Chernyshevsky, of Russian Orthodox priests. It was only at the end of the century, in the mid-1890s, that the Marxist wing of the intelligentsia acquired a mass base among the rapidly growing industrial proletariat.
The Decembrists were the first revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movement in Russia. They were also the last such movement. That is, they were the last movement that attempted to overthrow the tsar in order to remodel Russian society along the lines of contemporary West Europe or North America. After that, those people who wanted to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism did not call themselves democrats because they were not democrats; they called themselves liberals. They did not want to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. Rather they wanted to pressure the tsarist autocracy to modernize Russia from above. Their goal was a constitutional mon¬archy in which the monarch remained strong and the constitution guaranteed the rule of the propertied classes. As Chernyshevsky put it: "The liberals absolutely refuse to allow the lower strata any preponderance in society."
The First Russian Socialist Movement
Following the suppression of the Decembrists it took another generation for a new revolutionary movement to emerge. This was the so-called Petrashevsky Circle, a group of a couple of hundred radicals around Mikhail Petrashevsky. At that time the Russian Orthodox Church was sexually segregated, and in order to show his support for the equality of women and his defiance of the state church, Petrashevsky donned women's clothing and he attended a ceremony of the church exclusive to women. However he had forgotten to shave off his beard! He was approached by a policeman who said, "Madam, I think you are a man." Petrashevsky replied, "Sir, I think you are an old woman." The policeman was so flustered, Petrashevsky made his getaway.
Whereas the Decembrists had viewed West Europe in the afterglow of the French Revolution, a generation later Petrashevsky and his comrades only saw in West Europe an arena of the horrible exploitation of the lower classes by the propertied classes. They identified with the socialist opposition to Western bourgeois society and defined their goal as the application of Western socialism to Russia. In light of everything that's happening in Russia today, it's important to emphasize that this very first Russian socialist movement was implacably opposed to Russian nationalism in all its manifestations. They of course opposed the Slavophiles, who idealized Russia before Peter the Great and counterposed the spirituality of the Russian people to the crass materialism of the bourgeois West. But Petrashevsky and his comrades also opposed radical democrats like Belinsky who argued that the progress of humanity goes through nations, not by transcending nations. Against this view they argued, "Socialism is a cosmopolitan doctrine, which stands higher than nationalities...for socialists differing nations do not exist, there are only people."
The Petrashevsky Circle was the exact contemporary of the German League of the Just, out of which came the Communist League for which Marx wrote the Com¬munist Manifesto. Like Marx, Petrashevsky and his com¬rades believed that the spectre of communism was haunt¬ing Europe. And Russia was part of Europe. They looked forward, in the near future, to a pan-European socialist revolution, predominantly proletarian in the West, predominantly peasant-based in the East. They believed that the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848 in West Europe was the beginning of that development, and they immediately wanted to get in on the act. They started discussing how they were actually going to overthrow the tsar. But before they got very far, the tsarist authorities simply crushed them. Nicholas I was panicked in his own way by the spectre of communism and moved to destroy its meager reflection among a small section of the Russian intelligentsia.
The Origins of Populism
The revolutions of 1848 and the ensuing counterrevolutions by the combined forces of bourgeois and monarchical reaction are the great historic watershed of 19th century Europe. Among other things they gave rise to Russian populism as a distinct current of European socialism. Petrashevsky and his comrades had believed that socialism would come to Russia as part of a general European revolution. That vision was defeated on the barricades in Paris, Vienna, Rome and elsewhere.
A witness to that defeat was Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian populism. Herzen had been a radical democrat who emigrated to West Europe, and he experienced the revolutions of 1848 in France and Italy. But Herzen remained optimistic about the prospects of revolution in Russia. If Russia was going to have a revolution in advance and independently of West Europe, however, it would have to be a predominantly peasant revolution because the industrial proletariat was minute. A German conservative, Baron Haxthausen, who had visited Russia in the 1840s, wrote a book saying that Russia didn't need a socialist revolution, it already had socialism in the form of the traditional peasant commune. After 1848 Herzen accepted this premise and argued that what would require a proletarian revolution in the West could be achieved on the basis of Russian rural institutions if the society were sufficiently democratized.
It is important to emphasize that while the Russian populists saw a different path to socialism in Russia, they had the same goal as Western revolutionaries. Thus Marx was always held in extremely high regard in the Russian populist movement. One of the early under¬ground populist groups wrote to Marx in London and proposed that he represent Russia as well as Germany in the leading council of the First International. The first language into which Capital was translated was Russian. It got through the tsarist censors, who figured that a book so dry and abstract as Capital could not inspire anyone to revolutionary passion, and it became an instant best seller. At the end of his life, Herzen stated that he had always been faithful to the ideas of Saint-Simon, who had an extremely technologically advanced conception of socialism.
Herein lay the fundamental contradiction of Russian populism. The populists projected onto the peasant commune not only economic egalitarianism, but social equality at all levels—the equality of women, a libertarian conception of sexual relations, a belief in materialism and the progress of science. They believed that the tsar-worshipping, priest-ridden, wife-beating Russian peasant could be won to the outlook of a Saint-Simon or a Marx. Such an illusion could survive only as long as the populist movement was exclusively a movement of the intelligentsia. And in fact the "To the People" movement marked the beginning of the end of Russian populism.
Revolutionary populism went through four distinct phases. The first phase was ushered in by the Crimean War of 1853-55 in which Russia was defeated by England and France. This defeat sent shock waves through the Russian upper classes. Tsar Nicholas I died in 1855 (some say he committed suicide out of a sense of shame). His successor, Alexander II, appeared to be a liberal, and in the late 1850s Russia experienced the tsarist version of glasnost and perestroika. Censorship was relaxed very considerably, and the tsarist government began talking about fundamental reforms of the system of serfdom.
Initially populist intellectuals like Herzen and Chernyshevsky demanded that the tsar expropriate the landed nobility and give the land to the peasantry. Some believed that the tsarist autocracy would achieve from above what the French Revolution had achieved from below. However, it soon became clear that the legal emancipation of the serfs was going to be done in a way which perpetuated the exploitation of the peasants at the hands of the landlords and the absolutist state. In the first years after the abolition of serfdom, the economic conditions of the peasantry were actually worse than they had been. When the Emancipation Edict of 1861 was read, it provoked scattered peasant uprisings; the peasants thought it was a counterfeit document by the local bureaucrats and the landlords. The so:called Emancipation Edict marked the beginning of revolutionary populism. The intelligentsia became convinced that in order to establish peasant-based socialism they would have to overthrow the tsarist autocracy and create a democratic republic.
The "Common Cause":
Women in the Revolutionary Movement
In the 1860s the first underground revolutionary organizations came into existence. These were easily crushed. Chernyshevsky himself was imprisoned and then exiled. Yet the tsarist repression in no way suppressed the revolutionary populist movement. Over the course of the next decade, a group of perhaps two or three hundred intellectuals became a mass movement of the intelligentsia numbering thousands of activists and perhaps ten times as many sympathizers.
A three-sided political struggle developed during this period within the Russian intelligentsia who opposed the existing social and political order to some degree: the Slavophiles, the liberals, and the revolutionary populists. In this struggle the populists won hands down, and by the early 1870s Russian universities were a bastion of revolutionary populism.
Perhaps the decisive reason for the victory of populism is that they were able to mobilize the vast reserves of the women of the educated classes. This movement literally liberated thousands of women from the shackles of the patriarchal family. A woman was not legally allowed to live on her own without the permission of her parents, or her husband if she was married. To circumvent this, the fictitious marriage became a sort of standard activity within the radical movement. Some young male student would be told by a friend that he knew of a woman of advanced views who wanted to go abroad to study medicine (a woman couldn't study medicine in Russia). And they would meet for the first time in front of a church; they would go in, get married; they would come out, and he would hand her her passport, of which he had control, and say, "Now you are free to go and study medicine and do what you like."
During the 1860s the Russian revolutionary movement acquired the participation of women to a far greater degree than their counterparts in Western Europe. These women at the same time consciously rejected Western-style feminism, that is, the idea of building a separate movement predominantly of women in order to pressure the existing government to pass laws in favor of women's equality. They saw women's equality coming about through what was called the "common cause," a total social revolution in which they would participate on an equal footing with male revolutionaries. Vera Figner, who became the principal leader of the terrorist People's Will in its final phase, recounts how she and her fellow Russian radical students at the University of Zurich viewed this question:
"Generally speaking, as a group the female students abroad were not advocates of the woman question and smiled at any mention of it. We came without thought of pioneering or trying to solve the woman question. We didn't think it needed solution. It was a thing of the past; the principle of equality between men and women had been achieved in the sixties."
Now of course what Figner meant was that it had been achieved within the revolutionary movement, not in Russian society at large. The Russian populists, called "Narodniks" in their own language, were acutely aware of the terrible oppression of women. At a mass trial of populists in 1877, the tsarist prosecutors denounced them for undermining the family. Sofia Bardina replied to this:
"As far as the family is concerned...isn't it being destroyed by a social system which forces an impoverished woman to abandon herself to prostitution, and which even sanctifies this prostitution as a legal and necessary element of every civilized state? Or is it we who are destroying the family? we who are trying to root out this poverty—the major cause of all society's ill, including the erosion of the family?"
"To the People"
In the mid-1870s the populist intelligentsia who were organized in Land and Liberty, which was an all-Russian, fairly highly centralized organization of the Narodnik vanguard, made a heroic 'attempt to overthrow what Bardina called the "social system." This was the "To the People" movement. Thousands of revolutionary intellec¬tuals flocked to rural villages trying to incite the peasants to rise up in a radical democratic and social revolution. The response was not favorable. One of the leading veterans of this movement reported:
"I noticed that any sharp sallies against the Tsar or against religion made an extremely disagreeable impression on the peasants; they were just as deeply perplexed by energetic appeals for a rebellion or uprising."
When the Narodnik intellectuals said that the peasants should have the landlords' land, they got a favorable hearing. But the peasants were unwilling to defy the state to achieve this end.
While the main body of Narodnik intellectuals went to the rural villages, some remained in the cities and sought to agitate and organize among factory workers. Here they were distinctly more successful. They were able to win over some advanced workers, such as Stepan Khalturin, who joined the leadership of Land and Liberty and set up small but significant allied organizations of workers.
One of the leading populist intellectuals involved in organizing the workers was Georgi Plekhanov. Initially Plekhanov accepted what could be called the conventional populist line: factory workers are simply peasants doing seasonal vyork in the factories, which had no effect on their sympathies and ties to the rural villages. But Plekhanov's own experience caused him to question this. In 1879 he wrote:
"The question of the city worker is one of those that it may be said will be moved forward automatically by life itself, to an appropriate place, in spite of the a priori theoretical decisions of the revolutionary leaders."
The "To the People" movement, which necessarily operated quite openly, exposed the Narodniks to massive state repression. This repression, combined with the frus¬tration that the movement had not achieved its basic aim, paved the way for the last phase of revolutionary populism: the turn toward terrorism.
