Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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How Trotsky and the Trotskyists confronted the Second World War
This article links the subject matter of our previous issue on the history of the revolutionary movement in Greece to the general theme of this magazine, that of the attitude to be taken up by revolutionaries towards the Second World War. It first appeared under the title Trotsky et les Trotskystes face à la deuxieme guerre mondiale, in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no.23, September 1985, pp.35-60. Yet again we must offer our thanks to Professor Broué and his conscientious translator John Archer for permission to publish this thought-provoking contribution. It drew a sharp criticism at the time from Pierre Vert, Trotskyists in World War Two, Spartacist, nos.38-39, Summer 1986, pp.46-8, to which Broué addressed a curt rejoinder, Broué Replies in Spartacist, no.40, Summer 1987, and then a more extensive reply, La deuxième guerre mondiale: question de method in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, no.39, September 1989, pp.5-21.
The debate was extended by the publication of the Documents on the Proletarian Military Policy, the second of the Prometheus Research Series, in February 1989. The implications of the documents were further commented upon in World War II and the Proletarian Military Policy in Workers Vanguard, 17 March 1989, and Workers Hammer, April 1989.
Three issues of the Cahiers Léon Trotsky have so far been devoted to this historical problem (nos.23, 39 and 43, September 1985, September 1989 and September 1990), and we have been able to publish two of our own, Revolutionary History, Volume I nos.3 and 4, Autumn and Winter 1988. In the first of these appears Jean-Paul Joubert’s essay on revolutionary defeatism (from the Cahiers, no.23) along with an essay written for us by Sam Levy, The Proletarian Military Policy Revisited, which now appears in the Cahiers, no.43. Those who are anxious to explore this theme in more detail are referred to the introductions to the different articles in these two previous issues of our journal, where numerous other references can be gleaned.
The dilemma of the European Trotskyists at the time is explored in Le Trotskysme et l’Europe pendant la deuxieme guerre mondiale by Gerd Rainer-Horn, a young man who does not always see fit to acknowledge the sources of his material, in Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.9, pp.49-75, and by Al Richardson, Fourth International? What Fourth International? in Workers News, October-November 1990. Other documentation on the collapse of the leading organs of the movement at the start of the war occurs in Trotsky in 1939-1940: The IEC Does Not Exist, in Spartacist, nos.43-44, Summer 1989, pp.28-31. The politics of the French Trotskyists during the resistance struggle are now becoming more clearly known, both through their propaganda, more of which is now available in Documents sur la politique du Front Ouvrier (POI 1943) et sommaires des numeros du journal Front ouvrier (1944-48), which appeared in Les Cahiers du CERMTRI, no.48, March 1988, and by their courageous activity on the spot as remembered by Andre Calves, Sans bottes ni medailles: Un trotskyste breton dans la guerre, which can be obtained from La Breche at 2 rue Richard Lenoir 93100, Montreuil, France, at a cost of 60 francs plus postage.
Opinions regarding the American (or Proletarian) Military Policy among the Trotskyists were sharply divided at the time, and remain so today. Readers of the former issue of our journal will gather that the majority of Greek Trotskyists were opposed to it. Stinas expressed himself most bitterly on the politics of the American, British and French Trotskyists during the Second World War (Memoires, Paris, 1989, p.273), and an equally forthright condemnation by Karliaftis takes up the Minneapolis case in particular, in Cannon and the SWP: On the Track of the Social Betrayers in Front of the Second World War: Documents of the Workers Vanguard (Greece), in Internationalist, no.5. January 1983. His criticism is derived from that made at the time by the veteran Spanish revolutionary Grandizo Munis, in Defense Policy in the Minneapolis Trial in International Bulletin, Volume 2 no.4, and afterwards in El SWP y la guerro imperialista (1945) and Le Trotskysme et la Defaitisme Revolutionnaire (both of them still obtainable from Alarma, BP 329, 7564 Paris Cedex I 3). Similar criticisms were made at the time by the Indian Trotskyists (cf. Charles Wesley Ervin, Trotskyism in India, in Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.4, pp.312). In Britain opinion was divided, the Revolutionary Socialist League itself being torn between outright rejection of the Military Policy by the Militant Centre Group of D.D. Harber and John Archer, together with the Left Fraction led by John Robinson and Tom Mercer, as against enthusiastic support from the Trotskyist Opposition of John Lawrence and Hilda Lane. The other group, the Workers International League, moved from a guarded response to a more whole-hearted agreement with the American SWP as the war went on (cf. S. Bornstein and A Richardson, War and the International, London 1986, pp.12-5, 34-5, 40-2), to the extent of publishing Cannon’s courtroom testimony as a general educational pamphlet on Socialism in three separate editions. And there were still those associated with the WIL, like Fred Kissin, the leader of the Danzig Trotskyists, who felt that it did not go far enough, submitting a contribution of this own to the internal bulletin, The Present War and Socialist Internationalism in April 1943. (Cf. S.F. Kissin, War and the Marxists, Volume 2, London. 1989, pp203-3, which shows that this was still his opinion just before his death.) The agitation of the WIL inside the armed forces has also been touched on by Tony Aitman, 'The War Within the War' in the British Militant, 15 September 1989.
General Marxist analyses of the Second World War should be consulted by those who do not have the time to subject the various problems to closer scrutiny. Among the shorter of these we might mention Phil Frampton, Why the World Went to War, Militant, 8 September 1989, and Marxism and the Second World War, Workers Power, no.122, September 1989. A good overall guide remains Ernest Mandel’s The Meaning of the Second World War, Verso, London 1986) which was sharply criticised by Gemma Forest in Marxism and the Mid-Century (Confrontation, no.3, Summer 1988, pp.147-55) and in her review in this magazine (Volume 1 no.4, Winter 1988-89, pp.45-8; cf. the correspondence upon this in Volume 2 no.2, pp.65-6, no.3, p.50, and Volume 3 no.1, pp.48-9).
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1. Little-Known Documents
Some years ago Daniel Guérin published some texts which Trotsky wrote on the Second World War. [1] His preface caused him to be subjected to some heavy fire from different groups claiming to be Trotskyist. He was accused, in particular, of having distorted Trotsky’s thinking by arbitrarily mutilating what he had written, and of having misrepresented Trotsky’s ideas, if not in the direction of social-patriotism, at any rate in that of narrow anti-Fascism, and of taking the liberty of presenting Trotsky as a “Soviet patriot”, for whom the necessity of “defending the Soviet Union” took precedence over every other consideration in the war. [2]
The preparation of Volumes 22 to 24 of the Oeuvres led me to work on the complete texts of the documents which Guérin published. Moreover, the opening of the closed section of the archives at Harvard has given us access to many documents, which, taken as a whole, enable us today to present an interpretation of Trotsky’s thought, one which agrees neither with Guérin’s version nor with that of the militants who have defended against him an ‘orthodoxy’ based upon the attitude of the Bolsheviks during the First World War – one war behind, and far behind the thinking of Trotsky as it leapt forward after Hitler’s great advances in 1940. [3] Trotsky, of course, understood what the war and the destruction which accompanied it meant for human civilisation. But in the spring of 1940, as the proverb says, “the wine was drawn and it had to be drunk”. Trotsky was no longer prepared merely to pose the revolution as the means to escape the war. The war had begun, and nothing could save humanity from it. Trotsky discerned in the war the gigantic crucible in which, amid unspeakable suffering, the revolutionary wave was to gather itself together, and within which the new phases of the world revolution would take shape. Trotsky expressed this very clearly in a fragment of an article which was cut short on 20 August 1940. Guérin knew of this article, but preferred to ignore it, no doubt because he did not understand its drift:
The present war, as we have stated more than once, is a continuation of the last war. But a continuation does not imply a repetition. As a general rule, a continuation implies a development, a deepening, a sharpening. Our policy, the policy of the revolutionary proletariat towards the second imperialist world war, is a continuation of the policy elaborated during the last imperialist war, primarily under the leadership of Lenin. But a continuation does not imply a repetition. In this case, too, a continuation means a development, a deepening and a sharpening. [4]
He then developed what he regarded as constituting the difference – a difference of development, quantitative and qualitative, between the policies of revolutionaries in the First and Second World Wars:
During the last war, not only the proletariat as a whole, but also its vanguard, and, in a certain sense, the vanguard of the vanguard, were caught unawares. The elaboration of the principles of revolutionary policy towards the war began at a time when the war was already in full blaze and when the military machine exercised unlimited rule. [5]
During the First World War the perspective of revolution seemed remote even to Lenin. He wrote that only future generations would see it. Trotsky recalled:
Prior to the February Revolution and even afterwards, the revolutionary elements felt themselves to be not so much contenders for power as the extreme left opposition. [6]
Therefore, the struggle for the independence of the proletariat, the rejection of ‘civil peace’, and the necessity for the class struggle of the proletariat, were the primary tasks in 1914-18, as defensive measures:
The attention of the revolutionary wing was centred on the question of the defence of the fatherland. The revolutionaries naturally replied in the negative to this question. This was entirely correct. This purely negative reply served as the basis for propaganda and for training the cadres. But it could not win the masses, who did not want a foreign conqueror. [7]
Trotsky recalled that the Bolsheviks succeeded in Russia in winning the proletariat and the majority of the people, in the space of eight months, and that this success was not in response to a negative refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland, but to the aspirations of the masses, to which the Bolsheviks knew how to give positive answers:
The decisive rôle in this conquest was played, not by the refusal to defend the bourgeois fatherland, but by the slogan “All power to the soviets”. And only by this revolutionary slogan! The criticism of imperialism and of its militarism, like the renunciation of defence of bourgeois democracy and so on, could never have won the overwhelming majority of the people to the side of the Bolsheviks. [8]
The difference between the First and Second World Wars was to be found, in Trotsky’s opinion, at one and the same time, in the objective situation, the deepening impasse of imperialism, and in the worldwide experience which the working class had accumulated. Through the suffering and impoverishment due to the war, these factors imperiously demanded the seizure of power by the proletariat. Trotsky was categorical:
This perspective must be made the basis of our agitation. It is not merely a question of a position on capitalist militarism and of renouncing the defence of the bourgeois state, but of directly preparing for the conquest of power and the defence of the proletarian fatherland. [9]
In reality, when Trotsky was struck down on 20 August 1940, the essential elements of the second phase of the Second World War had only just emerged after the collapse of the French army. He wrote that this was “not just an episode, but an integral part of the ‘catastrophe of Europe’”. The materials which enable us to grasp the outlines of the conception which Trotsky was forming of the war, which he began to form at the same time as he outlined the direction of the revolutionary forces which could not fail to emerge from it, are to be found in the notes on the war and on the Soviet Union which he drafted in the spring of 1940. [10]
Daniel Guérin has vigorously emphasised that Trotsky had formed a remarkably exact and precise idea of the coming war in 1940. When men who had been close to him seemed resigned to decades of ‘Brown Europe’ under Nazi rule, Trotsky simply and confidently forecast the war between Germany and the USA for world hegemony, and, in addition, foresaw the ephemeral character of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the future alliance of the Soviet Union and the bourgeois democracies, the orientation of Japanese imperialism which was to avoid a collision with the Soviet Union, and many other features, which eminent strategists and commentators failed to foresee.
Guérin did not fail to notice all that. However, he made it impossible for himself to penetrate to what was at the centre of Trotsky’s thinking. Guérin reduced the analyses, which had only been sketched, and especially Trotsky’s expectations of the revolutionary movement during the war, to what he calls “his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution”. Guérin wrote that this was an “erroneous point” in which Trotsky “showed the utmost confidence’.
In this way, the insights which Guérin provided led him to deny Trotsky’s revolutionary perspective. No doubt this is not what Guérin intended, but some of his citations had the effect of clothing Trotsky in the mantle of a prophet, even in military matters. This is a distorted image of Trotsky. Indeed, Guérin himself reproduced many of Trotsky’s forecasts about the approach of the revolution! But we must be fair. Trotsky did no more than glimpse the future and give indications in these matters. He neither explained nor developed. The defenders of the ‘archaic’ conception, conceived as an orthodoxy, have generally ignored these indications. As some of the reactions to Guérin’s analyses show, they continue to ignore them when they look back at the solid mass of history which the war now appears to them to be.
For these reasons I wish to try in this article to show what were the main lines of Trotsky’s vision of the Second World War. I emphasise that his vision includes not merely essential aspects of the conflict, but also certain aspects of the period immediately following the war. We shall ignore some questions here, for example his analyses of the changes effected in 1939 in Poland by the Soviet bureaucracy, and those which it dreamed of making in Finland. These were the foundations of a theory of satellite bureaucratic states within the sphere of interest of the Soviet Union, which later became known as the buffer zone countries. This is to be found in the documents of the internal discussion in the Socialist Workers Party in 1939-40 on the nature of the Soviet Union.
Trotsky recognised that ‘Brown Europe’ under the Nazi jackboot would not last for a thousand years. He confidently gave it 10 years at most. He especially pointed out what the formidable conquests of the German army under Nazi leadership would mean for the working masses of Europe: “They bear a sentimental hatred against Hitler mixed with confused class sentiments.” [11]
According to Trotsky, we have here the positive aspect on which the work of revolutionary preparation in the USA was to rely. This was the starting point from which he developed (before his somewhat disconcerted comrades of the SWP) the idea that they must demand worker-officers in the army and the military training of every worker under trade union control, in anticipation of new forms of political work in a militarised society. These demands for militarisation and control – political independence by means of arms – went alongside agitational slogans, “to explain to the millions of American workers that the defence of their ‘democracy’ cannot be delivered over to an American Marshal Pétain”:
You, workers, wish to defend and improve democracy. We, of the Fourth International, wish to go further. However, we are ready to defend democracy with you, only on condition that it should be a real defence, and not a betrayal in the Pétain manner. [12]
The ‘orthodox’ interpreters of Trotsky’s thoughts have often seen this as nothing more than a tactical device, a ruse, a trick intended to have made the bourgeoisie reveal its true self, to show that it really feared the working class more than the Fascists at home and abroad. This argument cannot stand up to serious examination. How is it possible to reconcile, even at the most abstract level, the formula “not ... in the Pétain manner” with a certain vulgar conception of ‘defeatism’ which was never that of Trotsky?
That is not all. In Trotsky’s discussions with his SWP comrades, he did not hesitate to pose the question of ‘militarising’ the party, of its distancing of itself from pacifist attitudes, which he forcefully condemned. He proceeded to proclaim that his comrades, and every revolutionary, must become ‘militarists’ ’ the expression he used was “proletarian Socialist revolutionary militarists”. [13] They had to turn themselves into ‘militarists’ because of the prospects for humanity were of a militarised society and armed struggle. The proletarian revolutionary Socialists had to become militarists because the fate of humanity was to be decided arms in hand. The Second World War had started. Revolutionaries had to prepare themselves for a rapidly approaching armed struggle for power against the class enemy. They could only prepare themselves for that fight by being where the masses were. Such was Trotsky’s conviction.
This conviction rested on a concrete forecast about the movement of the masses, especially in Europe. In an article of 30 June 1940, Trotsky outlined a perspective of European development, which he expected to pass through the mass uprising against foreign occupation:
In the defeated countries the position of the masses will immediately become worsened in the extreme. Added to social oppression is national oppression, the main burden of which is likewise borne by the workers. Of all the forms of dictatorship, the totalitarian dictatorship of a foreign conqueror is the most intolerable. [14]
Can we doubt that Trotsky located the revolutionaries on the same side as those who were socially and nationally oppressed, who felt the “totalitarian dictatorship” of a “foreign conqueror” to be “intolerable”?
He knew the Nazis would try and exploit the industries and natural resources of the countries which they conquered and occupied. He knew that this super-exploitation would reduce them to pauperism. He foresaw a workers’ and peasants’ resistance: “It is impossible to attach a soldier with a rifle to each Polish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, French worker and peasant.” [15] He believed that the Hitlerite domination of Europe would provoke the general uprising of the peoples:
One can expect with assurance the rapid transformation of all the conquered countries into powder magazines. The danger is rather this, that the explosions may occur too soon without sufficient preparation and lead to isolated defeats. It is in general impossible, however, to speak of the European and the world revolution without taking into account partial defeats. [16]
The threat which hung over Hitler was that of the proletarian revolution in every part of Europe. He forecast “attempts at resistance and protest” by the masses, “at first muffled and then more and more open and bold”, against which the armies of occupation would have to act as pacifiers and oppressors. [17]
Addressing the Dewey Commission, Trotsky had distinguished the attitude to adopt in an imperialist country at war with the Soviet Union from that towards an imperialist country allied to it. In the former case, the immediate aim was to disorganise the whole machine, and in the military machine in the first place. In the latter case, the immediate aim was political opposition to the bourgeoisie and preparation for proletarian revolution. [18] It was clear, likewise, when the Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union, that throughout all occupied Europe the necessity to disorganise and to strike at the German military machine would be added to that of armed resistance, and this implied armed struggle.
However, to understand at least some of the aspects of the criticism which we have called ‘orthodox’, we may recall that Vereeken and some of his political friends had accused Trotsky of denying his principles by abandoning ‘defeatism’ in a country allied to the Soviet Union, in the event of war, on the pretext of the defence of the Soviet Union. We find a little of that manner of thinking in the criticism made by the Spaniard Grandizo Munis of the policy followed by James P. Cannon and the SWP in their defence at the time of the Minneapolis Trial. The political history of the Fourth International during the Second World War certainly demonstrates the strength of the current, which, under the flag of ‘orthodoxy’, often confined itself to pacifist positions, considering armed struggle to be participation in the war and in the union sacrée, and an acceptance of the war, purely because it was armed struggle. This current was simultaneously sectarian and conservative.
Of course, the belief that the policy which Trotsky advocated betrayed the influence of his ‘Soviet patriotism’ is completely out of the question. He explained the basis for his defence of the Soviet Union often enough to preclude anybody taking this belief seriously. Nor is there in his analyses or slogans the slightest concession to social-patriotism or to national defence in an imperialist country. Simply, as he forcefully declared: “ny confusion with the pacifists is a hundred times more dangerous than temporary confusion with the bourgeois militarists.” [19]
Guérin considers that the Manifesto of the International Conference of May 1940 is “the central piece” in his compilation, “both by length and by content”, and that it “expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism”. Trotsky’s conclusion, which follows the call for workers to “become skilled specialists of the military art”, leaves no doubt on the matter:
At the same time, we do not forget for a moment that this war is not our war... The Fourth International builds its policy not on the military fortunes of the capitalist states but on the transformation of the imperialist war into a war of the workers against the capitalists, on the overthrow of the ruling classes of all countries, on the world Socialist revolution. [20]
The question for Trotsky, therefore, was indeed that of the revolution, of the form which the revolutionary movement was to adopt, as it was developed by the war and the crisis of the capitalist world, which the war both expresses and exacerbates, and which creates the conditions for the working class to struggle for power. This struggle during the war and within the framework of the militarisation of society could not be imagined if it did not have a practical link with political struggle in a form which was not, in the main, armed class struggle or class war. Only incorrigible dreamers or sectarians could imagine anything else. The new arena, in which it would be necessary to smash the militarists, demanded that revolutionaries and the working class themselves be militarised.
There are certain observations which must be made by anybody wishing to test the validity during the war of the perspective which Trotsky sketched out in 1940. In the first place, the various Communist parties have often succeeded in giving the illusion that they held the monopoly over the armed struggle, with which they identify with their politics after the events. This is due to them propounding the ‘defence’ of the Soviet Union, which from June 1941 transformed them into ‘Resistance activists’. However, on the basis of a certain development of the armed struggle, what this ‘defence’ of the Soviet Union actually meant, as it was conceived in Moscow, no longer consisted of sabotage or partisan operations against the German military machine. It became a direct or indirect political struggle and, where necessary, a police-style repression aimed at the mass movement itself, whenever, as it nearly always happened, the latter threatened to disrupt the agreements between the Soviet Union and its allies, to call into question the arrangement of spheres of influence, or, still more seriously, to unleash a revolution, which Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill desired as little as Hitler, and who were, in any case, determined to crush any uprisings if Hitler failed previously to do so.
