***Poet's Corner- Andrew Marvell's Ode To Oliver Cromwell

Here is Andrew Marvell's famous Ode To Oliver Cromwell. Marvell was a friend of, student of and subsequently succeeded John Milton as Secretary of Foreign Tongues under the Cromwellian Protectorate. I will divide this ode up better when I can find a book copy that does so. Markin.

The First Anniversary Of
the Government under O.C.

by Andrew Marvell

Like the vain Curlings of the Watry maze,
Which in smooth streams a sinking Weight does raise;
So Man, declining alwayes, disappears.
In the Weak Circles of increasing Years;
And his short Tumults of themselves Compose,
While flowing Time above his Head does close.
Cromwell alone with greater Vigour runs,
(Sun-like) the Stages of succeeding Suns:
And still the Day which he doth next restore,
Is the just Wonder of the Day before.
Cromwell alone doth with new Lustre spring,
And shines the Jewel of the yearly Ring.

'Tis he the force of scatter'd Time contracts,
And in one Year the Work of Ages acts:
While heavy Monarchs make a wide Return,
Longer, and more Malignant then Saturn:
And though they all Platonique years should raign,
In the same Posture would be found again.
Their earthly Projects under ground they lay,
More slow and brittle then the China clay:
Well may they strive to leave them to their Son,
For one Thing never was by one King don.
Yet some more active for a Frontier Town
Took in by Proxie, beggs a false Renown;
Another triumphs at the publick Cost,
And will have Wonn, if he no more have Lost;
They fight by Others, but in Person wrong,
And only are against their Subjects strong;
Their other Wars seem but a feign'd contest,
This Common Enemy is still opprest;
If Conquerors, on them they turn their might;
If Conquered, on them they wreak their Spight:
They neither build the Temple in their dayes,
Nor Matter for succeeding Founders raise;
Nor Sacred Prophecies consult within,
Much less themselves to perfect them begin,
No other care they bear of things above,
But with Astrologers divine, and Jove,
To know how long their Planet yet Reprives
From the deserved Fate their guilty lives:
Thus (Image-like) and useless time they tell,
And with vain Scepter strike the hourly Bell;
Nor more contribute to the state of Things,
Then wooden Heads unto the Viols strings,

While indefatigable Cromwell hyes,
And cuts his way still nearer to the Skyes,
Learning a Musique in the Region clear,
To tune this lower to that higher Sphere.

So when Amphion did the Lute command,
Which the God gave him, with his gentle hand,
The rougher Stones, unto his Measures hew'd,
Dans'd up in order from the Quarreys rude;
This took a Lower, that an Higher place,
As he the Treble alter'd, or the Base:
No Note he struck, but a new Story lay'd,
And the great Work ascended while he play'd.

The listning Structures he with Wonder ey'd,
And still new Stopps to various Time apply'd:
Now through the Strings a Martial rage he throws,
And joyng streight the Theban Tow'r arose;
Then as he strokes them with a Touch more sweet,
The flocking Marbles in a Palace meet;
But, for he most the graver Notes did try,
Therefore the Temples rear'd their Columns high:
Thus, ere he ceas'd, his sacred Lute creates
Th'harmonious City of the seven Gates.

Such was that wondrous Order and Consent,
When Cromwell tun'd the ruling Instrument;
While tedious Statesmen many years did hack,
Framing a Liberty that still went back;
Whose num'rous Gorge could swallow in an hour
That Island, which the Sea cannot devour:
Then our Amphion issues out and sings,
And once he struck, and twice, the pow'rful Strings.

The Commonwealth then first together came,
And each one enter'd in the willing Frame;
All other Matter yields, and may be rul'd;
But who the Minds of stubborn Men can build?
No Quarry bears a Stone so hardly wrought,
Nor with such labour from its Center brought;
None to be sunk in the Foundation bends,
Each in the House the highest Place contends,
And each the Hand that lays him will direct,
And some fall back upon the Architect;
Yet all compos'd by his attractive Song,
Into the Animated City throng.

The Common-wealth does through their Centers all
Draw the Circumf'rence of the publique Wall;
The crossest Spirits here do take their part,
Fast'ning the Contignation which they thwart;
And they, whose Nature leads them to divide,
Uphold, this one, and that the other Side;
But the most Equal still sustein the Height,
And they as Pillars keep the Work upright;
While the resistance of opposed Minds,
The Fabrick as with Arches stronger binds,
Which on the Basis of a Senate free,
Knit by the Roofs Protecting weight agree.

When for his Foot he thus a place had found,
He hurles e'r since the World about him round,
And in his sev'ral Aspects, like a Star,
Here shines in Peace, and thither shoots a War.
While by his Beams observing Princes steer,
And wisely court the Influence they fear,
O would they rather by his Pattern won.
Kiss the approaching, nor yet angry Son;
And in their numbred Footsteps humbly tread
The path where holy Oracles do lead;
How might they under such a Captain raise
The great Designs kept for the latter Dayes!
But mad with reason, so miscall'd, of State
They know them not, and what they know not, hate
Hence still they sing Hosanna to the Whore,
And her whom they should Massacre adore:
But Indians whom they should convert, subdue;
Nor teach, but traffique with, or burn the Jew.

Unhappy Princes, ignorantly bred,
By Malice some, by Errour more misled;
If gracious Heaven to my Life give length,
Leisure to Times, and to my Weakness Strength,
Then shall I once with graver Accents shake
Your Regal sloth, and your long Slumbers wake:
Like the shrill Huntsman that prevents the East,
Winding his Horn to Kings that chase the Beast.

Till then my Muse shall hollow far behind
Angelique Cromwell who outwings the wind;
And in dark Nights, and in cold Dayes alone
Pursues the Monster thorough every Throne:
Which shrinking to her Roman Den impure,
Gnashes her Goary teeth; nor there secure.

Hence oft I think, if in some happy Hour
High Grace should meet in one with highest Pow'r,
And then a seasonable People still
Should bend to his, as he to Heavens will,
What we might hope, what wonderful Effect
From such a wish'd Conjuncture might reflect.
Sure, the mysterious Work, where none withstand,
Would forthwith finish under such a Hand:
Fore-shortned Time its useless Course would stay,
And soon precipitate the latest Day.
But a thick Cloud about that Morning lyes,
And intercepts the Beams of Mortal eyes,
That 'tis the most which we deteremine can,
If these the Times, then this must be the Man.
And well he therefore does, and well has guest,
Who in his Age has always forward prest:
And knowing not where Heavens choice may light,
Girds yet his Sword, and ready stands to fight;
But Men alas, as if they nothing car'd,
Look on, all unconcern'd, or unprepar'd;
And Stars still fall, and still the Dragons Tail
Swinges the Volumes of its horrid Flail.
For the great Justice that did first suspend
The World by Sin, does by the same extend.
Hence that blest Day still counterpoysed wastes,
The ill delaying, what th'Elected hastes;
Hence landing Nature to new Seas it tost,
And good Designes still with their Authors lost.

And thou, great Cromwell, for whose happy birth
A Mold was chosen out of better Earth;
Whose Saint-like Mother we did lately see
Live out an Age, long as a Pedigree;
That she might seem, could we the Fall dispute,
T'have smelt the Blossome, and not eat the Fruit;
Though none does of more lasting Parents grow,
But never any did them Honor so;
Though thou thine Heart from Evil still unstain'd,
And always hast thy Tongue from fraud refrain'd,
Thou, who so oft through Storms of thundring Lead
Hast born securely thine undaunted Head,
Thy Brest through ponyarding Conspiracies,
Drawn from the Sheath of lying Prophecies;
Thee proof beyond all other Force or Skill,
Our Sins endanger, and shall one day kill.

How near they fail'd, and in thy sudden Fall
At once assay'd to overturn us all.
Our brutish fury strugling to be Free,
Hurry'd thy Horses while they hurry'd thee.
When thou hadst almost quit thy Mortal cares,
And soyl'd in Dust thy Crown of silver Hairs.

Let this one Sorrow interweave among
The other Glories of our yearly Song.
Like skilful Looms which through the costly threed
Of purling Ore, a shining wave do shed:
So shall the Tears we on past Grief employ,
Still as they trickle, glitter in our Joy.
So with more Modesty we may be True,
And speak as of the Dead the Praises due:
While impious Men deceiv'd with pleasure short,
On their own Hopes shall find the Fall retort.

But the poor Beasts wanting their noble Guide,
What could they move? shrunk guiltily aside.
First winged Fear transports them far away,
And leaden Sorrow then their flight did stay.
See how they each his towring Crest abate,
And the green Grass, and their known Mangers hate,
Nor through wide Nostrils snuffe the wanton air,
Nor their round Hoofs, or curled Mane'scompare;
With wandring Eyes, and restless Ears theystood,
And with shrill Neighings ask'd him of the Wood.

Thou Cromwell falling, not a stupid Tree,
Or Rock so savage, but it mourn'd for thee:
And all about was heard a Panique groan,
As if that Natures self were overthrown.
It seem'd the Earth did from the Center tear;
It seem'd the Sun was faln out of the Sphere:
Justice obstructed lay, and Reason fool'd;
Courage disheartned, and Religion cool'd.
A dismal Silence through the Palace went,
And then loud Shreeks the vaulted Marbles rent.
Such as the dying Chorus sings by turns,
And to deaf Seas, and ruthless Tempests mourns,
When now they sink, and now the plundring Streams
Break up each Deck, and rip the Oaken seams.

But thee triumphant hence the firy Carr,
And firy Steeds had born out of the Warr,
From the low World, and thankless Men above,
Unto the Kingdom blest of Peace and Love:
We only mourn'd our selves, in thine Ascent,
Whom thou hadst lest beneath with Mantle rent.

For all delight of Life thou then didst lose,
When to Command, thou didst thy self Depose;
Resigning up thy Privacy so dear,
To turn the headstrong Peoples Charioteer;
For to be Cromwell was a greater thing,
Then ought below, or yet above a King:
Therefore thou rather didst thy Self depress,
Yielding to Rule, because it made thee Less.

For, neither didst thou from the first apply
Thy sober Spirit unto things too High,
But in thine own Fields exercisedst long,
An Healthful Mind within a Body strong;
Till at the Seventh time thou in the Skyes,
As a small Cloud, like a Mans hand didst rise;
Then did thick Mists and Winds the air deform,
And down at last thou pow'rdst the fertile Storm;
Which to the thirsty Land did plenty bring,
But though forewarn'd, o'r-took and wet the King.

