This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Friday, January 03, 2014
HONOR
THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The Historic
Leader Of The German Spartacists-Karl Liebknecht
EVERY JANUARY WE HONOR LENIN OF
RUSSIA, ROSA LUXEMBURG OF POLAND, AND KARL LIEBKNECHT OF GERMANY AS THREE
LEADERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS MOVEMENT.
Karl Liebknecht Thumbnail Biography
The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD,
Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in
political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement
and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism.
As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD
representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in
December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His
opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he
was imprisoned.
Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself
into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new
Communist Party (KPD). Along with Luxemburg he was murdered by military
officers with the tacit approval of the leaders of the SPD after the
suppression of the so-called “Spartacist Uprising” in January 1919.
************** Markin
comment:
Karl
Liebknecht- A Model Anti-Warrior
This
comment was written in 2006 but the main points hold true today:
I recently (2006) received a comment from someone whom
I took earnestly to be perplexed by a section of a commentary that I had
written where I stated that the minimum necessary for any anti-war politician
was to vote against the Iraq war budget in a principled manner. Not the way
former Democratic presidential candidate Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s
(and others) dipsy-doodled votes for and against various war budgetary requests
in 2004. And certainly not the other variations on this theme performed
recently by aspiring Democratic presidential candidates Senators Obama and
Clinton in the lead-up to 2008. Nor, for that matter, the way of those who
oppose the Iraq war budget but have no problems if those funds were diverted to
wars in Afghanistan, Iran , North Korea, China or their favorite ‘evil state’ of
the month. What really drew the commenter up short was that I stated this was
only the beginning political wisdom and then proceeded to explain that even
that would not be enough to render the politician political support if his or
her other politics were weak.The
commenter then plaintively begged me to describe what politician would qualify
for such support. Although I have noted elsewhere that some politicians,
Democratic Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts and presidential
candidate Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich stand out from the pack, the
real anti-war hero on principle we should look at is long dead-Karl Liebknecht,
the German Social-Democratic leader from World War I. Wherever anyone fights
against unjust wars Liebknecht’s spirit hovers over those efforts.
…I do not believe we are lacking in physical
courage. What has declined is political courage, and this seems in irreversible
decline on the part of parliamentary politicians. That said, I want to finish
up with a woefully inadequate political appreciation of Karl Liebknecht, member
of the German Social Democratic faction in the Reichstag in the early 1900’s.
Karl was also a son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, friend of Karl Marx and founder of
the German Social Democratic Party in the 1860’s. On August 4, 1914, at the
start of World War I the German Social Democratic Party voted YES on the war
budget of the Kaiser against all its previous historic positions on German
militarism. This vote was rightly seen as a betrayal of socialist principles.
Due to a policy of parliamentary solidarity Karl Liebknecht also voted for this
budget, or at least felt he had to go along with his faction. Shortly
thereafter, he broke ranks and voted NO against the war appropriations. As
pointed out below Karl Liebknecht did much more than that to oppose the German
side in the First World War. THAT, MY FRIENDS, IS THE KIND OF POLITICAN I CAN
SUPPORT. AS FOR THE REST- HOLD THEIR FEET TO THE FIRE.
One of the problems with being the son of a famous
politician is that as founder of the early German Social Democratic Party
Wilhelm Liebknecht's son much was expected of Karl, especially on the question
of leading the German working class against German militarism. Wilhelm had done
a prison term (with August Bebel) for opposition to the Franco-Prussian War. As
for Karl I have always admired that famous picture of him walking across the
Potsdam Plaza in uniform, subject to imprisonment after loss of his
parliamentary immunity, with briefcase under arm ready to go in and do battle
with the parliamentary cretins of the Social Democratic Party over support for
the war budget. (THIS PICTURE CAN BE GOOGLED) That is the kind of leadership
cadre we desperately need now. REMEMBER HIS FAMOUS SLOGANS- "HE MAIN ENEMY IS
AT HOME’-‘NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE PERSON (updated by writer) FOR THE WAR."
Wilhelm would have been proud.
***Honor The 80th Anniversary Of The Minneapolis Teamsters' Strikes
This year marks the 80th Anniversary of three great labor struggles that ended in victory in heart of the Great Depression(the 1930s version of what we, at least partially, confront today); the great General Strike in San Francisco that was led by the dockers and sailor unions and brought victory on the key issue of the union hiring hall (since then greatly emasculated); the great Minneapolis Teamster strikes that led to the unionization of truck drivers and allied workers in that labor-hating town and later to the organizing of over-the-road drivers that created one of the strongest (if corrupt) unions in North America; and, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike whose key component was leadership by the unemployed workers. Does all of this sound familiar? Yes and no. Yes, to labor militants who, looking to a way out of the impasse of the condition of today's quiescent labor movement, have studied these labor actions. No, to the vast majority of workers who are either not organized or are clueless about their history. In either case, though, these actions provide a thread to how we must struggle in the future. Although 80 years seems like a long time ago the issues posed then have not gone away. Far from it. Study this labor history now to be ready to struggle when we get our openings. ******* This year is the 80th Anniversary of the great Minneapolis Teamsters strikes that paved the way to the later over-the road trucker unionization that was to make the Teamsters Union one of the strongest unions (if at the same time one of the most corrupt but that is a story for another time). Here is a 1934 article by Socialist Workers Party(SWP) (then Communist League Of America)leader James P. Cannon who was also a key leader behind the scenes (and not so behind the scenes when the law came looking to arrest him and Max Schachtman) about the lessons to be learned by labor militants from that great series of strike actions. I also recommend "Teamster Rebellion" and "Teamster Power" by local Teamsters leader and later SWP leader Farrell Dobbs. Those books trace the rank and file struggle and the later over-the road fight that he was instrumental in leading.
James P. Cannon
The New International 1934
Minneapolis and its Meaning June 1934 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: 1934 Source: The New International. Original bound volumes of The New International and microfilm provided by the Holt Labor Library, San Francisco, California. Transcription\HTML Markup:Andrew Pollack
Standing by itself, the magnificent strike of the Minneapolis truck drivers would merit recognition as an extraordinary event in modem American labor history. Its connection with the second wave of labor struggles to sweep the country since the inception of the NRA, however, and its indubitable place as the high point of the present strike wave, invest the Minneapolis demonstration with an exceptional importance. Therefore it has come by right to be the subject of serious and attentive study and of heated discussion. This discussion, despite all the partisan prejudice and misrepresentation injected into it, is bound on the whole to have a profitable result. The best approach to the trade union question, the key question of revolutionary politics in the United States, is through the study and discussion of concrete examples.
The second strike wave under the NRA raises higher than the first and marks a big forward stride of the American working class. The enormous potentialities of future developments are clearly written in this advance. The native militancy of the workers, so impressively demonstrated on every strike front in recent months, needs only to be fused with an authentic leadership which brings organization, consciousness, and the spirit of determined struggle into the movement. Minneapolis was an example of such a fusion. That is what lifted the drivers’ strike out above the general run. Therein lies its great significance—as an anticipation, if only on a comparatively small, local scale, of future developments in the labor movement of the country. The determining role of policy and leadership was disclosed with singular emphasis in the Minneapolis battle.
The main features of the present strike wave, on the background of which the Minneapolis example must be considered, are easily distinguishable. Now, as in the labor upsurge of last year, the attitude of the workers toward the NRA occupies a central place. But the attitude is somewhat different than it was before. The messianic faith in the Roosevelt administration which characterized the strike movement of a year ago and which, to a certain extent, provided the initial impulse for the movement, has largely disappeared and given place to skeptical distrust. It is hardly correct, however, to say, as some revolutionary wishful thinkers are saying, that the current strikes are consciously directed against the NRA. There is little or no evidence to support such a bald assertion.
It is more in keeping with reality to say that the striking workers now depend primarily on their own organization and fighting capacity and expect little or nothing from the source to which, a short year ago, they looked for everything. Nevertheless they are not yet ready even to ignore the NRA, to say nothing of fighting against it directly. What has actually taken place has been a heavy shift in emphasis from faith in the NRA to reliance on their own strength.
In these great struggles the American workers, in all parts of the country, are displaying the unrestrained militancy of a class that is just beginning to awaken. This is a new generation of a class that has not been defeated. On the contrary, it is only now beginning to find itself and to feel its strength. And in these first, tentative conflicts the proletarian giant gives a glorious promise for the future. The present generation remains true to the tradition of American labor; it is boldly aggressive and violent from the start. The American worker is no Quaker. Further developments of the class struggle will bring plenty of fighting in the USA.
It is also a distinct feature of the second strike wave, and those who want to understand and adjust themselves to the general trend of the movement should mark it well, that the organization drives and the strikes, barring incidental exceptions, are conducted within the framework of the AFL unions. The exceptions are important and should not be disregarded. At any rate, the movement begins there. Only those who foresaw this trend and synchronized their activities with it have been able to play a part in the recent strikes and to influence them from within.
The central aim and aspiration of the workers, that is, of the newly organized workers who are pressing the fight on every front, is to establish their organizations firmly. The first and foremost demand in every struggle is: recognition of the union. With unerring instinct the workers seek first of all the protection of an organization.
William S. Brown, president of the Minneapolis union, expressed the sentiment of all the strikers in every industry in his statement: “The union felt that wage agreements are not much protection to a union man unless first there is definite assurance that the union man will be protected in his job.” The strike wave sweeping the country in the second year of the NRA is in its very essence a struggle for the right of organization. The outcome of every strike is to be estimated primarily by its success or failure in enforcing the recognition of the union.
And from this point of view the results in general are not so rosy. The workers manifested a mighty impulse for organization, and in many cases they fought heroically. But they have yet to attain their first objective. The auto settlement, which established the recognition of the company union rather than the unions of the workers, weighs heavily on the whole labor situation. The workers everywhere have to pay for the precedent set in this industry of such great strategic importance. From all appearances the steelworkers are going to be caught in the same runaround. The New York hotel strike failed to establish the union. The New York taxi drivers got no union recognition, or anything else. Not a single of the “red” unions affiliated to the Trade Union Unity League has succeeded in gaining recognition. Even the great battle of Toledo appears to have been concluded without the attainment of this primary demand.
The American workers are on the march. They are organizing by the hundreds of thousands. They are fighting to establish their new unions firmly and compel the bosses to recognize them. But in the overwhelming majority of cases they have yet to win this fundamental demand.
In the light of this general situation the results of the Minneapolis strike stand out preeminent and unique. Judged in comparison with the struggles of the other newly formed unions—and that is the only sensible criterion—the Minneapolis settlement, itself a compromise, has to be recorded as a victory of the first order. In gaining recognition of the union, and in proceeding to enforce it the day following the settlement, General Drivers Union No. 574 has set a pace for all the new unions in the country. The outcome was not accidental either. Policy, method, leadership—these were the determining factors at Minneapolis which the aspiring workers everywhere ought to study and follow.
The medium of organization in Minneapolis was a craft union of the AFL, and one of the most conservative of the AFL Internationals at that. This course was deliberately chosen by the organizers of the fight in conformity with the general trend of the movement, although they are by no means worshippers of the AFL. Despite the obvious limitations of this antiquated form of organization it proved to be sufficient for the occasion thanks to a liberal construction of the jurisdictional limits of the union. Affiliation with the AFL afforded other compensating advantages. The new union was thereby placed in direct contact with the general labor movement and was enabled to draw on it for support. This was a decisive element in the outcome. The organized labor movement, and with it practically the entire working class of Minneapolis, was lined up behind the strike. Out of a union with the most conservative tradition and obsolete structure came the most militant and successful strike.
The stormy militancy of the strike, which electrified the whole labor movement, is too well known to need recounting here. The results also are known, among them the not unimportant detail that the serious casualties were suffered by the other side. True enough, the striking workers nearly everywhere have fought with great courage. But here also the Minneapolis strike was marked by certain different and distinct aspects which are of fundamental importance. In other places, as a rule, the strike militancy surged from below and was checked and restrained by the leaders. In Minneapolis it was organized and directed by the leaders. In most of the other strikes the leaders blunted the edge of the fight where they could not head it off altogether, as in the case of the auto workers—and preached reliance on the NRA, on General Johnson, or the president. In Minneapolis the leaders taught the workers to fight for their rights and fought with them.
This conception of the leadership, that the establishment of the union was to be attained only by struggle, shaped the course of action not only during the ten-day strike but in every step that led to it. That explains why the strike was prepared and organized so thoroughly. Minneapolis never before saw such a well-organized strike, and it is doubtful if its like, from the standpoint of organization, has often been seen anywhere on this continent.
Having no illusions about the reasonableness of the bosses or the beneficence of the NRA, and sowing none in the ranks, the leadership calculated the whole campaign on the certainty of a strike and made everything ready for it. When the hour struck the union was ready, down to the last detail of organization. “If the preparations made by their union for handling it are any indication,” wrote the Minneapolis Tribune on the eve of the. conflict, “the strike of the truck drivers in Minneapolis is going to be a far-reaching affair. . . . Even before the official start of the strike at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday the ’General Headquarters’ organization set up at 1900 Chicago Avenue was operating with all the precision of a military organization.”
This spirit of determined struggle was combined at the same time with a realistic appraisal of the relation of forces and the limited objectives of the fight. Without this all the preparations and all the militancy of the strikers might well have been wasted and brought the reaction of a crushing defeat. The strike was understood to be a preliminary, partial struggle, with the objective of establishing the union and compelling the bosses to recognize it. When they got that, they stopped and called it a day.
The strong union that has emerged from the strike will be able to fight again and to protect its membership in the meantime. The accomplishment is modest enough. But if we want to play an effective part in the labor movement, we must not allow ourselves to forget that the American working class is just beginning to move on the path of the class struggle and, in its great majority, stands yet before the first task of establishing stable unions. Those who understand the task of the day and accomplish it prepare the future. The others merely chatter.