In fact, the whole of Europe underwent German occupation, and suffered in varying degrees not merely the national oppression which every country undergoes when it is occupied by a foreign army, but also the systematic looting which plunged several of these countries into famine, and all into poverty. In this way the conditions for a revolutionary upsurge were created. This revealed itself first and with the greatest force in the weakest links of the imperialist chain in Europe. In the face of this danger, the safety valves provided by the Stalinist apparatus no longer had the same effectiveness in relation to the former relations between the parties and the masses, and even to historical circumstances of an accidental kind. Nonetheless, the movement did advance through its contradictions.
We shall attempt here to ascertain which general verifications of Trotsky’s perspectives can be found in the cases in which a revolution occurred, and which, with its own momentum and as far as it could by its own efforts, broke out of the hold of the official Communist movement, but which lacked an alternative leadership to that which handed them over to Allied repression once German imperialism fell. From this viewpoint, the Greek example appears to be the most instructive.
2. The Greek Resistance
We shall attempt to test Trotsky’s conceptions about the Second World War by studying two aspects of it: firstly, the revolt of the soldiers and sailors of the Greek armed forces in the Middle East, and secondly, the armed resistance in Greece, which was crushed by the British army in December 1944 on the personal orders of Winston Churchill, who denounced the armed resistance as “triumphant Trotskyism”.
One of the peculiar features of Greece, which we find also in its neighbouring countries, Italy and Yugoslavia, is that it had been subjected to a bloody military/Fascist regime, in this instance the 4 August regime of General Metaxas and King George II. It had very severely repressed the workers’ movement, imprisoning or interning in dungeons on the islands the leaders and cadres of the workers’ movement.
This drove the Greek Communist Party (KKE) into precarious clandestinity, which made its communications with Moscow intermittent and fragile. Like their comrades in neighbouring Yugoslavia, what the Greek Communists failed to understand about their international movement was that, after the death of Metaxas, his successors and executioners would become the ‘democratic allies’, and the restoration of the king would become a positive factor in the liberation of humanity!
Immediately after the German attack, the KKE issued the slogan of a constituent assembly. This automatically opened up the ‘royal question’. The king was in exile, under the protection of Churchill. This demand placed an obstacle between the internal resistance and the exiled monarch, and was an obstacle to the adoption of the policies which the Communist International was to dictate to the KKE. From 1942 communications became difficult not only between Moscow and the KKE, but also between the party leadership and the leaders of the partisan fighters. The KKE had attempted to start to control and centralise the activities of the partisans, who were growing stronger, arms in hand, in the mountains and in the workers’ quarters in the cities. The fighters were led by the andartes, the kapetanios, who had gained popularity by acceding to the demands of the poor peasants.
The Greek resistance, like that of the proletariat, the petit-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, did not emerge from any organisational decision. Likewise, it was outside any organisational framework that on the night of 30-31 May 1941 two students scaled the Acropolis and tore down the swastika from it. André Kedros describes this as “a madly daring and splendidly gratuitous act”, for him it became “the symbol of the Greek refusal to submit”. [21] Around that time, army officers often organised or provoked the disbandment of the defeated Greek army. The first guerrilla bands appeared in the countryside, armed with rifles and ammunition which they collected almost without resistance on the battlefields and alongside the roads where the army had been defeated.
There was a tradition of agrarian struggle in Greece. The ‘bandit’ had long been regarded as the liberator and defender, beloved by the poor. Kedros relates how the villagers “bred armed bands as an antidote to poverty and oppression” that was caused or exacerbated by the occupation. We know that tiny groups were formed more or less everywhere. They sported a variety of names, ranging from “mixed companies” to “assault groups”. They were formed spontaneously and developed their own leaderships. Some of their leaders were young men of militant temper, others had won their spurs by escaping from Metaxas’ concentration camps during the retreat of the army.
However, at first the KKE did not apply itself to the organisation, centralisation and development of these groups. It remained obedient to the orders of Moscow. It considered its first task to be the formation of a ‘national front’ against the occupation, which meant a bloc for a certain period with other Greek political formations. It did not, however, succeed in doing so, mainly because, despite its efforts, it could not formulate a consistent policy towards the restoration of the monarchy. This was a very sensitive point with its own supporters. It was also a very sensitive point with the forces linked to the bourgeoisie and the landlords. They did not wish to break from the monarchy and their British ‘protectors’ – nor could they.
The EAM (National Liberation Front) was founded in September 1941, but it was no more than one organisation which bore this name. It was not the hoped-for national front. Alongside the KKE there were only the very small Socialist formations, two equally small ‘democratic’ organisations, and the trade unions. However, the EAM only accepted a ‘national’ basis for struggle. It refused to consider social liberation, and addressed the ‘nation’ regardless of classes. It concentrated on attempting to attract support from the upper strata of society, and kept silent on the demands of the workers.
This desire to maintain a ‘united nation’ against the invader – when it was not united – and to ignore in silence the class sources of the popular opposition to the occupiers and to the members of the Greek bourgeoisie who collaborated with them, did not, however, succeed in preventing the workers and the poorest strata of the people from laying hold of the framework of organisation which the KKE offered. They instinctively used it to fight for their demands. The influx of fighters gave a working class character to the EAM, which was doing so much to reject it.
The workers demonstrated in their thousands on 18 October 1941, the first anniversary of the Italian invasion. Then in December 1941 the students took up the fight. On 26 January and 17 March 1942 the wounded war veterans, a particularly downtrodden section of the poor, took to the streets, supported by militants of the clandestine EAM clad in hospital nurses’ uniforms. The organisation spread and was elaborated. On 15 March 1942 there were strikes in support of economic demands in several cities, including Athens. Other strikes followed, including, for example, those by 40,000 civil servants, in whose leadership were Trotskyist militants. Then there was the fertiliser workers’ strike in the Piraeus in August 1942. Meanwhile, the peasants of the Peloponnese had successfully mounted a series of demonstrations. The KKE decided to send a handful of its militants to organise the partisans, the andartes, within the framework of the People’s National Liberation Army (ELAS), the armed wing of the EAM.
A report by the German Abwehr in November 1942 mentioned that whole districts of Greece were in the hands of the guerrillas, who executed traitors, distributed the corn which they collected by forced levies, and who called upon the villagers freely to elect their representative leaders and to discuss all their problems in a democratic manner. The struggle of the andartes became a factor in the rural class war, by the force of events and against the desire of their political leaders, even when the partisan group led by the celebrated Aris Velouchiotis took part in spectacular acts of sabotage of communications and transport which disorganised the German military machine.
We cannot detail here the history of the mass movement in Greece. On 22 December 1942 there were 40 000 people on strike. The demonstrations and strikes which followed the announcement of compulsory labour service in Germany, and which developed from 24 February to 5 March 1943, resulted in the only occasion when the occupying power backed down on this issue. By 1943 the armed struggle was no longer the work of small groups but that of real military units. When they arrived in a region with the intention of extending the liberated zones, there would be an immediate mass uprising of the armed people. Kedros declared that “the entire population was involved in the armed resistance”. The mass movements in the cities were irrepressible. There was a general strike in Athens on 25 June 1943 against the execution of hostages by the occupying power. The tram drivers’ strike, which began on 12 June, had led to 50 tramway workers being sentenced to death. They were saved by the general strike. By 1944 not only were wide rural areas liberated, but the German troops lived under siege in the cities, which they could only leave in guarded convoys. The ‘Red Belt’, the workers’ quarters around Athens, were nothing less than fortresses of the armed people.
During all this the KKE leaders, who controlled the EAM and ELAS, continued to insist that they were waging a purely national struggle, and denied that it had any class character. This was by no means the opinion of the Greek Government in Exile, under the protection of Winston Churchill. In 1942 elements in the officer corps – that “ultimate rampart of the state”, as Churchill said at the time of Franco – grouped in Grivas’ Khi organisation, the Pan organisation, the military hierarchy, the Zervasites and Dentirisites, attached to Metaxas’ secret services, organised a counter-attack.
They tried to organise –national guerrillas’ with the intention of fighting the –Communist guerrillas’ rather than the occupying invaders. Here we had exactly the Greek equivalent of Mihailovic in Yugoslavia, the Serbian colonel who led the Chetniks, who was a minister in the king’s government in exile, and who fought arms in hand against Tito’s partisans. There was no shortage of money or equipment. They wanted to create new formations, but they also hoped to undermine the ELAS militants, who were deprived of equipment now that their operations seemed certain to succeed. One of the leaders of the British Special Operations Executive, Eddie Myers, quoted a document on this subject in his memoirs. It corroborates Trotsky’s analysis, and demonstrates how lucid was Churchill, that champion of the existing order, the strategist of the opposite side of the class war. Myers’ superiors informed him in April 1943 that “the Cairo authorities consider that after the liberation of Greece, civil war is almost inevitable”. [22]
The mass movement swelled the ranks of the EAM and ELAS, which grew from strength to strength, sweeping these diversions aside, and never ceasing to assert its mastery. Colonel Saraphis, the ‘democratic’ officer chosen to be the Mihailovic of Greece, decided to join the ELAS because he recognised how efficient and representative it was! The Italian capitulation placed more weapons in the hands of the andartes and their civilian allies than all that the Allies provided by parachute drops.
The crucial year was 1943. Ioannis Rallis, a politician whom even the Germans knew was in contact with the British secret service, became Prime Minister of occupied Greece. [23] The ruling classes actively and consciously prepared to transform the national war into a civil war. In Athens there were Security Battalions, a militia with a sinister reputation. In Cairo there was the Mountain Brigade. Both were intended to crush the popular movement. The KKE announced that more than ever it sought collaboration with the ‘national guerrillas’ and desired ‘toleration’, which meant renouncing a class approach, whilst at the same time it prepared to launch attacks upon the left. In March 1943 Aris Velouchiotis was summoned to Athens from his mountain base, despite the dangers posed by such a journey, to receive a severe reprimand. That May, when the Communist International was dissolved, the KKE adopted an orientation from which it would not thereafter deviate:
The KKE supports by all possible means the struggle for national liberation, and will do all in its power to help gather all the patriotic forces into one unbreakable national front, which will unite the whole people to shake off the foreign yoke and to win national liberation at the side of our great Allies. [24]
At the same time it developed its own political police, the OPLA, recruited from reliable killers, and used them more against ‘Trotskyists’ and leftists in its own ranks, than against real collaborators.
The policies of all these tendencies underwent their first test when the Greek army in Egypt mutinied. The history of this episode is still fairly obscure, and seems to this writer to be a fruitful contribution to the discussion about the Proletarian Military Policy. The affair occurred in what, by analogy with France, could be called ‘Free Greece’; this consisted, after the defeat of the Greek forces in April 1941, of the remnants of the Greek army and fleet, with senior civil servants and ministers of King George II’s government in exile.
These worthies, especially the military chiefs, were evidently important figures in the Fascist dictatorship of Metaxas. Many people believed that this was the reason for their ‘treachery’ in the face of the Nazi invasion. Nonetheless, as Dominic Eudes says: “Alongside the royal clique of officers and politicians, however, the embryo of a new Greek army was formed in Egypt.” [25] This was composed of people who had escaped by sea from military units, volunteers who had endured tremendous hardships travelling individually to Egypt, and merchant and naval seamen. They were obviously people who wanted to “fight against Fascism for freedom and democracy”, as the new ‘liberal’ head of the government put it. A collision was inevitable between the bulk of the 20,000 men who had arrived in Egypt to fight Fascism, and the monarchist camarilla which, like Churchill, was concerned above all to “save Greece from Communism”.
In October 1941 a secret organisation, the Military Organisation for Liberation (ASO), was formed within the Greek army in the Middle East. Its aims were simple, even over-simple. They were to send Greek units to the front, to fight in Greece alongside the Resistance, and to oppose the infiltration into the army in Egypt of those sympathetic to Metaxas, who wanted to restore their regime in Greece at the end of the war. The Metaxist cadres demanded that cadres sympathetic to the ASO be removed by large-scale discharges from the army. The officers due to be dismissed from the Second Brigade were arrested and replaced. The mutineers stood firm in the face of threats. The First Brigade supported them. The government submitted and accepted that the Metaxist officers should be isolated, on the one hand to prevent events from running out of control, and on the other hand to prepare a fresh attack. Over the next few months military directives caused the units to be dispersed, the rebels were punished by disciplinary training, and finally the subversive elements were weeded out and the officers who had been isolated were brought back into key positions.
The second mutiny was more serious and significant. The demands of the officers under the influence of the ASO were evidently more political than before. Under the pressure of the men, the Committee for Armed Coordination presented a petition, signed by the majority of the Greek soldiers, as soon as the real provisional government of the Greek resistance, the PEEA, was formed in Greece. It demanded that a real government of ‘national unity’ be formed on the basis of the proposals of the PEEA. The initiative came neither from the EAM and ELAS nor from Greece, but quite simply from the ideas which the soldiers formed of the situation in their country and the conditions in which they could really ‘fight Fascism’.
On the same day, 31 March 1944, the delegates of the soldiers and the mixed committee demanded to be received with their petition at the Soviet Embassy. The ambassador closed the doors on them. They found no echo or promise of support except from the left wing of the British Labour Party. In Egypt, however, they enjoyed the sympathy of the Egyptian population, who were always close to the Greek workers. There was a series of meetings and demonstrations in Alexandria and Cairo. On 4 April the Egyptian police intervened on the side of the Greek Government in Exile and the British, and arrested some 50 militant workers and trade union leaders, in particular the leaders of the Greek dockers. The British High Command, for its part, disarmed two regiments and sent 280 ‘ringleaders’ to concentration camps. Then on 5 April it disarmed the unit attached to the High Command of the Greek army and interned the mutineers. By now the mutineers had their backs to the wall. The First Brigade arrested its Metaxist officers, reorganised its command, and refused to hand over its arms as a prelude to internment. The movement spread to the navy, to the destroyer Pindos, the cruiser Averoff, the Ajax and several more. The crews elected a mixed committee of men and officers to take conunand. The British Ambassador to the Greek Government in Cairo, Reginald Leeper, telegraphed to Churchill: “What is happening here among the Greeks is nothing less than a revolution.” [26]
Churchill directly and personally took control of the repression. The arrival of King George II was a symbol as well as a provocation. The support of the Egyptian youth for the mutineers was a promise. On 13 April Admiral Cunningham announced that he had decided to put down the rebellion by force, and if necessary to sink the Greek ships in the very roadstead of Alexandria. The mutinous land formations were surrounded, deprived of water and starved out. On 22 April a successful raid was made on the Ajax by the leading Metaxist, Admiral Voulgaris. The other ships lay under British guns and surrendered. General Paget launched his tanks against the First Brigade, and it also surrendered. Within a few days, some 20,000 Greek volunteers on the Army of the Middle East found themselves in concentration camps in Libya and Eritrea. [27]
The Greek army in the Middle East no longer existed, and its place was now free for the formation of specially prepared shock troops, technically equipped and politically trained for the civil war following the ‘liberation’.
We must note that British censorship suppressed reports of this episode in the press. It was not a minor episode, in fact it was very significant, which no doubt explains the violent response of the British authorities. It exposed the myth about ‘national defence’ and ‘national unity’. The 20,000 volunteers wanted ‘defence’ and ‘unity’, but their leaders did not, and they crushed them. The incident exposed the lie about the “war against Fascism and for freedom and democracy”. The Greeks considered Metaxas to be a detested Fascist dictator. Churchill’s policy aimed at restoring the rule of the forces upon which Metaxas had been based.
Trotsky’s remarks in 1940 about the war became concrete. The Greek soldiers in the Middle East wanted to fight, arms in hand, against Fascism. They therefore demanded officers whom they could trust, allied themselves with.the labour movement, and formed their own soviet-style organisations. This was precisely along the lines which Trotsky had developed when he wrote that the defence of their ‘democracy’ could not be delivered over to the likes of a Marshal Pétain. The mass movement born out of the war expressed itself along these lines, and did so, as Trotsky had forecast, in the army, that central section of militarised society, no less important than in the factories.
The talks in Moscow and the bargaining which followed them led to the agreement with Stalin that Churchill would have a free hand in Greece. The KKE and through it the EAM were ultimately to place the noose around the neck of the extraordinary mass movement in Greece itself, after contributing politically to the repression of the mutineers.
After the April 1944 crisis, the Government in Exile in Cairo was entrusted to George Papandreou, who helped to develop the anti-Communist movement. Under his pressure the leaders of the EAM and ELAS signed on 30 May 1944 the Lebanon Charter, which denounced ELAS ‘terrorism’, the indiscipline of the mutineers (many of whom served sentences for it), left open the question of the monarchy, and agreed to a single command of the Greek armed forces and to the re-establishment of order “alongside the Allied troops” at the Liberation. The EAM and ELAS were unhappy at this, and for several weeks bargained and demanded ministerial posts and a change of prime minister.
However, a Soviet mission, led by Colonel Popov, arrived and put an end to these ill-tempered grumblings. The KKE and the EAM unconditionally entered the government. When the German forces left Athens on 12 October 1944, the KKE called on the Greek people to “ensure public order”. It also ensured that Papandreou came to power. He arrived with the British forces, at a time when the ELAS exercised real power all across the country.
Churchill was to provoke the Resistance when he ordered that General Scobie, the commander of the Allied forces, to maintain the military formations of the collaborators as ‘security battalions’ and to forbid them to be purged, and to ensure that on 2 December the Papandreou government could disarm the ELAS forces. A demonstration against the disarmament of the ELAS in Athens on 3 December was fired upon by the police. This assault in Syntagmata Square upon the biggest demonstration in Greek history left dozens dead and hundreds wounded. Thirty-three days of armed fighting followed in Athens between the forces of order grouped around Scobie and those of the local Resistance.
At last Churchill carried through his plan to crush the Greek revolution. He announced that he was intervening to prevent a “hideous massacre”, and to stop what he called the victory of “triumphant Trotskyism” – with a grin of complicity in the direction of Stalin. [28] From 3 December onwards those ELAS units whose leaders had decided not to surrender their arms were paralysed by the orders not to fire on British forces, who, as Churchill put it, were there by the “goodwill” of Roosevelt and Stalin. The andartes in Macedonia, the shock troops and the forces in the mountains were ordered to stay put and let the fighters in Athens be exterminated. The heroism with which they fought could not prevail against the policies of leaders who had made up their minds to lead these fighters into the surrender that was demanded by Moscow.
The Varkiza agreement of 15 February 1945 provided for all Resistance forces to be disarmed, but the ELAS forces in Athens had not submitted to this. The forces in the countryside had not moved to support them. This time Aris Velouchiotis understood the magnitude of the KKE’s betrayal. He was attacked in the KKE’s journal Rizospastis on 12 June. On 16 June he was assassinated, and his head was publicly exhibited in the villages on 18 June. How many other Resistance fighters fell at tha time under the fire of the British and of the counter-revolutionary formations which the Germans had created in Athens and the British in Cairo? Nonetheless, several more years of Stalinist treachery were required to exhaust the fighting potential of the Greek revolution.
3. The Trotskyists in the War
We cannot undertake here a wide-ranging study of the policies of the Trotskyists during the war, or compare them with the policies which Trotsky outlined on the eve of his death and of which his comrades were generally unaware at the time. This will be the objective of larger works. My ignorance of the Greek language prevents me from making use of the solid researches into the activities of the Trotskyists during the war which exist in Greek. Let us hope that this gap will be closed.
But in the meantime, let us be careful not to make over-hasty judgements. From 4 August 1936 onwards the Trotskyists were subjected to ferocious repression. The great majority of Trotskyist militants were arrested and thrown into prisons from which many did not emerge. Several leading cadres, including Pantelis Pouliopoulos, the former General Secretary of the KKE, were killed during the occupation. The conditions of illegality appear to have been particularly difficult for them because they were unable to participate even in the unification of the three organisations on which the leaders had agreed in 1938.
At best, any known Trotskyist militants who actually managed to join ELAS units were closely observed and carefully isolated. The Stalinists removed in one way or another any Trotskyists who managed to win responsible positions in the ELAS or in the People’s Army. Furthermore, between October and December 1944, the OPLA, which was really a Greek GPU, mounted a campaign of extermination against the Trotskyists. Throughout the country OPLA agents abducted, tortured and murdered such militants as Stavros Veroukhis, the Secretary of the Association of the War Wounded, and Thanassis Ikonomou, former Secretary of the Communist Youth at Ghazi. Workers, dockers, metal workers and teachers all suffered alike. “We killed more than 800 Trotskyists” boasted Barzotas, a member of the KKE Political Bureau, in 1947.