What since he did, an higher Force him push'd
Still from behind, and it before him rush'd,
Though undiscern'd among the tumult blind,
Who think those high Decrees by Man design'd.
'Twas Heav'n would not that his Pow'r should cease,
But walk still middle betwixt War and Peace;
Choosing each Stone, and poysing every weight,
Trying the Measures of the Bredth and Height;
Here pulling down, and there erecting New,
Founding a firm State by Proportions true.

When Gideon so did from the War retreat,
Yet by Conquest of two Kings grown great,
He on the Peace extends a Warlike power,
And Is'rel silent saw him rase the Tow'r;
And how he Succoths Elders durst suppress,
With Thorns and Briars of the Wilderness.
No King might ever such a Force have done;
Yet would not he be Lord, nor yet his Son.

Thou with the same strength, and an Heart as plain,
Didst (like thine Olive) still refuse to Reign;
Though why should others all thy Labor spoil,
And Brambles be anointed with thine Oyl,
Whose climbing Flame, without a timely stop,
Had quickly Levell'd every Cedar's top.
Therefore first growing to thy self a Law,
Th'ambitious Shrubs thou in just time didst aw.

So have I seen at Sea, when whirling Winds,
Hurry the Bark, but more the Seamens minds,
Who with mistaken Course salute the Sand,
And threat'ning Rocks misapprehend for Land;
While balefull Tritons to the shipwrack guide,
And Corposants along the Tacklings slide.
The Passengers all wearyed out before,
Giddy, and wishing for the fatall Shore;
Some lusty Mate, who with more carefull Ey
Counted the Hours, and ev'ry Star did spy,
The Helm does from the artless Steersman strain,
And doubles back unto the safer Main.
What though a while they grumble discontent,
Saving himself he does their loss prevent.


'Tis not a Freedome, that where All command;
Nor Tyranniey, where One does them withstand:
But who of both the Bounders knows to lay
Him as their Father must the State obey.

Thou, and thine House, like Noahs Eight did rest,
Left by the Warrs Flood on the Mountains crest:
And the large Vale lay subject to thy Will,
Which thou but as an Husbandman wouldst Till:
And only didst for others plant the Vine
Of Liberty, not drunken with its Wine.

That sober Liberty which men may have,
That they enjoy, but more they vainly crave:
And such as to their Parents Tents do press,
May shew their own, not see his Nakedness.

Yet such a Chammish issue still does rage,
The Shame and Plague both of the Land and Age,
Who watch'd thy halting, and thy Fall deride,
Rejoycing when thy Foot had slipt aside;
That their new King might the fifth Scepter shake,
And make the World, by his Example, Quake:
Whose frantique Army should they want for Men
Might muster Heresies, so one were ten.
What thy Misfortune, they the Spirit call,
And their Religion only is to Fall.
Oh Mahomet! now couldst thou rise again,
Thy Falling sicknes should have made thee Reign,
While Feake and Simpson would in many a Tome,
Have writ the Comments of thy sacred Foame:
For soon thou mightst have past among their Rant
Wer't but for thine unmoved Tulipant;
As thou must needs have own'd them of thy band
For Prophecies fit to be Alcorand.

Accursed Locusts, whom your King does spit
Out of the Center of th' unbottom'd Pit;
Wand'rers, Adult'rers, Lyers, Munser's rest,
Sorcerers, Atheists, Jesuites, Possest;
You who the Scriptures and the Laws deface
With the same liberty as Points and Lace;
Oh Race most hypocritically strict!
Bent to reduce us to the ancient Pict;
Well may you act the Adam and the Eve;
Ay, and the Serpent too that did deceive.

But the great Captain, now the danger's ore,
Makes you for his sake Tremble one fit more;
And, to your spight, returning yet alive
Does with himself all that is good revive.

So when first Man did through the Morning new
See the bright Sun his shining Race pursue,
All day he follow'd with unwearied sight,
Pleas'd with that other World of moving Light;
But thought him when he miss'd his setting beams,
Sunk in the Hills, or plung'd below the Streams.
While dismal blacks hung round the Universe,
And Stars (like Tapers) burn'd upon his Herse:
And Owls and Ravens with their screeching noyse
Did make the Fun'rals sadder by their Joyes.
His weeping Eys the dolefull Vigils keep,
Not knowing yet the Night was made for sleep:
Still to the West, where he him lost, he turn'd,
And with such accents, as Despairing, mourn'd:
Why did mine Eyes once see so bright a Ray;
Or why Day last no longer than a Day?
When streight the Sun behind him he descry'd,
Smiling serenely from the further side.

So while our Star that gives us Light and Heat,
Seem'd now a long and gloomy Night to threat,
Up from the other World his Flame he darts,
And Princes, shining through their windows, starts;
Who their suspected Counsellors refuse,
And credulous Ambassadors accuse.

“Is this,” saith one, “the Nation that we read
Spent with both Wars, under a Captain dead?
Yet rig a Navy while we dress us late;
And ere we Dine, rase and rebuild our State.
What Oaken Forrests, and what golden Mines!
What Mints of Men, what Union of Designes!
Unless their Ships, do, as their Fowle proceed
Of shedding Leaves, that with their Ocean breed.
Theirs are not Ships, but rather Arks of War,
And beaked Promontories sail'd from farr;
Of floting Islands a new Hatched Nest;
A Fleet of Worlds, of other Worlds in quest;
An hideous shole of wood-Leviathans,
Arm'd with three Tire of brazen Hurricans;
That through the Center shoot their thundring side
And sink the Earth that does at Anchor ride.
What refuge to escape them can be found,
Whose watry Leaguers all the world surround?
Needs must we all their Tributaries be,
Whose Navies hold the Sluces of the Sea.
The Ocean is the Fountain of Command,
But that once took, we Captives are on Land:
And those that have the Waters for their share,
Can quickly leave us neither Earth nor Air.
Yet if through these our Fears could find a pass;
Through double Oak, & lin'd with treble Brass;
That one Man still, although but nam'd, alarms
More then all Men, all Navies, and all Arms.
Him, all the Day, Him, in late Nights I dread,
And still his Sword seems hanging o're my head.
The Nation had been ours, but his one Soul
Moves the great Bulk, and animates the whole.
He Secrecy with Number hath inchas'd,
Courage with Age, Maturity with Hast:
The Valiants Terror, Riddle of the Wise;
And still his Fauchion all our Knots unties.
Where did he learn those Arts that cost us dear?
Where below Earth, or where above the Sphere?
He seems a King by long Succession born,
And yet the same to be a King does scorn.
Abroad a King he seems, and something more,
At Home a Subject on the equal Floor.
O could I once him with our Title see,
So should I hope yet he might Dye as wee.
But let them write his Praise that love him best,
It grieves me sore to have thus much confest.”

Pardon, great Prince, if thus their Fear or Spight
More then our Love and Duty do thee Right.
I yield, nor further will the Prize contend;
So that we both alike may miss our End:
While thou thy venerable Head dost raise
As far above their Malice as my Praise.
And as the Angel of our Commonweal,
Troubling the Waters, yearly mak'st them Heal.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source:
Marvell, Andrew. The Complete Poems.
George deF. Lord, Ed.
London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1984. 93-104.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




to Andrew Marvell

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Created by Anniina Jokinen on July 25, 2000. Last updated on September 10, 2006.

Waiting To Exhale- Pop Music in 1960

CD REVIEW

The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll-1960, various artists, Time-Life Music, 1995

In the late 1960’s a number of my friends from the Generation of ’68 who considered themselves part of the counter-cultural movement argued, sincerely I believe, that music, by which they meant rock or maybe folk/rock music was the revolution. According to this political logic the various summers of love, be-ins, Woodstocks, etc., if sustained, would create the atmosphere for social change without the need for either a political overthrow of the current capitalist system or doing any heavy political lifting to overturn society’s values and create the ‘new man and woman’. Probably the most articulate expression of that concept was expounded by the likes of John and Yoko Lennon. Well, life has demonstrated once and for all the fantastic nature of that assertion. Which is just a roundabout way for me to argue my point here that while music may not be the revolution some music may be ‘counter-revolutionary’. Let me explain that further.

Whatever the roots of rock and roll- country, rockabilly, blues, rhythm and blues, etc. the sound produced was clearly a dramatic departure from the likes of Ms. Patti Page and her "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" and songs of that ilk that clogged up the airwaves in the early 1950’s. Rock got people, and by this I mean young ‘impressionable’ people like myself, moving. Moving much more than our parents liked. In short, getting caught up in the ‘sexual’ sensual beat of things like "Shake, Rattle and Roll" or "Good Rockin’ Tonight". And there was a palpable backlash from adults and other authorities to this. While teens might have then begun to have more disposable dollars to spend that money came from parents, for the most part. The record companies and other responded, at least in part, to that reality. Hence this truly scary compilation of tunes from 1960 that, frankly, put my hair on ends when I listened to it recently.

Don’t get me wrong. I listened, like millions of other teenagers, to this music and liked some of it but in listening to it in combination back-to-back with Carl Perkins' "Classic Hits" for Sun Records I want my money back. No, not from Time-Life but from whoever imposed this stuff on us in 1960. Okay, compare the rock classics of 1955 like Perkins’ "Blue Suede Shoes" or "Everyone Wants To Be My Baby" and The Theme From “A Summer Place” by Percy Faith and the band, Connie Steven’s "Sixteen Reasons" or Bobby Vee’s "Devil or Angel". Need I go on or say more. Unless you are a nostalgically-inclined modern popular music historian then pass this by and wait for The Rolling Stones or the Beatles to come by in a few years. Enough said

*400th Anniversary Birthday Greetings- John Milton, Revolutionary And Poet

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for John Milton for background information about this important republican publicist of the English Revolution of the 17th century.

BOOK REVIEW

Milton And The English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Penguin Press, New York 1972

The name and work of the late British Marxist historian Christopher Hill should be fairly well known to readers of this space who follow my reviews on the subject of the 17th century English Revolution. That revolution has legitimately been described as the first one of the modern era and had profound repercussions, especially on the American Revolution and later events on this continent. Although Hill was an ardent Stalinist, seemingly to the end of his life, his works, since they were not as subjected to the conforming pressures of the Soviet political line that he adhered to, are less influenced by that distorting pressure. To our benefit.