In 1878 Vera Zasulich heard that one of her comrades had been almost beaten to death in prison. She put on her best clothes, walked to the prison, requested that she present a petition to the head of the prison, and when she went into his office she pulled out a gun and shot him pointblank. She did not however kill him. The tsarist authorities thought this was such an open-and-shut case that instead of trying her for a political crime before a special tribunal, they tried her on an ordinary criminal charge before a jury drawn from the St. Petersburg upper classes. And she was acquitted, because the jury found this a justifiable act of moral outrage!
The acquittal had a far more shocking impact than the shooting. Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, expressed the views of the educated elite when he called Zasulich's acquittal "a harbinger of revolution." The populist leaders drew the same conclusion: that if even an upper-class jury will acquit an overt terrorist, then a cam¬paign of terrorism would have enormous popular support. Marx and Engels in London similarly concluded that in the particular conditions of Russia a campaign of terrorism could incite a popular revolution.
The one populist intellectual who dissented was Plekhanov, who warned that the only effect of shooting Alexander II would be to replace him with another Alexander with another digit after his name. He wanted to continue to propagandize and agitate among the rural had been in prison and then in exile for almost 20 years. The tsarist regime had sufficient respect for the effectiveness of People's Will that they did in fact free the old man of Russian socialism. But in the following years Russian populism was basically broken, not so much by the tsarist repression as by demoralization. Neither mass agitation nor terrorism had seriously affected the tsarist autocracy, which emerged if anything even more reactionary than ever.
From Populism to Marxism
The 1880s were the low point of the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1889 a student in St. Petersburg, just ten years earlier a hotbed of revolutionary activism, reported: "There were few self-sacrificing participants who completely consecrated themselves to the cause.... All wanted to finish the course as soon as possible and then to live entirely within the law." Yet just a few years later, a new generation of Russian revolutionaries would enter the scene and finish off the tsarist autocracy
once and for all.
Most accounts of the transition from populism to Marxism within the Russian intelligentsia focus exclusively on Plekhanov and his comrades. It's important, however, to place this transition in its international context. During the 1870s Russia appeared to be the one country on the verge of a radical upheaval. The bomb-throwing Russian Narodnik seemed the model of the European revolutionary. When Zasulich fled to West Europe after being acquitted for shooting Trepov, she was greeted as a heroine not only by socialists, but even by many Western liberals who hated the tsarist autocracy. Yet a decade later the Russian populist movement had almost evaporated. In 1878, the same year that People's Will was formed, the Bismarck regime in Germany passed the so-called Anti-Socialist Laws aimed at breaking the power of the German Marxist movement. The leaders, Bebel and Kautsky, were driven into exile and many activists were imprisoned. Yet unlike the Russian populists, the Marxists became the mass party of the German proletariat despite the repression. So Plekhanov's influence among a new generation of Russian revolutionaries-was not merely because of the intrinsic brilliance of his polemics against populism, but also because he was a cothinker of the strongest, most effective socialist movement in Europe.
After the split in Land and Liberty, Plekhanov attempted to establish a small propaganda group called "Total Redistribution," but the tsarist persecution was so intense that he and his comrades were forced into exile. This compelled them to rethink their basic theoretical premises and strategic perspectives, and in the early 1880s Ple¬khanov made the transition from populism to Marxism. That transition contained two basic elements, one negative, the other positive. Instead of just idealizing it, Plekhanov looked at what was happening to the peasant commune, and he saw that since the emancipation of the serfs, the collective elements of the Russian peasantry were rapidly being undermined. A new layer of rich peas¬ants, known by the insulting term kulaks, or "fists," was increasingly dominating the life of the village because they had the money. That was the negative element. The positive element is that Plekhanov generalized from his own experiences in the 1870s that there was a fundamental difference between workers and peasants, that they were not just part of the narod, the "people," and that only the workers in their mass were receptive to the socialist program. He concluded that a socialist party in Russia must be based centrally on the slowly but steadily growing proletariat.
In rejecting the conception of peasant-based socialism, Plekhanov concluded that Russia at that point in its economic development could not have a socialist transformation of any kind. He conceived a theory of what later came to be called the "two-stage revolution." In the first stage the working class, guided by the socialist intelligentsia, would lead the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy. The liberal bourgeoisie, such as ruled in the West, would then come to power. In turn the workers would gain the political freedom to build a mass proletarian party and allied trade-union movement. Plekhanov also believed that a radical democratic revolution in Russia would enormously accelerate capitalist development, thus increasing the numerical weight of the industrial proletariat and creating the objective economic conditions for a socialist revolution in the future. Thus the program of the Eman¬cipation of Labor group, formed in 1883, stated:
"Present-day Russia is suffering—as Marx once said of the West European continent—not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from insufficiency of that development.
"One of the most harmful consequences of this backward state of production was and still is the underdevelopment of the middle class, which, in our country, is incapable of taking the initiative in the struggle against absolutism. "That is why the socialist intelligentsia has been obliged to head the present-day emancipation movement, whose immediate task must be to set up free political institutions in our country...."
Plekhanov's two-stage revolutionary schema was accepted within the Marxist movement until the beginnings of the Revolution of 1905, when it was confronted, as Plekhanov would have said, "by life itself." It was then challenged in different ways by Lenin's conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution.
"From a Spark a Flame Shall Be Kindled"
In the first decade of its existence, the Emancipation of Labor group was a mere handful of exiles. This reflected both the apolitical mood of the Russian intelligentsia and the continuing dominance of the populists over the diminished radical movement. Slowly Plekhanov began to influence a new younger generation of Russian intellectuals, personified by Vladimir llyich Ulyanov. According to his own account, the future Lenin was an apolitical youth until 1887, when his older brother was executed for participating in one of the last populist attempts to take the tsar's life. Alexander Ulyanov's execution radicalized his younger brother, who, however, did not follow the same path in a programmatic and strategic sense. In the early 1890s the young future Lenin consciously rejected populism in all its contemporary manifestations, and consid¬ered himself a Marxist.
By the mid-1890s, revolutionary populism was a thing of the past and what passed for populism had merged with liberalism. In the 1890s the only people who were calling for a democratic republic were the Marxists, called the Social Democrats. Thus Lenin could write at this time: "All true and consistent democrats in Russia must become Social Democrats." The Russian Marxists had achieved a position in some ways comparable to the revolutionary populists of a generation earlier. They had become the dominant current among that section of the Russian intelligentsia which was fundamentally hostile to the existing social and political order. They had also acquired a small layer of advanced workers. But they had to break outside the narrow circle. This was called the transition from propaganda to agitation. Plekhanov defined propaganda as the explanation of many complex ideas to the few, and agitation as the explanation of a few basic ideas to the many.
The attempt of the Marxist propaganda circle to involve itself in agitation among the workers happened to coincide with a major strike wave. As a result they got a far more favorable hearing and greater influence among the workers than they had initially expected. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of the movement sought to direct the workers' economic resistance to the employer toward the ultimate goal of a radical democratic revolution against the tsarist autocracy. In a popular pamphlet on factory fines written in 1895, for example, Lenin wrote:
"[The workers] will understand that the government and its officials are on the side of the factory owners, and that the laws are drawn up in such a way as to make it easier for the employer to oppress the worker."
The turn toward agitation incurred increased tsarist repression. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of what were called the first generation of Russian Marxist "practicals"—that is, the Russian Marxists who actually organized the workers, as opposed to the older veterans like Plekhanov and Axelrod who provided the theoretical direction from exile—were arrested. The movement passed into the hands of younger people whose formative experience was their involvement in the mass strikes. They became so enthralled with increasing their influence among the workers that they decided to drop the demand for a democratic republic, which they argued was remote from the immediate concerns of the workers and was unpopular among the more backward sections who still had illusions in the tsar's benevolence.
Plekhanov denounced this tendency as "economism," which a colleague of Lenin, Potresov, defined as the Utopian notion of building an effective trade-union move¬ment under tsarist absolutism. Nonetheless in the late 1890s economism became the dominant current within Russian Social Democracy, both the underground circles in Russia and the exile organizations in West Europe.
In 1900 Lenin, Martov and Potresov were released from Siberia, where they had been sent into exile. They joined Plekhanov and his comrades in West Europe to form what was called the Iskra group. "Iskra," meaning "spark," was taken for their journal; it derived from a letter that was written 75 years earlier by the imprisoned and condemned Decembrists to their friend, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. In justifying their actions, the Decembrists said: "From a spark a flame shall be kindled." In choosing this name the Iskra group was stating that the proletariat was and must be the heir to the tradition of revolutionary democratic struggle against the tsarist autocracy. The very name was an attack on economism.
Although Plekhanov was one of the towering figures of European socialism, it was Lenin who was the real driving force and principal organizer of the Iskra group. Its immediate goal was to wrest control of the movement from the still dominant economists. The Iskra group won rather rapidly, in part because Russian society was beginning to experience revolutionary ferment at all levels. Factory workers in large numbers spontaneously joined student strikes and protests, thereby giving the lie to the economist notion that workers would take to the streets only when their own personal livelihood was involved—a very narrow and degrading conception. The narrowness of the economist perspective was discredited even among the economists themselves.
For Lenin, the leadership of the movement was only the first step. The second and decisive step was to cohere the localized propaganda circles into a centralized party with a clearly defined program, strategic perspective and leadership. Describing the need for a such a party in his principal work of the Iskra period, What Is To Be Done?, Lenin used a metaphor from construction:
"Pray tell me, when a bricklayer lays bricks in various parts of an enormous structure, the like of which he has never seen, is it not a 'paper line' that he uses to find the correct place to lay each brick and to indicate the ultimate goal of his work as a whole.... And aren't we passing now through a period in our party life, in which we have bricks and bricklayers, but lack a guiding line visible to all?"
To establish such a guiding line and a centralized party, the Iskra group called a congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in mid-1903. As is well known, this congress ended in a deep split between the Bolsheviks (the majority, or "hards"), led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks (the minority, called at the time the "softs"), whose principal leader was Martov. At first it appeared that the split was over narrowly organizational grounds: whether to have a highly centralized party consisting of people who are committed revolutionaries, or, as the Mensheviks wanted, a looser party open to all workers and intellectuals who actively supported the movement in some degree. However, as Russia moved toward a revolutionary crisis it became increasingly clear that the difference over the internal nature of the party was linked to differences over the course of the role it would play in the revolution, in fact differences over the revolution itself.
The Permanent Revolution
In 1904 Russia engaged in a war with Japan over which country would control the Far East. The tsarist autocracy had expected that a wave of popular patriotic solidarity would dampen the growing social discontent. Instead the defeats of the Russian army at the hands of the Japanese further undermined the tsarist autocracy. "Bloody Sunday," the January 1905 massacre of peaceful workers who were petitioning the tsar, ignited a wave of mass workers strikes, peasant uprisings and military mutinies throughout the year. The Romanov throne tottered wildly, although in the end it did not fall. However, in the early months of 1905 the demise of the autocracy seemed imminent, and therefore the various factions and tendencies of Rus¬sian Social Democracy were forced to spell out much more concretely their conceptions of the course of the revolution and its aftermath.
