Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Hold On.
Hold On Lyrics-Tom Waits
They hung a sign up in our town
"if you live it up, you won't
live it down"
So, she left Monte Rio, son
Just like a bullet leaves a gun
With charcoal eyes and Monroe hips
She went and took that California trip
Well, the moon was gold, her
Hair like wind
She said don't look back just
Come on Jim
Oh you got to
Hold on, Hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
You gotta hold on
Well, he gave her a dimestore watch
And a ring made from a spoon
Everyone is looking for someone to blame
But you share my bed, you share my name
Well, go ahead and call the cops
You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops
She said baby, I still love you
Sometimes there's nothin left to do
Oh you got to
Hold on, hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you got to
Just hold on.
Well, God bless your crooked little heart St. Louis got the best of me
I miss your broken-china voice
How I wish you were still here with me
Well, you build it up, you wreck it down
You burn your mansion to the ground
When there's nothing left to keep you here, when
You're falling behind in this
Big blue world
Oh you go to
Hold on, hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
You got to hold on
Down by the Riverside motel,
It's 10 below and falling
By a 99 cent store she closed her eyes
And started swaying
But it's so hard to dance that way
When it's cold and there's no music
Well your old hometown is so far away
But, inside your head there's a record
That's playing, a song called
Hold on, hold on
You really got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
And just hold on.
JLB Note: It really doesn’t take much these days, these old time memory be-fogged days, to have some snippet come swirling out of the air, some caught phrase in a passing conversation, some half-glanced word mentioned on some media outlet, some fragrance smelled from long ago soaps, perfumes, downy billows, to get me into that frame of mind to speak of old time Olde Saco (that is up in Maine for the unknowing heathens). The Olde Saco of the 1960s dying textile mills, of various working- class rites of passage, of teenage this and that, and most of all of the French-Canadian (on my mother Delores’ side, the side that counted, nee LeBlanc) ethos, pathos, and bathos that permeated the town. And of course, of F-C loves, lost and found.
The genesis of this particular air-borne swirl came via YouTube when I was searching for Tom Waits’ knows-skid-row-in-his-heart version of Yip Harsburg’s Brother Can You Spare A Dime? and I noticed his Hold On as part of his available playlist (the list of other stuff by an artist located on the right side of the screen if that is not what it is called). Upon listening that song brought to mind one Yvette Genet, her mad passion for men (boys really but I will get to that below), her mad passion for poetry and her mad passion for the “beats,” for the odd and unusual in grey old 1960s Olde Saco. She was to pay a dear price for those passions on October 23, 1964 (that date is important to the story, to my memory of her, and to her fate so I mention here first).
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They kicked Yvette Genet out of town, kicked her out calling her a social disease, kicked her out before she could give every boy (and maybe every man but that was left unspoken) in town some social disease [a sexually transmitted disease, venereal disease, the “clap” for the less sensitive-JLB] they said. They kicked her out and told her in no uncertain terms not to come back on that fateful October 23, 1964 day. The day, night really, they found her, well, buck naked in her big ’56 Chevy (bought courtesy of some old-time flame for her “favors” from what I had heard) down in back of the parking lot of Jimmy Jake’s Diner with an identically clad under-aged boy (meaning not out of high school) going at it hammer and tongs. [Having sex, big old sex, in some odd position, not missionary-style for the less sensitive-JLB]
Hey, I had better back up and clarify this kicking out, this Yvette kicking out thing, before you get the wrong idea, or maybe better half-wrong idea about growing up in Olde Saco. Before you thing I grew up in the Stone Age or something and not at the threshold of the sexual revolution here in America. Of course, as far as I know, sex, consensual (and unfortunately not consensual too) under-aged sex, illicit sex, sex with somebody not you betrothed, or anything like that has been going on since, well, since Adam and Eve. Even in Olde Saco, and maybe especially in Olde Saco (the “summer guest” part of the town near the ocean anyway when about forty bars and clubs lure every available taste).
What got Yvette Genet on the wrong side of things was that she, all of eighteen, all of Gallic beauty (thin, blonde hair, natural, natural as any blonde’s can be, no bosom like most all F-C [French- Canadian] girls and a come hither smile that said “welcome,” welcome not in a lewd way but in a you-are-a- man-and- I-like men way) did what she pleased, and where, as the incident at Jimmy Jake’s Diner (not exactly out in the boondocks) gives graphic expression to. And that was too much for the madames of the Atlantic section of Olde Saco (the men, if they said anything or thought anything probably were half-thinking about that buck naked scene), the F-C quarters. A place with its own ethos derived from generations of previous Gallic F-C Roman Catholics and on the surface very, very proper.
They, the good F-C mothers, the good merchants who catered to the F-C community, the good F-C priests (with their own lusts, or wanna-be lusts),
“froze” Yvette out just as surely as any medieval town did with their scorning parades, and their various physical acts of isolating of the “different.” So Yvette left, left with a tank full of gas (according to Stewball “Stu” who worked as a gas jockey at Jimmy Jake’s Gas Station [the one adjoining the diner, not the one of Atlantic Avenue]), left first for Portland where she could blend into the crowd, and then headed west. The reason I knew all this, and knew of her whereabouts for a while, was her brother Johnny (okay, okay Jean) was a good friend of mine at Olde Saco High School where we ran track together.
I wondered, wondered for a time (a long teenage time, a couple of years before I graduated from high school and lost track of Yvette, and Johnny, as I made my own trek west) why she had to leave. Sure she liked sex, liked showing the boys a good time. But no boy that I knew (or man when I later got to that stage) ever complained, privately anyway, about that charm. About that certain charm in connection with any girl/woman. She also was something of a “beatnik,” or what passed for beat in far-removed and last news Olde Saco in 1964 when that was getting to be old hat elsewhere. Johnny said she loved poetry. Howling into that good night Allen Ginsberg, Olde Saco South mill town (Lowell, Massachusetts) million word on the road Jack Kerouac, zen buddha wordsmith Gary Snyder, mad street gangster saint out of some Catholic Worker shelter Gregory Corso. Names that I was starting to recognize and “dig.” (Along with a madness for T.S Eliot modern wastelands and John Milton ancient paradise losts, figure that out for yourselves). She also didn’t go to Ste. Brigitte’s like she should, and that had those very catholic rite watching madames in a tizzy (and the priests too, once the madams gave their marching orders) . But mainly, I guess, she made a point, a very big point of being independent, enough to make her stand out way before women learned to run amok and have nobody (or almost nobody think twice about it).
Enough of Olde Saco, its witchcraft traditions, its fake exorcisms, and its babble. This is after all about Yvette. I told you about her going to Portland (hey, I just thought, the Maine Portland not the Oregon one. They don’t consider it proper to have sex there either from what I heard, at least non-politically correct sex.). There she worked in a topless bar for a while for coffee and cakes, took a couple of classes in poetry at Bowdoin (quoting Ginsberg’ Howl from memory I heard later, much later, when I ran into an English professor from there at some anti-war march and he mentioned her after he made the Olde Saco connection), and met some wrong gee, some grifter, some Faro Jack, some five- card stud player, and headed west.
The heading west part was harder to pin down, as Johnny got fewer and fewer phone calls and letters from her (more often just some postcard from some Podunk town like Olde Saco as she, they, passed through). What we pieced together (and this was pure speculation on our part) was that she was “showing the boys a good time” for dough to keep them in coffee and cakes when Faro Jack hit a rough patch with the cards. [Read: worked as a prostitute, hooker, whore, for the less sensitive.]
But Yvette was also working on her own poetry. She sent Johnny (and mentioned to him to show it to me) a poem one time that had gotten published in some now forgotten poetry journal. And when you think about it our speculation wasn’t that far off, she loved sex and poetry. Like I said I lost contact with Johnny and thus her later story but I like to think that her charms (she really was beautiful in that “who was that woman who just passed by subtle Gallic way” that has you thinking, hell, that drove to distraction, some later sleepless night about some unnamed, maybe un-nameable, fragrance) and her poetry allowed her to hold on.
Oh, yes, and that boy, that under-aged buck naked boy sitting (actually lying down) in a big old two-toned ’56 Chevy, brought courtesy of some guy for Yvette’s favors, down in the back of Jimmy Jake’s Diner, that was me, Josh Breslin. But that is a story for another day. Yah, I hope she held on.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part One- Buonarroti and Babouvist Heritage ("Young Spartacus", February 1976)
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part One- Buonarroti and Babouvist Heritage
By Joseph Seymour
EDITOR'S NOTE: Over the weekend of 17-19 January in Berkeley more than 100 supporters of the Spartacus Youth League and the Spartacist League participated in a SYL West Coast educational conference. The program featured presentations on the Soviet economy, the Right Opposition in the Bolshevik Party during the 1920's, and the heritage of Jacobin communism. Beginning with this issue Young Spartacus is publishing the contribution "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition" by Joseph Seymour, a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League. To preserve the character of the verbal presentation we have introduced only stylistic alterations and deletions.
I am in the process of giving a seven-part [SYL class] series, titled "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." This talk constitutes a compression of the first three parts: it is an attempt to analyze the main European revolutionary movement from the French Revolution until the time that Marx as a left-of-center bourgeois democrat arrived in France and Engels as a Utopian socialist, bohemian hell rake from the University of Berlin arrived in England, where they were transformed into communists.
In the general conception of the origins and background of Marxism there is the tendency toward idealization and individualization which sees Marx as a genius who assimilated Hegel, Ricardo and Adam Smith and who read history and then synthesized these intellectual traditions into Marxism. Now, this is simply not true. In 1847 Marx joined an organization which had a twelve year revolutionary history. He did not join as a member; he joined at the top after he had come to agreement with the leadership. But it was not his organization, and he was a leader not because these people were followers of Marx but because his own ideas were in congruence with theirs.
Objectively, there has been the suppression of the influence of the Jacobin communist tradition and the living organizational links, not simply the ideological and intellectual effects, of the French Revolution through two generations of revolutionary communists who, in the broad sense, educated Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There are, I think, several reasons as to why there is this false view.
First, since World War II, particularly, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, virtually all of the literature on Marxist historiography has been done by academics who have no knowledge of or interest in revolutionary organization, so that there has been a systematic idealization of Marx. Second, the Stalinists, who have done much of the historical study of the pre-1848 left, are very much aware of the revolutionary movement, but introduce another kind of falsification, namely, the cult of personality projected back- wards. When Marx walks on the historic stage of 1843 in the Stalinist writings, he is presented as standing head and shoulders above the people who taught him things which he did not know and could not have figured out for himself. Within the Stalinist historiography of this period there is a strong tendency to deny Marx's assertion that the educator too must be educated. Finally, there is what could be called the obscurity of the obvious. Marx's debt to German philosophical traditions was in many ways unique. But Marx shared with almost all of his contemporaries a profound debt to the Jacobin communist tradition. In 1861 Marx wrote, in effect, "Well, of course, before 1848 everybody was a Babouvist." At that time all communists basically identified with the left wing of the French Revolution.
So, a main purpose of this series, of which the talk is a part, is to restore to the consciousness of our comrades our real debt to Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Julian Harney and Karl Schapper. Without them, both as individuals and as tendencies', Marx would have been nothing other than a German academic, just another version of Bruno Bauer.
Shaping impact of Great French Revolution
The great British historian, William Maitland, said that the most difficult thing about history is to remember that events which happened long ago were once in the future. Indeed, one of the most difficult things is to be able to put yourself into the political context of the 1820's and the 1830's. But there are two things that stand out, and they are interrelated.
First, one cannot overestimate the degree to which the consciousness of the revolutionaries and communists of those days was shaped by the French Revolution. The Jacobin dictatorship which lasted one year represented for any revolutionary democrat or communist—and the line between them was very thin—the only thing that they had to look back on, the only historic experience that they could build on. The period from the overthrow of Robespierre at least to the revolution of 1830 in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in Britain, but really to the revolution of 1848, was a period of deep reaction, in which the possibility of a radical bourgeois-democratic republic seemed almost Utopian. The historic experiences on which to build a communist theory were very meager and were concentrated in one great event— the French Revolution, specifically, the Jacobin dictatorship.
Second, on the basis of the French Revolution and the attitudes of the ruling class, communism was generally identified with democracy. As Metternich remarked, "There is no difference between a liberal and a communist.” For Metternich there was no difference: if you had universal suffrage, if you overthrew the government and instituted a bourgeois democracy, then the collectivization of property—the expropriation of the bourgeoisie—was relatively easy. Only the experience of the revolution, of 1848 allowed for a general re-evaluation of that premise. But before 1848, from Metternich through Marx, it was assumed that universal suffrage, at least in a country like England, would be associated with the massive economic reorganization in the interests of the proletariat—the proletariat then
being not the industrial working class, but basically the plebeian masses, those who own nothing but their labor or who did not employ labor.
The French Revolution shares with the Bolshevik Revolution the fact that the revolutionaries had a strong doctrinal pre-history. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf and Marat were no less committed to carrying out the doctrines of Rousseau, Diderot and the other French philosophes than Lenin and Trotsky were to Marx. Therefore, one cannot understand the French Revolution, particularly Jacobin communism, without some knowledge of the left wing of the French Enlightenment.
The dominant philosopher who shaped the French revolutionary movement was Jean Jacques Rousseau. I will simply make the following point about Rousseau: unlike the other philosophers of the bourgeois-democratic movement, such as the Englishman Locke, Rousseau did not regard property as a natural right but as a social convention. He believed that as a social convention, property was serviceable in the interests of democracy and individual freedom. While having as an ideal a society of small property owners, Rousseau never regarded property as a natural right; therefore, one could indeed be a follower of Rousseau and be a communist, simply by differing with Rousseau not on the question of principle, but rather on the question of his empirical evaluation of property as the best convention to guarantee individual liberty.
There were also contemporaries of Rousseau, notably a Catholic priest named Mably and an atheist named Morelly, who disagreed with Rousseau. They contended that only under a collectivist system, only when there is equality of consumption and some kind of general collective organization of labor, can there arise a genuinely democratic society. There existed, therefore, in a doctrinal form, concepts of communism which arose out of the ideological preparation for the greatest of bourgeois-democratic revolutions.
Jacobin dictatorship
The Jacobin dictatorship, the reign of terror, the rule of Robespierre, represented an episode in which the revolutionary bourgeoisie, facing overwhelming international reaction and not yet having established its own strong state apparatus, had to make certain concessions to the masses, particularly the masses of Paris, which tended to be the seat of social power in France. In particular, the need to finance a revolutionary war could be done through either unrestrained inflationary finance, in which the living standards of the population would decline, or some kind of economic controls. Furthermore, the revolutionary bourgeoisie also faced the question of the expropriation of the reactionaries and disposition of their property. Thus, the Robespierre dictatorship, under the direct military pressure of the so-called sans-culottes of Paris, instituted elements of economic control in conflict with the basic bourgeois ideology of laissez faire, the unlimited expansion of incomes and the historic interests of the bourgeoisie.
However, Robespierre genuinely believed that his policies represented a trans-class national interest. In 1793 Robespierre rewrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, since the original Declaration, representing an earlier phase, was too liberal. Incidentally, the rewritten Declaration of the Rights of Man is substantially • to the left of [Socialist Workers Party candidate] Peter Camejo's electoral campaign. The 1793 Declaration demanded that every able-bodied Frenchman be guaranteed a job or that the
state provide support; that the state provide free education; that every foreign citizen resident in France for more than six months and not a counterrevolutionary be automatically granted French citizenship; and that when the government violates the rights of the people the people have the sacred right and duty to insurrect.
Now, when the French Revolution had beaten back the external military threat, the conservative bourgeoisie, whose social base was mainly the peasantry, overthrew Robespierre; the conservative bourgeoisie formed a
parliamentary majority which had an element of a right-left bloc, because Robespierre had also tended to suppress elements of the Paris proletariat who were going too far. And that was Thermidor, the ninth of Thermidor. So the Robespierre heritage was therefore ambiguous. But, nonetheless, it was extremely important that the Jacobin dictatorship was assimilated in the communist tradition even by a certain kind of distortion of history—which saw Robespierre as really a communist—a distortion which certainly did not represent any malice, but rather a kind of false consciousness.
The Thermidorian reaction did not lead to a stable regime; only the overthrow of all elements of representative civilian government by Napoleon Bonaparte five years later stabilized that regime. So in the interim, the Jacobins, although suppressed and dispersed, continued to be a politically organized force and a potential contender for power.
Conspiracy of Equals
In 1796 there was a regroupment of the left-wing revolutionaries headed by Babeuf which on the basis of their experience had gone over to communism. Now, in some aspects, the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals represented a genuine, fundamental programmatic shift toward communism. But around the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals, which was not a small group of fanatics by any means, there were also followers of Robespierre, so they constituted basically a unified left opposition subscribing to two programs which were not really consistent with one another. One was a program simply calling for a return to the democratic constitution of 1793, which was acceptable to the Jacobins and had the historical authority of Robespierre. The other was the doctrine of Babouvists proper, which was that of a communistic regime.
The Conspiracy of Equals suffered from over-confidence; they simply passed out bills saying, "We are the secret committee of insurrection and we're going to insurrect." This agitation actually intersected considerable discontent. Thus, the army mutinied before they got around to organizing it, so that the rebellion was suppressed and the soldiers shipped out, and
the Conspiracy was infiltrated and suppressed. But it is worth noting that simply as an insurrection the Conspiracy of Equals could have succeeded. But the Conspiracy could not have carried out its program, and Babeuf personally would have been displaced by the right wing of his own movement. Nevertheless, one could have had a second reign of terror in 1796.
There was another important duality in Babouvism. On the one hand, it had its popular program for return to universal suffrage. On the other hand, the experience of the reign of terror, in which a conservative majority had ousted Robespierre, combined with the recognition that Robespierre had only stayed in power by calling upon the Paris population every once and awhile to invade the Convention and silence the representatives who had been elected by the peasants, convinced the Babouvists that they would need in the initial stages a dictatorship of revolutionaries. Filippo Buonarroti, who carried this tradition forward, described their ideas,
"To found a Republic belongs only to such disinterested friends of humanity and of their country whose reason and courage have shot above the reason and courage of their contemporaries. The spirit of the Republic when established forms that of the citizens and of the magistrates, but at the commencement it is only the wisest and most ardent instigators of reform who can create the popular republican spirit. It was therefore a point resolutely agreed upon by committee [the Babouvist committee] that the magistrates, imposed at first and exclusively of the best revolutionaries, should not be subsequently renewed by the full application of the constitutional laws at once, but only generally and partially as the proportion of progress of national regeneration."