More importantly, along the way Professor Hill almost single-handedly brought to life the under- classes that formed the backbone of the plebeian efforts during that revolution. We would, surely, know far less about Fifth Monarchists, Brownists, Ranters, panters, Shakers, Quakers and fakers without the sharp eye of the good professor. All to the tune of, and in the spirit of that famous last line from John Milton's "Paradise Lost" about the locus of paradise, except instead of trying to explain the ways of god to man the professor has tried to explain ways of our earlier plebeian brothers and sisters to us.

That said, on this the 400th Anniversary year of the birth of John Milton the great English revolutionary and poet it is fitting that the occasion be commemorated by a review of one of Professor Hill's major literary/historical works, "Milton and The English Revolution". Now with a figure like Milton, so central to the Western literary canon, it is, after 400 years of critique, entirely possible to analysis his life and work from a merely literary or religious point of view and "deep-six" his central role as a propagandist for Cromwell's republican English Commonwealth, as a defender of regicide in "The Tenure Of Kings and Magistrates" or as a man emerged in the various radical religious and political controversies of his day. The literary and political fight against such reductionism is, in fact, both the purpose of Hill's book and his core argument in order to take back the person of John Milton for the revolution. And along the way dispel the proposition that Milton was a cloistered "up-tight" Puritan exemplar, especially through his analysis of Milton's tracts on divorce and an examination of his career during the tumultuously 1640's. To this reviewer's mind Hill succeeds in the first task although I still have reservations in imagining the figure of a `rakish' John Milton on the second.

As always in dealing with the controversies of the mid-17th in England it is best to have knowledge of the various religious controversies that were swirling through all classes as the showdown with the king, and more importantly, the theory of 'divine right' of kings and the heavy monarchical/church state apparatus based on it. Hill's main argument on this point is that Milton's known theological divergences from then orthodox Laudian Church of England dogma or, for that matter; orthodox Puritan dogma as well made him a prime candidate to be the leading propagandist for the republican side in the dispute.

Thus, Milton intellectually was totally emerged in the on-going controversies over mortalism, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the literalness (and timing) of the Second Coming, the virgin birth, arminianism, Arianism and the thousand and one varieties on this theme that had more than one champion in its day. As Hill notes these controversies may seem rather abstract or of merely academic interest today but then one could pay with his or her life for a wrong move. Most famously, look at the fate of Quaker James Nayler, for one, for the truth of that matter-and remember that man drew a severe sentence for his `folly' during the fairly "enlightened" Cromwellian Protectorate.

If one recognizes, as I following Professor Hill do, the politically shrewd aspect of Milton's career as well as that of his role as thoughtful if somewhat arbitrary advocate for various political causes that were dear to his heart then his role as propagandist for the Republic is easier to understand. As Secretary of Foreign Tongues he was the voice of the English Revolution to the known world. In that capacity, rather than that of a 'private intellectual' the reading of such treatises as his defense of regicide "Tenure of Kings And Magistrates" and his rebuttal to Charles I in "Eikonoklastes" makes more sense.

At one time I placed Milton as something of the 17th century equivalent of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the 20th century who, according to no less an authority than George Bernard Shaw, was the "prince of pamphleteers" of his era. I now believe this earlier characterization of mine made Milton more organizationally and theoretically committed to the fate of the revolution, as he suffered later disillusions with the revolution under the Commonwealth, than he actually was. However, among the literary set of the English Revolution, his is the most outstanding voice trying to push the revolution, the "revolution of the saints" to put it in the parlance of the day, to the left. All the way to 1660 and beyond, despite his physical blindness. And then in defeat to explain what went wrong, as well.

Although Hill has drawn in this little political biography a portrait of Milton as a man enmeshed in his times his seminal poetic and other literary work after his narrow escape from the clutches of a vengeful Charles II in 1660- the trilogy, "Paradise Lost", "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes" are also well analyzed. I do not, however, want to enter into that post-revolutionary literary/political discussion which takes up the last part of the book here, interesting as it is. As mentioned above more than enough ink has been spilled over the last four hundred years deciphering the meanings of those works by the literary set. The reader can read this section and make up his or her mind without my layman's literary comments. To conclude then, this book pays due homage to the prime literary defender of the "Good Old Cause", a cause that WAS worth fighting for. All Honor To The Memory Of John Milton, Revolutionary And Poet.

*Poet's Corner- John Milton's "Pardise Lost"

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for John Milton's master poetic attempt to "explain the ways of god to man", "Paradise Lost". Short of posting the whole work this, at least, gives a taste of what he was trying to do. Of course, check Christopher Hill's, "Milton and The English Revolution", or or sources to get the real "skinny".

*Defend The Republic Window Workers' Chicago Factory Occupation

Click on the title to link to an article in December 2009 "Socialist Appeal" concerning last year's factory take-over at the Republic Door and Window factory in Chicago.

Commentary

This is a little news item that I have just picked up from the AP. I note here that last week I mentioned as a "fantasy" that the Detroit auto workers needed to "seize" the factories in order to get something for all the wealth they had produced. One should also note that this was a union-led action. More, hopefully much more, later. Markin



Idled workers occupy factory in Chicago

By Rupa Shenoy

Associated Press Writer / December 6, 2008

CHICAGO—Workers laid off from their jobs at a factory have occupied the building and are demanding assurances they'll get severance and vacation pay that they say they are owed.

About 200 employees of Republic Windows and Doors began their sit-in Friday, the last scheduled day of the plant's operation.

Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give 60 days' notice required by law before shutting down.

Workers also were angered when company officials didn't show up for a meeting Friday that had been arranged by U.S. Rep Luis Gutierrez, a Chicago Democrat, she said.

During the peaceful takeover, workers have been shoveling snow and cleaning the building, Fried said.

"We're doing something we haven't since the 1930s, so we're trying to make it work," Fried said.

Union officials said another meeting with the company is scheduled for Monday.

Representatives of Republic Windows did not immediately respond Saturday to calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Police spokeswoman Laura Kubiak said authorities were aware of the situation and officers were patrolling the area.

Crain's Chicago Business reported that the company's monthly sales had fallen to $2.9 million from $4 million during the past month. In a memo to the union, obtained by the business journal, Republic CEO Rich Gillman said the company had "no choice but to shut our doors."

© Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
More articles in Nation

*Since I Met You Baby- The Music Of Ivory Joe Hunter

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Ivory Joe Hunter performing his classic "Since I Met You Baby."

CD REVIEW

Since I Met You Baby: The Best of Ivory Joe Hunter, Razor and Tie Records, 1994

Here is a little quiz. Ask someone from the Generation of ’68 (forget anyone younger) if they know who the legendary rhythm and blues pianist Ivory Joe Hunter was. Probably, no response. Then ask whether they remember the song "Since I Met You Baby". They will start singing out the verses for you from a time of young love, class proms or school dances. Yes, that is Ivory Joe Hunter. While he never was at the top of my list of rhythm and blues artists who played piano he nevertheless was one of those instrumental artists who, kind of behind the scenes, influenced a whole generation of musicians to play and sing in that very sweet sing-song way. This, in fact, was the key to white kids like me in the 1950’s getting hip to black music. Nobody, at least who I knew, started with a dose of Ike Turner doing "Rocket 88" to beat the band. Or Elmore James stomping on that slide guitar doing "Dust My Broom". Or even Big Joe Turner jumping on "Shake, Rattle and Roll". We all learned about that ‘black’ thing from Ivory Joe then moved to the big boys (and girls).

As far as the work in this best of album goes, obviously "Since I Met You Baby" is tops. A few others using that same basic melody, like "Empty Arms", are here. Some early boogie woogie work like "Rockin’ Chair Boogie" jumps out at you. However overall, despite the importance of Ivory Joe to the roots of rhythm and blues and to our young love lives, there are, frankly, other artists I would run out and buy first now that I know what’s what with this kind of music.


IVORY JOE HUNTER lyrics - Since I Met You Baby

(Ivory Joe Hunter)

Since I met you baby
My whole life has changed
Since I met you baby
My whole life has changed
And everybody tells me
That I am not the same

I don't need nobody
To tell my troubles to
I don't need nobody
To tell my troubles to
'Cause since I met you baby
All I need is you

[Instrumental Interlude]

Since I met you baby
I'm a happy man
Since I met you baby
I'm a happy man
I'm gonna try to please you
In every way I can

*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" - We Are The Party Of The Russian Revolution- A Guest Commentary

Clink on the headline to link to a Part Three of a three part "Workers Vanguard" commentary , dated December 5, 2008, on the continuing relevance of the lessons of the Russian revolution of 1917 for the international labor movement.

Markin comment:

If you believe, as I do, that the Russian October Revolution of 1917 led by Lenin, Trotsky and their fellow Bolsheviks was the defining moment for the international working class in the 20th century and for world politics you should read this three- part commentary. If you also desire to learn the lessons of that revolution, warts and all, you NEED to read this article as a primer on that revolutionary catalyst. If you fervently want to help create new Octobers then you best get busy and read everything you can on the subject. And then come out and join us, as the children of the Russian revolution, in order to put substance into the slogan in the headline.






Workers Vanguard No. 924
7 November 2008

We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution

Part One

We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by comrade Victor Gibbons given in Los Angeles on 10 November 2007 in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

The vast political gulf that separates the International Communist League from the rest of the left can be summed up in one declaration: “We are the party of the Russian Revolution.” We salute the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in the same spirit as the red proletariat of Petrograd celebrated its first anniversary—as “the greatest event in the history of the world.” And it remains the most important event in the history of human civilization: the path that the workers and toiling masses must follow, if we are to escape the death agony of capitalism and embark on the transition to communist society.

The founder and historic leader of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, stated in his 1939 “Speech on the Russian Question”:

“The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once and for all, took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality....

“The October revolution put socialism on the order of the day throughout the world. It revived and shaped and developed the revolutionary labor movement of the world out of the bloody chaos of the war. The Russian revolution showed in practice, by example, how the workers’ revolution is to be made. It revealed in life the role of the party. It showed in life what kind of a party the workers must have.”

For a more extended discussion of the 1917 Revolution, I recommend that you read a series of four educationals on Leon Trotsky’s The History of the Russian Revolution (1932) in WV Nos. 874, 875, 877 and 879 (4 August, 1 September, 29 September and 27 October 2006).

