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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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 to 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.
Previous historical models readily 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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Charles Fourier, 1772-1837 -- Selections from his Writings
Because Fourier's writings are lengthy and repetitious we are indeed fortunate that the French economist Charles Gide produced a one-volume edition of selections from Fourier's works, a volume which was then translated into English by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier. The following selections come from Fourier's Théorie des Quatre Mouvements (2nd ed., 1841), Le Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire (3rd ed., 1848), Théorie de l'Unit? Universelle (2nd ed., 1838), La Fausse Industrie (1835-36) and the Manuscrits de Fourier (1851). On the WWW, the Harmonic Series of Charles Fourier is an especially interesting site. A Fourier links page looks promising as well.
OF THE ROLE OF THE PASSIONS
All those philosophical whims called duties have no relation whatever to Nature; duty proceeds from men, Attraction proceeds from God; now, if we desire to know the designs of God, we must study Attraction, Nature only, without any regard to duty, which varies with every age, while the nature of the passions has been and will remain invariable among all nations of men.
The learned world is wholly imbued with a doctrine termed MORALITY, which is a mortal enemy of passional attraction.
Morality teaches man to be at war with himself, to resist his passions, to repress them, to believe that God was incapable of organizing our souls, our passions wisely; that he needed the teachings of Plato and Seneca in order to know how to distribute characteristics and instincts. Imbued with these prejudices regarding the impotence of God, the learned world was not qualified to estimate the natural impulses or passional attractions, which morality proscribes and relegates to the rank of vices.
It is true that these impulses entice us only to evil, if we yield to them individually; but we must calculate their effect upon a body of about two thousand persons socially combined, and not upon families or isolated individuals: this is what the learned world has not thought of; in studying it, it would have recognized that as soon as the number of associates (societaires) has reached 1600, the natural impulses, termed attractions, tend to form series of contrasting groups, in which everything incites to industry, become attractive, and to virtue, become lucrative.
The passions, believed to be the enemies of concord, in reality conduce to that unity from which we deem them so far removed. But outside of the mechanism termed "exalted," emulatory, interlocked (engrenees) Series, they are but unchained tigers, incomprehensible enigmas. It is this which has caused philosophers to say that we ought to repress them; an opinion doubly absurd inasmuch as we can only repress our passions by violence or absorbing replacement, which replacement is no repression. On the other hand, should they be efficiently repressed, the civilized order would rapidly decline find relapse into the nomad state, where the passions would still be malevolent as with us. The virtue of shepherds is as doubtful as that of their apologists, and our utopia-makers, by thus attributing virtues to imaginary peoples, only succeed in proving the impossibility of introducing virtue into civilization.
We are quite familiar with the five sensitive passions tending to Luxury, the four affective ones tending to Groups; it only remains for us to learn about the three distributive ones whose combined impulse produces Series, a social method of which the secret has been lost since the age of primitive mankind, who were unable to maintain the Series more than about 300 years.
The four affective passions tending to form the four groups of friendship, love, ambition, paternity or consanguinity are familiar enough; but no analyses or parallels or scales have been made of them.
The three others, termed distributive, are totally misunderstood, and bear only the title of vices, although they are infinitely precious; for these three possess the property of forming and directing the series of groups, the mainspring of social harmony. Since these series are not formed in the civilized order, the three distributive passions cause disorder only. Let us define them.
10th. THE CABALIST is the passion that, like love, has the property of confounding ranks, drawing superiors and inferiors closer to each other. Everyone must recall occasions when he has been strongly drawn into some Path followed with complete success.
For instance: electoral cabal to elect a certain candidate; cabal on 'Change in the stock-jobbing game; cabal of two pairs of lovers, planning a partie carrée without the father's knowledge; a family cabal to secure a desirable match. If these intrigues are crowned with success, the participants become friends; in spite of some anxiety, they have passed happy moments together while conducting the intrigue; the emotions it arouses are necessities of the soul.
Far removed from the insipid calm whose charms are extolled by morality, the cabalistic spirit is the true destination of man. Plotting doubles his resources, enlarges his faculties. Compare the tone of a formal social gathering, its moral, stilted, languishing jargon, with the tone of these same people united in a cabal: they will appear transformed to you; you will admire their terseness, their animation, the quick play of ideas, the alertness of action, of decision; in a word, the rapidity of the spiritual or material motion. This fine development of the human faculties is the fruit of the cabalist or tenth passion, which constantly prevails in the labors and the reunions of a passionate series.
As it always results in some measure of success, and as its groups are all precious to each other, the attraction of the cabals becomes a potent bond of friendship between all the sectaires, even the most unequal.
The general perfection of industry will spring, then, from the passion which is most condemned by the philosophers; the cabalist or dissident, which has never been able to obtain among us the rank of a passion, notwithstanding that it is so strongly rooted even in the philosophers themselves, who are the greatest intriguers in the social world.
The cabalist is a favorite passion of women; they are excessively fond of intrigue, the rivalries and all the greater and lesser flights of a cabal. It is a proof of their eminent fitness ( for the new social order, where cabals without number will be needed in every series, periodical schisms, in order to maintain a movement of coming and going among the sectaries of the different groups.
12th. THE COMPOSITE.--This passion requires in every action a composite allurement or pleasure of the senses and of the soul, and consequently the blind enthusiasm which is born only of the mingling of the two kinds of pleasure. These conditions are but little compatible with civilized labor, which, far from offering any allurement either to the senses or the soul, is only a double torment even in the most vaunted of work-shops, such as the spinning factories of England where the people, even the children, work fifteen hours a day, under the lash, in premises devoid of air.
The composite is the most beautiful of the twelve passions, the one which enhances the value of all the others. A love is not beautiful unless it is a composite love, combining the charm of the senses and of the soul. It becomes trifling or deception if it limits itself to one of these springs. An ambition is not vehement unless it brings into play the two springs, glory and interest. It is then that it becomes capable of brilliant efforts. .
The composite commands so great a respect, that all are agreed in despising people inclined to simple pleasure. Let a man provide himself with fine viands, fine wines, with the intention of enjoying them alone, of giving himself up to gormandizing by himself, and he exposes himself to well-merited gibes. But if this man gathers a select company in his house, where one may enjoy at the same time the pleasure of the senses by good cheer, and the pleasure of the soul by companionship, he will be lauded, because these banquets will be a composite and not a simple pleasure.
If general opinion despises simple material pleasure, the same is true as well of simple spiritual pleasure, of gatherings where there is neither refreshment, nor dancing, nor love, nor anything for the senses, where one enjoys oneself only in imagination. Such a gathering, devoid of the composite or pleasure of the senses and the soul, becomes insipid to its participants, and it is not long before it "grows bored and dissolves."
11th. THE PAPILLONNE [Butterfly] or Alternating. Although eleventh according to rank, it should be examined after the twelfth, because it serves as a link between the other two, the tenth and the twelfth. If the sessions of the series were meant to be prolonged twelve or fifteen hours like those of civilized workmen, who, from morning till night, stupefy themselves by being engaged in insipid duties without any diversion, God would have given us a taste for monotony, an abhorrence of variety. But as the sessions of the series are to be very short, and the enthusiasm inspired by the composite is incapable of being prolonged beyond an hour and a half, God, in conformity to this industrial order, had to endow us with the passion of papillonnage, the craving for periodic variety in the phases of life, and for frequent variety in our occupations. Instead of working twelve hours with a scant intermission for a poor, dull dinner, the associative state will never extend its sessions of labor beyond an hour and a half or at most two; besides, it will diffuse a host of pleasures, reunions of the two sexes terminating in a repast, from which one will proceed to new diversions, with different company and cabals.
Without this hypothesis of associative labor, arranged in the order I have described, it would be impossible to conceive for what purpose God should have given us three passions so antagonistic to the monotony experienced in civilization, and so unreasonable that, in the existing state, they have not even been accorded the rank of passions, but are termed only vices.
A series, on the contrary, could not be organized without the permanent cooperation of these three passions. They are bound to intervene constantly and simultaneously in the serial play of intrigue. Hence it comes that these three passions could not be discerned until the invention of the serial mechanism, and that up to that time they had to be regarded as vices. When the social order for which God has destined us shall be known in detail, it will be seen that these pretended vices, the Cabalist, the Papillonne, the Composite, become there three pledges of virtue and riches; that God did indeed know how to create passions such as are demanded by social unity; that He would have been wrong to change them in order to please Seneca and Plato; that on the contrary human reason ought to strive to discover a social condition which shall be in affinity with these passions. No moral theory will ever change them, and, in accordance with the rules of the duality of tendency, they will intervene for ever to lead us TO EVIL in the disjointed state or social limbo, and TO GOOD in the regime of association or serial labor.
The seven "affective" and "distributive" passions depend more upon the spirit than upon matter; they rank as PRIMITIVES. Their combined action engenders a collective passion or one formed by the union of the other seven, as white is formed by the union of the seven colors of a ray of light; I shall call this thirteenth passion Harmonism or Unityism; it is even less known than the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth, of which I have not spoken.
Unityism is the inclination of the individual to reconcile his own happiness with that of all surrounding him, and of all human kind, to-day so odious. It is an unbounded philanthropy, a universal good-will which can only be developed when the entire human race shall be rich, free, and just.
Questions regarding gallantly and the love of eating are treated facetiously by the Civilized, who do not comprehend the importance that God attaches to our pleasures. Voluptuousness is the sole arm which God can employ to master us and lead us to carry out his designs; he rules the universe by Attraction and not by Force; therefore the enjoyments of his creatures are the most important object of the calculations of God.
I shall, in order to dispose others to share my confidence, explain the object of one of these impulses, accounted as vicious.
I select a propensity which is the most general and the most thwarted by education: it is the gluttony of children, their fondness for dainties, in opposition to the advice of the pedagogues who counsel them to like bread, to eat more bread than their allowance.
Nature, then, is very clumsy to endow children with tastes so opposed to sound doctrines! every child regards a breakfast of dry bread as a punishment; he would wish for sugared cream, sweetened milk-food and pastry, marmalades and stewed fruit, raw and preserved fruit, lemonades and orangeades, mild white wines. Let us observe closely these tastes which prevail among all children; on this point a great case is to be adjudged: the question to be determined is who is wrong, God or morality?
God, dispenser of attraction, gives all children a liking for dainties: it was in his power to give them a liking for dry bread and water; it would have suited the views of morality; why then does he knowingly militate against sound civilized doctrines? Let us explain these motives.
God has given children a liking for substances which will be the least costly in the associative state. When the entire globe shall be populated and cultivated, enjoying free-trade, exempt from all duties, the sweet viands mentioned above will be much less expensive than bread; the abundant edibles will be fruit, milk-foods, and sugar, but not bread, whose price will be greatly raised, because the labor incident to the growing of grain and the daily making of bread is wearisome and little attractive; these kinds of labor would have to be paid much higher than that in orchards or confectioneries.
And as it is fitting that the food and maintenance of children should involve less expense than those of their parents, God has acted judiciously in attracting them to those sweetmeats and dainties which will be cheaper than bread as soon as we shall have entered upon the associative state. Then the sound moral doctrines will be found to be altogether erroneous concerning the nourishment of children, as well as upon all other points which oppose attraction. It will be recognized that God did well what he did, that he was right in attracting children to milk-foods, fruit, and sweet pastries; and that, instead of foolishly losing three thousand years in declaiming against God's wisest work, against the distribution of tastes and passionate attractions, it would have been better to study its aim, by reckoning with all those impulses combined, which morality insults singly, under the pretext that they are hurtful to the civilized and barbarous orders; this is true, but God did not create the passions for the civilized and barbarous orders. If he had wished to maintain these two forms of society exclusively, he would have given children a fondness for dry bread, and to the parents a love of poverty, since that is the lot of the immense majority of mankind in civilization and barbarism.
In the civilized state, love of eating does not ally itself to industry because the laboring producer does not enjoy the commodities which he has cultivated or manufactured. This passion therefore becomes an attribute of the idle; and through that alone it would be vicious, were it not so already by the outlay and the excesses which it occasions.
In the associative state love of eating plays an entirely opposite role; it is no longer a reward of idleness but of industry; because there the poorest tiller of the soil participates in the consumption of choice commodities. Moreover, its only influence will be to preserve us from excess, by dint of variety, and to stimulate us to work by allying the intrigues of consumption to those of production, preparation, and distribution. Production being the most important of the four, let us first state the principle which must guide it; it is the generalization of epicurism. In point of fact.
If the whole human race could be raised to a high degree of gastronomic refinement, even in regard to the most ordinary kinds of food, such as cabbages and radishes, and everyone be given a competence which would allow him to refuse all edibles which are mediocre in quality or treatment, the result would be that every cultivated country would, after a few years, be covered with delicious productions; for there would be no sale for mediocre ones, such as bitter melons, bitter peaches, which certain kinds of soil yield, upon which neither melons nor peaches would be cultivated; every district would confine itself to productions which its soil is capable of raising to perfection; it would fetch earth for spots where the soil is poor, or perhaps convert them into forests, artificial meadows, or whatever else might yield products of good quality. It is not that the passionate Series do not consume ordinary eatables and stuffs; but they desire, even in ordinary things such as beans and coarse cloth, the most perfect quality possible, in conformity to the proportions which Nature has established in industrial attraction.
The principle which must be our starting-point is, that a general perfection in industry will be attained by the universal demands and refinement of the consumers, regarding food and clothing, furniture and amusements.
My theory confines itself to utilizing the passions now condemned, just as Nature has given them to us and without in any way changing them. That is the whole mystery, the whole secret of the calculus of passionate Attraction. There is no arguing there whether God was right or wrong in giving mankind these or those passions; the associative order avails itself of them without changing them, and as God has given them to us.
Its mechanism produces coincidence in every respect between individual interest and collective interest, in civilization always divergent.
It makes use of men as they are, utilizing the discords arising from antipathies, and other motives accounted vicious, and vindicating the Creator from the reproach of a lacuna in providence, in the matter of general unity and individual foresight.
Finally, it in nowise disturbs the established order, limiting itself to trial on a small scale, which will incite to imitation by the double allurement of quadruple proceeds and attractive industry.
OF EDUCATION
There is no problem upon which people have gone more astray than upon public instruction and its methods. Nature has, in this branch of social politics, taken a malign pleasure in all ages in confounding our theories and their exponents, from the time of the disgrace incurred by Seneca, the instructor of Nero, to that of the failures of Condillac and Rousseau, of whom the first fashioned only a political idiot and the second did not dare to undertake the education of his own children.
It will be observed that in Harmony the only paternal function of the father is to yield to his natural impulse, to spoil the child, to humor all his whims.
The child will be sufficiently reproved and rallied by his peers. When an infant or little child has in the course of the day passed through half a dozen such groups and undergone their jokes, he is thoroughly imbued with a sense of his insufficiency, and quite disposed to listen to the advice of the patriarchs and venerables who are good enough to offer him instruction.
It will, after that, be of little consequence that the parents at the child's bed-time indulge themselves in spoiling him, telling him that he has been treated too severely, that he is really very charming, very clever; these effusions will only skim the surface, they will not convince. The impression has been made. He is humbled by the railleries of seven or eight groups of little ones which he has visited during the day. In vain will it be for the father and mother to tell him that the children who have repulsed him are barbarians, enemies of social intercourse, of gentleness and kindliness; all these parental platitudes will have no effect, and the child on returning to the infantile seristeries the following day will remember only the affronts of the day before; it is he who in reality will cure the father of the habit of spoiling, by redoubling his efforts and proving that he is conscious of his inferiority.