We do not have the means here to discover the truth about the policies of the Greek Trotskyists and how they could have escaped the dreadful fate that awaited them. Rene Dazy quotes from a document of 1943 in a Greek Trotskyist publication: “The Anglo-Americans will come to restore state power to the bourgeoisie. The exploited will only have changed one yoke for another.” [29] If that really was the case, then it is clear that the Greek Trotskyists sentenced themselves to death by confining themselves to negative perspectives and not taking their place in the mass movement.
Michel Raptis, at that time European Secretary of the Fourth International, and writing under the pseudonym of M. Spiro, recalled just after the events of December 1944 what Trotsky had written about the era of armed struggle. He paid tribute to the activity of the Greek masses when “a wind of revolution blew through the workers’ districts and suburbs of Athens”, declaring that their activity would “stand among the finest examples of the proletarian movement”. But he said nothing about what the Greek Trotskyists were doing. He also stated that “despite the official ideology of its Popular Frontist democratic and petit-bourgeois leadership”, the EAM “retained considerable class independence in action”. [30] There is nothing more, and often much less, to be found in the documents of the Fourth International.
André Kedros, the historian of the Greek Resistance, whose ideas about Stalinism are far from clear, stresses the international impact and effect of the ‘Athens coup’ as a “rebuke to all the resistance movements heavily influenced by the Communist parties”. Does this mean, as he declares, that the British repression in Greece “weighed heavily upon the decisions and tactics of Thorez, Togliatti and other such leaders”? [31] That view cannot be accepted. Their decisions and tactics were determined by the same factors that had determined the tactics of the KKE – and they had been determined in Moscow. But it is highly probable that the Greek defeat strengthened the Stalinist policy of capitulation and of restoring the capitalist order in Western Europe, and that it weighed heavily and negatively upon those who throughout Europe had identified the national struggle with the social struggle, and had believed that they had found the road to revolution when they joined the Resistance. We need to do what we cannot do here: to analyse concretely the developments in each of the countries of Europe.
However, an examination of the documents which Prager has assembled in Les congrès de la Quatrième Internationale provides what is essential for the study of the Fourth International during the war. He has omitted little but the initial positions of the former PCI and its sister-tendency led by Vereeken in Belgium. In the introduction to the second volume, he writes:
The war sharply corrected those who had doubted the timeliness of founding the Fourth International in a period of downturn and with weak forces. The Fourth International bravely confronted the violence and persecution of ‘democratic’ and Fascist regimes, plus the Stalinist thugs who attacked our organisations. Despite heavy losses to be mourned, and despite some inevitable individual collapses, it is remarkable that it not only maintained its forces, but notably strengthened and rejuvenated them in the USA, Britain and other countries. Even though it could not break through into the masses as it had hoped, because of the limits of revolutionary situations and of the rise of Stalinism, nonetheless it saw new sections come into existence. [32]
This was undoubtedly a remarkable result, but it was in stark contrast with what Trotsky had written at the beginning of the war, for example about the USA:
The American working class is still without a mass labour party even today. But the objective situation and the experience accumulated by the American workers can pose within a very brief period of time on the order of the day the question of the conquest of power. This perspective must be made the basis of our agitation. It is not merely a question of a position on capitalist militarism and of renouncing the defence of the bourgeois state, but of directly preparing for the conquest of power and the defence of the proletarian fatherland. [33]
Furthermore:
Ahead lies a favourable perspective, providing all the justification for revolutionary activism. It is necessary to utilise the opportunities which are opening up and to build the revolutionary party. [34]
In the face of these absolutely clear statements, the historian cannot restrict himself to mentioning the “limits of revolutionary situations”, or “the rise of Stalinism”, or to suggesting that we have “here elements which Trotsky could not foresee”. We must, at least, recognise the contradiction, even if we do not explain it, or even consider whether it was Trotsky or the Trotskyists who were wrong.
Moreover, Prager indicates that the Proletarian Military Policy, which the SWP (US) adopted at Trotsky’s suggestion, provoked widespread opposition within the Fourth International. He notes that the Belgian section excised several paragraphs on this question from the clandestine version of the May 1940 Manifesto. He also refers to the ‘reservations’ of the French section and of the European Secretariat. [35]
In 1940 the French Trotskyists were divided into two tendencies over perspectives which were ultimately as far away from each other as they both were from that of Trotsky. Beginning from the conception that the defeat of French imperialism and the occupation of French territory were leading, not only to national oppression, but to the rebirth of a genuine ‘national question’ in which all classes were interested, as in a colonial country, the majority of the POI, organised around the committees which published La Verité, outlined a strategy according to which the bourgeoisie of an occupied country becomes the natural ally of the workers’ movement, and the latter devotes itself completely to “national resistance”. Conversely, the La Seule Voie (The Only Road) group, which had emerged from the PCI, and subsequently became the CCI, denied that an imperialist nation could ever become an oppressed nation following a military defeat, and considered that national demands were “the importation of bourgeois ideology into the proletariat in order to demoralise it”.
These two positions, remote from each other, were both in a way the result of isolation. Under the pressure of the European Secretariat, they were gradually abandoned. The European Secretariat, led first by Marcel Hic and, after his arrest, by Raptis, was formed in the village of St Hubert in the Belgian Ardennes. This was a remarkable political and organisational feat in itself, and it also signified a return to an organisation which planned and functioned on an international scale. In 1944 the two viewpoints were rapidly converging, whilst the CCI continued to assert that the elementary duty of revolutionaries at the time was ferociously to denounce the union sacrée, to explain to the working class that it had to prepare for another ‘June 1936’ on a world scale, and at the same to carry out intense agitation for fraternisation with the German workers. Prager adequately summarises the consensus on the question of armed struggle:
Relations with the official Resistance could take on no forms other than independence, without agreeing to the ‘Front of Frenchmen’. But this structure should not be confused with the mass movements, nor include the latter in the same condemnation. Nor did these relations exclude individual participation in these movements in order to influence some of its members ... This work no doubt did not develop sufficiently, due to lack of forces and because the Trotskyists gave priority to the struggle in the factories. It certainly did not noticeably change the balance of forces or the course of events. The lack of success of the Trotskyists was not essentially the result of tactical or other faults, but to their situation, swimming against the stream, and to the grip of Stalinism on the masses. [36]
All the evidence shows that Trotsky’s appeal for the line of armed struggle and his proposal that revolutionary Socialists should become ‘militarists’ in order to play their rôle in a militarised world, are missing in this conception, or rather reduced to a secondary, ‘partisan’ level, entirely subordinated to ‘the struggle in the factories’. The discovery that ‘the armed struggle’ exerted an attractive force upon the masses must have presented many problems in the absence of the dimension which Trotsky contributed on ‘militarisation’.
Thus the resolution of the Provisional European Secretariat in 1943 on the partisan movement – which was adopted in full by the 1944 European Conference – recognised the “partly spontaneous character” of the partisan movement, and declared that Bolshevik-Leninists were now “obliged to take this form of struggle into account”. The resolution stated that “the guerrilla movements” were “military organisations in the tow of Anglo-Saxon imperialism”, but it noted that “the participation of the masses in the Balkans and in the West since the large-scale deportations of workers to Germany, though they had not changed the character of these movements”, obliged revolutionaries to advance a programme for them, in order to “make them understand that they must play the part of armed detachments in the service of the proletarian revolution”. [37] The resolution undoubtedly had left it rather late.
One could suggest that there was a wide gap between the positions of the Europeans, as Prager had summarised them, and those of the Americans, who systematically applied in their 1940s meetings and statements the Military Policy as advocated by Trotsky. Indeed, a completely exceptional kinship revealed itself on this level as well as on that of general principles. James P. Cannon came under attack from Munis for the ‘opportunist’ manner in which he presented the attitude of the SWP towards the war at the trial of its Minneapolis leaders which commenced on 27 October 1941. Cannon replied in May 1942:
The masses today, thanks to all kinds of compulsions and deceptions, and the perfidious role of the labour bureaucracy and the renegade Socialists and Stalinists, are accepting and supporting the war, that is, they are acting with the bourgeoisie and not with us. The problem for our party is, first, to understand this primary fact; second, to take up a position of ‘political opposition’; and then, on that basis, to seek an approach to the honestly patriotic workers and try to win them away from the bourgeoisie and over to our side by means of propaganda. That is the only ‘action’ that is open to us, as a small minority, at the present time. [38]
If we leave aside two documents which were published at that time by Jean Van Heijenoort under the pseudonym of Marc Loris [39], who was then Secretary of the Fourth International, we could conclude that apart from him, who had been in contact with Trotsky’s undogmatic thinking for years, nobody in or on the fringe of the Fourth International had understood the question of militarisation. Jean Rous, with his National Revolutionary Movement [40], and Marcel Hic with his theses on the national question in the Committees for the Fourth International [41], each in his own way missed the mark.
Meanwhile, the other tendencies locked themselves in a paralysing orthodoxy, and were running the risks arising from the ‘pacifist’ tendencies against which Trotsky had warned so vigorously. Apart from the veteran of the Russian Left Opposition, Tarov (A.A. Davtian), who under the false identity of Manouchian individually joined the FTP/MOI and was executed with other members of the group that was named after him, we meet only one contrary example.
This is Chen Duxiu, whose foresight led him, soon after he emerged from jail, to intervene in the political department of a division of the army, the head of which understood how military effectiveness depends upon political clarity. [42] This enterprise was nipped in the bud. The Guomindang police understood the danger better than Chen’s own comrades did.
In the same order of ideas, the hesitancy with which Trotskyists looked at armed resistance suggests that it would be interesting to study how the revolution was conceived within the Fourth International during the war. It seems sometimes to have been conceived as something apocalyptic, which would occur independently of what was going on, and not as a result of being worked for. Had their almost exclusively ‘propagandist’ education, involving the use of the weapons of denunciation and ‘explanation’ – which clearly were the essential activities of an organisation the leaders of which felt themselves to be “swimming against the stream” – prepared the cadres for such a belief?
Did not the extraordinary weakness of the SWP’s resolution of November 1943 result in part from this same ‘propagandist’ isolation? [43] How could people – who declared that the Kremlin was unable to play a counter-revolutionary rôle on a large scale, that American imperialism would play in Europe in the immediate future the same plundering rôle as German imperialism, that the only alternatives in Europe were a workers’ government or a brutal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, without any prospect of a parliamentary regime, and which rejected democratic demands with the declaration that the European working class had no ‘democratic illusions’ – place themselves in the stream of development after the objective turn in the situation?
We can go even further and say that if the Trotskyists, after pushing that line for years, had found themselves placed, if not at the head of such a revolutionary movement, but actually within it, they would have been obliged to revise the ABC of teachings of Marxism and Bolshevism. They would have had to admit the correctness of a point of view which sectarians always defend, according to which the role of revolutionaries consists in confining themselves to propaganda in periods of reaction, whilst they wait for the swing of the pendulum to bring the masses back to them.
What lay beneath this discussion – or rather this absence of discussion – on the most vital issues is not merely the question of the role of Stalinism, but that of the orientation towards the construction of the revolutionary party, as Trotsky had defended it in 1940. Our feeling, after treading the documents of the war period, is that there were often references that more resembled incantations than reflections on what had been gained and on working out a method by which to construct parties. It seems to me – and there is no ill-will here, because I was one of them – that during this period the Trotskyists at least learned how not to build a revolutionary party.
Serge Lambert has shown in a recent work, Revolutionary Tradition and a ‘New Party’ in Italy 1942-45, that, contrary to a certain legend, the Italian revolution was not decisively defeated at the moment when the short-lived dual power was set up in 1945 between the Allied administration and the Committees of the Republican Partisans, but from 1943 when the apparatus of Togliatti’s ‘new party’, which the men from Moscow established, broke the resistance of the scattered Communist oppositional groups.
When every chance of establishing a revolutionary party had been destroyed, the game was played out in which the leaders of the Italian Communist Party could without risk give the signal for what they called “the insurrection against the revolution”. [44] Moreover, Lambert shows very well that the decisive political weakness of many of these groups – some of which here and there developed considerably more powerful armed forces than those of the PCI – lay in the illusion which they held that the Soviet Union possessed some kind of “objectively revolutionary” character. They thought that the revolution was spreading along with every advance of the Red Army. We meet this conception not only in the well-known article in La Verité in February 1944, but throughout the world press of the Trotskyist movement. [45]
The question which we have tried to raise here is by no means academic. During the Second World War were the Trotskyist organisations, leaders and members alike, victims of an objective situation that was beyond them? Could they have done no more than what they did, that is to survive by drawing in more members and saving the honour of the internationalists, by maintaining against wind and tide the militant work of fraternising with German workers in uniform?
If that is the case, it would be necessary to recognise that Trotsky, with his analysis of the militarisation which had to be carried out, and his perspective that the revolutionary party could be constructed and the struggle for power begun in a short time, was completely isolated in 1940, not only from what was really happening politically in the world, but also from the political reality of his own organisation. He was, therefore, entertaining illusions and perceiving possibilities of breakthroughs when the Fourth International was in fact doomed to impotence, forced for a long time to swim against the current, and confronted with “the grip of Stalinism on the masses”.
But we may suppose, on the contrary, that the Trotskyist organisations, their members and their leaders, were involved, and that they have at least some responsibility for their own setbacks. In that case, we may think, if we start from the premises of Trotsky’s analysis of 1940, that the Second World War did see the development of a mass movement based upon a national and social resistance, which the Stalinists did their utmost to divert, and which, in the case of Greece, they led to its destruction – a resistance which the Trotskyists could neither support nor utilise, because they did not know how to locate themselves in it and even, perhaps, because they could not understand the concrete character of the moment in history in which they were living.
We believe that this question deserves to be asked.
Pierre Broué
Notes
1. These documents are in L. Trotsky, Sur la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, originally published by La Taupe in Belgium, and republished by Seuil in Paris in 1974. The articles and interviews by Trotsky were sometimes mutilated by the removal of passages which do not bear directly upon the Second World War, but were generally concerned with the Spanish Civil War and the Fourth International.
2. The preface and postscript are printed below. pp.12-14, 18-19 – Editors.
Some of these documents were published in 1945 in the European Secretariat’s Internal Bulletin (No.5). Some members reacted strongly against Trotsky. One of them, ‘Am’, French or Belgian, sent to the International Secretariat an article entitled On the Subject of the Proletarian Military Policy: Did the Old Man Kill Trotskyism?. This article characterised Trotsky’s position as “pure and simple chauvinism”, speaking of the “importance of his errors”, and attributing to him “willingness to defend the fatherland without first overthrowing the bourgeoisie, while at the same time using in agitation the danger from its imperialist opponent”.
He went as far as to ask: “We must openly and frankly pose the question whether we can continue to bear the name of ‘Trotskyists’, when the leader of the Fourth International has dragged it into the mire of social-chauvinism.” This article is in the Archive of the International Secretariat, in the possession of the Institut Léon Trotsky.
3. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York 1977, pp.410ff. This version has been slightly edited. Another version, with editorial interpolations, appears in L.D. Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, New York 1971, pp.444ff. It first appeared in the October 1940 issue of Fourth International in the incomplete state in which Trotsky left it on his death – Editors.
4. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.411.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid. The translator of Trotsky’s article added: “Several citations from Lenin during that period fit Trotsky’s description”, and gives two: “It is possible, however, that five, 10 or even more years will elapse before the Socialist revolution begins.” (V.I. Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Collected Works, Volume 22, Moscow 1977, p.153), and: “We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.” (V.I. Lenin, Lecture on the 1905 Revolution, Collected Works, Volume 23, Moscow 1974, p.253).
7. Trotsky, op. cit., p.411.
8. Op. cit., p.412.
9. Op. cit., p.414.
10. These will be published in Volume 23 of the Oeuvres, and the articles and interviews, including Bonapartism, Fascism and War, will be found in Volume 26. [Cf. L.D. Trotsky, On the Future of Hitler’s Armies, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.406, Fragments from the First Seven Months of the War, Fragments on the USSR, Preface to a Book on War and Peace, Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement 1934-40, New York 1979, pp.72ff. – Editors]
11. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, op. cit., p.253.
12. L.D. Trotsky, How to Really Defend Democracy, op. cit., pp.344-5.
13. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, op. cit., p.257.
14. L.D. Trotsky, We Do Not Change Our Course, op. cit., p.297.
15. Op. cit., p298
16. ibid.
17. L.D. Trotsky, On the Future of Hitler’s Armies, op. cit., p.406.
18. The Case of Leon Trotsky, New York 1969, pp.289-90
19. L.D. Trotsky, Discussions with Trotsky, op. cit., p.256.
20. L.D. Trotsky, Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, op. cit., p.222.
21. A. Kedros, La Resistance Grèque: 1940-44, p.174.
22. E. Myers, The Great Entanglement, p.189.
23. A. Kedros, op. cit., p.199, mentions a report by the German police when Ioannis Rallis came to power: “He passes for the confidential adviser of Pangalos, who is on the side of the English.” Kedros also refers to the semi-Fascist military hierarchy, General Papagos and Rallis: “All these men and formations were to be headed in a certain direction by a secret adviser of the king, who was also a prince of the church, the Metropolitan of Athens, Chrisanthios.” (p.179)
24. Svetozar Vukmanovic-Tempo, How and Why the People’s Liberation Struggle of Greece Met With Defeat, London 1985, cited in Kedros, op. cit., p.409.
25. D. Eudes, The Kapetanios, New Left Books, 1972, p.75.
26. W. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 5, London 1952, p.479. Churchill’s account clearly shows how much he was worried about the mutiny, and how anxious he was to see it crushed.
27. The official sources of the Government in Exile placed this figure at 10,000.
28. Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons on 19 December 1944, defended his use of the term ‘Trotskyism’, saying:
I think that ‘Trotskyism’ is a better definition of Greek Communism and certain other sects than the usual term. It has the advantage of being equally hated in Russia.
This was followed by “prolonged laughter”. On 13 December Churchill had invited Communist MP William Gallacher not to get too excited over the subject of the situation in Greece, if he didn’t want to be accused of ‘Trotskyism’. Interestingly, Churchill noted that Archbishop Damaskinos, who was more or less imposed by the British authorities as regent, “greatly feared the Communist, or Trotskyite as he put it, combination in Greek affairs” (W. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 6, London 1954, p.272).
Churchill noted that the British massacres in Athens were widely and strongly criticised in the US press and by the US State Department, and also in The Times and the Manchester Guardian in Britain, but added:
Stalin, however, adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia. (Ibid., p.255) [Editors’ note]
29. R. Dazy, Fusillez les chiens enragés, p.266.
30. M. Spiro, The Greek Revolution, Quatrième Internationale, no.14-15, January-February 1945. On the same subject, the special International Internal Bulletin (January 1945) does not even mention the existence of Trotskyist organisations in Greece. The organ of the US Socialist Workers Party, Fourth International (February 1945) contains a documented article, Civil War in Greece, and the paragraph headed Trotskyism in Greece confines itself to generalities:
ELAS is ‘Trotskyist’ in one sense only – in the revolutionary instincts of its indomitable fighters, in their great capacity for struggle and sacrifice. But its programme and leadership has no resemblance to Trotskyism.
Further on it declares: “The Trotskyists will team to connect themselves with the masses and their struggles.” It adds that under the reign of terror unleashed by the Stalinists, this would take some time. Quatrième Internationale (no.22-24, September-November 1945) contains a note headed Greece which calls for the exposure of the murder of revolutionary militants in Greece by the Stalinists, and is followed by a preliminary list of names. Fourth International (October 1945), 39. reported in the Inside the Fourth International column that:
Papers of the International Communist Party (Fourth International), the only revolutionary party in Greece, are illegal. Members of that party are persecuted, hounded and quite frequently killed by both the government and the Stalinists.
In fact there were serious divergences between the International Secretariat and the Greek Trotskyists. On 25 November 1946 Michel Raptis (Pablo) wrote under the name of ‘Pilar’ to the Greek section:
`It is not a matter of conforming to the letter of every political resolution of the International. But it is not a matter, either, of taking a diametrically opposite line on such important questions as your attitude to the movement of the EAM and ELAS and to the events of December 1944.