During the course of the Russian Revolution, the multinational proletariat, drawing behind it the peasantry and the oppressed nationalities, forged its own new organs of class power, the soviets. With the smashing of the old capitalist state, these organs, under Bolshevik leadership, formed the basis of the new workers state. The vanguard of the workers understood that they were not just taking power in Russia; they were opening the first chapter of the world socialist revolution. They inspired workers uprisings throughout Europe and inspired rebellions by imperialism’s colonial slaves.

The tremors of October 1917 extended all the way around the globe to right here in the richest bastion of imperialism. In 1919, the Bolsheviks launched the Communist International (CI). Under Bolshevik leaders V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the CI and the Soviet state became the most powerful revolutionary force ever yet assembled by the world proletariat.

The October Revolution forged a Red Army that emerged victorious from four years of civil war as well as invasion by the armies of 14 capitalist powers in league with their local capitalist henchmen. The Soviet government expropriated the capitalists and repudiated outright the tsar’s massive debt to foreign bankers. It proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education, as the first steps to building a socialist society.

It gave land to the peasants and self-determination to the many oppressed nations of the tsar’s prison house of peoples. It tore down the whole edifice of Russian patriarchal medievalism. The early Soviet government not only separated church and state, it put all available resources toward universal secular education and science. It eliminated all laws discriminating against national and ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals. Soviet Russia not only gave the vote to women at a time when the Western imperialists were beating them bloody for demanding such a thing; the Bolsheviks put women in the front ranks of proletarian rule as factory managers, state commissars and army commanders.

The Soviet workers state proved the superiority of nationalized property and planned economy over capitalist private property and anarchy in production. Out of the historical poverty left by tsarist Russia, the wreckage left by imperialist invasions, the continuing economic and military encirclement by imperialism, and in spite of Stalinist mismanagement and parasitism, the Soviet Union achieved unrivaled modernization and growth. At the same time as the capitalist world had fallen into the abyss of the 1930s Great Depression, the Soviet planned economy brought tens of millions of Soviet workers and peasants out of Russia’s medieval villages and turned them into educated modern proletarians, scientists, directors of industry and commanders of the mechanized Red Army.

The Soviet Union was the industrial and military powerhouse that made possible, and protected, the overturns of capitalist rule from Cuba to East Europe to China to Vietnam and North Korea. Had it not been for the USSR, the imperialists would have attacked North Korea, China and Vietnam with nuclear weapons during the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism there in 1991-92 and in East Europe transformed the political landscape of the planet and threw proletarian consciousness back to a point in which workers today by and large no longer associate their struggles with the goal of socialism. Capitalist counterrevolution triggered an unparalleled economic collapse throughout the former Soviet Union, with skyrocketing rates of poverty and disease combined with a catastrophic decline in the average lifespan. Internationally, with the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to their ambitions, the imperialists feel they have a free hand to project their military might, from Serbia to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The bourgeoisie has always wanted to wipe the October Revolution from historical memory by burying it under a mountain of lies. They often call it a conspiracy or putsch, but the 1917 October Revolution was no putsch and no accident. It was needed because the socially organized productive forces of the planet were tearing at bourgeois private property forms, and at the bourgeois nation-states as well. These had become shackles on social progress. The first imperialist world war of 1914-18 marked the descent of the capitalist system into a barbaric destruction of society’s productive forces, culture and humanity itself. World War I signaled that, to free the planet’s productive forces from the death grip of capitalist imperialism, proletarian revolution, in the historical sense, had to be on the order of the day. The October Revolution happened because it was organized and led by a party that was able to instill in the proletariat this understanding of its historic mission.

Capitalist imperialism is still caught in its fatal contradictions; it still creates a proletariat with the social power to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and it still compels the workers to fight for their survival. Our duty is to make sure that there will be a party like Lenin’s in the right place at the right time. So this talk is not just about what happened in 1917 in Russia, it is also about the fight of the ICL to make new Octobers.

War and Revolution

The immediate backdrop to the outbreak of revolution in Russia in February 1917 was World War I. This war had a profound impact on Lenin’s thinking. It had triggered the collapse of the Second “Socialist” International. Beginning on 4 August 1914, the vast majority of its affiliated parties lined up behind their bourgeoisies’ war mobilizations. The Bolsheviks turned out to be among the few that sought to act on the International’s prior resolutions to use war to hasten workers revolution.

The collapse of the old International led Lenin to generalize his split with the Mensheviks in Russia. That split went back to the 1903 fight over the definition of party membership; the differences broadened shortly thereafter as the Bolsheviks rejected the Mensheviks’ promotion of the liberal bourgeoisie as the purported leadership of an overthrow of the tsar. The split had become definitive by 1912.

Lenin concluded from World War I that opportunism in the workers movement was not a vestigial or localized phenomenon that could be overcome within a common party. He concluded that the Second International had been destroyed and that a new revolutionary international must be built through a complete split with not only the outright jingoists, but also the centrists who covered for them by using fake-Marxist arguments. The archetype of such centrists at the time was the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky.

Lenin held that the war had demonstrated that capitalism was in its final stage of decay and that proletarian socialist revolution offered the only way out of a continuing descent into barbarism. He maintained that the path to proletarian revolution was the transformation of the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war and that the condition for this was that socialists must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state in the war. Lenin’s policies brilliantly anticipated the revolutionary sweep of events to come and pointed to the program needed to meet them.

It was in the Russian capital of Petrograd on International Women’s Day, 23 February 1917 (by the old Julian calendar) when the social tensions exacerbated by World War I burst. A strike of mostly women textile workers demanded bread and war rations. There were over 1,000 casualties as ever more workers joined the street fighting and launched a general strike on the 25th. This was the start of the February Revolution. Throughout Russia, police and state officials were sent packing, and on February 27 the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was formed. The election of soviets in the factories and in the army reflected the workers’ experience in the 1905 Revolution. (You can read a presentation on the 1905 Russian Revolution in WV No. 872, 9 June 2006.)

Let’s take a moment to define “soviets.” These were working-class organs, councils of deputies elected from workplaces and army units. The workers elected their deputies, could actively control them and, whenever need be, recall them. The soviets were organs of struggle, insurgency and proletarian administration.

But the paradox of the February Revolution was that while the autocracy had been overthrown by the workers, many of them schooled over the years by the Bolsheviks, the official government that emerged was bourgeois. Even as street fighting was raging in Petrograd, a self-appointed Provisional Committee of bourgeois-monarchist politicians met in the Tauride Palace on the night of February 27, behind the back of the popular revolution. They declared a Provisional Government aimed at erecting a constitutional monarchy.

And while the Bolsheviks and the workers were still in the streets battling the tsar’s gendarmes, a cabal rushed to the other wing of the Tauride Palace and appointed themselves the heads of the Petrograd and All-Russian soviets. These were the leaders of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs). While the SRs were largely based on the peasantry, the Mensheviks represented urban petty-bourgeois layers and the more conservative and privileged workers. The program of the Mensheviks and SRs was that the bourgeoisie should lead and rule, and they desperately appealed to the bourgeois Provisional Government to take control.

The February Revolution thus resulted in a situation of dual power. That is, alongside the Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie, there stood the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, based on the working class and answering to it. This situation could not last. One class or the other would have to rule.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks’ internal life was an arena of constant debates. And in the course of 1917, a struggle recurred between Lenin and a conservative wing centered around Bolshevik leaders Lev Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin. And as we will see, the latter three would come together again after the October Revolution.

Lenin waged a key fight with them when he returned to Petrograd on April 3. While still trapped in Swiss exile, he had been reading with increasing alarm in the party paper, Pravda, of Kamenev and Stalin’s “conditional” support to the Provisional Government. They dropped Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism on the war and embraced a variety of Menshevik defensism, under the cover of pressuring the Provisional Government to negotiate an end to the war. They moved to merge the Bolsheviks with the Mensheviks. They were steering the party towards the Menshevik mirage of a parliamentary pressure group on the government of Prince Lvov!

When he finally arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd, Lenin climbed atop an armored car to address the cheering crowds that had brought down the tsar. Lenin hailed them and, to the shock of the official pro-war Soviet welcoming committee, gave an internationalist salute to the German revolutionary Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht who was in a prison cell for opposing German militarism and its fake-socialist supporters: “The hour is not far when, at the summons of our comrade Karl Liebknecht, the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters.... Long live the world-wide socialist revolution!”

This was the opening shot of Lenin’s fight to rearm the party. He was adamant on the principle of no support to the capitalist Provisional Government and its imperialist war. It was a split issue. He was a minority of one, but he knew his program corresponded to the needs of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin’s program for proletarian seizure of power was already taking shape in the masses’ own struggles. “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!” would be concretized on Bolshevik banners that read “All Power to the Soviets!” and “Down With the War!” What made it possible for Lenin to turn the party wheel toward the proletarian seizure of power was that by the end of April he rallied decisive support from the proletarian provinces and industrial districts of the capital.

Whenever you hear us Spartacists being called “splitters” or you hear sermons about “unity, unity,” just remember: Lenin could not have led a workers revolution alongside supporters of the bourgeois government and imperialist war.

State and Revolution

One of Lenin’s great achievements during 1917 was his revival and defense of the teachings of Karl Marx and his lifelong comrade, Friedrich Engels, on the state. In July, as he was hiding from a government death squad, Lenin devoted what he thought might be his last days to completing a pamphlet, The State and Revolution. He wrote that the bourgeoisie uses lies to hide its dictatorship, but that Marxists must state the truth: states are not neutral arbiters above classes.

Engels defined the core of the state as armed bodies of men, the prisons and police who hold a monopoly of violence over society. These instruments were forged in wars and revolutions for the social domination of particular classes. These social classes are defined by their property rights in relation to society’s means of production. Thus all states are instruments for the domination of a particular class’s property forms in the means of production. In modern society, there are only two fundamental classes: the bourgeoisie, which owns the means of production; and the proletariat, defined as those who own only their labor power. The capitalists require private property in the means of production, the workers need socialized ownership of them. The interests of the capitalists and workers are thus absolutely counterposed and cannot be served by one and the same state.