One has here the germs of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, albeit deformed through a certain objectively determined false
consciousness. The Babouvists empirically recognized that, had there been a free election in 1796, the communist Jacobins or even the radical Jacobins would not have been a majority; they were a majority in Paris but not in the country. This was not transformed into an understanding of the class differences between the peasantry, which had already gotten what they wanted, namely the land and the abolition of feudal taxes and obligations, and a pre-industrial working class; rather, this recognition was translated into the notion of the difference between the enlightened revolutionists and the backward masses.
So the revolutionary regime was seen as the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, selected on-the basis of individual political morality. In this sense, the Babouvists did not and could not transcend the ideological premises of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Babeuf and Darthe were executed; but before his death, Babeuf wrote to one of his collaborators—he said, "Here are my notes, here are my ideas. Save these for posterity."
That collaborator for the next forty years worked to realize the Babouvist program. He was an Italian by the name of Filippo Michele Buonarroti. The most important work of his life, I would argue, was in the last five years, when the man was in his seventies. Because, he was an Italian, he did not participate as a politician during the Jacobin dictatorship but rather as a revolutionary administrator. He was a troubleshooter and a terrorist. So he began his career as the Jacobin equivalent of the Cheka. Then he was imprisoned for a while, but following Thermidor he was released, in this regroupment he joined the Babouvists. He was an orthodox follower of Robespierre; he convinced Babeuf for tactical reasons to claim the traditions of Robespierre rather than Hebert, who had less historical prestige with the masses.
Thinking about Buonarroti's career, the parallels with Trotsky are so great as to be overwhelming. They simply force themselves upon one's consciousness, although there is a difference, and it is a difference which appears superficial but is in fact fundamental, the difference between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian revolution.
Buonarroti was the only one of his revolutionary generation to carry on against overwhelming historical odds, and in greater isolation than Trotsky faced, the traditions of the French Revolution and its most radical expression. He did this in two forms. In the year 1828, as an old man, he published a book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of Equals], which both in effect and in purpose was The Revolution Betrayed of its day. In fact, the main theme was the original Thermidor, the one in 1794, not the one in 1924. In its day the book actually had a greater mass impact than The Revolution Betrayed, and was known as the Bible of revolutionaries. It was the book that educated the generation that educated Karl Marx. However, Buonarroti was not content, being a man of action, to limit himself simply to the literary expression of doctrine as important as that was. He also attempted to establish international revolutionary organizations.
Reaction and conspiratorial strategy
Yet there is a difference with Trotsky which is fundamental. In a certain sense it encapsulates the whole purpose of this class series. The French counterrevolution, and French Bonapartism, was forced by overwhelming historical objective circumstances. Thus, the entire generation of Jacobins, including many Babouvists, capitulated to Bonapartism, so that throughout the Napoleonic era the bureaucracy and the army contained ex-Jacobins, ex-Hebertists, ex-Babouvists and ex-partisans of Robespierre. Even Napoleon himself could declare, "I was never a dictator; I was never an oppressor. I was a true son of the French Revolution. I'm here because I fought to liberate the people against the tyrants." Read some of Napoleon's last letters; he sounds very radical.
Buonarroti's ex-Jacobin comrades tended to abound within the interstices of the French bureaucracy. In fact, one of the reasons Buonarroti survived was that he skillfully exploited the Jacobin "old boys club." This fact conditioned his conception of strategy, which was not the organization of a revolution from the ground up but rather from the top of society, from communist sympathizers within the state bureaucracy, within the army, within these very restricted parliaments. Therefore, the Buonarroti organizations were conspiratorial organizations in several different senses. They were not merely a means of hiding from the authorities, the absolutely reactionary authorities; they were a means of the conspiratorial infiltration and manipulation of the liberal opposition.
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Guidelines for recruitment to the first international communist (Babouvist) organization, the Sublimes Maitres Parfaits led by Filippo Buonarroti.
*Devotion to the principles of the order and willingness to sacrifice to them personal interest and pleasure.
*Courage, that is to say, scorn of danger of work and hardship. *Patience and perseverance.
*Moderation in the use of intoxicating liquors.
*The habit of speaking little and to the point.
*No wish to make an impression, to shine, and to impose oneself.
*Caution in gambling, in love, in anger, and in the opening of one's
heart.
*Exquisite sensibility concerning the wrongs that weigh on humanity.
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Buonarroti's strategy was to attempt to achieve through conspiratorial manipulation the organic radicalization of the French Revolution. You begin with a constitutional monarch, then you go to the liberal bourgeoisie, then the radical bourgeoisie, and then communism. The Buonarroti secret societies would have their members join something like the Society for Freedom of the Press or the semi-legal, liberal nationalistic oppositions in Metternich-ean Europe. So, you were electing somebody you thought was a good liberal; but he was really a communist on the hotline to Geneva, where Buonarroti was running the operation.
Thus, Buonarroti's strategy, which was in a certain sense realistically
conditioned by the existence of an era of bourgeois-democratic revolution, was the conspiratorial manipulation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the service of communism. For that reason these were hierarchical organizations whose ultimate program was not known to its lower ranks. Only Buonarroti and the Central Committee knew the real program. You joined if you were a liberal and believed in universal suffrage. If you were a revo¬lutionary democrat, you reached the second level; and you only got to know the final program after you had been coopted onto the Central Committee. Ultimately, Buonarroti's conception, of course, was Utopian. However, in the year 1821, Buonarroti's followers were involved in—even leading—partially successful, simultaneous insurrections in Spain, Naples and Rome. For one man, that is not bad!
In one talk I can only give some index of the importance of Buonarroti. If you read a biography of Marx, you will find under this period just names: he collaborated with this person here and that person there. Well, in almost every case, all of Marx's collabor¬ators in the 1840’s were either indirectly or directly influenced or recruited by Buonarroti! To give you just two examples, which could be multi¬plied ad infinitum. In 1847 the front group for the Communist League in Belgium was called the Democratic Association, of which Marx was the vice-president and a man named Lucien Jottrand was the president. In 1828 Buonarroti was in Belgium and he recruited a small circle of Belgian followers, one of whom was Lucien Jottrand. Another example: Marx's leading non-German collaborator throughout this period was the left-wing leader of British Chartism, Julian Harney, a very important figure in his own right. Barney’s mentor was an earlier left-wing leader of British Chartism named James Bronterre O'Brien. In 1836, Buonarroti's book on Babeuf was translated into English by -James Bronterre O'Brien.
So, I’ll conclude with an anecdote indicating what Buonarroti contributed to the communist movement. James Bronterre O'Brien, after he translated the book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of EquaIs], began a correspondence with Buonarroti the year before Buonarroti died. At that time O'Brien was an Owenite, or had been an Owenite, Owenite socialism being pacifist and cooperativist. O'Brien translated Owen's writings into French and sent them to Buonarroti and asked him for his ideas on Owenite socialism. Buonarroti wrote back, in effect, "You know, it's remarkable that Owen, independent of Babeuf and I, has the same conception of what society should look like, what we are working for. But he seems to believe that you can get this while keeping the existing British government, while keeping the monarchy.
By Joseph Seymour
EDITOR'S NOTE: Over the weekend of 17-19 January in Berkeley more than 100 supporters of the Spartacus Youth League and the SpartacistLeague participated in a SYL West Coast educational conference. The program featured presentations on the Soviet economy, the Right Opposition in the Bolshevik Party during the 1920's, and the heritage of Jacobin communism. Beginning with this issue Young Spartacus is publishing the contribution "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition" by Joseph Seymour, a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League. To preserve the character of the verbal presentation we have introduced only stylistic alterations and deletions.
I am in the process of giving a seven-part [SYL class] series, titled "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." This talk constitutes a compression of the first three parts: it is an attempt to analyze the main European revolutionary movement from the French Revolution until the time that Marx as a left-of-center bourgeois democrat arrived in France and Engels as a Utopian socialist, bo-hemian hellrake from the University of Berlin arrived in England, where they were transformed into communists.
In the general conception of the origins and background of Marxism there is the tendency toward idealization and individualization which sees Marx as a genius who assimilated Hegel, Ricardo and Adam Smith and who read history and then synthesized these intellectual traditions into Marxism. Now, this is simply not true. In 1847 Marx joined an organization which had a twelve year revolutionary history. He did not join as a member; he joined at the top after he had come to agreement with the leadership. But it was not his organization, and he was a leader not because these people were •followers of Marx but because his own ideas were in congruence with theirs.
Objectively, there has been the suppression of the influence of the Jacobin communist tradition and the living organizational links, not simply the ideological and intellectual effects, of the French Revolution through two generations of revolutionary communists who, in the broad sense, educated Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There are, I think, several reasons as to why there is this false view.
First, since World War n, particularly, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, virtually all of the literature on Marxist historiography has been done by academics who have no knowledge of or interest in revolutionary organization,
Filippo Buonarroti.
so that there has been a systematic idealization of Marx. Second, the Stalinists, who have done much of the historical study of the pre-1848 left, are very much aware of the revolutionary movement, but introduce another kind of falsification, namely, the cult of personality projected back- • wards. When Marx walks on the historic stage of 1843 in the Stalinist writings, he is presented as standing head and shoulders above the people who taught him things which he did not know and could not have figured out for himself. Within the Stalinist historiography of this period there is a strong tendency to deny Marx's assertion that the educator too must be educated. Finally, there is what could be called the obscurity of the obvious. Marx's debt to German philosophical traditions was in many ways unique. But Marx shared with almost all of his contemporaries a profound debt to the Jacobin communist traditibn. In 1861 Marx wrote, in effect, "Well, of course, before 1848 everybody was a Babouv-ist." At that time all communists basically identified with the left wing of the French Revolution.
So, a main purpose of this series, of which the talk is a part, is to restore to the consciousness of our comrades our real debt to Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Julian Harney and Karl Schapper. Without them, both as individuals and as tendencies', Marx would have been nothing other than a German academic, just another version of Bruno Bauer.
Shaping impact of Great French Revolution
The great British historian, William Maitland, said that the most difficult thing about history is to remember that events which happened long ago were once in the future. Indeed, one of the most difficult things is to be able to put yourself into the political context of the 1820's and the 1830's. But there are two things that stand out, and they are interrelated.
First, one cannot overestimate the degree to which the consciousness of the revolutionaries and communists of those days was shaped by the French Revolution. The Jacobin dictatorship which lasted one year represented for any revolutionary democrat or communist—and the line between them was very thin—the only thing that they had to look back on, the only historic experience that they could build on. The period from the overthrow of Robespierre at least to the revolution of 1830 in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in Britain, but really to the revolution of 1848, was a period of deep reaction, in which the possibility of a radical bourgeois-democratic republic seemed almost Utopian. The historic experiences on which to build a communist theory were very meager and were concentrated in one great event— the French Revolution, specifically, the Jacobin dictatorship.
Second, on the basis of the French Revolution and the attitudes of the ruling class, communism was generally identified with democracy. As Metter-nich remarked, "There is no difference between a liberal and a communist. " For Metternich there was no difference: if you had universal suffrage, if you overthrew the government and instituted a bourgeois democracy, then the collectivization of property—the expropriation of the bourgeoisie—was relatively easy. Only the experience of the revolution, of 1848 allowed for a general re-evaluation of that premise. But before 1848, from Metternich through Marx, it was assumed that universal suffrage, at least in a country like England, would be associated with the massive economic reorganization in the interests of the proletariat—the proletariat then
being not the industrial working class, but basically the plebeian masses, those who own nothing but their labor or who did not employ labor.
The French Revolution shares with the Bolshevik Revolution the fact that the revolutionaries had a strong doctrinal pre-history. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf and Marat were no less committed to carrying out the doctrines of Rousseau, Diderot and the other French philosophes than Lenin and Trotsky were to Marx. Therefore, one cannot understand the French Revolution, particularly Jacobin communism, without some knowledge of the left wing of the French Enlightenment.
The dominant philosopher who shaped the French revolutionary movement was Jean Jacques Rousseau. I will simply make the following point about Rousseau: unlike the other philosophers of the bourgeois-democratic movement, such as the Englishman Locke, Rousseau did not regard property as a natural right but as a social convention. He believed that as a social convention, property was serviceable in the interests of democracy and individual freedom. While having as an ideal a society of small property owners, Rousseau never regarded property as a natural right; therefore, one could indeed be a follower of Rousseau and be a communist, simply by differing with Rousseau not on the question of principle, but rather on the question of his empirical evaluation of property as the best convention to guarantee individual liberty.
There were also contemporaries of Rousseau, notably a Catholic priest named Mably and an atheist named Morelly, who disagreed with Rousseau. They contended that only under a col-lectivist system, only when there is equality of consumption and some kind of general collective organization of labor, can there arise a genuinely democratic society. There existed, therefore, in a doctrinal form, concepts of communism which arose out of the ideological preparation for the greatest of bourgeois-democratic revolutions.
Jacobin dictatorship
The Jacobin dictatorship, the reign of terror, the rule of Robespierre, represented an episode in which the revolutionary bourgeoisie, facing overwhelming international reaction and not yet having established its own strong state apparatus, had to make certain concessions to the masses, particularly the masses of Paris, which tended to be the seat of social power in France. In particular, the need to finance a revolutionary war could be done through either unrestrained inflationary finance, in which the living standards of the population would decline, or some kind of economic controls. Furthermore, the revolutionary bourgeoisie also faced the question of the expropriation of the reactionaries and disposition of their property. Thus, the Robespierre dictatorship, under the direct military pressure of the so-called sans-culottes of Paris, instituted elements of economic control in conflict with the basic bourgeois ideology of laissez faire, the unlimited expansion of incomes and the historic interests of the bourgeoisie.
However, Robespierre genuinely believed that his policies represented a trans-class national interest. In 1793 Robespierre rewrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, since the original Declaration, representing an earlier phase, was too liberal. Incidentally, the rewritten Declaration of the Rights of Man is substantially • to the left of [Socialist Workers Party candidate] Peter Camejo's electoral campaign. The 1793 Declaration demanded that every able-bodied Frenchman be guaranteed a job or that the
state provide support; that the state provide free education; that every foreign citizen resident in France for more than six months and not a counterrevolutionary be automatically granted French citizenship; and that when the government violates the rights of the people the people have the sacred right and duty to insurrect.
Now, when the French Revolution had beaten back the external military threat, the conservative bourgeoisie, whose social base was mainly the peasantry, overthrew Robespierre; the conservative bourgeoisie formed a
parliamentary majority which had an element of a right-left bloc, because Robespierre had also tended to suppress elements of the Paris proletariat who were going too far. And that was Thermidor, the ninth of Thermidor. So the Robespierre heritage was therefore ambiguous. But, nonetheless, it was extremely important that the Jacobin dictatorship was assimilated in the communist tradition even by a certain kind of distortion of h i s t o r y—which saw Robespierre as really a communist—a distortion which certainly did not represent any malice, but rather a kind of false consciousness. The Thermidorian reaction did not lead to a stable regime; only the overthrow of all elements of representative civilian government by Napoleon Bonaparte five years later stablilized that regime. So in the interim, the Jacobins, although suppressed and dispersed, continued to be a politically organized force and a potential contender for power.
Conspiracy of Equals
In 1796 there was a regroupment 01 the left-wing revolutionaries headed by Babeuf which on the basis of their experience had gone over to communism. Now, in some aspects, the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals represented a genuine, fundamental programmatic shift toward communism. But around the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals, which was not a small group of fanatics by any means, there were also followers of Robespierre, so they constituted basically a unified left opposition subscribing to two programs which were not really consistent with one another. One was a program simply calling for a return to the democratic constitution of 1793, which was acceptable to the Jacobins and had the historical authority of Robespierre. The other was the doctrine of Babouv-ists proper, which was that of a communistic regime.
The Conspiracy of Equals suffered from over-confidence; they simply passed out bills saying, "We are the secret committee of insurrection and we're going to insurrect." This agitation actually intersected considerable discontent. Thus, the army mutinied before they got around to organizing it, so that the rebellion was suppressed and the soldiers shipped out, and
the Conspiracy was infiltrated and suppressed. But it is worth noting that simply as an insurrection the Conspiracy of Equals could have succeeded. But the Conspiracy could not have carried out its program, and Data euf personally would have been displaced by the right wing of his own movement. Nevertheless, one could have had a second reign of terror in 1796.
There was another important duality in Babouvism. On the one hand, it had its popular program for return to universal suffrage. On the other hand, the experience of the reign of terror, in which a conservative majority had ousted Robespierre, combined with the recognition that Robespierre had only stayed in power by calling upon the Paris population every once and awhile to invade the Convention and silence the representatives who had been elected by the peasants, convinced the Babouvists that they would need in the initial stages a dictatorship of revolutionaries. Filippo Buonarroti, who carried this tradition
forward, described their ideas,
"To found a Republic belongs only to such disinterested friends of humanity and of their country whose reason and courage have shot above the reason and courage of their contemporaries. The spirit of the Republic when established forms that of the citizens and of the magistrates, but at the commencement it is only the wisest and most ardent instigators of reform who can create the popular republican spirit. It was therefore a point resolutely agreed upon by committee [the Babouvist committee] that the magistries, imposed at first and exclusively of the best revolutionaries, should not be subsequently renewed by the full application of the constitutional laws at once, but only generally and partially as the proportion of progress of national regeneration." One has here the germs of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, albeit deformed through a certain objectively determined false
consciousness. The Babouvists empirically recognized that, had there been a free election in 1796, the communist Jacobins or even the radical Jacobins would not have been a majority; they were a majority in Paris but not in the country. This was not transformed into an understanding of the class differences between the peasantry, which had already gotten what they wanted, namely the land and the abolition of feudal taxes and obligations, andapre-industrial working class; rather, this recognition was translated into the notion of the difference between the enlightened revolutionists and the backward masses.
So the revolutionary regime was seen as the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, selected on-the basis of individual political morality. In this sense, the Babouvists did not and could not transcend the ideological premises of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Babeuf and Darthe were executed; but before his death, Babeuf wrote to one of his collaborators—he said, "Here are my notes, here are my ideas. Save these for posterity."