Quatrième Internationale (October-November 1946) reported on the Unification Congress of July 1946, which produced the KDKE, and published the Congress manifesto:
Despite itself, despite its nationalist pronouncements, despite its policy of conciliation and class collaboration, the Greek Communist Party grouped around itself the forces which history set in motion and which, in the last analysis, were the forces of the proletarian revolution.
Rodolphe Prager stated that the Greek Trotskyists held a “generally dismissive attitude to the national movement”, that they distanced themselves from it, and held a neutralist position “hostile equally to the two factions in struggle” during the civil war:
The principle mistake was an inability to discern the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist character which was powerfully germinating in this mass movement, and its revolutionary dynamic, behind the bourgeois and Stalinist leaderships. Ignorance of this reality prevented the Trotskyists from understanding that in December 1944 the conflict could not be reduced to a confrontation between British imperialism on the one side and the Soviet bureaucracy and its supporters on the other. (R. Prager, Les congres de la Quatrième Internationale, Volume 2, pp.348-9, cf. R. Prager, The Fourth International During the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988, p.33)
It is not an easy question to answer. We have found in the archives of the International Secretariat a letter from George Vitsoris in which he protests against the omission from the manifesto of the Unification Congress of the slogan “Withdraw the British troops”, and considers “unacceptable” the fact that the manifesto does not say a word about the murder of the Trotskyists by the Stalinists.
31. A. Kedros, op. cit., p.512.
32. R. Prager, op. cit., p.2. This introduction does not appear in the English translation.
33. L.D. Trotsky, Bonapartism, Fascism and War, op. cit., p.414.
34. Op. cit., p.413.
35. Prager, op. cit., pp.13-4.
36. Op. cit., p.12.
37. Op. cit., p.221-3.
38. J.P. Cannon, Socialism on Trial, New York 1970, p.167.
39. One article by Van Heijenoort appeared in the September and November 1942 issues of Fourth International, with an editorial note in the October issue describing it as “a discussion article”. In an article dated June 1941, entitled Where is Europe Going?, Loris stated that the working class would lead the struggle against the Hitlerite occupation. He then emphasised the dialectical link between ‘national’ and ‘social’ liberation, in fact proletarian revolution, whilst he criticised the illusions that could arise from the national liberation movement. This article appeared in the October 1942 issue of La Verité. Loris wrote:
It is not the task of Marxists to impose this or that form of struggle which they themselves may prefer. The task is really to deepen, widen and make more systematic all the manifestations of resistance, to bring to them the spirit of organisation, and to open a broad perspective before them.
The article seems to criticise the European ‘revisionists’ on the national question. The 1942 article seems rather to be a polemic against the position of the SWP. One of the documents that Loris wrote in 1944 stresses as “one of the teachings of Bolshevism” its contempt for simple propaganda that merely tries to shed light on the virtues of Socialism, its “capacity to sense the aspirations of the masses and to take advantage of their progressive aspects”, and in knowing “how to conduct activities which can win the masses away from their conservative parties and leaders”. Much of the original documentation in the discussion was devoted to the Three Theses of the IKD, and to their position on the national question. We have not dealt with this question here, which involves open revisionism that conceals other divergences. In any case, the essential documents are in the second volume of Prager’s collection.
40. Compare La Révolution Française, 1/1940, and the different comments of J. Rabaut in Tout est Possible, pp.343-4, and J.P. Joubert in Revolutionaires dans la SFIO, pp.224-6.
41. Prager, op. cit., pp.92-101, and M. Dreyfus, Les Trotskystes pendant la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, Le Mouvement Sociale, pp.20-2.
42. P Broué, Chen Duxiu and the Fourth International, 1938-42, Revolutionary History, Volume 2 no.4, Spring 1990, pp.16-21.
43.The text of this resolution of the SWP’s National Committee appeared in Quatrième Internationale, no.11-12-13, September-November 1944, under the title of Perspectives and Tasks of the European Revolution. It was accompanied by an introduction which emphasised “the remarkable agreement between the general line of this document and that of the resolution of the European Conference of February 1944”.
44. Serge Lambert, Tradition Revolutionaire et ‘Parti Nouveau’ Communiste en Italie, 1942-45, thesis in political science, Grenoble 1985.
45. The clandestine issue of La Verité (10 February 1944) carried a front-page headline, The Banners of the Red Army will Join with Our Red Banners. Felix Morrow in the SWP Internal Bulletin (Volume 8, no 8) quotes this article and mentions analogous positions adopted by the Bolshevik-Leninist Party in India, La Voix de Lenin in Belgium, El Militante in Chile, etc. Of course, the fact that they all reacted in the same way is not necessarily a sign that they agreed on principle. It may also express conservative responses or overriding pressures upon them.
Sunday, April 01, 2012
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-Lessons From The Utopian Socialists- Charles Fourier and The Phalanx Movement
Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Lecture 21
The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier (1)
By 1825, European society had undergone several shock waves of change. The transformation was set in motion by two immense revolutions: one set the pace for political change in the 19th century, while the other radically transformed the nature of economic man. As we have seen, the French Revolution made change the order of the day and helped to instill in man -- at least some men -- the notion that change was somehow both good and desirable. Occurring at the same time, although with a varied pace depending upon what European nation we are observing, an Industrial Revolution worked its wonders on nations, social classes and individuals (see Lecture 17). Although there were those thinkers who were critical of the Industrial Revolution and wanted to return to some pre-modern state of existence, there were other critics who saw that industry and industrial capitalism were here to stay. For these individuals, it was a forward-looking socialism which would help make sense of all these changes for the benefit of mankind. However, it is curious to note that following the Napoleonic period, a strong wave of conservative reaction set in across most of Europe. This is not that surprising since most monarchs feared what another French Revolution and another Napoleon could do in their country.
The first quarter of the 19th century was also marked by an artistic and cultural phenomenon known as Romanticism (see Lecture 16). The Romantic artist idealized medieval society and in general, exhibited a strong distaste for rationalism of any flavor. The Romantic also had no sympathy for the atomized individualism that was so prominent among the philosophes. Therefore, Romanticism also lent itself to conservative and reactionary purposes. But since Romanticism also meant the attempt to break away from established norms and standards in art, conduct and philosophy, it could also seem to have served the purposes of liberation that was embraced by the radical and revolutionary socialist.
Romanticism was so complex a movement that historians have never reached a consensus regarding definitions or meanings. Romantics were liberals, conservatives, rationalists, idealists, Catholics, atheists, revolutionaries and reactionaries. Their essential message, however, was that the imagination of the individual should determine the form and content of all art. Such an attitude ran counter to the judgments of the Enlightenment. The philosophes attacked the Church because it blocked human Reason. The Romantics attacked the philosophes because they had turned man into a soulless thinking machine, a robot. Christianity had formed a matrix into which medieval man found understanding. The Enlightenment replaced the medieval matrix with the matrix of Newtonian physics. For the Romantics, the result of all this was the demotion of the individual. Imagination, sensitivity, feeling, spontaneity and freedom were stifled, choked to death. Man must liberate himself. Like Rousseau, one of their spiritual fathers, the individual must rediscover true freedom. Habits, rules, traditions and standards imposed by rational society must be lifted. Man must be liberated.
The philosophes tried to demonstrate that all men are the same because they are endowed with Reason. But where the philosophes saw commonality, the Romantics saw diversity and uniqueness. Discover yourself, they said, express yourself. Play your own music, write your own poetry, paint your own personal vision: live, love or suffer in your own way. Whereas as the 18th century philosophe would have agreed with Kant when he said, "Sapere Aude! Dare to Know!," the Romantics took up the battle cry, "Dare to be! Dare to be yourself" The Romantics were rebels and they knew it. They dared to be themselves. And they were most passionate about their subjectivism, their emphasis on the introspective self. After all, had not Rousseau¡¯s Confessions begun with the following words:
I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself. Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
For the Romantic, it was poetry which revealed the highest truth. Poetry could do what rational analysis and geometric calculation could not. Poetry could speak to the heart, clarify life¡¯s mysteries, and bring the imagination out of the soul. "O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," said John Keats (1795-1821). "Bathe in the waters of life," said William Blake (1757-1827). The Romantics gave European culture an antidote to the excessive rationalism of the 18th century. Intensely subjective and introspective, the Romantics discovered the soul behind the mind.
It was in the context of the Romantic movement, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, that the Utopian Socialists made their appearance upon the historical stage. The three main Utopian Socialists -- Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon -- differed from one another in a number of fundamental ways but they had enough in common to justify talking about them collectively. They all lived at approximately the same time: only twelve years separated the oldest (Saint-Simon) from the youngest (Fourier). All were alive between 1770 and 1825 and they all did their most influential work during the first quarter of the 19th century. Although it was Marx and Engels who eventually labeled these socialists as utopian (as outlined in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO), they were not utopian in the sense that Sir Thomas More certainly was. The Utopian Socialists believed that their ideal societies could be established in the immediate future. More, on the other hand, could only admit that the island called Utopia was an ideal society, but also that the only way England or Europe could find its utopia was to go back in time rather than forward. This much said, the label utopian has been accepted but not necessarily because historians have agreed with the judgment of Marx and Engels. The real reason why Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen are Utopian Socialists is because their thought closely resembles that of the religious sectarian, the recent convert, the visionary and the Romantic. It might also be added that for the modern, the ideas of the Utopian Socialist also appear to have been formulated by fanatics. This is perhaps a result of the fact that they announced their plans for an ideal society with the zeal of the religious prophet.
Appearing as they did in the first quarter of the 19th century, it is necessary to identify the Utopian Socialists according to how perceptively they understood and dealt with the massive challenge of industrial society. In this regard, it was CHARLES FOURIER (1772-1837) who seems to have been the most utopian of the Utopian Socialists. What I mean by this is that although Fourier was aware of what was happening in England as a result of the Industrial Revolution, he rejected industrialism wholesale. He despised laissez-faire liberalism and the factory system not because of what effects they might have on human society, but because he believed that industrial society was a passing phase. He saw no need to rectify the dangers inherent in industrialism -- he simply went beyond industrialism by ignoring it. Visionaries can do such things, you know.
As a visionary, Fourier¡¯s ideas seem quite fantastical and without ground in reality. Indeed, there is much in Fourier¡¯s writing that is pure nonsense. Yes, like some of the representatives of the early French communist movement, Fourier exhibits that almost characteristic pretension of the visionary: contradictory, confused, repetitive, chaotic and, of course, long-winded. Reading Fourier after having read Marx and Engels, Fourier comes off as a confused thinker. For instance, Fourier's passion for numbers led him to predict that the ideal world he was helping to create would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them in an era of Perfect Harmony in which:
androgynous plants would copulate
six moons would orbit the earth
the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean
the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade
the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although "these are approximate estimates"
every woman would have four lovers or husbands simultaneously
It may be difficult to surmount these "difficulties" in Fourier's thought but I think it would be wrong to pass Fourier off as nothing more than an absurd eccentric. After all, even Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a bit odd: he believed that men could extend their life spans indefinitely simply by the power of mind over matter. If one is able to wade through the near endless nonsense which runs rampant through Fourier¡¯s writings, one will find that he does offer even the modern reader some fresh and somewhat audacious views of the human condition. If his proposals seem rather extraordinary if not bizarre by modern standards, his insights into human society and individual psychology remain quite perceptive.
Fourier was a relatively isolated thinker. We cannot trace the origin of his ideas with any accuracy. He had no formal academic training and claimed to be bored with the discourses of the philosophers. Working as a traveling salesman during the day and scribbling away in the evenings, he was mocked and ridiculed by his critics. He had no meaningful contacts with any political organizations nor did his ideas correspond in any clear way to either the early French communists or the British democratic radicals.
This is not to say that we must accept Fourier¡¯s claim of originality or epoch-making genius either. Fourier tells us that his ideas had tremendous implications for the future. In his parable, "The Four Apples," Fourier sees history guided by four apples. The first two -- Adam and Helen of Troy -- were the bad apples. The good apples, on the other hand, were Newton and yeah, you may have guessed it, Fourier himself. Newton had discovered the physical laws of universal attraction: it was up to Fourier, so Fourier the illiterate shopkeeper tells us, to discover the laws of passional attraction. These ideas aside, some of what Fourier says does reflect certain rather typical Enlightenment themes. For instance, Reason and Nature were key terms in his writings. He called himself the "Messiah of Reason," and, like Rousseau, he criticized bourgeois society for having created an unnatural civilization. Fourier proposed a completely non-repressive society in which basic human drives would not be repressed but expressed and cultivated.
Fourier detested the English for their rapidly emerging industrial society and for men like Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1832), Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and other political economists who had done so much to rationalize that system. He held in special contempt the rationally calculating individualism of the utilitarians. They were too intellectual, too rational. In their place, Fourier foresaw a community tied together by the bonds of emotion. Thus Bentham¡¯s system, designed as it was to repress human drive and will, was both wrong and impossible. Human nature, Fourier believed, was created by God and organized society should respect that and not try to fight it. Neither could Fourier accept Rousseau¡¯s concept of the General Will, nor Robespierre, nor the Reign of Terror, nor even the Jacobins.
Charles Fourier was born into a well-established family of cloth merchants and spent the bulk of his life engaged in commerce. But from an early age, so he tells us, he rebelled against his work, lamenting that it was his fate to be "participating in the deceitful activities of merchants and brutalizing myself in the performance of degrading tasks." He spent his early years in Lyons where he observed the efforts of the silk workers to organize themselves. Here too he observed the rampant commercial speculation, the cycles of inflation and industrial stagnation that prevailed when the free market economy was re-established under the Directory.
Fourier wanted to elevate the status of manual labor, to rescue it from a long-standing tradition of degradation and denigration. But while Fourier was interested in the rational reorganization and efficiency of labor, he by no means accepted the bourgeois work ethic or the older Judeo-Christian notion that work is unavoidably toilsome. For Fourier, all manual labor was arduous and irksome -- whether in the factory, workshop or field, the plight of the laboring population was intolerably dehumanizing. He believed, on the other hand, that it was possible to make all work into play, to make it pleasurable and desirable and deeply satisfying, both physically and mentally. This was perhaps the one vision of Fourier¡¯s thought that most captivated other socialist thinkers of the 19th century, including Marx and Engels.
The device which Fourier believed would make possible this non-repressive social cohesion, this Eden of joyous labor, he termed the phalanstere. A typically untranslatable concept, the term was coined by Fourier to suggest the ancient Greek phalanx, where men were tightly linked together, forming a highly interdependent and impenetrable fighting unit. Fourier¡¯s phalanx was to become a self-contained community housing 1,620 members with a myriad of subdivisions designed to encourage a dynamic interplay of various human passions. Why 1,620? Well, Fourier had determined that there are 810 different psychological types -- if you multiply this by two (male and female), you arrive at a figure of 1,620. Here the Law of Passional Attractions would be allowed to operate unfettered for the first time in history. What Newton had done for physics, Fourier had done for human society. And of course, Fourier believed his discovery to be much more important than Newton¡¯s.
There are twelve fundamental passions: five of the senses (touch, taste, hearing, sight and smell); four of the soul (friendship, love, ambition and parenthood); and three that he called distributive. The first eight passions are self-explanatory. It is the distributive passions that deserve our closer attention.
First, la Papillone refers to the love of variety. A worker quickly tires of one kind of task, just as lovers, in spite of their initial attraction, soon find themselves looking elsewhere. Fourier held Christianity in deep contempt because it made people feel guilty when they pursued their natural desire for variety in work or in sex. For the same reasons, he also hated Adam Smith¡¯s vision of a society of specialists, doing the same thing over and over all in the name of the division of labor. Whatever the productive advantages of the Smith¡¯s liberal political economy, the fact remained, according to Fourier, that it created only stunted and repressed human beings. Society should strive to eliminate all tedious or unpleasant jobs, learning, if possible, to do without the products derived from such labor.
The second of the distributive passions, la Cabaliste, had to do with rivalry and conspiracy. While in previous societies this passion caused many problems, in the phalanx it would be put to good use. Productive teams would compete with one another to produce the most delicious peaches or the best pair of shoes. The need to compete would satisfy a natural passion for all men, by nature, are competitive. And the harmful aspects of competitive commerce in civilization would not be reproduced because production would keep the overall good of society in mind, rather than encouraging individual profit in the market.
Finally, la Composite, the distributive passion which Fourier considered the most beautiful of all. Nearly impossible to translate into reality, by la Composite, Fourier seems to have meant a combination of two or more different varieties of passions -- the sharing of a good meal (senses) in good company (soul) while conspiring (la Cabaliste) to arrange a sexual orgy with the couple at the next table. This suggests some of the special interest scholars took in Fourier in the 1960s. He was an ardent advocate of sexual liberation and a staunch defender of sexual preferences that were clearly not accepted by religion or society. He believed that the only sexual activity that could be forbidden involved pain or force. He was willing to accept sadism and masochism among consenting partners as well as sodomy, lesbianism, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, fetishism, sex between close relatives -- any sexual activity, in others words, that satisfied man¡¯s natural needs. Fourier was also a radical feminist. He considered the position of women in his society as a form of slavery. In one famous passage, he set it down that the level of any civilization could be determined by the extent to which its women had been liberated. On the other hand, Fourier did not advocate the equality of the sexes for the simple reason that there were real differences between the sexes. He rejected patriarchy and familial conditions in the phalanx were based on a structure entirely unknown in western civilization. He believed that the existing family structure was partly responsible for the subjugation of women. The family turned people exclusively inward to spouse and children, rather than outward to society.
Fourier¡¯s vision, together with his criticism of the existing system, places him as one of the most inspired prophets of 19th century socialism. His remarkable psychological insights, such as his championing of brief spells and variety in work, his quickness to see oppression no matter how veiled, and his penetrating concern with character formations and problems, links him to modern educational theory, the emancipation of women and even personnel management.
Fourier can also be described as a brilliant exponent of the idea of alienation, a concern which we will find fully developed in Marx, or as an early theoretician of the affluent society, a theme later developed by the American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith. His sometimes nonsensical statements aside, Fourier¡¯s ideas do make some sense when placed alongside the more advanced ideas of a Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Herbert Marcuse, the critic of the one-dimensional society of the 1960s. His vision that mankind¡¯s existence is somehow false or repressive, was certainly taken up again by later thinkers, of course, with quite different conclusions.
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copyright ?2000 Steven Kreis
Last Revised -- August 03, 2009
Conditions of Use
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the “new world” we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one. In that sense previous historical models come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Lecture 21
The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier (1)
By 1825, European society had undergone several shock waves of change. The transformation was set in motion by two immense revolutions: one set the pace for political change in the 19th century, while the other radically transformed the nature of economic man. As we have seen, the French Revolution made change the order of the day and helped to instill in man -- at least some men -- the notion that change was somehow both good and desirable. Occurring at the same time, although with a varied pace depending upon what European nation we are observing, an Industrial Revolution worked its wonders on nations, social classes and individuals (see Lecture 17). Although there were those thinkers who were critical of the Industrial Revolution and wanted to return to some pre-modern state of existence, there were other critics who saw that industry and industrial capitalism were here to stay. For these individuals, it was a forward-looking socialism which would help make sense of all these changes for the benefit of mankind. However, it is curious to note that following the Napoleonic period, a strong wave of conservative reaction set in across most of Europe. This is not that surprising since most monarchs feared what another French Revolution and another Napoleon could do in their country.
The first quarter of the 19th century was also marked by an artistic and cultural phenomenon known as Romanticism (see Lecture 16). The Romantic artist idealized medieval society and in general, exhibited a strong distaste for rationalism of any flavor. The Romantic also had no sympathy for the atomized individualism that was so prominent among the philosophes. Therefore, Romanticism also lent itself to conservative and reactionary purposes. But since Romanticism also meant the attempt to break away from established norms and standards in art, conduct and philosophy, it could also seem to have served the purposes of liberation that was embraced by the radical and revolutionary socialist.
Romanticism was so complex a movement that historians have never reached a consensus regarding definitions or meanings. Romantics were liberals, conservatives, rationalists, idealists, Catholics, atheists, revolutionaries and reactionaries. Their essential message, however, was that the imagination of the individual should determine the form and content of all art. Such an attitude ran counter to the judgments of the Enlightenment. The philosophes attacked the Church because it blocked human Reason. The Romantics attacked the philosophes because they had turned man into a soulless thinking machine, a robot. Christianity had formed a matrix into which medieval man found understanding. The Enlightenment replaced the medieval matrix with the matrix of Newtonian physics. For the Romantics, the result of all this was the demotion of the individual. Imagination, sensitivity, feeling, spontaneity and freedom were stifled, choked to death. Man must liberate himself. Like Rousseau, one of their spiritual fathers, the individual must rediscover true freedom. Habits, rules, traditions and standards imposed by rational society must be lifted. Man must be liberated.