The Mensheviks translated Plekhanov's initially rather abstract conception of a two-stage revolution into support for the liberal wing of the Russian bourgeoisie, organized in the Constitutional Democratic party or Cadets. The last thing that the Cadets wanted was a popular insurrection to overthrow the tsar. What they aimed at was to use the turmoil from below to pressure the tsarist autocracy to create quasi-parliamentary bodies in which the propertied classes would have the dominant place. In practice the Mensheviks' adherence to a two-stage revolution, in which the first stage meant the workers were supposed to march arm in arm with the democratic bourgeoisie against tsarist reaction, turned out to be a no-stage revolution because there was no democratic bourgeoisie with which to march.
Lenin recognized that all wings of the Russian bourgeoisie were anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary, that a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution therefore would have to occur against and not in alliance with the Russian bourgeoisie. This was the core of his conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. He projected that a workers party, supported by the mass of the peasants, would be able to purge Russia of all the feudal-derived backwardness, the tsarist autocracy, bureaucracy and the state church. It would eliminate the oppression of nationalities as well as of the Jews and end the exploitation of the peasants by the landed nobility.
This conception was clearly influenced by the Jacobin dictatorship in the Great French Revolution. Yet the ques¬tion remained: could the proletariat replay the Jacobin dictatorship in the Russia of 1905; was it possible to take economic actions which would harm the interests of large sections of the propertied class and at the same time not economically expropriate the bourgeoisie? Lenin insisted that this was not a stable form of government, but rather "only a transient, temporary socialist aim." He argued a' the time (although he later changed his view) that in thi absence of proletarian revolutions in West Europe, a rev¬olution in Russia, no matter how radical, could not go beyond the framework of capitalist economic relations.
The person who uniquely argued arthe time that th Russian Revolution could and had to go beyond bourgeois economic relations was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had bef one of the younger leaders of the Iskra group; in the split he initially sided with the Mensheviks. He played prominent role in the Revolution of 1905, and in the course of that revolution developed what he called the doctrine of permanent revolution, in part based on Marx's writings in the immediate aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In a preface which he wrote in 1921 to his writings on the Revolution of 1905, Trotsky summarized the doctrine of permanent revolution:
"This rather high-flown expression defines the thought that the Russian revolution, although directly concerned with bourgeois aims, could not stop short at those aims; the revolution could not solve its immediate, bourgeois tasks except by putting the proletariat into power. And the proletariat, once having power in its hands, would not be able to remain confined within the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the contrary, precisely in order to guarantee its victory, the proletarian vanguard in the very earliest stages of its rule would have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations....
"The contradictions between a workers' government and an overwhelming majority of peasants in a backward country could be resolved only on an international scale, in the arena of a world proletarian revolution. Having, by virtue of historical necessity, burst the narrow bourgeois-democratic confines of the Russian revolution, the victorious proletariat would be compelled also to burst its national and state confines, that is to say, it would have to strive consciously for the Russian revolution to become the pro¬logue to a world revolution."
In 1905 the permanent revolution did not go further than the beginnings of dual power between the proletariat and the tsarist autocracy. However, Russia's defeats in the first imperialist world war broke the back of the tsarist autocracy and paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the greatest victory of the world pro¬letariat in history. Today that victory is being desperately threatened by the ascendancy of capitalist counterrevo¬lutionary forces.
But I would like to end this talk rather with a story. After the assassination of Alexander II the leadership of People's Will came into the hands of Vera Figner. It was she who negotiated with the tsarist regime for the release of Chernyshevsky, and she managed to hold together an underground group in Russia for the next two years. The police official who finally tracked her down had gained so much respect for her that he requested to kiss her hand before sending her to prison. But sent to prison she was, where she stayed for the next 22 years. She was only released in the amnesty of 1905. When she came out of prison she was a kind of Narodnik Rip Van Winkle; she could not understand or orient to the radically changed political and social conditions.
Nevertheless, she remained active within the left, where she was universally respected.
In 1917 many prominent old populists joined the counterrevolutionary camp and went into exile. Figner, the old Narodnik terrorist, faced with a fundamental choice of political loyalties, chose to stay in Soviet Russia. In the 1920s she devoted herself to writing her memoirs and to an organization called the Society of Former Political Prisoners, who were old populists who considered themselves loyal citizens of the Soviet Union. In that capacity she sought to induce populists who had emigrated to return to Soviet Russia and to serve the interests of the workers state. This eminently worthy organization was disbanded by Stalin in the early '30s.
Figner was still alive and kicking at the age of 89, living in Moscow, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. As the Wehrmacht approached Moscow, the Russian authorities turned to Figner and said, "We will move you to safety further east." She refused, saying, "I am very old. I will die soon anyway. Save your efforts for people who are living, who still have a life to give to the cause." So the last member of the famous Central Committee of the People's Will died the following year in Moscow, a heroic and self-sacrificing revolutionary right to the end, and in that sense an inspiration for us all.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Summer/Autumn 1992 issue of "Women and Revolution" that has some historical interest for all those who wish to learn about our militant forbears. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during this Women's History Month.
The Roots Of Bolshevism:The Russian Revolutionary Tradition
W&R is pleased to present the edited transcript of a talk given by a member of our editorial board, Joseph Seymour, at an educational conference of the Spartacist League/US, held in the Bay Area on 2 May 1992.
The origins of this talk go back a few years to conversations I had with two comrades who were most directly and actively involved in seeking to build a section of the International Communist League in the Soviet Union. We talked about how wretched the present-day Russian intelligentsia was, both the pro-Wall Street self-styled "democrats" and the Stalinist self-described "patriots." Particularly disturbing was the depth of women's oppression and the pervasive¬ness of male chauvinism, not only in Soviet societyat large but even amongpeople who considered themselves communists, Leninists, would-be Trotskyists.
As we were talking, it occurred to me that the present-day Russian intelligentsia is not only profoundly alienated from Bolshevism, but from the many generations of Russian revolutionaries who preceded and culminated in Bolshevism. If the ghost of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who was the greatest Russian socialist of the pre-Marxist era—a man who had a profound influence on Lenin—could return to his old intellectual haunts in the universities and editorial offices of Russia today, he would not be able to understand how anyone who called himself a democrat could want to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism. For him, to be a democrat meant to be for social equality. It meant to be for the rule of the lower classes in society. The Russian revolutionaries despised the bourgeoisie, both the Russian version and the Western version.
Chernyshevsky would be even more uncomprehending about how anyone could call himself a communist and yet be a Russian nationalist, a male chauvinist and an anti-Semite. Because to be a communist meant by definition that you were an internationalist, you were an extreme partisan of women's equality and liberation, and you welcomed Jews as equals and as comrades. From the 1870s onward, Jews played a prominent role in all of the Russian radical movements, all of the wings of populism and later all wings of Marxism.
And women played a far more prominent role in the Russian revolutionary movement than they did in any other country in the world. Women like Vera Zasulich and Sofia Bardina of Land and Liberty, which was the principal populist organization, were hard, tough, dedicated revolutionaries. From the shooting of the police commandant Trepov in 1878 to the assassination of the tsarist general Luzhenovsky by Maria Spiridonova in 1906, Russian women carried out some of the most spectacular acts of terrorism. After the
Revolution of 1905 a tsarist prison official in his own way recognized the equality of women: "Experience shows that women, in terms of criminality, ability, and possession of the urge to escape, are hardly distinguishable from men."
If we could get into a time machine and go back to the world of Chernyshevsky and Land and Liberty, we would have big fights about peasant socialism and the efficacy of terrorism. But at a deeper level we would feel ourselves among comrades. So what we are trying to do is to reinstill in Russia today its own great revolutionary tradition, a tradition which has been perverted and degraded or simply forgotten after decades of Stalinist rule and the pressure of Western imperialism on the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state.
French Jacobins and Russian Decembrists
That tradition begins with the Decembrists, a group of revolutionary democratic military officers who sought to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. But the Decembrists themselves begin with the French Revolution, which is the fountainhead of radicalism in the modern world. It is one of the ironies of history that the Russian army which the tsar sent into West Europe to crush the French Revolution in its Napoleonic phase became a transmission belt back into Russia for the ideals of that revolution. One of the Decembrists later wrote:
"During the campaigns through Germany and France our young men became acquainted with European civilization, which produced upon them the strongest impression. They were able to compare all that they had seen abroad with what confronted them at every step at home: slavery of the majority of Russians, cruel treatment of subordinates by superiors, all sorts of government abuses, and general tyranny."
So the Decembrists were a belated attempt to extend the French Revolution into Russia. One of their principal leaders had been the son of the Russian ambassador to Napoleonic France; he grew up in a milieu shot through with former Jacobin revolutionaries, among them Napo¬leon himself. Another prominent Decembrist, when he was stationed in Paris in 1815, went around to the leading intellectuals, among them Henri Saint-Simon, a pioneer
theorist of socialism. Saint-Simon attempted to convince this young Russian nobleman to introduce socialism into his homeland.
The most radical of the Decembrists, Pavel Pestel, had not personally been to France although he identified himself wholeheartedly with the French revolutionaries. But he went beyond Jacobinism. By the 1820s the ideas of socialism were beginning to gain currency among the European intelligentsia. Pestel attempted to combine a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution with elements of socialism. He proposed that the land be taken from the nobility and given to the peasants—half given to the peasants to farm privately, the other half to farm collectively so that no peasant family would go hungry. And Pestel called this the Russian Law. After the insurrection was suppressed, the tsarist authorities discovered the Russian Law among Pestel's private papers. Instead of publicizing it at his trial, they thought it was so inflammatory and attractive that they buried it in a secret archive. It did not see the light of day for almost 100 years.
An old reactionary general was on his deathbed when he heard of the Decembrist uprising, and it perplexed him. He said: before we have had uprisings of peasants who want to become noblemen; now we have an uprising of noblemen who want to become shoemakers. The Decembrists did not want to become shoemakers; they were not concerned with their future personal status. But this old reactionary understood something: that this was a movement of an elite, isolated from the peasant masses in whose interests they spoke and attempted to act. And this would be true of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia throughout the 19th century. Initially this milieu consisted mainly of the sons of noblemen, later on the sons and daughters of what was called the "middle class," the children of tsarist bureaucrats or like Chernyshevsky, of Russian Orthodox priests. It was only at the end of the century, in the mid-1890s, that the Marxist wing of the intelligentsia acquired a mass base among the rapidly growing industrial proletariat.
The Decembrists were the first revolutionary bourgeois-democratic movement in Russia. They were also the last such movement. That is, they were the last movement that attempted to overthrow the tsar in order to remodel Russian society along the lines of contemporary West Europe or North America. After that, those people who wanted to transform Russia along the lines of Western capitalism did not call themselves democrats because they were not democrats; they called themselves liberals. They did not want to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. Rather they wanted to pressure the tsarist autocracy to modernize Russia from above. Their goal was a constitutional mon¬archy in which the monarch remained strong and the constitution guaranteed the rule of the propertied classes. As Chernyshevsky put it: "The liberals absolutely refuse to allow the lower strata any preponderance in society."