That collaborator for the next forty years worked to realize the Babouvist program. He was an Italian by the name of Filippo Michele Buonarroti. The most important work of his life, I would argue, was in the last five years, when the man was in his seventies. Because ,he was an Italian, he did not participate as a politician during the Jacobin dictatorship but rather as a revolutionary administrator. He was a troubleshooter and a terrorist. So he began his career as the Jacobin equivalent of the Cheka. Then he was imprisoned for awhile, but following Thermidor he was released, in this regroupment he joined the Babouvists. He was an orthodox follower of Robespierre; he convinced Babeuf for tactical reasons to claim the traditions of Robespierre rather than Hebert, who had less historical prestige with the masses.
Thinking about Buonarroti's career, the parallels with Trotsky are so great as to be overwhelming. They simply force themselves upon one's consciousness, although there is a difference, and it is a difference which appears superficial but is in fact fundamental, the difference between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian revolution.
Buonarroti was the only one of his revolutionary generation to carry on against overwhelming historical odds, and in greater isolation than Trotsky faced, the traditions of the French Revolution and its most radical expression. He did this in two forms. In the year 1828, as an old man, he published a book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of Equals], which both in effect and in purpose was The Revolution Betrayed of its day. In fact, the main theme was the original Thermidor, the one in 1794, not the one in 1924. In its day the book actually had a greater mass impact than The Revolution Betrayed, and was known as the Bible of revolutionaries. It was the book that educated the generation that educated Karl Marx. However, Buonarroti was not content, being a man of action, to limit himself simplt to the literary expression of doctr;*< as important as that was. He also A tempted to establish international re '-olutionary organizations.
Reaction and conspiratorial strategy
Yet there is a difference with Trotsky which is fundamental. In a certain sense it encapsulates the whole purpose of this class series. The French counterrevolution, and French Bonapartism, was forced by overwhelming historical objective circumstances. Thus, the entire generation of Jacobins, including many Babouvists, capitulated to Bonapartism, so that throughout the Napoleonic era the bureaucracy and the army contained ex-Jacobins, ex-HSbertists, ex-Babouvists and ex-partisans of Robespierre. Even Napoleon himself could declare, "I was never a dictator; I was never an oppressor. I was a true son of the French Revolution. I'm here because I fought to liberate the people against the tyrants." Read some of Napoleon's last letters; he sounds very radical.
Buonarroti's ex-Jacobin comrades tended to abound within the interstices of the French bureaucracy. In fact, one of the reasons Buonarroti survived was that he skillfully exploited the Jacobin "old boys club." This fact conditioned his conception of strategy, which was not the organization of a revolution from the ground up but rather from the top of society, from communist sympathizers within the state bureaucracy, within the army, within these very restricted parliaments. Therefore, the Buonarroti organizations were conspiratorial organizations in several different senses. They were not merely a means of hiding from the authorities, the absolutely reactionary authorities; they were a means of the conspiratorial infiltration and manipulation of the liberal opposition.
**********
Guidelines for recruitment to the first international communist (Babouvist) organization, the Sublimes Maitres Parfaits led by Filippo Buonarroti.
*Devotion to the principles of the order and willingness to sacrifice to them personal interest and pleasure.
*Courage, that is to say, scorn of danger of work and hardship. *Patience and perseverance.
*Moderation in the use of intoxicating liquors.
*The habit of speaking little and to the point.
*No wish to make an impression, to shine, and to impose oneself.
*Caution in gambling, in love, in anger, and in the opening of one's
heart.
*Exquisite sensibility concerning the wrongs that weigh on humanity.
*************
Buonarroti's strategy was to attempt to achieve through conspiratorial manipulation the organic radicalization of the French Revolution. You begin •with a constitutional monarch, then you go to the liberal bourgeoisie, then the radical bourgeoisie, and then communism. The Buonarroti secret^ societies would have their members join something like the Society for Freedom of the Press or the semi-legal, liberal nationalistic oppositions in Metternich-ean Europe. So, you were electing somebody you thought was a good liberal; but he was really a communist on the hotline to Geneva, where Buonarroti was running the operation.
Thus, Buonarroti's strategy, which was in a certain sense realistically
conditioned by the existence of an era of bourgeois-democratic r e voluti on, was the conspiratorial manipulation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the service of communism. For that reason these were hierarchical organizations whose ultimate program was not known to its lower ranks. Only Buonarroti and the Central Committee knew the real program. You joined if you were a liberal and believed in universal suffrage. If you were a revolutionary democrat, you reached the second level; and you only got to know the final program after you had been coopted onto the Central Committee. Ultimately, Buonarroti's conception, of course, was Utopian. However, in the year 1821, Buonarroti's followers were involved in—even leading—partially successful, simultaneous insurrections in Spain, Naples and Rome. For one man, that is not bad!
In one talk I can only give some index of the importance of Buonarroti. If you read a biography of Marx, you will find under this period just names: he collaborated with this person here and that person there. Well, in almost every case, all of Marx's collaborators in the 1840's were either indirectly or directly influenced or recruited by Buonarroti! To give you just two examples, which could be multiplied ad infinitum. In 1847 the front group for the Communist League in Belgium was called the Democratic Association, of which Marx was the vice-president and a man named Lucien Jottrand was the president. In 1828 Buonarroti was in Belgium and he recruited a small circle of Belgian followers, one of whom was Lucien Jottrand. Another example: Marx's leading non-German collaborator throughout this period was the left-wing leader of British Chartism, Julian Harney, a very important figure in his own right. Barney's mentor was an earlier left-wing leader of British Chartism named James Bronterre O'Brien. In 1836, Buonarroti's book on Babeuf was translated into English by -Tames Bronterre O'Brien.
So, I'll conclude with an anecdote indicating what Buonarroti contributed to the communist movement. James Bronterre O'Brien, after he translated the book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of EquaIs], began a correspondence with Buonarroti the year before Buonarroti died. At that time O'Brien was an Owenite, or had.been an Owenite, Owenite socialism being pacifist and cooperativist. O'Brien translated Owen's writings into French and sent them to Buonarroti and asked him for his ideas on Owenite socialism. Buonarroti wrote back, in effect, "You know, it's remarkable that Owen, independent of Babeuf and I, has the same conception of what society should look like, what we are working for. But he seems to believe that you can get this while keeping the existing British government, while keeping the monarchy.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.
As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
***********
Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part One- Buonarroti and Babouvist Heritage
By Joseph Seymour
EDITOR'S NOTE: Over the weekend of 17-19 January in Berkeley more than 100 supporters of the Spartacus Youth League and the Spartacist League participated in a SYL West Coast educational conference. The program featured presentations on the Soviet economy, the Right Opposition in the Bolshevik Party during the 1920's, and the heritage of Jacobin communism. Beginning with this issue Young Spartacus is publishing the contribution "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition" by Joseph Seymour, a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League. To preserve the character of the verbal presentation we have introduced only stylistic alterations and deletions.
I am in the process of giving a seven-part [SYL class] series, titled "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." This talk constitutes a compression of the first three parts: it is an attempt to analyze the main European revolutionary movement from the French Revolution until the time that Marx as a left-of-center bourgeois democrat arrived in France and Engels as a Utopian socialist, bohemian hell rake from the University of Berlin arrived in England, where they were transformed into communists.
In the general conception of the origins and background of Marxism there is the tendency toward idealization and individualization which sees Marx as a genius who assimilated Hegel, Ricardo and Adam Smith and who read history and then synthesized these intellectual traditions into Marxism. Now, this is simply not true. In 1847 Marx joined an organization which had a twelve year revolutionary history. He did not join as a member; he joined at the top after he had come to agreement with the leadership. But it was not his organization, and he was a leader not because these people were followers of Marx but because his own ideas were in congruence with theirs.
Objectively, there has been the suppression of the influence of the Jacobin communist tradition and the living organizational links, not simply the ideological and intellectual effects, of the French Revolution through two generations of revolutionary communists who, in the broad sense, educated Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There are, I think, several reasons as to why there is this false view.
First, since World War II, particularly, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, virtually all of the literature on Marxist historiography has been done by academics who have no knowledge of or interest in revolutionary organization, so that there has been a systematic idealization of Marx. Second, the Stalinists, who have done much of the historical study of the pre-1848 left, are very much aware of the revolutionary movement, but introduce another kind of falsification, namely, the cult of personality projected back- wards. When Marx walks on the historic stage of 1843 in the Stalinist writings, he is presented as standing head and shoulders above the people who taught him things which he did not know and could not have figured out for himself. Within the Stalinist historiography of this period there is a strong tendency to deny Marx's assertion that the educator too must be educated. Finally, there is what could be called the obscurity of the obvious. Marx's debt to German philosophical traditions was in many ways unique. But Marx shared with almost all of his contemporaries a profound debt to the Jacobin communist tradition. In 1861 Marx wrote, in effect, "Well, of course, before 1848 everybody was a Babouvist." At that time all communists basically identified with the left wing of the French Revolution.
So, a main purpose of this series, of which the talk is a part, is to restore to the consciousness of our comrades our real debt to Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Julian Harney and Karl Schapper. Without them, both as individuals and as tendencies', Marx would have been nothing other than a German academic, just another version of Bruno Bauer.
Shaping impact of Great French Revolution
The great British historian, William Maitland, said that the most difficult thing about history is to remember that events which happened long ago were once in the future. Indeed, one of the most difficult things is to be able to put yourself into the political context of the 1820's and the 1830's. But there are two things that stand out, and they are interrelated.
First, one cannot overestimate the degree to which the consciousness of the revolutionaries and communists of those days was shaped by the French Revolution. The Jacobin dictatorship which lasted one year represented for any revolutionary democrat or communist—and the line between them was very thin—the only thing that they had to look back on, the only historic experience that they could build on. The period from the overthrow of Robespierre at least to the revolution of 1830 in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in Britain, but really to the revolution of 1848, was a period of deep reaction, in which the possibility of a radical bourgeois-democratic republic seemed almost Utopian. The historic experiences on which to build a communist theory were very meager and were concentrated in one great event— the French Revolution, specifically, the Jacobin dictatorship.
Second, on the basis of the French Revolution and the attitudes of the ruling class, communism was generally identified with democracy. As Metternich remarked, "There is no difference between a liberal and a communist.” For Metternich there was no difference: if you had universal suffrage, if you overthrew the government and instituted a bourgeois democracy, then the collectivization of property—the expropriation of the bourgeoisie—was relatively easy. Only the experience of the revolution, of 1848 allowed for a general re-evaluation of that premise. But before 1848, from Metternich through Marx, it was assumed that universal suffrage, at least in a country like England, would be associated with the massive economic reorganization in the interests of the proletariat—the proletariat then
being not the industrial working class, but basically the plebeian masses, those who own nothing but their labor or who did not employ labor.
The French Revolution shares with the Bolshevik Revolution the fact that the revolutionaries had a strong doctrinal pre-history. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf and Marat were no less committed to carrying out the doctrines of Rousseau, Diderot and the other French philosophes than Lenin and Trotsky were to Marx. Therefore, one cannot understand the French Revolution, particularly Jacobin communism, without some knowledge of the left wing of the French Enlightenment.
The dominant philosopher who shaped the French revolutionary movement was Jean Jacques Rousseau. I will simply make the following point about Rousseau: unlike the other philosophers of the bourgeois-democratic movement, such as the Englishman Locke, Rousseau did not regard property as a natural right but as a social convention. He believed that as a social convention, property was serviceable in the interests of democracy and individual freedom. While having as an ideal a society of small property owners, Rousseau never regarded property as a natural right; therefore, one could indeed be a follower of Rousseau and be a communist, simply by differing with Rousseau not on the question of principle, but rather on the question of his empirical evaluation of property as the best convention to guarantee individual liberty.
There were also contemporaries of Rousseau, notably a Catholic priest named Mably and an atheist named Morelly, who disagreed with Rousseau. They contended that only under a collectivist system, only when there is equality of consumption and some kind of general collective organization of labor, can there arise a genuinely democratic society. There existed, therefore, in a doctrinal form, concepts of communism which arose out of the ideological preparation for the greatest of bourgeois-democratic revolutions.
Jacobin dictatorship
The Jacobin dictatorship, the reign of terror, the rule of Robespierre, represented an episode in which the revolutionary bourgeoisie, facing overwhelming international reaction and not yet having established its own strong state apparatus, had to make certain concessions to the masses, particularly the masses of Paris, which tended to be the seat of social power in France. In particular, the need to finance a revolutionary war could be done through either unrestrained inflationary finance, in which the living standards of the population would decline, or some kind of economic controls. Furthermore, the revolutionary bourgeoisie also faced the question of the expropriation of the reactionaries and disposition of their property. Thus, the Robespierre dictatorship, under the direct military pressure of the so-called sans-culottes of Paris, instituted elements of economic control in conflict with the basic bourgeois ideology of laissez faire, the unlimited expansion of incomes and the historic interests of the bourgeoisie.
However, Robespierre genuinely believed that his policies represented a trans-class national interest. In 1793 Robespierre rewrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, since the original Declaration, representing an earlier phase, was too liberal. Incidentally, the rewritten Declaration of the Rights of Man is substantially • to the left of [Socialist Workers Party candidate] Peter Camejo's electoral campaign. The 1793 Declaration demanded that every able-bodied Frenchman be guaranteed a job or that the
state provide support; that the state provide free education; that every foreign citizen resident in France for more than six months and not a counterrevolutionary be automatically granted French citizenship; and that when the government violates the rights of the people the people have the sacred right and duty to insurrect.
Now, when the French Revolution had beaten back the external military threat, the conservative bourgeoisie, whose social base was mainly the peasantry, overthrew Robespierre; the conservative bourgeoisie formed a
parliamentary majority which had an element of a right-left bloc, because Robespierre had also tended to suppress elements of the Paris proletariat who were going too far. And that was Thermidor, the ninth of Thermidor. So the Robespierre heritage was therefore ambiguous. But, nonetheless, it was extremely important that the Jacobin dictatorship was assimilated in the communist tradition even by a certain kind of distortion of history—which saw Robespierre as really a communist—a distortion which certainly did not represent any malice, but rather a kind of false consciousness.
The Thermidorian reaction did not lead to a stable regime; only the overthrow of all elements of representative civilian government by Napoleon Bonaparte five years later stabilized that regime. So in the interim, the Jacobins, although suppressed and dispersed, continued to be a politically organized force and a potential contender for power.
Conspiracy of Equals
In 1796 there was a regroupment of the left-wing revolutionaries headed by Babeuf which on the basis of their experience had gone over to communism. Now, in some aspects, the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals represented a genuine, fundamental programmatic shift toward communism. But around the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals, which was not a small group of fanatics by any means, there were also followers of Robespierre, so they constituted basically a unified left opposition subscribing to two programs which were not really consistent with one another. One was a program simply calling for a return to the democratic constitution of 1793, which was acceptable to the Jacobins and had the historical authority of Robespierre. The other was the doctrine of Babouvists proper, which was that of a communistic regime.
The Conspiracy of Equals suffered from over-confidence; they simply passed out bills saying, "We are the secret committee of insurrection and we're going to insurrect." This agitation actually intersected considerable discontent. Thus, the army mutinied before they got around to organizing it, so that the rebellion was suppressed and the soldiers shipped out, and
the Conspiracy was infiltrated and suppressed. But it is worth noting that simply as an insurrection the Conspiracy of Equals could have succeeded. But the Conspiracy could not have carried out its program, and Babeuf personally would have been displaced by the right wing of his own movement. Nevertheless, one could have had a second reign of terror in 1796.
There was another important duality in Babouvism. On the one hand, it had its popular program for return to universal suffrage. On the other hand, the experience of the reign of terror, in which a conservative majority had ousted Robespierre, combined with the recognition that Robespierre had only stayed in power by calling upon the Paris population every once and awhile to invade the Convention and silence the representatives who had been elected by the peasants, convinced the Babouvists that they would need in the initial stages a dictatorship of revolutionaries. Filippo Buonarroti, who carried this tradition forward, described their ideas,
"To found a Republic belongs only to such disinterested friends of humanity and of their country whose reason and courage have shot above the reason and courage of their contemporaries. The spirit of the Republic when established forms that of the citizens and of the magistrates, but at the commencement it is only the wisest and most ardent instigators of reform who can create the popular republican spirit. It was therefore a point resolutely agreed upon by committee [the Babouvist committee] that the magistrates, imposed at first and exclusively of the best revolutionaries, should not be subsequently renewed by the full application of the constitutional laws at once, but only generally and partially as the proportion of progress of national regeneration."
One has here the germs of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, albeit deformed through a certain objectively determined false
consciousness. The Babouvists empirically recognized that, had there been a free election in 1796, the communist Jacobins or even the radical Jacobins would not have been a majority; they were a majority in Paris but not in the country. This was not transformed into an understanding of the class differences between the peasantry, which had already gotten what they wanted, namely the land and the abolition of feudal taxes and obligations, and a pre-industrial working class; rather, this recognition was translated into the notion of the difference between the enlightened revolutionists and the backward masses.
So the revolutionary regime was seen as the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, selected on-the basis of individual political morality. In this sense, the Babouvists did not and could not transcend the ideological premises of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Babeuf and Darthe were executed; but before his death, Babeuf wrote to one of his collaborators—he said, "Here are my notes, here are my ideas. Save these for posterity."
That collaborator for the next forty years worked to realize the Babouvist program. He was an Italian by the name of Filippo Michele Buonarroti. The most important work of his life, I would argue, was in the last five years, when the man was in his seventies. Because, he was an Italian, he did not participate as a politician during the Jacobin dictatorship but rather as a revolutionary administrator. He was a troubleshooter and a terrorist. So he began his career as the Jacobin equivalent of the Cheka. Then he was imprisoned for a while, but following Thermidor he was released, in this regroupment he joined the Babouvists. He was an orthodox follower of Robespierre; he convinced Babeuf for tactical reasons to claim the traditions of Robespierre rather than Hebert, who had less historical prestige with the masses.
Thinking about Buonarroti's career, the parallels with Trotsky are so great as to be overwhelming. They simply force themselves upon one's consciousness, although there is a difference, and it is a difference which appears superficial but is in fact fundamental, the difference between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian revolution.