The philosophes tried to demonstrate that all men are the same because they are endowed with Reason. But where the philosophes saw commonality, the Romantics saw diversity and uniqueness. Discover yourself, they said, express yourself. Play your own music, write your own poetry, paint your own personal vision: live, love or suffer in your own way. Whereas as the 18th century philosophe would have agreed with Kant when he said, "Sapere Aude! Dare to Know!," the Romantics took up the battle cry, "Dare to be! Dare to be yourself" The Romantics were rebels and they knew it. They dared to be themselves. And they were most passionate about their subjectivism, their emphasis on the introspective self. After all, had not Rousseau¡¯s Confessions begun with the following words:
I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself. Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
For the Romantic, it was poetry which revealed the highest truth. Poetry could do what rational analysis and geometric calculation could not. Poetry could speak to the heart, clarify life¡¯s mysteries, and bring the imagination out of the soul. "O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts," said John Keats (1795-1821). "Bathe in the waters of life," said William Blake (1757-1827). The Romantics gave European culture an antidote to the excessive rationalism of the 18th century. Intensely subjective and introspective, the Romantics discovered the soul behind the mind.
It was in the context of the Romantic movement, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, that the Utopian Socialists made their appearance upon the historical stage. The three main Utopian Socialists -- Charles Fourier, Robert Owen and Henri de Saint-Simon -- differed from one another in a number of fundamental ways but they had enough in common to justify talking about them collectively. They all lived at approximately the same time: only twelve years separated the oldest (Saint-Simon) from the youngest (Fourier). All were alive between 1770 and 1825 and they all did their most influential work during the first quarter of the 19th century. Although it was Marx and Engels who eventually labeled these socialists as utopian (as outlined in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO), they were not utopian in the sense that Sir Thomas More certainly was. The Utopian Socialists believed that their ideal societies could be established in the immediate future. More, on the other hand, could only admit that the island called Utopia was an ideal society, but also that the only way England or Europe could find its utopia was to go back in time rather than forward. This much said, the label utopian has been accepted but not necessarily because historians have agreed with the judgment of Marx and Engels. The real reason why Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen are Utopian Socialists is because their thought closely resembles that of the religious sectarian, the recent convert, the visionary and the Romantic. It might also be added that for the modern, the ideas of the Utopian Socialist also appear to have been formulated by fanatics. This is perhaps a result of the fact that they announced their plans for an ideal society with the zeal of the religious prophet.
Appearing as they did in the first quarter of the 19th century, it is necessary to identify the Utopian Socialists according to how perceptively they understood and dealt with the massive challenge of industrial society. In this regard, it was CHARLES FOURIER (1772-1837) who seems to have been the most utopian of the Utopian Socialists. What I mean by this is that although Fourier was aware of what was happening in England as a result of the Industrial Revolution, he rejected industrialism wholesale. He despised laissez-faire liberalism and the factory system not because of what effects they might have on human society, but because he believed that industrial society was a passing phase. He saw no need to rectify the dangers inherent in industrialism -- he simply went beyond industrialism by ignoring it. Visionaries can do such things, you know.
As a visionary, Fourier¡¯s ideas seem quite fantastical and without ground in reality. Indeed, there is much in Fourier¡¯s writing that is pure nonsense. Yes, like some of the representatives of the early French communist movement, Fourier exhibits that almost characteristic pretension of the visionary: contradictory, confused, repetitive, chaotic and, of course, long-winded. Reading Fourier after having read Marx and Engels, Fourier comes off as a confused thinker. For instance, Fourier's passion for numbers led him to predict that the ideal world he was helping to create would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them in an era of Perfect Harmony in which:
androgynous plants would copulate
six moons would orbit the earth
the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean
the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade
the world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although "these are approximate estimates"
every woman would have four lovers or husbands simultaneously
It may be difficult to surmount these "difficulties" in Fourier's thought but I think it would be wrong to pass Fourier off as nothing more than an absurd eccentric. After all, even Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was a bit odd: he believed that men could extend their life spans indefinitely simply by the power of mind over matter. If one is able to wade through the near endless nonsense which runs rampant through Fourier¡¯s writings, one will find that he does offer even the modern reader some fresh and somewhat audacious views of the human condition. If his proposals seem rather extraordinary if not bizarre by modern standards, his insights into human society and individual psychology remain quite perceptive.
Fourier was a relatively isolated thinker. We cannot trace the origin of his ideas with any accuracy. He had no formal academic training and claimed to be bored with the discourses of the philosophers. Working as a traveling salesman during the day and scribbling away in the evenings, he was mocked and ridiculed by his critics. He had no meaningful contacts with any political organizations nor did his ideas correspond in any clear way to either the early French communists or the British democratic radicals.
This is not to say that we must accept Fourier¡¯s claim of originality or epoch-making genius either. Fourier tells us that his ideas had tremendous implications for the future. In his parable, "The Four Apples," Fourier sees history guided by four apples. The first two -- Adam and Helen of Troy -- were the bad apples. The good apples, on the other hand, were Newton and yeah, you may have guessed it, Fourier himself. Newton had discovered the physical laws of universal attraction: it was up to Fourier, so Fourier the illiterate shopkeeper tells us, to discover the laws of passional attraction. These ideas aside, some of what Fourier says does reflect certain rather typical Enlightenment themes. For instance, Reason and Nature were key terms in his writings. He called himself the "Messiah of Reason," and, like Rousseau, he criticized bourgeois society for having created an unnatural civilization. Fourier proposed a completely non-repressive society in which basic human drives would not be repressed but expressed and cultivated.
Fourier detested the English for their rapidly emerging industrial society and for men like Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1832), Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and other political economists who had done so much to rationalize that system. He held in special contempt the rationally calculating individualism of the utilitarians. They were too intellectual, too rational. In their place, Fourier foresaw a community tied together by the bonds of emotion. Thus Bentham¡¯s system, designed as it was to repress human drive and will, was both wrong and impossible. Human nature, Fourier believed, was created by God and organized society should respect that and not try to fight it. Neither could Fourier accept Rousseau¡¯s concept of the General Will, nor Robespierre, nor the Reign of Terror, nor even the Jacobins.
Charles Fourier was born into a well-established family of cloth merchants and spent the bulk of his life engaged in commerce. But from an early age, so he tells us, he rebelled against his work, lamenting that it was his fate to be "participating in the deceitful activities of merchants and brutalizing myself in the performance of degrading tasks." He spent his early years in Lyons where he observed the efforts of the silk workers to organize themselves. Here too he observed the rampant commercial speculation, the cycles of inflation and industrial stagnation that prevailed when the free market economy was re-established under the Directory.
Fourier wanted to elevate the status of manual labor, to rescue it from a long-standing tradition of degradation and denigration. But while Fourier was interested in the rational reorganization and efficiency of labor, he by no means accepted the bourgeois work ethic or the older Judeo-Christian notion that work is unavoidably toilsome. For Fourier, all manual labor was arduous and irksome -- whether in the factory, workshop or field, the plight of the laboring population was intolerably dehumanizing. He believed, on the other hand, that it was possible to make all work into play, to make it pleasurable and desirable and deeply satisfying, both physically and mentally. This was perhaps the one vision of Fourier¡¯s thought that most captivated other socialist thinkers of the 19th century, including Marx and Engels.
The device which Fourier believed would make possible this non-repressive social cohesion, this Eden of joyous labor, he termed the phalanstere. A typically untranslatable concept, the term was coined by Fourier to suggest the ancient Greek phalanx, where men were tightly linked together, forming a highly interdependent and impenetrable fighting unit. Fourier¡¯s phalanx was to become a self-contained community housing 1,620 members with a myriad of subdivisions designed to encourage a dynamic interplay of various human passions. Why 1,620? Well, Fourier had determined that there are 810 different psychological types -- if you multiply this by two (male and female), you arrive at a figure of 1,620. Here the Law of Passional Attractions would be allowed to operate unfettered for the first time in history. What Newton had done for physics, Fourier had done for human society. And of course, Fourier believed his discovery to be much more important than Newton¡¯s.
There are twelve fundamental passions: five of the senses (touch, taste, hearing, sight and smell); four of the soul (friendship, love, ambition and parenthood); and three that he called distributive. The first eight passions are self-explanatory. It is the distributive passions that deserve our closer attention.
First, la Papillone refers to the love of variety. A worker quickly tires of one kind of task, just as lovers, in spite of their initial attraction, soon find themselves looking elsewhere. Fourier held Christianity in deep contempt because it made people feel guilty when they pursued their natural desire for variety in work or in sex. For the same reasons, he also hated Adam Smith¡¯s vision of a society of specialists, doing the same thing over and over all in the name of the division of labor. Whatever the productive advantages of the Smith¡¯s liberal political economy, the fact remained, according to Fourier, that it created only stunted and repressed human beings. Society should strive to eliminate all tedious or unpleasant jobs, learning, if possible, to do without the products derived from such labor.
The second of the distributive passions, la Cabaliste, had to do with rivalry and conspiracy. While in previous societies this passion caused many problems, in the phalanx it would be put to good use. Productive teams would compete with one another to produce the most delicious peaches or the best pair of shoes. The need to compete would satisfy a natural passion for all men, by nature, are competitive. And the harmful aspects of competitive commerce in civilization would not be reproduced because production would keep the overall good of society in mind, rather than encouraging individual profit in the market.
Finally, la Composite, the distributive passion which Fourier considered the most beautiful of all. Nearly impossible to translate into reality, by la Composite, Fourier seems to have meant a combination of two or more different varieties of passions -- the sharing of a good meal (senses) in good company (soul) while conspiring (la Cabaliste) to arrange a sexual orgy with the couple at the next table. This suggests some of the special interest scholars took in Fourier in the 1960s. He was an ardent advocate of sexual liberation and a staunch defender of sexual preferences that were clearly not accepted by religion or society. He believed that the only sexual activity that could be forbidden involved pain or force. He was willing to accept sadism and masochism among consenting partners as well as sodomy, lesbianism, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, fetishism, sex between close relatives -- any sexual activity, in others words, that satisfied man¡¯s natural needs. Fourier was also a radical feminist. He considered the position of women in his society as a form of slavery. In one famous passage, he set it down that the level of any civilization could be determined by the extent to which its women had been liberated. On the other hand, Fourier did not advocate the equality of the sexes for the simple reason that there were real differences between the sexes. He rejected patriarchy and familial conditions in the phalanx were based on a structure entirely unknown in western civilization. He believed that the existing family structure was partly responsible for the subjugation of women. The family turned people exclusively inward to spouse and children, rather than outward to society.
Fourier¡¯s vision, together with his criticism of the existing system, places him as one of the most inspired prophets of 19th century socialism. His remarkable psychological insights, such as his championing of brief spells and variety in work, his quickness to see oppression no matter how veiled, and his penetrating concern with character formations and problems, links him to modern educational theory, the emancipation of women and even personnel management.
Fourier can also be described as a brilliant exponent of the idea of alienation, a concern which we will find fully developed in Marx, or as an early theoretician of the affluent society, a theme later developed by the American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith. His sometimes nonsensical statements aside, Fourier¡¯s ideas do make some sense when placed alongside the more advanced ideas of a Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Herbert Marcuse, the critic of the one-dimensional society of the 1960s. His vision that mankind¡¯s existence is somehow false or repressive, was certainly taken up again by later thinkers, of course, with quite different conclusions.
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Friday, March 30, 2012
From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 90th Anniversary Of The Fourth Congress (1922)On The 93rd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (1919)-The First Five Years of the Communist International-Volume 2-On the United Front
Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
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Leon Trotsky
The First Five Years of the Communist International-Volume 2-
On the United Front [1]
(Material for a Report on the Question of French Communism)
March 2, 1922
I) General Considerations on the United Front
1) The task of the Communist Party is to lead the proletarian revolution. In order to summon the proletariat for the direct conquest of power and to achieve it the Communist Party must base itself on the overwhelming majority of the working class.
So long as it does not hold this majority, the party must fight to win it.
The party can achieve this only by remaining an absolutely independent organization with a clear program and strict internal discipline. That is the reason why the party was bound to break ideologically and organizationally with the reformists and the centrists who do not strive for the proletarian revolution, who possess neither the capacity nor the desire to prepare the masses for revolution, and who by their entire conduct thwart this work.
Any members of the Communist Party who bemoan the split with the centrists in the name of “unity of forces” or “unity of front” thereby demonstrate that they do not understand the ABC of Communism and that they themselves happen to be in the Communist Party only by accident.
2) After assuring itself of the complete independence and ideological homogeneity of its ranks, the Communist Party fights for influence over the majority of the working class. This struggle can be accelerated or retarded depending upon objective circumstances and the expediency of the tactics employed.
But it is perfectly self-evident that the class life of the proletariat is not suspended during this period preparatory to the revolution. Clashes with industrialists, with the bourgeoisie, with the state power, on the initiative of one side or the other, run their due course.
In these clashes – insofar as they involve the vital interests of the entire working class, or its majority, or this or that section – the working masses sense the need of unity in action, of unity in resisting the onslaught of capitalism or unity in taking the offensive against it. Any party which mechanically counterposes itself to this need of the working class for unity in action will unfailingly be condemned in the minds of the workers.
Consequently the question of the united front is not at all, either in point of origin or substance, a question of the reciprocal relations between the Communist parliamentary fraction and that of the Socialists, or between the Central Committee of the two parties, or between l’Humanité and Le Populaire. [2] The problem of the united front – despite the fact that a split is inevitable in this epoch between the various political organizations basing themselves on the working class – grows out of the urgent need to secure for the working class the possibility of a united front in the struggle against capitalism.
For those who do not understand this task, the party is only a propaganda society and not an organization for mass action.
3) In cases where the Communist Party still remains an organization of a numerically insignificant minority, the question of its conduct on the mass-struggle front does not assume a decisive practical and organizational significance. In such conditions, mass actions remain under the leadership of the old organizations which by reason of their still powerful traditions continue to play the decisive role.
Similarly the problem of the united front does not arise in countries where – as in Bulgaria, for example – the Communist Party is the sole leading organization of the toiling masses.
But wherever the Communist Party already constitutes a big, organized, political force, but not the decisive magnitude: wherever the party embraces organizationally, let us say, one-fourth, one-third, or even a larger proportion of the organized proletarian vanguard, it is confronted with the question of the united front in all its acuteness.
If the party embraces one-third or one-half of the proletarian vanguard, then the remaining half or two-thirds are organized by the reformists or centrists. It is perfectly obvious, however, that even those workers who still support the reformists and the centrists are vitally interested in maintaining the highest material standards of living and the greatest possible freedom for struggle. We must consequently so devise our tactic as to prevent the Communist Party, which will on the morrow embrace the entire three-thirds of the working class, from turning into – and all the more so, from actually being – an organizational obstacle in the way of the current struggle of the proletariat.
Still more, the party must assume the initiative in securing unity in these current struggles. Only in this way will the party draw closer to those two-thirds who do not as yet follow its leadership, who do not as yet trust the party because they do not understand it. Only in this way can the party win them over.
4) If the Communist Party had not broken drastically and irrevocably with the Social Democrats, it would not have become the party of the proletarian revolution. It could not have taken the first serious steps on the road to revolution. It would have for ever remained a parliamentary safety-valve attached to the bourgeois state.
Whoever does not understand this, does not know the first letter of the ABC of Communism.
If the Communist Party did not seek for organizational avenues to the end that at every given moment joint, co-ordinated action between the Communist and the non-Communist (including the Social-Democratic) working masses were made possible, it would have thereby laid bare its own incapacity to win over – on the basis of mass action – the majority of the working class. It would degenerate into a Communist propaganda society but never develop into a party for the conquest of power.
It is not enough to possess the sword, one must give it an edge it is not enough to give the sword an edge, one must know how to wield it.
After separating the Communists from the reformists it is not enough to fuse the Communists together by means of organizational discipline, it is necessary that this organization should learn how to guide all the collective activities of the proletariat in all spheres of its living struggle.
This is the second letter of the alphabet of Communism.
5) Does the united front extend only to the working masses or does it also include the opportunist leaders?
The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding.
If we were able simply to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world. But then the very question of the united front would not exist in its present form.
The question arises from this, that certain very important sections of the working class belong to reformist organizations or support them. Their present experience is still insufficient to enable them to break with the reformist organizations and join us. It may be precisely after engaging in those mass activities, which are on the order of the day, that a major change will take place in this connection. That is just what we are striving for. But that is not how matters stand at present. Today the organized portion of the working class is broken up into three formations.
One of them, the Communist, strives toward the social revolution and precisely because of this supports concurrently every movement, however partial, of the toilers against the exploiters and against the bourgeois state.
Another grouping, the reformist, strives toward conciliation with the bourgeoisie. But in order not to lose their influence over the workers reformists are compelled, against the innermost desires of their own leaders, to support the partial movements of the exploited against the exploiters.
Finally, there is a third grouping, the centrist, which constantly vacillates between the other two, and which has no independent significance.
The circumstances thus make wholly possible joint action on a whole number of vital issues between the workers united in these three respective organizations and the unorganized masses adhering to them.
The Communists, as has been said, must not oppose such actions but on the contrary must also assume the initiative for them, precisely for the reason that the greater is the mass drawn into the movement, the higher its self-confidence rises, all the more self-confident will that mass movement be and all the more resolutely will it be capable of marching forward, however modest may be the initial slogans of struggle. And this means that the growth of the mass aspects of the movement tends to radicalize it, and creates much more favourable conditions for the slogans, methods of struggle, and, in general, the leading role of the Communist Party.
The reformists dread the revolutionary potential of the mass movement; their beloved arena is the parliamentary tribune, the trade-union bureaux, the arbitration boards, the ministerial antechambers.
On the contrary, we are, apart from all other considerations, interested in dragging the reformists from their asylums and placing them alongside ourselves before the eyes of the struggling masses. With a correct tactic we stand only to gain from this. A Communist who doubts or fears this resembles a swimmer who has approved the theses on the best method of swimming but dares not plunge into the water.
6) Unity of front consequently presupposes our readiness, within certain limits and on specific issues, to correlate in practice our actions with those of reformist organizations, to the extent to which the latter still express today the will of important sections of the embattled proletariat.
But, after all, didn’t we split with them? Yes, because we disagree with them on fundamental questions of the working-class movement.
And yet we seek agreement with them? Yes, in all those cases where the masses that follow them are ready to engage in joint struggle together with the masses that follow us and when they, the reformists, are to a lesser or greater degree compelled to become an instrument of this struggle.
But won’t they say that after splitting with them we still need them? Yes, their blabbermouths may say this. Here and there somebody in our own ranks may take fright at it. But as regards the broad working masses – even those who do not follow us and who do not as yet understand our goals but who do see two or three labour organizations leading a parallel existence – these masses will draw from our conduct this conclusion, that despite the split we are doing everything in our power to facilitate unity in action for the masses.
7) A policy aimed to secure the united front does not of course contain automatic guarantees that unity in action will actually be attained in all instances. On the contrary, in many cases and perhaps even the majority of cases, organizational agreements will be only half-attained or perhaps not at all. But it is necessary that the struggling masses should always be given the opportunity of convincing themselves that the non-achievement of unity in action was not due to our formalistic irreconcilability but to the lack of real will to struggle on the part of the reformists.
In entering into agreements with other organizations, we naturally obligate ourselves to a certain discipline in action. But this discipline cannot be absolute in character. In the event that the reformists begin putting brakes on the struggle to the obvious detriment of the movement and act counter to the situation and the moods of the masses, we as an independent organization always reserve the right to lead the struggle to the end, and this without our temporary semi-allies.
This, may give rise to a new sharpening of the struggle between us and the reformists. But it will no longer involve a simple repetition of one and the same set of ideas within a shut-in circle but will signify – provided our tactic is correct – the extension of our influence over new, fresh groups of the proletariat.