The First Russian Socialist Movement
Following the suppression of the Decembrists it took another generation for a new revolutionary movement to emerge. This was the so-called Petrashevsky Circle, a group of a couple of hundred radicals around Mikhail Petrashevsky. At that time the Russian Orthodox Church was sexually segregated, and in order to show his support for the equality of women and his defiance of the state church, Petrashevsky donned women's clothing and he attended a ceremony of the church exclusive to women. However he had forgotten to shave off his beard! He was approached by a policeman who said, "Madam, I think you are a man." Petrashevsky replied, "Sir, I think you are an old woman." The policeman was so flustered, Petrashevsky made his getaway.
Whereas the Decembrists had viewed West Europe in the afterglow of the French Revolution, a generation later Petrashevsky and his comrades only saw in West Europe an arena of the horrible exploitation of the lower classes by the propertied classes. They identified with the socialist opposition to Western bourgeois society and defined their goal as the application of Western socialism to Russia. In light of everything that's happening in Russia today, it's important to emphasize that this very first Russian socialist movement was implacably opposed to Russian nationalism in all its manifestations. They of course opposed the Slavophiles, who idealized Russia before Peter the Great and counterposed the spirituality of the Russian people to the crass materialism of the bourgeois West. But Petrashevsky and his comrades also opposed radical democrats like Belinsky who argued that the progress of humanity goes through nations, not by transcending nations. Against this view they argued, "Socialism is a cosmopolitan doctrine, which stands higher than nationalities...for socialists differing nations do not exist, there are only people."
The Petrashevsky Circle was the exact contemporary of the German League of the Just, out of which came the Communist League for which Marx wrote the Com¬munist Manifesto. Like Marx, Petrashevsky and his com¬rades believed that the spectre of communism was haunt¬ing Europe. And Russia was part of Europe. They looked forward, in the near future, to a pan-European socialist revolution, predominantly proletarian in the West, predominantly peasant-based in the East. They believed that the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848 in West Europe was the beginning of that development, and they immediately wanted to get in on the act. They started discussing how they were actually going to overthrow the tsar. But before they got very far, the tsarist authorities simply crushed them. Nicholas I was panicked in his own way by the spectre of communism and moved to destroy its meager reflection among a small section of the Russian intelligentsia.
The Origins of Populism
The revolutions of 1848 and the ensuing counterrevolutions by the combined forces of bourgeois and monarchical reaction are the great historic watershed of 19th century Europe. Among other things they gave rise to Russian populism as a distinct current of European socialism. Petrashevsky and his comrades had believed that socialism would come to Russia as part of a general European revolution. That vision was defeated on the barricades in Paris, Vienna, Rome and elsewhere.
A witness to that defeat was Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian populism. Herzen had been a radical democrat who emigrated to West Europe, and he experienced the revolutions of 1848 in France and Italy. But Herzen remained optimistic about the prospects of revolution in Russia. If Russia was going to have a revolution in advance and independently of West Europe, however, it would have to be a predominantly peasant revolution because the industrial proletariat was minute. A German conservative, Baron Haxthausen, who had visited Russia in the 1840s, wrote a book saying that Russia didn't need a socialist revolution, it already had socialism in the form of the traditional peasant commune. After 1848 Herzen accepted this premise and argued that what would require a proletarian revolution in the West could be achieved on the basis of Russian rural institutions if the society were sufficiently democratized.
It is important to emphasize that while the Russian populists saw a different path to socialism in Russia, they had the same goal as Western revolutionaries. Thus Marx was always held in extremely high regard in the Russian populist movement. One of the early under¬ground populist groups wrote to Marx in London and proposed that he represent Russia as well as Germany in the leading council of the First International. The first language into which Capital was translated was Russian. It got through the tsarist censors, who figured that a book so dry and abstract as Capital could not inspire anyone to revolutionary passion, and it became an instant best seller. At the end of his life, Herzen stated that he had always been faithful to the ideas of Saint-Simon, who had an extremely technologically advanced conception of socialism.
Herein lay the fundamental contradiction of Russian populism. The populists projected onto the peasant commune not only economic egalitarianism, but social equality at all levels—the equality of women, a libertarian conception of sexual relations, a belief in materialism and the progress of science. They believed that the tsar-worshipping, priest-ridden, wife-beating Russian peasant could be won to the outlook of a Saint-Simon or a Marx. Such an illusion could survive only as long as the populist movement was exclusively a movement of the intelligentsia. And in fact the "To the People" movement marked the beginning of the end of Russian populism.
Revolutionary populism went through four distinct phases. The first phase was ushered in by the Crimean War of 1853-55 in which Russia was defeated by England and France. This defeat sent shock waves through the Russian upper classes. Tsar Nicholas I died in 1855 (some say he committed suicide out of a sense of shame). His successor, Alexander II, appeared to be a liberal, and in the late 1850s Russia experienced the tsarist version of glasnost and perestroika. Censorship was relaxed very considerably, and the tsarist government began talking about fundamental reforms of the system of serfdom.
Initially populist intellectuals like Herzen and Chernyshevsky demanded that the tsar expropriate the landed nobility and give the land to the peasantry. Some believed that the tsarist autocracy would achieve from above what the French Revolution had achieved from below. However, it soon became clear that the legal emancipation of the serfs was going to be done in a way which perpetuated the exploitation of the peasants at the hands of the landlords and the absolutist state. In the first years after the abolition of serfdom, the economic conditions of the peasantry were actually worse than they had been. When the Emancipation Edict of 1861 was read, it provoked scattered peasant uprisings; the peasants thought it was a counterfeit document by the local bureaucrats and the landlords. The so:called Emancipation Edict marked the beginning of revolutionary populism. The intelligentsia became convinced that in order to establish peasant-based socialism they would have to overthrow the tsarist autocracy and create a democratic republic.
The "Common Cause":
Women in the Revolutionary Movement
In the 1860s the first underground revolutionary organizations came into existence. These were easily crushed. Chernyshevsky himself was imprisoned and then exiled. Yet the tsarist repression in no way suppressed the revolutionary populist movement. Over the course of the next decade, a group of perhaps two or three hundred intellectuals became a mass movement of the intelligentsia numbering thousands of activists and perhaps ten times as many sympathizers.
A three-sided political struggle developed during this period within the Russian intelligentsia who opposed the existing social and political order to some degree: the Slavophiles, the liberals, and the revolutionary populists. In this struggle the populists won hands down, and by the early 1870s Russian universities were a bastion of revolutionary populism.
Perhaps the decisive reason for the victory of populism is that they were able to mobilize the vast reserves of the women of the educated classes. This movement literally liberated thousands of women from the shackles of the patriarchal family. A woman was not legally allowed to live on her own without the permission of her parents, or her husband if she was married. To circumvent this, the fictitious marriage became a sort of standard activity within the radical movement. Some young male student would be told by a friend that he knew of a woman of advanced views who wanted to go abroad to study medicine (a woman couldn't study medicine in Russia). And they would meet for the first time in front of a church; they would go in, get married; they would come out, and he would hand her her passport, of which he had control, and say, "Now you are free to go and study medicine and do what you like."
During the 1860s the Russian revolutionary movement acquired the participation of women to a far greater degree than their counterparts in Western Europe. These women at the same time consciously rejected Western-style feminism, that is, the idea of building a separate movement predominantly of women in order to pressure the existing government to pass laws in favor of women's equality. They saw women's equality coming about through what was called the "common cause," a total social revolution in which they would participate on an equal footing with male revolutionaries. Vera Figner, who became the principal leader of the terrorist People's Will in its final phase, recounts how she and her fellow Russian radical students at the University of Zurich viewed this question:
"Generally speaking, as a group the female students abroad were not advocates of the woman question and smiled at any mention of it. We came without thought of pioneering or trying to solve the woman question. We didn't think it needed solution. It was a thing of the past; the principle of equality between men and women had been achieved in the sixties."
Now of course what Figner meant was that it had been achieved within the revolutionary movement, not in Russian society at large. The Russian populists, called "Narodniks" in their own language, were acutely aware of the terrible oppression of women. At a mass trial of populists in 1877, the tsarist prosecutors denounced them for undermining the family. Sofia Bardina replied to this:
"As far as the family is concerned...isn't it being destroyed by a social system which forces an impoverished woman to abandon herself to prostitution, and which even sanctifies this prostitution as a legal and necessary element of every civilized state? Or is it we who are destroying the family? we who are trying to root out this poverty—the major cause of all society's ill, including the erosion of the family?"
"To the People"
In the mid-1870s the populist intelligentsia who were organized in Land and Liberty, which was an all-Russian, fairly highly centralized organization of the Narodnik vanguard, made a heroic 'attempt to overthrow what Bardina called the "social system." This was the "To the People" movement. Thousands of revolutionary intellec¬tuals flocked to rural villages trying to incite the peasants to rise up in a radical democratic and social revolution. The response was not favorable. One of the leading veterans of this movement reported:
"I noticed that any sharp sallies against the Tsar or against religion made an extremely disagreeable impression on the peasants; they were just as deeply perplexed by energetic appeals for a rebellion or uprising."
When the Narodnik intellectuals said that the peasants should have the landlords' land, they got a favorable hearing. But the peasants were unwilling to defy the state to achieve this end.
While the main body of Narodnik intellectuals went to the rural villages, some remained in the cities and sought to agitate and organize among factory workers. Here they were distinctly more successful. They were able to win over some advanced workers, such as Stepan Khalturin, who joined the leadership of Land and Liberty and set up small but significant allied organizations of workers.
One of the leading populist intellectuals involved in organizing the workers was Georgi Plekhanov. Initially Plekhanov accepted what could be called the conventional populist line: factory workers are simply peasants doing seasonal vyork in the factories, which had no effect on their sympathies and ties to the rural villages. But Plekhanov's own experience caused him to question this. In 1879 he wrote:
"The question of the city worker is one of those that it may be said will be moved forward automatically by life itself, to an appropriate place, in spite of the a priori theoretical decisions of the revolutionary leaders."
The "To the People" movement, which necessarily operated quite openly, exposed the Narodniks to massive state repression. This repression, combined with the frus¬tration that the movement had not achieved its basic aim, paved the way for the last phase of revolutionary populism: the turn toward terrorism.
In 1878 Vera Zasulich heard that one of her comrades had been almost beaten to death in prison. She put on her best clothes, walked to the prison, requested that she present a petition to the head of the prison, and when she went into his office she pulled out a gun and shot him pointblank. She did not however kill him. The tsarist authorities thought this was such an open-and-shut case that instead of trying her for a political crime before a special tribunal, they tried her on an ordinary criminal charge before a jury drawn from the St. Petersburg upper classes. And she was acquitted, because the jury found this a justifiable act of moral outrage!
The acquittal had a far more shocking impact than the shooting. Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, expressed the views of the educated elite when he called Zasulich's acquittal "a harbinger of revolution." The populist leaders drew the same conclusion: that if even an upper-class jury will acquit an overt terrorist, then a cam¬paign of terrorism would have enormous popular support. Marx and Engels in London similarly concluded that in the particular conditions of Russia a campaign of terrorism could incite a popular revolution.