Nature endows every child with a great number of instincts in industry, about thirty, of which some are primary or guiding and lead to those that are secondary.
The point is to discover first of all the primary instincts: the child will seize this bait as soon as it is presented to him; accordingly, as soon as he is able to walk, to leave the infant seristery, the male and female nurses in whose charge he is placed hasten to conduct him to all the workshops and fill the industrial reunions which are close by; and as he finds every where diminutive tools, an industry in miniature, in which little tots of from two and a half to three years already engage, with whom he is anxious to associate, to rummage about, to handle things, at the end of a fortnight one may discern what are the workshops that attract him, what his industrial instincts.
The phalanx containing an exceedingly great variety of occupations, it is impossible that the child in passing from one to the other should not find opportunities of satisfying several of his dominant instincts; these will exhibit themselves at the sight of the little tools manipulated by other children a few months older than himself.
According to civilized parents and teachers, children are little idlers; nothing is more erroneous; children are already at two and three years of age very industrious, but we must know the springs which Nature wishes to put in action to attract them to industry in the passionate series and not in civilization. The dominant tastes in all children are:
1. Rummaging or inclination to handle everything, examine everything, look through everything, to constantly change occupations;
2. Industrial commotion, taste for noisy occupations;
3. Aping or imitative mania.
4. Industrial miniature, a taste for miniature workshops.
5. Progressive attraction of the weak toward the strong.
There are many others; I limit myself to naming these five first, which are very familiar to the civilized. Let us examine the method to be followed in order to apply them to industry at an early age.
The male and female nurses will first exploit the mania for rummaging so dominant in a child of two. He wants to peer into every place, to handle and examine everything he sees. He is consequently obliged to be kept apart, in a bare room, otherwise he would destroy everything.
This propensity to handle everything is a bait to industry; to draw him to it, he will be conducted to the little workshops; there he will see children only two and a half and three years old using little tools, little hammers. He will wish to exercise his imitative mania, termed APING; he will be given some tools, but he will want to be admitted among the children of twenty-six and twenty-seven months who know how to work, and who will repel him.
He will persist if the work coincides with any of his instincts: the nurse or the patriarch will teach him some portion of the work, and he will very soon succeed in making himself useful in some trifling things which will serve him as an introduction; let us examine this effect in regard to an inconsiderable kind of labor, within the reach of the smallest children, the shelling and sorting of green peas. This work which with us would occupy the hands of people of thirty, will be consigned to children of two, three, four years of age: the hall is provided with inclined tables containing a number of hollows; two little ones are seated at the raised side; they take the peas out of the shell, the inclination of the table causes the grains to roll towards the lower side where three tots are placed of twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five months, charged with the task of sorting, and furnished with special implements.
The thing to be done is to separate the smallest peas for the sweetened ragout, the medium ones for the bacon ragout, and the largest for the soup. The child of thirty-five months first selects the little ones which are the most difficult to pick out; she sends all the large and medium ones to the next hollow, where the child of thirty months shoves those that seem large to the third hollow, returns the little ones to the first, and drops the medium grains into the basket. The infant of twenty-five months, placed at the third hollow, has an easy task; he returns some medium grains to the second, and gathers the large ones into his basket.
It is in this third rank that the infant debutante will be placed; he will mingle proudly with the others in throwing the large grains into the basket; it is very trifling work, but he will feel as if he had accomplished as much as his companions; he will grow enthusiastic and be seized by a spirit of emulation, and at the third seance he will be able to replace the infant of twenty-five months, to send back the grains of the second size into the second compartment, and to gather up only the largest ones, which are easily distinguished.
If civilized education developed in every child its natural inclinations, we should see nearly all rich children enamored of various very plebeian occupations, such as that of the mason, the carpenter, the smith, the saddler. I have instanced Louis the XVI, who loved the trade of locksmith; an Infanta of Spain preferred that of shoemaker; a certain king of Denmark gratified himself by manufacturing syringes; the former king of Naples loved to sell the fish he had caught in the market-place himself; the prince of Parma, whom Condillac had trained in metaphysical subtitles, in the understanding of intuition, of cognition, had no taste but for the occupation of church-warden and lay-brother.
The great majority of wealthy children would follow these plebeian tastes, if civilized education did not oppose the development of them; and if the filthiness of the workshops and the coarseness of the workmen did not arouse a repugnance stronger than the attraction. What child of a prince is there who has no taste for one of the four occupations I have just mentioned, that of mason, carpenter, smith, saddler, and who would not advance in them if he beheld from an early age the work carried on in blight workshops, by refined people, who would always arrange a miniature workshop for children, with little implements and light labor?
No attempt will be made, as is the case in existing educational methods, to create precocious little savants, intellectual primary school beginners, initiated from their sixth year in scientific subtleties; the endeavor will by preference be to secure mechanical precocity; capability in bodily industry, which, far from retarding the growth of the mind, accelerates it.
If one wishes to observe the general inclination of children of from four and a half to nine years of age, he will see that they are strongly drawn to all material exercises, and very little to studies; it is right then, that, in accordance with the desire of nature or attraction, the cultivation of the material should predominate at that age.
Why this impulse of childhood toward material exercises? Because Nature wishes, above all, to make man husbandman and manufacturer, to lead him to wealth before leading him to science.
THE PHALANSTERY
The announcement does, I acknowledge, sound very improbable, of a method for combining three hundred families unequal in fortune, and rewarding each person--man. woman, child--according to the three properties, capital, labor, talent. More than one reader will credit himself with humor when he remarks: "Let the author try to associate but three families, to reconcile three households in the same dwelling to social union, to arrangements of purchases and expenses, to perfect harmony in passions, character, and authority; when he shall have succeeded in reconciling three mistresses of associated households, we shall believe that he can succeed with thirty and with three hundred."
I have already replied to an argument which it is well to reproduce (for repetition will frequently be necessary here); I have observed that as economy can spring only from large combinations, God had to create a social theory applicable to large masses and not to three or four families.
An objection seemingly more reasonable, and which needs to be refuted more than once, is that of social discords. How conciliate the passions, the conflicting interests, the incompatible characters, in short, the innumerable disparities which engender so much discord?
It may easily have been surmised that I shall make use of a lever entirely unknown, and whose properties cannot be judged until I shall have explained them. The passional contrasted Series draws its nourishment solely from those disparities which bewilder civilized policy; it acts like the husbandman who from a mass of filth draws the germs of abundance; the refuse, the dirt, and impure matter which would serve only to defile and infect our dwellings, are for him the sources of wealth.
If social experiments have miscarried, it is because some fatality has impelled all speculators to work with bodies of poor people whom they subjected to a monastic-industrial discipline, chief obstacle to the working of the series. Here, as in everything else, it is ever SIMPLISM (simplisme) which misleads the civilized, obstinately sticking to experiments with combinations of the poor; they cannot elevate themselves to the conception of a trial with combinations of the rich. They are veritable Lemming rats (migrating rats of Lapland), preferring drowning in a pond to deviating from the route which they have decided upon.
It is necessary for a company of 1,500 to 1,600 persons to have a stretch of land comprising a good square league, say a surface of six million square toises (do not let us forget that a third of that would suffice for the simple mode).
The land should be provided with a fine stream of water; it should be intersected by hills, and adapted to varied cultivation; it should be contiguous to a forest, and not far removed from a large city, but sufficiently so to escape intruders.
The experimental Phalanx standing alone, and without the support of neighboring phalanxes, will, in consequence of this isolation, have so many gaps in attraction, and so many passional calms to dread in its workings, that it will be necessary to provide it with the aid of a good location fitted for a variety of functions. A flat country such as Antwerp, Leipzig, Orleans, would be totally unsuitable, and would cause many Series to fail, owing to the uniformity of the land surface. It will, therefore, be necessary to select a diversified region, like the surroundings of Lausanne, or, at the very least, a fine valley provided with a stream of water and a forest, like the valley of Brussels or of Halle. A fine location near Paris would be the stretch of country lying between Poissy and Confleurs, Poissy and Meulan.
A company will be collected consisting of from 1,500 to 1,600 persons of graduated degrees of fortune, age, character, of theoretical and practical knowledge; care will be taken to secure the greatest amount of variety possible, for the greater the number of variations either in the passions or the faculties of the members, the easier will it be to make them harmonize in a short space of time.
In this district devoted to experiment, there ought to be combined every species of practicable cultivation, including that in conservatories and hot-houses; in addition, there ought to be at least three accessory factories, to be used in winter and on rainy days; furthermore, various practical branches of science and the arts, independent of the schools.
Above all, it will be necessary to fix the valuation of the capital invested in shares; lands, materials, flocks, implements, etc. This point ought, it seems, to be among the first to receive attention; I think it best to dismiss it here. I shall limit myself to remarking that all these investments in transferable shares and stock-coupons will be represented.
A great difficulty to be overcome in the experimental Phalanx will be the formation of the ties of high mechanism or collective bonds of the Series, before the close of the first season. It will be necessary to accomplish the passional union of the mass of the members; to lead them to collective and individual devotion to the maintenance of the Phalanx, and, especially, to perfect harmony regarding the division of the profits, according to the three factors, Capital, Labor, Talent.
This difficulty will be greater in northern than in southern countries, owing to the difference between devoting eight months and five months to agricultural labor.
An experimental Phalanx, being obliged to start out with agricultural labor, will not be in full operation until the month of May (in a climate of 50 degrees, say in the region around London or Paris); and, since it will be necessary to form the bonds of general union, the harmonious ties of the Series, be fore the suspension of field labor, before the month of October, there will be barely five months of full practice in a region of 50 degrees: the work will have to be accomplished in that short space.
The trial would, therefore, be much more conveniently made in a temperate legion, like Florence, Naples, Valencia, Lisbon, where they would have eight to nine months of full cultivation and a far better opportunity to consolidate the bonds of union, since there would be but two or three months of passional calm remaining to tide over till the advent of the second spring, a time when the Phalanx, resuming agricultural labor, would form its ties and cabals anew with much greater zeal, imbuing them with a degree of intensity far above that of the first year; it would thenceforth be in a state of complete consolidation, and strong enough to weather the passional calm of the second winter.
We shall see in the chapter on hiatuses of attraction, that the first Phalanx will, in consequence of its social isolation and other impediments inherent to the experimental canton, have twelve special obstacles to overcome, obstacles which the Phalanxes subsequently founded would not have to contend with. That is why it is so important that the experimental canton should have the assistance coming from field-work prolonged eight or nine months, like that in Naples and Lisbon.
Let us proceed with the details of composition.
At least seven-eighths of the members ought to be cultivators and manufacturers; the remainder will consist of capitalists, scholars, and artists.
The Phalanx would be badly graded and difficult to balance, if among its capitalists there were several having 100,000 francs, several 50,000 francs, without intermediate fortunes. In such a case it would be necessary to seek to procure intermediate fortunes of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 francs. The Phalanx best graduated in every respect raises social harmony and profits to the highest degree.
One is tempted to believe that our sybarites would not wish to be associated with Grosjean and Margot: they are so even now (as I believe I have already pointed out). Is not the rich man obliged to discuss his affairs with twenty peasants who occupy his farms, and who are all agreed in taking illegal advantage of him? He is, therefore, the peasant's associate, obliged to make inquiries about the good and the bad farmers, their character, morals, solvency, and industry; he does associate in a very direct and a very tiresome way with Grosjean and Margot. In Harmony, he will be their indirect associate, being relieved of accounts regarding the management, which will be regulated by the regents, proctors, and special officers, without its being necessary for the capitalist to intervene or to run any risk of fraud. He will, therefore, be freed from the disagreeable features of his present association with the peasantry; he will form a new one, where he will not furnish them anything, and where they will only be his obliging and devoted friends, in accordance with the details given regarding the management of the Series and of reunions. If he takes the lead at festivals, it is because he has agreed to accept the rank of captain. If he gives them a feast, it is because he takes pleasure in acknowledging their continual kind attentions.
Thus the argument urged about the repugnance to association between Mondor and Grosjean, already associated in fact, is only, like all the others, a quibble devoid of sense.
The edifice occupied by a Phalanx does not in any way resemble our constructions, whether of the city or country; and none of our buildings could be used to establish a large Harmony of 1,600 persons--not even a seat palace like Versailles, nor a great monastery like the Escurial. If, for the purposes of experiment, only an inconsiderable Harmony of 200 or 300 members, or a hongrée of 400 members is organized, a monastery or a palace (Meudon) could be used for it.
The lodgings, plantations, and stables of a Society conducted on the plan of Series of groups, must differ vastly from our villages and country towns, which are intended for families having no social connection, and which act in a perverse manner; in place of that class of little houses which rival each other in filth and ungainliness in our little towns, a Phalanx constructs an edifice for itself which is as regular as the ground permits: here is a sketch of distribution for a location favorable to development.
The central part of the Palace or Phalanstery ought to be appropriated to peaceful uses, and contain the dining-halls, halls for finance, libraries, study, etc. In this central portion are located the place of worship, the tour d'ordre, the telegraph, the post-office boxes, the chimes for ceremonials, the observatory, the winter court adorned with resinous plants, and situated in the rear of the parade-court.
One of the wings ought to combine all the noisy workshops, such as the carpenter-shop, the forge, all hammer-work; it ought to contain also all the industrial gatherings of children, who are generally very noisy in industry and even in music. This combination will obviate a great annoyance of our civilized cities, where we find some man working with a hammer in every street, some dealer in iron or tyro on the clarionet, who shatter the tympanum of fifty families in the vicinity.
The other wing ought to contain the caravansary with its ballrooms and its halls appropriated to intercourse with outsiders, so that these may not encumber the central portion of the palace and embarrass the domestic relations of the Phalanx.
ATTRACTIVE LABOR
In the civilized mechanism we find everywhere composite unhappiness instead of composite charm. Let us judge of it by the case of labor. It is, says the Scripture very justly, a punishment of man: Adam and his issue are condemned to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. That, already, is an affliction; but this labor, this ungrateful labor upon which depends the earning of our miserable bread, we cannot even get it! a laborer lacks the labor upon which his maintenance depends--he asks in vain for a tribulation! He suffers a second, that of obtaining work at times whose fruit is his master's and not his, or of being employed in duties to which he is entirely unaccustomed.. . . The civilized laborer suffers a third affliction through the maladies with which he is generally stricken by the excess of labor demanded by his master.
He suffers a fifth affliction, that of being despised and treated as a beggar because he lacks those necessaries which he consents to purchase by the anguish of repugnant labor. He suffers, finally, a sixth affliction, in that he will obtain neither advancement nor sufficient wages, and that to the vexation of present suffering is added the perspective of future suffering, and of being sent to the gallows should he demand that labor which he may lack to-morrow.
Labor, nevertheless, forms the delight of various creatures, such as beavers, bees, wasps, ants, which are entirely at liberty to prefer inertia: but God has provided them with a social mechanism which attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why should he not have accorded us the same favor as these animals? What a difference between their industrial condition and ours! A Russian, an Algerian, work from fear of the lash or the bastinado; an Englishman, a Frenchman, from fear of the famine which stalks close to his poor household; the Greeks and the Romans, whose freedom has been vaunted to us, worked as slaves, and from fear of punishment, like the Negroes in the colonies to-day.
Associative labor, in order to exert a strong attraction upon people, will have to differ in every particular from the repulsive conditions which render it so odious in the existing state of things. It is necessary, in order that it become attractive, that associative labor fulfill the following seven conditions:
1. That every laborer be a partner, remunerated by dividends and not by wages.
2. That every one, man, woman, or child, be remunerated in proportion to the three faculties, capital, labor, and talent.