8) It is possible to see in this policy a rapprochement with the reformists only from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of reformism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and giving the latter an opportunity to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle. Behind this seeming revolutionary fear of “rapprochement” there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle.
9) We broke with the reformists and centrists in order to obtain complete freedom in criticizing perfidy, betrayal, indecision and the half-way spirit in the labour movement. For this reason any sort of organizational agreement which restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely unacceptable to us. We participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment. It is precisely in the course of struggle that broad masses must learn from experience that we fight better than the others, that we see more clearly than the others, that we are more audacious and resolute. In this way, we shall bring closer the hour of the united revolutionary front under the undisputed Communist leadership.
II) Groupings in the French Labour Movement
10) If we propose to analyse the question of the united front as it applies to France, without leaving the ground of the foregoing theses which flow from the entire policy of the Communist International, then we must ask ourselves: Do we have in France a situation in which the Communists represent, from the standpoint of practical actions, an insignificant magnitude (quantité négligeable)? Or do they, on the contrary, encompass the overwhelming majority of organized workers? Or do they perhaps occupy an in-between position? Are they sufficiently strong to make their participation in the mass movement of major importance, but not strong enough to concentrate the undisputed leadership in their own hands?
It is quite incontestable that we have before us precisely the latter case in France.
11) In the party sphere the predominance of the Communists over the reformists is overwhelming. The Communist organization and the Communist press surpass by far in numbers, richness and vitality the organization and press of the so-called Socialists.
This overwhelming preponderance, however, far from secures to the French Communist Party the complete and unchallenged leadership of the French proletariat, inasmuch as the latter is still strongly under the influence of anti-political and anti-party tendencies and prejudices, the arena for whose operation is primarily provided by the trade unions.
12) The outstanding peculiarity of the French labour movement consists in this, that the trade unions have long served as an integument or cover for a peculiar anti-parliamentary political party which bears the name of syndicalism. Because, however the revolutionary syndicalists may try to demarcate themselves from politics or from the party, they can never refute the fact that they themselves constitute a political party which seeks to base itself on trade-union organizations of the working class. This party has its own positive, revolutionary. proletarian tendencies, but it also has its own extremely negative features, namely, the lack of a genuinely definitive program and a rounded organization. The organization of the trade unions by no means corresponds with the organization of syndicalism. In the organizational sense, the syndicalists represent amorphous political nuclei, grafted upon the trade unions.
The question is further complicated by the fact that the syndicalists, like all other political groupings in the working class, have split, after the war, into two sections: the reformists who support bourgeois society and are thereby compelled to work hand in hand with parliamentary reformists; and the revolutionary section which is seeking ways to overthrow bourgeois society and is thereby, in the person of its best elements, moving toward Communism.
It was just this urge to preserve the unity of the class front which inspired not only the Communists but also the revolutionary syndicalists with the absolutely correct tactic of fighting for the unity of the trade-union organization of the French proletariat. On the other hand, with the instinct of bankrupts who sense that before the eyes of the working masses they cannot, in action, in struggle, meet the competition of the revolutionary wing, Jouhaux, Merrheim and Co. have taken the path of split. The colossally important struggle now unfolding throughout the entire trade-union movement of France, the struggle between the reformists and the revolutionists, is for us at the same time a struggle for the unity of the trade-union organization and the trade-union front.
III) The Trade-Union Movement and the United Front
13) French Communism finds itself in an extremely favourable position precisely with regard to the idea of the united front. In the framework of political organization, French Communism has succeeded in conquering the majority of the old Socialist Party, whereupon the opportunists added to all their other political credentials the quality of “Dissidents”, that is, splitters. Our French party has made use of this in the sense that it has branded the social-reformist organization with the label of Dissidents (splitters), thus singling out the fact that the reformists are disrupters of unity in action and unity of organization alike.
14) In the field of the trade-union movement, the revolutionary wing and above all the Communists cannot hide either from themselves or their adversaries how profound are the differences between Moscow and Amsterdam – differences which are by no means simple shadings within the ranks of the labour movement but a reflection of the profoundest contradiction which is tearing modern society apart, namely, the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But at the same time the revolutionary wing, i.e., first and foremost the conscious Communist elements, never sponsored, as has been said, the tactic of leaving the trade unions or of splitting the trade-union organization. Such slogans are characteristic only of sectarian groupings of “localists”, of the KAPD, of certain “libertarian” anarchist grouplets in France, which never wielded any influence among broad working masses, which neither aspire nor strive to gain this influence but are content with small churches of their own, each with its rigidly demarcated congregation. The truly revolutionary elements among the French syndicalists have felt instinctively that the French working class can be won on the arena of the trade-union movement only by counterposing the revolutionary viewpoint and the revolutionary methods to those of the reformists on the arena of mass action, while preserving at the same time the highest possible degree of unity in action.
15) The system of cells in the trade-union organizations adopted by the revolutionary wing signifies nothing else but the most natural form of struggle for ideological influence and for unity of front without disrupting the unity of organization.
16) Like the reformists of the Socialist Party, the reformists of the trade-union movement took the initiative for the split. But it was precisely the experience of the Socialist Party that largely inspired them with the conclusion that time worked in favour of Communism, and that it was possible to counteract the influence of experience and time only by forcing a split. On the part of the ruling CGT (the French Confederation of Labour) clique we see a whole system of measures designed to disorganize the left wing, to deprive it of those rights which the trade-union statutes afford it, and, finally, through open expulsion – counter to all statutes and regulations – to formally place it outside the trade-union organization.
On the other hand, we see the revolutionary wing fighting to preserve its rights on the grounds of the democratic norms of workers’ organizations and resisting with all its might the split implanted from above by appealing to the rank and file for unity of the trade-union organization.
17) Every thinking French worker must be aware that when the Communists comprised one-sixth or one-third of the Socialist Party they did not attempt to split, being absolutely certain that the majority of the party would follow them in the near future. When the reformists found themselves reduced to one-third, they split away, nursing no hopes to again win the majority of the proletarian vanguard.
Every thinking French worker must be aware that when the revolutionary elements were confronted with the problem of the trade-union movement, they, still an insignificant minority at the time, decided it in the sense of working in common organizations, being certain that the experience of the struggle in the conditions of the revolutionary epoch would quickly impel the majority of the unionized workers to the side of the revolutionary program. When the reformists, however, perceived the growth of the revolutionary wing in the trade unions, they – nursing no hopes of coping with it on a competitive basis – resorted immediately to the methods of expulsion and split.
Hence flow conclusions of greatest importance:
•First, the full depth of the differences which reflect, as has been said, the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, becomes clarified.
•Secondly, the hypocritical “democratism” of the opponents of proletarian dictatorship is being exposed to the very roots, inasmuch as these gentlemen are averse to tolerating methods of democracy, not only in the framework of the state, but also in the framework of workers’ organizations. Whenever the latter turn against them, they either split away themselves, like the Dissidents in the party, or expel others, like the clique of Jouhaux-Dumoulin. It is truly monstrous to suppose that the bourgeoisie would ever agree to permit the struggle against the proletariat to come to a decision within the framework of democracy, when even the agents of the bourgeoisie inside the trade-union and political organizations are opposed to solving the questions of the labour movement on the basis of norms of workers’ democracy which they themselves voluntarily adopted.
18) The struggle for the unity of the trade-union organization and trade-union action will remain in the future as well one of the most important tasks of the Communist Party – a struggle not only in the sense of constantly striving to unite ever larger numbers of workers around the program and tactics of Communism, but also in the sense that the Communist Party – on the road to the realization of this goal – both directly and through Communists in the trade unions, strives in action to reduce to a minimum those obstacles which are placed before the workers’ movement by an organizational split.
If in spite of all our efforts to restore unity, the split in the CGT becomes sealed in the immediate future, this would not at all signify that the CGT Unitaire [3] regardless of whether half or more than half of the unionized workers join it in the next period, will conduct its work by simply ignoring the existence of the reformist CGT. Such a policy would render difficult in the extreme – if not exclude altogether – the possibility of co-ordinated militant actions of the proletariat, and at the same time would make it extremely easy for the reformist CGT to play, in the interests of the bourgeoisie, the role of La Ligue Civique [4] as regards strikes, demonstrations, etc.; and it would simultaneously provide the reformist CGT with a semblance of justification in arguing that the revolutionary CGTU provokes inexpedient public actions and must bear full responsibility for them. It is perfectly self-evident that in all cases where circumstances permit, the revolutionary CGTU will, whenever it deems it necessary to undertake some campaign, openly address itself to the reformist CGT with specific proposals and demands for a concrete plan of co-ordinated actions, and bring to bear the pressure of labour’s public opinion and expose before this public opinion each hesitating and evasive step of the reformists.
In this way, even in the event that the split of the trade-union organization becomes permanent, the methods of struggle for the united front will preserve all their meaning.
19) We can, therefore, state that in relation to the most important field of the labour movement – the trade unions – the tactic of the united front demands that those methods, by which the struggle against Jouhaux and Co. has already been conducted on our side, be applied more consistently, more persistently and resolutely than ever before.
IV) The Political Struggle and the United Front
20) On the party plane there is, to begin with, a very important difference from the trade unions in this, that the preponderance of the Communist Party over the Socialist, both in point of organization and the press, is overwhelming. We may consequently assume that the Communist Party, as such, is capable of securing the unity of the political front and that therefore it has no impelling reasons for addressing itself to the organization of the Dissidents with any sort of proposals for concrete actions. This strictly businesslike and legitimate method of posing the question, on the basis of evaluating the relationship of forces and not on the basis of verbal radicalism, must be appraised on its substantive merits.
21) If we take into account that the Communist Party numbers 130,000 members, while the Socialists number 30,000, then the enormous successes of Communist ideas in France become apparent. However, if we take into account the relation between these figures and the numerical strength of the working class as a whole, together with the existence of reformist trade unions and of anti-Communist tendencies within the revolutionary trade unions, then the question of the hegemony of the Communist Party inside the labour movement will confront us as a very difficult task, still far from solved by our numerical superiority over the Dissidents. The latter may under certain conditions prove to be a much more important counter-revolutionary factor within the working class than might appear, if one were to judge solely from the weakness of their organization and the insignificant circulation and ideological content of their paper, Le Populaire.
22) In order to evaluate a situation, it is necessary to take clear cognizance of how this situation took shape. The transformation of the majority of the old Socialist Party into the Communist Party came as a result of a wave of dissatisfaction and mutiny engendered in all countries in Europe by the war. The example of the Russian Revolution and the slogans of the Third International seemed to point a way out. The bourgeoisie, however, was able to maintain itself throughout 1919-20 and was able, by means of combined measures, to establish on post-war foundations a certain equilibrium, which is being undermined by the most terrible contradictions and which is heading toward vast catastrophes, which meanwhile provides relative stability for the current day and for the period immediately ahead. The Russian Revolution, in surmounting the greatest difficulties and obstacles created by world capitalism, has been able to achieve its socialist tasks only gradually, only at the cost of an extraordinary strain upon all its forces. As a result, the initial flood-tide of vague, uncritical, revolutionary moods has been unavoidably superseded by an ebb. Only the most resolute, audacious and youthful section of the world working class has remained under the banner of Communism.
This does not mean naturally that those broad circles of the proletariat who have been disillusioned in their hopes for immediate revolution, for swift radical transformations, etc., have wholly returned to the old pre-war positions. No, their dissatisfaction is deeper than ever before, their hatred of the exploiters is fiercer. But at the same time they are politically disoriented, they do not see the paths of struggle, and therefore remain passively expectant – giving rise to the possibility of sharp swings to this or that side, depending on how the situation unfolds.
This big reservoir of the passive and the disoriented can, under a certain combination of circumstances, be widely utilized by the Dissidents against us.
23) In order to support the Communist Party, faith in the revolutionary cause, will to action and loyalty are needed. In order to support the Dissidents, disorientation and passivity are necessary and sufficient. It is perfectly natural for the revolutionary and dynamic section of the working class to effuse from its ranks a much larger proportion of members for the Communist Party than the passive and disoriented section is able to supply to the party of the Dissidents.
The same thing applies to the press. The elements of indifferentism read little. The insignificant circulation and content of Le Populaire mirrors the mood of a certain section of the working class. The fact that complete ascendancy of the professional intellectuals over the workers prevails in the party of the Dissidents runs nowise counter to our diagnosis and prognosis. Because the passive and partially disillusioned, partially disoriented worker-masses are an ideal culture medium, especially in France, for political cliques composed of attorneys and journalists, reformist witch-doctors and parliamentary charlatans.
24) If we regard the party organization as an operating army, and the unorganized mass of workers as the reserves, and if we grant that our operating army is three to four times stronger than the active army of Dissidents, then, under a certain combination of circumstances, the reserves may prove to be divided between ourselves and the social-reformists in a proportion much less favourable to us.
25) The political atmosphere of France is pervaded with the idea of the “Left Bloc”. After a new period of Poincaré-ism which represents the bourgeoisie’s attempt to serve up to the people a warmed-over hash of the illusions of victory, a pacifist reaction may quite likely set in among broad circles of bourgeois society, i.e., first and foremost among the petty bourgeoisie. The hope for universal pacification, for agreement with soviet Russia, obtaining raw materials and payments from her on advantageous terms, cuts in the burden of militarism, and so on – in brief, the illusory program of democratic pacifism – can become for a while the program of a “Left Bloc”, superseding the National Bloc.
From the standpoint of the development of the revolution in France, such a change of régimes will be a step forward only provided the proletariat does not fall prey to any extent to the illusions of petty-bourgeois pacifism.
26) Reformist-Dissidents are the agency of the “Left Bloc” within the working class. Their successes will be the greater, all the less the working class as a whole is seized by the idea and practice of the united front against the bourgeoisie. Layers of workers, disoriented by the war and by the tardiness of the revolution, may venture to support the “Left Bloc” as a lesser evil, in the belief that they do not thereby risk anything at all, or because they see no other road at present.
27) One of the most reliable methods of counteracting inside the working class the moods and ideas of the “Left Bloc”, i.e., a bloc between the workers and a certain section of the bourgeoisie against another section of the bourgeoisie, is through promoting persistently and resolutely the idea of a bloc between all the sections of the working class against the whole bourgeoisie.
28) In relation to the Dissidents this means that we must not permit them to occupy with impunity an evasive, temporizing position on questions relating to the labour movement, and to use platonic declarations of sympathy for the working class as a cover for utilizing the patronage of the bourgeois oppressors. In other words, we can and must, in all suitable instances, propose to the Dissidents a specific form of joint aid to strikers, to locked-out workers, unemployed, war invalids, etc., etc., recording before the eyes of the masses their responses to our precise proposals, and in this way driving a wedge between them and certain sections of politically indifferent or semi-indifferent masses on whom the reformists hope to lean for support under certain favourable conditions.
29) This kind of tactic is all the more important in view of the fact that the Dissidents are unquestionably bound up intimately with the reformist CGT and together with the latter constitute the two wings of the bourgeois agency inside the labour movement. We take the offensive both on the trade-union and political fields simultaneously against this twofold agency, applying the very same tactical methods.
30) The impeccable and agitationally extremely persuasive logic of our conduct is as follows: “You, the reformists of trade unionism and socialism,” we say to them before the eyes of the masses, “have split the trade unions and the party for the sake of ideas and methods which we consider wrong and criminal. We demand that you at least refrain from placing a spoke in the wheel during the partial and un-postponable concrete tasks of the working-class struggle and that you make possible unity in action. In the given concrete situation we propose such and such a program of struggle.”
31) The indicated method could be similarly employed and not without success in relation to parliamentary and municipal activities. We say to the masses, “The Dissidents, because they do not want the revolution, have split the mass of the workers. It would be insanity to count upon their helping the proletarian revolution. But we are ready, inside and outside the parliament, to enter into certain practical agreements with them, provided they agree, in those cases where one must choose between the known interests of the bourgeoisie and the definite demands of the proletariat, to support the latter in action. The Dissidents can be capable of such actions only if they renounce their ties with the parties of the bourgeoisie, that is, the ‘Left Bloc’ and its bourgeois discipline.”
If the Dissidents were capable of accepting these conditions, then their worker-followers would be quickly absorbed by the Communist Party. Just because of this, the Dissidents will not agree to these conditions. In other words, to the clearly and precisely posed question whether they choose a bloc with the bourgeoisie or a bloc with the proletariat – in the concrete and specific conditions of mass struggle – they will be compelled to reply that they prefer a bloc with the bourgeoisie. Such an answer will not pass with impunity among the proletarian reserves on whom they are counting.
V) Internal Tasks of the Communist Party
32) The foregoing policy presupposes, naturally, complete organizational independence, ideological clarity and revolutionary firmness of the Communist Party itself.
Thus, for example, it would be impossible to conduct with complete success a policy aimed at making hateful and contemptible the idea of the “Left Bloc” among the working class, if in our own party ranks there are partisans of this “Left Bloc” bold enough openly to defend this projected program of the bourgeoisie. Unconditional and merciless expulsion in disgrace of those who come out in favour of the idea of the “Left Bloc” is a self-understood duty of the Communist Party. This will cleanse our policy of all elements of equivocation and unclarity; this will attract the attention of advanced workers to the acute character of the issue of the “Left Bloc” and will demonstrate that the Communist Party does not trifle with the questions which imperil the revolutionary unity in action of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
33) Those who seek to use the idea of the united front for agitating in favour of unification with the reformists and Dissidents must be mercilessly ejected from our party, inasmuch as they serve as the agency of the Dissidents in our ranks and are deceiving the workers concerning the reasons for the split and who is really responsible for it. Instead of correctly posing the question of the possibility of this or that co-ordinated, practical action with the Dissidents, despite their petty-bourgeois and essentially counter-revolutionary character, they are demanding that our own party renounce its Communist program and revolutionary methods. The ejection of such elements, mercilessly and in disgrace, will best demonstrate that the tactic of the workers’ united front in no way resembles capitulation to or reconciliation with the reformists. The tactic of the united front demands from the party complete freedom in manoeuvring, flexibility and resoluteness. To make this possible, the party must clearly and specifically declare at every given moment just what its wishes are, just what it is striving for, and it must comment authoritatively, before the eyes of the masses, on its own steps and proposals.
34) Hence flows the complete inadmissibility for individual party members to issue on their own responsibility and risk political publications in which they counterpose their own slogans, methods of action and proposals to the slogans, methods of action and proposals of the party. Under the cover of the Communist Party and consequently also inside that milieu which is influenced by a Communist cover, i.e., in a workers’ milieu, they spread from day to day ideas hostile to us, or they sow confusion and scepticism which are even more pernicious than avowedly hostile ideologies. Periodicals of this type, together with their editors, must once and for all be placed outside the party and the entire working-class France must learn about this from articles which mercilessly expose the petty-bourgeois smugglers who operate under a Communist flag.
35) From what has been said, it likewise follows that it is completely inadmissible for the leading party publications to carry side by side with articles defending the basic concepts of Communism, other articles disputing these concepts or denying them. Absolutely impermissible is a continuation of a régime in the party press under which the mass of worker-readers find, in the guise of editorials in leading Communist periodicals, articles which try to turn us back to positions of tearful pacifism and which propagate among workers a debilitating hostility toward revolutionary violence in the face of the triumphant violence of the bourgeoisie. Under the guise of a struggle against militarism, a struggle is thus being conducted against the ideas of revolution.
If after the experience of the war and all the subsequent events, especially in Russia and Germany, the prejudices of humanitarian pacifism have still survived in the Communist Party; and if the party finds it advisable for the sake of completely liquidating these prejudices to open a discussion on this question, even in that case, the pacifists with their prejudices cannot come forward in such a discussion as an equal force but must be severely condemned by the authoritative voice of the party, in the name of its Central Committee. After the Central Committee decides that the discussion has been exhausted, all attempts to spread the debilitating ideas of Tolstoyanism and other varieties of pacifism must unquestionably bring expulsion from the party.