The one populist intellectual who dissented was Plekhanov, who warned that the only effect of shooting Alexander II would be to replace him with another Alexander with another digit after his name. He wanted to continue to propagandize and agitate among the rural had been in prison and then in exile for almost 20 years. The tsarist regime had sufficient respect for the effectiveness of People's Will that they did in fact free the old man of Russian socialism. But in the following years Russian populism was basically broken, not so much by the tsarist repression as by demoralization. Neither mass agitation nor terrorism had seriously affected the tsarist autocracy, which emerged if anything even more reactionary than ever.
From Populism to Marxism
The 1880s were the low point of the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1889 a student in St. Petersburg, just ten years earlier a hotbed of revolutionary activism, reported: "There were few self-sacrificing participants who completely consecrated themselves to the cause.... All wanted to finish the course as soon as possible and then to live entirely within the law." Yet just a few years later, a new generation of Russian revolutionaries would enter the scene and finish off the tsarist autocracy
once and for all.
Most accounts of the transition from populism to Marxism within the Russian intelligentsia focus exclusively on Plekhanov and his comrades. It's important, however, to place this transition in its international context. During the 1870s Russia appeared to be the one country on the verge of a radical upheaval. The bomb-throwing Russian Narodnik seemed the model of the European revolutionary. When Zasulich fled to West Europe after being acquitted for shooting Trepov, she was greeted as a heroine not only by socialists, but even by many Western liberals who hated the tsarist autocracy. Yet a decade later the Russian populist movement had almost evaporated. In 1878, the same year that People's Will was formed, the Bismarck regime in Germany passed the so-called Anti-Socialist Laws aimed at breaking the power of the German Marxist movement. The leaders, Bebel and Kautsky, were driven into exile and many activists were imprisoned. Yet unlike the Russian populists, the Marxists became the mass party of the German proletariat despite the repression. So Plekhanov's influence among a new generation of Russian revolutionaries-was not merely because of the intrinsic brilliance of his polemics against populism, but also because he was a cothinker of the strongest, most effective socialist movement in Europe.
After the split in Land and Liberty, Plekhanov attempted to establish a small propaganda group called "Total Redistribution," but the tsarist persecution was so intense that he and his comrades were forced into exile. This compelled them to rethink their basic theoretical premises and strategic perspectives, and in the early 1880s Ple¬khanov made the transition from populism to Marxism. That transition contained two basic elements, one negative, the other positive. Instead of just idealizing it, Plekhanov looked at what was happening to the peasant commune, and he saw that since the emancipation of the serfs, the collective elements of the Russian peasantry were rapidly being undermined. A new layer of rich peas¬ants, known by the insulting term kulaks, or "fists," was increasingly dominating the life of the village because they had the money. That was the negative element. The positive element is that Plekhanov generalized from his own experiences in the 1870s that there was a fundamental difference between workers and peasants, that they were not just part of the narod, the "people," and that only the workers in their mass were receptive to the socialist program. He concluded that a socialist party in Russia must be based centrally on the slowly but steadily growing proletariat.
In rejecting the conception of peasant-based socialism, Plekhanov concluded that Russia at that point in its economic development could not have a socialist transformation of any kind. He conceived a theory of what later came to be called the "two-stage revolution." In the first stage the working class, guided by the socialist intelligentsia, would lead the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy. The liberal bourgeoisie, such as ruled in the West, would then come to power. In turn the workers would gain the political freedom to build a mass proletarian party and allied trade-union movement. Plekhanov also believed that a radical democratic revolution in Russia would enormously accelerate capitalist development, thus increasing the numerical weight of the industrial proletariat and creating the objective economic conditions for a socialist revolution in the future. Thus the program of the Eman¬cipation of Labor group, formed in 1883, stated:
"Present-day Russia is suffering—as Marx once said of the West European continent—not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from insufficiency of that development.
"One of the most harmful consequences of this backward state of production was and still is the underdevelopment of the middle class, which, in our country, is incapable of taking the initiative in the struggle against absolutism. "That is why the socialist intelligentsia has been obliged to head the present-day emancipation movement, whose immediate task must be to set up free political institutions in our country...."
Plekhanov's two-stage revolutionary schema was accepted within the Marxist movement until the beginnings of the Revolution of 1905, when it was confronted, as Plekhanov would have said, "by life itself." It was then challenged in different ways by Lenin's conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and Trotsky's conception of permanent revolution.
"From a Spark a Flame Shall Be Kindled"
In the first decade of its existence, the Emancipation of Labor group was a mere handful of exiles. This reflected both the apolitical mood of the Russian intelligentsia and the continuing dominance of the populists over the diminished radical movement. Slowly Plekhanov began to influence a new younger generation of Russian intellectuals, personified by Vladimir llyich Ulyanov. According to his own account, the future Lenin was an apolitical youth until 1887, when his older brother was executed for participating in one of the last populist attempts to take the tsar's life. Alexander Ulyanov's execution radicalized his younger brother, who, however, did not follow the same path in a programmatic and strategic sense. In the early 1890s the young future Lenin consciously rejected populism in all its contemporary manifestations, and consid¬ered himself a Marxist.
By the mid-1890s, revolutionary populism was a thing of the past and what passed for populism had merged with liberalism. In the 1890s the only people who were calling for a democratic republic were the Marxists, called the Social Democrats. Thus Lenin could write at this time: "All true and consistent democrats in Russia must become Social Democrats." The Russian Marxists had achieved a position in some ways comparable to the revolutionary populists of a generation earlier. They had become the dominant current among that section of the Russian intelligentsia which was fundamentally hostile to the existing social and political order. They had also acquired a small layer of advanced workers. But they had to break outside the narrow circle. This was called the transition from propaganda to agitation. Plekhanov defined propaganda as the explanation of many complex ideas to the few, and agitation as the explanation of a few basic ideas to the many.
The attempt of the Marxist propaganda circle to involve itself in agitation among the workers happened to coincide with a major strike wave. As a result they got a far more favorable hearing and greater influence among the workers than they had initially expected. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of the movement sought to direct the workers' economic resistance to the employer toward the ultimate goal of a radical democratic revolution against the tsarist autocracy. In a popular pamphlet on factory fines written in 1895, for example, Lenin wrote:
"[The workers] will understand that the government and its officials are on the side of the factory owners, and that the laws are drawn up in such a way as to make it easier for the employer to oppress the worker."
The turn toward agitation incurred increased tsarist repression. Lenin, Martov and the other leaders of what were called the first generation of Russian Marxist "practicals"—that is, the Russian Marxists who actually organized the workers, as opposed to the older veterans like Plekhanov and Axelrod who provided the theoretical direction from exile—were arrested. The movement passed into the hands of younger people whose formative experience was their involvement in the mass strikes. They became so enthralled with increasing their influence among the workers that they decided to drop the demand for a democratic republic, which they argued was remote from the immediate concerns of the workers and was unpopular among the more backward sections who still had illusions in the tsar's benevolence.
Plekhanov denounced this tendency as "economism," which a colleague of Lenin, Potresov, defined as the Utopian notion of building an effective trade-union move¬ment under tsarist absolutism. Nonetheless in the late 1890s economism became the dominant current within Russian Social Democracy, both the underground circles in Russia and the exile organizations in West Europe.
In 1900 Lenin, Martov and Potresov were released from Siberia, where they had been sent into exile. They joined Plekhanov and his comrades in West Europe to form what was called the Iskra group. "Iskra," meaning "spark," was taken for their journal; it derived from a letter that was written 75 years earlier by the imprisoned and condemned Decembrists to their friend, the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. In justifying their actions, the Decembrists said: "From a spark a flame shall be kindled." In choosing this name the Iskra group was stating that the proletariat was and must be the heir to the tradition of revolutionary democratic struggle against the tsarist autocracy. The very name was an attack on economism.
Although Plekhanov was one of the towering figures of European socialism, it was Lenin who was the real driving force and principal organizer of the Iskra group. Its immediate goal was to wrest control of the movement from the still dominant economists. The Iskra group won rather rapidly, in part because Russian society was beginning to experience revolutionary ferment at all levels. Factory workers in large numbers spontaneously joined student strikes and protests, thereby giving the lie to the economist notion that workers would take to the streets only when their own personal livelihood was involved—a very narrow and degrading conception. The narrowness of the economist perspective was discredited even among the economists themselves.
For Lenin, the leadership of the movement was only the first step. The second and decisive step was to cohere the localized propaganda circles into a centralized party with a clearly defined program, strategic perspective and leadership. Describing the need for a such a party in his principal work of the Iskra period, What Is To Be Done?, Lenin used a metaphor from construction:
"Pray tell me, when a bricklayer lays bricks in various parts of an enormous structure, the like of which he has never seen, is it not a 'paper line' that he uses to find the correct place to lay each brick and to indicate the ultimate goal of his work as a whole.... And aren't we passing now through a period in our party life, in which we have bricks and bricklayers, but lack a guiding line visible to all?"
To establish such a guiding line and a centralized party, the Iskra group called a congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in mid-1903. As is well known, this congress ended in a deep split between the Bolsheviks (the majority, or "hards"), led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks (the minority, called at the time the "softs"), whose principal leader was Martov. At first it appeared that the split was over narrowly organizational grounds: whether to have a highly centralized party consisting of people who are committed revolutionaries, or, as the Mensheviks wanted, a looser party open to all workers and intellectuals who actively supported the movement in some degree. However, as Russia moved toward a revolutionary crisis it became increasingly clear that the difference over the internal nature of the party was linked to differences over the course of the role it would play in the revolution, in fact differences over the revolution itself.
The Permanent Revolution
In 1904 Russia engaged in a war with Japan over which country would control the Far East. The tsarist autocracy had expected that a wave of popular patriotic solidarity would dampen the growing social discontent. Instead the defeats of the Russian army at the hands of the Japanese further undermined the tsarist autocracy. "Bloody Sunday," the January 1905 massacre of peaceful workers who were petitioning the tsar, ignited a wave of mass workers strikes, peasant uprisings and military mutinies throughout the year. The Romanov throne tottered wildly, although in the end it did not fall. However, in the early months of 1905 the demise of the autocracy seemed imminent, and therefore the various factions and tendencies of Rus¬sian Social Democracy were forced to spell out much more concretely their conceptions of the course of the revolution and its aftermath.
The Mensheviks translated Plekhanov's initially rather abstract conception of a two-stage revolution into support for the liberal wing of the Russian bourgeoisie, organized in the Constitutional Democratic party or Cadets. The last thing that the Cadets wanted was a popular insurrection to overthrow the tsar. What they aimed at was to use the turmoil from below to pressure the tsarist autocracy to create quasi-parliamentary bodies in which the propertied classes would have the dominant place. In practice the Mensheviks' adherence to a two-stage revolution, in which the first stage meant the workers were supposed to march arm in arm with the democratic bourgeoisie against tsarist reaction, turned out to be a no-stage revolution because there was no democratic bourgeoisie with which to march.
Lenin recognized that all wings of the Russian bourgeoisie were anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary, that a radical bourgeois-democratic revolution therefore would have to occur against and not in alliance with the Russian bourgeoisie. This was the core of his conception of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. He projected that a workers party, supported by the mass of the peasants, would be able to purge Russia of all the feudal-derived backwardness, the tsarist autocracy, bureaucracy and the state church. It would eliminate the oppression of nationalities as well as of the Jews and end the exploitation of the peasants by the landed nobility.