3. That the industrial sessions be varied about eight times a day, it being impossible to sustain enthusiasm longer than an hour and a half or two hours in the exercise of agricultural or manufacturing labor.
4. That they be carried on by bands of friends, united spontaneously, interested and stimulated by very active rivalries.
5. That the workshops and husbandry offer the laborer the allurements of elegance and cleanliness.
6. That the division of labor be carried to the last degree, so that each sex and age may devote itself to duties that are suited to it.
7. That in this distribution, each one, man, woman, or child, be in full enjoyment of the right to labor or the right to engage in such branch of labor as they may please to select, provided they give proof of integrity and ability.
Finally, that, in this new order, people possess a guarantee of well-being, of a minimum sufficient for the present and the future, and that this guarantee free them from all uneasiness concerning themselves and their families.
We find all these properties combined in the associative mechanism, whose discovery I make public.
In order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the labors which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction. Morality teaches us to love work: let it know, then, how to render work lovable, and, first of all, let it introduce luxury into, husbandry and the workshop. If the arrangements are poor, repulsive, how arouse industrial attraction?
In work, as in pleasure, variety is evidently the desire of nature. Any enjoyment prolonged, without interruption, beyond two hours, conduces to satiety, to abuse, blunts our faculties, and exhausts pleasure. A repast of four hours will not pass off without excess; an opera of four hours will end by cloying the spectator. Periodical variety is a necessity of the body and of the soul, a necessity in all nature; even the soil requires alteration of seeds, and seed alteration of soil. The stomach will soon reject the best dish if it be offered every day, and the soul will be blunted in the exercise of any virtue if it be not relieved by some other virtue.
If there is need of variety in pleasure after indulging in it for two hours, so much the more does labor require this diversity, which is continual in the associative state, and is guaranteed to the poor as well as the rich.
The chief source of light-heartedness among Harmonians is the frequent change of sessions. Life is a perpetual torment to our workmen, who are obliged to spend twelve, and frequently fifteen, consecutive hours in some tedious labor. Even ministers are not exempt; we find some of them complain of having passed an entire day in the stupefying task of affixing signatures to thousands of official vouchers. Such wearisome duties are unknown in the associative order; the Harmonians, who devote an hour, an hour and a half, or at most two hours, to the different sessions, and who, in these short sessions, are sustained by cabalistic impulses and by friendly union with selected associates, cannot fail to bring and to find cheerfulness everywhere.
The radical evil of our industrial system is the employment of the laborer in a single occupation, which runs the risk of coming to a stand-still. The fifty thousand workmen of Lyons who are beggars to-day (besides fifty thousand women and children), would be scattered over two or three hundred phalanxes, which would make silk their principal article of manufacture, and which would not be thrown out by a year or two of stagnation in that branch of industry. If at the end of that time their factory should fail completely, they would start one of a different kind, without having stopped work, without ever making their daily subsistence dependent upon a continuation or suspension of outside orders.
In a progressive series all the groups acquire so much the more skill in that their work is greatly subdivided, and that every member engages only in the kind in which he professes to excel. The heads of the Series, spurred on to study by rivalry, bring to their work the knowledge of a student of the first rank. The subordinates are inspired with an ardor which laughs at all obstacles, and with a fanaticism for the maintenance of the honor of the Series against rival districts. In the heat of action they accomplish what seems humanly impossible, like the French grenadiers who scaled the rocks of Mahon, and who, upon the day following, were unable, in cold blood, to clamber up the rock which they had assailed under the fire of the enemy. Such are the progressive Series in their work; every obstacle vanishes before the intense pride which dominates them; they would grow angry at the word impossible, and the most daunting kinds of labor, such as managing the soil, are to them the lightest of sports. If we could to-day behold an organized district, behold at early dawn thirty industrial groups issue in state from the palace of the Phalanx, and spread themselves over the fields and the workshops, waving their banners with cries of triumph and impatience, we should think we were gazing at bands of madmen intent upon putting the neighboring districts to fire and sword. Such will he the athletes who will take the place of our mercenary and languid workmen, and who will succeed in making ambrosia and nectar grow upon a soil which yields only briers and tares to the feeble hands of the civilized.
[Source: Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, ed., Socialist Thought: A Documentary History ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 129-151.]
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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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Thursday, April 05, 2012
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade: A Day When The Words Veterans and Peace Came Together –Came Together Very Nicely- The Struggle Continues –On To May Day 2012-Important May Day Committee Meeting On April 26th
Important information: General Strike Occupy Boston meets every Thursday from 5:15-6:45 PM at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston (Chinatown). April 26 th meetings of GSOB and the Boston May Day Committee. Check our Facebook event page- Occupy May 1st-Boston at http://www.facebook.com/#!/Occupy.May1.Boston. Join us!
Thanks to all those who helped organize, marched in, donated funds to, donated time to, helped spread the word about, or just gave us their good wishes in the just concluded 2nd Annual Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade through the streets of South Boston on Sunday March 18th. Many of us have been through lots of protests and other street actions in the struggle against war, against inequality, and against injustice but our well-received march through the working-class neighborhoods of Southie ranks very high, very high indeed, in the annals of those struggles.
Of course no one event, even a parade of the army of the righteous to spread the word to the kindred, will turn the swords into plowshares, right the incredible disparity between the rich and poor, or give indignant voice to the oppressed and voiceless so the struggle continues. And continues in other forms on other days. So we throw our very pleasant memories in the back of our minds and roll up our sleeves for the next struggle. And I just happen to have an event for you to focus on- May Day 2012
May Day 2012 is a day, as we have dubbed it, when we want to show a different face of the struggle- the struggle against social and political inequality to the bosses. A day when the 99% shows the 1% that we created the wealth and we are ready to take it. It’s ours. A day when we say no work, no school, no shopping, no banking, and no chores (nobody will have a problem with that last one). More later. For now though-All Out On May Day
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From the General Strike Working Group of Occupy Boston:
Occupy May Day- A Day Without the 99%
On May 1st Occupy Boston calls on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk
out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business for a
day without the 99%.
NO WORK.
Request the day off. Call out sick. Small businesses are encouraged to
close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets. If you
must work, don’t worry - there will be actions planned for all
hours of the day.
NO SCHOOL.
Walk out of class. Occupy the universities. Kick out the
administration. Participate in student strike actions or plan your
own. It’s your future. Own it.
BLOCK THE FLOW.
In the early hours on May 1st the 99% will converge on the Boston
Financial district for a day of direct action to demand an
end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The
Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of
Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and
corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
There will be a May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza at noon followed by
solidarity marches and other creative actions throughout the day.
EVERYONE TO THE STREETS!
We call upon all of the 99% to join in this day of action to demand an
end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. No work. No
school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we
have the power. Let’s show the world a day without the 99%.
Thanks to all those who helped organize, marched in, donated funds to, donated time to, helped spread the word about, or just gave us their good wishes in the just concluded 2nd Annual Saint Patrick’s Peace Parade through the streets of South Boston on Sunday March 18th. Many of us have been through lots of protests and other street actions in the struggle against war, against inequality, and against injustice but our well-received march through the working-class neighborhoods of Southie ranks very high, very high indeed, in the annals of those struggles.
Of course no one event, even a parade of the army of the righteous to spread the word to the kindred, will turn the swords into plowshares, right the incredible disparity between the rich and poor, or give indignant voice to the oppressed and voiceless so the struggle continues. And continues in other forms on other days. So we throw our very pleasant memories in the back of our minds and roll up our sleeves for the next struggle. And I just happen to have an event for you to focus on- May Day 2012
May Day 2012 is a day, as we have dubbed it, when we want to show a different face of the struggle- the struggle against social and political inequality to the bosses. A day when the 99% shows the 1% that we created the wealth and we are ready to take it. It’s ours. A day when we say no work, no school, no shopping, no banking, and no chores (nobody will have a problem with that last one). More later. For now though-All Out On May Day
*************
From the General Strike Working Group of Occupy Boston:
Occupy May Day- A Day Without the 99%
On May 1st Occupy Boston calls on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk
out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business for a
day without the 99%.
NO WORK.
Request the day off. Call out sick. Small businesses are encouraged to
close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets. If you
must work, don’t worry - there will be actions planned for all
hours of the day.
NO SCHOOL.
Walk out of class. Occupy the universities. Kick out the
administration. Participate in student strike actions or plan your
own. It’s your future. Own it.
BLOCK THE FLOW.
In the early hours on May 1st the 99% will converge on the Boston
Financial district for a day of direct action to demand an
end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The
Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of
Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and
corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
There will be a May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza at noon followed by
solidarity marches and other creative actions throughout the day.
EVERYONE TO THE STREETS!
We call upon all of the 99% to join in this day of action to demand an
end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. No work. No
school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we
have the power. Let’s show the world a day without the 99%.
The Struggle To Create The Modern World- Professor Laslett’s “The World We Have Lost: England Before The Industrial Age”-A Book Review
Click on the headline to link to Wikipedia entry for Professor Peter Laslett
Book Review
The World We Have Lost: England Before The Industrial Age, Professor Peter Laslett, Scribners, New York, Second Edition, 1972
No question that the precursor events of the 19th century industrial revolution in the 17th century transformation of England from an agrarian society, the first major country of that revolution, are of more than curious interest to modern readers (and radicals). While, as is to be expected, the focus of 17th century interest is the struggle between the monarchy and parliament in the middle decades of that century the ground underneath that struggle gets full exposition in this nice little academic book under review, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age, by the prominent English professor, Peter Laslett.
While there is plenty to disagree with about Professor Laslett’s personal political perspective on the mid-century “disturbance,” the English Revolution (so-called English Revolution by him which gives a timely clue to his sympathies), there is no denying that he provided (for the time, 1972) an exceptional amount of interesting material about marriage, life-spans, eating habits, physical size, sexual habits of some segments of 17th century English society. Using a mass of data (a 17th century-sized mass of data which is undoubtedly skimpy by modern standards) from church, town and court records he was able to bring some startling facts about our forebears (for those of us from that corner of Europe). For example, the smaller size than one would expect of the average peasant family (and larger size, including servants , of gentry families), the late age of marriage, the pushing of children out of the family household into their own (or into the burgeoning towns) as soon as possible and much other sociological data.
Professor Laslett, naturally, as a social historian working during the heyday of fierce interest in the English Revolution with such heavyweight names as Christopher Hill. R.W. Tawney and Huge Trevor-Roper leading the way has to weigh in on the various academic controversies of the day. For example, the rising or falling gentry as a factor in the revolution, the role of neutrals, clubmen, in local disputes during the period and other localist factors between competing gentry families). His work provides extensive footnotes and commentaries at the back amounting to about one hundred pages so be prepared for some very arcane material to work through. Not every book one reads needs to be in the same political universe as one’s own, and this one isn’t. What it does is give plenty of good information for further study and that is a virtue in itself.
Book Review
The World We Have Lost: England Before The Industrial Age, Professor Peter Laslett, Scribners, New York, Second Edition, 1972
No question that the precursor events of the 19th century industrial revolution in the 17th century transformation of England from an agrarian society, the first major country of that revolution, are of more than curious interest to modern readers (and radicals). While, as is to be expected, the focus of 17th century interest is the struggle between the monarchy and parliament in the middle decades of that century the ground underneath that struggle gets full exposition in this nice little academic book under review, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age, by the prominent English professor, Peter Laslett.
While there is plenty to disagree with about Professor Laslett’s personal political perspective on the mid-century “disturbance,” the English Revolution (so-called English Revolution by him which gives a timely clue to his sympathies), there is no denying that he provided (for the time, 1972) an exceptional amount of interesting material about marriage, life-spans, eating habits, physical size, sexual habits of some segments of 17th century English society. Using a mass of data (a 17th century-sized mass of data which is undoubtedly skimpy by modern standards) from church, town and court records he was able to bring some startling facts about our forebears (for those of us from that corner of Europe). For example, the smaller size than one would expect of the average peasant family (and larger size, including servants , of gentry families), the late age of marriage, the pushing of children out of the family household into their own (or into the burgeoning towns) as soon as possible and much other sociological data.
Professor Laslett, naturally, as a social historian working during the heyday of fierce interest in the English Revolution with such heavyweight names as Christopher Hill. R.W. Tawney and Huge Trevor-Roper leading the way has to weigh in on the various academic controversies of the day. For example, the rising or falling gentry as a factor in the revolution, the role of neutrals, clubmen, in local disputes during the period and other localist factors between competing gentry families). His work provides extensive footnotes and commentaries at the back amounting to about one hundred pages so be prepared for some very arcane material to work through. Not every book one reads needs to be in the same political universe as one’s own, and this one isn’t. What it does is give plenty of good information for further study and that is a virtue in itself.
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions -This Is Class War-We Say No More-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Working Class-Take The Offensive!-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website to find out about actions planned in the Greater Boston area.
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 back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike Call-Labor And Its Allies Should As Well
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
***********
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream”.
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
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.
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing ,where a strike is not possible, to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Agree or disagree with the Wobblies and their political concepts for class struggle but read their very early statement about the nature of class warfare. “Big Bill” Haywood and his crowd got it right then and have useful words to say now. Read on.
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.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
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 back on December 12, 2011and the subsequent defense of the longshoremen’s union at Longview, Washington and the beating back of the anti-union drives by the bosses there. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown on December 12th this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society.
Not everything has gone as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston on the afternoon of December 12th but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the struggle against the bosses, including plenty of illusions or misunderstandings about who our friends, and our enemies, are. Some of that will get sorted out in the future as we get a better grip of the importance of the labor movement in winning victories in our overall social struggles. May Day can be the start of that new offensive in order to gain our demands
******
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Labor Movement And Its Allies! Defend All Those Who Defend The Labor Movement! Defend All May Day Protesters Everywhere!
*******
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
*******
OB Endorses Call for General Strike Call-Labor And Its Allies Should As Well
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
***********
Why You, Your Union, Or Your Community Organization Needs To Join The May Day 2012 Actions In Boston-Stand Up!-Fight Back!
Wage cuts, long work hours, steep consumer price rises, unemployment, small or no pensions, little or no paid vacation time, plenty of poor and inadequate housing, homelessness, and wide-spread sicknesses as a result of a poor medical system or no health insurance. Sound familiar? Words, perhaps, taken from today’s global headlines? Well, yes. But these were also the similar conditions that faced our forebears in America back in the 1880s when the vicious ruling class was called, and rightly so, “the robber barons,” and threatened, as one of their kind stated in a fit of candor, “to hire one half of the working class to kill the other half,” so that they could maintain their luxury in peace. That too has not changed.
What did change then is that our forebears fought back, fought back long and hard, starting with the fight for the eight-hour day symbolized each year by a May Day celebration of working class power. We need to reassert that claim. This May Day let us revive that tradition as we individually act around our separate grievances and strike, strike like the furies, collectively against the robber barons of the 21st century.
No question over the past several years (really decades but it is just more public and in our face now) American working people has taken it on the chin, taken it on the chin in every possible way. Starting with massive job losses, heavy job losses in the service and manufacturing sectors (and jobs that are not coming back except as “race to the bottom” low wage, two-tier jobs dividing younger workers from older workers), paying for the seemingly never-ending bail–out of banks, other financial institutions and corporations “too big to fail,” home foreclosures and those “under water,” effective tax increases (since the rich refuse to pay, we pay), mountains of consumer debt for everything from modern necessities to just daily get-bys, and college student loan debt as a lifetime deadweight around the neck of the kids there is little to glow about in the harsh light of the “American Dream”.