36) An objection might, however, be raised that so long as the work of cleansing the party of ancient prejudices and of attaining internal cohesion remains uncompleted, it would be dangerous to place the party in situations where it would come into close proximity with reformists and nationalists. But such a point of view is false. Naturally it is undeniable that a transition from broad propagandist activity to direct participation in the mass movement carries with it new difficulties and therefore dangers for the Communist Party. But it is completely wrong to suppose that the party can be prepared for all tests without directly participating in struggles, without directly coming in contact with enemies and adversaries. On the contrary, only in this way can a genuine, non-fictitious internal cleaning and fusing of the party be achieved. It is quite possible that some elements in the party and in the trade-union bureaucracy will feel themselves drawn more closely to the reformists, from whom they have accidentally split than toward us. The loss of such camp-followers will not be a liability but an asset, and it will be compensated a hundredfold by the influx of those working men and women who still follow the reformists today. The party will in consequence become more homogeneous, more resolute and more proletarian.
VI) Party Tasks in the Trade-Union Movement
37) Absolute clarity on the trade-union question is a task of first-rate importance, surpassing by far all the other tasks before the Communist Party of France.
Naturally the legend spread by the reformists that Plans are afoot to subordinate the trade unions organizationally to the party must be unconditionally denounced and exposed. Trade unions embrace workers of different political shadings as well as non-party men, atheists as well as believers, whereas the party unites political co-thinkers on the basis of a definite program. The party has not and cannot have any instrumentalities and methods for subjecting the trade unions to itself from the outside.
The party can gain influence in the life of the trade unions only to the extent that its members work in the trade unions and carry out the party point of view there. The influence of party members in the trade unions naturally depends on their numerical strength and especially on the degree to which they are able to apply party principles correctly, consistently and expediently to the needs of the trade-union movement.
The party has the right and the duty to aim to conquer, along the road above outlined, the decisive influence in the trade-union organization. It can achieve this goal only provided the work of the Communists in the trade unions is wholly and exclusively harmonized with the principles of the party and is invariably conducted under its control.
38) The minds of all Communists must therefore be completely purged of reformist prejudices, in accordance with which the party is regarded as a political parliamentary organization of the proletariat, and nothing more. The Communist Party is the organization of the proletarian vanguard for the ideological fructification of the labour movement and the assumption of leadership in all spheres – first and foremost in the trade unions. While the trade unions are not subordinate to the party but wholly autonomous organizations, the Communists inside the trade unions, on the other hand, cannot pretend to any kind of autonomy in their trade-union activity but must act as the transmitters of their party’s program and tactics. To be most severely condemned is the conduct of those Communists who not only fail to fight inside the trade unions for the influence of party ideas but actually counteract such a struggle in the name of a principle of “autonomy” which they apply absolutely falsely. As a matter of fact, they thus pave the way for the decisive influence in the trade unions of individuals, groups and cliques, bound neither by a definite program nor by party organization, and who utilize the formlessness of ideological groupings and relations in order to keep the organizational apparatus in their own hands and secure the independence of their own clique from any actual control by the workers’ vanguard.
While the party, in its activity inside the trade unions, must show the greatest attentiveness and caution toward the non-party masses and their conscientious and honest representatives; while the party must, on the basis of joint work, systematically and tactically draw closer to the best elements of the trade-union movement – including the revolutionary anarchists who are capable of learning – the party can, on the contrary, no longer tolerate in its midst those pseudo-Communists who utilize the status of party membership only in order all the more confidently to promote anti-party influences in the trade unions.
39) The party through its own press, through its own propagandists and its members in the trade unions must submit to constant and systematic criticism the shortcomings of revolutionary syndicalism for solving the basic tasks of the proletariat. The party must tirelessly and persistently criticize the weak theoretical and practical sides of syndicalism, explaining at the same time to its best elements that the only correct road for securing the revolutionary influence on the trade unions and on the labour movement as a whole is the entry of revolutionary syndicalists into the Communist Party: their participation in working out all the basic questions of the movement, in drawing the balance sheet of experience, in defining new tasks, in cleansing the Communist Party itself and strengthening its ties with the working masses.
40) It is absolutely indispensable to take a census of all the members of the French Communist Party in order to determine their social status (workers, civil employees, peasants, intellectuals, etc.); their relations with the trade-union movement (do they belong to trade unions – do they participate in meetings of Communist and revolutionary syndicalists? do they carry out at these meetings the decisions of the party on the trade unions? etc.); their attitude toward the party press (what party publications do they read?), and so on.
The census must be so conducted that its chief aspects can be taken into account before the Fourth World Congress convenes.
March 2, 1922
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Notes
1. These Theses on the United Front, unquestionably one of the most important programmatic documents of revolutionary Marxism, were drafted by Trotsky lor the enlarged Plenum of the ECCI which convened toward the end of February 1922.
2. Le Populaire, founded by Leon Blum, was, as it remained, the central publication of the French Socialist Party.
3. The CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail – General Confederation of Labor) was the central trade union organization of France. Formed in 1903 it embraced all the existing trade unions. Prior to World War I the CGT was the most revolutionary organization in France. But with the outbreak of war in 1914, the majority of the leaders, headed by Jouhaux, became rabid jingoes. The official CGT leadership savagely opposed the growing left wing movement, which grew rapidly after the war and came under Communist influence. They engineered a split which led early in 1922 to the formation of the Unitarian General Confederation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire or CGTU). This split was marked by a sharp decline in total union membership. In 1920 there were about 2,500,000 workers in the CGT. By 1923 the combined memberships of the CGT and CGTU fell under 100,000.
4. La Ligue Civique was a bourgeois anti-labor, strikebreaking organization in France. The closest counterpart to it in the US would be the National Association of Manufacturers.
Markin comment:
This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.
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Leon Trotsky
The First Five Years of the Communist International-Volume 2-
On the United Front [1]
(Material for a Report on the Question of French Communism)
March 2, 1922
I) General Considerations on the United Front
1) The task of the Communist Party is to lead the proletarian revolution. In order to summon the proletariat for the direct conquest of power and to achieve it the Communist Party must base itself on the overwhelming majority of the working class.
So long as it does not hold this majority, the party must fight to win it.
The party can achieve this only by remaining an absolutely independent organization with a clear program and strict internal discipline. That is the reason why the party was bound to break ideologically and organizationally with the reformists and the centrists who do not strive for the proletarian revolution, who possess neither the capacity nor the desire to prepare the masses for revolution, and who by their entire conduct thwart this work.
Any members of the Communist Party who bemoan the split with the centrists in the name of “unity of forces” or “unity of front” thereby demonstrate that they do not understand the ABC of Communism and that they themselves happen to be in the Communist Party only by accident.
2) After assuring itself of the complete independence and ideological homogeneity of its ranks, the Communist Party fights for influence over the majority of the working class. This struggle can be accelerated or retarded depending upon objective circumstances and the expediency of the tactics employed.
But it is perfectly self-evident that the class life of the proletariat is not suspended during this period preparatory to the revolution. Clashes with industrialists, with the bourgeoisie, with the state power, on the initiative of one side or the other, run their due course.
In these clashes – insofar as they involve the vital interests of the entire working class, or its majority, or this or that section – the working masses sense the need of unity in action, of unity in resisting the onslaught of capitalism or unity in taking the offensive against it. Any party which mechanically counterposes itself to this need of the working class for unity in action will unfailingly be condemned in the minds of the workers.
Consequently the question of the united front is not at all, either in point of origin or substance, a question of the reciprocal relations between the Communist parliamentary fraction and that of the Socialists, or between the Central Committee of the two parties, or between l’Humanité and Le Populaire. [2] The problem of the united front – despite the fact that a split is inevitable in this epoch between the various political organizations basing themselves on the working class – grows out of the urgent need to secure for the working class the possibility of a united front in the struggle against capitalism.
For those who do not understand this task, the party is only a propaganda society and not an organization for mass action.
3) In cases where the Communist Party still remains an organization of a numerically insignificant minority, the question of its conduct on the mass-struggle front does not assume a decisive practical and organizational significance. In such conditions, mass actions remain under the leadership of the old organizations which by reason of their still powerful traditions continue to play the decisive role.
Similarly the problem of the united front does not arise in countries where – as in Bulgaria, for example – the Communist Party is the sole leading organization of the toiling masses.
But wherever the Communist Party already constitutes a big, organized, political force, but not the decisive magnitude: wherever the party embraces organizationally, let us say, one-fourth, one-third, or even a larger proportion of the organized proletarian vanguard, it is confronted with the question of the united front in all its acuteness.
If the party embraces one-third or one-half of the proletarian vanguard, then the remaining half or two-thirds are organized by the reformists or centrists. It is perfectly obvious, however, that even those workers who still support the reformists and the centrists are vitally interested in maintaining the highest material standards of living and the greatest possible freedom for struggle. We must consequently so devise our tactic as to prevent the Communist Party, which will on the morrow embrace the entire three-thirds of the working class, from turning into – and all the more so, from actually being – an organizational obstacle in the way of the current struggle of the proletariat.
Still more, the party must assume the initiative in securing unity in these current struggles. Only in this way will the party draw closer to those two-thirds who do not as yet follow its leadership, who do not as yet trust the party because they do not understand it. Only in this way can the party win them over.
4) If the Communist Party had not broken drastically and irrevocably with the Social Democrats, it would not have become the party of the proletarian revolution. It could not have taken the first serious steps on the road to revolution. It would have for ever remained a parliamentary safety-valve attached to the bourgeois state.
Whoever does not understand this, does not know the first letter of the ABC of Communism.
If the Communist Party did not seek for organizational avenues to the end that at every given moment joint, co-ordinated action between the Communist and the non-Communist (including the Social-Democratic) working masses were made possible, it would have thereby laid bare its own incapacity to win over – on the basis of mass action – the majority of the working class. It would degenerate into a Communist propaganda society but never develop into a party for the conquest of power.
It is not enough to possess the sword, one must give it an edge it is not enough to give the sword an edge, one must know how to wield it.
After separating the Communists from the reformists it is not enough to fuse the Communists together by means of organizational discipline, it is necessary that this organization should learn how to guide all the collective activities of the proletariat in all spheres of its living struggle.
This is the second letter of the alphabet of Communism.
5) Does the united front extend only to the working masses or does it also include the opportunist leaders?
The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding.
If we were able simply to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world. But then the very question of the united front would not exist in its present form.
The question arises from this, that certain very important sections of the working class belong to reformist organizations or support them. Their present experience is still insufficient to enable them to break with the reformist organizations and join us. It may be precisely after engaging in those mass activities, which are on the order of the day, that a major change will take place in this connection. That is just what we are striving for. But that is not how matters stand at present. Today the organized portion of the working class is broken up into three formations.
One of them, the Communist, strives toward the social revolution and precisely because of this supports concurrently every movement, however partial, of the toilers against the exploiters and against the bourgeois state.
Another grouping, the reformist, strives toward conciliation with the bourgeoisie. But in order not to lose their influence over the workers reformists are compelled, against the innermost desires of their own leaders, to support the partial movements of the exploited against the exploiters.
Finally, there is a third grouping, the centrist, which constantly vacillates between the other two, and which has no independent significance.
The circumstances thus make wholly possible joint action on a whole number of vital issues between the workers united in these three respective organizations and the unorganized masses adhering to them.
The Communists, as has been said, must not oppose such actions but on the contrary must also assume the initiative for them, precisely for the reason that the greater is the mass drawn into the movement, the higher its self-confidence rises, all the more self-confident will that mass movement be and all the more resolutely will it be capable of marching forward, however modest may be the initial slogans of struggle. And this means that the growth of the mass aspects of the movement tends to radicalize it, and creates much more favourable conditions for the slogans, methods of struggle, and, in general, the leading role of the Communist Party.
The reformists dread the revolutionary potential of the mass movement; their beloved arena is the parliamentary tribune, the trade-union bureaux, the arbitration boards, the ministerial antechambers.
On the contrary, we are, apart from all other considerations, interested in dragging the reformists from their asylums and placing them alongside ourselves before the eyes of the struggling masses. With a correct tactic we stand only to gain from this. A Communist who doubts or fears this resembles a swimmer who has approved the theses on the best method of swimming but dares not plunge into the water.
6) Unity of front consequently presupposes our readiness, within certain limits and on specific issues, to correlate in practice our actions with those of reformist organizations, to the extent to which the latter still express today the will of important sections of the embattled proletariat.
But, after all, didn’t we split with them? Yes, because we disagree with them on fundamental questions of the working-class movement.
And yet we seek agreement with them? Yes, in all those cases where the masses that follow them are ready to engage in joint struggle together with the masses that follow us and when they, the reformists, are to a lesser or greater degree compelled to become an instrument of this struggle.
But won’t they say that after splitting with them we still need them? Yes, their blabbermouths may say this. Here and there somebody in our own ranks may take fright at it. But as regards the broad working masses – even those who do not follow us and who do not as yet understand our goals but who do see two or three labour organizations leading a parallel existence – these masses will draw from our conduct this conclusion, that despite the split we are doing everything in our power to facilitate unity in action for the masses.
7) A policy aimed to secure the united front does not of course contain automatic guarantees that unity in action will actually be attained in all instances. On the contrary, in many cases and perhaps even the majority of cases, organizational agreements will be only half-attained or perhaps not at all. But it is necessary that the struggling masses should always be given the opportunity of convincing themselves that the non-achievement of unity in action was not due to our formalistic irreconcilability but to the lack of real will to struggle on the part of the reformists.
In entering into agreements with other organizations, we naturally obligate ourselves to a certain discipline in action. But this discipline cannot be absolute in character. In the event that the reformists begin putting brakes on the struggle to the obvious detriment of the movement and act counter to the situation and the moods of the masses, we as an independent organization always reserve the right to lead the struggle to the end, and this without our temporary semi-allies.
This, may give rise to a new sharpening of the struggle between us and the reformists. But it will no longer involve a simple repetition of one and the same set of ideas within a shut-in circle but will signify – provided our tactic is correct – the extension of our influence over new, fresh groups of the proletariat.
8) It is possible to see in this policy a rapprochement with the reformists only from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of reformism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and giving the latter an opportunity to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle. Behind this seeming revolutionary fear of “rapprochement” there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle.
9) We broke with the reformists and centrists in order to obtain complete freedom in criticizing perfidy, betrayal, indecision and the half-way spirit in the labour movement. For this reason any sort of organizational agreement which restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely unacceptable to us. We participate in a united front but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment. It is precisely in the course of struggle that broad masses must learn from experience that we fight better than the others, that we see more clearly than the others, that we are more audacious and resolute. In this way, we shall bring closer the hour of the united revolutionary front under the undisputed Communist leadership.
II) Groupings in the French Labour Movement
10) If we propose to analyse the question of the united front as it applies to France, without leaving the ground of the foregoing theses which flow from the entire policy of the Communist International, then we must ask ourselves: Do we have in France a situation in which the Communists represent, from the standpoint of practical actions, an insignificant magnitude (quantité négligeable)? Or do they, on the contrary, encompass the overwhelming majority of organized workers? Or do they perhaps occupy an in-between position? Are they sufficiently strong to make their participation in the mass movement of major importance, but not strong enough to concentrate the undisputed leadership in their own hands?
It is quite incontestable that we have before us precisely the latter case in France.
11) In the party sphere the predominance of the Communists over the reformists is overwhelming. The Communist organization and the Communist press surpass by far in numbers, richness and vitality the organization and press of the so-called Socialists.
This overwhelming preponderance, however, far from secures to the French Communist Party the complete and unchallenged leadership of the French proletariat, inasmuch as the latter is still strongly under the influence of anti-political and anti-party tendencies and prejudices, the arena for whose operation is primarily provided by the trade unions.
12) The outstanding peculiarity of the French labour movement consists in this, that the trade unions have long served as an integument or cover for a peculiar anti-parliamentary political party which bears the name of syndicalism. Because, however the revolutionary syndicalists may try to demarcate themselves from politics or from the party, they can never refute the fact that they themselves constitute a political party which seeks to base itself on trade-union organizations of the working class. This party has its own positive, revolutionary. proletarian tendencies, but it also has its own extremely negative features, namely, the lack of a genuinely definitive program and a rounded organization. The organization of the trade unions by no means corresponds with the organization of syndicalism. In the organizational sense, the syndicalists represent amorphous political nuclei, grafted upon the trade unions.
The question is further complicated by the fact that the syndicalists, like all other political groupings in the working class, have split, after the war, into two sections: the reformists who support bourgeois society and are thereby compelled to work hand in hand with parliamentary reformists; and the revolutionary section which is seeking ways to overthrow bourgeois society and is thereby, in the person of its best elements, moving toward Communism.
It was just this urge to preserve the unity of the class front which inspired not only the Communists but also the revolutionary syndicalists with the absolutely correct tactic of fighting for the unity of the trade-union organization of the French proletariat. On the other hand, with the instinct of bankrupts who sense that before the eyes of the working masses they cannot, in action, in struggle, meet the competition of the revolutionary wing, Jouhaux, Merrheim and Co. have taken the path of split. The colossally important struggle now unfolding throughout the entire trade-union movement of France, the struggle between the reformists and the revolutionists, is for us at the same time a struggle for the unity of the trade-union organization and the trade-union front.
III) The Trade-Union Movement and the United Front
13) French Communism finds itself in an extremely favourable position precisely with regard to the idea of the united front. In the framework of political organization, French Communism has succeeded in conquering the majority of the old Socialist Party, whereupon the opportunists added to all their other political credentials the quality of “Dissidents”, that is, splitters. Our French party has made use of this in the sense that it has branded the social-reformist organization with the label of Dissidents (splitters), thus singling out the fact that the reformists are disrupters of unity in action and unity of organization alike.
14) In the field of the trade-union movement, the revolutionary wing and above all the Communists cannot hide either from themselves or their adversaries how profound are the differences between Moscow and Amsterdam – differences which are by no means simple shadings within the ranks of the labour movement but a reflection of the profoundest contradiction which is tearing modern society apart, namely, the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But at the same time the revolutionary wing, i.e., first and foremost the conscious Communist elements, never sponsored, as has been said, the tactic of leaving the trade unions or of splitting the trade-union organization. Such slogans are characteristic only of sectarian groupings of “localists”, of the KAPD, of certain “libertarian” anarchist grouplets in France, which never wielded any influence among broad working masses, which neither aspire nor strive to gain this influence but are content with small churches of their own, each with its rigidly demarcated congregation. The truly revolutionary elements among the French syndicalists have felt instinctively that the French working class can be won on the arena of the trade-union movement only by counterposing the revolutionary viewpoint and the revolutionary methods to those of the reformists on the arena of mass action, while preserving at the same time the highest possible degree of unity in action.
15) The system of cells in the trade-union organizations adopted by the revolutionary wing signifies nothing else but the most natural form of struggle for ideological influence and for unity of front without disrupting the unity of organization.
16) Like the reformists of the Socialist Party, the reformists of the trade-union movement took the initiative for the split. But it was precisely the experience of the Socialist Party that largely inspired them with the conclusion that time worked in favour of Communism, and that it was possible to counteract the influence of experience and time only by forcing a split. On the part of the ruling CGT (the French Confederation of Labour) clique we see a whole system of measures designed to disorganize the left wing, to deprive it of those rights which the trade-union statutes afford it, and, finally, through open expulsion – counter to all statutes and regulations – to formally place it outside the trade-union organization.
On the other hand, we see the revolutionary wing fighting to preserve its rights on the grounds of the democratic norms of workers’ organizations and resisting with all its might the split implanted from above by appealing to the rank and file for unity of the trade-union organization.
17) Every thinking French worker must be aware that when the Communists comprised one-sixth or one-third of the Socialist Party they did not attempt to split, being absolutely certain that the majority of the party would follow them in the near future. When the reformists found themselves reduced to one-third, they split away, nursing no hopes to again win the majority of the proletarian vanguard.
Every thinking French worker must be aware that when the revolutionary elements were confronted with the problem of the trade-union movement, they, still an insignificant minority at the time, decided it in the sense of working in common organizations, being certain that the experience of the struggle in the conditions of the revolutionary epoch would quickly impel the majority of the unionized workers to the side of the revolutionary program. When the reformists, however, perceived the growth of the revolutionary wing in the trade unions, they – nursing no hopes of coping with it on a competitive basis – resorted immediately to the methods of expulsion and split.
Hence flow conclusions of greatest importance:
•First, the full depth of the differences which reflect, as has been said, the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, becomes clarified.