This conception was clearly influenced by the Jacobin dictatorship in the Great French Revolution. Yet the ques¬tion remained: could the proletariat replay the Jacobin dictatorship in the Russia of 1905; was it possible to take economic actions which would harm the interests of large sections of the propertied class and at the same time not economically expropriate the bourgeoisie? Lenin insisted that this was not a stable form of government, but rather "only a transient, temporary socialist aim." He argued a' the time (although he later changed his view) that in thi absence of proletarian revolutions in West Europe, a rev¬olution in Russia, no matter how radical, could not go beyond the framework of capitalist economic relations.
The person who uniquely argued arthe time that th Russian Revolution could and had to go beyond bourgeois economic relations was Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had bef one of the younger leaders of the Iskra group; in the split he initially sided with the Mensheviks. He played prominent role in the Revolution of 1905, and in the course of that revolution developed what he called the doctrine of permanent revolution, in part based on Marx's writings in the immediate aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. In a preface which he wrote in 1921 to his writings on the Revolution of 1905, Trotsky summarized the doctrine of permanent revolution:
"This rather high-flown expression defines the thought that the Russian revolution, although directly concerned with bourgeois aims, could not stop short at those aims; the revolution could not solve its immediate, bourgeois tasks except by putting the proletariat into power. And the proletariat, once having power in its hands, would not be able to remain confined within the bourgeois framework of the revolution. On the contrary, precisely in order to guarantee its victory, the proletarian vanguard in the very earliest stages of its rule would have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations....
"The contradictions between a workers' government and an overwhelming majority of peasants in a backward country could be resolved only on an international scale, in the arena of a world proletarian revolution. Having, by virtue of historical necessity, burst the narrow bourgeois-democratic confines of the Russian revolution, the victorious proletariat would be compelled also to burst its national and state confines, that is to say, it would have to strive consciously for the Russian revolution to become the pro¬logue to a world revolution."
In 1905 the permanent revolution did not go further than the beginnings of dual power between the proletariat and the tsarist autocracy. However, Russia's defeats in the first imperialist world war broke the back of the tsarist autocracy and paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, the greatest victory of the world pro¬letariat in history. Today that victory is being desperately threatened by the ascendancy of capitalist counterrevo¬lutionary forces.
But I would like to end this talk rather with a story. After the assassination of Alexander II the leadership of People's Will came into the hands of Vera Figner. It was she who negotiated with the tsarist regime for the release of Chernyshevsky, and she managed to hold together an underground group in Russia for the next two years. The police official who finally tracked her down had gained so much respect for her that he requested to kiss her hand before sending her to prison. But sent to prison she was, where she stayed for the next 22 years. She was only released in the amnesty of 1905. When she came out of prison she was a kind of Narodnik Rip Van Winkle; she could not understand or orient to the radically changed political and social conditions.
Nevertheless, she remained active within the left, where she was universally respected.
In 1917 many prominent old populists joined the counterrevolutionary camp and went into exile. Figner, the old Narodnik terrorist, faced with a fundamental choice of political loyalties, chose to stay in Soviet Russia. In the 1920s she devoted herself to writing her memoirs and to an organization called the Society of Former Political Prisoners, who were old populists who considered themselves loyal citizens of the Soviet Union. In that capacity she sought to induce populists who had emigrated to return to Soviet Russia and to serve the interests of the workers state. This eminently worthy organization was disbanded by Stalin in the early '30s.
Figner was still alive and kicking at the age of 89, living in Moscow, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. As the Wehrmacht approached Moscow, the Russian authorities turned to Figner and said, "We will move you to safety further east." She refused, saying, "I am very old. I will die soon anyway. Save your efforts for people who are living, who still have a life to give to the cause." So the last member of the famous Central Committee of the People's Will died the following year in Moscow, a heroic and self-sacrificing revolutionary right to the end, and in that sense an inspiration for us all.
Monday, November 03, 2008
***Remember "Studs" Terkel- Pro- Working Class Partisan Journalist
Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page.
Commentary
Strangely, as I found out about the death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in Americaand elsewhere, for review in this space. A little comment is in order here for now. The obvious one is that many of the icons of my youth are now passing the scene. Saul Bellows, Arthur Miller, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Utah Phillips to name a few. Terkel was certainly one of them not for his rather bland old New Deal political perspective, as much as a working class partisan as he might have been, but for his reportage about ordinary working people. These are our people. He heard the particular musical cadence of their lives and wrote with some verve on the subject. Here I post an obituary from The Boston Globe for November 1, 2008. I will have much more to say later when I review his books.
***********
Studs Terkel - the Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian and radio host who heard America talking and presented an aural landscape of its democratic vistas as lively, expansive, and often as dark as Walt Whitman's - died in Chicago yesterday. He was 96.
Discuss
COMMENTS (0)
His son, Dan, issued a statement saying Mr. Terkel died at home, the Associated Press reported.
Mr. Terkel, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, "is more than a writer; he is a national resource." The psychologist Robert Coles hailed him as "our leading student of American variousness as it gets embodied in human particularity."
Mr. Terkel's interviews with a wide range of Americans on such topics as the Great Depression ("Hard Times," 1970), jobs ("Working," 1974), and World War II ("The Good War," 1984, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction) helped establish oral history as a popular and enduring genre.
Yet the designation "oral historian" never sat well with Mr. Terkel. "It's too much kind of a grandiose term," he explained, "I'm uncomfortable wearing it. My books aren't histories; they're memory books."
Mr. Terkel preferred a more companionable title for himself: raconteur. A raconteur, he once said, "is a teller of stories for public entertainment. I like that; it's a good description of what I am, I guess."
Those stories were told on the air, as well as in print. For more than a half-century, Mr. Terkel was a fixture in Chicago broadcasting. His interview program - originally known as "Studs Terkel Almanac" and then "The Studs Terkel Show" - ran from 1952 to 1997.
When Mr. Terkel retired from broadcasting, he became distinguished scholar in residence at the Chicago Historical Society. The society is a repository for some 5,000 hours of tapes from Mr. Terkel's radio shows and another 2,000 hours of taped interviews done for his books. Several hundred hours are available at www.studsterkel.org.
Mr. Terkel liked to joke about how important the tape recorder had been to his career. "Do I become most alive and imaginative when I press down the ON lever of my mute companion? I have a theory. I am a neo-Cartesian: I tape; therefore I am."
Despite this identification with his tape recorder (or perhaps because of it), Mr. Terkel often referred to the device as "the goddamn thing." Such dismissiveness was understandable. Among the interview subjects Mr. Terkel inadvertently erased or failed to record were actor Michael Redgrave, theater director Peter Hall, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, and actor and comedian Jacques Tati.
"I don't know how a tape recorder works," Mr. Terkel once confessed.
Although audio technician never appeared on Mr. Terkel's resume, he did not lack for job titles. In addition to author and radio host, Mr. Terkel's jobs included actor, playwright, disc jockey, and journalist. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, whose first performances for predominantly white audiences were arranged by Mr. Terkel, told him he should have been a preacher.
"The way I look at it," he said of his interviewing, "it's like being a gold prospector. You find this precious metal in people when you least expect it."
Mr. Terkel, whose first book was "Giants of Jazz" (1956), an introduction to the music for young readers, likened his interviewing to a jazz soloist's improvising: "There aren't any rules. You do it your own way. You experiment. You try this, you try that. . . . Stay loose, stay flexible."
Along with looseness and flexibility, Mr. Terkel had another piece of advice: "The first thing I'd say to any interviewer is . . . Listen. It's the second thing I say, too, and the third, and the fourth. Listen . . . listen . . . listen. And if you do, people will talk. They'll always talk."
Mr. Terkel was being somewhat disingenuous. Much of that willingness to talk was special to him. He was the least intimidating of interviewers, with a famously warm and empathetic manner. As Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko said, "I could never imagine someone replying 'no comment' to Studs."
Such friendliness toward his subjects led to the criticism most frequently leveled against Mr. Terkel's books, their tendency to sentimentalize people and simplify complex issues.
Admirers as well as critics saw in that tendency the influence of Mr. Terkel's politics, which were very much of the left. (Blacklisted during the 1950s, Mr. Terkel was proud of having a 503-page FBI file.) Certainly, his populist methodology reflected his radical egalitarianism. "My turf has been the arena of unofficial truth," he liked to say.
Mr. Terkel's books include the words of the unknown as well as famous, poor as well as rich, inarticulate as well as eloquent: a class-blind democracy of the tongue.
"I'm looking for the uniqueness in each person," he said. "What was it like to be a certain person then? What's it like to be a certain person now? That's what I'm trying to capture."
Mr. Terkel's own uniqueness was never in doubt. A friendly biographer once spoke of his "orotund personality."
He cut a colorful figure: garrulous, exuberant, a character every bit as distinctive as the honeyed gargle that was his voice. Working into his 90s, Mr. Terkel seemed inexhaustible and inexhaustibly interested.
"Curiosity never killed this cat - that's what I'd like as my epitaph," he once said. "It's what gave me life; the older I got the more curious I became."
Part of Mr. Terkel's legend grew from his association with Chicago. Equally uncomfortable with the elitist East and the laid-back West, he personified the open, muscular ethos of the urban heartland. Appropriately enough, his best friend was another quintessential Chicago writer, the novelist Nelson Algren. Indeed, Mr. Terkel was as much a part of Chicago as Wrigley Field or the Loop.
"In a city with a population of 3 million, Studs must know 2,999,999," the writer Calvin Trillin once observed, "and the only reason he doesn't know the other one is they never happened to ride the same bus together."
Even Mr. Terkel's nickname sprang from his hometown: So great was his identification with Studs Lonigan, the hero of James T. Farrell's 1930s trilogy, a classic of Chicago literature, friends took to calling him Studs. By the time he married Ida (Goldberg) Terkel, in 1939, only she was calling him by his given name, Louis, a habit she never abandoned during the six decades of their marriage. She died in 1999.
Louis Terkel was born in New York on May 16, 1912. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia: Samuel Terkel, a tailor, and Anna (Finkel) Terkel, a seamstress. In 1922, the family moved to Chicago and ran a boarding house. Mr. Terkel would often cite the experience of listening to the establishment's highly varied clientele as to how he came to have such an appreciation for others' talk.
After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1932, Mr. Terkel attended its law school. "I'd read about the great Clarence Darrow, the defender of the guilty and the oppressed," he said. "I saw myself as some kind of heroic figure like that."
He quickly learned the law had more to do with torts than crusades. Still, Mr. Terkel earned his degree; but after failing the bar exam he abandoned the profession. He applied to become a fingerprint classifier for the FBI, only to be rejected. Years later, he discovered that one of his professors had warned the bureau, "His appearance was somewhat sloppy, and I considered him to be not the best type of boy."
He went to work for the federal government doing statistical research in Omaha and then Washington, D.C. In Washington, he took up acting, something he continued when he returned to Chicago to join the Federal Writers Project.
Mr. Terkel flourished as an actor on radio, tending to get cast as a gangster, he explained, "because of the low, husky menacing sort of voice I had." During World War II, he briefly served in the Army Air Force.