Lenin also explained that it is impossible to make the institutions of the bourgeoisie’s class dictatorship serve the proletariat: “Marx’s idea is that the working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made state machinery,’ and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.” The proletariat had to build up its own organs of state power out of such things as factory committees, unions, red guards, workers militias, soldiers committees and revolutionary soviets, independent of, and in active struggle against, the old bourgeois state. These were built in 1917 and, after the workers’ revolutionary seizure of power, became the basis of a new kind of state: the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was a fundamentally different power from all previous states in that its purpose was ultimately not perpetuation of class domination, but the transition to classless, therefore, stateless, socialist society.

The Bolsheviks’ Fight Against Class Collaboration

The first Provisional Government was brought down in a political firestorm over its pledge to continue the hated imperialist war. A new cabinet was formed on May 5, and this time the SR and Menshevik Soviet leaders took ministerial posts in the capitalist government. Trotsky later called this Russian coalition government “the greatest historical example of the Popular Front.” The popular front was the name that the Stalinists would use, starting in the 1930s, to designate their coalition government betrayals. It also goes by other names: Union of the Left, Unidad Popular, Tripartite Alliance.

Such class collaboration is not a tactic, but the greatest betrayal. Any political bloc that a workers party enters into with capitalist parties, whether in government or in opposition, is a pledge by the traitorous working-class leaders that they will not violate the bourgeois order. It means that the workers party will take political responsibility for policing the bourgeois social order.

Lenin and Trotsky devised a slogan in response to the coalition government: “Down With the Ten Capitalist Ministers!” This meant: break the coalition with the capitalists; the workers and soldiers Soviets should take all the power! The refusal of the Mensheviks and SRs to do this exposed them before the mass of workers, soldiers and peasants of Russia who still followed them.

In June, the coalition government launched a new war offensive. This impelled the Petrograd proletariat and sailors of the neighboring Kronstadt naval base to embark on a three-day armed demonstration in July to demand the Soviet leaders end the hated war and take power. The Bolsheviks strove to prevent a premature showdown but, unable to hold back the mobilization, took their place at its head to provide leadership.

Capitalist Petrograd’s reaction was to bring in reactionary troops from the front and launch a reign of terror. But when even this failed to stop the Bolsheviks, the bourgeoisie in August resolved on a military coup by the Commander-in-Chief of the army, General Lavr Kornilov, to crush the Soviets altogether. The conciliationist Soviet tops were paralyzed, but the masses rallied around the Bolshevik-organized united-front action that stopped Kornilov in his tracks.

Kornilov was gearing up to sweep away the Provisional Government along with the Soviets as a whole. In mobilizing to stop Kornilov, the Bolsheviks were defending the Provisional Government, but this was strictly military defense. The Bolsheviks gave absolutely no political support to the Provisional Government. On the contrary, while the workers and soldiers mobilized against the counterrevolutionary threat, the Bolsheviks exposed the traitors—the Mensheviks and SRs—in the Provisional Government, who were in constant communication with Kornilov.

A crucial corner had been turned by the beginning of September. The masses were convinced through their Bolshevik-led struggle against Kornilov that the old Soviet misleaders were kaput and that only the Bolsheviks would take decisive action to end the war and stop capitalist sabotage of the economy. The General Staff of the army was no longer capable of mobilizing military units against revolutionary Petrograd. The countryside was aflame as returning peasant soldiers seized the landlords’ fields and torched palatial estates. On September 4, Trotsky was released from prison, and by the 23rd he was elected Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. The Bolsheviks finally had solid majorities in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets. Trotsky declared, “Long live the direct and open struggle for a revolutionary power throughout the country!” Lenin hammered home: Get on with it, take power!

The Party, the Soviets and the Conquest of Power

The Bolshevik Central Committee met on October 10 and 16 to finalize the insurrection. At both meetings Zinoviev and Kamenev were opposed to insurrection, while the Lenin and Trotsky wing carried the majority in support of it. Everywhere, factory Red Guards were drilling, workers at the arms factories funneled weapons directly to the workers militias, and the Petrograd Soviet and Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute became a beehive of working-class organization.

On October 18, Kamenev and Zinoviev publicly blew the whistle on the insurrection in the press. Lenin called them strikebreakers and demanded their expulsion. As Trotsky explained in his 1924 work, Lessons of October, sharp turns such as the leap to insurrection footing provoke conservative tendencies latent in the party into opposition. Trotsky defined the essence of Bolshevism as “such a training, such a tempering and such an organization of the proletarian vanguard as enables the latter to seize power, arms in hand” and the social-democratic (Menshevik) tendency as “the acceptance of a reformist opposition activity within the framework of bourgeois society and an adaptation to its legality—i.e. the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state.”

As we’ve seen, the soviets by themselves do not settle the question of power. They can serve different programs and leaderships. As Trotsky wrote, “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.”

The insurrection took place on the eve of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on October 25th. Lenin reappeared in public and read out declarations on peace, land and the rights of the toilers. The Bolsheviks’ proclamations were punctuated by the steady boom of red naval artillery directed against the government holdouts in the Winter Palace. Lenin declared: “The Russian started the revolution, and the German will carry it through to the end.” He also said: “A new phase has opened up not just in Russia, but throughout the entire world.”

Isolation of the Revolution and Stalinist Degeneration

The masses of workers in war-ravaged Europe looked to the example of Soviet Russia. However, the social-democratic leaders of the mass reformist workers parties sought to preserve the capitalist order and strangle the October Revolution. Hamstrung by this treachery, insurgent workers in Europe failed in their efforts to take and hold power in Finland (1918), Germany (1918-19), Hungary (1919) and Italy (1919-20), where revolutionary struggles went down to defeat. What was lacking were programmatically grounded and battle-tested revolutionary parties like the Bolshevik Party, capable of leading the workers in victory over the social-democratic and nationalist defenders of capitalist rule.

Within Soviet Russia, the Red Army eventually repulsed all the imperialist-sponsored troops and domestic White Guards, but the country emerged exhausted and drained from the Civil War. There was a vast gulf between the Bolsheviks’ communist goals and the prevailing material scarcity and want. Not only was industry in ruins, the vibrant proletariat that had accomplished October had practically ceased to exist. Vast parts of Moscow and Petrograd were like dark, frozen ghost towns. Instead of an influx of material resources from a Soviet Europe to help rebuild Russia’s devastated infrastructure, Soviet Russia was swept by famine that reached the point of cannibalism in the countryside.

Because of the material and cultural poverty inherited from tsarism, the Bolsheviks early on had to utilize those remaining former functionaries, technical specialists and military officers who, often for careerist reasons, offered their services to the new regime. Lenin warned at the March 1922 Eleventh Party Congress that “‘Four thousand seven hundred responsible communists’ in Moscow administer the state machine. ‘Who is leading whom? I doubt very much whether you can say that the communists are in the lead’” (quoted in Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, 1936). A nascent conservative and bureaucratized layer had developed—using its position to secure privileges amidst general scarcity—that became a transmission belt for alien class interests and conservative political moods into the Bolshevik Party itself.

These were the conditions in which the revolutionary core of the Bolshevik Party was outflanked by the growing conservative wing, centered on the party apparatus headed by Stalin. After Lenin was struck down by a stroke in May 1922, Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a secret “troika” (or triumvirate) to stop Trotsky from succeeding him as central leader of the party. Their bloc against Trotsky became a center around which opponents of the party’s Leninist wing would act to usurp political power. Stalin emerged as the protector and spokesman for the conservative, bureaucratic layer in the party and state apparatuses.

Doing away with Great Russian chauvinist despotism, the Bolsheviks in power offered full democratic rights to all ethnicities in what had been, in Lenin’s words, the tsarist “prison house of peoples.” In order to liberate the myriad peoples at different levels of national consolidation, a variety of soviet republics were established, from Union Republics for fully formed nations to Autonomous Oblasts (provinces) for various nationalities. In areas of heavy interpenetration of peoples, such as the Caucasus, the resulting complicated checkerboard of autonomous regions set an internationalist framework for intercourse among the peoples.

It was precisely over the national question in the Caucasus that the first decisive political fight against the developing Stalinist bureaucracy was waged by Lenin. After Stalin attempted to deny the Georgian, Azerbaijani and Armenian republics their sovereign status and force them into a Transcaucasian federation, Lenin broke with him in late 1922. Lenin resolved to consummate a bloc with Trotsky, preparing to, in the words of one of his secretaries, drop a “bomb” on Stalin at the upcoming Twelfth Party Congress, held in April 1923. However, Lenin was debilitated by another stroke shortly before the Congress opened, ending his active participation in the affairs of the Soviet party and state. With Lenin ill, Trotsky’s primary concern was to avoid a split within the leadership. Thus, he accepted a deal in which his resolutions on key issues, including the national question, were adopted by the Congress while Stalin kept his post as General Secretary (see “A Critical Balance Sheet: Trotsky and the Russian Left Opposition,” Spartacist No. 56, Spring 2001).

The final straw was the defeat of the October 1923 revolution in Germany. It stopped the postwar revolutionary wave, allowing the global bourgeois order to stabilize. This was hugely demoralizing for Soviet workers. They had strained every nerve preparing for common revolutionary struggle alongside a Bolshevik Germany. Instead, they now faced, for the first time, the prospect of national isolation for the foreseeable future.

The delay of international revolution is what enabled the ascendancy of a conservative bureaucracy in Soviet Russia, which step-by-step strangled the remnants of the Bolshevik Party’s revolutionary core. Trotskyism (i.e., genuine Marxism) is the continuation of Leninism. Stalinism did not flow from Leninism; it was a conservative reaction against it.

A qualitative turning point occurred at the Bolshevik Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924. In the discussions leading up to that conference, Trotsky and the emerging opposition to bureaucratism and Stalin’s Great Russian national chauvinist policies received unexpectedly broad party support. The apparatus panicked and demonstratively slammed shut the doors to the last party forum where Lenin and Trotsky’s revolutionary core might have been able to overcome their opponents. The elections for delegates to this conference were systematically rigged by the Troika to allow only three supporters of Trotsky to attend. The nascent bureaucracy had shaken its fist in the face of the Opposition: you are out!

One of the three Oppositionist delegates seated at the Conference was Ivan Vrachev. As he denounced Stalin’s undermining of Lenin’s party from the floor of the Thirteenth Conference, he was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers. Vrachev fired back in protest: “Comrades, it may be that we have only a few hours left of full democracy, so let us use it!” He was right. From that point on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled and the purposes for which it was ruled all changed.