•Secondly, the hypocritical “democratism” of the opponents of proletarian dictatorship is being exposed to the very roots, inasmuch as these gentlemen are averse to tolerating methods of democracy, not only in the framework of the state, but also in the framework of workers’ organizations. Whenever the latter turn against them, they either split away themselves, like the Dissidents in the party, or expel others, like the clique of Jouhaux-Dumoulin. It is truly monstrous to suppose that the bourgeoisie would ever agree to permit the struggle against the proletariat to come to a decision within the framework of democracy, when even the agents of the bourgeoisie inside the trade-union and political organizations are opposed to solving the questions of the labour movement on the basis of norms of workers’ democracy which they themselves voluntarily adopted.
18) The struggle for the unity of the trade-union organization and trade-union action will remain in the future as well one of the most important tasks of the Communist Party – a struggle not only in the sense of constantly striving to unite ever larger numbers of workers around the program and tactics of Communism, but also in the sense that the Communist Party – on the road to the realization of this goal – both directly and through Communists in the trade unions, strives in action to reduce to a minimum those obstacles which are placed before the workers’ movement by an organizational split.
If in spite of all our efforts to restore unity, the split in the CGT becomes sealed in the immediate future, this would not at all signify that the CGT Unitaire [3] regardless of whether half or more than half of the unionized workers join it in the next period, will conduct its work by simply ignoring the existence of the reformist CGT. Such a policy would render difficult in the extreme – if not exclude altogether – the possibility of co-ordinated militant actions of the proletariat, and at the same time would make it extremely easy for the reformist CGT to play, in the interests of the bourgeoisie, the role of La Ligue Civique [4] as regards strikes, demonstrations, etc.; and it would simultaneously provide the reformist CGT with a semblance of justification in arguing that the revolutionary CGTU provokes inexpedient public actions and must bear full responsibility for them. It is perfectly self-evident that in all cases where circumstances permit, the revolutionary CGTU will, whenever it deems it necessary to undertake some campaign, openly address itself to the reformist CGT with specific proposals and demands for a concrete plan of co-ordinated actions, and bring to bear the pressure of labour’s public opinion and expose before this public opinion each hesitating and evasive step of the reformists.
In this way, even in the event that the split of the trade-union organization becomes permanent, the methods of struggle for the united front will preserve all their meaning.
19) We can, therefore, state that in relation to the most important field of the labour movement – the trade unions – the tactic of the united front demands that those methods, by which the struggle against Jouhaux and Co. has already been conducted on our side, be applied more consistently, more persistently and resolutely than ever before.
IV) The Political Struggle and the United Front
20) On the party plane there is, to begin with, a very important difference from the trade unions in this, that the preponderance of the Communist Party over the Socialist, both in point of organization and the press, is overwhelming. We may consequently assume that the Communist Party, as such, is capable of securing the unity of the political front and that therefore it has no impelling reasons for addressing itself to the organization of the Dissidents with any sort of proposals for concrete actions. This strictly businesslike and legitimate method of posing the question, on the basis of evaluating the relationship of forces and not on the basis of verbal radicalism, must be appraised on its substantive merits.
21) If we take into account that the Communist Party numbers 130,000 members, while the Socialists number 30,000, then the enormous successes of Communist ideas in France become apparent. However, if we take into account the relation between these figures and the numerical strength of the working class as a whole, together with the existence of reformist trade unions and of anti-Communist tendencies within the revolutionary trade unions, then the question of the hegemony of the Communist Party inside the labour movement will confront us as a very difficult task, still far from solved by our numerical superiority over the Dissidents. The latter may under certain conditions prove to be a much more important counter-revolutionary factor within the working class than might appear, if one were to judge solely from the weakness of their organization and the insignificant circulation and ideological content of their paper, Le Populaire.
22) In order to evaluate a situation, it is necessary to take clear cognizance of how this situation took shape. The transformation of the majority of the old Socialist Party into the Communist Party came as a result of a wave of dissatisfaction and mutiny engendered in all countries in Europe by the war. The example of the Russian Revolution and the slogans of the Third International seemed to point a way out. The bourgeoisie, however, was able to maintain itself throughout 1919-20 and was able, by means of combined measures, to establish on post-war foundations a certain equilibrium, which is being undermined by the most terrible contradictions and which is heading toward vast catastrophes, which meanwhile provides relative stability for the current day and for the period immediately ahead. The Russian Revolution, in surmounting the greatest difficulties and obstacles created by world capitalism, has been able to achieve its socialist tasks only gradually, only at the cost of an extraordinary strain upon all its forces. As a result, the initial flood-tide of vague, uncritical, revolutionary moods has been unavoidably superseded by an ebb. Only the most resolute, audacious and youthful section of the world working class has remained under the banner of Communism.
This does not mean naturally that those broad circles of the proletariat who have been disillusioned in their hopes for immediate revolution, for swift radical transformations, etc., have wholly returned to the old pre-war positions. No, their dissatisfaction is deeper than ever before, their hatred of the exploiters is fiercer. But at the same time they are politically disoriented, they do not see the paths of struggle, and therefore remain passively expectant – giving rise to the possibility of sharp swings to this or that side, depending on how the situation unfolds.
This big reservoir of the passive and the disoriented can, under a certain combination of circumstances, be widely utilized by the Dissidents against us.
23) In order to support the Communist Party, faith in the revolutionary cause, will to action and loyalty are needed. In order to support the Dissidents, disorientation and passivity are necessary and sufficient. It is perfectly natural for the revolutionary and dynamic section of the working class to effuse from its ranks a much larger proportion of members for the Communist Party than the passive and disoriented section is able to supply to the party of the Dissidents.
The same thing applies to the press. The elements of indifferentism read little. The insignificant circulation and content of Le Populaire mirrors the mood of a certain section of the working class. The fact that complete ascendancy of the professional intellectuals over the workers prevails in the party of the Dissidents runs nowise counter to our diagnosis and prognosis. Because the passive and partially disillusioned, partially disoriented worker-masses are an ideal culture medium, especially in France, for political cliques composed of attorneys and journalists, reformist witch-doctors and parliamentary charlatans.
24) If we regard the party organization as an operating army, and the unorganized mass of workers as the reserves, and if we grant that our operating army is three to four times stronger than the active army of Dissidents, then, under a certain combination of circumstances, the reserves may prove to be divided between ourselves and the social-reformists in a proportion much less favourable to us.
25) The political atmosphere of France is pervaded with the idea of the “Left Bloc”. After a new period of Poincaré-ism which represents the bourgeoisie’s attempt to serve up to the people a warmed-over hash of the illusions of victory, a pacifist reaction may quite likely set in among broad circles of bourgeois society, i.e., first and foremost among the petty bourgeoisie. The hope for universal pacification, for agreement with soviet Russia, obtaining raw materials and payments from her on advantageous terms, cuts in the burden of militarism, and so on – in brief, the illusory program of democratic pacifism – can become for a while the program of a “Left Bloc”, superseding the National Bloc.
From the standpoint of the development of the revolution in France, such a change of régimes will be a step forward only provided the proletariat does not fall prey to any extent to the illusions of petty-bourgeois pacifism.
26) Reformist-Dissidents are the agency of the “Left Bloc” within the working class. Their successes will be the greater, all the less the working class as a whole is seized by the idea and practice of the united front against the bourgeoisie. Layers of workers, disoriented by the war and by the tardiness of the revolution, may venture to support the “Left Bloc” as a lesser evil, in the belief that they do not thereby risk anything at all, or because they see no other road at present.
27) One of the most reliable methods of counteracting inside the working class the moods and ideas of the “Left Bloc”, i.e., a bloc between the workers and a certain section of the bourgeoisie against another section of the bourgeoisie, is through promoting persistently and resolutely the idea of a bloc between all the sections of the working class against the whole bourgeoisie.
28) In relation to the Dissidents this means that we must not permit them to occupy with impunity an evasive, temporizing position on questions relating to the labour movement, and to use platonic declarations of sympathy for the working class as a cover for utilizing the patronage of the bourgeois oppressors. In other words, we can and must, in all suitable instances, propose to the Dissidents a specific form of joint aid to strikers, to locked-out workers, unemployed, war invalids, etc., etc., recording before the eyes of the masses their responses to our precise proposals, and in this way driving a wedge between them and certain sections of politically indifferent or semi-indifferent masses on whom the reformists hope to lean for support under certain favourable conditions.
29) This kind of tactic is all the more important in view of the fact that the Dissidents are unquestionably bound up intimately with the reformist CGT and together with the latter constitute the two wings of the bourgeois agency inside the labour movement. We take the offensive both on the trade-union and political fields simultaneously against this twofold agency, applying the very same tactical methods.
30) The impeccable and agitationally extremely persuasive logic of our conduct is as follows: “You, the reformists of trade unionism and socialism,” we say to them before the eyes of the masses, “have split the trade unions and the party for the sake of ideas and methods which we consider wrong and criminal. We demand that you at least refrain from placing a spoke in the wheel during the partial and un-postponable concrete tasks of the working-class struggle and that you make possible unity in action. In the given concrete situation we propose such and such a program of struggle.”
31) The indicated method could be similarly employed and not without success in relation to parliamentary and municipal activities. We say to the masses, “The Dissidents, because they do not want the revolution, have split the mass of the workers. It would be insanity to count upon their helping the proletarian revolution. But we are ready, inside and outside the parliament, to enter into certain practical agreements with them, provided they agree, in those cases where one must choose between the known interests of the bourgeoisie and the definite demands of the proletariat, to support the latter in action. The Dissidents can be capable of such actions only if they renounce their ties with the parties of the bourgeoisie, that is, the ‘Left Bloc’ and its bourgeois discipline.”
If the Dissidents were capable of accepting these conditions, then their worker-followers would be quickly absorbed by the Communist Party. Just because of this, the Dissidents will not agree to these conditions. In other words, to the clearly and precisely posed question whether they choose a bloc with the bourgeoisie or a bloc with the proletariat – in the concrete and specific conditions of mass struggle – they will be compelled to reply that they prefer a bloc with the bourgeoisie. Such an answer will not pass with impunity among the proletarian reserves on whom they are counting.
V) Internal Tasks of the Communist Party
32) The foregoing policy presupposes, naturally, complete organizational independence, ideological clarity and revolutionary firmness of the Communist Party itself.
Thus, for example, it would be impossible to conduct with complete success a policy aimed at making hateful and contemptible the idea of the “Left Bloc” among the working class, if in our own party ranks there are partisans of this “Left Bloc” bold enough openly to defend this projected program of the bourgeoisie. Unconditional and merciless expulsion in disgrace of those who come out in favour of the idea of the “Left Bloc” is a self-understood duty of the Communist Party. This will cleanse our policy of all elements of equivocation and unclarity; this will attract the attention of advanced workers to the acute character of the issue of the “Left Bloc” and will demonstrate that the Communist Party does not trifle with the questions which imperil the revolutionary unity in action of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
33) Those who seek to use the idea of the united front for agitating in favour of unification with the reformists and Dissidents must be mercilessly ejected from our party, inasmuch as they serve as the agency of the Dissidents in our ranks and are deceiving the workers concerning the reasons for the split and who is really responsible for it. Instead of correctly posing the question of the possibility of this or that co-ordinated, practical action with the Dissidents, despite their petty-bourgeois and essentially counter-revolutionary character, they are demanding that our own party renounce its Communist program and revolutionary methods. The ejection of such elements, mercilessly and in disgrace, will best demonstrate that the tactic of the workers’ united front in no way resembles capitulation to or reconciliation with the reformists. The tactic of the united front demands from the party complete freedom in manoeuvring, flexibility and resoluteness. To make this possible, the party must clearly and specifically declare at every given moment just what its wishes are, just what it is striving for, and it must comment authoritatively, before the eyes of the masses, on its own steps and proposals.
34) Hence flows the complete inadmissibility for individual party members to issue on their own responsibility and risk political publications in which they counterpose their own slogans, methods of action and proposals to the slogans, methods of action and proposals of the party. Under the cover of the Communist Party and consequently also inside that milieu which is influenced by a Communist cover, i.e., in a workers’ milieu, they spread from day to day ideas hostile to us, or they sow confusion and scepticism which are even more pernicious than avowedly hostile ideologies. Periodicals of this type, together with their editors, must once and for all be placed outside the party and the entire working-class France must learn about this from articles which mercilessly expose the petty-bourgeois smugglers who operate under a Communist flag.
35) From what has been said, it likewise follows that it is completely inadmissible for the leading party publications to carry side by side with articles defending the basic concepts of Communism, other articles disputing these concepts or denying them. Absolutely impermissible is a continuation of a régime in the party press under which the mass of worker-readers find, in the guise of editorials in leading Communist periodicals, articles which try to turn us back to positions of tearful pacifism and which propagate among workers a debilitating hostility toward revolutionary violence in the face of the triumphant violence of the bourgeoisie. Under the guise of a struggle against militarism, a struggle is thus being conducted against the ideas of revolution.
If after the experience of the war and all the subsequent events, especially in Russia and Germany, the prejudices of humanitarian pacifism have still survived in the Communist Party; and if the party finds it advisable for the sake of completely liquidating these prejudices to open a discussion on this question, even in that case, the pacifists with their prejudices cannot come forward in such a discussion as an equal force but must be severely condemned by the authoritative voice of the party, in the name of its Central Committee. After the Central Committee decides that the discussion has been exhausted, all attempts to spread the debilitating ideas of Tolstoyanism and other varieties of pacifism must unquestionably bring expulsion from the party.
36) An objection might, however, be raised that so long as the work of cleansing the party of ancient prejudices and of attaining internal cohesion remains uncompleted, it would be dangerous to place the party in situations where it would come into close proximity with reformists and nationalists. But such a point of view is false. Naturally it is undeniable that a transition from broad propagandist activity to direct participation in the mass movement carries with it new difficulties and therefore dangers for the Communist Party. But it is completely wrong to suppose that the party can be prepared for all tests without directly participating in struggles, without directly coming in contact with enemies and adversaries. On the contrary, only in this way can a genuine, non-fictitious internal cleaning and fusing of the party be achieved. It is quite possible that some elements in the party and in the trade-union bureaucracy will feel themselves drawn more closely to the reformists, from whom they have accidentally split than toward us. The loss of such camp-followers will not be a liability but an asset, and it will be compensated a hundredfold by the influx of those working men and women who still follow the reformists today. The party will in consequence become more homogeneous, more resolute and more proletarian.
VI) Party Tasks in the Trade-Union Movement
37) Absolute clarity on the trade-union question is a task of first-rate importance, surpassing by far all the other tasks before the Communist Party of France.
Naturally the legend spread by the reformists that Plans are afoot to subordinate the trade unions organizationally to the party must be unconditionally denounced and exposed. Trade unions embrace workers of different political shadings as well as non-party men, atheists as well as believers, whereas the party unites political co-thinkers on the basis of a definite program. The party has not and cannot have any instrumentalities and methods for subjecting the trade unions to itself from the outside.
The party can gain influence in the life of the trade unions only to the extent that its members work in the trade unions and carry out the party point of view there. The influence of party members in the trade unions naturally depends on their numerical strength and especially on the degree to which they are able to apply party principles correctly, consistently and expediently to the needs of the trade-union movement.
The party has the right and the duty to aim to conquer, along the road above outlined, the decisive influence in the trade-union organization. It can achieve this goal only provided the work of the Communists in the trade unions is wholly and exclusively harmonized with the principles of the party and is invariably conducted under its control.
38) The minds of all Communists must therefore be completely purged of reformist prejudices, in accordance with which the party is regarded as a political parliamentary organization of the proletariat, and nothing more. The Communist Party is the organization of the proletarian vanguard for the ideological fructification of the labour movement and the assumption of leadership in all spheres – first and foremost in the trade unions. While the trade unions are not subordinate to the party but wholly autonomous organizations, the Communists inside the trade unions, on the other hand, cannot pretend to any kind of autonomy in their trade-union activity but must act as the transmitters of their party’s program and tactics. To be most severely condemned is the conduct of those Communists who not only fail to fight inside the trade unions for the influence of party ideas but actually counteract such a struggle in the name of a principle of “autonomy” which they apply absolutely falsely. As a matter of fact, they thus pave the way for the decisive influence in the trade unions of individuals, groups and cliques, bound neither by a definite program nor by party organization, and who utilize the formlessness of ideological groupings and relations in order to keep the organizational apparatus in their own hands and secure the independence of their own clique from any actual control by the workers’ vanguard.
While the party, in its activity inside the trade unions, must show the greatest attentiveness and caution toward the non-party masses and their conscientious and honest representatives; while the party must, on the basis of joint work, systematically and tactically draw closer to the best elements of the trade-union movement – including the revolutionary anarchists who are capable of learning – the party can, on the contrary, no longer tolerate in its midst those pseudo-Communists who utilize the status of party membership only in order all the more confidently to promote anti-party influences in the trade unions.
39) The party through its own press, through its own propagandists and its members in the trade unions must submit to constant and systematic criticism the shortcomings of revolutionary syndicalism for solving the basic tasks of the proletariat. The party must tirelessly and persistently criticize the weak theoretical and practical sides of syndicalism, explaining at the same time to its best elements that the only correct road for securing the revolutionary influence on the trade unions and on the labour movement as a whole is the entry of revolutionary syndicalists into the Communist Party: their participation in working out all the basic questions of the movement, in drawing the balance sheet of experience, in defining new tasks, in cleansing the Communist Party itself and strengthening its ties with the working masses.
40) It is absolutely indispensable to take a census of all the members of the French Communist Party in order to determine their social status (workers, civil employees, peasants, intellectuals, etc.); their relations with the trade-union movement (do they belong to trade unions – do they participate in meetings of Communist and revolutionary syndicalists? do they carry out at these meetings the decisions of the party on the trade unions? etc.); their attitude toward the party press (what party publications do they read?), and so on.
The census must be so conducted that its chief aspects can be taken into account before the Fourth World Congress convenes.
March 2, 1922
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1. These Theses on the United Front, unquestionably one of the most important programmatic documents of revolutionary Marxism, were drafted by Trotsky lor the enlarged Plenum of the ECCI which convened toward the end of February 1922.
2. Le Populaire, founded by Leon Blum, was, as it remained, the central publication of the French Socialist Party.
3. The CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail – General Confederation of Labor) was the central trade union organization of France. Formed in 1903 it embraced all the existing trade unions. Prior to World War I the CGT was the most revolutionary organization in France. But with the outbreak of war in 1914, the majority of the leaders, headed by Jouhaux, became rabid jingoes. The official CGT leadership savagely opposed the growing left wing movement, which grew rapidly after the war and came under Communist influence. They engineered a split which led early in 1922 to the formation of the Unitarian General Confederation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire or CGTU). This split was marked by a sharp decline in total union membership. In 1920 there were about 2,500,000 workers in the CGT. By 1923 the combined memberships of the CGT and CGTU fell under 100,000.
4. La Ligue Civique was a bourgeois anti-labor, strikebreaking organization in France. The closest counterpart to it in the US would be the National Association of Manufacturers.
From The “West Coast Port Shutdown” Website-This Is Class War, We Say No More!- Support The Defense Of The Longshoremen's UnIons!
Click on the headline to link to the West Coast Port Shutdown website.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing as implement “30 for 40” so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other sector that desperately need to be organized is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
Guest Commentary
From The Transitional Program Of The Leon Trotsky-Led Fourth International In 1938Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours
Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.
The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.
Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.
Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment, “structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.
Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor, but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the American imperial monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working-class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Karl Marx was right way back in the 19th century on his labor theory of value, the workers do produce the social surplus appropriated by the capitalists. Capitalism tends to immiserate the mass of society for the few. Most importantly capitalism, a system that at one time was historically progressive in the fight against feudalism and other ancient forms of production, has turned into its opposite and now is a fetter on production. The current multiple crises spawned by this system show there is no way forward, except that unless we push them out, push them out fast, they will muddle through, again.
Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Socialism is the only serious answer to the human crisis we face economically, socially, culturally and politically. This socialist system is the only one calculated to take one of the great tragedies of life, the struggle for daily survival in a world that we did not create, and replace it with more co-operative human endeavors.
Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. None of the nice things mentioned above can be accomplished without as serious struggle for political power. We need to struggle for an independent working-class-centered political party that we can call our own and where our leaders act as “tribunes of the people” not hacks. The creation of that workers party, however, will get us nowhere unless it fights for a workers government to begin the transition to the next level of human progress on a world-wide scale.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)
Posted Sun, 05/01/2005 - 8:34am by IWW.org Editor
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.
These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.
Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."
It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.
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