As in every strike of any consequence, the workers involved in the Minneapolis struggle also had an opportunity to see the government at work and to learn some practical lessons as to its real function. The police force of the city, under the direction of the Republican mayor, supplemented by a horde of “special deputies,” were lined up solidly on the side of the bosses. The police and deputies did their best to protect the strikebreakers and keep some trucks moving, although their best was not good enough. The mobilization of the militia by the Farmer-Labor governor was a threat against the strikers, even if the militiamen were not put on the street. The strikers will remember that threat. In a sense it can be said that the political education of a large section of the strikers began with this experience. It is sheer lunacy, however to imagine that it was completed and that the strikers, practically all of whom voted yesterday for Roosevelt and Olson, could have been led into a prolonged strike for purely political aims after the primary demand for the recognition of the union had been won.
Yet this is the premise upon which all the Stalinist criticism of the strike leadership is based. Governor Olson, declared Bill Dunne in the Daily Worker, was the “main enemy.” And having convinced himself on this point, he continued: “The exposure and defeat of Olson should have been the central political objective of the Minneapolis struggle.” Nor did he stop even there. Wound up and going strong by this time, and lacking the friendly advice of a Harpo Marx who would explain the wisdom of keeping the mouth shut when the head is not clear, he decided to go to the limit, so he added: “This [exposure and defeat of Olson] was the basic necessity for winning the economic demands for the Drivers Union and the rest of the working class.”
There it is, Mr. Ripley, whether you believe it or not. This is the thesis, the “political line,” laid down for the Minneapolis truck drivers in the Daily Worker. For the sake of this thesis, it is contended that negotiations for the settlement of he strike should have been rejected unless the state troopers were demobilized, and a general strike should have been proclaimed “over the heads of the Central Labor Council and state federation of labor officials.” Dunne only neglected to add: over the heads of the workers also, including the truck drivers.
For the workers of Minneapolis, including the striking drivers, didn’t understand the situation in this light at all, and leaders who proceeded on such an assumption would have found themselves without followers. The workers of Minneapolis, like the striking workers all over the country, understand the “central objective” to be the recognition of the union. The leaders were in full harmony with them on this question; they stuck to this objective; and when it was attained, they did not attempt to parade the workers through a general strike for the sake of exercise or for “the defeat of Governor Olson.” For one reason, it was not the right thing to do. And, for another reason, they couldn’t have done it if they had tried.
The arguments of Bill Dunne regarding the Minneapolis “betrayal” could have a logical meaning only to one who construed the situation as revolutionary and aimed at an insurrection. We, of course, are for the revolution. But not today, not in a single city. There is a certain unconscious tribute to the “Trotskyists”—and not an inappropriate one—in the fact that so much was demanded of them in Minneapolis. But Bill Dunne, who is more at home with proverbs than with politics, should recall the one which says, “every vegetable has its season.” It was the season for an armed battle in Germany in the early part of 1933. In America in 1934, it is the season for organizing the workers, leading them in strikes, and compelling the bosses to recognize their unions. The mistake of all the Stalinists, Bill Dunne among them, in misjudging the weather in Germany in 1933 was a tragedy. In America in 1934 it is a farce.
The strike wave of last year was only a prelude to the surging movement we witness today. And just as the present movement goes deeper and strikes harder than the first, so does it prepare the way for a third movement which will surpass it in scope, aggressiveness, and militancy. Frustrated in their aspirations for organization by misplaced faith in the Roosevelt administration, and by the black treachery of the official labor bureaucracy, the workers will take the road of struggle again with firmer determination and clearer aims. And they will seek for better leaders. Then the new left wing of the labor movement can have its day. The revolutionary militants can bound forward in mighty leaps and come to the head of large sections of the movement if they know how to grasp their opportunities and understand their tasks. For this they must be politically organized and work together as a disciplined body; they must forge the new party of the Fourth International without delay. They must get inside the developing movement, regardless of its initial form, stay inside, and shape its course from within.
They must demonstrate a capacity for organization as well as agitation, for responsibility as well as for militancy. They must convince the workers of their ability not only to organize and lead strikes aggressively, but also to settle them advantageously at the right time and consolidate the gains. In a word, the modem militants of the labor movement have the task of gaining the confidence of the workers in their ability to lead the movement all the year round and to advance the interests of the workers all the time.
On this condition the new left wing of the trade unions can take shape and grow with rapid strides. And the left wing, in turn, will be the foundation of the new party, the genuine communist party. On a local scale, in a small sector of the labor movement, the Minneapolis comrades have set an example which shows the way. The International Communists have every right to be proud of this example and hold it up as a model to study and follow.
***Out In The 1950s B-Film Noir Night- William Berke’s Sky Liner
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Sky Liner, starring Richard Travis, directed by William Berke, 1949
It is an old saw now that not all classic film noir, not all B-film noir efforts either, are equal. Take the three (including this one) B- reviews that I have recently undertaken on the 1940s-1950s film director William Berke. His Roaring City was passablequick look at second-rate private detectives starved for serious femmes and serious plot-lines and his Treasure of Monte Christo stretched suspension of disbelief to the limit with his modern day swash-buckler and now, Sky Liner, falls somewhere in between. Here’s why.
Of course the late 1940s-1950s were a great age of red scare, Cold War, red under every bed, your mommy is a commie, turn her in, cautionary tale films about the need to be ever vigilant against the latest foreign menace. And of course that menace included agents, paid or ideologically-driven, working to get information for that other side. And others willing, more than willing, to buy and sell that information to suit their own political or personal needs. Of course the buying and selling of sensitive information that might hurt the American government required an ever vigilant law enforcement arm, the FBI, to snuff out such evil doings. And that is the framework underlying this film.
Most of the action, if one can call it that, takes place on a transcontinental airplane flight from New York City to Los Angeles. (Howard Hughes’ TWA of course.) A flight done in propeller-driven airplane days so there is plenty of time for the plot to unfold. An American federal law enforcement agent, okay, okay FBI, has been following a certain secretary of nefarious political sympathies to an important State Department official (shades of Alger Hiss et. al) to find out what she is reporting to her confederates. That trail leads to the flight where a number of “red herring” characters are also on board to add “suspense” to the plot.Along the way the secretary’s confederate (acting as her now deceased boss, yes, some rough stuff was necessary) is murdered, the plane is set down for an emergency landing, and the confederate murderer/information buyer is subsequently apprehended.
All in a day’s work for your average 1950s federal agent. Get this though said agent for his efforts also gets a date with a foxy little stewardess (oops, flight attendant). Apparently somebody could not resist that twist in order to pay homage to Hollywood’s insatiable desire to plot every film with the classic boy meets girl formula. In any case definitely the middle one of the three- film trifecta directed by William Berke.
***The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator-On One Nick Charles (Okay, Nora Too), Private Eye- The (Real) Thin Man Case
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman –with kudos to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler
Disclaimer: Of course Michael Philip Marlin is not alive. Christ, he would be over one hundred years old, although seeing the way private eyes today use the latest DNA samples, the Internet, techno-photography, enhanced this and that, and the ubiquitous GPS and still come up empty-handed, still can’t solve the damn case in front of them Marlin would still give them a run for their money if he were alive. Especially if some rough stuff was at hand. No, what the “The Life And Times Of Michael Philip Marlin, Private Investigator” means is that there is a Marlin, Tyrone, Marlin’s son, who has taken up the profession and is carrying on with his father’s work.
This may surprise many, including Marlin’s father, uh, step-father, no, that’s not right either, god-father, a guy named Raymond Chandler who did not knowthat Marlin had a son, thought he was strictly a loner, a middle-aged loner and who was strictly a “love them and leave them” guy with the women. Chandler can be excused for being unaware of Marlin’s family status since he had lost touch with Marlin before he, Chandler, died in 1959. See Marlin kept it all hush-hush about his big affair with Fiona Fallon, yes, that Fiona, who gave the likes of Gene Tierney, Lauren Bacall and Rita Hayworth a run for their money in the femme fatale department back when they were lighting up the screens in the 1940s with a smile and a come hither look that every guy thought, no, knew was meant for him (keep that quiet just in case those guys married, and are still married to, the dish they took to that show).
They were having an affair on the sly after Marlin saved a producer’s bacon, a well-known producer who is still working so we will use some discretion, on a kidnapping case (of his daughter) who wrapped up the thing with no loss of life and no ransom paid and to show his gratitude he introduced them to each other. Fiona, a shapely green-eyed red-head, and Marlin hit it off right away. A child was born of their love, Tyrone, in 1946. It was never clear whether they had been married, nobody could find a marriage certificate (maybe today’s techno-dicks could find one, at least they should be able to do that). What is not in dispute is that on the QT Marlin acknowledged his son, and came through with child support when Fiona’s star started fade in the 1950s when shapely red-heads were being pushed out of Hollywood by curvaceous buxom blondes, as were those who like Fiona had been too close to the Hollywood Ten-types as well. More importantly, as Marlin wound down his personal involvement in his agency, Michael Philip Marlin and Associates, leaving the day to day operations to a guy named Miles Archer, a skirt-chaser but good on divorce work, work which brought in the serious 1950s Hollywood dough, he spent more time with Tyrone.
The pair, to use today’s term, bonded, bonded over Marlin’s endless tales about his own cases, and cases of guys that he worked with, or in competition with. After Marlin died in 1976, died the way he lived, by the way, taking two slugs to the heart from some two-bit gunsel, Elisha Cook I think his name was, who was ordered by old- time gangster boss of bosses Max Webber to “hit” Webber’s ex-girlfriend who had hired Marlin to protect her, Tyrone got “religion,” got the shamus bug that must have been DNA-embedded in his cells. Funny though Tyrone never used his father’s name when he went private, using his mother’s name Fallon instead.His reason, like lots of children of the famous, was that he wanted to succeed or fall on his own ass. Besides more people, people who counted in Hollywood, remembered the beautiful if wild Fiona Fallon than some two-bit key-hole peeper (Marlin’s term not Tyrone’s). Moreover lone wolf shamuses with quirky habits, quick fists, and fast trigger fingers were not what serious money Hollywood was looking for in the 1970s. They wanted work done quietly, very quietly.
One day somebody, somebody I know quite well, Joshua Lawrence Breslin the old time radical journalist (The East Bay Eye and other small newspapers and journals) asked Tyrone to tell him some of the stories that Marlin had told him about the days when men,and women too, made of steel, steely stuff anyway. One thing Josh wanted to know was about Marlin’s take on a famous gumshoe, a society guy named Nick Charles, who had solved one of the biggest murder cases around, the one they called the Thin Man case.Tyrone laughed, laughed heartily when he was asked that question because Marlin would always bring that guy, Nick Charos he called him, and that case, up when he wanted to make a point about guys who should have taken up some trade, plumbing maybe, rather than private detection. Here is the way Tyrone explained the case to Josh who explained it to me one night not long ago over a few drinks, although I take full responsibility for what is written here.
************** Tyrone Fallon started the story out by sayingthat one thing his father always said, said the thing almost every time he spoke of a case, spoke of it like some mantra, was don’t believe everything you hear around or read in the damn newspapers. And Tyrone remembered that Marlin (let’s call him that for convenience, besides everybody except a few flames, including Fiona, called him the manly Marlin surname rather than the wimpy Michael Philip, Philip with one “l”) punctuated that remark, punctuated it by digging a finger into Tyrone’s chest about one Nick Charos, strictly a creation of the tabloids and society swells.
(Nick Charles, born Nicholas Charos, a Greek guy from the old neighborhood who could hardly wait to Anglicize his name like half the other sons and daughters of immigrants who stepped off the boat from Ellis Island back in the day in order to move in with the uptown crowd, the WASPs, when they, he, came of age )
The media went crazy when Nick solved what all the newspapers and radio reports called, for lack of a better moniker, the Thin Man case, the case of the murder of Lawrence Winot the big inventor/ industrialist, right under noses of New York’s finest. But Marlin, after he daily read the doings in the case in the Times got curious, very curious about how a guy, a society guy like Charles could have done such a feat, a feat that even he would have been hard pressed to solve from what he knew of the few facts provided by the press.So he started to make some connections with his sources in New York City to find out what was what because something was out of whack.
Those connections led him to NYPD Detective Lieutenant Tom Mallory, the cop in charge of the day to day operations of the case who told him over the telephone in several conversations exactly what did and did not happen in that case. Once Detective Mallory found out he was dealing with a real private eye, Jesus, the guy who solved, or rather wrapped up with a bow the famous Galton case, the Hollywood kidnap and ransom case with no loss of innocent life, and no ransom given he was more than happy to share the real facts of his case. All he asked of Marlin was that he keep the stuff under his hat, keep it between professionals since the media now that the dust had settled could have cared less about facts anyway. Mallory said that straight out at the beginning of their first conversation because the papers, radio too, had just cribbed the AP-UPI ticker, had gotten it all balled up. Especially the guy from the Gazette, Dashiell Hammett, who was mainly the flak-catcher on the case, apparently the only guy at that newspaper who could walk on two feet Mallory guessed. He cynically used the case to try to make a big name for himself, trying to move up in the business, and trying to win a by-line over the dead body of Winot.
The guy, Winot, apparently carried a lot of water in New York, whatever little quirks he might have exhibited which were learned as the case unfolded, so you knew there would be plenty of publicity. Hammett was nothing but a two-bit cub reporter trying to cash in. Christ, Hammett had previously spent his time at the paper writing some advice or “how to” column or something like that, you know “Should I wear brown shoes with a grey suit-coat?” that kind of stuff, lightweight stuff, for the Gazette newspaper before the police beat reporter, old reliable Glenn Hubbard, passed away and they needed somebody to cover the spot until they got a real beat reporter.