Buonarroti was the only one of his revolutionary generation to carry on against overwhelming historical odds, and in greater isolation than Trotsky faced, the traditions of the French Revolution and its most radical expression. He did this in two forms. In the year 1828, as an old man, he published a book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of Equals], which both in effect and in purpose was The Revolution Betrayed of its day. In fact, the main theme was the original Thermidor, the one in 1794, not the one in 1924. In its day the book actually had a greater mass impact than The Revolution Betrayed, and was known as the Bible of revolutionaries. It was the book that educated the generation that educated Karl Marx. However, Buonarroti was not content, being a man of action, to limit himself simply to the literary expression of doctrine as important as that was. He also attempted to establish international revolutionary organizations.
Reaction and conspiratorial strategy
Yet there is a difference with Trotsky which is fundamental. In a certain sense it encapsulates the whole purpose of this class series. The French counterrevolution, and French Bonapartism, was forced by overwhelming historical objective circumstances. Thus, the entire generation of Jacobins, including many Babouvists, capitulated to Bonapartism, so that throughout the Napoleonic era the bureaucracy and the army contained ex-Jacobins, ex-Hebertists, ex-Babouvists and ex-partisans of Robespierre. Even Napoleon himself could declare, "I was never a dictator; I was never an oppressor. I was a true son of the French Revolution. I'm here because I fought to liberate the people against the tyrants." Read some of Napoleon's last letters; he sounds very radical.
Buonarroti's ex-Jacobin comrades tended to abound within the interstices of the French bureaucracy. In fact, one of the reasons Buonarroti survived was that he skillfully exploited the Jacobin "old boys club." This fact conditioned his conception of strategy, which was not the organization of a revolution from the ground up but rather from the top of society, from communist sympathizers within the state bureaucracy, within the army, within these very restricted parliaments. Therefore, the Buonarroti organizations were conspiratorial organizations in several different senses. They were not merely a means of hiding from the authorities, the absolutely reactionary authorities; they were a means of the conspiratorial infiltration and manipulation of the liberal opposition.
**********
Guidelines for recruitment to the first international communist (Babouvist) organization, the Sublimes Maitres Parfaits led by Filippo Buonarroti.
*Devotion to the principles of the order and willingness to sacrifice to them personal interest and pleasure.
*Courage, that is to say, scorn of danger of work and hardship. *Patience and perseverance.
*Moderation in the use of intoxicating liquors.
*The habit of speaking little and to the point.
*No wish to make an impression, to shine, and to impose oneself.
*Caution in gambling, in love, in anger, and in the opening of one's
heart.
*Exquisite sensibility concerning the wrongs that weigh on humanity.
*************
Buonarroti's strategy was to attempt to achieve through conspiratorial manipulation the organic radicalization of the French Revolution. You begin with a constitutional monarch, then you go to the liberal bourgeoisie, then the radical bourgeoisie, and then communism. The Buonarroti secret societies would have their members join something like the Society for Freedom of the Press or the semi-legal, liberal nationalistic oppositions in Metternich-ean Europe. So, you were electing somebody you thought was a good liberal; but he was really a communist on the hotline to Geneva, where Buonarroti was running the operation.
Thus, Buonarroti's strategy, which was in a certain sense realistically
conditioned by the existence of an era of bourgeois-democratic revolution, was the conspiratorial manipulation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the service of communism. For that reason these were hierarchical organizations whose ultimate program was not known to its lower ranks. Only Buonarroti and the Central Committee knew the real program. You joined if you were a liberal and believed in universal suffrage. If you were a revo¬lutionary democrat, you reached the second level; and you only got to know the final program after you had been coopted onto the Central Committee. Ultimately, Buonarroti's conception, of course, was Utopian. However, in the year 1821, Buonarroti's followers were involved in—even leading—partially successful, simultaneous insurrections in Spain, Naples and Rome. For one man, that is not bad!
In one talk I can only give some index of the importance of Buonarroti. If you read a biography of Marx, you will find under this period just names: he collaborated with this person here and that person there. Well, in almost every case, all of Marx's collabor¬ators in the 1840’s were either indirectly or directly influenced or recruited by Buonarroti! To give you just two examples, which could be multi¬plied ad infinitum. In 1847 the front group for the Communist League in Belgium was called the Democratic Association, of which Marx was the vice-president and a man named Lucien Jottrand was the president. In 1828 Buonarroti was in Belgium and he recruited a small circle of Belgian followers, one of whom was Lucien Jottrand. Another example: Marx's leading non-German collaborator throughout this period was the left-wing leader of British Chartism, Julian Harney, a very important figure in his own right. Barney’s mentor was an earlier left-wing leader of British Chartism named James Bronterre O'Brien. In 1836, Buonarroti's book on Babeuf was translated into English by -James Bronterre O'Brien.
So, I’ll conclude with an anecdote indicating what Buonarroti contributed to the communist movement. James Bronterre O'Brien, after he translated the book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of EquaIs], began a correspondence with Buonarroti the year before Buonarroti died. At that time O'Brien was an Owenite, or had been an Owenite, Owenite socialism being pacifist and cooperativist. O'Brien translated Owen's writings into French and sent them to Buonarroti and asked him for his ideas on Owenite socialism. Buonarroti wrote back, in effect, "You know, it's remarkable that Owen, independent of Babeuf and I, has the same conception of what society should look like, what we are working for. But he seems to believe that you can get this while keeping the existing British government, while keeping the monarchy.
By Joseph Seymour
EDITOR'S NOTE: Over the weekend of 17-19 January in Berkeley more than 100 supporters of the Spartacus Youth League and the SpartacistLeague participated in a SYL West Coast educational conference. The program featured presentations on the Soviet economy, the Right Opposition in the Bolshevik Party during the 1920's, and the heritage of Jacobin communism. Beginning with this issue Young Spartacus is publishing the contribution "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition" by Joseph Seymour, a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League. To preserve the character of the verbal presentation we have introduced only stylistic alterations and deletions.
I am in the process of giving a seven-part [SYL class] series, titled "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." This talk constitutes a compression of the first three parts: it is an attempt to analyze the main European revolutionary movement from the French Revolution until the time that Marx as a left-of-center bourgeois democrat arrived in France and Engels as a Utopian socialist, bo-hemian hellrake from the University of Berlin arrived in England, where they were transformed into communists.
In the general conception of the origins and background of Marxism there is the tendency toward idealization and individualization which sees Marx as a genius who assimilated Hegel, Ricardo and Adam Smith and who read history and then synthesized these intellectual traditions into Marxism. Now, this is simply not true. In 1847 Marx joined an organization which had a twelve year revolutionary history. He did not join as a member; he joined at the top after he had come to agreement with the leadership. But it was not his organization, and he was a leader not because these people were •followers of Marx but because his own ideas were in congruence with theirs.
Objectively, there has been the suppression of the influence of the Jacobin communist tradition and the living organizational links, not simply the ideological and intellectual effects, of the French Revolution through two generations of revolutionary communists who, in the broad sense, educated Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There are, I think, several reasons as to why there is this false view.
First, since World War n, particularly, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, virtually all of the literature on Marxist historiography has been done by academics who have no knowledge of or interest in revolutionary organization,
Filippo Buonarroti.
so that there has been a systematic idealization of Marx. Second, the Stalinists, who have done much of the historical study of the pre-1848 left, are very much aware of the revolutionary movement, but introduce another kind of falsification, namely, the cult of personality projected back- • wards. When Marx walks on the historic stage of 1843 in the Stalinist writings, he is presented as standing head and shoulders above the people who taught him things which he did not know and could not have figured out for himself. Within the Stalinist historiography of this period there is a strong tendency to deny Marx's assertion that the educator too must be educated. Finally, there is what could be called the obscurity of the obvious. Marx's debt to German philosophical traditions was in many ways unique. But Marx shared with almost all of his contemporaries a profound debt to the Jacobin communist traditibn. In 1861 Marx wrote, in effect, "Well, of course, before 1848 everybody was a Babouv-ist." At that time all communists basically identified with the left wing of the French Revolution.
So, a main purpose of this series, of which the talk is a part, is to restore to the consciousness of our comrades our real debt to Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Julian Harney and Karl Schapper. Without them, both as individuals and as tendencies', Marx would have been nothing other than a German academic, just another version of Bruno Bauer.
Shaping impact of Great French Revolution
The great British historian, William Maitland, said that the most difficult thing about history is to remember that events which happened long ago were once in the future. Indeed, one of the most difficult things is to be able to put yourself into the political context of the 1820's and the 1830's. But there are two things that stand out, and they are interrelated.
First, one cannot overestimate the degree to which the consciousness of the revolutionaries and communists of those days was shaped by the French Revolution. The Jacobin dictatorship which lasted one year represented for any revolutionary democrat or communist—and the line between them was very thin—the only thing that they had to look back on, the only historic experience that they could build on. The period from the overthrow of Robespierre at least to the revolution of 1830 in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in Britain, but really to the revolution of 1848, was a period of deep reaction, in which the possibility of a radical bourgeois-democratic republic seemed almost Utopian. The historic experiences on which to build a communist theory were very meager and were concentrated in one great event— the French Revolution, specifically, the Jacobin dictatorship.
Second, on the basis of the French Revolution and the attitudes of the ruling class, communism was generally identified with democracy. As Metter-nich remarked, "There is no difference between a liberal and a communist. " For Metternich there was no difference: if you had universal suffrage, if you overthrew the government and instituted a bourgeois democracy, then the collectivization of property—the expropriation of the bourgeoisie—was relatively easy. Only the experience of the revolution, of 1848 allowed for a general re-evaluation of that premise. But before 1848, from Metternich through Marx, it was assumed that universal suffrage, at least in a country like England, would be associated with the massive economic reorganization in the interests of the proletariat—the proletariat then
being not the industrial working class, but basically the plebeian masses, those who own nothing but their labor or who did not employ labor.
The French Revolution shares with the Bolshevik Revolution the fact that the revolutionaries had a strong doctrinal pre-history. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf and Marat were no less committed to carrying out the doctrines of Rousseau, Diderot and the other French philosophes than Lenin and Trotsky were to Marx. Therefore, one cannot understand the French Revolution, particularly Jacobin communism, without some knowledge of the left wing of the French Enlightenment.
The dominant philosopher who shaped the French revolutionary movement was Jean Jacques Rousseau. I will simply make the following point about Rousseau: unlike the other philosophers of the bourgeois-democratic movement, such as the Englishman Locke, Rousseau did not regard property as a natural right but as a social convention. He believed that as a social convention, property was serviceable in the interests of democracy and individual freedom. While having as an ideal a society of small property owners, Rousseau never regarded property as a natural right; therefore, one could indeed be a follower of Rousseau and be a communist, simply by differing with Rousseau not on the question of principle, but rather on the question of his empirical evaluation of property as the best convention to guarantee individual liberty.
There were also contemporaries of Rousseau, notably a Catholic priest named Mably and an atheist named Morelly, who disagreed with Rousseau. They contended that only under a col-lectivist system, only when there is equality of consumption and some kind of general collective organization of labor, can there arise a genuinely democratic society. There existed, therefore, in a doctrinal form, concepts of communism which arose out of the ideological preparation for the greatest of bourgeois-democratic revolutions.
Jacobin dictatorship
The Jacobin dictatorship, the reign of terror, the rule of Robespierre, represented an episode in which the revolutionary bourgeoisie, facing overwhelming international reaction and not yet having established its own strong state apparatus, had to make certain concessions to the masses, particularly the masses of Paris, which tended to be the seat of social power in France. In particular, the need to finance a revolutionary war could be done through either unrestrained inflationary finance, in which the living standards of the population would decline, or some kind of economic controls. Furthermore, the revolutionary bourgeoisie also faced the question of the expropriation of the reactionaries and disposition of their property. Thus, the Robespierre dictatorship, under the direct military pressure of the so-called sans-culottes of Paris, instituted elements of economic control in conflict with the basic bourgeois ideology of laissez faire, the unlimited expansion of incomes and the historic interests of the bourgeoisie.
However, Robespierre genuinely believed that his policies represented a trans-class national interest. In 1793 Robespierre rewrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, since the original Declaration, representing an earlier phase, was too liberal. Incidentally, the rewritten Declaration of the Rights of Man is substantially • to the left of [Socialist Workers Party candidate] Peter Camejo's electoral campaign. The 1793 Declaration demanded that every able-bodied Frenchman be guaranteed a job or that the
state provide support; that the state provide free education; that every foreign citizen resident in France for more than six months and not a counterrevolutionary be automatically granted French citizenship; and that when the government violates the rights of the people the people have the sacred right and duty to insurrect.
Now, when the French Revolution had beaten back the external military threat, the conservative bourgeoisie, whose social base was mainly the peasantry, overthrew Robespierre; the conservative bourgeoisie formed a
parliamentary majority which had an element of a right-left bloc, because Robespierre had also tended to suppress elements of the Paris proletariat who were going too far. And that was Thermidor, the ninth of Thermidor. So the Robespierre heritage was therefore ambiguous. But, nonetheless, it was extremely important that the Jacobin dictatorship was assimilated in the communist tradition even by a certain kind of distortion of h i s t o r y—which saw Robespierre as really a communist—a distortion which certainly did not represent any malice, but rather a kind of false consciousness. The Thermidorian reaction did not lead to a stable regime; only the overthrow of all elements of representative civilian government by Napoleon Bonaparte five years later stablilized that regime. So in the interim, the Jacobins, although suppressed and dispersed, continued to be a politically organized force and a potential contender for power.
Conspiracy of Equals
In 1796 there was a regroupment 01 the left-wing revolutionaries headed by Babeuf which on the basis of their experience had gone over to communism. Now, in some aspects, the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals represented a genuine, fundamental programmatic shift toward communism. But around the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals, which was not a small group of fanatics by any means, there were also followers of Robespierre, so they constituted basically a unified left opposition subscribing to two programs which were not really consistent with one another. One was a program simply calling for a return to the democratic constitution of 1793, which was acceptable to the Jacobins and had the historical authority of Robespierre. The other was the doctrine of Babouv-ists proper, which was that of a communistic regime.
The Conspiracy of Equals suffered from over-confidence; they simply passed out bills saying, "We are the secret committee of insurrection and we're going to insurrect." This agitation actually intersected considerable discontent. Thus, the army mutinied before they got around to organizing it, so that the rebellion was suppressed and the soldiers shipped out, and
the Conspiracy was infiltrated and suppressed. But it is worth noting that simply as an insurrection the Conspiracy of Equals could have succeeded. But the Conspiracy could not have carried out its program, and Data euf personally would have been displaced by the right wing of his own movement. Nevertheless, one could have had a second reign of terror in 1796.
There was another important duality in Babouvism. On the one hand, it had its popular program for return to universal suffrage. On the other hand, the experience of the reign of terror, in which a conservative majority had ousted Robespierre, combined with the recognition that Robespierre had only stayed in power by calling upon the Paris population every once and awhile to invade the Convention and silence the representatives who had been elected by the peasants, convinced the Babouvists that they would need in the initial stages a dictatorship of revolutionaries. Filippo Buonarroti, who carried this tradition
forward, described their ideas,
"To found a Republic belongs only to such disinterested friends of humanity and of their country whose reason and courage have shot above the reason and courage of their contemporaries. The spirit of the Republic when established forms that of the citizens and of the magistrates, but at the commencement it is only the wisest and most ardent instigators of reform who can create the popular republican spirit. It was therefore a point resolutely agreed upon by committee [the Babouvist committee] that the magistries, imposed at first and exclusively of the best revolutionaries, should not be subsequently renewed by the full application of the constitutional laws at once, but only generally and partially as the proportion of progress of national regeneration." One has here the germs of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, albeit deformed through a certain objectively determined false
consciousness. The Babouvists empirically recognized that, had there been a free election in 1796, the communist Jacobins or even the radical Jacobins would not have been a majority; they were a majority in Paris but not in the country. This was not transformed into an understanding of the class differences between the peasantry, which had already gotten what they wanted, namely the land and the abolition of feudal taxes and obligations, andapre-industrial working class; rather, this recognition was translated into the notion of the difference between the enlightened revolutionists and the backward masses.
So the revolutionary regime was seen as the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, selected on-the basis of individual political morality. In this sense, the Babouvists did not and could not transcend the ideological premises of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Babeuf and Darthe were executed; but before his death, Babeuf wrote to one of his collaborators—he said, "Here are my notes, here are my ideas. Save these for posterity."
That collaborator for the next forty years worked to realize the Babouvist program. He was an Italian by the name of Filippo Michele Buonarroti. The most important work of his life, I would argue, was in the last five years, when the man was in his seventies. Because ,he was an Italian, he did not participate as a politician during the Jacobin dictatorship but rather as a revolutionary administrator. He was a troubleshooter and a terrorist. So he began his career as the Jacobin equivalent of the Cheka. Then he was imprisoned for awhile, but following Thermidor he was released, in this regroupment he joined the Babouvists. He was an orthodox follower of Robespierre; he convinced Babeuf for tactical reasons to claim the traditions of Robespierre rather than Hebert, who had less historical prestige with the masses.
Thinking about Buonarroti's career, the parallels with Trotsky are so great as to be overwhelming. They simply force themselves upon one's consciousness, although there is a difference, and it is a difference which appears superficial but is in fact fundamental, the difference between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian revolution.
Buonarroti was the only one of his revolutionary generation to carry on against overwhelming historical odds, and in greater isolation than Trotsky faced, the traditions of the French Revolution and its most radical expression. He did this in two forms. In the year 1828, as an old man, he published a book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of Equals], which both in effect and in purpose was The Revolution Betrayed of its day. In fact, the main theme was the original Thermidor, the one in 1794, not the one in 1924. In its day the book actually had a greater mass impact than The Revolution Betrayed, and was known as the Bible of revolutionaries. It was the book that educated the generation that educated Karl Marx. However, Buonarroti was not content, being a man of action, to limit himself simplt to the literary expression of doctr;*< as important as that was. He also A tempted to establish international re '-olutionary organizations.
Reaction and conspiratorial strategy
Yet there is a difference with Trotsky which is fundamental. In a certain sense it encapsulates the whole purpose of this class series. The French counterrevolution, and French Bonapartism, was forced by overwhelming historical objective circumstances. Thus, the entire generation of Jacobins, including many Babouvists, capitulated to Bonapartism, so that throughout the Napoleonic era the bureaucracy and the army contained ex-Jacobins, ex-HSbertists, ex-Babouvists and ex-partisans of Robespierre. Even Napoleon himself could declare, "I was never a dictator; I was never an oppressor. I was a true son of the French Revolution. I'm here because I fought to liberate the people against the tyrants." Read some of Napoleon's last letters; he sounds very radical.