It took some time for the bureaucracy to consolidate its rule. The Stalin clique had to carry out bloody purges throughout the 1930s. (As an aside, one of the things that the ICL did in the USSR was to seek out surviving veterans of the Trotskyist Opposition. We found Ivan Vrachev and interviewed him.)

In defending its privileges, the Stalinist bureaucracy necessarily soon acquired political self-consciousness in opposition to the Bolshevik Party’s Marxist program. The change of purpose of the USSR’s leadership was encapsulated in December 1924 when Stalin trampled on October’s banner of world revolution by propagating the false dogma of economic autarky and isolationism known as “socialism in one country.” As a theory it was absurd. A workers state cannot ignore the capitalist-dominated international economy. In order to achieve a classless, socialist society, what is required are socialist revolutions to expropriate the bourgeoisies and establish planned, collectivized economies. But Stalin’s nationalist formula crystallized a mood of conservatism, a retreat into a false hope of stability for which Soviet society ached after years of war, revolution and privation.

As the Kremlin bureaucracy became more conscious of its position, this revisionism of internationalist principle became a rationale for political betrayal. Increasingly, Communist parties abroad were transformed into Soviet foreign-policy bargaining chips in a bid for illusory “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Over the coming decades, one opportunity after another for socialist revolution in the capitalist countries was strangled.

The Left Opposition that emerged from the crucible of the anti-bureaucratic struggle in the Soviet party was unquestionably the continuity of Leninism, the real heirs to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Trotsky’s Left Opposition fought, both in the Soviet Union and—insofar as they were able—in the Communist International, to preserve and extend the gains of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky’s 1928 “Critique of the Draft Program of the Communist International” proved that the fight in the Russian party was a fight not only for a revival of the Soviet proletariat and against the bureaucratic deformation of the Soviet Union, but also to preserve the theoretical and programmatic heritage of Bolshevism, the revolutionary Marxism of the imperialist epoch. Trotsky’s The Third International After Lenin, containing his 1928 “Critique,” stands as the founding statement of international Trotskyism.

In 1933, Hitler came to power in Germany without a single shot being fired. The Stalinists, who were then in an ultra-left phase that they termed the “Third Period,” referred to the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and refused to call for a united front with this mass reformist working-class party against Hitler’s drive to power. In the face of this historic defeat—and the fact that no opposition was voiced nor a balance sheet drawn within the Stalinized Comintern—Trotsky called for forging a new, Fourth International.

The Communist International under Stalin, after the catastrophic ultra-left line, zigzagged to the right and, at the Seventh (and last) Comintern Congress in 1935, consolidated around a policy of forming class-collaborationist coalitions that they termed “popular fronts.” At the time, the Stalinists sought to justify this treacherous policy by arguing that they were uniting with supposedly “democratic” bourgeois parties “against fascism.”

It was through tying the workers politically to their class enemy that the 1936 French general strike was betrayed by the French Socialist and Communist parties. From the Spanish Revolution of 1936-38 to Chile in 1970-73, the popular front has served to undermine any independent bid for proletarian power, paralyze its struggles and set it up for defeat, often bloody. Like Lenin and Trotsky, we are opposed in principle to any coalition with capitalist parties, whether in government or in opposition, and we are against voting for the workers parties that are part of a popular-front coalition.

In the aftermath of the Stalinist betrayal in Germany, followed by the Comintern’s codification of the reformist popular-front line, Trotsky and his comrades founded the Fourth International in 1938. The 1938 Transitional Program of the Fourth International characterized the Soviet Union under Stalin as follows:

“The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back into capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”

Trotsky’s program pointed to how these contradictions could be resolved: the Fourth International fought for unconditional military defense of the degenerated workers state from imperialism and counterrevolution. This was based on the understanding that the Stalinist bureaucracy’s usurpation of power was a political, rather than social, counterrevolution because it did not overthrow the proletarian property forms created by October. As Lenin had taught, the state—a repressive apparatus of armed bodies at its core—defends the property relations of the ruling class: a bourgeois state defends capitalist private property relations, a workers state defends collectivized property relations. The Soviet Union, with the political rule of the parasitic and repressive Stalinist bureaucracy, had become a bureaucratically degenerated workers state.

The Trotskyists called for proletarian political revolution. Such a revolution, based on defense of collectivized property forms, is not a social revolution or a counterrevolution, which overturns existing property relations and puts a different class in power. Rather it is a political revolution to oust the bureaucracy, restoring workers soviet democracy and a Trotskyist internationalist leadership such as the one that led the October Revolution.

[TO BE CONTINUED]- Part Two is below



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Workers Vanguard No. 925
21 November 2008

We Are the Party of the Russian Revolution

Part Two

We print below, edited for publication, the second part of a presentation by comrade Victor Gibbons, given in Los Angeles on 10 November 2007 in commemoration of the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Part One of this presentation was published in WV No. 924, 7 November.

Leading the fight against the Stalinist degeneration of the world’s first workers state, which was created by the 1917 Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition upheld the revolutionary-internationalist program of V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. Central to the program of Trotsky’s Fourth International was the unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution and the call for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and restore working-class political power in the USSR.

A crucial turning point in the fate of the Soviet Union—and world history—proved to be the war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In December 1979, Leonid Brezhnev’s Kremlin had intervened militarily into Afghanistan to shore up a strategically important client state along the southern border of Soviet Central Asia. The modernizing bourgeois-nationalist regime in Kabul had repeatedly requested Soviet aid against a reactionary Islamic insurgency—backed and armed by the U.S.—which had taken up arms against the regime’s modest social reforms, especially those that improved the horribly oppressed condition of Afghan women.

In dreadfully backward Afghanistan, the Red Army represented the only real basis for social progress. A Red Army victory and a prolonged occupation of the country posed the extension of the social gains of the October Revolution to Afghanistan, transforming it along the lines of Soviet Central Asia.

It should have been easy for any leftist to see that it was necessary to take the Soviet side in this war. The war was doubly progressive on the part of the USSR, defending both the fate of women and elementary social progress in Afghanistan, as well as defending the Soviet Union’s strategic southern flank. Against the solid front that ran from the imperialists to their “left” drummer boys, the international Spartacist tendency (predecessor of the International Communist League) declared: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to Afghan peoples!”

The 1979 Red Army intervention into Afghanistan cut against the grain of the Stalinists’ nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country.” Our internationalist line, aimed squarely against the CIA-backed mujahedin, at the same time promoted political revolution against the Kremlin bureaucracy.

During the onslaught of the war hysteria cranked out by the U.S. ruling class—beginning with Jimmy Carter’s “human rights” demagogy and escalating to Ronald Reagan’s crusade against the Soviet “evil empire”—a defining moment took place for the left internationally. Much of the left rushed to embrace what was the biggest “covert” CIA operation in history. The lackeys of imperialism did not give a damn about the genuine progress that the Soviet presence from 1979-89 did start to bring about for Afghan women, anymore than they care today about the living hell women have been thrown back into by the triumphal march of imperialism and the Islamic cutthroats that they spawned in the region.

Left apologists for U.S. imperialism’s holy war against the USSR and progress in Afghanistan screamed bloody murder over purported Soviet violations of Afghanistan’s supposed “national rights.” But Afghanistan is not a nation. It is a feudal-derived state that is a mosaic of nationalities, ethnic and tribal groupings. And, in any case, this is beside the point. Even if Afghanistan were a homogeneous nation, revolutionary Marxists would have supported the Soviet Union’s armed intervention since the furthering of social revolution, including defense of the USSR against capitalist imperialism, stands higher than the bourgeois-democratic right of national self-determination.

The war in Afghanistan would prove to be a watershed. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s treacherous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was the direct precursor to capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself. As I will explain below, we fought for an internationalist response to help defeat the Afghan reactionaries. We said it would be better to fight against imperialism there than against counterrevolution in Moscow—and we were proved very right.

Bourgeoisie, Social Democrats Promote Counterrevolution in Poland

In the early ’80s, another anti-Communist campaign was waged around events in Poland where striking workers lined up behind an opposition composed of reactionary ultranationalists, Catholic clerics and pro-capitalist social democrats. Significant sections of the working class were mobilized against the Stalinist bureaucracy through Solidarność, a “trade union” sponsored by the CIA, West European social democrats and the Vatican. In the U.S. and West Europe, the trade-union bureaucracy went whole hog in mobilizing support for Solidarność.

The ascendancy of Solidarność was a direct consequence of the political bankruptcy of Stalinism. In Poland in 1956, 1970 and again in 1976, proletarian upheavals were headed off as the bureaucracy each time put forward a new leader or new promises for a better deal. At the same time, the Polish Stalinists strengthened the Catholic church in various ways, including by perpetuating a landowning peasantry. By the late 1970s, having been disillusioned three times with “national-liberal” Stalinism, significant sections of the Polish working class became susceptible to being organized in Solidarność.

At its first national congress in September 1981, Solidarność consolidated around a program of open counterrevolution. Its call for “free trade unions” was a war cry of Cold War anti-Sovietism. In regard to the Stalinist-ruled workers states, we have historically fought for trade unions that are independent of bureaucratic control and are based on the principle of defending the workers state and its collectivized economy. Solidarność also called for “free elections” to the Sejm (parliament), a program of capitalist restoration under the guise of a parliamentary government.

We described Solidarność as a company union for the CIA and bankers. Stressing the need to unconditionally militarily defend the Polish deformed workers state against capitalist restoration, we raised the call “Stop Solidarność Counterrevolution!”

When in December 1981 the bid for power by Solidarność was spiked by General Wojciech Jaruzelski, we unconditionally defended that measure as a means to defend the workers state and buy time for the formation of a Trotskyist party. By contrast, much of the left backed Solidarność. At the same time, we warned that the Stalinists were capable of selling out the Polish workers state to capitalism—and that is exactly what happened. In 1989, the Polish Stalinists ceded governmental power to Solidarność, which had won a landslide electoral victory that June. Thus Solidarność formed the first of the capitalist-restorationist regimes in East and Central Europe.

In Poland today you can see the result of capitalist counterrevolution: whole parts of the Polish economy—mining, heavy industry and textiles—have been massively destroyed. Unemployment—largely nonexistent in the period before 1989—hovers around 20 percent, and there are hardly any unemployment benefits. Women’s rights have been rolled back and a reactionary clerical capitalist government established.