This Hammett was nothing but a bother, soaking up other guys’ material, real reporters, and just re-writing the stuff in that awful hard-boiled cop manner that he thought was the real thing, thought was the way cops, victims, or witnesses talked, gruff talk. You know, highlighting some cop, some cop he slipped a fiver to, telling the reading public about how the cop saved somebody’s bacon, or gunned down some desperado with no thought to his own safety. Not worrying about truth or anything like that, that’s for sure. The situation was awful until Mallory and his buddies threw him out of the reporters’ pit down at Precinct. But that only made things worse as Hammett started making stuff up out of whole cloth as he went along grabbling stuff of off the police channel and embellishing it. He was the guy who coined it the Thin Man case since when NYPD found Winot’s body it turned to be that of a tall thin guy. Why not the Tall Man case. Jesus, Marlowe could see what Mallory meant.
So you know Hammett was nothing but putty in a smoothie like Nick Charles’ hands. Nick wouldn’t even have to work up a sweat just throwing out whatever “evidence” came into his alcohol-addled head. And Hammett lapped it up, all of it just like a dog. And printing whatever his wife, Nora, had to say for that matter who Mallory guessed had nothing better to do that clipping stock dividend coupons and decided that wouldn’t it be lovely to be crime-busters for a while, until the social season started anyway. So Nick Charles, or wife Nora, or the both of them gave Hammett all the information they wanted planted (and drinks at their favorite afternoon watering hole over at the Alhambra, the one on 54th Street not the one on 42nd). Hammett never checked any of it out and wound up with egg on his face when Nick, drunk probably, swore he had dinner with Winot one afternoon. It must have been a very quiet dinner on that date he gave out since according to the coroner’s report, an official report, Winot had been dead a couple of weeks by that time. Of course once NYPD, Mallory and his partners, solved the case all of that was water under the bridge and Nick came up, like every Mayfair swell, smelling of roses. Here’s the real story, the unvarnished story, if you can stand it.
This Nick Charles was a Greek kid from Mallory’s old neighborhood, from the only Greek family in an Irish neighborhood, his father ran the corner market is why. Mallory had run with his older brother, Samos, stealing hubcaps, batteries from cars and stuff, doing five-finger discounts of almost anything with some value from stores for a while before he got on the force. (Truth: Mallory said he got nabbed a couple of times but his father, a twenty- year cop himself got it squashed, squashed real good. The fact that Mallory disclosed that tidbit without having to do so impressed Marlin.) Nick later got on the force too through Mallory’s father who liked the kid, and he was likable in an Irish sort of way for a guy who wasn’t Irish but pure Greek. He left the force after a few years because he didn’t like the red tape and the paper work or something, didn’t get the big cases but was walking some beat out in Five Points before that place got too rough for cops to walk around in. Mallory heard the real reason he left was he was not getting what he thought was his proper cut of the graft from the bookies, tavern owners, and dope-peddlers on his beat and made a stink about it but let’s leave it at the reason Nick gave Hammett since that is what everybody will believe of Saint Nick anyway.
After a couple of years of bumming around, riding the rails (to get a feel for the country according to Hammett like running from railroad bulls with blackjacks and eating “jungle” stew was some kind of lark to see how the other half lived) Nick went private. Yeah, became a private key-hole peeper, a shamus, a gumshoe and every other put down name you can think of that real cops call home-wreckers, divorce work guys mainly, or just plain leeches. No offense, Marlin. Hell in those days all you needed was a cheapjack license from the real cops (Mallory’s father helping again in his behalf) and five bucks and you were ready to go so nobody should make more out it than that, make it like you had to grind away at some four- year college to get going.
Mallory had worked a couple of cases with Nick when he was around New York, nothing big, some stolen jewelry from a department store (He said he used his old time expertise as a five-finger discounter to wrap that one up. Nick wanted to fingerprint every kid under twenty who came the store for any reason, Jesus.). Another time a guy who skipped out of his wife and who NYPD was interested in on a Bunco charge, nothing stuff. Mallory forgot whether they ever nabbed that guy, maybe not. Then Mallory didn’t hear about Nick for a while until he ran into Samos one day back in the old neighborhood where he went to visit his mother. He stepped into the market that Samos had taken over from his father when he got too old to do it.By the way, and this is what Marlowe liked about Mallory, his honesty which counted for a lot with him, especially the few cops who were not totally on the “take,” Malloryhad also stepped by in order to collect some protection money since Samos was running a betting parlor out of the back of the store. If you want to do such an illegal activity you best pay some protection money to the men in blue or you will find out fast that such activity is against the law. Samos was wise to that and paid up, paid up regularly and on time, no problem.
Samos said Nick had gone to the West Coast to try his luck there after he heard about a guy named Michael Philip Marlin, none other than Tyrone’s father, nothing but a private dick but with some street smarts. Marlin Tyrone said was making a bundle solving cases, especially one big Hollywood case where he saved some producer’sbacon after a busted kidnap ransom on his daughter went sour, and he was getting some silky sheets action from the starlets (courtesy of that grateful producer) down in Los Angeles. Marlin hemmed and hawed as he said all this to Tyrone, kind of wanted to pass the starlet and silky sheets stuff off as just publicity. Tyrone bailed Marlin out by saying he understood that was Los Angeles before the war, before everything went crazy out there, before everybody and their brother and sister was crazy to go to Babylon.
So Nick tried his luck up north in Frisco. Mallory didn’t see his name or photograph in the papers in New York like you would about every other week with Marlin escorting some starlet at an opening night so he figured Nick busted. Later he heard that Nick had given up the private dick game and had gotten married to some frill with dough out there, Nora Allen, whom he had met on some case. He found out later (from Nora’s maid, maids always a good source for information) that Nick had actually dropped the ball on the case, an embezzlement of one of her father’s companies by a trusted employee, who got away to some Pacific island and was never caught. The father had subsequently had a heart attack and Nick was there to hold the daughter’s, Nora’s, hand before he passed on.
Then one night Mallory was working the Club Soto, looking for a couple of guys, wise guys that he had questions, third –degree questions, to ask about a certain robbery at Kay’s Jewelry Store over on 42nd Street, when he spied Nick and that wife, Nora, a real looker. They had come to town for some stockholders’ meeting or something and were enjoying the night life while they were here. He had been drinking heavily and maybe she had too although she carried it better. They greeted, Nick introduced Mallory to Nora, cut up a few old torches and then they parted. That was the last he had heard of them until the Thin Man case broke a couple of months later, around Christmas. The Chief told Mallory, no ordered him, to bring Nick (and as it turned out this Nora who was the one with the real pull, with the dough to do the pulling) into the case since he, they, had bought a whole block of tickets to the upcoming Policemen’s Ball. So that was that. But already, and he hadn’t even told Marlowe thing one about the case, you could see where bringing in Mayfair swells, even if one of them was a busted-down gumshoe who got lucky, would ball the whole thing up. Would make more work for NYPD before he, they, were through. That stuff, filler really when Marlin thought back on it, was okay but after about two long telephone calls he was itchy to get the details of the case, as a matter of professional curiosity.
So Mallory spilled it out on the third conversation especially when Marlin pulled his chain about who, or who did not have the investigative smarts to round the killer up. This thin man, thisLawrence Winot, who even now people, people with cars, everybody, he was sure Marlin had have heard of (he had), or somebody you know has heard of, was a giant in the invention game, mostly about making automobiles faster and safer, and then producing the cars at one of his plants. Naturally a guy who can make cars safer and faster in this car-crazy world would have nothing but money hanging off of him. And he did, except that was not what pulled his chain. Thinking up new inventions was what made him tick.
His family, his wife, really ex-wife and three young marriage- eligible daughters though were another matter, they wanted dough and plenty of it. But him, people would see him around town and kind of laugh at him, privately laugh averting his face since you don’t laugh out loud when that much money is walking down the street and someday you might need a job, or a favor. The reason that they laughed though was that this Winot, about sixty years old was gangly, was a tall skinny guy who always looked a little disheveled, a little too long- haired and with a bleary-eyed look and like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. But the biggest laugh was that he was kind of an absent-minded professor-type. You know head down and bumping into people or tripping and falling off a curbstone. That is why nobody, nobody meaning the family since his companies were managed by professionals who kept him away from production and company finances leaving him a toy- box laboratory to fiddle around in in one of the downtown buildings off of Seventh Avenue where he could be found at all hours, was nervous when he didn’t show up for a couple of weeks.
Oh yeah, once NYPD was on the case, although it was like pulling teeth to get the family to provide that information, that like a lot of guys with money and some old time reversion to a young man’s sexual dreams Winot was keeping company with his secretary. This secretary, this Janet, was a looker although Mallory said he didn’t know how she was at dictation or whether it mattered to Winot but she was all blonde and curves.Mallory had her down as nothing but a gold-digger anyway, or high ticket call girl but that was not important. What was important was everybody, family, company executives, his lawyer, thought he was either with Janet under the silky sheets somewhere or out in some desolate, isolated spot inventing something on the QT. When Janet showed up one day at the office after coming back from vacation and said she hadn’t seen Winot for a couple of weeks and nobody could figure out from any evidence his whereabouts then the family, really Winot’s oldest daughter, Dorothy, filed a missing person’s report and that was how Mallory lammed onto the case.
Now this Winot family was buggy, buggy as Winot himself. Seems that Winot divorced his wife, Ida, in order to play with Janet. Such things happen all the time in and around New York, it’s that kind of city just like Marlin’s L.A. except there in real money in the former, but she had gotten remarried on the rebound to some gigolo, a guy named Roman Griffin who NYPD had a book on for pandering and some Bunco activities. Nothing big but enough to figure he was working some scam and for a while they had him set in stone for the big step-off. Ida, Mrs. Winot, ah, Mrs. Griffin thought Roman had dough, dough being very necessary to her up-town lifestyle which was threatened since Janet made sure that Winot cut Ida off after the alimony settlement. Griffin though was nothing but a gold-digger, male version. This Dorothy thought Roman had something to do with her father’s disappearance (as Mallory said so did he once they had a look at Roman’s rap sheet) and convinced her two younger sisters to go along with her on the story.
Jesus those two were nuts, nuts plain and simple, a couple of wayward nubiles with time on their hands while waiting for some guy to spring a wedding ring on them They, night and day, began spying on Roman, sending goofy notes, and threatening murder and mayhem if he did not confess to kidnapping their father. And that is where this Hammett guy, this cub reporter came into the picture. They, the sisters egged on by Dorothy who hunted down some information about Griffin and his previous shady life, had called him and as much as said Roman was the one. Hammett printed their sad-ass story and the whole town was ready to lynch Roman. But see Roman was known to NYPD , very well-known and so after a little friendly third –degree grilling they put him on ice as a material witness like they do all the time when they are not sure who did what and to whom. Just so you aren’t in suspense and get an example of how Mallory was in charge right from the beginning this Roman was cleared early, was nothing but a pretty boy con man, and in any savvy detective’s long experience con men don’t go in for murder, no way.
Mallory said even with pressure from higher up they kept Nick at arm’s length most of the time, and he kept himself supplied with enough liquor to waltz through the thing. It was this flak-catcher Hammett and his daily bull that got all the attention while NYPD was hunkered down doing the real work. Every day page one in the Gazette Nick Charles this, Nora Charles that. Nick suspected some gangster one day or some ex-lover, or Janet the next while they were really either throwing some party for half of Nick’s old crumb bum friends from the old days or were out on the town drinking from slippers or something.
Truth, he, they, never were a factor in the case at all until that last night when Mallory had all the suspects up to the Charles’ apartment for a final grilling. See Winot had not disappeared, at least not on his own disappeared to silky sheets or to inventive isolation. One day the cops got a warrant and searched Winot’s lab looking for evidence that might help them find him if he was out inventing something once the silky sheets with Janet angle blew up after she surfaced at the office. In one corner of the lab, a wall really, they “found” Winot, found his bones anyway, found him very dead, okay. So that was when Mallory came up with the idea of using a party at Nick’s place to nail the killer since he had a pretty good idea what happened at the lab, and who did the nasty deed. The way Hammett reported it after the dust settled was based on the idea that because it was Nick’s party where the killer was apprehended then it was Nick’s collar. Hammett was clueless that the “party” was a trap, had been set up that way not that somehow between martinis, dry, that Nick out of the blue exposed the killer and he crumbled before the great man’s deductive reasoning. Mallory was steaming for a month over that one.
Oh yeah how did they find that killer. Simple police work, simple tax-payer public police work. They figured foul play from the time Janet surfaced without Winot. They had followed her, followed her for a couple of weeks until one afternoon she met at the Automat with a guy, a guy who was later identified as James Livermore, a competitor and ex-partner of Winot’s when they both were starting out after studying at MIT and who was a man with a grudge since he believed that Winot had stolen some patent, some patent for automobile transmissions and which had made Winot a bundle. This Livermore got nothing, nothing except for living out in the open air bumming and thumbing most of his life. This Janet was his daughter whom he had convinced to seduce Winot and then after he was perfume-crazed grab his dough while doing her job in the office.
That strategy proved too slow though, and Winot was kind of crafty and a cheapskate always hovering around when it came down to it, so they hatched a kidnap-ransom gag that has been used since about Adam and Eve, maybe before. The problem was that Winot recognized Livermore’s voice during the abduction at the lab and so old Winot’s days were numbered. Very numbered. NYPD checked every place Livermore or Janet might have been where Winot might have also been, checked carefully and they hit pay-dirt when they checked Winot’s workshop area and noticed that what looked like a fresh digging in one corner of the shop. They had that section of the wall dug up and there they found the remains of a man, a tall, skinny man. Winot.
It is one thing to suspect a guy of a crime, even murder, it is another to have a case against him, although a few times Mallory admitted the cops have had to frame a guy just to close a case (and Marlin knew that as well from his own checkered dealing with West Coast cops). But not this one, not with the Chief looking over everybody’s shoulder, not with Nick snooping around when he was dead drunk, and not with Hammett printing every fool theory that Charles threw his way. That is when Mallory decided to spring his trap at Nick’s house while everybody of interest was at his dinner party. Mallory had arranged the guest list to include the Winot family in toto, Julia, Winot’s lawyer, a few yeggs, and of course the Charles pair and their lapdog Hammett. Of course he had a few coppers acting as waiters and doormen to keep order and prevent the targeted guy from getting away. And the guest of honor although he didn’t know it? One James Livermore whom Mallory was able to get there using the ruse that Winot’s lawyer had information about settling up with him through his will.