Buonarroti's ex-Jacobin comrades tended to abound within the interstices of the French bureaucracy. In fact, one of the reasons Buonarroti survived was that he skillfully exploited the Jacobin "old boys club." This fact conditioned his conception of strategy, which was not the organization of a revolution from the ground up but rather from the top of society, from communist sympathizers within the state bureaucracy, within the army, within these very restricted parliaments. Therefore, the Buonarroti organizations were conspiratorial organizations in several different senses. They were not merely a means of hiding from the authorities, the absolutely reactionary authorities; they were a means of the conspiratorial infiltration and manipulation of the liberal opposition.
**********
Guidelines for recruitment to the first international communist (Babouvist) organization, the Sublimes Maitres Parfaits led by Filippo Buonarroti.
*Devotion to the principles of the order and willingness to sacrifice to them personal interest and pleasure.
*Courage, that is to say, scorn of danger of work and hardship. *Patience and perseverance.
*Moderation in the use of intoxicating liquors.
*The habit of speaking little and to the point.
*No wish to make an impression, to shine, and to impose oneself.
*Caution in gambling, in love, in anger, and in the opening of one's
heart.
*Exquisite sensibility concerning the wrongs that weigh on humanity.
*************
Buonarroti's strategy was to attempt to achieve through conspiratorial manipulation the organic radicalization of the French Revolution. You begin •with a constitutional monarch, then you go to the liberal bourgeoisie, then the radical bourgeoisie, and then communism. The Buonarroti secret^ societies would have their members join something like the Society for Freedom of the Press or the semi-legal, liberal nationalistic oppositions in Metternich-ean Europe. So, you were electing somebody you thought was a good liberal; but he was really a communist on the hotline to Geneva, where Buonarroti was running the operation.
Thus, Buonarroti's strategy, which was in a certain sense realistically
conditioned by the existence of an era of bourgeois-democratic r e voluti on, was the conspiratorial manipulation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the service of communism. For that reason these were hierarchical organizations whose ultimate program was not known to its lower ranks. Only Buonarroti and the Central Committee knew the real program. You joined if you were a liberal and believed in universal suffrage. If you were a revolutionary democrat, you reached the second level; and you only got to know the final program after you had been coopted onto the Central Committee. Ultimately, Buonarroti's conception, of course, was Utopian. However, in the year 1821, Buonarroti's followers were involved in—even leading—partially successful, simultaneous insurrections in Spain, Naples and Rome. For one man, that is not bad!
In one talk I can only give some index of the importance of Buonarroti. If you read a biography of Marx, you will find under this period just names: he collaborated with this person here and that person there. Well, in almost every case, all of Marx's collaborators in the 1840's were either indirectly or directly influenced or recruited by Buonarroti! To give you just two examples, which could be multiplied ad infinitum. In 1847 the front group for the Communist League in Belgium was called the Democratic Association, of which Marx was the vice-president and a man named Lucien Jottrand was the president. In 1828 Buonarroti was in Belgium and he recruited a small circle of Belgian followers, one of whom was Lucien Jottrand. Another example: Marx's leading non-German collaborator throughout this period was the left-wing leader of British Chartism, Julian Harney, a very important figure in his own right. Barney's mentor was an earlier left-wing leader of British Chartism named James Bronterre O'Brien. In 1836, Buonarroti's book on Babeuf was translated into English by -Tames Bronterre O'Brien.
So, I'll conclude with an anecdote indicating what Buonarroti contributed to the communist movement. James Bronterre O'Brien, after he translated the book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of EquaIs], began a correspondence with Buonarroti the year before Buonarroti died. At that time O'Brien was an Owenite, or had.been an Owenite, Owenite socialism being pacifist and cooperativist. O'Brien translated Owen's writings into French and sent them to Buonarroti and asked him for his ideas on Owenite socialism. Buonarroti wrote back, in effect, "You know, it's remarkable that Owen, independent of Babeuf and I, has the same conception of what society should look like, what we are working for. But he seems to believe that you can get this while keeping the existing British government, while keeping the monarchy.
Monday, July 16, 2012
From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- COMMUNISTS AND THE GENERAL STRIKE (1922)
COMMUNISTS AND THE GENERAL STRIKE
By Leon Trotsky
The signal for a review of the international tasks of Communism was given by the March 1921 events in Germany. You will recall what happened. There were calls for a general strike, there were sacrifices by the workers, there was a cruel massacre of the Communist Party, internally there were disagreements on the part of some, and utter treachery on the part of others. But the Comintern said firmly: In Germany the March policy of the Communist Party was a mistake. Why? Because the German Party reckoned that it was directly confronted with the task of conquering power. It turned out that the task confronting the party was that of conquering not power, but the working class. What nurtured the psychology of the German Communist Party in 1921 that drove it into the March action? It was nurtured by the circumstances and the moods which crystallised in Europe after the war.
In 1919 the German working class engaged in a number of cruel and bloody battles, the same thing happened in 1920, and during the January and March days of 1920 the German working class became convinced that heroism alone, that readiness to venture and to die, was not enough; that somehow the working class was lacking something. It began to take a more watchful and expectant attitude towards events and facts. It had banked in its time upon the old Social Democracy to secure the socialist overturn.
The Social Democracy dragged the proletariat into the war. When the thunders of the November 1918 revolution rolled, the old Social Democracy begins to talk the language of social revolution and even proclaimed, as you recall, the German republic to be a socialist republic. The proletariat took this seriously, and kept pressing forward. Colliding with the bourgeois gangs it suffered crushing defeats once, twice and a third time. Naturally this does not mean that its hatred of the bourgeosie or its readiness to struggle had lessened, but its brains had meanwhile acquired many new convolutions of caution and watchfulness. For new battles it already wants to have guarantees of victory.
And this mood began to grow increasingly stronger among the European working class in 1920-22 after the experiences of the initial assault, after the initial semi-victories and minor conquests and the subsequent major defeats. At that moment, in the days when the European working class began after the war to understand clearly, or at least to sense that the business of conquering state power is a very complicated business and that bare hands cannot cope with the bourgeoisie—at that moment the most dynamic section of the working class formed itself into the Communist Party.
But this Communist Party still felt as if it were a shell shot out of a cannon. It appeared on the scene and it seemed to it that it needed only shout its battle-cry, dash forward and the working class would rush out to follow. It turned out otherwise. It turned out that the working class had, upon suffering a series of disillusions concerning its primitive revolutionary illusions, assumed a watch-and-wait attitude by the time the Communist Party took shape in 1920 (and especially in 1921) and rushed forward. The working class was not accustomed to this party, it had not seen the party in action. Since the working class had been deceived more than once in the past, it has every reason to demand that the party win its confidence, or, to put it differently, the party must still discharge its obligation of demonstrating to the working class that it should follow and is justified in following the party into the fires of battle, when the party issues the summons. During the March days of 1921 in Germany we saw a Communist Party—devoted, revolutionary, ready for struggle—rushing forward, but not followed by the working class. Perhaps one-quarter or one-fifth of the German working class did follow. Because of its revolutionary impatience this most revolutionary section came into collision with the other four-fifths; and already tried, so to speak, mechanically and here and there by force to draw them into the struggle, which is of course completely out of the question.
In general, comrades, the International is a wonderful institution. And the training one party gives to another is likewise irreplaceable. But generally speaking, one must say that each working class tends to repeat all the mistakes at the expense of its own back and bones. The International can be of assistance only in the sense of seeing to it that this back receives the minimum number of scars, but in the nature of things scars are unavoidable.
We saw this almost the other day in France. In the port of Havre there occurred a strike of 15,000 workers. This strike of local importance attracted the nation-wide attention of the working class by its stubbornness, firmness and discipline. It led to rather large contributions for the benefit of the strikers through our party's central organ, L 'Humanite: there were agitational tours, and so on. The French government through its police-chief brought the strike to a bloody clash in which three workers were killed. (It is quite possible that this happened through some assistance by anarchist elements inside the French working class who time and again involuntarily abet reaction.) These killings were of course bound to produce great repercussions among the French working class.
You will recall that the March 1921 events in Germany also started when in Central Germany the chief of police, a Social Democrat, sent military-police gangs to crush the strikers. This fact was at the bottom of our German party's call for a general strike. In France we observe an analogous course of events: a stubborn strike, which catches the interest of the entire working class, followed by bloody clashes. Three strikers are killed. The murders occurred, say, on Friday and by Saturday there already convened a conference of the so-called unitarian unions, i.e., the revolutionary trade unions, which maintain close relations with the Communist Party; and at this conference it is decided to call the working class to a general strike on the next day. But no general strike came out of it. In Germany during the (so-called) general strike in March there participated one-quarter, one-fifth or one-sixth of the working class. In France even a smaller fraction of the French proletariat participated in the general strike. If one follows the French press to see how this whole affair was carried out, then, comrades, one has to scratch one's head ten times in recognising how young and inexperienced are the Communist parties of Western Europe. The Comintern had accused the French Communists of passivity. This was correct. And the German Communist Party, too, had been accused prior to March of passivity.
Demanded of the party was activity, initiative, aggressive agitation, intervention into the day-to-day struggles of the working class. But the party attempted in March to recoup its yesterday's passivity by the heroic action of a general strike, almost an uprising. On a lesser scale, this was repeated the other day in France. In order to emerge from passivity they proclaimed a general strike for a working class which was just beginning to emerge from passivity under the conditions of an incipient revival and improvement in the conjuncture. How did they motivate this? They motivated it by this, that the news of the murder of the three workers had produced a shocking impression on the party's Central Committee and on the Confederation of Labour. How could it have failed to produce such an impression? Of course, it was shocking! And so the slogan of the general strike was raised. If the Communist Party were so strong as to need only issue a call for a general strike then everything would
be fine. But a general strike is a component and a dynamic part of the proletarian revolution itself.
Out of the general strike there arise clashes with the troops and the question is posed of who is master in the country. Who controls the army—the bourgeoisie or the proletariat? It is possible to speak of a protest general strike, but this is a question of utmost importance. When a dispatch comes over the wires that three workers have been killed at Havre and when it is known that there is no revolution in France but, instead, a stagnant situation, that the working class is just beginning to stir slightly out of a condition of passivity engendered by events during the war and post-war period—in such a situation to launch the slogan for a general strike is to commit the geatest and crudest blunder which can only undermine for a long time, for many months to come, the confidence of the working masses in a party which behaves in such a manner.
True enough, the direct responsibility in this case was not borne by the party; the slogan was issued by the so-called unitarian, that is, revolutionary trade unions. But in reality what should the party and the trade unions have done? They should have mobilised every party and trade union worker who was qualified and sent them out to read this news from one end of the country to the other. The first thing was to tell the story as it should have been told. We have a daily paper, L'ffumanite, our central organ. It has a circulation of approximately 200,000—a rather large circulation, but France has a population of not less than 40 million. In the provinces there is virtually no circulation of the daily newspaper, consequently, the task was to inform the workers, to tell them the story agitationally, and to touch them to the quick with this story. The -second thing needed was to turn to the Socialist Party, the party of Longuet and Renaudel with a few questions—no occasion could have been more propitious—and say: "In Havre three worker strikers have been killed; we take it for granted that this cannot be permitted to go unpunished. We are prepared to employ the most resolute measures. We ask, what do you propose?"
The very posing of these questions would have attracted a great attention. It was necessary to turn to Jouhaux's reformist trade unions which are much closer to the strikers. Jouhaux feigned sympathy for this strike and gave it material aid. It was necessary to put to him the following question: "You of the reformist trade unions, what do you propose? We, the Communist Party, propose to hold tomorrow not a general strike but a conference of the Communist Party, of the unitarian revolutionary trade unions and of the reformist trade unions in order to discuss how this aggression of capitalism ought to be answered."
It was necessary to swing the working masses into motion. Perhaps a general strike might have come into it. I do not know; maybe a protest strike, maybe not. In any case it was far too little simply to announce, to cry out that my indignation had been aroused, when I learned over the wires that three workers had been killed. It was instead necessary to touch to the quick the hearts of the working masses. After such an activity the whole working class might not perhaps have gone out on a demonstrative strike but we could, of course, have reached a very considerable section. However, instead there was a mistake, let me repeat, on a smaller scale than the March events. It was a mistake on a two by four scale. With this difference that in France there were no assaults, no sweeping actions, no new bloody clashes, but simply a failure; the general strike was a fiasco and by this token—a minus on the Communist Party's card, not a plus but a minus.
(From the Report on the Fifth Anniversary of the October Revolution and the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International. Moscow, October 20th 1922)
By Leon Trotsky
The signal for a review of the international tasks of Communism was given by the March 1921 events in Germany. You will recall what happened. There were calls for a general strike, there were sacrifices by the workers, there was a cruel massacre of the Communist Party, internally there were disagreements on the part of some, and utter treachery on the part of others. But the Comintern said firmly: In Germany the March policy of the Communist Party was a mistake. Why? Because the German Party reckoned that it was directly confronted with the task of conquering power. It turned out that the task confronting the party was that of conquering not power, but the working class. What nurtured the psychology of the German Communist Party in 1921 that drove it into the March action? It was nurtured by the circumstances and the moods which crystallised in Europe after the war.
In 1919 the German working class engaged in a number of cruel and bloody battles, the same thing happened in 1920, and during the January and March days of 1920 the German working class became convinced that heroism alone, that readiness to venture and to die, was not enough; that somehow the working class was lacking something. It began to take a more watchful and expectant attitude towards events and facts. It had banked in its time upon the old Social Democracy to secure the socialist overturn.
The Social Democracy dragged the proletariat into the war. When the thunders of the November 1918 revolution rolled, the old Social Democracy begins to talk the language of social revolution and even proclaimed, as you recall, the German republic to be a socialist republic. The proletariat took this seriously, and kept pressing forward. Colliding with the bourgeois gangs it suffered crushing defeats once, twice and a third time. Naturally this does not mean that its hatred of the bourgeosie or its readiness to struggle had lessened, but its brains had meanwhile acquired many new convolutions of caution and watchfulness. For new battles it already wants to have guarantees of victory.
And this mood began to grow increasingly stronger among the European working class in 1920-22 after the experiences of the initial assault, after the initial semi-victories and minor conquests and the subsequent major defeats. At that moment, in the days when the European working class began after the war to understand clearly, or at least to sense that the business of conquering state power is a very complicated business and that bare hands cannot cope with the bourgeoisie—at that moment the most dynamic section of the working class formed itself into the Communist Party.
But this Communist Party still felt as if it were a shell shot out of a cannon. It appeared on the scene and it seemed to it that it needed only shout its battle-cry, dash forward and the working class would rush out to follow. It turned out otherwise. It turned out that the working class had, upon suffering a series of disillusions concerning its primitive revolutionary illusions, assumed a watch-and-wait attitude by the time the Communist Party took shape in 1920 (and especially in 1921) and rushed forward. The working class was not accustomed to this party, it had not seen the party in action. Since the working class had been deceived more than once in the past, it has every reason to demand that the party win its confidence, or, to put it differently, the party must still discharge its obligation of demonstrating to the working class that it should follow and is justified in following the party into the fires of battle, when the party issues the summons. During the March days of 1921 in Germany we saw a Communist Party—devoted, revolutionary, ready for struggle—rushing forward, but not followed by the working class. Perhaps one-quarter or one-fifth of the German working class did follow. Because of its revolutionary impatience this most revolutionary section came into collision with the other four-fifths; and already tried, so to speak, mechanically and here and there by force to draw them into the struggle, which is of course completely out of the question.
In general, comrades, the International is a wonderful institution. And the training one party gives to another is likewise irreplaceable. But generally speaking, one must say that each working class tends to repeat all the mistakes at the expense of its own back and bones. The International can be of assistance only in the sense of seeing to it that this back receives the minimum number of scars, but in the nature of things scars are unavoidable.
We saw this almost the other day in France. In the port of Havre there occurred a strike of 15,000 workers. This strike of local importance attracted the nation-wide attention of the working class by its stubbornness, firmness and discipline. It led to rather large contributions for the benefit of the strikers through our party's central organ, L 'Humanite: there were agitational tours, and so on. The French government through its police-chief brought the strike to a bloody clash in which three workers were killed. (It is quite possible that this happened through some assistance by anarchist elements inside the French working class who time and again involuntarily abet reaction.) These killings were of course bound to produce great repercussions among the French working class.
You will recall that the March 1921 events in Germany also started when in Central Germany the chief of police, a Social Democrat, sent military-police gangs to crush the strikers. This fact was at the bottom of our German party's call for a general strike. In France we observe an analogous course of events: a stubborn strike, which catches the interest of the entire working class, followed by bloody clashes. Three strikers are killed. The murders occurred, say, on Friday and by Saturday there already convened a conference of the so-called unitarian unions, i.e., the revolutionary trade unions, which maintain close relations with the Communist Party; and at this conference it is decided to call the working class to a general strike on the next day. But no general strike came out of it. In Germany during the (so-called) general strike in March there participated one-quarter, one-fifth or one-sixth of the working class. In France even a smaller fraction of the French proletariat participated in the general strike. If one follows the French press to see how this whole affair was carried out, then, comrades, one has to scratch one's head ten times in recognising how young and inexperienced are the Communist parties of Western Europe. The Comintern had accused the French Communists of passivity. This was correct. And the German Communist Party, too, had been accused prior to March of passivity.
Demanded of the party was activity, initiative, aggressive agitation, intervention into the day-to-day struggles of the working class. But the party attempted in March to recoup its yesterday's passivity by the heroic action of a general strike, almost an uprising. On a lesser scale, this was repeated the other day in France. In order to emerge from passivity they proclaimed a general strike for a working class which was just beginning to emerge from passivity under the conditions of an incipient revival and improvement in the conjuncture. How did they motivate this? They motivated it by this, that the news of the murder of the three workers had produced a shocking impression on the party's Central Committee and on the Confederation of Labour. How could it have failed to produce such an impression? Of course, it was shocking! And so the slogan of the general strike was raised. If the Communist Party were so strong as to need only issue a call for a general strike then everything would
be fine. But a general strike is a component and a dynamic part of the proletarian revolution itself.