Add to that the double (and triple) troubles facing immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and women and the grievances voiced in the Declaration of Independence seem like just so much whining. In short, it is not secret that working people have faced, are facing and, apparently, will continue to face an erosion of their material well-being for the foreseeable future something not seen by most people since the 1930s Great Depression, the time of our grandparents (or, ouch for some of us, great-grandparents).
That is this condition will continue unless we take some lessons from those same 1930s and struggle, struggle like demons, against the ruling class that seems to have all the card decks stacked against us. Struggle like they did in places like Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo, Flint, and Detroit. Those labor-centered struggles demonstrated the social power of working people to hit the “economic royalists” (the name coined for the ruling class of that day by their front man Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR) to shut the bosses down where it hurts- in their pocketbooks and property.
The bosses will let us rant all day, will gladly take (and throw away) all our petitions, will let us use their “free-speech” parks (up to a point as we have found out via the Occupy movement), and curse them to eternity as long as we don’t touch their production, “perks,” and profits. Moreover an inspired fight like the actions proposed for this May Day 2012 can help new generations of working people, organized, unorganized, unemployed, homeless, houseless, and just plain desperate, help themselves to get out from under. All Out On May Day 2012.
Show Power
We demand:
*Hands Off Our Public Worker Unions! Hands Off All Our Unions!
* Give the unemployed work! Billions for public works projects to fix America’s broken infrastructure (bridges, roads, sewer and water systems, etc.)!
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.
*End the endless wars- Troops And Mercenaries Out Of Afghanistan (and Iraq)!-U.S Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
* Full citizenship rights for all those who made it here no matter how they got here!
* A drastic increase in the minimum wage and big wage increases for all workers!
* A moratorium on home foreclosures! No evictions!
* A moratorium on student loan debt! Free, quality higher education for all! Create 100, 200, many publicly-supported Harvards!
*No increases in public transportation fares! No transportation worker lay-offs! Free quality public transportation!
To order to flex our collective bottom up power on May 1, 2012 we will be organizing a wide-ranging series of mass collective participatory actions:
*We will be organizing within our unions- or informal workplace organizations where there is no union - a one-day general strike.
*We will be organizing ,where a strike is not possible, to call in sick, or take a personal day, as part of a coordinated “sick-out”.
*We will be organizing students from kindergarten to graduate school and the off-hand think tank to walk-out of their schools (or not show up in the first place), set up campus picket lines, or to rally at a central location, probably Boston Common.
*We will be calling in our communities for a mass consumer boycott, and with local business support where possible, refuse to make purchases on that day.
Guest Commentary from the IWW (Industrial Workers Of The World, Wobblies) website http://www.iww.org/en/culture/official/preamble.shtml
Agree or disagree with the Wobblies and their political concepts for class struggle but read their very early statement about the nature of class warfare. “Big Bill” Haywood and his crowd got it right then and have useful words to say now. Read on.
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.
Watch this website and other social media sites for further specific details of events and actions.
All out on May Day 2012.
All Out April Fourth For Free Public Transportation (MBTA) In Boston-The People's Assembly At The State House
Click on the headline to link to April Fourth For Free Public Transportation (MBTA) In Boston-The People's Assembly At The State House
From The "Boston Occupier"-Photos Of The April First "Return To Dewey" Action
Click on the headline to link to the Boston Occupier website for Photos Of The April First "Return To Dewey" Action.
Via The "Occupy Boston" Website- Photos and Video Of The April First "Return To Dewey Square" Actions
Click on the headline to link via the Occupy Boston website to Photos and Video Of The April First "Return To Dewey Square" Actions
Via "The Boston Phoenix"-April First At Dewey Square-A Commentary
Click on the headline to link to a report via The Boston Phoenix-April First At Dewey Square-A Commentary
From The Boston May Day Coalition-All Out For May-Day International Workers Day 2012!
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Boston May Day 2012 at City Hall Plaza!
Join us on Tuesday May 1st to celebrate International Workers Day this year with a rally at 12 noon at City Hall Plaza!
This year, there will be a full schedule of events throughout the day - truly making this 'A Day Without the 99%!"
WE demand:
• Stop the attacks on workers!
• Stop the detention and deportation of migrant workers and their families!
• Immediate permanent residency for all undocumented workers!
• Say NO to racial profiling and police brutality!
• Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!
• Unity of all workers to defend our rights!
Say it loud, say it proud! We are workers, we have rights!
Sponsored by the Boston May Day Committee (Mass. Global Action, ANSWER Coalition, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, July 26 Coalition, Tecschange, Latinos for Social Change).
(Endorsers list in formation)
http://www.bostonmayday.org
Greater Boston Area May 1st Activities
Chelsea:
Chelsea City Hall
500 Broadway (& Hawthorne St.)
Gather at 12:noon march at 2:pm
For More information please contact
La Colaborativa (617) 889-6097
East Boston:
LoPresti Park
Summer & New Streets (Maverick Square )
Gather at 12:noon begin march at 2:30pm
For more information please contact
Dominic at City life/Vida Urbana
(617) 710-7176
Everett:
Glendale Park
Ferry & Elm Streets
Gathering and rally at 4:pm
For more information please contact
La Comunidad (617) 387-9996
Block Party
In the Boston Financial District:
(corner of Federal and Franklin Streets)
Gather at 7:AM
For more information please go to www.occupymay1st.org
Boston evening Funeral March:
Copley Square Park (steps of Trinity Church)
Gather at 7:pm begin march at 8:pm
For more information please go to
www.occupymay1st.org
All Out On May Day 2012: A Day Of International Working Class Solidarity Actions- A Call To Action In Boston
Click on the headline to link to the Boston May Day Coalition website.
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins I believe it is high time that the multi-layered American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organized radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within GSOB centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its sparse recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. That was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap, the endemic political voiceless-ness, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist, communist and trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Also tentatively planned for the early hours on May 1st working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters will converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a variety of speakers at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The following are general slogans for May 1st- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
All Out For May 1st-International Workers Day 2012!
Markin comment:
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other political issues such as supporting union organizing, building rank and file committees in the unions, and defending union rights that have long been associated with the labor movement internationally are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a day when the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy. Given May Day’s origins I believe it is high time that the multi-layered American working class begin to link up with its historic past and make this day its day.
Political activists here in Boston, some connected with Occupy Boston (OB) and others who are independent or organized radicals, decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan local May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 7, 2012.
********
OB Endorses Call for General Strike
January 8th, 2012 • mhacker •
Passed Resolutions No comments The following proposal was passed by the General Assembly on Jan 7, 2012:
Occupy Boston supports the call for an international General Strike on May 1, 2012, for immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. We recognize housing, education, health care, LGBT rights and racial equality as human rights; and thus call for the building of a broad coalition that will ensure and promote a democratic standard of living for all peoples.
********
Early discussions within GSOB centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and did close in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its sparse recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. Thus successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 will not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Discussions have since then reflected that understanding. The focus will be on actions and activities that respond to and reflect the Boston political situation as attempts are made to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working-class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration rallies in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national and international actions this year. One of the first necessary steps therefore was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. That was done as well in order to better coordinate this year’s more extensive over-all May Day actions.
Taking a cue from the developing May Day movement in this country, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of some of the more vocal Occupy working groups a consensus has formed around the theme of “May 1st- A Day Without The Working Class And Its Allies” in order to highlight the fact that in the capitalist system labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Highlighting the increasing economic gap, the endemic political voiceless-ness, and social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions the vast majority face under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated long ago by those who fought for the eight hour day in the late 1800s and later with the rise of the anarchist, socialist, communist and trade union movements.
On May Day working people and their allies are called to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. Working people are encouraged to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the working class and its allies in the streets.
For students at all levels the call is for a walk-out of classes. Further college students are urged to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward think tank should plan its own strike actions and, at some point in the day all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
Also tentatively planned for the early hours on May 1st working people, students, oppressed minorities and their supporters will converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a permit-approved May Day rally to be addressed by a variety of speakers at Boston City Hall Plaza. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions and for any others who wish to do, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The following are general slogans for May 1st- No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the rulers that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without working people and their allies really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. All Out For May Day 2012 in Boston!
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Revolutionary Policy and Falsification- Trotsky And World War II
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.
**************
3. Revolutionary Policy and Falsification
From Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970
Without any doubt – and we are not the only ones to stress it – one of the characteristics of the political period in which we have entered is the interest shown in Trotsky’s writings, and everything that concerns him. As a consequence of the search for a revolutionary Socialist programme and of the wish to understand the experience of Bolshevism, which inspires thousands of young people, we have seen many reissued or original works of Trotsky.
But at the same time it is a general phenomenon that introducers are not content to ‘introduce’ and to place such and such a work in the context of the development of the thought and actions of Trotsky, but to inflict a long exposition of their own views on the reader.
The selection of writings on the Second World War, collected and prefaced by Daniel Guérin, does not escape this rule. [1]
And – whatever the reservations which one would have about the way in which certain articles have been mutilated – the texts collected in this volume on the thirtieth anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination are a tribute to the clarity and relentless fight of an activist, and a magisterial example of the theoretical capabilities of a great Marxist.
The texts offered by Guérin extend from an article in August 1937 On the Threshold of a New World War to unfinished note left by Trotsky in his desk after the GPU agent Mercader had smashed his skull.
The Method of D Guérin
Daniel Guérin could only publish a certain number of documents within the limits of this book, and this was a difficult choice. But he is up to a riskier operation: in a number of cases he is happy to give us extracts from a text. Well now, Guérin uses a method which is the opposite of Trotsky’s: he explains in his Preface that he deliberately left out passages which had no connection with the question. But to be precise, for Trotsky the war was not a phenomenon in itself but “the continuation of politics by other means”, and as a result his explanation does not take on its full significance except in the context of elements apparently irrelevant to the “question discussed”. Worse still, certain cuts seem opportunistically to favour Guérin’s theories in his Preface, not an understanding of the thought of Trotsky. We will return to this point.
What Guérin stresses most is the fact that Trotsky’s articles on the war consist of “a series of extraordinary prophecies”, for example the fact that in 1937, before Munich, he had fixed very precisely a delay of two years before the outbreak of war, and had analysed the basic trends in the future conflict from the point of view of international alliances and the general line of military strategy.
Though that is correct, the insistence on presenting Trotsky as an inspired and solitary genius masks the essential point. Indeed, Trotsky did have genius, and he joined to his mastery of Marxism a profound knowledge of international phenomena and the social factors which were to be found behind military or diplomatic combinations. In other words, his astonishing understanding of the dynamics of international developments found its roots, not in his gifts of ‘superlucidity’ but in his unequalled capacity – an expression of his prodigious intellectual gifts indeed – to apply the Marxist method. The forecasts that he fires off start from the decisive facts of the class struggle. In 1937 it was not enough to say that the working class, demoralised by the successive defeats caused by its leaderships, was not capable of stopping the race to war, and with a sure hand to trace on the blackboard the world’s evolution and to calculate in some way the date of the conflict, even if that is the starting point.
In other words, contrary to Guérin’s assertions, it is because Trotsky was not an “attentive and passionate observer” of a “succession of changing scenes” but a revolutionary leader who struggled so that he could attain such precision and rigour in his analyses. Of all the conclusions which Trotsky drew from the inevitability and proximity of the Second World War, the most important is the one that Guérin forgets: the proclamation of the Fourth International, the historic justification for whose foundation is found in the Transitional Programme, which theoretically generalises the experience of class struggle in our epoch in which the concrete conditions of theoretical and political disaster in the working class movement obliged to carry out the essential task of maintaining the organisational cadre and preserving the historical continuation of the movement with a proletarian internationalism that is still alive.
Guérin does not speak about that, but the texts that he himself has chosen justify without contradiction the method which led to the proclamation of the Fourth International in 1938, as they do the role played in the war by that International.
The masterly text – The Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, dated 26 May 1940 – happily reproduced as a whole, alone would justify every militant worker getting this book without delay. Guérin writes that it “saved the honour of the world working class”. But he does not seem to understand that this document is only conceivable on the basis of the Transitional Programme and that what has given it this meaning is the activity of the sections of the Fourth International saving, not “the honour of the world working class”, but internationalism as a strategy, the struggle for the Socialist revolution, even if these sections which formed the “vanguard of the vanguard”, though not exempt from weakness, yet resisted the ordeal, “these precious cadres”, who as Trotsky had foreseen, “will not be swerved from their road by any wave of chauvinism, nor intimidated by Stalinist Mausers and knives.” [2]
Was Trotsky Divided Against Himself?
But there is something worse. Guérin, not content with omitting what is essential in Trotsky’s activities at the start of the second imperialist conflict, goes on to pure and simple falsifications. Thus we learn that “Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant”.
Divided against himself Trotsky then combines an internationalist Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde, who leans towards social patriotism, so that, according to Guérin:
This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist. It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and of encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations.”
We know how Trotsky posed the question of the defence of the conquests of October. We can find an example elsewhere on page 120 in the book introduced by Guérin:
To renounce defeatism in relation to that imperialist camp to which the USSR adheres today, or might adhere tomorrow, is to push the workers of the enemy camp to the side of their government: it means to renounce defeatism in general. The renunciation of defeatism under the conditions of imperialist war, which is tantamount to the rejection of the Socialist revolution – rejection of the revolution in the name of the ‘defence of the USSR’ – would sentence the USSR to final decomposition and doom. [3]
Guérin then adds:
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intense military preparation.
In other words, Trotsky gives a progressive rôle to American imperialism, and invites workers in the United States to put themselves behind it! By assembling extracts of the discussions by Trotsky with the leaders of the SWP (the American section of the Fourth International), Guérin seeks a shadowy existence to his thesis. He alternately denounces petit-bourgeois pacifism with passages of analyses of the world situation (it is inevitable that the United States would enter the war) and extracts the pieces of the discussion which bear on the opportunity of voting for the Stalinist candidate at the election.
Marxism and the War
The falsehood is quite apparent. Taken together the discussions on the international situation have the object of showing that the Stalinists would ‘turn’, that is to say, abandon their conjectural position of defeatism vis-a-vis their own imperialism as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The discussion on the presidential electoral campaign combines two aspects: firstly, the necessity of opposing Roosevelt (whose programme was the preparation of an imperialist war) with a working class candidate; and, secondly, in the absence of a working class candidate from the trade unions or the SWP, Trotsky advised a call to vote for the candidate of the American Communist Party, a worker candidate who opposed (even if from a Stalinist position) the war preparations of its imperialism. The question is not to support the Stalinists because they were less ‘militarist’ than the others, or that they annoyed American imperialism on its road to war, but to use the electoral campaign to fight it, and among its cadre to work to prepare the workers duped by the temporary defeatism of the American CP and to reject its inevitable turn to social-patriotism.
It is indeed correct to say that Trotsky lambasted the pacifists for their sermons, for if they failed to disarm imperialism they did disarm the workers politically. “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, and this formulation also has value for the workers’ movement. The inevitable war will be the terrain on which the independence and the interests of the working class must be defended. Trotsky suggests some transitional demands to develop the proletariat’s struggle against its own imperialism so that it would not be handed over to bourgeois militarists. It was the later development of this policy which the leaders of American Trotskyism carried on from prison.