Back in Chicago, Mr. Terkel became host of a music program called "The Wax Museum." Music was always a great love of Mr. Terkel's, and his tastes were eclectic. A given show might include recordings by Duke Ellington, Lotte Lehmann, Benny Goodman, Mahalia Jackson, and Enrico Caruso.
With the blacklist preventing him from acting, Mr. Terkel took up on-air interviewing. A publisher, Andre Schiffrin, noticed his talent for drawing people out and urged him to do a book.
The idea appealed to Mr. Terkel. "A radio interview, you do it and it's gone," he once put it. "The ephemeralness, that's part of the attraction. But a book is forever."
Mr. Terkel's other books include "Division Street: America" (1967), "Talking to Myself" (1977), "American Dreams: Lost and Found" (1980), "Chicago" (1986), "The Great Divide" (1988), "Race" (1992), "Coming of Age" (1995), "My American Century" (1997), "Spectator" (1999), "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (2001), "Hope Dies Last" (2003), and "Touch and Go" (2007).
"P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening" is scheduled for release this month.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Commentary
Strangely, as I found out about the death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in Americaand elsewhere, for review in this space. A little comment is in order here for now. The obvious one is that many of the icons of my youth are now passing the scene. Saul Bellows, Arthur Miller, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Utah Phillips to name a few. Terkel was certainly one of them not for his rather bland old New Deal political perspective, as much as a working class partisan as he might have been, but for his reportage about ordinary working people. These are our people. He heard the particular musical cadence of their lives and wrote with some verve on the subject. Here I post an obituary from The Boston Globe for November 1, 2008. I will have much more to say later when I review his books.
***********
Studs Terkel - the Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian and radio host who heard America talking and presented an aural landscape of its democratic vistas as lively, expansive, and often as dark as Walt Whitman's - died in Chicago yesterday. He was 96.
Discuss
COMMENTS (0)
His son, Dan, issued a statement saying Mr. Terkel died at home, the Associated Press reported.
Mr. Terkel, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, "is more than a writer; he is a national resource." The psychologist Robert Coles hailed him as "our leading student of American variousness as it gets embodied in human particularity."
Mr. Terkel's interviews with a wide range of Americans on such topics as the Great Depression ("Hard Times," 1970), jobs ("Working," 1974), and World War II ("The Good War," 1984, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction) helped establish oral history as a popular and enduring genre.
Yet the designation "oral historian" never sat well with Mr. Terkel. "It's too much kind of a grandiose term," he explained, "I'm uncomfortable wearing it. My books aren't histories; they're memory books."
Mr. Terkel preferred a more companionable title for himself: raconteur. A raconteur, he once said, "is a teller of stories for public entertainment. I like that; it's a good description of what I am, I guess."
Those stories were told on the air, as well as in print. For more than a half-century, Mr. Terkel was a fixture in Chicago broadcasting. His interview program - originally known as "Studs Terkel Almanac" and then "The Studs Terkel Show" - ran from 1952 to 1997.
When Mr. Terkel retired from broadcasting, he became distinguished scholar in residence at the Chicago Historical Society. The society is a repository for some 5,000 hours of tapes from Mr. Terkel's radio shows and another 2,000 hours of taped interviews done for his books. Several hundred hours are available at www.studsterkel.org.
Mr. Terkel liked to joke about how important the tape recorder had been to his career. "Do I become most alive and imaginative when I press down the ON lever of my mute companion? I have a theory. I am a neo-Cartesian: I tape; therefore I am."
Despite this identification with his tape recorder (or perhaps because of it), Mr. Terkel often referred to the device as "the goddamn thing." Such dismissiveness was understandable. Among the interview subjects Mr. Terkel inadvertently erased or failed to record were actor Michael Redgrave, theater director Peter Hall, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, and actor and comedian Jacques Tati.
"I don't know how a tape recorder works," Mr. Terkel once confessed.
Although audio technician never appeared on Mr. Terkel's resume, he did not lack for job titles. In addition to author and radio host, Mr. Terkel's jobs included actor, playwright, disc jockey, and journalist. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, whose first performances for predominantly white audiences were arranged by Mr. Terkel, told him he should have been a preacher.
"The way I look at it," he said of his interviewing, "it's like being a gold prospector. You find this precious metal in people when you least expect it."
Mr. Terkel, whose first book was "Giants of Jazz" (1956), an introduction to the music for young readers, likened his interviewing to a jazz soloist's improvising: "There aren't any rules. You do it your own way. You experiment. You try this, you try that. . . . Stay loose, stay flexible."
Along with looseness and flexibility, Mr. Terkel had another piece of advice: "The first thing I'd say to any interviewer is . . . Listen. It's the second thing I say, too, and the third, and the fourth. Listen . . . listen . . . listen. And if you do, people will talk. They'll always talk."
Mr. Terkel was being somewhat disingenuous. Much of that willingness to talk was special to him. He was the least intimidating of interviewers, with a famously warm and empathetic manner. As Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko said, "I could never imagine someone replying 'no comment' to Studs."
Such friendliness toward his subjects led to the criticism most frequently leveled against Mr. Terkel's books, their tendency to sentimentalize people and simplify complex issues.
Admirers as well as critics saw in that tendency the influence of Mr. Terkel's politics, which were very much of the left. (Blacklisted during the 1950s, Mr. Terkel was proud of having a 503-page FBI file.) Certainly, his populist methodology reflected his radical egalitarianism. "My turf has been the arena of unofficial truth," he liked to say.
Mr. Terkel's books include the words of the unknown as well as famous, poor as well as rich, inarticulate as well as eloquent: a class-blind democracy of the tongue.
"I'm looking for the uniqueness in each person," he said. "What was it like to be a certain person then? What's it like to be a certain person now? That's what I'm trying to capture."
Mr. Terkel's own uniqueness was never in doubt. A friendly biographer once spoke of his "orotund personality."
He cut a colorful figure: garrulous, exuberant, a character every bit as distinctive as the honeyed gargle that was his voice. Working into his 90s, Mr. Terkel seemed inexhaustible and inexhaustibly interested.
"Curiosity never killed this cat - that's what I'd like as my epitaph," he once said. "It's what gave me life; the older I got the more curious I became."
Part of Mr. Terkel's legend grew from his association with Chicago. Equally uncomfortable with the elitist East and the laid-back West, he personified the open, muscular ethos of the urban heartland. Appropriately enough, his best friend was another quintessential Chicago writer, the novelist Nelson Algren. Indeed, Mr. Terkel was as much a part of Chicago as Wrigley Field or the Loop.
"In a city with a population of 3 million, Studs must know 2,999,999," the writer Calvin Trillin once observed, "and the only reason he doesn't know the other one is they never happened to ride the same bus together."
Even Mr. Terkel's nickname sprang from his hometown: So great was his identification with Studs Lonigan, the hero of James T. Farrell's 1930s trilogy, a classic of Chicago literature, friends took to calling him Studs. By the time he married Ida (Goldberg) Terkel, in 1939, only she was calling him by his given name, Louis, a habit she never abandoned during the six decades of their marriage. She died in 1999.
Louis Terkel was born in New York on May 16, 1912. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia: Samuel Terkel, a tailor, and Anna (Finkel) Terkel, a seamstress. In 1922, the family moved to Chicago and ran a boarding house. Mr. Terkel would often cite the experience of listening to the establishment's highly varied clientele as to how he came to have such an appreciation for others' talk.
After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1932, Mr. Terkel attended its law school. "I'd read about the great Clarence Darrow, the defender of the guilty and the oppressed," he said. "I saw myself as some kind of heroic figure like that."
He quickly learned the law had more to do with torts than crusades. Still, Mr. Terkel earned his degree; but after failing the bar exam he abandoned the profession. He applied to become a fingerprint classifier for the FBI, only to be rejected. Years later, he discovered that one of his professors had warned the bureau, "His appearance was somewhat sloppy, and I considered him to be not the best type of boy."
He went to work for the federal government doing statistical research in Omaha and then Washington, D.C. In Washington, he took up acting, something he continued when he returned to Chicago to join the Federal Writers Project.
Mr. Terkel flourished as an actor on radio, tending to get cast as a gangster, he explained, "because of the low, husky menacing sort of voice I had." During World War II, he briefly served in the Army Air Force.
Back in Chicago, Mr. Terkel became host of a music program called "The Wax Museum." Music was always a great love of Mr. Terkel's, and his tastes were eclectic. A given show might include recordings by Duke Ellington, Lotte Lehmann, Benny Goodman, Mahalia Jackson, and Enrico Caruso.
With the blacklist preventing him from acting, Mr. Terkel took up on-air interviewing. A publisher, Andre Schiffrin, noticed his talent for drawing people out and urged him to do a book.
The idea appealed to Mr. Terkel. "A radio interview, you do it and it's gone," he once put it. "The ephemeralness, that's part of the attraction. But a book is forever."
Mr. Terkel's other books include "Division Street: America" (1967), "Talking to Myself" (1977), "American Dreams: Lost and Found" (1980), "Chicago" (1986), "The Great Divide" (1988), "Race" (1992), "Coming of Age" (1995), "My American Century" (1997), "Spectator" (1999), "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (2001), "Hope Dies Last" (2003), and "Touch and Go" (2007).
"P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening" is scheduled for release this month.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
VOTE NO ON PROPOSITION 8 IN CALIFORNIA- THE GAY MARRIGE BAN AMENDMENT
Click On Title To Link To July 2, 2009 "New York Review Of Books" Article Entitled "The Same-Sex Future" By David Cole That Gives An Update On This Struggle And A Capsule Of The Various Positions On The Issue.
Commentary
IN CALIFORNIA VOTE NO ON PROPOSITION 8- THE GAY MARRIAGE BAN AMENDMENT-WITH BOTH HANDS!!!
Earlier this year the California Supreme Court held by a 4-3 vote that the prohibition against same sex marriage violated the California constitution. Needless to say, as has occurred in other locales like Massachusetts, the "social conservatives" there have attempted to overturn that decision by placing a proposition (Proposition 8) banning same sex marriages on the ballot for the November 4, 2008 elections.
Just as adamantly we oppose this measure. Vote NO with both hands on this one. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the politics of this space knows this is a "no-brainer" position that needs no further motivation as a simple measure in defense of democratic rights. Moreover, unless there is some supportable socialist candidate that I have not heard about on the California ballot (no, NOT Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party and certainly not the moribund Peace and Freedom Party) then this may be the only reason to go to the polls on that day. Do so.
Commentary
IN CALIFORNIA VOTE NO ON PROPOSITION 8- THE GAY MARRIAGE BAN AMENDMENT-WITH BOTH HANDS!!!
Earlier this year the California Supreme Court held by a 4-3 vote that the prohibition against same sex marriage violated the California constitution. Needless to say, as has occurred in other locales like Massachusetts, the "social conservatives" there have attempted to overturn that decision by placing a proposition (Proposition 8) banning same sex marriages on the ballot for the November 4, 2008 elections.