Out of the general strike there arise clashes with the troops and the question is posed of who is master in the country. Who controls the army—the bourgeoisie or the proletariat? It is possible to speak of a protest general strike, but this is a question of utmost importance. When a dispatch comes over the wires that three workers have been killed at Havre and when it is known that there is no revolution in France but, instead, a stagnant situation, that the working class is just beginning to stir slightly out of a condition of passivity engendered by events during the war and post-war period—in such a situation to launch the slogan for a general strike is to commit the geatest and crudest blunder which can only undermine for a long time, for many months to come, the confidence of the working masses in a party which behaves in such a manner.
True enough, the direct responsibility in this case was not borne by the party; the slogan was issued by the so-called unitarian, that is, revolutionary trade unions. But in reality what should the party and the trade unions have done? They should have mobilised every party and trade union worker who was qualified and sent them out to read this news from one end of the country to the other. The first thing was to tell the story as it should have been told. We have a daily paper, L'ffumanite, our central organ. It has a circulation of approximately 200,000—a rather large circulation, but France has a population of not less than 40 million. In the provinces there is virtually no circulation of the daily newspaper, consequently, the task was to inform the workers, to tell them the story agitationally, and to touch them to the quick with this story. The -second thing needed was to turn to the Socialist Party, the party of Longuet and Renaudel with a few questions—no occasion could have been more propitious—and say: "In Havre three worker strikers have been killed; we take it for granted that this cannot be permitted to go unpunished. We are prepared to employ the most resolute measures. We ask, what do you propose?"
The very posing of these questions would have attracted a great attention. It was necessary to turn to Jouhaux's reformist trade unions which are much closer to the strikers. Jouhaux feigned sympathy for this strike and gave it material aid. It was necessary to put to him the following question: "You of the reformist trade unions, what do you propose? We, the Communist Party, propose to hold tomorrow not a general strike but a conference of the Communist Party, of the unitarian revolutionary trade unions and of the reformist trade unions in order to discuss how this aggression of capitalism ought to be answered."
It was necessary to swing the working masses into motion. Perhaps a general strike might have come into it. I do not know; maybe a protest strike, maybe not. In any case it was far too little simply to announce, to cry out that my indignation had been aroused, when I learned over the wires that three workers had been killed. It was instead necessary to touch to the quick the hearts of the working masses. After such an activity the whole working class might not perhaps have gone out on a demonstrative strike but we could, of course, have reached a very considerable section. However, instead there was a mistake, let me repeat, on a smaller scale than the March events. It was a mistake on a two by four scale. With this difference that in France there were no assaults, no sweeping actions, no new bloody clashes, but simply a failure; the general strike was a fiasco and by this token—a minus on the Communist Party's card, not a plus but a minus.
(From the Report on the Fifth Anniversary of the October Revolution and the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International. Moscow, October 20th 1922)
From The Boston Fare Hike Coalition -They say FARE HIKE. We say FARE STRIKE!
They say FARE HIKE. We say FARE STRIKE!
Join us! for a public meeting to plan our next action
Thursday, July 19th at 6 pm at the Bandstand
(or inside City Place in case of rain)
BOSTON FARE STRIKE
Boston Fare Strike is a coalition of organizations and individuals that came
together to meet the July 1st fare hikes with a fare- strike. We see this action as a step in a the long term struggle to not only defend Public Transit, but to improve and expand it to better serve the people of Boston and the surrounding areas.
We aim to build a people powered movement of workers and riders and rooted in direct action that can rescue our Public Transit from the jaws of financial parasites, corrupt corporate managers, and unresponsive public officials. We will be holding regular meetings and actions as negotiations over long-term funding for Public Transit heat up In the next year,
The voice of the riders will net be ignored!
Contact us:
BostonFareStrike@riseup.net
Facebook.com/BostonFareStrike
Twitter: @BosFareStrike
Join us! for a public meeting to plan our next action
Thursday, July 19th at 6 pm at the Bandstand
(or inside City Place in case of rain)
BOSTON FARE STRIKE
Boston Fare Strike is a coalition of organizations and individuals that came
together to meet the July 1st fare hikes with a fare- strike. We see this action as a step in a the long term struggle to not only defend Public Transit, but to improve and expand it to better serve the people of Boston and the surrounding areas.
We aim to build a people powered movement of workers and riders and rooted in direct action that can rescue our Public Transit from the jaws of financial parasites, corrupt corporate managers, and unresponsive public officials. We will be holding regular meetings and actions as negotiations over long-term funding for Public Transit heat up In the next year,
The voice of the riders will net be ignored!
Contact us:
BostonFareStrike@riseup.net
Facebook.com/BostonFareStrike
Twitter: @BosFareStrike
From The "PeopleforDemocraticRevolution"-Should We Pay Back the Debts?
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
**********
Should We Pay Back the Debts?
Governments are telling the public that we must do with less so that the government can pay back its debts. They're raising fares for public transportation, cutting budgets, and enforcing draconian austerity belt-tightening. It's all about taking from the have-nots to give even more to the haves.
The debt payments go to the billionaire class and to working class investors and pension funds, who make loans to the government (i.e. buy government bonds) with the guarantee of being repaid what they loaned plus interest.
Governments could just tax the billionaires. Why don't they? Because the billionaires control the government and run it in their interest. Our fake democracy is mere window-dressing for billionaires' rule.
The wealth of billionaires does not rightfully belong to them. Working people have produced all the wealth of society other than natural resources. Yet billionaires claim to own the .ana, buildings, machines and raw materials that people need in order to do productive labor. They claim, therefore, to own all the wealth that people produce with their labor on that land or with those machines and raw materials. Yes, the billionaires pay their workers wages and salaries, but the wages and salaries suffice only to buy back a fraction of the wealth the workers produce. This explains how profits are made and where all billion-dollar fortunes come from.
A billionaire may or may not personally contribute some useful managerial labor, but that is not the way he or she ends up owning billions of dollars. Nobody can work enough hours to earn billions of dollars as fair pay for their labor. Nor is anybody's intellectual contribution a reason for them to own billions of dollars; great ideas are only possible because of the countless ideas of others before them. Billion dollar fortunes don't come from honest labor or brainy ideas; they come from legalized theft.
Working people should rightfully own all the wealth because they produced all of it. They have already "paid" for all of it with their labor. To be able to live decently, working class people (including retirees and those who cannot work) ought to enjoy their reasonable share of the wealth that working people produce, taken from the stolen billion-dollar fortunes to start with. The billionaires, however, deny this wealth to workers and force them to buy stocks and bonds to be able to retire, and then tell us we have to pay back the bond debts "for the sake of retired people"—making the billionaires richer.
The working class should not have to pay (in the form of bus or subway fares or taxes or anything else) "debt" payments to the billionaire class (or its governments or its banks) for what working people themselves already produced. The billionaire class should be made to live like everybody else and work like everybody else, and be told they are not going to be handed "debt" payments to live in luxury at the expense of working people any more.
The wealthiest people in the world deliberately created the recent banking crisis, knowing that the governments they control would bail out the "too big to fail" banks with money borrowed from the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve Banks and other countries' central banks (which create money from nothing). They knew the governments would pay the central banks (i.e. billionaires) back, plus interest, with money taken from the public as taxes and austerity budget cuts, a!! in the name of "we have to repay our debts.' The FED has given banks $16 trillion already. Ifs a "make the rich richer and the working class poorer" scam.
If anybody owes anyone money to pay back a loan, it is the billionaires who owe working people all of the wealth they have "borrowed" (actually stolen) from workers over the centuries—trillions of dollars!
PeopleforDemocraticRevolution@gmail.com visit www.NewDemocracyWorld.org
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
**********
Should We Pay Back the Debts?
Governments are telling the public that we must do with less so that the government can pay back its debts. They're raising fares for public transportation, cutting budgets, and enforcing draconian austerity belt-tightening. It's all about taking from the have-nots to give even more to the haves.
The debt payments go to the billionaire class and to working class investors and pension funds, who make loans to the government (i.e. buy government bonds) with the guarantee of being repaid what they loaned plus interest.
Governments could just tax the billionaires. Why don't they? Because the billionaires control the government and run it in their interest. Our fake democracy is mere window-dressing for billionaires' rule.
The wealth of billionaires does not rightfully belong to them. Working people have produced all the wealth of society other than natural resources. Yet billionaires claim to own the .ana, buildings, machines and raw materials that people need in order to do productive labor. They claim, therefore, to own all the wealth that people produce with their labor on that land or with those machines and raw materials. Yes, the billionaires pay their workers wages and salaries, but the wages and salaries suffice only to buy back a fraction of the wealth the workers produce. This explains how profits are made and where all billion-dollar fortunes come from.
A billionaire may or may not personally contribute some useful managerial labor, but that is not the way he or she ends up owning billions of dollars. Nobody can work enough hours to earn billions of dollars as fair pay for their labor. Nor is anybody's intellectual contribution a reason for them to own billions of dollars; great ideas are only possible because of the countless ideas of others before them. Billion dollar fortunes don't come from honest labor or brainy ideas; they come from legalized theft.
Working people should rightfully own all the wealth because they produced all of it. They have already "paid" for all of it with their labor. To be able to live decently, working class people (including retirees and those who cannot work) ought to enjoy their reasonable share of the wealth that working people produce, taken from the stolen billion-dollar fortunes to start with. The billionaires, however, deny this wealth to workers and force them to buy stocks and bonds to be able to retire, and then tell us we have to pay back the bond debts "for the sake of retired people"—making the billionaires richer.
The working class should not have to pay (in the form of bus or subway fares or taxes or anything else) "debt" payments to the billionaire class (or its governments or its banks) for what working people themselves already produced. The billionaire class should be made to live like everybody else and work like everybody else, and be told they are not going to be handed "debt" payments to live in luxury at the expense of working people any more.
The wealthiest people in the world deliberately created the recent banking crisis, knowing that the governments they control would bail out the "too big to fail" banks with money borrowed from the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve Banks and other countries' central banks (which create money from nothing). They knew the governments would pay the central banks (i.e. billionaires) back, plus interest, with money taken from the public as taxes and austerity budget cuts, a!! in the name of "we have to repay our debts.' The FED has given banks $16 trillion already. Ifs a "make the rich richer and the working class poorer" scam.
If anybody owes anyone money to pay back a loan, it is the billionaires who owe working people all of the wealth they have "borrowed" (actually stolen) from workers over the centuries—trillions of dollars!
PeopleforDemocraticRevolution@gmail.com visit www.NewDemocracyWorld.org
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War-ABook 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.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
***********
Reviews
Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War, Verso, London, 1986, pp210, £6.95.
In a review of this book elsewhere (Confrontation 3, Summer 1988) I criticised Ernest Mandel for his concessions to bourgeois historicism and for downplaying the catastrophic defeat that the Second World War represented for the international working class. Here I shall concentrate upon another aspect of his book – his apology for Stalinism.
We get a sense of Mandel’s problems when we read, on the back cover blurb, that the fight between the “hideously distorted Socialism” of the USSR and the “Nazi capitalism” of Germany represented “a decisive new element in the war”. Now, though Mandel does not follow his publishers in describing the Soviet Union as Socialist, it is clear that he too finds it a conundrum. It is “non-capitalist” (p.45), but fewer than 20 pages later it is guilty of “partial (post-capitalist) commodity production” (p.82). With this lack of clarity on the nature of the Soviet regime, it is hardly surprising that Mandel cannot explain its military exploits.
What Verso terms “hideously distorted Socialism”, Mandel translates as the contradiction between the USSR’s strengthening industrial and military infrastructure and the purges and diplomatic fiascos, initiated by Stalin, that ran alongside this process. How did the Soviet Union resolve that contradiction'? Eventually, Mandel says, the “achievements of October” (p.38) won out against all else, allowing Moscow to triumph over Berlin. Let us examine this claim.
It is true that the Soviet economy was strengthened in a dramatic manner in the ’thirties. But this was more a matter of the emergence of a new social formation and a weighty bureaucracy than strength in depth or strength in quality. The Stalinists’ great claims to fame were quantitative growth, and a shift, between 1932 and 1937, of the proportion of machine tools installed from 22 per cent Soviet-built to more than 90 per cent Soviet-built. On nearly every other index, however, the Soviet economy was weak – even in military-industrial sectors.
The Stalinists began the ’thirties with famine. By 1933 and the second Five Year Plan, Kazakhstan had to endure its third year of famine based on collectivisation (one million dead out of a nomadic population of less than four million), and the Ukraine its second based on ethnically-inspired terror (five million dead). Famine had also claimed a million lives in the North Caucasus and another million elsewhere in Russia. That same year, investment fell by 14 per cent, gross industrial production rose by only five per cent, and shortages and crises in transport were everywhere. The Five Year Plan had to be revised completely.
By 1937, when the purges were at their height, matters were little improved. Investment had sunk by 10 per cent in two years of bloodletting, and was especially poor in military basics such as iron, steel and construction. Real wages were perhaps a third down on those available in 1928; grain yields did not compare with those raised in the first Five Year Plan; the shortage of recruits in industry, construction and especially transport, where labour turnover stood at more than 100 per cent, stood at a new high of 1.5 million.
The Soviet economy grew because of the bureaucracy’s freedom to mobilise resources. Through terror, social engineering and a certain amount of foreign technology, a system was fashioned which could deliver ’ some of the goods, some of the time. The condition of the urban working class spoke a lot more for the strengthening of Soviet military-industrial might than did the “achievements of October”.
In 1926, 18 per cent of the Soviet Union’s population of 147 million people were in the cities. By 1939, 33 per cent of a population of 170 million were. In Moscow, in 1935, more than 90 per cent of tenants in old accommodation – the general rule in the city – lived one or more to a room; 25 per cent lived in dormitories, and five per cent in kitchens and corridors.
Slave labour
In the cities, as in the concentration camps, it was slave labour, not the gains of 1917, which allowed the Soviet economy to face down the Germans. From 1935 we are in the era of Stakhanov. Then, between 1937 and 1940, real wages dropped by 10 per cent. After laws introduced in 1940, being 20 minutes late for work meant up to six months’ hard labour and up to 25 per cent cuts in pay; unauthorised departures from work could mean four months in jail; low quality production work could lead to eight years in jail. The working day was lengthened from seven to eight hours, the working week from five to six days, and pay stayed the same,
After 1934, when food rationing gave way to price rises, wives went out to work much more. They thus joined with general demographic trends in adding more simultaneous working days to the Soviet economy. In 1938 maternity leave was cut from 112 to 70 days; in 1940 fees were introduced for students in upper secondary and higher education. It was, therefore, through the suffering of working class families that the bureaucracy was able to generate the wealth to fight and win the war
Mandel’s contradiction – industrial might vs. purges and foreign policy fiascos – amounts to little more than a liberal apology for Stalinism. Killing millions and allying with Hitler Mandel condemns with withering criticism; but he always makes clear that industry and thus the achievements of October were paramount. In fact, though, it is simply sentimental to attribute the USSR’s survival after 1941 to the overturn of October 1917. Not only did civil war, famine and the New Economic Policy separate the two periods: the purges themselves destroyed such tenuous links as still existed, by the mid ’thirties, between old Bolshevism and the new bureaucratism. After 1935, the bureaucracy was in complete control. Three in every four workers were on piece wages. In the West, the proletariat had been crushed.
It was the defeats of the working class that both empowered the Kremlin to win the war and ensured that the Soviet death toll reached 20 million. By the early ’forties Stalin had, in effect, run the Soviet economy on a war footing for more than a decade: just as he had thrown manpower and sweat at economic problems before, he now threw lives at the Nazi invaders. For Mandel, the revival in Soviet production after December 1941 demonstrates “the economic and social superiority of a planned economy” (p.53). In other words, it was the nationalised property relations established in 1917 which saw the USSR through. In reality, however, nationalised property relations, without conscious workers’ management, were little match for the law of value when it came to either economic or military competition.
The Soviet Union held out because the bureaucracy, could centralise and use resources as ruthlessly as the Nazis, but over a larger population and under natural conditions (distance, climate) which it could turn to its advantage. To put the Soviet Union’s survival down to ‘planned economy’ is ridiculous. Soviet research and development, for example, was poorly coordinated, too theoretical in orientation, and further weakened by the impact of imports of new, foreign technology. Foreign technology itself was often badly handled, and expert foreign technicians were made the subject of random terror. These fundamental defects were carried through to every sphere. The bulk of pre-war industrial investment was made in the west of the Soviet Union, the area most vulnerable to foreign attack. The territorial gains derived from the Hitler-Stalin Pact were put to no good use; nor were consistent intelligence reports about the Nazis’ plans for invasion. In terms of Stalin’s, generalship, Khrushchev’s report, in his Secret Speech of 1956, that Stalin could be lost for a map at crucial junctures in the war – this, today, still has the ring of truth about it. After the war, too, little changed. It took the Stalinist bureaucracy ten years to rebuild a number of important Soviet towns.
From on high there were orders, targets and repression in the war, and, as in other countries, the Soviet Union denied workers holidays, mobilised children and pensioners for the war effort, lengthened working hours and cut the availability of consumer goods. But collective, conscious planning never existed. What little the Soviet Union had ever managed to establish had been extinguished by the mid ’twenties.
Instead of bringing out the defeat of the Soviet proletariat, Mandel prefers to stress “the tremendous individual commitment of the Soviet working class” (p.53) and the “considerable morale among the workforce and the fighting men and women” (p.69). But this is not the end of his attempt unjustly to dignify the property relations of the Soviet Union with a progressive character. He makes a similar effort in his discussion of US aid during the war.
Most commentators accept that it was Soviet-built tanks and Soviet-built aircraft which won the day, not foreign technology. But Mandel feels the need to point out that “the amount of aid extended by the USA through Lend Lease and otherwise to all its allies was relatively small: some 15 per cent of its military output” (p.70). What he forgets is that, by his own figures (p.52), 15 per cent of the USA’s military output, even though only some of it went to the Soviet Union, was worth in 1942 $5.6 billion – in other words, getting on for half the Soviet Union’s military output of $13.9 billion. So while “l5 per cent” cost the USA little, it meant a lot to its allies – the Soviet Union included. In particular, the Kremlin gained from the USA more than 40,000 machine tools, nearly 2,000 Russian-gauge locomotives, and a large part of the 400,000 increase in military vehicles it recorded in the four years after 1941, when its fleet amounted to only 272,000. Apart from 4.5 million tons of American packaged food, more than two million tons of high-grade oil, millions of pairs of shoes and an enormous quantity of clothes, these vehicles were vital to the Soviet military: at the Teheran Conference of the Allies in 1943, Stalin reported that, in his offensive against Germany, his margin was simply 60 mobile divisions. Much of that mobility he owed not to Leninist planning, but to Studebaker trucks.