Whichever way we look at it, Guérin’s method is far from being that of a historian. We often see notices that it is forbidden to throw filth over a wall. Over some works one should not throw certain introductions. But we must not be discouraged. We must carry on. We must read and study the writings on the Second World War, for they constitute an indispensable weapon to maintain their line in the continuing struggle about which Trotsky in the Manifesto of the Emergency Conference went on:
The capitalist world has no way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars and new uprisings. A young revolutionary party must base itself on this perspective. History will provide it with enough opportunities and possibilities to test itself, to accumulate experience, and to mature. The swifter the ranks of the vanguard are fused, the more the epoch of bloody convulsions will be cut short and the less destruction will our planet suffer. But the great historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the head of the proletariat. The question of tempos and time intervals is of enormous importance; but it alters neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of our policy. The conclusion is a simple one: it is necessary to carry out the work of educating and organising the proletarian vanguard with tenfold energy. Precisely in this lies the task of the Fourth International. [4]
Notes
1. Leon Trotsky, Sur la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, Textes rassemblés et prefacés par Daniel Guérin, Editions La Taupe.
2. L.D. Trotsky, A Fresh Lesson: After the Imperialist Peace at Munich, 10 October 1938, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, p.78.
3. L.D. Trotsky, The USSR in War, 25 September 1939, In Defence of Marxism, New Park, London 1966, p.20.
4. L.D. Trotsky, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940, Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933-40, New York 1973, p.346.
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.
**************
3. Revolutionary Policy and Falsification
From Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970
Without any doubt – and we are not the only ones to stress it – one of the characteristics of the political period in which we have entered is the interest shown in Trotsky’s writings, and everything that concerns him. As a consequence of the search for a revolutionary Socialist programme and of the wish to understand the experience of Bolshevism, which inspires thousands of young people, we have seen many reissued or original works of Trotsky.
But at the same time it is a general phenomenon that introducers are not content to ‘introduce’ and to place such and such a work in the context of the development of the thought and actions of Trotsky, but to inflict a long exposition of their own views on the reader.
The selection of writings on the Second World War, collected and prefaced by Daniel Guérin, does not escape this rule. [1]
And – whatever the reservations which one would have about the way in which certain articles have been mutilated – the texts collected in this volume on the thirtieth anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination are a tribute to the clarity and relentless fight of an activist, and a magisterial example of the theoretical capabilities of a great Marxist.
The texts offered by Guérin extend from an article in August 1937 On the Threshold of a New World War to unfinished note left by Trotsky in his desk after the GPU agent Mercader had smashed his skull.
The Method of D Guérin
Daniel Guérin could only publish a certain number of documents within the limits of this book, and this was a difficult choice. But he is up to a riskier operation: in a number of cases he is happy to give us extracts from a text. Well now, Guérin uses a method which is the opposite of Trotsky’s: he explains in his Preface that he deliberately left out passages which had no connection with the question. But to be precise, for Trotsky the war was not a phenomenon in itself but “the continuation of politics by other means”, and as a result his explanation does not take on its full significance except in the context of elements apparently irrelevant to the “question discussed”. Worse still, certain cuts seem opportunistically to favour Guérin’s theories in his Preface, not an understanding of the thought of Trotsky. We will return to this point.
What Guérin stresses most is the fact that Trotsky’s articles on the war consist of “a series of extraordinary prophecies”, for example the fact that in 1937, before Munich, he had fixed very precisely a delay of two years before the outbreak of war, and had analysed the basic trends in the future conflict from the point of view of international alliances and the general line of military strategy.
Though that is correct, the insistence on presenting Trotsky as an inspired and solitary genius masks the essential point. Indeed, Trotsky did have genius, and he joined to his mastery of Marxism a profound knowledge of international phenomena and the social factors which were to be found behind military or diplomatic combinations. In other words, his astonishing understanding of the dynamics of international developments found its roots, not in his gifts of ‘superlucidity’ but in his unequalled capacity – an expression of his prodigious intellectual gifts indeed – to apply the Marxist method. The forecasts that he fires off start from the decisive facts of the class struggle. In 1937 it was not enough to say that the working class, demoralised by the successive defeats caused by its leaderships, was not capable of stopping the race to war, and with a sure hand to trace on the blackboard the world’s evolution and to calculate in some way the date of the conflict, even if that is the starting point.
In other words, contrary to Guérin’s assertions, it is because Trotsky was not an “attentive and passionate observer” of a “succession of changing scenes” but a revolutionary leader who struggled so that he could attain such precision and rigour in his analyses. Of all the conclusions which Trotsky drew from the inevitability and proximity of the Second World War, the most important is the one that Guérin forgets: the proclamation of the Fourth International, the historic justification for whose foundation is found in the Transitional Programme, which theoretically generalises the experience of class struggle in our epoch in which the concrete conditions of theoretical and political disaster in the working class movement obliged to carry out the essential task of maintaining the organisational cadre and preserving the historical continuation of the movement with a proletarian internationalism that is still alive.
Guérin does not speak about that, but the texts that he himself has chosen justify without contradiction the method which led to the proclamation of the Fourth International in 1938, as they do the role played in the war by that International.
The masterly text – The Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, dated 26 May 1940 – happily reproduced as a whole, alone would justify every militant worker getting this book without delay. Guérin writes that it “saved the honour of the world working class”. But he does not seem to understand that this document is only conceivable on the basis of the Transitional Programme and that what has given it this meaning is the activity of the sections of the Fourth International saving, not “the honour of the world working class”, but internationalism as a strategy, the struggle for the Socialist revolution, even if these sections which formed the “vanguard of the vanguard”, though not exempt from weakness, yet resisted the ordeal, “these precious cadres”, who as Trotsky had foreseen, “will not be swerved from their road by any wave of chauvinism, nor intimidated by Stalinist Mausers and knives.” [2]
Was Trotsky Divided Against Himself?
But there is something worse. Guérin, not content with omitting what is essential in Trotsky’s activities at the start of the second imperialist conflict, goes on to pure and simple falsifications. Thus we learn that “Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant”.
Divided against himself Trotsky then combines an internationalist Dr Jekyll and a Mr Hyde, who leans towards social patriotism, so that, according to Guérin:
This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist. It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and of encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations.”
We know how Trotsky posed the question of the defence of the conquests of October. We can find an example elsewhere on page 120 in the book introduced by Guérin:
To renounce defeatism in relation to that imperialist camp to which the USSR adheres today, or might adhere tomorrow, is to push the workers of the enemy camp to the side of their government: it means to renounce defeatism in general. The renunciation of defeatism under the conditions of imperialist war, which is tantamount to the rejection of the Socialist revolution – rejection of the revolution in the name of the ‘defence of the USSR’ – would sentence the USSR to final decomposition and doom. [3]
Guérin then adds:
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intense military preparation.
In other words, Trotsky gives a progressive rôle to American imperialism, and invites workers in the United States to put themselves behind it! By assembling extracts of the discussions by Trotsky with the leaders of the SWP (the American section of the Fourth International), Guérin seeks a shadowy existence to his thesis. He alternately denounces petit-bourgeois pacifism with passages of analyses of the world situation (it is inevitable that the United States would enter the war) and extracts the pieces of the discussion which bear on the opportunity of voting for the Stalinist candidate at the election.
Marxism and the War
The falsehood is quite apparent. Taken together the discussions on the international situation have the object of showing that the Stalinists would ‘turn’, that is to say, abandon their conjectural position of defeatism vis-a-vis their own imperialism as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The discussion on the presidential electoral campaign combines two aspects: firstly, the necessity of opposing Roosevelt (whose programme was the preparation of an imperialist war) with a working class candidate; and, secondly, in the absence of a working class candidate from the trade unions or the SWP, Trotsky advised a call to vote for the candidate of the American Communist Party, a worker candidate who opposed (even if from a Stalinist position) the war preparations of its imperialism. The question is not to support the Stalinists because they were less ‘militarist’ than the others, or that they annoyed American imperialism on its road to war, but to use the electoral campaign to fight it, and among its cadre to work to prepare the workers duped by the temporary defeatism of the American CP and to reject its inevitable turn to social-patriotism.
It is indeed correct to say that Trotsky lambasted the pacifists for their sermons, for if they failed to disarm imperialism they did disarm the workers politically. “War is the continuation of politics by other means”, and this formulation also has value for the workers’ movement. The inevitable war will be the terrain on which the independence and the interests of the working class must be defended. Trotsky suggests some transitional demands to develop the proletariat’s struggle against its own imperialism so that it would not be handed over to bourgeois militarists. It was the later development of this policy which the leaders of American Trotskyism carried on from prison.
Whichever way we look at it, Guérin’s method is far from being that of a historian. We often see notices that it is forbidden to throw filth over a wall. Over some works one should not throw certain introductions. But we must not be discouraged. We must carry on. We must read and study the writings on the Second World War, for they constitute an indispensable weapon to maintain their line in the continuing struggle about which Trotsky in the Manifesto of the Emergency Conference went on:
The capitalist world has no way out, unless a prolonged death agony is so considered. It is necessary to prepare for long years, if not decades, of war, uprisings, brief interludes of truce, new wars and new uprisings. A young revolutionary party must base itself on this perspective. History will provide it with enough opportunities and possibilities to test itself, to accumulate experience, and to mature. The swifter the ranks of the vanguard are fused, the more the epoch of bloody convulsions will be cut short and the less destruction will our planet suffer. But the great historical problem will not be solved in any case until a revolutionary party stands at the head of the proletariat. The question of tempos and time intervals is of enormous importance; but it alters neither the general historical perspective nor the direction of our policy. The conclusion is a simple one: it is necessary to carry out the work of educating and organising the proletarian vanguard with tenfold energy. Precisely in this lies the task of the Fourth International. [4]
Notes
1. Leon Trotsky, Sur la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, Textes rassemblés et prefacés par Daniel Guérin, Editions La Taupe.
2. L.D. Trotsky, A Fresh Lesson: After the Imperialist Peace at Munich, 10 October 1938, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, p.78.
3. L.D. Trotsky, The USSR in War, 25 September 1939, In Defence of Marxism, New Park, London 1966, p.20.
4. L.D. Trotsky, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940, Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933-40, New York 1973, p.346.
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning On Wednesday April 25th - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information in his case and the April 24th and 25th support rallies on his behalf.
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Bradley Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Bradley Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Brother Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Bradley Manning Now!
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Out In The Train Smoke And Dreams 2000s Night – Denzel Washington’ “Unstoppable”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film Unstoppable.
DVD Review
Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington, Telecinco Cinema.2010
Usually when I think about trains I think of my childhood (and on) love affair with that then vanishing way of getting around. Simple enough when the local commuter train, then soon to be abandoned in the 1950s golden age of the automobile, the highway and the Howrad Johnson’s (and subsequently McDonald’s) pit stop night, came tooting its lonesome whistle in the high North Adamsville night. Or that same fascination held up later when I took my first baby steps on the endless search for the great blue-pink American West night and wound up a few time travelling in some desolate empty box car pushing the Southern Pacific high desert night. And no question, even now I have very strong memories of what Tom Waits called in one of his mule variation day dreams- “living on train smoke and dreams.”
But enough of nostalgia, earned or not. For the film under review, Unstoppable, is a very different cinematic look at the modern day train experience on the American tracks. Trains and disaster, or the threat of disaster, are no strangers today, and have not been since the beginning of the railroads. The runaway train that stars in this film, the old 777 running highly dangerous cargo through rural Pennsylvania in this case, is just a continuation of the danger associated with tangling with the train smoke (from whatever fossil fuel used). And this saga is based on a real incident too boot.
Through carelessness (and corporate speed-up policies) a railroad man makes a series of wrong decisions about how to fix a problem on his long-line freight train. And the thing takes off-ummanned. Naturally all hell breaks loose as everyone from the yard master to corporate headquarters tries to figure out how to stop the thing short of shooting it (although that thought I am sure crossed somebody’s mind). No problem though because old railroad man Denzel Washington, ready to be tossed on the washed-out heap and training his “new boy replacement,” just happens to be on that same track coming the other way. Now once Denzel Washington is on the case, any cinematic case, from cop to Malcolm X to washed-out train engineer, one can rest easy. Sure there will be a couple of close calls, quite a few actually, in the hour and one half of the film but at the end of the day no highly explosive cargo is going to harm urban areas. No way. Now we can all go back to thinking about train smoke and dreams.
DVD Review
Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington, Telecinco Cinema.2010
Usually when I think about trains I think of my childhood (and on) love affair with that then vanishing way of getting around. Simple enough when the local commuter train, then soon to be abandoned in the 1950s golden age of the automobile, the highway and the Howrad Johnson’s (and subsequently McDonald’s) pit stop night, came tooting its lonesome whistle in the high North Adamsville night. Or that same fascination held up later when I took my first baby steps on the endless search for the great blue-pink American West night and wound up a few time travelling in some desolate empty box car pushing the Southern Pacific high desert night. And no question, even now I have very strong memories of what Tom Waits called in one of his mule variation day dreams- “living on train smoke and dreams.”
But enough of nostalgia, earned or not. For the film under review, Unstoppable, is a very different cinematic look at the modern day train experience on the American tracks. Trains and disaster, or the threat of disaster, are no strangers today, and have not been since the beginning of the railroads. The runaway train that stars in this film, the old 777 running highly dangerous cargo through rural Pennsylvania in this case, is just a continuation of the danger associated with tangling with the train smoke (from whatever fossil fuel used). And this saga is based on a real incident too boot.
Through carelessness (and corporate speed-up policies) a railroad man makes a series of wrong decisions about how to fix a problem on his long-line freight train. And the thing takes off-ummanned. Naturally all hell breaks loose as everyone from the yard master to corporate headquarters tries to figure out how to stop the thing short of shooting it (although that thought I am sure crossed somebody’s mind). No problem though because old railroad man Denzel Washington, ready to be tossed on the washed-out heap and training his “new boy replacement,” just happens to be on that same track coming the other way. Now once Denzel Washington is on the case, any cinematic case, from cop to Malcolm X to washed-out train engineer, one can rest easy. Sure there will be a couple of close calls, quite a few actually, in the hour and one half of the film but at the end of the day no highly explosive cargo is going to harm urban areas. No way. Now we can all go back to thinking about train smoke and dreams.
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Leon Trotsky on the Second World War-A Review
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.
***************
2. Leon Trotsky on the Second World War
From La Gauche (socialiste et révolutionnaire) 28 March 1970
Collected and introduced by Daniel Guérin, this choice of articles by Leon Trotsky illustrates in a masterly way the power of analysis and lucidity of a man who, in spite of the fact that he was practically cut off from the world, observed the frightful reality of where the world was going for three long years. These writings, which run from August 1937 until the assassination of the leader of the Fourth International in August 1940, astonish us, not only because of the depth and clarity of their argument – the perfect mastery of the dialectical method in politics – but above all they astound the reader with the incomparable gift which Trotsky had of ‘predicting’ developments for a number of years, which his contemporaries, starting with the leading politicians, did not in any way suspect.
Recalling briefly the material in these articles, which for a long time were confidential or only read by the censor, Guérin sets out the favourable balance-sheet of the analyses of this man isolated in Mexico:
•From the time of Munich Trotsky understood that war was inevitable, and in August 1937 he fixed the date in two years’ time;
•Trotsky, in denouncing the bankruptcy of the Popular Fronts so dear to the Stalinists, had seen very well that while mobilising the masses against Hitler in the name of ‘democracy’, Stalin was carefully arranging a deal with the German dictator ... inasmuch as he feared war as a mortal danger to the Soviet bureaucracy;
•On 3 August 1939 Stalin’s double game led to the reversal of his foreign policy and gave the green light to the Nazi dictator;
•The fact that Stalin had decapitated the Soviet army, party and the Bolshevik state apparatus in the purges of 1936-38, for a long time prevented him from facing up to the threat from Hitler, of which Hitler was aware when pushing Stalin into the laughable adventure of the Finnish war, a fiasco which destroyed the prestige of the Red Army ... while conceding compensation to Stalin (such as the partition of Poland and the invasion of the Baltic states);
•Trotsky foresaw that at first the Germans would gain striking successes in the West (he always pointed out that Britain would maintain its independence) before turning East and attacking the USSR.