Just as adamantly we oppose this measure. Vote NO with both hands on this one. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the politics of this space knows this is a "no-brainer" position that needs no further motivation as a simple measure in defense of democratic rights. Moreover, unless there is some supportable socialist candidate that I have not heard about on the California ballot (no, NOT Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party and certainly not the moribund Peace and Freedom Party) then this may be the only reason to go to the polls on that day. Do so.
Friday, October 31, 2008
In Massachusetts Vote NO on Question 1- No Repeal Of The State Income Tax
Commentary
In Massachusetts Vote NO on Question 1- Repealing of the State Income Tax
For President- Republican John McCain-No. Democrat Barack Obama- No. Green Party Cynthia McKinney-No. Independent-Ralph Nader-No. And so on down through the offices to the local county commissioners and such. Come Election Day in Massachusetts on November 4, 2008 it would seem that there is no reason to go to the polls. Right? Not true. As usually is the case here there are some interesting ballot questions to select from. None, from a socialist perspective (hell, from a democratic perspective even) as important as the No vote on Proposition 8 (the gay marriage amendment) in California but important smaller issues nevertheless.
Vote No on Question 1- This the perennial repeal the state income tax proposition that the “no tax”- types try to get passed every few years. Usually this is spear-headed by know-nothings and those who just do not want to pay taxes under any circumstances. Who does? Normally, this question of how the bourgeois state finances itself is of minor interest to socialists but there is another issue at stake. Until working people take state power in their own interests some form of taxation is going to be needed to provide basic services. Hell, in the beginning stages of socialist transformation there may be taxes, depending on the economic superstructure that we inherit from the capitalists.
The argument lurking underneath this one is that if there is no state income tax then the inevitable taxes that will replace that lost revenue will be based on local real property valuations. That means that public services like local education, public works and health care such as they are will be dependent on the wildly varying property tax bases of the various towns. In short, the poor and minorities will get even less public services that at present. And the richer towns? Well, you can already guess about their heartrending problems. We have a side on this one today. Vote it down with both hands!!!
Vote Yes on Question 2- This is a proposition that would decriminalize marijuana possession and use for the recreational smoker, in effect, by making a first offense a civil rather than a criminal one for certain non- drug pusher amounts. There is a system of fines, etc. in place of criminal penalties. Nevertheless the proposition is basically supportable. As socialists we are committed to the decriminalization of all drug use and this proposition is in line with that goal, a basic social right to be left alone to one’s own devises when there are victimless situations involved.
Vote Yes on Question 3- This is a proposition that would ban dog races (essentially greyhound racing) where wagering was involved (subject to state regulation, in other words). The writer of this blog has spend some time betting on various sporting propositions, lately, mainly on college football games (See My revolving weekly Now For The Real Question Of The Day- Who Will Win The National College Football Championship? for current selections.) so I am personally somewhat agnostic on this one, except my “significant other” is very strongly in favor of this one. I will defer to her on this. I would rather watch horses race any day. From my limited knowledge on this subject, the trainers do not do right by these beautiful animals either during their racing careers or seeing that they are provided for after that time.
In Massachusetts Vote NO on Question 1- Repealing of the State Income Tax
For President- Republican John McCain-No. Democrat Barack Obama- No. Green Party Cynthia McKinney-No. Independent-Ralph Nader-No. And so on down through the offices to the local county commissioners and such. Come Election Day in Massachusetts on November 4, 2008 it would seem that there is no reason to go to the polls. Right? Not true. As usually is the case here there are some interesting ballot questions to select from. None, from a socialist perspective (hell, from a democratic perspective even) as important as the No vote on Proposition 8 (the gay marriage amendment) in California but important smaller issues nevertheless.
Vote No on Question 1- This the perennial repeal the state income tax proposition that the “no tax”- types try to get passed every few years. Usually this is spear-headed by know-nothings and those who just do not want to pay taxes under any circumstances. Who does? Normally, this question of how the bourgeois state finances itself is of minor interest to socialists but there is another issue at stake. Until working people take state power in their own interests some form of taxation is going to be needed to provide basic services. Hell, in the beginning stages of socialist transformation there may be taxes, depending on the economic superstructure that we inherit from the capitalists.
The argument lurking underneath this one is that if there is no state income tax then the inevitable taxes that will replace that lost revenue will be based on local real property valuations. That means that public services like local education, public works and health care such as they are will be dependent on the wildly varying property tax bases of the various towns. In short, the poor and minorities will get even less public services that at present. And the richer towns? Well, you can already guess about their heartrending problems. We have a side on this one today. Vote it down with both hands!!!
Vote Yes on Question 2- This is a proposition that would decriminalize marijuana possession and use for the recreational smoker, in effect, by making a first offense a civil rather than a criminal one for certain non- drug pusher amounts. There is a system of fines, etc. in place of criminal penalties. Nevertheless the proposition is basically supportable. As socialists we are committed to the decriminalization of all drug use and this proposition is in line with that goal, a basic social right to be left alone to one’s own devises when there are victimless situations involved.
Vote Yes on Question 3- This is a proposition that would ban dog races (essentially greyhound racing) where wagering was involved (subject to state regulation, in other words). The writer of this blog has spend some time betting on various sporting propositions, lately, mainly on college football games (See My revolving weekly Now For The Real Question Of The Day- Who Will Win The National College Football Championship? for current selections.) so I am personally somewhat agnostic on this one, except my “significant other” is very strongly in favor of this one. I will defer to her on this. I would rather watch horses race any day. From my limited knowledge on this subject, the trainers do not do right by these beautiful animals either during their racing careers or seeing that they are provided for after that time.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Hoodoo Lady- Memphis Minnie
CD REVIEW
Hoodoo Lady, Memphis Minnie, 1933-37, Sony, 1991
One of the interesting facts about the development of the blues is that in the early days the recorded music and the bulk of the live performances were done by women, at least they were the most popular exponents of the genre. That time, the early 1920's to the 1930's, was the classic age of women blues performers. Of course, when one thinks about that period the name that comes up is the legendary Bessie Smith. Beyond that, maybe some know Ethel Waters. And beyond that-a blank.
Yet the blues singer under review, Memphis Minnie, probably had as a productive career as either of the above-mentioned names. And here is the kicker. If you were to ask today's leading women blues singers like Bonnie Raitt, Rory Block, Tracey Nelson or Maria Muldaur about influences they will, naturally, give the obligatory Bessie response, but perhaps more surprisingly will also praise Ms. Minnie to the skies.
This compilation, while not technically the best, will explain the why of the above paragraph. Minnie worked with many back up players over the years, some good some bad, but her style and her energy carried most of the production. She was the mistress of the double entendre so popular in old time blues- you know phrases like `put a little sugar in my bowl'. The best of the bunch here are the title song Hoodoo Lady, Ice Man and Butcher Man but the real deal here is that this is an album you acquire a taste for-and then do not want to turn the damn thing off. That, for me, is high praise indeed.
Hoodoo Lady, Memphis Minnie, 1933-37, Sony, 1991
One of the interesting facts about the development of the blues is that in the early days the recorded music and the bulk of the live performances were done by women, at least they were the most popular exponents of the genre. That time, the early 1920's to the 1930's, was the classic age of women blues performers. Of course, when one thinks about that period the name that comes up is the legendary Bessie Smith. Beyond that, maybe some know Ethel Waters. And beyond that-a blank.
Yet the blues singer under review, Memphis Minnie, probably had as a productive career as either of the above-mentioned names. And here is the kicker. If you were to ask today's leading women blues singers like Bonnie Raitt, Rory Block, Tracey Nelson or Maria Muldaur about influences they will, naturally, give the obligatory Bessie response, but perhaps more surprisingly will also praise Ms. Minnie to the skies.
This compilation, while not technically the best, will explain the why of the above paragraph. Minnie worked with many back up players over the years, some good some bad, but her style and her energy carried most of the production. She was the mistress of the double entendre so popular in old time blues- you know phrases like `put a little sugar in my bowl'. The best of the bunch here are the title song Hoodoo Lady, Ice Man and Butcher Man but the real deal here is that this is an album you acquire a taste for-and then do not want to turn the damn thing off. That, for me, is high praise indeed.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
*Saucy and Sexy- The Wicked Old World of James M. Cain- "The Institute"-Sex and Power in Washington
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for American novelist James M. Cain
Sex and Power in Washington
The Institute, James M. Cain, Mason/Charter, New York, 1976
The last time I have had a chance to mention the work of James M. Cain, author of the classic noir works The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity a couple of novels that take place in the 1930-40’s in sunny California, was a later work Mignon set in the Louisiana of the American Civil War days. As usual when I get ‘high’ on an author I like to run through most of his or her work to see where he or she is going with it. Thus, this review of a lesser work, a much lesser work by Cain is something of an obligation. As is familiar to anyone who runs through an author’s lifetime of writing efforts not all such endeavors are equal. The Institute written late in Cain’s literary career shows a man who has run out of steam in his literary efforts.
Why is that so here? Well, the premise that Cain is working under is well-worn. Power, sex and philanthropy or some such combination in the corridors of Washington and its environs has been done to death both before and after this 1976 effort. In his earlier work, the classic stuff, Cain distinguished himself by writing novels that verged on being ‘potboilers’ but when the dust settled they were little gems of literary insight into how the human psyche operated when it got its ‘wanting habits on' as Bessie Smith once sang in an old blues tunes. Not so here as the plot is predictable concerning the powerful showing off their wealth by endowing an institute of learning and several off-hand rather surreal romances, the twists lead nowhere and in the end it turns into a sappy melodrama as all is forgiven and the main characters (who survive) the brainy Dr. Palmer and beautiful Mrs. Garrett, lovers and newly-hatched parents ride off into the sunset. Give me those chiselin’ dames and handy ne’er-do-well guys from the old days anytime. Sorry, James.
Sex and Power in Washington
The Institute, James M. Cain, Mason/Charter, New York, 1976
The last time I have had a chance to mention the work of James M. Cain, author of the classic noir works The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity a couple of novels that take place in the 1930-40’s in sunny California, was a later work Mignon set in the Louisiana of the American Civil War days. As usual when I get ‘high’ on an author I like to run through most of his or her work to see where he or she is going with it. Thus, this review of a lesser work, a much lesser work by Cain is something of an obligation. As is familiar to anyone who runs through an author’s lifetime of writing efforts not all such endeavors are equal. The Institute written late in Cain’s literary career shows a man who has run out of steam in his literary efforts.
Why is that so here? Well, the premise that Cain is working under is well-worn. Power, sex and philanthropy or some such combination in the corridors of Washington and its environs has been done to death both before and after this 1976 effort. In his earlier work, the classic stuff, Cain distinguished himself by writing novels that verged on being ‘potboilers’ but when the dust settled they were little gems of literary insight into how the human psyche operated when it got its ‘wanting habits on' as Bessie Smith once sang in an old blues tunes. Not so here as the plot is predictable concerning the powerful showing off their wealth by endowing an institute of learning and several off-hand rather surreal romances, the twists lead nowhere and in the end it turns into a sappy melodrama as all is forgiven and the main characters (who survive) the brainy Dr. Palmer and beautiful Mrs. Garrett, lovers and newly-hatched parents ride off into the sunset. Give me those chiselin’ dames and handy ne’er-do-well guys from the old days anytime. Sorry, James.
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