When Mallory had everybody gathered and a couple of courses served he played a little game. He asked Nick to eliminate anybody that he was sure was not involved in Winot’s disappearance and for a dipso he did pretty good, getting it down to Janet Livermore and an old yegg, John “Studs” Murphy. At that point James flipped out, flipped out badly yelling that Janet had nothing to do with Winot’s disappearance. He drew a gun and naturally Mallory had to put two slugs into him.
As for Janet, well they left Janet alone although they could have charged her with kidnapping pure and simple, felony murder too. The last anybody heard she was married to some big money stockbroker who liked blondes with curves and who maybe had murder in their hearts. As for Nick and Nora Charles they took the fastest train out of town that night, right after the gun play started. They boarded the Red-Eye Special that left around midnight and the last anybody had heard of them was they were back clipping stock coupons out in Frisco while using the lounge at the Drake Hotel as their favorite watering hole. Hammett, well, Hammett gave up the newspaper dodge and the last anybody heard he was writing detective novels based on Nick and Nora’s exploits in that Thin Man case. Mallory grumbled into the telephone at that idea-“What a laugh.”
***The Roots Is The
Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II…
For
Prentice John Markin and Delores Maude Markin (nee Riley) who lived through it
all, survived it all, and never drew a blessed break…
…Yes,
still he disturbed her sleep that week, made her a little cuckoo at work and
around the house if you asked anyone within fifty feet of her. Was made more
cuckoo when she talked to thatnon-
observant Irish Catholic tyrant father about his opinion (theoretically, of
course) of southerners, American southerners, Protestants, Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, the British kind, and Marines (she did not add the “love them and
leave them” kind). His response was horrific. Yes, he had opinions of all three
categories, none good, and not just none good. He sensed what she was getting
at (her mother had vaguely posed the question to him earlier in the week) and
said in no uncertain terms that he would not, his word, abide, an ignorant,
uneducated (this before she even knew her Marine’s lack of formal education),
whiskey-drinking (despite his rages her fatherwas a tee-totaller having survived a drunken besotted father), redneck
southern Protestant (or northern Protestant for that matter) ne’er –do-well
Marine, or any other military man from that part of the country in his house.
End of conversation, forever.
Still
she thought of him, wondered whether he would be at the dance that week. Maybe
he had shipped out, maybe he was off with some pretty young thing (although
those fierce brown eyes when he spoke to her should have told her otherwise).
In any case she was going to make her case, despite her father (or who knows
maybe because of the old tyrant) and despite her qualms about his intentions.
So come that Friday she prepared herself, put on her best party dress (which
had first served as her graduation dress but with the war efforts eating up
textiles at a prodigious rate serious dresses were not be had), make herself up
special with a little rouge and some ruby red lipstick and, and, put on nylons,
nylons, even more than special dresses not to be had then. Her best come hither
soldier boy look.
And
you know that he was there, the Sheik was there that night all in dress blues,
as she walked in while Jimmy Mack and the Pack back again warmed up on Til The End Of Time.She did not know where it would all lead but when he asked her
after they had danced a couple of numbers if maybe they could go down to
Hullsville Beach and talk instead of staying for the dance she said yes…
Thursday, January 02, 2014
HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN,
LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT-Honor The
Historic Leader Of The Bolshevik Revolution-Vladimir Lenin
Every January leftists honor three
revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl
Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after
leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. I made my political points
about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German
war budget in World War I in this space earlier (see review in April 2006
archives). I made some special points here last year about the life of Rosa
Luxemburg (see review in January 2006 archives). This year it is appropriate,
at a time when the young needs to find a few good heroes, to highlight the
early struggles of Vladimir Lenin, the third L, to define himself politically.
Probably the best way to do that is to look at Lenin’s experiences through the
prism of his fellow revolutionary, early political opponent and eventual
co-leader of the Bolshevik Revolution Leon Trotsky.
A Look At The Young Lenin By A
Fellow Revolutionary
The Young Lenin, Leon Trotsky,
Doubleday and Co., New York, 1972
The now slightly receding figure of
the 20th century Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin founder and
leader of the Bolshevik Party and guiding light of the October 1917 Russian
Revolution and the first attempt at creating a socialist society has been the
subject to many biographies. Some of those efforts undertaken during the time
of the former Soviet government dismantled in 1991-92, especially under the
Stalin regime, bordered on or were merely the hagiographic. Others, reflecting
the ups and downs of the post- World War II Cold War, painted an obscene
diabolical picture, excluding Lenin’s horns, and in some cases not even
attempting to exclude those. In virtually all cases these effort centered on
Lenin’s life from the period of the rise of the Bolshevik Social Democratic
faction in 1903 until his early death in 1924. In short, the early formative
period of his life in the backwaters of provincial Russia rate a gloss over.
Lenin’s fellow revolutionary Leon Trotsky, although some ten years younger than
him, tries to trace that early stage of his life in order to draw certain
lessons. It is in that context that Trotsky’s work contains some important
insights about the development of revolutionary figures and their beginnings.
Although Trotsky’s little work,
originally intended to be part of a full biography of Lenin, never served its
purpose of educating the youth during his lifetime and the story of it
discovery is rather interesting one should note that this is neither a
scholarly work in the traditional sense nor is it completely free from certain
fawning over Lenin by Trotsky. Part of this was determined by the vicissitudes
of the furious Trotsky-Stalin fights for the soul of the Russian Revolution as
Trotsky tried to uncover the layers of misinformation about Lenin’s early life.
Part of it resulted from Trotsky’s status of junior partner to Lenin and also
to his late coming over to Bolshevism. And part of it is, frankly, to
indirectly contrast Lenin’s and his own road to Marxism. That said, this
partial biography stands up very well as an analysis of the times that the
young Lenin lived in, the events that affected his development and the
idiosyncrasies of his own personality that drove him toward revolutionary
conclusions. In short, Trotsky’s work is a case study in the proposition that
revolutionaries are made not born.
To a greater extent than would be
true today in a celebrity-conscious world many parts of Lenin’s early life are
just not verifiable. Partially that is due to the nature of record keeping in
the Russia of the 19th century. Partially it is because of the
necessity to rely on not always reliable police records. Another part is that
the average youth, and here Lenin was in some ways no exception, really have a
limited noteworthy record to present for public inspection. That despite the
best efforts of Soviet hagiography to make it otherwise. Nevertheless Trotsky
does an admirable job of detailing the high and low lights of agrarian Russian
society and the vagaries of the land question in the second half of the 19thcentury.
One should note that Trotsky grew up on a Ukrainian farm and therefore is no
stranger to many of the same kind of problems that Lenin had to work through
concerning the solution to the agrarian crisis, the peasant question. Most
notably, is that the fight for the Russian revolution that everyone knew was
coming could only be worked out through the fight for influence over the small
industrial working class and socialism.
I would note that for the modern
young reader that two things Trotsky analyzes are relevant. The first is the
relationship between Lenin and his older brother Alexander who, when he became
politicized, joined a remnant of the populist People’s Will terrorist
organization and attempted to assassinate the Tsar. For his efforts he and his
co-conspirators were hanged. I have always been intrigued by the effect that
this event had on Lenin’s development. On the one hand, as a budding young
intellectual, would Lenin have attempted to avenge his brother’s fate with his
same revolutionary intellectual political program? Or would Lenin go another
way to intersect the coming revolutionary either through its agrarian component
or the budding Marxist Social Democratic element? We know the answer but Trotsky
provides a nicely reasoned analysis of the various influences that were at work
in the young Lenin. That alone is worth the price of admission here.
The other point I have already
alluded to above. Revolutionaries are made not born, although particular life
circumstances may create certain more favorable conditions. Soviet historians
in their voluntarist hay day tried to make of Lenin a superhuman phenomenon- a
fully formed Marxist intellectual from his early youth. Trotsky once again
distills the essence of Lenin’s struggle to make sense of the world, the
Russian world in the first instance, as he tries to find a way out the Russian
political impasse. Trotsky’s work only goes up to 1892-93, the Samara period,
the period before Lenin took off for Petersburg and greener pastures. He left
Samara a fully committed Marxist but it would be many years, with many polemics
and by using many political techniques before he himself became a Bolshevik, as
we know it. And that, young friends, is a cautionary tale that can be taken
into the 21st century. Read on.
From The Marxist Archives -The Revolutionary History Journal-Sam Levy-The Proletarian Military Policy Revisited Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement than in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
*********** Proletarian Military Policy Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter, No. 13, August-September 1972
The sharpening inter-imperialist antagonisms upsurge in imperialist rivalry and "surprising" new alignments pose for the third time in this century the specter of a world war, this time with thermonuclear weaponry. Imperialist war has always been a decisive test for the communist movement. Such wars are the consummate expression of the inability of capitalism to transcend the contradiction between the productive forces, which have outgrown both national boundaries and private property relations, and the relations of production which define the two great classes of modern society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Imperialist war brings only increased misery, enslavement and suffering to the working class, exacerbating the tensions of class society to a fever pitch. Marxists seek to use these periodic violent disruptions of decaying capitalism to bring about the liberation of the proletariat. This is due not to a "the worse the better" outlook, but rather is the necessary recognition of the objective conditions of crisis weakening bourgeois society which Marxists must seek to utilize in order to drive forward to the socialist revolution.
As the outlines and alignments of yet a third global inter-imperialist war begin to take shape, it is essential to examine the policy of the Trotskyist movement in World War II and to understand the role and nature of the modern bourgeois state and its army, in order to prepare ourselves for the coming period of increasing international conflicts and war. Failure to take the basic Leninist conception of the state as a starting point for any strategy towards the bourgeois army leads almost inevitably to major theoretical errors, as was the case with the Socialist Workers Party’s adoption of the "Proletarian Military Policy" (PMP) in 1940. A study of the PMP and of Trotsky’s writings on the coming war, fascism and military policy in 1940 reveal a sliding off from basic Leninist concepts of the bourgeois state and army.
The PMP was a misdirected attempt to turn the American working class’s desire to fight fascism into a revolutionary perspective of overthrowing its "own" imperialist state. The core of the PMP was a call for trade union control of the compulsory military training being instituted by the state. The SWP resolution on "Proletarian Military Policy" adopted at the SWP’s Plenum-Conference in Chicago in September 1940 states:
"We fight against sending the worker-soldiers into battle without proper training and equipment. We oppose the military direction of worker-soldiers by bourgeois officers who have no regard for their treatment, their protection and their lives. We demand federal funds for the military training of workers and worker-officers under the control of the trade unions. Military appropriations? Yes–but only for the establishment and equipment of worker training camps! Compulsory military training of workers? Yes–but only under the control of the trade unions!"
James P. Cannon, leader of the SWP, defended the policy, primarily against the criticisms of Max Shachtman who had recently broken from the SWP and founded the Workers Party. Essentially, the PMP contained a reformist thrust; it implied that it was possible for the working class to control the bourgeois army. The logic of the PMP leads to reformist concepts of workers’ control of the state–which stand in opposition to the Marxist understanding that the proletariat must smash the organs of bourgeois state power in order to carry through a socialist revolution.
Cannon "Telescopes" the Tasks
It is necessary to see the background against which the PMP was developed, and what the expectations of the SWP and Trotsky were in World War II, as these expectations were the assumptions which led them to the PMP. Cannon said at the 1940 SWP Conference:
"We didn’t visualize a world situation in which whole countries would be conquered by fascist armies. The workers don't want to be conquered by foreign invaders, above all by the fascists. They require a program of military struggle against foreign invaders which assures their class independence. That is the gist of the problem.
"Many times in the past we were put to a certain disadvantage: the demagogy of the social democrats against us was effective to a certain extent. They said: ‘You have no answer to the question of how to fight Hitler...’ Well, we answered in a general way, the workers will fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie at home, and then they will take care of invaders. That was a good program, but the workers did not make the revolution in time. Now the two tasks must be telescoped and carried out simultaneously….
"We are willing to fight Hitler. No worker wants to see that gang of fascist barbarians overrun this country or any country. But we want to fight fascism under a leadership we can trust."
Cannon strongly emphasized that capitalism has plunged the world into an epoch of universal militarism, and that from now on, "great questions can be decided only by military means." For Cannon, "anti-militarism was all right when we were fighting against war in time of peace. But here you have a new situation of universal militarism."
Trotsky and the SWP were attempting to take advantage of the intersection of the "universal militarism" of the bourgeois states’ preparation for imperialist war with the genuine anti-fascist sentiment of the masses. Trotsky’s writings of 1939-40 reveal an apocalyptic vision of the coming war which led him to see the need to develop some strategy to fairly immediately win over the army. Trotsky and the SWP vastly overestimated the extent to which the processes of the war itself would rip the facade off the (Anglo-American) bourgeoisie’s ideology of "democracy" fighting "dictatorship." Trotsky, in conversations with SWP leaders in Mexico in 1940, said, "If the bourgeoisie could preserve democracy, good, but within a year they will impose a dictatorship. Naturally in principle we would overthrow so-called bourgeois democracy given the opportunity but the bourgeoisie won’t give us time" (discussion with Trotsky, 12 June 1940, Writings Leon Trotsky, 1939-40).