•It was not in order to provoke a world war that Stalin allied himself with Hitler, but because he, being a short-term tactician, thought that he himself could escape war and revolution;
•In spite of Stalinism Trotsky never doubted that the Socialist system would survive the war. This was the position that Mao Zedong took in the course of his quarrel and clash with the Soviet bureaucracy;
•Any attack on the USSR would temporarily strengthen the power of the bureaucracy, and Trotsky did not hide this, but thought that this was preferable to a defeat of the USSR, which would wipe out the gains of October;
•From 11 September 1939 he announced that, in the case of a prolonged war (and that is what would happen if the United States joined the dance) Hitler would march to the abyss with the `infallibility of a sleep-walker; [1]
•In May 1940 he compared the occupied countries of Europe with powder barrels where revolutionary defeatism would develop. At Teheran and Yalta we know that Stalin focused on the partition of the world, which would demobilise the masses educated in the Western European Resistance;
•Trotsky never ceased to assert that the real war was between Germany and the USA for a new partition of the world. According to him, the USA could not long remain neutral, because it was a question of their supremacy, and in their intervention he saw an effective way of persuading Stalin to lose his fear of Hitler;
•On 4 December 1939 Trotsky foresaw that Japan, rather than attack the USSR, would throw itself into the conquest of East Asia and dispute the supremacy of the Pacific with the USA; but he added that, even if Japan succeeded in conquering large territories at the start, it was incapable of supporting a long war;
•At the end of the Second World War, wrote Trotsky, supremacy would fall to the United States, not without noting that war would hasten movements for national liberation in the colonies of the imperialist European countries;
•Connecting the facts of a new imperialist explosion with the behaviour of the USA, Trotsky dared to conceive of a Third World War “which this time would pitch entire continents against one another and which would be the tomb of civilisation”;
•Finally, Trotsky stayed faithful to proletarian internationalism. In Guérin’s words: “He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the Western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.”
Such a balance sheet leaves us speechless. In three short years Trotsky, an infallible observer, had foreseen not only the course of the war, but the situation which would result from it, and in which we still live today ... These two points culminated in the Manifesto of May 1940 which Trotsky drafted in his own hand, and which constitutes the cornerstone of the book (pp.187-245). Haunted by the position of Lenin during the First World War, Trotsky reckoned up the situation: “State power and domination of the economy can be torn from the hands of these rapacious imperialist cliques only by the revolutionary working class. That is the meaning of Lenin’s warning that ‘without a series of successful revolutions’ a new imperialist war would inevitable follow.” [2] Simultaneously fighting the innocent choir boys of pacifism, the cynical partisans of isolationism and the masses deceived by the charlatan Stalinists, at that decisive moment Trotsky embodied the unhappy consciousness of the world proletariat. Guérin is mistaken when he states that Trotsky was torn between his old role as a Soviet leader and the fact that he led the Fourth International. When Trotsky writes: “The USSR’s defeat in the world war would signify not merely the overthrow of the totalitarian bureaucracy but the liquidation of the new forms of property, the collapse of the first experiment in planned economy, and the transformation of the entire country into a colony; that is the handing over to imperialism of colossal natural resources which would give it a respite until the Third World War” [3], it is clear that Trotsky is behaving as both the last representative of Bolshevik power and the founder and theoretician of the Fourth International.
These articles frequently emphasise that it must not be left to Hitler to overthrow Stalin: that task must be done by the Soviet workers and peasants. He recalls also that “taken on an historic scale the antagonism between world imperialism and the Soviet Union is infinitely deeper than the antagonisms that set the individual capitalist countries in opposition to one another”. [4] Twelve years before Stalin announced his opposing thesis on inter-capitalist economic rivalry Trotsky had already destroyed it, as he had already deflated the petit-bourgeois windbags for whom support for imperialism against Stalinism would aid the former to defeat the bureaucratic caste: in fact this had and continues to have the opposite effect (in particular when that great friend of Khrushchev’s, Averell Harriman, signed the non-proliferation treaty on nuclear arms). [5] On this matter Trotsky’s strategy not only appreciated the role of the colonial peoples, but emphasised the importance of the Chinese Revolution “on which the proletariat will have to trace a strong line of orientation”. [6] Finally, let us remember this prophesy which takes on its full meaning today: “The trade unions can escape burial beneath the ruins of war only if they take the road of Socialist revolution.” [7] As Trotsky predicted, the disasters of war have integrated the trade unions into capitalism during the greatest expansion of imperialism ever seen.
André Frankin
Notes
1. “The fall of Stalin will not, however, save Hitler, who with the infallibility of a sleepwalker is being drawn towards the greatest catastrophe in history.” The Riddle of the USSR, 21 June 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, p.360.
2. L. Trotsky, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940, in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933-40, New York 1973, p.313.
3. Op. cit., pp.325-6.
4. Op. cit., p.327.
5. Presumably these are references to Stalin’s statement of 1 February 1952 (“Consequently, the struggle of the capitalist countries for markets and their desire to crush their competitors proved in practice to be stronger than the contradictions between the capitalist camp and the Socialist camp.” (Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Works, Volume 16, London 1986, p.331)); and to the later trajectory of Max Shachtman.
6. Nothing exactly parallels this at the position in the text cited. But then we have: “The Chinese people will be able to reach independence only under the leadership of the youthful and self-sacrificing proletariat, in whom the indispensable self-confidence will be rekindled by the rebirth of the world revolution. They will indicate a firm line of march.” Op. cit., pp.331-2. If this is really the original, the French version hardly amounts to a paraphrase.
7. Op. cit., p.342.
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.
***************
2. Leon Trotsky on the Second World War
From La Gauche (socialiste et révolutionnaire) 28 March 1970
Collected and introduced by Daniel Guérin, this choice of articles by Leon Trotsky illustrates in a masterly way the power of analysis and lucidity of a man who, in spite of the fact that he was practically cut off from the world, observed the frightful reality of where the world was going for three long years. These writings, which run from August 1937 until the assassination of the leader of the Fourth International in August 1940, astonish us, not only because of the depth and clarity of their argument – the perfect mastery of the dialectical method in politics – but above all they astound the reader with the incomparable gift which Trotsky had of ‘predicting’ developments for a number of years, which his contemporaries, starting with the leading politicians, did not in any way suspect.
Recalling briefly the material in these articles, which for a long time were confidential or only read by the censor, Guérin sets out the favourable balance-sheet of the analyses of this man isolated in Mexico:
•From the time of Munich Trotsky understood that war was inevitable, and in August 1937 he fixed the date in two years’ time;
•Trotsky, in denouncing the bankruptcy of the Popular Fronts so dear to the Stalinists, had seen very well that while mobilising the masses against Hitler in the name of ‘democracy’, Stalin was carefully arranging a deal with the German dictator ... inasmuch as he feared war as a mortal danger to the Soviet bureaucracy;
•On 3 August 1939 Stalin’s double game led to the reversal of his foreign policy and gave the green light to the Nazi dictator;
•The fact that Stalin had decapitated the Soviet army, party and the Bolshevik state apparatus in the purges of 1936-38, for a long time prevented him from facing up to the threat from Hitler, of which Hitler was aware when pushing Stalin into the laughable adventure of the Finnish war, a fiasco which destroyed the prestige of the Red Army ... while conceding compensation to Stalin (such as the partition of Poland and the invasion of the Baltic states);
•Trotsky foresaw that at first the Germans would gain striking successes in the West (he always pointed out that Britain would maintain its independence) before turning East and attacking the USSR.
•It was not in order to provoke a world war that Stalin allied himself with Hitler, but because he, being a short-term tactician, thought that he himself could escape war and revolution;
•In spite of Stalinism Trotsky never doubted that the Socialist system would survive the war. This was the position that Mao Zedong took in the course of his quarrel and clash with the Soviet bureaucracy;
•Any attack on the USSR would temporarily strengthen the power of the bureaucracy, and Trotsky did not hide this, but thought that this was preferable to a defeat of the USSR, which would wipe out the gains of October;
•From 11 September 1939 he announced that, in the case of a prolonged war (and that is what would happen if the United States joined the dance) Hitler would march to the abyss with the `infallibility of a sleep-walker; [1]
•In May 1940 he compared the occupied countries of Europe with powder barrels where revolutionary defeatism would develop. At Teheran and Yalta we know that Stalin focused on the partition of the world, which would demobilise the masses educated in the Western European Resistance;
•Trotsky never ceased to assert that the real war was between Germany and the USA for a new partition of the world. According to him, the USA could not long remain neutral, because it was a question of their supremacy, and in their intervention he saw an effective way of persuading Stalin to lose his fear of Hitler;
•On 4 December 1939 Trotsky foresaw that Japan, rather than attack the USSR, would throw itself into the conquest of East Asia and dispute the supremacy of the Pacific with the USA; but he added that, even if Japan succeeded in conquering large territories at the start, it was incapable of supporting a long war;
•At the end of the Second World War, wrote Trotsky, supremacy would fall to the United States, not without noting that war would hasten movements for national liberation in the colonies of the imperialist European countries;
•Connecting the facts of a new imperialist explosion with the behaviour of the USA, Trotsky dared to conceive of a Third World War “which this time would pitch entire continents against one another and which would be the tomb of civilisation”;
•Finally, Trotsky stayed faithful to proletarian internationalism. In Guérin’s words: “He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the Western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.”
Such a balance sheet leaves us speechless. In three short years Trotsky, an infallible observer, had foreseen not only the course of the war, but the situation which would result from it, and in which we still live today ... These two points culminated in the Manifesto of May 1940 which Trotsky drafted in his own hand, and which constitutes the cornerstone of the book (pp.187-245). Haunted by the position of Lenin during the First World War, Trotsky reckoned up the situation: “State power and domination of the economy can be torn from the hands of these rapacious imperialist cliques only by the revolutionary working class. That is the meaning of Lenin’s warning that ‘without a series of successful revolutions’ a new imperialist war would inevitable follow.” [2] Simultaneously fighting the innocent choir boys of pacifism, the cynical partisans of isolationism and the masses deceived by the charlatan Stalinists, at that decisive moment Trotsky embodied the unhappy consciousness of the world proletariat. Guérin is mistaken when he states that Trotsky was torn between his old role as a Soviet leader and the fact that he led the Fourth International. When Trotsky writes: “The USSR’s defeat in the world war would signify not merely the overthrow of the totalitarian bureaucracy but the liquidation of the new forms of property, the collapse of the first experiment in planned economy, and the transformation of the entire country into a colony; that is the handing over to imperialism of colossal natural resources which would give it a respite until the Third World War” [3], it is clear that Trotsky is behaving as both the last representative of Bolshevik power and the founder and theoretician of the Fourth International.
These articles frequently emphasise that it must not be left to Hitler to overthrow Stalin: that task must be done by the Soviet workers and peasants. He recalls also that “taken on an historic scale the antagonism between world imperialism and the Soviet Union is infinitely deeper than the antagonisms that set the individual capitalist countries in opposition to one another”. [4] Twelve years before Stalin announced his opposing thesis on inter-capitalist economic rivalry Trotsky had already destroyed it, as he had already deflated the petit-bourgeois windbags for whom support for imperialism against Stalinism would aid the former to defeat the bureaucratic caste: in fact this had and continues to have the opposite effect (in particular when that great friend of Khrushchev’s, Averell Harriman, signed the non-proliferation treaty on nuclear arms). [5] On this matter Trotsky’s strategy not only appreciated the role of the colonial peoples, but emphasised the importance of the Chinese Revolution “on which the proletariat will have to trace a strong line of orientation”. [6] Finally, let us remember this prophesy which takes on its full meaning today: “The trade unions can escape burial beneath the ruins of war only if they take the road of Socialist revolution.” [7] As Trotsky predicted, the disasters of war have integrated the trade unions into capitalism during the greatest expansion of imperialism ever seen.
André Frankin
Notes
1. “The fall of Stalin will not, however, save Hitler, who with the infallibility of a sleepwalker is being drawn towards the greatest catastrophe in history.” The Riddle of the USSR, 21 June 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, New York 1974, p.360.
2. L. Trotsky, Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution, Manifesto of the Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, May 1940, in Documents of the Fourth International: The Formative Years 1933-40, New York 1973, p.313.
3. Op. cit., pp.325-6.
4. Op. cit., p.327.
5. Presumably these are references to Stalin’s statement of 1 February 1952 (“Consequently, the struggle of the capitalist countries for markets and their desire to crush their competitors proved in practice to be stronger than the contradictions between the capitalist camp and the Socialist camp.” (Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Works, Volume 16, London 1986, p.331)); and to the later trajectory of Max Shachtman.
6. Nothing exactly parallels this at the position in the text cited. But then we have: “The Chinese people will be able to reach independence only under the leadership of the youthful and self-sacrificing proletariat, in whom the indispensable self-confidence will be rekindled by the rebirth of the world revolution. They will indicate a firm line of march.” Op. cit., pp.331-2. If this is really the original, the French version hardly amounts to a paraphrase.
7. Op. cit., p.342.
Monday, April 02, 2012
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Trotsky and the Second World War
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.
***********
Trotsky and the Second World War
(Part 2)
What appears below for the first time in English is the second instalment, much delayed, of a controversy carried on in the French language press about the attitude of Leon Trotsky to the Second World War. Chronologically it takes in the first and final contributions, the part we selected for publishing two years ago (Lutte Ouvrière/Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988, pp.38-40) making up the central part of it.
Our initial item, which sparked off the discussion in the first place, is Daniel Guérin’s preface to Léon Trotsky – Sur la deuxième guerre mondiale, a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the war first published by Éditions la Taupe in Brussels in 1970. The second and third pieces are reviews of this work, by André Frankin in the Belgian Socialist weekly La Gauche, 28 March 1970, and by an anonymous reviewer in the French weekly Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970, the journal of the OCI. The final document is Guérin’s reply to his critics, which took the form of a postscript added to the French edition of Trotsky’s writings on the war, publish by Seuil (Bibliothèque politique) in 1974.
They have all been rendered into English by Ted Crawford. All emphasis is as in the original, but citations of Trotsky’s writing have been altered from the French texts to the standard English ones, generally those of the Pathfinder corpus.
1. Daniel Guérin’s Preface
The articles reprinted here consist of pieces by Trotsky and interviews which he gave to a number of publications in the last years of his life from August 1937 to August 1940, when he was murdered by an assassin on the orders of Stalin. These articles are exclusively concerned with the forecasts, the outbreak and the first year of the Second World War. In order to provide them with more homogeneity and to concentrate the thought of Leon Davidovich better on one and the same subject, we have deliberately left passages out of certain texts that have no connection with the question.
These writings deal with a particularly dramatic slice of history. They start with the period of agonising international tension which culminated in the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for the Axis, and Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier for the so-called Western ‘democracies’. This agreement, which anxious peoples believed had really given them peace, was only a short respite, as we now know, and what is more it helped to isolate dangerously the USSR by creating the possibility of a future coalition of these four great powers against the Socialist state.
The following sequence helps us understand the period which preceded the start of the war, after Munich, and despite Munich. It is then marked by the dramatic German-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, which was a complete reversal of previous Stalinist foreign policy, which had been more or less aligned with the Western ‘democracies’ until then, in a common defence against the menace of Hitler. The prolonged negotiations which had taken place with them until then collapsed at the last moment as the Western powers dragged things out while Poland opposed the passage of the Red Armies across its territory.