The ICL and the Struggle Against Capitalist Counterrevolution

The fact that the Soviet Union was able to recover from the utter destruction caused by the Nazi invasion during World War II—and become an industrial and military superpower—was further testimony to the superiority of the collectivized planned economy. However, the Soviet economy—its level of productivity and technological base—necessarily continued on the whole to lag behind the advanced centers of the capitalist West. Over the next decades, the Soviet Union was subjected to the unremitting pressures of imperialism—not only military encirclement and an arms buildup aimed at bankrupting the Soviet economy, but also the pressure of the imperialist world market.

Trotsky had explained that the Stalinist bureaucracy was capable of extensive ecomomic growth. The Kremlin oligarchy could and did expand the Soviet economy by crudely transplanting capitalist production methods and even entire factories from abroad. But it was incapable of consistently raising the overall level of technology and labor productivity. As Trotsky put it in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): “Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative—conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”

Although the planned economy proved its superiority over capitalist anarchy during its period of extensive growth, as the need for quality and intensive development came to the fore, the bureaucratic stranglehold more and more undermined the economy. By the 1980s, the cumulative effects of Stalinist mismanagement and parasitism had brought the USSR’s once explosive growth rate to just a few percentage points a year, and then none at all.

The bureaucratic caste in the Kremlin was no longer able to simultaneously fund defense spending, maintain the steady postwar rise of Soviet workers’ living standards, and invest in new industrial technology. A change of course was inevitable. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with his slogan of perestroika, a program of “market reforms” intended as a whip to spur worker productivity and enterprise efficiency. This was linked to a policy of glasnost (which means “openness”). The attempt to restructure the Soviet economy through so-called “market socialism” signified a transition away from central planning in favor of market mechanisms for running the economy. This led to a deepening of social inequalities and a strengthening of forces pushing for the restoration of capitalism.

These reforms were combined with increased diplomatic conciliation vis-à-vis imperialism under the slogan “new thinking” in foreign policy. When, in early 1989, the Soviet bureaucracy under Gorbachev withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the vain hope of winning the good graces of the imperialists, we denounced this as a crime against both the Afghan and Soviet peoples—as has been amply verified by subsequent events.

The reason Gorbachev threw Afghanistan to the imperialist wolves by withdrawing the Soviet Army was not that the USSR was militarily defeated in Afghanistan. That is a Cold War myth manufactured and marketed by the CIA and its media chorus. Today the imperialists’ spies and diplomats who ran the operation readily concede that the high point of the mujahedin insurgency was in 1980. From then on, the mullahs were consistently “getting beaten” and “are not strong enough to hold or deny territory to the Soviets” (quoted in Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal).

One’s blood boils reading the Politburo records of the generals and party bosses wrestling with the Afghan dilemma. Gorbachev ruled out extending the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples. Soon after coming to power he lectured the Politburo that, “after all, it’s not socialism we want there.” He stated in 1986 that “the USSR does not intend to remain in Afghanistan and does not seek a ‘breakthrough to warm seas’ [of the Indian Ocean].” Gorbachev was countering those who chafed at the humiliating retreat he demanded by evoking the Stalinists’ shared renunciation of the struggle for world revolution. But it was not just Gorbachev personally who betrayed the masses of Afghanistan for the sake of appeasing Ronald Reagan. No wing of the bureaucracy had an alternative to Gorbachev’s attempt to reduce the Soviet military budget and its commitments through a vain attempt to appease imperialism.

Just days before Gorbachev pulled the last Soviet units out of Afghanistan, the Partisan Defense Committee—the class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—sent a 7 February 1989 letter to the Afghan government offering to organize an international brigade to fight to the death to defend the right of women to read; to defend freedom from the veil and the tyranny of the mullahs and the landlords; to defend the introduction of medical care and the right of all to an education.

Unfortunately, the Afghan government declined our offer. They asked instead that we raise funds internationally for the civilian victims of attacks by the CIA’s cutthroats in the Afghan city of Jalalabad. We took up this cause and raised over $40,000 from all around the world. In immigrant communities, at factories, workplaces and union halls, and among foreign students, people who keenly knew what a victory of the mujahedin would mean donated generously. We also sent a press representative to Jalalabad to help break the imperialist information blockade. You can read about this in our bound volumes of WV for 1989-90; see, for example, “Afghanistan: Scenes of Civil War—Exclusive Photographs from Our Correspondent,” WV No. 484, 1 September 1989.

Had our proposal for fighting internationalist brigades taken shape, it could have had a real impact on the Soviet veterans of the Afghan war, whose socialist aspirations had been rekindled by their internationalist service. It could have helped to galvanize their real but partial and unfocused opposition within the USSR to Gorbachev’s betrayals. Reports emerged stating that “Soviet veterans of the Afghanistan war have asked the Central Committee of the CP to be allowed to return there with a voluntary division” to fight the counterrevolutionaries (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 27 July 1989). This mood was particularly felt by Soviet veterans coming from Central Asia, who in Afghanistan had battled the very slavery that the 1917 October Revolution had saved their grandparents from. The Soviet soldiers who had been told, and rightly believed, that they were fulfilling their internationalist duty in fighting against the reactionary Afghan mujahedin on the USSR’s southern border, were now maligned at home as “war criminals” who had supposedly perpetrated “Russia’s Vietnam.”

Now we have authoritative records kept by participants in Politburo meetings that show Gorbachev’s humiliating orders to “get out!” of Afghanistan. This evoked resistance all the way up to the Politburo, although in the end they bowed to Gorbachev. Had the beginnings of a Soviet Trotskyist party been crystallized in 1989—had our brigades helped to serve as a catalyst for this—history might have taken a very different path. Instead, Gorbachev’s ignominious pullout from Afghanistan only served to instill a sense of defeatism and demoralization among the Soviet masses.

Proletarian Revolt Against Stalinist Regime in China

During the 1980s, the influence of petty-bourgeois democrats and nationalists increasingly gained strength throughout most of East Europe, with the notable exception of East Germany. In July 1989, Gorbachev disavowed Soviet “interference” in the Eastern bloc countries. At the same time, as part of his market restructuring, he announced that the Soviet Union would now sell oil and raw materials to the East European deformed workers states at world market prices for hard currency—i.e., no more subsidies. Gorbachev was offering up East Europe to the imperialists. The fate of the East European and Soviet workers was thus posed: either proletarian political revolutions to defend and extend the gains embodied in the collectivized economies, or capitalist counterrevolution and all-sided social devastation.

The first sign of political revolution in this period appeared not in East Europe but in China. In May-June 1989, a protest initiated by students in Tiananmen Square in Beijing won widespread support among workers, who were furious at growing economic inequalities, rampant corruption and endemic inflation encouraged by Deng Xiaoping’s “market socialist” economy. Under Deng, during the preceding decade, agriculture had been decollectivized and centralized economic planning had been weakened. The “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed lifetime employment and social benefits for workers was becoming rusted out.

Groups of young workers joined the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, which spread throughout the country. As we wrote at the time, “It was the beginnings of a working-class revolt against Deng’s program of ‘building socialism with capitalist methods’ which gave the protests their mass and potentially revolutionary nature” (“Defend Chinese Workers!” WV No. 480, 23 June 1989). Initially, both rank-and-file soldiers and some senior military commanders refused to carry out orders to suppress the protests.

The two weeks during which the army refused to implement martial law were a critical juncture. There was a political vacuum. Even a tiny Chinese Bolshevik organization could have played a significant role in 1989, especially during those two weeks. The situation in which working people were beginning to take control of the cities in their own hands needed to be developed into a fight for political power. Deng was finally able to find military units willing to suppress the protests. This was directed primarily at the working class rather than at the student protesters. The key factor in China in 1989 was the absence of a revolutionary leadership.

Nascent Proletarian Political Revolution in the DDR

The events in China were echoed in Central and East Europe, specifically in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) or East Germany. The broadening crisis there led to growing weekly demonstrations in October against the Stalinist regime of Erich Honecker. Gorbachev and the Soviet Army command in the DDR refused Honecker’s request to use troops against the protesters. The unlamented Honecker regime fell in late October. On November 4, a million-strong demonstration took place in East Berlin. Five days later the Berlin Wall came down.

Today we are constantly subjected to bourgeois propaganda that depicts all East Germans at that time rushing out to embrace West Germany and capitalist reunification. This is a big lie. The mass of workers, students and soldiers wanted to save the DDR from the collapse caused by the bankrupt Stalinist rulers. They marched under banners saying, “For Communist Ideals” and “Against Privileges.”

This was the setting in which we launched the largest and most important effort in the history of our tendency. Comrades, whether they knew German or not, volunteered from all around the world to fly into Germany. In December 1989, we began publishing a near-daily press: Arprekorr (Workers Press Correspondence). We turned our readers’ circles into a series of Spartakist-Gruppen (Spartacist Groups). Arprekorr took on a life of its own. Comrades would hit a new city and discover our press and leaflets had preceded us.

We called for proletarian political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the West, as the road to a red, soviet Germany in a Socialist United States of Europe. We called for the founding of workers and soldiers councils. We unconditionally opposed capitalist reunification with imperialist West Germany.

We also directed propaganda and slogans to soldiers in the East German National People’s Army (NVA). Some units and soldiers committees of the East German army responded to our propaganda and circulated Arprekorr in the barracks. The West German bourgeoisie and U.S. imperialists moved to spike the nascent political revolution by fomenting German revanchism. Neo-Nazis incited provocations against the soldiers of the Soviet garrison, which was the decisive military force in the DDR.

We countered this right from the start by massively distributing greetings in the name of the insurgent German workers fighting for political revolution to our class brothers and sisters in the Soviet Army Zone. We saluted them and invited them to join us to celebrate the New Year in the Soviet custom of Novogodnyaya Yolka. We also distributed greetings to Cuban, Vietnamese and other foreign workers in the DDR.

The principal stalking horse intervening in the DDR for capitalist reunification was the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). At the same time, the key obstacle to fighting against capitalist reunification was the ruling East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), because many had illusions that it would defend the DDR. Under pressure from below, the SED convened an emergency congress in December 1989 and added to their old name Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). The SED-PDS, as it was now called, promised to oppose a “profit-dominated capitalist society.” It simultaneously advocated market-oriented reforms and praised West German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s program for “confederative structures,” which in reality served to incorporate the DDR into capitalist West Germany.