"Reformism Cannot Live Today"
As part of his projection, Trotsky also believed that reformism had exhausted all its possibilities: "At one time America was rich in reformist tendencies, but the New Deal was the last flareup. Now with the war it is clear that the New Deal exhausted all the reformist and democratic possibilities and created incomparably more favorable possibilities for revolution." The SWP developed the viewpoint that as a result of the crisis resulting from the war, reformism could not survive. A section of the SWP Resolution titled "Reformism Cannot Live Today" stated, "In the first place the victories of the fascist war machine of Hitler have destroyed every plausible basis for the illusion that a serious struggle against fascism can be conducted under the leadership of a bourgeois democratic regime." But following World War II, because of the hatred of the working class for fascism and the broad strike wave, the bourgeoisie was forced to reinstate liberal reformist ideology and parliamentary politics, in an effort to mollify the workers.
The Trotskyists took as the basis and starting point of their new policy, the deeply popular working class sentiment against fascism. The working class was being conscripted, and part of their acceptance of this conscription was based on their desire to fight fascism, the SWP reasoned, so therefore their acceptance of conscription has a "progressive" character. The PMP was based on the belief that the bourgeoisie would be forced to institute military dictatorships and thus would be forced to expose its reactionary character in the midst of war, in a situation when the working class was armed (by the state itself) and motivated by deeply anti-dictatorship and anti-fascist feelings. This would lead inevitably to a revolutionary situation, and very quickly at that. These were the primary assumptions of Trotsky and the SWP. They do not serve to justify the adoption of the PMP, however, but rather only illuminate the background against which it was developed.
The slogan, "For trade union control of military training," implies trade union control of the bourgeois army. The PMP slid over the particular nature and role of the imperialist army as the bulwark of capitalism. Shachtman caught the core of the PMP’s reformist thrust and this sliding over when he wrote:
"I characterized his [Cannon’s] formula as essentially social-patriotic… Cannon used to say: We will be defensists when we have a country to defend, that is, when the workers have taken power in the land, for then it will not be an imperialist war we are waging but rather a revolutionary war against imperialist assailants.… Now he says something different, because the revolution did not come in time. Now the two tasks–the task of bringing about the socialist revolution and defending the fatherland–‘must be telescoped and carried out simultaneously.’"
-"Working Class Policy in War and Peace," The New International, January, 1941
In 1941 Shachtman had not yet been a year on his uneven eighteen-year-long centrist course from revolutionary Marxism to social democracy. In the first years Shachtman’s Workers Party claimed to be a section of the Fourth International and argued for the "conditional defense" of the Soviet Union whose "bureaucratic collectivism"–as he designated the degenerated workers state–was still progressive relative to capitalism. And as late as 1947 the issue of unification between the SWP and the Workers Party was sharply posed. His revisionist break with Marxism was nonetheless profound from the outset: a complete repudiation of its philosophic methodology coupled with the concrete betrayal of the Soviet Union in the real wars that took place, first with Finland in 1939 and then the German invasion in 1941. Thus the SWP’s departure from the clear principled thrust of Leninism in advancing the ambiguous PMP was for the early revisionist Shachtman a gift which he was able to exploit because it did not center on his own areas of decisive departure from Marxism.
Ten years later, however, under the pressures of the Korean War, Shachtman’s revisionism had become all-encompassing and he advanced a grotesquely reactionary version of the PMP of his own. Writing of the anticipated Third World War he asserted that "the only greater disaster than the war itself… would be the victory of Stalinism as the outcome of the war." From this he concluded that "socialist policy must be based upon the idea of transforming the imperialist war into a democratic war [against Stalinism]." And to achieve this transformation he looked to "a workers’ government, no matter how modest its aims would be at the beginning, no matter how far removed from a consistently socialist objective" ("Socialist Policy in the War," New International, 1951). Shachtman’s "workers’ government" is clearly no dictatorship of the proletariat–without socialist aims!–but rather the blood relative of Major Atlee’s British Labour government, fantasized into an American labor government headed by Walter Reuther. Here the class character of the state has been disappeared with a vengeance. (Shachtman’s group, by 1949 the Independent Socialist League, entered the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation in 1958. In the early 1960’s nostalgic ISL types, most notably Hal Draper, gradually separated from the SP–especially after Shachtman himself defended the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion. Draper et al. went on to found what has now become the present-day International Socialists.)
Trotsky on the PMP
The fragmentary material that Trotsky wrote on the subject in his last few months makes it clear that he bears responsibility for initiating the PMP; however, he was murdered prior to its full-blown public inauguration and development by the SWP. Trotsky’s prediction that the bourgeoisie would not give the workers time to overthrow the bourgeois state before they had to fight against fascism feeds directly into Cannon’s ambiguity over revolutionary defeatism and the "telescoping" process of combining national defense with the workers’ fight against fascism.
Trotsky writes in Some Questions on American Problems, "The American workers do not want to be conquered by Hitler and to those who say, ‘Let us have a peace program,’ we say, ‘We will defend the United States with a workers’ army, with workers’ officers, with a workers’ government, etc.’ If we are not pacifists, who wait for a better future, and if we are active revolutionists, our job is to penetrate into the whole military machine." What is left out of this agitational approach is significant. Marxists do not defend the U.S.! At least not until the U.S. is a socialist U. S., only after the bourgeoisie and all its institutions, including the army, have been crushed. Marxists must oppose imperialist war; World War II was being fought not for "democracy" against "fascism" but purely for redivision of the world for imperialist ends. The workers’ army Trotsky writes of cannot develop organically out of the bourgeois army, but must be built up under conditions of class tension and revolutionary crisis through independent workers militias and by polarization of the bourgeois armed forces–that is, as the counterposed military arm of the working class organizing itself as the state power dual to the capitalists’ government.
The PMP’s thrust was that of supporting a war against fascism without making clear whose class state was waging the war. Because of the popularity of a "democratic war against fascism," the actual effect of the PMP would have been merely to make the bourgeois state’s war more efficient and more democratically conducted.
Workers Control of the Army?
The logic of the PMP impelled the SWP to see the bourgeois army as only one more arena of working-class struggle, like a factory, rather than as the main coercive force of the bourgeois state. If Marxists can favor trade union control of industry, why not trade union control of military training? We agree that Marxists seek to fight oppression wherever it arises, including fighting for soldiers’ rights–but from this it does not follow that we should call for "workers’ control of the army" as a parallel slogan to "workers' control of the factories." There will always be a need for development of the forces of production; the proletarian revolution does not need to smash them for its own purposes. The army’s sole function is to maintain the dominant class in power through coercion and repression; during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the revolutionary state will have its own army, organized to serve its own class purposes; a developed socialist society will have no need for this special repressive apparatus, which will gradually dissolve into the whole self-armed population, and then, like the state, it too will wither away. The army is not a class-neutral institution. As part of the "special bodies of armed men" which constitute the basis of the state, it cannot be a workers’ army unless it is the army of a workers’ state.
Similarly we do not delude the workers with slogans of "workers’ control" of the police or of the prisons either, since both are at the essence of the bourgeois state. If we called for "workers’ control of the prisons," the blood of Attica would be on our hands as well as Rockefeller’s. The storming of the Bastille represents the only possible form of "workers’ control" of the repressive apparatus of the state–i.e., smashing it utterly.
The PMP was a proposal for the unions to make the bourgeois army more democratic and efficient to prosecute the war "against fascism." But the bourgeoisie cannot fight fascism! The U.S. bourgeoisie wanted to fight the Germans and Japanese to further its own imperialist goals, not to "fight fascism."
The PMP error can be most clearly seen in the case of an unpopular war: should we demand trade union control of military training in order to better fight in Vietnam? Obviously not. But the point is the same. Only those social chauvinists who support "their" government’s war aims can reasonably raise the PMP.
As an SWP programmatic demand, the PMP never took life and shortly was shelved, because the SWP did oppose the second imperialist war and therefore the autonomous social-patriotic implications of the PMP did not take hold. But neither was the error corrected in those years, and it has been a source of disorientation ever since for those young militants who seek to counterpose en bloc the revolutionary SWP of the 1940’s to the wretched reformist vehicle which today still bears the initials SWP.
The whole authority of the state is based ultimately on its ability to successfully employ its coercive power, which rests on its standing army, police and prisons; the coercive power of the state is the very essence of its structure. This development of state power is linked directly to the development of class antagonisms, so that while the state appears to stand above and outside of class conflict, as a "neutral" third force, in reality it is nothing more than an agent of the dominant, more powerful class in society. These considerations give rise to two major premises of revolutionary strategy: (1) that the existing bourgeois state machinery, including its army, must be crushed, and (2) in order to successfully accomplish this, the bourgeois state must be unable to rely upon its own coercive power; it must be unable to use it successfully against the revolutionary forces who seek to fundamentally change the class structure upon which the state rests. It is impossible to use the bourgeois army for proletarian ends; it must be smashed. The destabilizing of the bourgeois army, turning a section of it to the side of the proletariat, is inseparably linked with, but not the same as, the process of arming the proletariat.
For the Independent Arming of the Working Class!
The SWP was trying to use the bourgeoisie’s militarism for its own ends, and so it dropped entirely any fight against bourgeois militarism and patriotism as the main danger to the working class, and instead of exposing the nature of the imperialist armies, concentrated on attacking pacifism. Had the working class had such pacifist illusions of peaceful resistance to war, one could find more justification for this emphasis–however, as Trotsky recognized, the workers were "95 to 98 percent patriotic" in 1940, and thus accepted conscription into the army, because they were willing to fight fascism. Since the workers were for conscription, the pressure on the SWP to blunt a defeatist policy was strong. The SWP should have counterposed at every step the independent arming of the proletariat; but instead it undercut opposition to bourgeois conscription. Cannon attacks the fight of the social-pacifists against conscription because it "overlooked realities and sowed illusions. The workers were for conscription…a certain amount of compulsion has always been invoked by the labor movement against the backward, the slackers…. Compulsion in the class war is a class necessity" (Cannon’s speech at 1940 SWP Conference). Yes, of course compulsion is a class necessity–but conscription into the bourgeois army is a class necessity for the bourgeois class. The fact that the workers may have supported it does not alter the class nature of the coercion being applied. It is not the job of the proletarian vanguard to help the bourgeoisie wage its imperialist wars, to provide it with cannon fodder. Communists must call for revolutionary defeatism and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in wars between imperialist powers–not for the working class in each country to "control" the fighting arm of its "own" bourgeoisie. The call must be to "turn the guns the other way," not to control the military apparatus.
As Trotsky wrote in 1934 in his comprehensive systematization of the revolutionary Marxist experience in World War I in application to the approaching second World War, "War and the Fourth International":
"If the proletariat should find it beyond its power to prevent war by means of revolution–and this is the only means of preventing war–the workers, together with the whole people, will be forced to participate in the army and in war. Individualistic and anarchistic slogans of refusal to undergo military service, passive resistance, desertion, sabotage are in basic contradiction to the methods of the proletarian revolution. But just as in the factory the advanced worker feels himself a slave of capital, preparing for his liberation, so in the capitalist army too he feels himself a slave of imperialism. Compelled today to give his muscles and even his life, he does not surrender his revolutionary consciousness. He remains a fighter, learns how to use arms, explains even in the trenches the class meaning of war, groups around himself the discontented, connects them into cells, transmits the ideas and slogans of the party, watches closely the changes in the mood of the masses, the subsiding of the patriotic wave, the growth of indignation, and summons the soldiers to the aid of the workers at the critical moment."
-Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1933-34, Trotsky's emphasis
The bourgeois state will only arm the workers for its own purposes–while this contradiction can and must be exploited by Marxists, it is utopian to expect that the trade unions could be able to use the bourgeois army for their own purposes. The modern imperialist armies created by the state have a largely working-class composition, but their function is directly counterposed to the interests of the world proletariat. The crucial task of Marxists is to always and everywhere smash bourgeois ideology in the ranks of the working class, to call for the independent arming and struggle of the organizations of the working class.
FOR WORKERS’ SELF-DEFENSE GROUPS BASED ON THE TRADE UNIONS!
FOR UNITED CLASS DEFENSE OF MINORITIES AND THE UNEMPLOYED! FIGHT FOR SOLDIERS’ RIGHTS THROUGH SOLDIERS’ COUNCILS!
TOWARDS THE INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATION OF WORKERS’ MILITIAS!
Click below to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s leftist militants to “discover” the work of our forebears, particularly the bewildering myriad of tendencies which have historically flown under the flag of the great Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, whether one agrees with their programs or not. But also other laborite, semi-anarchist, ant-Stalinist and just plain garden-variety old school social democrat groupings and individual pro-socialist proponents.
Some, maybe most of the material presented here, cast as weak-kneed programs for struggle in many cases tend to be anti-Leninist as screened through the Stalinist monstrosities and/or support groups and individuals who have no intention of making a revolution. Or in the case of examining past revolutionary efforts either declare that no revolutionary possibilities existed (most notably Germany in 1923) or alibi, there is no other word for it, those who failed to make a revolution when it was possible.
The Spanish Civil War can serve as something of litmus test for this latter proposition, most infamously around attitudes toward the Party Of Marxist Unification's (POUM) role in not keeping step with revolutionary developments there, especially the Barcelona days in 1937 and by acting as political lawyers for every non-revolutionary impulse of those forebears. While we all honor the memory of the POUM militants, according to even Trotsky the most honest band of militants in Spain then, and decry the murder of their leader, Andreas Nin, by the bloody Stalinists they were rudderless in the storm of revolution. But those present political disagreements do not negate the value of researching the POUM’s (and others) work, work moreover done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
Finally, 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 from the Revolutionary History journal in which they have post hoc attempted to rehabilitate some pretty hoary politics and politicians, most notably August Thalheimer and Paul Levy of the early post Liebknecht-Luxemburg German Communist Party. 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. So read, learn, and try to figure out the wheat from the chaff. ********
The Proletarian Military Policy Revisited
This issue of Revolutionary History focuses sharply upon the
Second World War and by implication, the Proletarian Military Policy (PMP),
which, although discussed polemically at the time, has yet to be discussed in
its historical context taking hindsight knowledge into account. This article is
a contribution towards that necessary understanding. The title indicates that I
took a minor part in the original discussion of it inside the British Workers
International League.