Mandel’s dishonesty over the dynamics of Soviet economic and military conduct is also evident in his omissions. In effect, he refuses to discuss the logic behind the labyrinth of Soviet foreign policy in the ’thirties. He supplies a paragraph on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, a page on the Soviet Union’s ensuing occupation of eastern Poland but nothing at all on its deportation of over a million Poles to the USSR, and a few phrases only about other Soviet operations between 1939 and 1940: war against Finland, seizure and purging of Estonia (1.13 million people), Latvia (1.95 million), Lithuania (2.57 million) and Bessarabia. Aside from this, all Mandel offers on the Soviets’ pre-war international position is a footnote defending Britain and France from a polemic from the venal Molotov.
Ignores
Mandel ignores the Kremlin's policy of peaceful coexistence with one or more imperialist powers at the expense of others – a policy which motivated Stalin from 1926-27 on, and one which still informs the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev and his worldwide followers today. For Mandel:
The Red Army’s complete lack of readiness in 1941 was the direct result of Stalin’s disastrous misunderstanding of the political situation in Europe and of Hitler’s – i.e., German imperialism’s – intentions in the coming war … the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 appeared increasingly as a strategic orientation rather than a tactical move (p33).
But the policy of peaceful coexistence was something much more profound than Stalin’s “misunderstanding” of European affairs. It was a “strategic orientation” in itself: the Hitler-Stalin Pact was but the tactical outcome of more than 12 years of fruitless searching for a durable imperialist ally.
Like bourgeois critics, Mandel likes to ridicule Stalin’s myopia about Hitler’s military intentions. But behind that individual myopia, the whole Stalinist dogma of Socialism in one country stressed the military intentions of outside imperialists above all else. For Stalin, the Soviet Union had only military, not economic, external threats to come to terms with. Especially after the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 sparked off a major recession in the West, Stalin made the exploitation of contradictions between the imperialists the dominating axis of his foreign policy, and abandoned all hopes of international revolution. Traditional Russian fears of encirclement, new and well-founded fears of nationalist unrest in the Soviet borderlands, and a desperate search for foreign technology – all these, not Stalin’s miscalculations, made the non-aggression pact inevitable.
Byzantine
After all, Moscow relied upon German technology for the implementation of much of the Soviet Union’s first Five Year Plan. Only during the first few years of Hitler’s power – from 1933 until 1936 – did Stalin stop formally courting Germany, and even then secret contacts continued. Indeed, the Byzantine course of Soviet foreign policy did much to discredit Communism in the eyes of the international working class even before the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Once the Pact became public, confusion reigned supreme throughout the international left.
In 1933 Moscow gained diplomatic recognition from the USA, spurred by its considerable dependence on American (and especially General Electric) technology. Once it had joined the imperialist League of Nations in 1934, foreign commissar Maxim Litvinov became the chief spokesman for ‘Collective Security’ against Hitler. As a result, British junior minister Anthony Eden, when brought to the Kremlin in 1935, was treated to the first rendition of God Save the Queen by a Moscow band since Tsarist times; in the same year, too, the signing of the Franco-Soviet Pact showed Stalin not adverse to concluding a deal of principle with a right-winger as slippery as Pierre Laval.
Does Mandel touch on how, in 1937, Stalin’s betrayal of the Spanish revolution ensured that what remained of the international vanguard of the working class was purged just as mercilessly as the people of the Soviet Union? Or on how, given the collapse of Anglo-French opposition to Hitler in the Munich crisis of September 1938, Stalin’s foreign policy framework dictated that he appoint a Politburo member, Molotov, to take charge of the all-important work of building a new alliance with Germany? Not at all. For him, Stalin was involved in a “reckless diplomatic game” (p.33). Writing the achievements of 1917 as large as he does, Mandel refuses to clarify how the Soviet Union was subordinate to the West and on the losing end of Allied appeasement of Nazism.
Nor does he consider the wider implications of Moscow’s eventual wartime alliance with Britain and America against Germany and Japan. In retrospect, we can see in the Second World War the beginnings of that integration into the world economy and world affairs which Gorbachev both benefits from, and is exercised by, today. In the years running up to the war, the Soviet economy was largely autarchic: shortages of foreign exchange, and attempts at import substitution, denied for foreign technology even the qualitative impact it had had before. During the war, by contrast, Moscow benefited not only from US Lend Lease, as we have seen, but also from British technology: one British firm of boilermakers, for example, alone supplied the Soviet power industry with 13 percent of its steam-generating capacity between 1942 and 1945. The war also gave Moscow a network of technical spies in the West which proved useful for at least two decades.
At the diplomatic-military level, the war marked the highpoint of peaceful co-existence. In August 1942, Stalin received Churchill, the West’s most notorious anti-Communist in Moscow, and graciously accepted his statement that the Allies were in no position to open a Second Front against Berlin. In 1943 he came out in favour of Roosevelt’s formula, upheld at Casablanca in the January or that year, of unconditional surrender for Germany; at Teheran in November, he also indicated his willingness to join in the war against Japan. With the establishment of the US Military Mission in Moscow in 1943, Soviet American exchange of and collaboration in intelligence began in earnest, as did the carpet-bombing of Germany by American planes based in the Ukraine. By October 1944, Stalin and Churchill jointly shared a standing ovation in the Bolshoi Theatre. The Comintern no longer existed, but joint planning of operations against German and Japan was underway. Over Italy Stalin had given his approval of the government of Marshal Badoglio, the invader of Abyssinia; over Japan he was shortly to agree to the rule of General MacArthur; he became such a zealous supporter of the United Nations that he proposed a specially formed U N air force to help police the world. The deception of the international working class, around the banner of anti-Fascist unity and the ‘Big Three’, was complete.
Origins
Although the Cold War meant a temporary collapse in East-West links, the 1941-46 period gave the Soviet Union ‘superpower’ status, and irrevocably too. The tangled web of trade and debt relations which today binds the Soviet Union to Western economies has its origins in the Second World War.
Many of those relations today derive not directly from the Soviet Union, but from those states in Eastern Europe which it was able to take over and, as Mandel puts it, transform “into a strategic glacis designed to protect the country’s western flank against possible future German revanchism” (p.62). However, Mandel’s treatment of the buffer states is entirely perfunctory. He spends a paragraph on the Warsaw Rising, pausing only briefly to mention how “ongoing repression by the NKVD” brought it forward and how Stalin’s unkept promises of Red Army assistance decapitated it (p.144). Then, in a striking reversal of his earlier subjectivism, he asks of the war’s conclusion:
Was the outcome decided at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam? Was it, in other words, the product of diplomatic horse-trading, ‘mistakes’ or even ‘betrayals’? To a large extent it was determined on the battlefield. (p.150)
Mandel wants to show that objective military circumstances, not the politics of Stalinism, were at issue in Eastern Europe. He discusses what would have happened if Washington had listened to London, if Eisenhower had gone beyond the Elbe, if Germany had capitulated in 1944, if Poland had made a deal with the Soviet Union in 1942, if the Red Army had arrived in Berlin before the Allies, and soon (pp.151-3). But that Stalinism might just be guilty “even” of betrayals bothers him hardly at all, so anxious is he to separate himself from vulgar, “conspiratorial” accounts of Soviet behaviour. Thus we are led to the following statement:
From the standpoint of the long-term interests of the working class, not to mention the interests of world Socialism it would of course have been preferable if the masses of Romania and the other East European countries had been able to liberate themselves through their own forms of struggle. The Soviet bureaucracy’s ‘revolutions from above’ bequeathed an ugly political legacy, not only in this part of Europe, but throughout the world. But this issue in turn had been largely pre-determined by what happened in the ’twenties and ’thirties, ie by the internal crisis of the Comintern and the growing passivity of the labouring masses. (p.156)
Now: during the years 1944-47, the workers of Eastern Europe went through one in what was to be a series of ordeals at the hands of Stalinism. That many of them welcomed the Red Army only to be repressed by it only confirms the point. Yet Mandel’s delicacy in evading this issue is breathtaking. Those East European workers who can still bring themselves voluntarily to recall their treatment at the hands of the Red Army will be glad to learn from Mandel that it was “of course” contrary to their “long-term” interest, not “preferable”, etc. They would, no doubt, also be comforted to learn that their fate was “pre-determined” by their “growing passivity” in earlier times. In fact matters stand very differently.
Throughout the Forties, the Balkans were the ideal place for the Kremlin to take advantage of imperialist rivalries, imperialist exhaustion and a general discrediting of the weak, far-right local bourgeoisies. At every stage, however, the USSR's grounds for expansion were defensive, a confession of the superior economic performance of the West. As a result, the workers of Eastern Europe were always and entirely the victims of the process. They experienced no revolutions from above – with or without inverted commas. What they saw was a social formation less efficient even than capitalism being consolidated through social engineering and terror.
Apart from nationalisations and manipulation of political parties, the bourgeois state bureaucracy, the intelligentsia and so on, terror was an essential, if uncontrollable, element in the extension of the Soviet system to Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, terror had been a necessary evil in the removal of the New Economic Policy: it proved doubly necessary in capitalist Eastern Europe. The Kremlin’s fear of and hostility towards nationalism in border territories was another factor making the purges in Eastern Europe even more ferocious than the internal purges of 1935-37.
It is true that Mandel describes the overturns in Eastern Europe as “a strictly military-bureaucratic operation … with no intention of "stimulating" international Socialist revolution” (p.166) and that he condemns the Kremlin’s deportation of 11 million German refugees from Eastern Europe as “indefensible” (p.163). Mandel also observes, of the Allies’ post-war carve-up, that “the gains of capitalism were certainly greater than those of the Soviet bureaucracy” (pl66). There, however, he stops.
In the West there is a great amount of hysteria about Stalinist purges in general, and those conducted in Eastern Europe in particular. Yet the task of dispelling this hysteria is not made easier by Mandel’s conspicuous desire to pass over the facts. When the Germans invaded in 1941, the NKVD shot thousands of Balts and Ukrainians in prison camps while the Red Army retreated. In 1944 deportation, imprisonment or execution caught perhaps half a million Romanians, as many Hungarians and yet more Ukrainians, Tartars, Caucasians and other nationalities. Five years later show trials opened in Prague, Budapest and Sofia, as Poland’s Gomulka was jailed, Yugoslavia’s Tito was ostracised, and more than a million East European Communists, stripped of party membership, met a grisly fate. The purges were not confined either to Eastern Europe or to wartime: politically, the Soviet Union was highly unstable after Germany's initial successes in 1941 and only widespread terror within what remained of its borders could guarantee the eradication of dissent and assure a serious war effort. Moreover, purges inside the Soviet Union raged in 1946-47 (against Jews and army officers) and again in 1949-50 (a wave of arrests and shootings in Leningrad). Thousands of Lithuanians, Ukrainians and prisoners also died in major disturbances in the late ’forties. Are these developments not part of the defeats of the international working class? Are they not part of the meaning of the Second World War? Mandel does not want to talk about them.
Mandel refuses to settle scores with Stalinism. Here, in his chapter on ‘ldeology’, is how he deals with the growth of Russian chauvinism in the war:
At the beginning of World War II the Soviet bureaucracy tried to stick to the peculiar ideology that had emerged from the Thermidor: a mixture of crude, dogmatised and simplified ‘Marxism-Leninism’, doctored and deformed to suit the bureaucracy’s specific interests; a no less crudely Byzantine cult of Stalin (the soldiers and workers were literally called to fight and die ‘;for the Fatherland, for Stalin’); and a growing Great Russian nationalism. Following German imperialist aggression, the Communist and pseudo-Communist themes rapidly receded into the background, as, incidentally, did the Stalin cult – at least until 1943. Russian nationalism more and more came to the fore, together with pan-Slavism. This culminated in Stalin’s Victory Manifesto of May 1945, which defined the victory as that of the Slav peoples in “their century-old struggle against the Germanic peoples”. So much for the counter-revolutionary (Trotskyist?) formula of the Communist Manifesto, according to which the history of all societies is the history of class struggles, not the history of ethnic struggles. (p.86)
If only the whole impact of the war on the consciousness of the Soviet working class could be dismissed in such a cavalier manner – by a quick reference to the Communist Manifesto! Unfortunately, things are not so simple.
It is ridiculous to overplay the ‘class’ aspects of the Soviet victory and underplay the ethnic ones. The Stalinist treatment of Russian nationalities and of Eastern Europe had a clear racial dimension to it, and this needs saying again and again. It was not just that Stalin disinterred Tsarist figures as national heroes, revived the trappings of the Tsar’s army (salutes, epaulettes, Cossacks), reclaimed Tsarist possessions from Japan (Sakhalin, the Kurils, Port Arthur), ordered a new national anthem to replace the Internationale, and gave his official seal of approval to the Russian Orthodox Church. Every broadcast by the man ended with the ringing slogan “Death to the German invaders”. While the Soviet Union colluded in the establishment of Israel, a principal charge laid at the feet of those purged in the late forties was ‘Zionism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’: the war provided a major impetus to anti-semitic feeling in the USSR. Nationalism, a natural response to Nazi intervention, was turned by Stalin into a major source of Soviet social cohesion and military élan. To hint at this in half a paragraph is criminal.
It is criminal, in particular, because as we have noted of the West, the Soviet workers’ political defeat at the hands of nationalist reaction was not so interpreted by them. On the contrary, Stalin emerged from the war as a national hero. Despite horrendous losses, the doctrine of Socialism in one country appeared vindicated. Stalin’s “victory of the Slavs” was unscientific, but it was what people thought and still think in the Soviet Union today. We cannot ignore this.
Ernest Mandel was a principled and heroic Trotskyist during the Second World War. In its immediate aftermath he was not so soft on the conduct of Stalinism in Eastern Europe as, sadly, he is now (See The Soviet Union After the War, International Information Bulletin, Socialist Workers Party (US), Vol.1, No.2, 1946). For more than 40 years Mandel has dominated the international Trotskyist movement; his works are published in many languages, his prestige is great, and of his personal integrity there can be no doubt. But he understands neither the Soviet Union nor its involvement in the Second World War.
Gemma Forest
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.
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
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Reviews
Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War, Verso, London, 1986, pp210, £6.95.
In a review of this book elsewhere (Confrontation 3, Summer 1988) I criticised Ernest Mandel for his concessions to bourgeois historicism and for downplaying the catastrophic defeat that the Second World War represented for the international working class. Here I shall concentrate upon another aspect of his book – his apology for Stalinism.
We get a sense of Mandel’s problems when we read, on the back cover blurb, that the fight between the “hideously distorted Socialism” of the USSR and the “Nazi capitalism” of Germany represented “a decisive new element in the war”. Now, though Mandel does not follow his publishers in describing the Soviet Union as Socialist, it is clear that he too finds it a conundrum. It is “non-capitalist” (p.45), but fewer than 20 pages later it is guilty of “partial (post-capitalist) commodity production” (p.82). With this lack of clarity on the nature of the Soviet regime, it is hardly surprising that Mandel cannot explain its military exploits.
What Verso terms “hideously distorted Socialism”, Mandel translates as the contradiction between the USSR’s strengthening industrial and military infrastructure and the purges and diplomatic fiascos, initiated by Stalin, that ran alongside this process. How did the Soviet Union resolve that contradiction'? Eventually, Mandel says, the “achievements of October” (p.38) won out against all else, allowing Moscow to triumph over Berlin. Let us examine this claim.
It is true that the Soviet economy was strengthened in a dramatic manner in the ’thirties. But this was more a matter of the emergence of a new social formation and a weighty bureaucracy than strength in depth or strength in quality. The Stalinists’ great claims to fame were quantitative growth, and a shift, between 1932 and 1937, of the proportion of machine tools installed from 22 per cent Soviet-built to more than 90 per cent Soviet-built. On nearly every other index, however, the Soviet economy was weak – even in military-industrial sectors.
The Stalinists began the ’thirties with famine. By 1933 and the second Five Year Plan, Kazakhstan had to endure its third year of famine based on collectivisation (one million dead out of a nomadic population of less than four million), and the Ukraine its second based on ethnically-inspired terror (five million dead). Famine had also claimed a million lives in the North Caucasus and another million elsewhere in Russia. That same year, investment fell by 14 per cent, gross industrial production rose by only five per cent, and shortages and crises in transport were everywhere. The Five Year Plan had to be revised completely.
By 1937, when the purges were at their height, matters were little improved. Investment had sunk by 10 per cent in two years of bloodletting, and was especially poor in military basics such as iron, steel and construction. Real wages were perhaps a third down on those available in 1928; grain yields did not compare with those raised in the first Five Year Plan; the shortage of recruits in industry, construction and especially transport, where labour turnover stood at more than 100 per cent, stood at a new high of 1.5 million.
The Soviet economy grew because of the bureaucracy’s freedom to mobilise resources. Through terror, social engineering and a certain amount of foreign technology, a system was fashioned which could deliver ’ some of the goods, some of the time. The condition of the urban working class spoke a lot more for the strengthening of Soviet military-industrial might than did the “achievements of October”.
In 1926, 18 per cent of the Soviet Union’s population of 147 million people were in the cities. By 1939, 33 per cent of a population of 170 million were. In Moscow, in 1935, more than 90 per cent of tenants in old accommodation – the general rule in the city – lived one or more to a room; 25 per cent lived in dormitories, and five per cent in kitchens and corridors.