The SED-PDS leadership took the decisive steps toward disbanding the Betriebskampfgruppen (factory militias). These had been the voluntary, armed, factory-based militias for defense of the DDR under the political leadership of the SED. Established after the 17 July 1953 pro-socialist workers uprising in East Berlin against Stalinist rule, these militias were intended by the bureaucracy to be used against any future workers uprising. But it became clear that many workers in the Kampfgruppen did not take kindly to the idea of being used in that way. The Kampfgruppen had the real potential in November 1989 to become a crystallizing point for proletarian political revolution against the bureaucracy in defense of the DDR—so, the Stalinists dissolved them and thus disarmed the working class.

We called for a new Leninist egalitarian party to fight for the revolutionary reunification of Germany and “No to the Sellout of the DDR!” We emphasized: “For an Effective Planned Economy Through Workers Democracy!” Meanwhile, Arprekorr (19 December 1989) argued for the potential of workers political revolution in the USSR:

“All these aims must be combined with a vigorous offensive for a comparable proletarian political renewal in the Soviet Union so that a far larger combined economy in transition from capitalism to socialism may defend itself against the fifth column of social democrats, restorers of capitalism, and large masses of the intelligentsia who imagine, sometimes foolishly, that they will acquire the soft lives of the new capitalist masters. In the short run, look not to the West but to the East!”

The Fight for a Red Germany of Workers Councils

The validity and necessity of this perspective were soon borne out. In late December, the neo-Nazis went so far as to desecrate the Soviet monument in East Berlin’s Treptow Park. This monument honors the Red Army soldiers who fell liberating Germany from the Nazi scourge.

The ICL initiated a united-front demonstration against this provocation. In essence, this was a call to defend the DDR and the Soviet Union. The response to our call ran deep and wide. It compelled the ruling Stalinists to join in the mobilization for the demonstration on 3 January 1990. One leader of the SED-PDS, Lothar Bisky, told us, “You have the workers.” He didn’t mean that we had them organized in our ranks (yet); rather, that our program was articulating the aspirations of the pro-socialist workers. The potential for the explosive growth of a Trotskyist party was real.

The turnout to the demonstration showed the face of the nascent proletarian political revolution. Treptow Park was filled to capacity with over a quarter-million workers, soldiers of the DDR and USSR, immigrant workers and students. At this mass demonstration, for the first time in the history of the Stalinist-ruled Soviet bloc, the ICL was able to present its Trotskyist program in counterposition to the Stalinists’ betrayals of the DDR.

In the face of organized heckling by Stalinist hacks, comrade Renate Dahlhaus declared:

“Economic absorption and political incorporation by stages—which West German imperialism, aided by the SPD, seeks—can turn this political revolution into a social counterrevolution. This must not happen!...

“Our economy is suffering from waste and obsolescence. The SED party dictatorship has shown that it is incompetent to fight this…. The fight for the power to make these decisions and to run this country must lie in the hands of workers councils so that rational decisions satisfactory to the majority can be arrived at. This can only be done through open and sometimes painful debates before the whole people. Perhaps our example will encourage the Soviet Union to take the same road.”

Our program was beginning to take on living form in the struggles of the masses. In many instances, the SED-PDS tops had more knowledge about this than we did at the time. Thus, unbeknownst to us, in the days prior to the Treptow demonstration, a series of mutinies broke out in various DDR garrisons.

Gorbachev saw the historic importance of Treptow too—from his own treacherous point of view. Later, on 8 November 1999, he declared on German TV:

“We changed our point of view on the process of unification of Germany under the impact of events that unfolded in the DDR. And an especially critical situation came about in January. In essence, a breakdown of structures took place.... This began on January 3 and [went] further almost every day.... This was...like a torrent of fiery lava: the current was flowing.”

The Stalinist betrayers from Moscow to Berlin moved swiftly to head off further revolutionary developments. The SPD, howling at our exposure of their counterrevolutionary intentions, castigated the ruling SED-PDS on national TV for sharing a platform with the Trotskyists. The capitulating Stalinists quickly aimed their political fire at us and made any further actions like Treptow “verboten.” Gorbachev immediately summoned Helmut Kohl to Moscow. He gave the green light for capitalist Anschluss (annexation). The West German bourgeoisie threw 20 billion deutschmarks toward annexing East Germany and promised to make the ostmark equivalent to the West German deutschmark. DDR elections were moved up by several months and every CIA Cold War party, agency and priest came flooding in from the West to bury the banner of Treptow and raise in its place the flag of the Fourth Reich, the Greater German Fatherland.

We continued the fight into the elections, which had become a referendum on capitalist reunification. The Spartakist-Gruppen fused with the ICL’s Trotskyist League of Germany to form the Spartakist Workers Party. We ran an electoral campaign for the East German legislature in March 1990. We proposed the following no-contest agreement: if an organization is prepared to say clearly, publicly, unambiguously and in writing that it opposes capitalist reunification, we would call on our supporters to vote for its candidates in places where we don’t run, and the other party would likewise call on its supporters to vote for our candidates where it wasn’t running. Not one party took up our offer! On the ballot, the Spartakist Workers Party stood alone as the party of the Russian Revolution, of proletarian political revolution against Fourth Reich capitalist restoration.

The election results registered the post-Treptow reactionary blitzkrieg: the Auschwitz bourgeoisie was the new master. The workers of East Germany, West Germany, of the USSR and of the whole world had suffered a historic defeat. But history also recorded that the ICL alone knew what to do, and acted on it.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Part Three is linked above in the headline

*From The Pen Of James P. Cannon- "No Illusions In The Labor Skates"

Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" posting, dated December 5, 2008, quoting the early Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, on reliance on the labor skates at the top of the labor movement.


Markin comment:

Today's labor militants, especially the younger militants who have only been through this trough in the class struggle, could do worst that to listen to words of James P. Cannon, an old Wobblie, American Communist Party founder, American Socialist Workers Party founder, and, most importantly, a central intelligence in the great Minneapolis Teamsters strikes in Minneapolis in 1934. And this above-linked quote is a good reason for that comment.

"Food, Housing And Peace"- Programmatic Notes For The Anti-Capitalist Left Opposition in Obamian Times

Click on title to link to the Lenin Internet Archive's copy of his 1917 article, "Banks And Ministers".

Commentary

In a recent entry in this space I pointed out that it was both necessary and desirable for the anti-capitalist left opposition to begin formulating our alternative program NOW for the forthcoming political struggle during the Obamiad. In that entry entitled "Bread, Land and Peace"-Fighting Slogans For Obamian Times, dated November 30, 2008, I made comparisons with the slogans that animated the working masses in the Russian Revolution in 1917 and today's concerns, all historical proportions guarded. Here, upon further thought, I would only change those slogans slightly to reflect more correctly today's immediate concerns. Thus from here on in I, for one, will fight under the banner of Food, Housing and Peace. Still, not so different from 1917, wouldn't you agree? That said, here's today's entry

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These are hard times for militant leftists for we have just come through an election period where all the political air, including that of our extra-parliamentary leftist turf, was sucked out by the effects of the Obama avalanche. Moreover, just now, we are between bourgeois capitalist administrations, the infamous “lame duck” period. We no longer effectively have the Cheney-Rove-Bush trifecta as a target. And although he has made some disturbing appointments, which have the liberals muttering among themselves in horror, to fill out his administration Obama is in a “grace” period. That period should, given the wasteland of the past eight years, last for some time barring unforeseen developments. Nevertheless, we can usefully spend formulating the anti-capitalist left opposition program that we need to propagandize for and expand over the coming period. Especially concerning those systematic problems with the capitalist system that, at this point, may well be beyond Obama’s team’s capacity to correct other than to apply bandages. We wait in the wings. But here are a couple of points until then.

In a few previous commentaries in this space I have attempted to begin to articulate some programmatic points that militant leftists are going to have fight around as we face the Obamiad. The shorthand for these programmatic points – the “three whales of anti-capitalist militancy” to use an old leftist expression- is indicated by the headline to this entry above- “Food, Housing And Peace”. The last part of the slogan, which I addressed previously in this space in the entry mentioned above, forms the first axis of intervention and the one most likely to prove an opening for us in the coming escalation of troop levels in the Afghanistan quagmire. Obama has signaled his intention to escalate troop levels, most prominently by his selection as key National Security Adviser of ex-Marine General James Jones. We now fight under the slogan “Obama- Immediate Unconditional U. S. Troop Withdrawal From Afghanistan And Iraq!”. That, my friends is a “no-brainer” and is merely the beginning of wisdom.

While I have not mentioned previously, other than in passing, the food issue- the increasingly desperate worldwide struggle for bread, I will not deal with that question today because I am still thinking through an appropriate approach to the question that does not sound like one befitting a charitable relief agency . I do however want to mention this second point about homes. I have already mentioned that a moratorium on foreclosures for a prolonged period is in order. I have also noted that precious little time or energy is being spent by any of these major players in articulating a program to “bail out” individual homeowners who are up against the wall. That is the axis I want to fight around today.

Over the past couple of months there have been several rounds of financial, credit and corporate governmental bailouts for those whose greed and need to expand profit margins beyond even the expansive capitalist norms of rationality turned this capitalist system on its head. As a reaction, and justifiably so, there has been something of a populist outpouring against those bailouts, from lower- level bourgeois politicians who are getting irate messages from constituents to those average citizens who are ticked off that these corporate wizards and financials mavens aren’t hanging from trees somewhere.

The recently electorally defeated Republican Party, now that it will be in the bourgeois political wilderness, is beginning to make noises in that direction as well since they are not in power in order to tap into this anger. Fellow leftists this, by right, is our issue and we best fight around a program that fights for the interests of working people who are our political base or the right-wingers will surely reap the benefits. That is, in the final analysis, the problem with getting a handle on vaguely articulated populist stirrings- they can go left or right. American history is replete with such movements, like that of George Wallace in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, that get fired up by right-wing demagogues. Let’s fight to make it a left turn. No To Corporate, Credit Or Financial Market Bailouts! Stop Individual Homeowner Foreclosures! Jobs For All! It is also time to dust off that old slogan from the 1930’s- “30 hour work for 40 hours pay” to really “redistribute the wealth” in this time of high unemployment. That slogan, by the way, is the one right-wingers will not touch. Enough said.