Part 1: The Policy
The discussion arose from our interpretation of a period – imperialism –
which according to Lenin was the final stage of capitalism – an incorrect
evaluation which we compounded by declaring it to be the ‘death agony of
capitalism’. But it also contained the fundamentally correct declaration that
capitalism had ceased to be a progressive form of society, and that the
transformation of society was on the historical order of the day-the practical
struggle for Socialism, the tactical application of this being the concept of
the transitional programme. By this I mean not a set of demands fixed for
evermore in concrete, but demands based upon the specific circumstances and an
understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of capitalism with the object of
raising the consciousness and the struggle of the working class to the level of
dual power
Basically the PMP was the application of the transitional programme to a
period of universal war and militarism as the concept applied to the struggle
for the hearts and minds, as well as the actions, of the millions of people who
were drafted, or were going to be drafted, into the military machine. It centred
around the demand for compulsory military training for the working class under
the supervision of elected officers at special training schools funded by the
state but under the control of labour movement institutions. As a corollary, the
related fields-the nation as a whole-made the concept deeper and broader than
the various concepts evolved during the First World War for its final object was
the overthrow of capitalism, unlike as in World War One when the possibility was
hoped for at best.
Whilst the concept was broadly raised in the 1938 Transitional
Programme, Trotsky gave it the sharpest and clearest expression after
the tall of France. Using the collapse of French imperialism as a propaganda
weapon to show the rottenness of imperialism, it was a weapon for raising the
class struggle in and through the armed forces. The state, as Engels had
postulated, is in the final analysis armed bodies of men. Furthermore, the armed
forces themselves are the most narrow, rigid and bureaucratic of the structures
controlled by any ruling class, and the capitalist class is no different. The
struggle for the breakdown of capitalist control of the armed forces is,
therefore, the essence of the struggle for power in wartime. Raising democratic
and revolutionary demands side by side with a fundamental exposure of the nature
of the war made the Proletarian Military Policy a major part of the transitional
programme.
The struggle was first and foremost in the original bourgeois democratic
countries, even though the struggle for the armed bodies of men was equally
necessary in the Fascist countries, though its manner and form would be
determined by circumstances, the difficulties involved, etc. Secondary to all
this was the question of the Soviet Union's involvement in the war, but I will
not deal with this as it has been discussed elsewhere, except to repeat that
whilst being important it was still secondary to the application of the PMP.
It is true that Trotsky foresaw the almost total elimination of bourgeois
democracy inside the countries prosecuting the war. It is equally true that
during the war, whilst there was large scale elimination of bourgeois democratic
rights, various elements of them remained, depending on the relationship of
class forces in each country. In France bourgeois democracy was almost totally
destroyed (as Harry Ratner showed in a earlier edition of this journal), whereas
in the USA state power was applied somewhat more liberally. As Trotsky was
murdered by Stalin in 1940 he could not take into account the modifications in
the policy that were obvious and necessary. Nevertheless, the Proletarian
Military Policy was the basic cornerstone of the transitional programme during
the war. It posed a policy, not of ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’, or ‘possibly’, but a
definite policy for the socialist revolution.
With the death of Trotsky the Socialist Workers Party in the USA, the
flagship of the Trotskyist movement, took over the promotion of the PMP. The
most important policy statement of it was that given by James P. Cannon on 28
September 1940 at the SWP plenum conference. Whilst it was a powerful statement,
in my opinion it suffered from two major defects. Firstly it equated the
application of the PMP simply with trade union activity in a new field, and
secondly, the fall of France was not seen for its programmatic value but as an
implied concept for the role of the American capitalist class.
It was against this background that the dispute on the PMP took place within
the WIL. The articles in Youth for Socialism and Workers
International News were similarly slanted in the direction pointed out by
Cannon, ie, equating the role of the British capitalist class with that of the
French which, afraid of the working class, was counter-revolutionary defeatist.
This slurred over the definite line of demarcation between defencism and
revolutionary defeatism, i.e, on the real character of the war. Fundamentally
the position was correct, but the demands and the posing of the question were
such as to create confusion.
This is not the first time that this sort of confused thinking had arisen.
Lenin, in reviewing and criticising as well as praising Rosa Luxemburg's The
Junius Pamphlet, says:
Junius, however, whilst brilliantly exposing the imperialist character of the
present war as distinct from a national war, falls into the very strange mistake
of trying to drag a national programme into the present non-national war. It
sounds almost incredible, but there it is.
It was this confusion (in our opinion) that laid the basis for the polemic.
The opening shot was a small, two-sided quarto sheet criticism of the articles
in the group journals written by Millie Lee and myself, but the major polemical
exchange was between Jock Haston, the Minority spokesman, and Ted Grant and
Gerry Healy representing the Majority view. The argument about democratising the
armed forces, such as officers coming from the working class being educated and
trained by institutions under the control of the trades unions and other working
class organisations, was accepted by both factions of the WIL, but it was
blurred by the Majority argument that the capitalists of Britain were afraid to
arm the workers. This was in a period when patriotism was at its height and
German troops were on the other side of the Channel.
The argument brought into focus the role of the Home Guard, for Haston
pointed out the possible dual role of the Home Guard against both the German
imperialists and the working class in Britain if the latter attempted to carry
out a revolutionary struggle of any sort. He gave examples of employers using
the Home Guard of their own factory against trade unionists who were too active.
Because of the lop-sided position of the propaganda that they issued, the
Majority tended to pooh-pooh both the arguments and the facts.
However, because the development of events was beyond their control, the
issue itself passed into the realms of history. Firstly, the hot flush of the
fear of German invasion dissipated, particularly after the invasion of Soviet
Russia. Secondly, linked to this, a small but growing number of workers were
beginning to struggle both against their working conditions as well as for pay.
Though very small, we were the only organised force prepared to support them in
this struggle, with the Labour Party being part of the official machinery, the
Stalinists being cheer-leaders for increased production, and the rest of the
Trotskyists being fragmented and basically inactive. This growing involvement in
industrial struggle, small though it was, helped to blunt the differences, and a
compromise solution was reached.
As for the Proletarian Military Policy, which I consider to have been
basically correct, two factors operated against our ability fully to apply the
policy. First, and fundamentally, despite some growth we were unable to become a
major force in order to apply it. Secondly, the centre of the bloodshed of the
war shifted to the Eastern Front – the British Army, for example, suffered far
fewer casualties than in the First World War.
Yet the importance of the polemic about the PMP went beyond the policy: it
was it symbol of the independence and growing level of maturity of the WIL. When
we first turned out Workers International News we used to have
a crack, which was basically true, that we only had two writers – Leon Trotsky
and Ralph Lee. By the time the polemic arose Leon Trotsky had been murdered, and
Ralph Lee had gone back ill to South Africa. In this context other tested
comrades began to emerge as leaders, although they were still strongly
influenced, and to some extent dominated, by Cannon’s SWP.
The basic organisational structure began to emerge at this time, its
organisational character being determined by Haston who, unlike either Healy or
Grant, was a democrat in the organisational sense of the word. Already, as the
polemical documents about the PMP showed, the Majority tried to ‘edit’ the
articles of Haston.
I was called up into the army in May 1941 and took no further part in this
discussion.
Part 2: The Genesis of the Policy
A movement is more than a question of individuals. It is mainly a question of
ideas, of principles, of tactics, of creating a movement to achieve the ideals
that flow from the principal ideas. It is in this context that PMP must be
understood. The PMP split the Trotskyist movement internationally. For example,
the Revolutionary Socialist League, the majority British Trotskyist group, was
hopelessly split on the PMP with a large majority opposing it, in spite of the
fact that it was the official section of the Trotskyist movement. To fortify
their opposition they glorified and misunderstood Lenin’s revolutionary
defeatism, counterposing it to Trotsky’s positions, particularly those he held
during the First World War.
The more recent discussion of the arguments of Lenin and Trotsky shows the
narrowness of both knowledge and understanding that many of our comrades then
had. During the earlier war there were three basic differences between Lenin and
Trotsky – the character of the future revolution, the question of the party and
the application of an anti-imperialist foreign policy. Anyone who deals with
that period and fails to realise the interplay of the three has understood
nothing. On one point each both stood firm – Lenin on the party, and Trotsky on
the character of the future revolution. Furthermore, their roles were different.
Trotsky was a brilliant theorist and propagandist, but Lenin was not only a
theorist and propagandist, he was also the founder and builder of a party and
its chief organiser, and the harshness of his language and the absolutist
character of its tone, which hid the extreme flexibility of his tactics, was
because he had a party to which he had to give direction and purpose.
The first two points were resolved in the process of the struggle, Trotsky
was compelled by events to move to Lenin’s position of a hard revolutionary
party (the Bolshevik Party) and not a loose, all-embracing party. This quotation
from Lenin proves the point:
The pressure of facts has increasingly compelled Nashe Slovo
and Trotsky, who reproach us for our ‘factionalism’, to take up the
struggle against the OC and Chkeidze. The trouble, however, is that it
was only ‘under pressure’ (of our criticism and the criticism of the
facts) that the Nashe Slovo supporters retreated from position
to position but they have not yet said the decisive word. Unity or a
split with the Chkeidze faction? They are still afraid to
decide!
Whilst this was a criticism of Trotsky, the main thrust of the article is an
attack on Martov and his defence of Chkeidze. It was published in December 1916.
By the time Trotsky had returned to Petrograd in May 1917 he was almost
completely in line with and in support of the Bolshevik Party. Equally by then
Lenin had come over to the idea of the workers taking power through the slogan
‘All Power to the Soviets’.
In the earlier part of the war Lenin had clearly and precisely declared that
the next revolution in Russia would he a bourgeois revolution. Read, for
example, Socialism and War, which was written in 1915. The
argument was presented more sharply that year in his article On the Two
Lines in the Revolution, a strong but frankly incorrect interpretation of
the future pattern of the struggle in the Russian revolution, and in this
context he therefore accused Trotsky of ‘underestimating the peasantry’,
assuming an independent role for the peasantry as expressed in the slogan ‘the
revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’.
Nevertheless, unlike the Mensheviks, Lenin always recognised the key role of
the proletariat in the coming revolution, and was therefore rapidly able to
adapt to reality. The April Theses, Lenin’s defence of his new position
against the old Bolshevism of Kamenev (the practice he had propagated before the
February 1917 revolution), expressed the new line in the slogan ‘All Power to
the Soviets’, which was the basis for Trotsky’s entry into the Bolshevik Party.
The changes in these two positions, of Trotsky on the party and of Lenin on the
character of the revolution, were the basis for the coming together of Lenin and
Trotsky. As for the third part, the character of the struggle against war, it
was resolved by historical events.
The slogan of revolutionary defeatism arose again in the second imperialist
war, but mainly as a criticism and an attack upon Trotsky’s PMP, attacking it
using the policies and arguments of the past on the given assumption that Lenin
was correct, his policy was precise and clear and, obviously, they understood it
– an assumption on the part of some of those I have mentioned which on further
reflection leaves a large element of doubt. Equally, as every struggle for
national independence has its own distinctive characteristics and must be
examined individually and concretely, so every imperialist war has its own
characteristics and must also be seen in context.
There seems to be a false position expressed by many of the opponents of the
PMP that the Bolshevik Party, as a hard, solid party, quickly and almost
automatically reacted to the imperialist war, a picture that Lenin unfortunately
seems to create in his writings of the period. The facts, however, contradict
this and sufficient material has been unearthed since to destroy this cosy
assumption. Firstly, the action and role of German Social Democracy in
particular took them by surprise – for example the well-known article in the
issue of Vorwärts supporting the war was believed by Lenin to
be a forgery. If this applied to Lenin it was even worse among other leading
elements of the party. In the early days of the war there was confusion among
the Bolshevik members of the Duma, with Kamenev disagreeing with elements of the
policy of revolutionary defeatism. The ‘Bolshevik Committee of Organisations
Abroad’ disintegrated. Of the five members on it, two enlisted in the French
army, and a third member withdrew. Lenin and Zinoviev remained as the only
representatives of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks abroad to elaborate
the war programme of the party.
In France, the ‘Bolshevik Group of Paris’ did not stand up any better than
the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. There were ‘defencists’ in all three
parties, and since the Russians do nothing by halves, most of the ‘defencists’
went off to enlist in the French army.
The first and basic position of Lenin, therefore, was to establish a hard and
clear line on the war based on the resolutions of the Second International at
its Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Basle congresses. He gave this the sharpest
expression in order to build the necessary theoretical propaganda foundation on
which the Bolsheviks could base their fight. It was made so distinctive that
elements of difference arose between Lenin and other people and organisations,
such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht as well as Trotsky. Revolutionary
defeatism as expounded by Lenin had contained in it two distinctive elements,
and it was particularly over the second element that differences arose, The
first element, that of carrying on the class struggle to the bitter end, even it
it causes the military defeat of your own oppressor (ie, the defeat of your own
bourgeoisie is the lesser evil) was more or less accepted by the other
revolutionary groups, as in Liebknecht’s famous slogan “The main enemy is at
home”, or “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war”. Although in slightly
different language, this concept was accepted as an aim by most revolutionary
groups.
The second element in Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism, from which the basic
differences arose, was advocating the military defeat of your own imperialist
state as a means of bringing on the revolution. Here again, there were elements
of two different strands, first, with reference to Russia alone, the most
backward and reactionary state, headed by a barbaric and feudal absolutism, and,
secondly, as applied generally to all imperialist states.