Slave labour
In the cities, as in the concentration camps, it was slave labour, not the gains of 1917, which allowed the Soviet economy to face down the Germans. From 1935 we are in the era of Stakhanov. Then, between 1937 and 1940, real wages dropped by 10 per cent. After laws introduced in 1940, being 20 minutes late for work meant up to six months’ hard labour and up to 25 per cent cuts in pay; unauthorised departures from work could mean four months in jail; low quality production work could lead to eight years in jail. The working day was lengthened from seven to eight hours, the working week from five to six days, and pay stayed the same,
After 1934, when food rationing gave way to price rises, wives went out to work much more. They thus joined with general demographic trends in adding more simultaneous working days to the Soviet economy. In 1938 maternity leave was cut from 112 to 70 days; in 1940 fees were introduced for students in upper secondary and higher education. It was, therefore, through the suffering of working class families that the bureaucracy was able to generate the wealth to fight and win the war
Mandel’s contradiction – industrial might vs. purges and foreign policy fiascos – amounts to little more than a liberal apology for Stalinism. Killing millions and allying with Hitler Mandel condemns with withering criticism; but he always makes clear that industry and thus the achievements of October were paramount. In fact, though, it is simply sentimental to attribute the USSR’s survival after 1941 to the overturn of October 1917. Not only did civil war, famine and the New Economic Policy separate the two periods: the purges themselves destroyed such tenuous links as still existed, by the mid ’thirties, between old Bolshevism and the new bureaucratism. After 1935, the bureaucracy was in complete control. Three in every four workers were on piece wages. In the West, the proletariat had been crushed.
It was the defeats of the working class that both empowered the Kremlin to win the war and ensured that the Soviet death toll reached 20 million. By the early ’forties Stalin had, in effect, run the Soviet economy on a war footing for more than a decade: just as he had thrown manpower and sweat at economic problems before, he now threw lives at the Nazi invaders. For Mandel, the revival in Soviet production after December 1941 demonstrates “the economic and social superiority of a planned economy” (p.53). In other words, it was the nationalised property relations established in 1917 which saw the USSR through. In reality, however, nationalised property relations, without conscious workers’ management, were little match for the law of value when it came to either economic or military competition.
The Soviet Union held out because the bureaucracy, could centralise and use resources as ruthlessly as the Nazis, but over a larger population and under natural conditions (distance, climate) which it could turn to its advantage. To put the Soviet Union’s survival down to ‘planned economy’ is ridiculous. Soviet research and development, for example, was poorly coordinated, too theoretical in orientation, and further weakened by the impact of imports of new, foreign technology. Foreign technology itself was often badly handled, and expert foreign technicians were made the subject of random terror. These fundamental defects were carried through to every sphere. The bulk of pre-war industrial investment was made in the west of the Soviet Union, the area most vulnerable to foreign attack. The territorial gains derived from the Hitler-Stalin Pact were put to no good use; nor were consistent intelligence reports about the Nazis’ plans for invasion. In terms of Stalin’s, generalship, Khrushchev’s report, in his Secret Speech of 1956, that Stalin could be lost for a map at crucial junctures in the war – this, today, still has the ring of truth about it. After the war, too, little changed. It took the Stalinist bureaucracy ten years to rebuild a number of important Soviet towns.
From on high there were orders, targets and repression in the war, and, as in other countries, the Soviet Union denied workers holidays, mobilised children and pensioners for the war effort, lengthened working hours and cut the availability of consumer goods. But collective, conscious planning never existed. What little the Soviet Union had ever managed to establish had been extinguished by the mid ’twenties.
Instead of bringing out the defeat of the Soviet proletariat, Mandel prefers to stress “the tremendous individual commitment of the Soviet working class” (p.53) and the “considerable morale among the workforce and the fighting men and women” (p.69). But this is not the end of his attempt unjustly to dignify the property relations of the Soviet Union with a progressive character. He makes a similar effort in his discussion of US aid during the war.
Most commentators accept that it was Soviet-built tanks and Soviet-built aircraft which won the day, not foreign technology. But Mandel feels the need to point out that “the amount of aid extended by the USA through Lend Lease and otherwise to all its allies was relatively small: some 15 per cent of its military output” (p.70). What he forgets is that, by his own figures (p.52), 15 per cent of the USA’s military output, even though only some of it went to the Soviet Union, was worth in 1942 $5.6 billion – in other words, getting on for half the Soviet Union’s military output of $13.9 billion. So while “l5 per cent” cost the USA little, it meant a lot to its allies – the Soviet Union included. In particular, the Kremlin gained from the USA more than 40,000 machine tools, nearly 2,000 Russian-gauge locomotives, and a large part of the 400,000 increase in military vehicles it recorded in the four years after 1941, when its fleet amounted to only 272,000. Apart from 4.5 million tons of American packaged food, more than two million tons of high-grade oil, millions of pairs of shoes and an enormous quantity of clothes, these vehicles were vital to the Soviet military: at the Teheran Conference of the Allies in 1943, Stalin reported that, in his offensive against Germany, his margin was simply 60 mobile divisions. Much of that mobility he owed not to Leninist planning, but to Studebaker trucks.
Mandel’s dishonesty over the dynamics of Soviet economic and military conduct is also evident in his omissions. In effect, he refuses to discuss the logic behind the labyrinth of Soviet foreign policy in the ’thirties. He supplies a paragraph on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939, a page on the Soviet Union’s ensuing occupation of eastern Poland but nothing at all on its deportation of over a million Poles to the USSR, and a few phrases only about other Soviet operations between 1939 and 1940: war against Finland, seizure and purging of Estonia (1.13 million people), Latvia (1.95 million), Lithuania (2.57 million) and Bessarabia. Aside from this, all Mandel offers on the Soviets’ pre-war international position is a footnote defending Britain and France from a polemic from the venal Molotov.
Ignores
Mandel ignores the Kremlin's policy of peaceful coexistence with one or more imperialist powers at the expense of others – a policy which motivated Stalin from 1926-27 on, and one which still informs the actions of Mikhail Gorbachev and his worldwide followers today. For Mandel:
The Red Army’s complete lack of readiness in 1941 was the direct result of Stalin’s disastrous misunderstanding of the political situation in Europe and of Hitler’s – i.e., German imperialism’s – intentions in the coming war … the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 appeared increasingly as a strategic orientation rather than a tactical move (p33).
But the policy of peaceful coexistence was something much more profound than Stalin’s “misunderstanding” of European affairs. It was a “strategic orientation” in itself: the Hitler-Stalin Pact was but the tactical outcome of more than 12 years of fruitless searching for a durable imperialist ally.
Like bourgeois critics, Mandel likes to ridicule Stalin’s myopia about Hitler’s military intentions. But behind that individual myopia, the whole Stalinist dogma of Socialism in one country stressed the military intentions of outside imperialists above all else. For Stalin, the Soviet Union had only military, not economic, external threats to come to terms with. Especially after the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 sparked off a major recession in the West, Stalin made the exploitation of contradictions between the imperialists the dominating axis of his foreign policy, and abandoned all hopes of international revolution. Traditional Russian fears of encirclement, new and well-founded fears of nationalist unrest in the Soviet borderlands, and a desperate search for foreign technology – all these, not Stalin’s miscalculations, made the non-aggression pact inevitable.
Byzantine
After all, Moscow relied upon German technology for the implementation of much of the Soviet Union’s first Five Year Plan. Only during the first few years of Hitler’s power – from 1933 until 1936 – did Stalin stop formally courting Germany, and even then secret contacts continued. Indeed, the Byzantine course of Soviet foreign policy did much to discredit Communism in the eyes of the international working class even before the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Once the Pact became public, confusion reigned supreme throughout the international left.
In 1933 Moscow gained diplomatic recognition from the USA, spurred by its considerable dependence on American (and especially General Electric) technology. Once it had joined the imperialist League of Nations in 1934, foreign commissar Maxim Litvinov became the chief spokesman for ‘Collective Security’ against Hitler. As a result, British junior minister Anthony Eden, when brought to the Kremlin in 1935, was treated to the first rendition of God Save the Queen by a Moscow band since Tsarist times; in the same year, too, the signing of the Franco-Soviet Pact showed Stalin not adverse to concluding a deal of principle with a right-winger as slippery as Pierre Laval.
Does Mandel touch on how, in 1937, Stalin’s betrayal of the Spanish revolution ensured that what remained of the international vanguard of the working class was purged just as mercilessly as the people of the Soviet Union? Or on how, given the collapse of Anglo-French opposition to Hitler in the Munich crisis of September 1938, Stalin’s foreign policy framework dictated that he appoint a Politburo member, Molotov, to take charge of the all-important work of building a new alliance with Germany? Not at all. For him, Stalin was involved in a “reckless diplomatic game” (p.33). Writing the achievements of 1917 as large as he does, Mandel refuses to clarify how the Soviet Union was subordinate to the West and on the losing end of Allied appeasement of Nazism.
Nor does he consider the wider implications of Moscow’s eventual wartime alliance with Britain and America against Germany and Japan. In retrospect, we can see in the Second World War the beginnings of that integration into the world economy and world affairs which Gorbachev both benefits from, and is exercised by, today. In the years running up to the war, the Soviet economy was largely autarchic: shortages of foreign exchange, and attempts at import substitution, denied for foreign technology even the qualitative impact it had had before. During the war, by contrast, Moscow benefited not only from US Lend Lease, as we have seen, but also from British technology: one British firm of boilermakers, for example, alone supplied the Soviet power industry with 13 percent of its steam-generating capacity between 1942 and 1945. The war also gave Moscow a network of technical spies in the West which proved useful for at least two decades.
At the diplomatic-military level, the war marked the highpoint of peaceful co-existence. In August 1942, Stalin received Churchill, the West’s most notorious anti-Communist in Moscow, and graciously accepted his statement that the Allies were in no position to open a Second Front against Berlin. In 1943 he came out in favour of Roosevelt’s formula, upheld at Casablanca in the January or that year, of unconditional surrender for Germany; at Teheran in November, he also indicated his willingness to join in the war against Japan. With the establishment of the US Military Mission in Moscow in 1943, Soviet American exchange of and collaboration in intelligence began in earnest, as did the carpet-bombing of Germany by American planes based in the Ukraine. By October 1944, Stalin and Churchill jointly shared a standing ovation in the Bolshoi Theatre. The Comintern no longer existed, but joint planning of operations against German and Japan was underway. Over Italy Stalin had given his approval of the government of Marshal Badoglio, the invader of Abyssinia; over Japan he was shortly to agree to the rule of General MacArthur; he became such a zealous supporter of the United Nations that he proposed a specially formed U N air force to help police the world. The deception of the international working class, around the banner of anti-Fascist unity and the ‘Big Three’, was complete.
Origins
Although the Cold War meant a temporary collapse in East-West links, the 1941-46 period gave the Soviet Union ‘superpower’ status, and irrevocably too. The tangled web of trade and debt relations which today binds the Soviet Union to Western economies has its origins in the Second World War.
Many of those relations today derive not directly from the Soviet Union, but from those states in Eastern Europe which it was able to take over and, as Mandel puts it, transform “into a strategic glacis designed to protect the country’s western flank against possible future German revanchism” (p.62). However, Mandel’s treatment of the buffer states is entirely perfunctory. He spends a paragraph on the Warsaw Rising, pausing only briefly to mention how “ongoing repression by the NKVD” brought it forward and how Stalin’s unkept promises of Red Army assistance decapitated it (p.144). Then, in a striking reversal of his earlier subjectivism, he asks of the war’s conclusion:
Was the outcome decided at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam? Was it, in other words, the product of diplomatic horse-trading, ‘mistakes’ or even ‘betrayals’? To a large extent it was determined on the battlefield. (p.150)
Mandel wants to show that objective military circumstances, not the politics of Stalinism, were at issue in Eastern Europe. He discusses what would have happened if Washington had listened to London, if Eisenhower had gone beyond the Elbe, if Germany had capitulated in 1944, if Poland had made a deal with the Soviet Union in 1942, if the Red Army had arrived in Berlin before the Allies, and soon (pp.151-3). But that Stalinism might just be guilty “even” of betrayals bothers him hardly at all, so anxious is he to separate himself from vulgar, “conspiratorial” accounts of Soviet behaviour. Thus we are led to the following statement:
From the standpoint of the long-term interests of the working class, not to mention the interests of world Socialism it would of course have been preferable if the masses of Romania and the other East European countries had been able to liberate themselves through their own forms of struggle. The Soviet bureaucracy’s ‘revolutions from above’ bequeathed an ugly political legacy, not only in this part of Europe, but throughout the world. But this issue in turn had been largely pre-determined by what happened in the ’twenties and ’thirties, ie by the internal crisis of the Comintern and the growing passivity of the labouring masses. (p.156)
Now: during the years 1944-47, the workers of Eastern Europe went through one in what was to be a series of ordeals at the hands of Stalinism. That many of them welcomed the Red Army only to be repressed by it only confirms the point. Yet Mandel’s delicacy in evading this issue is breathtaking. Those East European workers who can still bring themselves voluntarily to recall their treatment at the hands of the Red Army will be glad to learn from Mandel that it was “of course” contrary to their “long-term” interest, not “preferable”, etc. They would, no doubt, also be comforted to learn that their fate was “pre-determined” by their “growing passivity” in earlier times. In fact matters stand very differently.
Throughout the Forties, the Balkans were the ideal place for the Kremlin to take advantage of imperialist rivalries, imperialist exhaustion and a general discrediting of the weak, far-right local bourgeoisies. At every stage, however, the USSR's grounds for expansion were defensive, a confession of the superior economic performance of the West. As a result, the workers of Eastern Europe were always and entirely the victims of the process. They experienced no revolutions from above – with or without inverted commas. What they saw was a social formation less efficient even than capitalism being consolidated through social engineering and terror.
Apart from nationalisations and manipulation of political parties, the bourgeois state bureaucracy, the intelligentsia and so on, terror was an essential, if uncontrollable, element in the extension of the Soviet system to Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, terror had been a necessary evil in the removal of the New Economic Policy: it proved doubly necessary in capitalist Eastern Europe. The Kremlin’s fear of and hostility towards nationalism in border territories was another factor making the purges in Eastern Europe even more ferocious than the internal purges of 1935-37.
It is true that Mandel describes the overturns in Eastern Europe as “a strictly military-bureaucratic operation … with no intention of "stimulating" international Socialist revolution” (p.166) and that he condemns the Kremlin’s deportation of 11 million German refugees from Eastern Europe as “indefensible” (p.163). Mandel also observes, of the Allies’ post-war carve-up, that “the gains of capitalism were certainly greater than those of the Soviet bureaucracy” (pl66). There, however, he stops.
In the West there is a great amount of hysteria about Stalinist purges in general, and those conducted in Eastern Europe in particular. Yet the task of dispelling this hysteria is not made easier by Mandel’s conspicuous desire to pass over the facts. When the Germans invaded in 1941, the NKVD shot thousands of Balts and Ukrainians in prison camps while the Red Army retreated. In 1944 deportation, imprisonment or execution caught perhaps half a million Romanians, as many Hungarians and yet more Ukrainians, Tartars, Caucasians and other nationalities. Five years later show trials opened in Prague, Budapest and Sofia, as Poland’s Gomulka was jailed, Yugoslavia’s Tito was ostracised, and more than a million East European Communists, stripped of party membership, met a grisly fate. The purges were not confined either to Eastern Europe or to wartime: politically, the Soviet Union was highly unstable after Germany's initial successes in 1941 and only widespread terror within what remained of its borders could guarantee the eradication of dissent and assure a serious war effort. Moreover, purges inside the Soviet Union raged in 1946-47 (against Jews and army officers) and again in 1949-50 (a wave of arrests and shootings in Leningrad). Thousands of Lithuanians, Ukrainians and prisoners also died in major disturbances in the late ’forties. Are these developments not part of the defeats of the international working class? Are they not part of the meaning of the Second World War? Mandel does not want to talk about them.
Mandel refuses to settle scores with Stalinism. Here, in his chapter on ‘ldeology’, is how he deals with the growth of Russian chauvinism in the war:
At the beginning of World War II the Soviet bureaucracy tried to stick to the peculiar ideology that had emerged from the Thermidor: a mixture of crude, dogmatised and simplified ‘Marxism-Leninism’, doctored and deformed to suit the bureaucracy’s specific interests; a no less crudely Byzantine cult of Stalin (the soldiers and workers were literally called to fight and die ‘;for the Fatherland, for Stalin’); and a growing Great Russian nationalism. Following German imperialist aggression, the Communist and pseudo-Communist themes rapidly receded into the background, as, incidentally, did the Stalin cult – at least until 1943. Russian nationalism more and more came to the fore, together with pan-Slavism. This culminated in Stalin’s Victory Manifesto of May 1945, which defined the victory as that of the Slav peoples in “their century-old struggle against the Germanic peoples”. So much for the counter-revolutionary (Trotskyist?) formula of the Communist Manifesto, according to which the history of all societies is the history of class struggles, not the history of ethnic struggles. (p.86)
If only the whole impact of the war on the consciousness of the Soviet working class could be dismissed in such a cavalier manner – by a quick reference to the Communist Manifesto! Unfortunately, things are not so simple.
It is ridiculous to overplay the ‘class’ aspects of the Soviet victory and underplay the ethnic ones. The Stalinist treatment of Russian nationalities and of Eastern Europe had a clear racial dimension to it, and this needs saying again and again. It was not just that Stalin disinterred Tsarist figures as national heroes, revived the trappings of the Tsar’s army (salutes, epaulettes, Cossacks), reclaimed Tsarist possessions from Japan (Sakhalin, the Kurils, Port Arthur), ordered a new national anthem to replace the Internationale, and gave his official seal of approval to the Russian Orthodox Church. Every broadcast by the man ended with the ringing slogan “Death to the German invaders”. While the Soviet Union colluded in the establishment of Israel, a principal charge laid at the feet of those purged in the late forties was ‘Zionism’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’: the war provided a major impetus to anti-semitic feeling in the USSR. Nationalism, a natural response to Nazi intervention, was turned by Stalin into a major source of Soviet social cohesion and military élan. To hint at this in half a paragraph is criminal.
It is criminal, in particular, because as we have noted of the West, the Soviet workers’ political defeat at the hands of nationalist reaction was not so interpreted by them. On the contrary, Stalin emerged from the war as a national hero. Despite horrendous losses, the doctrine of Socialism in one country appeared vindicated. Stalin’s “victory of the Slavs” was unscientific, but it was what people thought and still think in the Soviet Union today. We cannot ignore this.
Ernest Mandel was a principled and heroic Trotskyist during the Second World War. In its immediate aftermath he was not so soft on the conduct of Stalinism in Eastern Europe as, sadly, he is now (See The Soviet Union After the War, International Information Bulletin, Socialist Workers Party (US), Vol.1, No.2, 1946). For more than 40 years Mandel has dominated the international Trotskyist movement; his works are published in many languages, his prestige is great, and of his personal integrity there can be no doubt. But he understands neither the Soviet Union nor its involvement in the Second World War.
Gemma Forest
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