The unnatural alliance between ‘Bolshevism’ (or what was left of it) and National Socialism simultaneously struck a heavy moral blow against the revolutionary movements in many countries, while leaving Hitler’s hands free for warlike enterprises. Then came the lightning aggression against the reactionary Poland of the colonels, the pretext invoked by Hitler being the Danzig corridor, which had, in fact, scandalously cut Germany into two since the Treaty of Versailles. In a few weeks, because of his superior military might and crushing technical superiority, Hitler finished with Poland, which was then divided between the two German and Russian gangsters.
Then there was that strange period called the ‘Phoney War’, where the Western powers, who had done nothing, or hardly anything, to help their ally Poland, passively faced the Wehrmacht, itself immobilised behind the Siegfried line.
But Stalin was not content with absorbing that portion of Poland and the Baltic states that Hitler was happy to leave him. His appetite whetted, he suddenly demanded a cession of territory from Finland and, being refused, just as Hitler had smashed down Poland, his armed forces fell on Finland, but with much less success. Thus started the particularly stressful Winter War, in the course of which, to the surprise of the whole world, and of Hitler in particular, the giant Red Army, weakened and demoralised by a previous series of purges of its generals and officer corps, did not succeed in finishing off the Finnish dwarf for several months. The soldiers on the Soviet side did not understand the legitimacy of an aggressive war waged by a Socialist country against a small people. In this situation the Finns fought with the energy of despair to preserve their national independence. Finally, in March 1940, a sort of compromise peace put an end to this disastrous adventure.
The World War had still not really started. Hitler, with economic help from Stalin, finally decided to commit himself. On 11 May 1940 the Wehrmacht first invaded Holland and then Belgium: by the beginning of June, after a shattering armoured breakthrough, France was routed and, on 2 June, Marshal Petain, the new head of state, signed the surrender.
As we shall see, Trotsky was an attentive and passionate observer of this succession of changing scenes. Unhappily, was not able to see how things finally turned out, because the blow of the pick which penetrated his skull on August 1940 put an end to the activity of his brain. The present compilation therefore, has the appearance of an unfinished work.
But his material is so rich and so powerful, and his predictions as to the eventual evolution of the war are always so lucid, that the writings of Trotsky on the Second World War go further than the moment when their author was forced to put down his pen on his blood-stained desk. While they interpreted the warlike events of which Leon Davidovich, in a masterly fashion, did not lose the thread for an instant, they throw no less light on the of the world conflict – which the author did not live to see – and by that they help us to understand it better.
For today’s reader the collection has a double interest:
1.We all know the lively curiosity that is growing about every aspect of the Second World War. Trotsky’s analyses, unknown in France until today, are even more precious since they emanate from a man who was not only a great Marxist theoretician, but a leading governmental and military figure in his own country. What is more, he had been able to follow the Balkan Wars as a journalist, and he had observed the First World War as a perceptive witness before creating the Red Army during the Civil War. He was therefore better able than most others to understand what lay behind the start of the Second World War.
2.In addition these writings will not fail to arouse great interest amongst those who are familiar with the rest of Trotsky’s written work from the period just before his tragic death. The reader will note that until the very last moment, Trotsky, the multinational specialist, followed the internal evolution of the belligerent countries in a manner that was both incisive and detailed, as can be seen in the two short fragments, which were left unfinished by his death, on France, Pétain and the foreseeable moral deterioration of the occupying forces.
No-one can predict the future. It is therefore not surprising to find some anticipated events which failed to happen in the articles and interviews with Trotsky; but these errors are more than compensated by a series of extraordinary prophecies. If we balance the errors of prediction with visions of the future that did occur, we are led to conclude that he was more often right than wrong.
A unique occurence in the war of 1914-18, which has never happened since, was surely the presence of Lenin, a superhuman and supernational mind, placed above the conflict in a neutral country both as an observer and interpreter, who watched the unfolding of the conflict, whereas those who managed it were as blind as they were deaf. Trotsky, in the same way, did not allow himself to give advice to governments, however useful he might have been to the leaders of the countries at war, who, if they had wished, could well have betaken themselves to the new Delphi at Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico, to listen to the oracle whose eye pierced the shadows of world politics, and who so clearly read the contradictions which made up the diplomatic alliances and conduct of the war.
Private
In fact, the articles by Trotsky on the Second World War were only read by a small minority of initiates, and their private character is accentuated by the war censorship and counter-revolutionary prejudice towards a man like him, which were international obstacles to the spread of his written thought, along with the call-up of so many revolutionary activists into the imperialist armies. An exception must be made for the articles and interviews that Leon Davidovich gave to the American press. One cannot exclude the fact – what a paradox! – that, against his wishes and though he would not have counselled them, the only great power which was to some extent able to use the profound analyses and audacious anticipations of Trotsky, was American imperialism.
It is true that the United States was still then ‘neutral’, that is to say, less caught up in the conflagration, and was thus less blinded by it, while the President, Franklin Roosevelt, had an infinitely more subtle and astute mind than the wild men urging their people on at the head of the belligerents.
Leon Davidovich was all the time aware of his vocation as a professional soothsayer. The word ‘prediction’ appears more than once in these articles. However, he has the modesty and honesty to doubt the accuracy of his forecasts himself. “Reality”, he wrote, “is worse than all the predictions that I have made.” “It would be hopeless to foresee the result of the War.”
Before allowing Trotsky himself to speak, we would like to make a short list of his numerous predictions for the benefit of the reader.
•Trotsky immediately understood, 10 days after the event, that the Munich Quadrumvirate was incapable of maintaining peace and that war was inevitable, after a more or less brief delay. With great precision he fixed a delay of two years in August 1937.
•Trotsky guessed that the Second World War would be a total one, and that only a very few small countries would be able to avoid the fighting.
•Trotsky denounced the misdeeds of the Stalinist Popular Front policy, which deluded the masses by mobilising them merely against Hitler and diverting them from opposing their own imperialist war. Furthermore, he saw that the seizure of power in France by Marshal Pétain was a direct consequence of the bankruptcy of the Popular Front in that country.
•Trotsky saw that the negotiations undertaken by the Kremlin with the Western powers in the spring of 1939 had an element of sincerity: because of the possible alternatives, Stalin was obliged to put forward the proposal of a ‘United Front of the Democracies’ in good faith. But in the opposite sense Leon Davidovich was right, on the one hand, to think that the negotiations gave Stalin a most important source of information on the military potential of the Allies, and, on the other, that they camouflaged the secret negotiations in which he was already engaged with Hitler.
•Trotsky thought that it was Hitler’s Germany which had treacherously pushed the USSR into attacking Finland. In his opinion it was the Franco-British threats that finally forced Stalin, as a result of his military reverses at the beginning of the campaign, to give up the idea of annexing Finland. In his opinion the humiliating check inflicted by this Nordic country was the start of the fall of Stalin.
•From 9 August 1937 Trotsky predicted that the German army would start by gaining great victories in the West, but correctly excluded the possibility of a complete victory over Britain. He saw France cut up, partitioned and reduced to the rank of a second-rate power, even to that of an oppressed nation. In September 1939 he foresaw the possibility that the French government, together with the governments of Belgium, Holland, Poland and Czechoslovakia, would have to take refuge in Great Britain. From 1937-38 he waited for the growth of French Fascism, which would be capable of replacing democracy. He foresaw Vichy.
•On 1 October 1939 Trotsky clearly saw the reason for the ‘Phoney War’ on the Western front: he knew that France and Britain hesitated to start a real war without an assurance of American help.
•On the morrow of Munich Trotsky predicted the Hitler-Stalin pact, a shameful collusion which arose out of a double fear, of a German attack on Russia and of a revolution. He reminded us that from the seizure of power by National Socialism Stalin went on his hands and knees to become Hitler’s ally. But at first he had been rebuffed. Trotsky reckoned that the Moscow Trials, among other things, had been a cover for the preparation of the Russo-German pact. Unlike others, however, he did not think that Stalin deliberately wished to provoke a world war by his alliance with Hitler, the outcome of which he, above all, doubted.
•Trotsky insisted on pointing to the considerable economic aid that Stalin gave to Hitler up to the moment of the break between the two countries in June 1941. He estimated that this made the Western blockade of Hitler’s Germany at least 25 per cent less effective.
Test
From 1937, in spite of his hatred of Stalin, Trotsky had an unshakeable confidence in the future of collective property in the USSR. For him the social basis of the Soviet regime (the new forms of property and the planned economy) would pass the test of war and would come out of it strengthened. In his opinion it would take merely a dozen or so years for Soviet industry to catch up with that of the capitalists.
However, Leon Davidovich did not hide the fact that if the USSR were attacked, the war against the foreigner would undoubtedly strengthen the position of the bureaucracy. That happened.
Once more, in spite of his savage struggle against Stalinism, Trotsky affirmed his unconditional defence of the Soviet Union. If the country was invaded, he stated that his supporters would fight against Hitler’s troops, and he congratulated the Russian people on their understanding that a defeat of the USSR would signify the destruction of the nationalised and planned economy.
Trotsky was full of optimism for the future of the Germany that had been subjugated by Hitler. If National Socialism had been able to triumph, it was only because the working class no longer had any confidence in its old parties and its old slogans, and it had not yet found a new way out. But on 11 September 1939 Leon Davidovich was convinced that Hitler would continue to slide into catastrophe. He saw that Hitler was walking to the abyss with the infallibility of a sleep-walker. He thought that Nazi rule, proclaimed as lasting for a thousand years, was not likely to last for even 10.
Shortly before his death, Trotsky had not the slightest doubt as to the resistance of the occupied peoples conquered by German imperialism, and he compared the occupied countries to powder-barrels.
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him, it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intensive military preparation. For him, at any rate, American intervention was absolutely inevitable. The real war would be between Germany and the USA.
From the beginning of September 1939, Trotsky never ceased to warn the Soviet Union against future German aggression. For him the Russo-German pact was only a “scrap of paper”. If Hitler was unfortunately victorious on the Western front, he would then turn his arms against the USSR.
As a corollary Trotsky predicted an alliance between the USSR and the imperialist ‘democracies’.
From 4 September 1939 onwards Trotsky said that Japan would launch an offensive towards the south in the direction of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, French Indochina and Burma, rather than attack the USSR. But while he foresaw the extension of Japanese rule over the greater part of the Asiatic continent, he reckoned that Japan was incapable of maintaining a war of great intensity.
From the years 1937-38, at the start of the coming world conflict, it is clear that for Trotsky, domination of our planet would fall to the United States, which would proceed into an explosion of imperialism, the like of which the world had never seen before.
Finally, Trotsky envisaged the perspective of a Third World War which would be waged by entire continents against one another, and which would become the tomb of civilisation.
Whatever happened, Trotsky kept an intransigent faith in proletarian internationalism. He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.
However, one point on which his perspicacious mind was mistaken was his scepticism about the possibility of an eventual outcome by a secret weapon held in reserve by one of the combatants. He said that no army could hold chemical or electronic miracles in reserve. In August 1937 Leon Davidovich was unable to guess at the military use of nuclear physics.
Another erroneous point was his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution, and in consequence, in the triumph of the Fourth International, in which he showed the utmost confidence. But is it possible to be a revolutionary and a guide to other revolutionaries unless, in addition to an incisive Marxist analysis, there is faith and fire in one’s belly?
The reader can perceive from the foregoing that Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other, a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant, staying faithful to the revolution he had himself led and the military power that he had created.
It is natural that in Against the Stream, the first Trotsky looked at the Second Imperialist War with similar eyes to those of Lenin, that is to say a totally revolutionary point of view demanding the defeat of all the imperialist countries. But the other Trotsky, the Soviet Trotsky, we repeat, is above all concerned with the unconditional defence of the USSR, a position from which he never deviated. The result is an alternating series of texts, the one inspired by the most burning Soviet patriotism, while in others he shows himself implacably opposed to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he accuses of inadequately defending the Soviet homeland. This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist.
It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and to encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations. He insisted on several occasions that Stalin had cooperated with Hitler, above all out of fear of him, and that the only way to help him out of the clutches of the Nazi dictator was for the Allies to show themselves strong.
One might think that day-to-day articles about events of long ago, now 30 years, would lose something of their immediacy. This is by no means the case for the articles that we publish. To us they do not appear to have aged. They keep their freshness and sharpness. No doubt this is because each of them raises itself above the situation of the moment to exhibit an interpretation, a philosophy, a global orientation, which is based on a coherent and durable system of thought, that of revolutionary Marxism.
The central piece in this collection, both by length and by content, is the admirable Manifesto of the Fourth International of May 1940 which was written in Trotsky's own hand. If he needs to, the reader can verify this with his own eyes, since, thanks to the Houghton Library of Harvard, we reproduce the handwritten manuscript. I do not believe that anyone else has dared to publish a text of such quality on the Second World War, which expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism. I am the better able to judge since I myself inserted, as an appendix to my book, Front Populaire: la Révolution Perdu, the appeals published during the war by the Front Ouvrier International contre La Guerre, the international rival to the Fourth International, and by the French Parti Socialist Ouvrier et Paysan, both inspired by Marceau Pivert.
Far be it for me to belittle the value of texts from the organisations of which I have just spoken and about which, in my opinion, Trotsky was rather too severe. For Marceau Pivert also had the great virtue that he stayed faithful above all to proletarian internationalism throughout the war. But I believe Trotsky expresses far better than he does, with much greater sharpness, greater weight, and a greater genius, an obstinately internationalist position which left him, like Marceau Pivert and we, his friends, isolated souls preaching to the desert, submerged by the depth of the wave of the world conflagration in which, in one way or another, all the nationalist passions were unleashed.
Trotsky’s Manifesto, which would also be his testament, saved the honour of the world working class in these accursed years.
Daniel Guérin
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.
***********
Trotsky and the Second World War
(Part 2)
What appears below for the first time in English is the second instalment, much delayed, of a controversy carried on in the French language press about the attitude of Leon Trotsky to the Second World War. Chronologically it takes in the first and final contributions, the part we selected for publishing two years ago (Lutte Ouvrière/Daniel Guérin, Trotsky and the Second World War, Revolutionary History, Volume 1 no.3, Autumn 1988, pp.38-40) making up the central part of it.
Our initial item, which sparked off the discussion in the first place, is Daniel Guérin’s preface to Léon Trotsky – Sur la deuxième guerre mondiale, a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the war first published by Éditions la Taupe in Brussels in 1970. The second and third pieces are reviews of this work, by André Frankin in the Belgian Socialist weekly La Gauche, 28 March 1970, and by an anonymous reviewer in the French weekly Informations Ouvrières, no.485, 29 July-5 August 1970, the journal of the OCI. The final document is Guérin’s reply to his critics, which took the form of a postscript added to the French edition of Trotsky’s writings on the war, publish by Seuil (Bibliothèque politique) in 1974.
They have all been rendered into English by Ted Crawford. All emphasis is as in the original, but citations of Trotsky’s writing have been altered from the French texts to the standard English ones, generally those of the Pathfinder corpus.
1. Daniel Guérin’s Preface
The articles reprinted here consist of pieces by Trotsky and interviews which he gave to a number of publications in the last years of his life from August 1937 to August 1940, when he was murdered by an assassin on the orders of Stalin. These articles are exclusively concerned with the forecasts, the outbreak and the first year of the Second World War. In order to provide them with more homogeneity and to concentrate the thought of Leon Davidovich better on one and the same subject, we have deliberately left passages out of certain texts that have no connection with the question.