Among the earliest and sharpest expressions of this argument is the article
The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War, which is a
criticism of other oppositions to imperialist war, in particular Trotsky’s, and
in this context is raised the character of the future revolution. These
quotations give the flavour: “Wartime revolutionary action against ones own
government indubitably means, not only desiring its defeat, but really
facilitating such a defeat.” What are the distinctive actions, i.e., distinctive
from the rest of the revolutionary opposition? He carries on:
“Discerning reader”, note that this does not mean “blowing up bridges”,
organising unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and in general helping
the government defeat the revolutionaries. What distinct, practical actions
flow from it I don’t know because in reality he doesn’t tell us. Instead he
repeats his arguments about the intertwining of the two distinct aspects of'
revolutionary defeatism:
A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war
between governments into a civil war, is on the one hand, facilitated by,
military reverses (‘defeats’) of governments; on the other hand, one
cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby
facilitating defeat.
Essentially it is a theoretical and propaganda argument with no really
distinctive action from the rest of the revolutionary opposition to the
imperialist war. And it is precisely on this point – practical action – that the
PMP comes into its own
The theoretical flaw in linking the two aspects of defeatism was shown in
France in June 1940. However, it would be totally incorrect to believe that
Lenin had a rigid concept: the language may make it seem so, but the reality was
somewhat different, reflecting his keen flexibility even on this question. For
example, during the debate about Brest Litovsk, in reply to Karnkov he declared,
“We were defeatists at the time of the Tsar, but we were not defeatists at the
time of Tseretelli and Chernov”, a fact pointed out by both Pearce and Joubert.
What is however, more of interest is that, as we have already noted, when German
troops were marching on Petrograd in August-September 1917, Kerensky’s generals
were counter-revolutionary defeatists whereas the Bolshevik-influenced troops
were military defencists.
That the Bolsheviks were right in trying to defend Petrograd, the centre of
the revolution during a period of dual power, is accepted by everyone as being
undoubtedly correct.
Nevertheless, the positions and arguments must be understood within the
period, the character of the war and the conditions under which the war was
taking place. As Trotsky was fond of saying, truth is concrete, and Lenin’s
policy at the time expresses this thought quite clearly, unlike the so-called
revolutionary defeatists who in their minds made the Second World War a re-run
of the First. So while Lenin’s concept of revolutionary defeatism was based on
the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Japanese wars, re-emphasised by the policy
statements of the Second International, it soon became obvious that on the major
and decisive fronts it was instead a static war with massive slaughter, a war of
attrition with millions being killed.
This caused a growing opposition to the war. There was a growing mood of
revolt, not only among revolutionary politicians but also among the soldiers and
sailors as well as among the civilian population. This applied to all the major
countries (with the possible exception of the USA, because of its late entry),
where there were growing revolts of military units during the last two years of
the war. For example, after the Nivelle Offensive in 1916 there were revolts of
French frontline troops that were brutally put down by Petain, with hundreds of
soldiers being shot almost out of hand. The Russian troops revolted in
Marseilles. There were revolts in the German army and navy, and even in Britain
there were small revolts – a growing tempo of revolts among all the armies and
navies.
In this context revolutionary defeatism as regards its second aspect had a
valid sense. In this setting military defeat applied to all countries, unlike
what Trotsky declared, for it meant the breakdown of the imperialist war at its
weakest point. The concept had a validity in this particular war, but was not a
universal tactic for all imperialist wars. The continuous and bloody
attrition-type of struggle on the Western and Eastern fronts laid the conditions
for such a mood. The pattern of the Second World War was, however, different,
with the overwhelming bulk of the struggle – and the bloodshed – taking place on
the Eastern front, creating different conditions and moods which needed a
different approach. In the final analysis the revolution and its success
depended on a revolutionary party. The final defeat of German imperialism in
1918, whilst creating revolutionary conditions, did not bring about a successful
German revolution, The revolutionary mood penetrated all combatants, even the
United States with its infamous Palmer Raids, but only the Bolsheviks carried
out a successful revolution.
The history of the arguments about revolutionary defeatism is well-documented
by Joubert. It is clear that the part of the policy whereby a revolutionary
wishes for the military defeat of his own government was basically side-stepped
by Trotsky, who accepted a modified version at best, that it can only apply to
one government. We, however, are not faced with that dilemma which was caused by
political infighting and not by the arguments themselves. We can say that
this particular argument is invalid as a universal law applied to every
imperialist war.
However, it did have a certain justification in the First World War. This
does not mean that Liebknecht’s arguments and slogans were not equally valid.
But it did have a justifiable basis in the fact that the First World War was a
static war based on trench warfare where millions were being slaughtered as well
as large numbers being injured, many seriously, and where a crescendo of revolt
was emerging among all combatant countries and where the collapse of the weakest
link would start a revolutionary movement. Although I have not mentioned the
mood and feeling of the civilian population, nonetheless a corresponding mood
developed there strongly influenced by the brutality of war.
Part 3: The Policy During the Second World War
With the Second World War the picture was different. Firstly, the concepts
among revolutionaries were different. Whereas as late as January 1917 Lenin, in
a lecture on the 1905 revolution, could say “we of the older generation may not
live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution”, the revolutionaries
in the Second Imperialist War put the coming revolution on the order of the day.
The mood of the population was vastly different. To give the classic example,
there were massive strikes and a rising mood of revolutionary feeling up to June
and July 1914 in Petrograd, but when war was declared the militant and
revolutionary mood vanished and a massive demonstration in support of the war
took its place. During the Second World War the holiday mood, was non-existent
and chauvinist fever was at a very low ebb. True, there were other specific
factors, such as the existence of Soviet Russia and the nature of German fascism
in particular, but they were secondary to the over-riding moods and
concepts.
It was in these conditions that the Proletarian Military Policy was
propounded and the polemic arose within the Trotskyist movement. It is
interesting in this connection to know that Lenin, also, had a military policy.
In his article The Disarmament Slogan, speaking of the smaller and more
democratic countries, he wrote:
Therefore “not a penny, not a man”, not only for a standing army but even for
a bourgeois militia, even in countries like the United States, or Switzerland,
Norway, etc. … We can demand popular election of officers, abolition of all
military law, equal rights for foreign and native-born workers … Further, we can
demand the right of every hundred, say, inhabitants of a given country to form
voluntary military training associations, with free elections of instructors
paid by the state, etc. Only under these conditions could the proletariat
acquire military training for itself and not for its slave owners, and the need
for such training is imperatively dictated by the interests of the
proletariat.
This programme is only a pale shadow of Trotsky’s PMP, and is presented as a
counterweight to the disarmament slogans of the pacifists, but it does recognise
the need for an independent military policy for the revolutionary left, though
not giving it the centrality that a real struggle demands,
Starting from the premise of the reactionary nature of imperialism, believing
(incorrectly) that it was the death agony of capitalism and, following on from
this, that the issue of capitalism would be finally decided by the war, the PMP
sharply posed a policy for power which was, however, an application and
extension of the previous policy, i.e., the Transitional
Programme. It was the transitional programme during wartime with its
own particular characteristics – universal militarism, etc. The concept was
linked to the question of power, whereas not one of the revolutionary leaders
during the First World War linked their concepts to the question of power; at
the very best they hoped for it. It assumed the following – the reactionary
nature of the war, that the transformation of society was on the order of the
day, and the need for a policy to do this – the PMP.
All of these were rational and, in my opinion, correct. It the process is far
more complex than any human being can totally evaluate, at least the great
revolutionary establishes the basic principles and the general direction; the
tactics were intended to be modified, as the captain of a ship does according to
the conditions in which the ship operates. This has always been recognised by
the great Marxists: Lenin, for example, when dealing with the range of
possibilities, refers to the possibility of a second imperialist war. Trotsky in
The USSR and the War raises the possibility of a
bureaucratic-collectivist world, with the role of the revolutionary being to
fight for reforms to protect the oppressed. Neither of them in any way accepted
or believed in these possibilities, but neither totally ruled them out if the
working class should fail to achieve the practical realisation of its
struggle.
The difficulties within the Trotskyist movement emerged with the death of
Leon Trotsky. Looking back in hindsight, whilst the problems that emerged were
insurmountable themselves (as the Trotskyists could not hope to carry out the
Socialist revolution) a lesser task was possible for small parties rooted in the
working class. It is against this standard that the movement internationally
will have to be judged. It was precisely our inability to evaluate the process
as it began to develop, substituting cliches for thought, that exaggerated our
weakness and prevented the movement from taking off.
The capitulation of France started off the process of wishful thinking. The
revolutionary defeatists took it in their stride, as if nothing had happened.
Revolutionary defeatism, the wish for the defeat of one's own bourgeoisie, was
proved to be bankrupt, the consequences of that defeat being the throwing back
of the revolutionary struggle for a number of years. Ironically, the American
SWP, which proclaimed itself the leading and dominant force in Trotskyism, for
some perverted reason also saw the defeat of France as part of the revolutionary
process. The Manifesto it published in November 1940 under the banner
of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International bore no
relationship to reality. This, of course, laid the basis for the conflict inside
the SWP and later between the SWP Majority and the WIL/Revolutionary Communist
Party in Britain.
The reality in France at the beginning of the war was that the majority of
the bourgeoisie was counter-revolutionary defeatist, the working class was
demoralised and dictatorial measures were being enacted against it. The articles
written later by Sherry Mangan (‘Terence Phelan’) pointed out that there was
fraternisation between the Germans and the French, not between German and French
workers, but between German and French officers, and that a number of important
and reactionary French capitalists were secretly supporting the Germans. As far
as the working class was concerned, Harry Ratner shows that revolutionaries were
being persecuted, that there was demoralisation among the soldiers, and that
there were some minor revolts, as in the Maginot Line, but that these were
suppressed, as was the information about them. The workers' conditions and wages
were being brutally lowered and their hours massively increased. For fear of
revolution in a period even when the working class was demoralised as a
consequence of the Popular Front, the bourgeoisie was defeatist. This was the
same French bourgeoisie that 26 years earlier at the Battle of the Marne had
sent troops to the front in taxis to fight off the German offensive on
Paris.
For if one looks at the defeat and the actions of the French bourgeoisie,
they are related to the previous Popular Front policy of the French Social
Democrats and Communists. There seems to be a law that if the working class
fails to seize its revolutionary opportunities it pays the consequences – as in
Germany 1918-19 and 1923, Spain in 1936, and France in 1936-37.
Equally ironic in this context was that a section of the movement which had
supported the PMP failed to understand the process, and drew the conclusion that
all the bourgeois states were defeatist. This affected the American SWP as well
as the majority advocates of the PMP in Britain in the struggle during the
events during the earlier part of the war.
From this a new situation emerged: the whole of Europe, excluding some
relatively minor countries, was under national oppression and, moreover, under
the iron hand of dictatorship. The whole concept of a transitional programme is
that in a period in which the capitalist class has ceased to be progressive and
has become reactionary, holding back the necessary rational development of human
existence, the consciousness and actions of the progressive class – the working
class – must be raised to the level of the struggle for power, requiring such a
transitional programme.
This fundamental approach to the new situation in Europe seemed to have been
forgotten, and the Trotskyists were thrown off course. To begin with the defeat
was conceived as the road to revolution, and then, when the magnitude of the
defeat of the working class was realised, a range of ideas, policies and
programmes flooded out in the Western non-Fascist capitalist societies. The
Three Theses of the IKD members in the United States written on 19
October 1941 reflected the most pessimistic and reformist policy in the movement
and sparked off a debate on future policy towards Nazi-occupied Europe. This
important period of history, in which the Trotskyists inside occupied Europe as
well as in Britain and the USA were found theoretically wanting, will be dealt
with later because the whole polemical developments were determined by events
external to them.
The first major, and in a sense, decisive, event was Hitler’s invasion of
Soviet Russia. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 (with its hidden clauses) had
achieved its objective as far as Hitler was concerned, and as the decapitation
of the Red Army necessitated the building of a new army command, Stalin
therefore acted as a junior partner and lackey of Hitler to give himself time to
do this. Both the insufficient time and the quality of the men be had appointed
as new commanders showed the level to which the Red Army had fallen. This was
practically demonstrated in the Soviet-Finnish War. In fact it was only during
the Second World War that a command leadership of a high and capable standard
was created.
In itself this was neither a surprise nor a shock to the Trotskyist movement.
Trotsky had envisaged it well before the war. Even the tactics towards this war
had been worked out well beforehand by Trotsky with reference to the Soviet
Union, the countries in alliance with the Soviet Union and the countries
opposing the Soviet Union. He had even pointed out that Nazi Germany would be
the main enemy. The problems with regard to the character of the Soviet Union
emerged later. No one, not even Trotsky, envisaged the lengthy and heroic nature
of the struggle, even though he had pointed out that the Soviet population in
defence of its own country was a different kettle of fish from other states. To
appreciate this point one needs only to read the articles he wrote in April 1940
for the News Chronicle, assessing the Soviet-Finnish War,
though he could hardly have fully imagined the end result, that the Soviet Union
would take the main brunt of the Nazi attack and then go on to occupy Berlin.
Stalin himself was demoralised in the first month (Khrushchev gives a clear
picture of Stalin’s attitude of mind during the first month of war), and only
after this did he become the Supreme Commander of the Soviet Armed Forces, a
necessary precondition of all dictators in major wars.
The Russians suffered a series of massive defeats in the early months. The
soldiers were ill-trained and demoralised and this applies even more to the
officer caste, who were in dread of their lives as Stalin passed the buck by
shooting the officers who carried out his policy, for example the Soviet
‘Guderian’, army general Pavlov. Yet already in 1936 Tukhachevsky had predicted
the opening character of the war. The Russians were able to withstand tremendous
blows, which would have eliminated every country in Europe if not in the world,
because of space, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of manpower and,
ironically, the dictatorial apparatus of Stalin. He both lowered the standard of
living and increased both hours and intensity of work for the production of
weapons of war, etc, in a manner no other country could have got away with. He
equally played on patriotism for all it was worth. Many top-ranking German
generals, including among others Field Marshals Von Rundstedt and Von Leeb, were
for early withdrawal from Russia once it did not collapse from the hammer blows,
because they realised that both space and man power were against them. There had
been some local support for the German Nazis when they first entered Russia, in
reaction to the brutally oppresive national regime of Stalin. In many are as of
the Ukraine people welcomed the Germans with flowers, bread and salt. But this
popular support they soon destroyed themselves, so that when they had to retreat
every man’s hand was against them, not merely the army, but the civilian
population as well.