These writings deal with a particularly dramatic slice of history. They start with the period of agonising international tension which culminated in the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini for the Axis, and Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier for the so-called Western ‘democracies’. This agreement, which anxious peoples believed had really given them peace, was only a short respite, as we now know, and what is more it helped to isolate dangerously the USSR by creating the possibility of a future coalition of these four great powers against the Socialist state.
The following sequence helps us understand the period which preceded the start of the war, after Munich, and despite Munich. It is then marked by the dramatic German-Soviet pact of 23 August 1939, which was a complete reversal of previous Stalinist foreign policy, which had been more or less aligned with the Western ‘democracies’ until then, in a common defence against the menace of Hitler. The prolonged negotiations which had taken place with them until then collapsed at the last moment as the Western powers dragged things out while Poland opposed the passage of the Red Armies across its territory.
The unnatural alliance between ‘Bolshevism’ (or what was left of it) and National Socialism simultaneously struck a heavy moral blow against the revolutionary movements in many countries, while leaving Hitler’s hands free for warlike enterprises. Then came the lightning aggression against the reactionary Poland of the colonels, the pretext invoked by Hitler being the Danzig corridor, which had, in fact, scandalously cut Germany into two since the Treaty of Versailles. In a few weeks, because of his superior military might and crushing technical superiority, Hitler finished with Poland, which was then divided between the two German and Russian gangsters.
Then there was that strange period called the ‘Phoney War’, where the Western powers, who had done nothing, or hardly anything, to help their ally Poland, passively faced the Wehrmacht, itself immobilised behind the Siegfried line.
But Stalin was not content with absorbing that portion of Poland and the Baltic states that Hitler was happy to leave him. His appetite whetted, he suddenly demanded a cession of territory from Finland and, being refused, just as Hitler had smashed down Poland, his armed forces fell on Finland, but with much less success. Thus started the particularly stressful Winter War, in the course of which, to the surprise of the whole world, and of Hitler in particular, the giant Red Army, weakened and demoralised by a previous series of purges of its generals and officer corps, did not succeed in finishing off the Finnish dwarf for several months. The soldiers on the Soviet side did not understand the legitimacy of an aggressive war waged by a Socialist country against a small people. In this situation the Finns fought with the energy of despair to preserve their national independence. Finally, in March 1940, a sort of compromise peace put an end to this disastrous adventure.
The World War had still not really started. Hitler, with economic help from Stalin, finally decided to commit himself. On 11 May 1940 the Wehrmacht first invaded Holland and then Belgium: by the beginning of June, after a shattering armoured breakthrough, France was routed and, on 2 June, Marshal Petain, the new head of state, signed the surrender.
As we shall see, Trotsky was an attentive and passionate observer of this succession of changing scenes. Unhappily, was not able to see how things finally turned out, because the blow of the pick which penetrated his skull on August 1940 put an end to the activity of his brain. The present compilation therefore, has the appearance of an unfinished work.
But his material is so rich and so powerful, and his predictions as to the eventual evolution of the war are always so lucid, that the writings of Trotsky on the Second World War go further than the moment when their author was forced to put down his pen on his blood-stained desk. While they interpreted the warlike events of which Leon Davidovich, in a masterly fashion, did not lose the thread for an instant, they throw no less light on the of the world conflict – which the author did not live to see – and by that they help us to understand it better.
For today’s reader the collection has a double interest:
1.We all know the lively curiosity that is growing about every aspect of the Second World War. Trotsky’s analyses, unknown in France until today, are even more precious since they emanate from a man who was not only a great Marxist theoretician, but a leading governmental and military figure in his own country. What is more, he had been able to follow the Balkan Wars as a journalist, and he had observed the First World War as a perceptive witness before creating the Red Army during the Civil War. He was therefore better able than most others to understand what lay behind the start of the Second World War.
2.In addition these writings will not fail to arouse great interest amongst those who are familiar with the rest of Trotsky’s written work from the period just before his tragic death. The reader will note that until the very last moment, Trotsky, the multinational specialist, followed the internal evolution of the belligerent countries in a manner that was both incisive and detailed, as can be seen in the two short fragments, which were left unfinished by his death, on France, Pétain and the foreseeable moral deterioration of the occupying forces.
No-one can predict the future. It is therefore not surprising to find some anticipated events which failed to happen in the articles and interviews with Trotsky; but these errors are more than compensated by a series of extraordinary prophecies. If we balance the errors of prediction with visions of the future that did occur, we are led to conclude that he was more often right than wrong.
A unique occurence in the war of 1914-18, which has never happened since, was surely the presence of Lenin, a superhuman and supernational mind, placed above the conflict in a neutral country both as an observer and interpreter, who watched the unfolding of the conflict, whereas those who managed it were as blind as they were deaf. Trotsky, in the same way, did not allow himself to give advice to governments, however useful he might have been to the leaders of the countries at war, who, if they had wished, could well have betaken themselves to the new Delphi at Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico, to listen to the oracle whose eye pierced the shadows of world politics, and who so clearly read the contradictions which made up the diplomatic alliances and conduct of the war.
Private
In fact, the articles by Trotsky on the Second World War were only read by a small minority of initiates, and their private character is accentuated by the war censorship and counter-revolutionary prejudice towards a man like him, which were international obstacles to the spread of his written thought, along with the call-up of so many revolutionary activists into the imperialist armies. An exception must be made for the articles and interviews that Leon Davidovich gave to the American press. One cannot exclude the fact – what a paradox! – that, against his wishes and though he would not have counselled them, the only great power which was to some extent able to use the profound analyses and audacious anticipations of Trotsky, was American imperialism.
It is true that the United States was still then ‘neutral’, that is to say, less caught up in the conflagration, and was thus less blinded by it, while the President, Franklin Roosevelt, had an infinitely more subtle and astute mind than the wild men urging their people on at the head of the belligerents.
Leon Davidovich was all the time aware of his vocation as a professional soothsayer. The word ‘prediction’ appears more than once in these articles. However, he has the modesty and honesty to doubt the accuracy of his forecasts himself. “Reality”, he wrote, “is worse than all the predictions that I have made.” “It would be hopeless to foresee the result of the War.”
Before allowing Trotsky himself to speak, we would like to make a short list of his numerous predictions for the benefit of the reader.
•Trotsky immediately understood, 10 days after the event, that the Munich Quadrumvirate was incapable of maintaining peace and that war was inevitable, after a more or less brief delay. With great precision he fixed a delay of two years in August 1937.
•Trotsky guessed that the Second World War would be a total one, and that only a very few small countries would be able to avoid the fighting.
•Trotsky denounced the misdeeds of the Stalinist Popular Front policy, which deluded the masses by mobilising them merely against Hitler and diverting them from opposing their own imperialist war. Furthermore, he saw that the seizure of power in France by Marshal Pétain was a direct consequence of the bankruptcy of the Popular Front in that country.
•Trotsky saw that the negotiations undertaken by the Kremlin with the Western powers in the spring of 1939 had an element of sincerity: because of the possible alternatives, Stalin was obliged to put forward the proposal of a ‘United Front of the Democracies’ in good faith. But in the opposite sense Leon Davidovich was right, on the one hand, to think that the negotiations gave Stalin a most important source of information on the military potential of the Allies, and, on the other, that they camouflaged the secret negotiations in which he was already engaged with Hitler.
•Trotsky thought that it was Hitler’s Germany which had treacherously pushed the USSR into attacking Finland. In his opinion it was the Franco-British threats that finally forced Stalin, as a result of his military reverses at the beginning of the campaign, to give up the idea of annexing Finland. In his opinion the humiliating check inflicted by this Nordic country was the start of the fall of Stalin.
•From 9 August 1937 Trotsky predicted that the German army would start by gaining great victories in the West, but correctly excluded the possibility of a complete victory over Britain. He saw France cut up, partitioned and reduced to the rank of a second-rate power, even to that of an oppressed nation. In September 1939 he foresaw the possibility that the French government, together with the governments of Belgium, Holland, Poland and Czechoslovakia, would have to take refuge in Great Britain. From 1937-38 he waited for the growth of French Fascism, which would be capable of replacing democracy. He foresaw Vichy.
•On 1 October 1939 Trotsky clearly saw the reason for the ‘Phoney War’ on the Western front: he knew that France and Britain hesitated to start a real war without an assurance of American help.
•On the morrow of Munich Trotsky predicted the Hitler-Stalin pact, a shameful collusion which arose out of a double fear, of a German attack on Russia and of a revolution. He reminded us that from the seizure of power by National Socialism Stalin went on his hands and knees to become Hitler’s ally. But at first he had been rebuffed. Trotsky reckoned that the Moscow Trials, among other things, had been a cover for the preparation of the Russo-German pact. Unlike others, however, he did not think that Stalin deliberately wished to provoke a world war by his alliance with Hitler, the outcome of which he, above all, doubted.
•Trotsky insisted on pointing to the considerable economic aid that Stalin gave to Hitler up to the moment of the break between the two countries in June 1941. He estimated that this made the Western blockade of Hitler’s Germany at least 25 per cent less effective.
Test
From 1937, in spite of his hatred of Stalin, Trotsky had an unshakeable confidence in the future of collective property in the USSR. For him the social basis of the Soviet regime (the new forms of property and the planned economy) would pass the test of war and would come out of it strengthened. In his opinion it would take merely a dozen or so years for Soviet industry to catch up with that of the capitalists.
However, Leon Davidovich did not hide the fact that if the USSR were attacked, the war against the foreigner would undoubtedly strengthen the position of the bureaucracy. That happened.
Once more, in spite of his savage struggle against Stalinism, Trotsky affirmed his unconditional defence of the Soviet Union. If the country was invaded, he stated that his supporters would fight against Hitler’s troops, and he congratulated the Russian people on their understanding that a defeat of the USSR would signify the destruction of the nationalised and planned economy.
Trotsky was full of optimism for the future of the Germany that had been subjugated by Hitler. If National Socialism had been able to triumph, it was only because the working class no longer had any confidence in its old parties and its old slogans, and it had not yet found a new way out. But on 11 September 1939 Leon Davidovich was convinced that Hitler would continue to slide into catastrophe. He saw that Hitler was walking to the abyss with the infallibility of a sleep-walker. He thought that Nazi rule, proclaimed as lasting for a thousand years, was not likely to last for even 10.
Shortly before his death, Trotsky had not the slightest doubt as to the resistance of the occupied peoples conquered by German imperialism, and he compared the occupied countries to powder-barrels.
Trotsky did not hesitate to proclaim that America must not stay neutral. According to him, it was necessary to give Hitler such a decisive blow that Stalin would cease to fear him. And he encouraged the American workers to engage in intensive military preparation. For him, at any rate, American intervention was absolutely inevitable. The real war would be between Germany and the USA.
From the beginning of September 1939, Trotsky never ceased to warn the Soviet Union against future German aggression. For him the Russo-German pact was only a “scrap of paper”. If Hitler was unfortunately victorious on the Western front, he would then turn his arms against the USSR.
As a corollary Trotsky predicted an alliance between the USSR and the imperialist ‘democracies’.
From 4 September 1939 onwards Trotsky said that Japan would launch an offensive towards the south in the direction of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, French Indochina and Burma, rather than attack the USSR. But while he foresaw the extension of Japanese rule over the greater part of the Asiatic continent, he reckoned that Japan was incapable of maintaining a war of great intensity.
From the years 1937-38, at the start of the coming world conflict, it is clear that for Trotsky, domination of our planet would fall to the United States, which would proceed into an explosion of imperialism, the like of which the world had never seen before.
Finally, Trotsky envisaged the perspective of a Third World War which would be waged by entire continents against one another, and which would become the tomb of civilisation.
Whatever happened, Trotsky kept an intransigent faith in proletarian internationalism. He cried out that in aiding the democracies against the Fascists, the workers in the western countries could only assist and accelerate the victory of Fascism inside their own countries. The war between the two adversaries could bring nothing but oppression and reaction in both camps.
However, one point on which his perspicacious mind was mistaken was his scepticism about the possibility of an eventual outcome by a secret weapon held in reserve by one of the combatants. He said that no army could hold chemical or electronic miracles in reserve. In August 1937 Leon Davidovich was unable to guess at the military use of nuclear physics.
Another erroneous point was his ardent conviction that the Second World War would end in the victory of the world revolution, and in consequence, in the triumph of the Fourth International, in which he showed the utmost confidence. But is it possible to be a revolutionary and a guide to other revolutionaries unless, in addition to an incisive Marxist analysis, there is faith and fire in one’s belly?
The reader can perceive from the foregoing that Trotsky was two men, on the one hand a revolutionary internationalist, the spokesman of the Fourth International, and on the other, a leader who was still very much a Soviet militant, staying faithful to the revolution he had himself led and the military power that he had created.
It is natural that in Against the Stream, the first Trotsky looked at the Second Imperialist War with similar eyes to those of Lenin, that is to say a totally revolutionary point of view demanding the defeat of all the imperialist countries. But the other Trotsky, the Soviet Trotsky, we repeat, is above all concerned with the unconditional defence of the USSR, a position from which he never deviated. The result is an alternating series of texts, the one inspired by the most burning Soviet patriotism, while in others he shows himself implacably opposed to the Stalinist bureaucracy, which he accuses of inadequately defending the Soviet homeland. This second Trotsky allows himself to be led into taking up positions that seem to contradict those of the first Trotsky – the internationalist.
It is thus that, foreseeing or even calling for the entry of the United States into the war on the side of the Western Allies, Trotsky was led into lambasting the American pacifists, considered as ‘Enemy No.1’ by him, and to encouraging the United States to accelerate its military preparations. He insisted on several occasions that Stalin had cooperated with Hitler, above all out of fear of him, and that the only way to help him out of the clutches of the Nazi dictator was for the Allies to show themselves strong.
One might think that day-to-day articles about events of long ago, now 30 years, would lose something of their immediacy. This is by no means the case for the articles that we publish. To us they do not appear to have aged. They keep their freshness and sharpness. No doubt this is because each of them raises itself above the situation of the moment to exhibit an interpretation, a philosophy, a global orientation, which is based on a coherent and durable system of thought, that of revolutionary Marxism.
The central piece in this collection, both by length and by content, is the admirable Manifesto of the Fourth International of May 1940 which was written in Trotsky's own hand. If he needs to, the reader can verify this with his own eyes, since, thanks to the Houghton Library of Harvard, we reproduce the handwritten manuscript. I do not believe that anyone else has dared to publish a text of such quality on the Second World War, which expresses with so much force and conviction the fundamentals of proletarian internationalism. I am the better able to judge since I myself inserted, as an appendix to my book, Front Populaire: la Révolution Perdu, the appeals published during the war by the Front Ouvrier International contre La Guerre, the international rival to the Fourth International, and by the French Parti Socialist Ouvrier et Paysan, both inspired by Marceau Pivert.
Far be it for me to belittle the value of texts from the organisations of which I have just spoken and about which, in my opinion, Trotsky was rather too severe. For Marceau Pivert also had the great virtue that he stayed faithful above all to proletarian internationalism throughout the war. But I believe Trotsky expresses far better than he does, with much greater sharpness, greater weight, and a greater genius, an obstinately internationalist position which left him, like Marceau Pivert and we, his friends, isolated souls preaching to the desert, submerged by the depth of the wave of the world conflagration in which, in one way or another, all the nationalist passions were unleashed.
Trotsky’s Manifesto, which would also be his testament, saved the honour of the world working class in these accursed years.
Daniel Guérin
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