Whereas during the First Imperialist War the Western Front was the main and
decisive centre of struggle, in the Second by far the main centre of struggle
was the Eastern Front. This was the decisive factor in the future developments.
The world’s present structures and conflicts are largely determined by that
fact. The policy of the more competent bourgeois politicians was to supply
Russia with enough arms and equipment to bleed both Russia and Germany to death.
This was expressed by Colonel Moore-Brabazon in a famous speech which had to be
officially repudiated. From a historical point of view the calculation misfired,
and there was, moreover, a conflict in strategic policy between British and
American imperialism, which, with the dominance of American power, assisted
Stalin in his manoeuvres. And Stalin was not just an agent of imperialism: the
sell-outs and deals had one purpose only-the preservation of himself and his
bureaucracy, a proposition that Trotsky often repeated when he pointed out that
the bureaucracy has a self interest, which history has since proved. When Tito
broke with Stalin, when Mao broke with Stalin, and when Khrushchev denounced
him, they did not become merely agents of imperialism.
Stalingrad
This independence of Stalin was first shown in a well known but not highly
publicised event. After the encircling and destruction of an entire German army
in Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943 even Hitler had second thoughts and
started negotiations with Stalin. In June 1943 Molotov met Ribbentrop at
Kirovograd, which was then inside the German lines, for a discussion about the
possibilities of ending the war. The relationship was, however, different to
1939, for, whereas then Stalin acted as a junior partner and accomplice to
remain outside the war, in 1943 the relationship was changed and the
negotiations were between equals. The terms were unbridgeable. One side or the
other had to gain a major concession which neither side, or rather neither
dictator, was willing to give. Immediately afterwards, in July, the great battle
of Kursk that had been prepared took place, and which was the decisive battle of
the war. After their massive defeat the Germans lost all hope of winning the war
and at best could only slow down the inevitable defeat.
From then onwards, maybe unconsciously at first, the whole relationship of
the Soviet Union changed, not only with Germany but with the Western Allies as
well. In spite of the arguments, of the leadership of the American SWP in
particular, that Stalinism was capitulating to capitalism, reality had a
different substance. The secondary manoeuvres and actions of Stalin were
exaggerated as capitulation – such things as the medals and uniforms, the
reactionary character of the patriotism, the liberalisation of the church for
its brutal and unconditional support of the war, etc. A well known example of
this is how Stalin sent a number of Jewish intellectuals and artists touring
Britain and America, only to butcher the majority of them after the war.
In the negotiations that followed with the Allies Stalin took an increasingly
aggressive stance, establishing spheres of influence, territorial adjustments,
etc. But he had one basic and fundamental agreement with his capitalist allies:
the destruction of revolution and of independent revolutionary
movements. The difference in interpretation is summed up in the Warsaw
Uprising. When the Russian troops were marching towards Warsaw, the internal
army of the semi-feudal reactionary government in exile rose against the Nazis,
hoping that when the Russian troops entered Warsaw it would have a large measure
of control. The Red Army sat deliberately on the banks of the Vistula watching
the Germans destroy the revolt, thereby altering the balance of power in Poland
in favour of its own ‘Lublin Government’. The issue was not one of morality,
rights or justice, since, after all, the Polish Internal Army had sat on its own
haunches watching the Nazis massacre the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but of power,
and it was equally a warning to the Allies as to what was meant by ‘spheres of
influence’. The British may have spluttered, but the Americans knew what it
meant. Whilst the primary and fundamental agreement of Stalin with the Allies
was for the destruction and elimination of all independent revolutionary
activity as well as independent revolutionary parties, it was also a warning to
the capitalist parties within the Soviet sphere of influence to toe the
line.
Yet the key and burning issue was Germany. The fear of revolution in Germany
determined the policy and strategy with regard to it. Already in the 1939
discussions between Hitler and the French Ambassador the fear of revolution in
Europe as a whole was acknowledged by both sides. That Germany seemed to be the
key to the revolution was accepted by everyone, not only by the bourgeoisie. The
RCP believed it to be so, and even both factions of the SWP. During the polemic
about the future of Europe, a document presented to the Eleventh Convention of
the SWP on 14 November 1944, declared: “The German Revolution is the key to the
European Revolution …” It is in the context of this universal belief and fear
that the strategy and tactics to be applied to Germany were agreed on between
the Allied imperialists and the Stalinist bureaucracy – the destruction of any
possibility of a German Revolution.
The demand agreed between them for the unconditional surrender of Germany was
not a slogan but a policy actively carried out by all the Allies. As regards
France, a deal was made with Admiral Darlan and General Giraud in which they
tried to replace De Gaulle with Giraud because they (quite rightly) believed
that De Gaulle reflected too independently the interests of the French military
and bourgeoisie, In Italy a deal was made with Marshal Badoglio and King Victor
Emmanuel III, and again there was no demand for an unconditional surrender: on
the contrary, secret negotiations were carried on and a secret deal was made
with sections of the regime against which they were supposed to be waging a war
for democracy. In Germany, the attitude was completely different: no one had
said that the only good Frenchman, or the only good Italian, was a dead one: no
one put forward plans to suppress and dismember France or Italy, but this was
proposed in the case of Germany.
Everyone alive at the time remembers how Ilya Ehrenburg coined the slogan
“the only good German is a dead one”, and this was propagated a million times
through all the media of communication. The fact that the Germans were the first
to suffer under Hitler was forgotten: Hitler’s barbarism was blamed upon the
whole population of Germany. In the economic field this became the famous (or
rather infamous) Morgenthau Plan, which proposed the dismemberment of Germany by
the destruction of its economic base and by its ruralisation. These were no mere
words intended to be taken lightly; they were the very centre of Allied
policy. This destruction of the German economy and the classification of every
German as a pariah made up their common counter-revolutionary policy to ensure
that a German revolution did not take place. Even after the war was over there
was a standing order prohibiting Allied troops from fraternising with the
Germans, as I know from personal experience.
The difference of approach is reflected in the way that the very popular and
extremely strongly-based coup of 20 July 1944 failed. Despite widespread support
among the German officer caste and bourgeoisie, it was unable to light a spark
because the mass of the population was demoralised and apathetic. Not that they
supported Hitler, but they felt caught in a trap with no way out. In the case of
France and Italy a deal was possible: in the German case the Morgenthau Plan was
not a deal, and they quite logically and correctly feared the entry of Russian
troops – the very barbarism of the German forces (particularly the Waffen SS) in
Russia causing them to fear the Russian advance. A conscious policy was in fact
carried out by Stalin of replacing assault troops after they had occupied an
area with troops from the most backward regions with the resulting pillage,
rape, murder, etc. The policy of unconditional surrender achieved its aim of
destroying any possibility of a German revolution, a policy in whose formulation
Stalin played a major part. Problems emerged later: both Stalin and the
imperialist Allies were counter-revolutionary, but on a different basis, and for
different reasons. But that was in the future.
The Trotskyist movement failed to understand the full meaning of the process:
they were on firm ground when it came to the great victories of the Soviet
Union, but for the Majority the counter-revolutionary policies of Stalin seemed
to he merely a weakness and a capitulation to the imperialists. This was an
illusion with which some of the capitalists may have begun but, unlike the
majority of the Trotskyists, they soon realised it to be incorrect. The Cold War
scenario emerged from this reconsideration.
In a sense this whole section is a diversion from the main purpose of this
article, which is the development of the ideological and political outlook of
the Trotskyist movement. But I feel that it is a necessary divergence because
ideas, policies and actions do not come out of mid-air but are rooted in the
events around them.
By 1942-43 the Proletarian Military Policy had disappeared as the centrepiece
of Trotskyist policy both in Britain and the USA. It is true that a faint
resolution on the PMP was submitted by the WIL and the Trotskyist Opposition to
the new unified Trotskyist organisation, but this was more a formal gesture and
an endorsement of the PMP rather than an active policy statement. Just as the
Bolsheviks dropped revolutionary defeatism after 1917, so in reality the active
element of the PMP was dropped by 1943. The reasons for thus entombing the PMP
were the changed conditions and the changed character of the struggle.
The superficial wisdom about this is that the Bolsheviks took power and
therefore revolutionary defeatism was correct, but that the Trotskyists after
the Second World War failed to take power and therefore the Proletarian Military
Policy was incorrect. This is untenable – even in the most abstract formalising.
If the PMP was a failure, revolutionary defeatism was an even greater failure,
as France in 1940 proved. We thus come to a position that either there was a
realistic policy but none of us knew what it was or, even more absurdly, no
policy could have worked, and therefore we should have done nothing. It is
precisely a one-sided picture of reality that creates these
assumptions.
Positive concept
There are three basic elements in any political position and the struggle to
achieve it; the policy and programme, the organisation and the conditions within
which the programme and the organisation both operate. We know that
revolutionary defeatism was basically a negative concept, whilst the Proletarian
Military Policy was positive – each of them flowing from the concepts they had
of the future. The second question is the organisation to carry out the policy.
Unfortunately there was a deliberate underestimation of the strength of the
Bolshevik Party, for which Trotsky, for reasons which are understandable, was
responsible as much as anyone else, but that is another matter. It is all very
well quoting Zinoviev`s statement that he and Lenin were alone and the party was
isolated, and to point to the splits and divisions, but at the end of the day
the Bolshevik Party was well rooted within the Russian working class. To begin
with the movement was well grounded in the Russian revolutionary tradition, and
they were well rooted in the Russian working class, far more so than the
Mensheviks, a fact reiterated a number of times by Lenin. They had parliamentary
representatives to prove it, and the fact that they were an insignificant
minority in the Duma hid the more important fact that they represented the
historically progressive class, the working class.
When we compare this with the representation and strength of the Trotskyist
movement, we start to see the question in its proper perspective. The Trotskyist
movement outside Russia was by and large not only very small and fragmented but
also petit bourgeois. There were pockets of a proletarian base, such as Flenu in
Belgium and Minneapolis in the USA, but they were pockets and not a movement.
The reasons are explicable, but that was of no assistance. The forces they also
faced were unfortunately greater than the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks competed as
one of the major parties, whereas we on the contrary were small groups competing
against two major forces in the working class, one of which laid claim to the
traditions of the Russian Revolution.
Trotsky hoped that events would develop in our favour by destroying the
all-powerful forces of Social Democracy and Stalinism, and that the question of
Soviet Russia would be resolved, and along with it that of the Stalinist
parties; that the war would create conditions that would either expose Social
Democracy or destroy it – either way creating the conditions for the massive
growth of the Trotskyist movement. Historical developments proved Trotsky’s
prognosis false, but all Marxists have had some of their prognoses falsified by
history. A reading of the writings of the myriad political commentators of the
time shows that they were even more incorrect than Trotsky was. Although by
1942/3 the Proletarian Military Policy was put on the back burner by both the
British and the American Trotskyist movement, it could have been relit with the
ending of the war if the conditions making it applicable had emerged – but this
never happened.
Part 4: Problems beyond the Military Policy
Two new and, in a sense, interlocking problems relating to the conditions of
the time emerged instead. The first, national oppression in Europe, affected
what was to happen during the post-war period in terms of the road to
revolution. The occupation of France in 1940 marked the end of one stage and the
start of another in the development of the imperialist war. This was a set-back
for the revolutionary movement and flowing from this came the question of the
programme which was required to deal with the change and the tactics to apply to
it. I cannot argue about the policy inside Europe because I do not know the
details, but it seems that some material is now being turned up dealing with the
activity of the various Trotskyist groups in occupied Europe, particularly in
France. A broad outline seems to be known; in France the Trotskyist movement was
split in all directions, from those who immersed themselves deep into the
factories for the duration of the war to those who were infatuated by the
chauvinist propaganda of the Stalinists and Gaullists. Nonetheless some good
work was done, such as the episodic turning out of newspapers and other material
catering specially for the German army of occupation, with a distinct class line
approach to the German working class in uniform.
Although articles had been written before, mainly by Marc Loris (Jean Van
Heijenoort, who later also wrote under the pseudonym of D. Logan), about the
situation in occupied Europe, and in particular with regard to France, illusions
were being shattered by events in the occupied territories. The need arose to
apply a revolutionary policy and programme to the phenomenon – what I would
regard as the application of a transitional programme to Europe. The question of
national oppression, and therefore the national question itself, arose but not
as a rerun of the position of the colonies and the backward countries, because
France and even Belgium and Holland were imperialist countries themselves
exploiting colonies. The struggle for national independence had to be raised
along with the struggle for Socialism. After the invasion of Russia the European
Stalinists became active and leading supporters of a unified struggle against
the Nazis under the banner of the bourgeoisie, particularly the bourgeois
governments in exile. Their political shrewdness taught them that, whilst being
under the overall blanket of the bourgeoisie, they must maintain their own
resistance forces as far as possible. The Social Democrats, though nowhere near
as active as the Stalinists, basically operated as a part of the bourgeois
establishment. Resistance movements, mainly very small ones, were already
emerging throughout occupied Europe, particularly with the changing pattern of
the war, and the problem of the Trotskyist movement inside Europe was how to
react towards and utilise this emerging struggle. From the little that I know
about this they did not do it very well or very successfully. Outside the
occupied territories the question equally arose of what policy arid programme
had to be formulated to deal with the national oppression.
The Three Theses proved to be the spark for, whilst being repudiated
by the opposing factions, they laid the groundwork upon which the polemics were
carried out: the struggle against national oppression and how to carry out a
policy for its success.
The Three Theses presented a theory of a classless (or all-class)
national struggle leading to an abstract democratic revolution. The SWP as a
whole rejected this as a capitulation to the bourgeoisie. The basic difference
within the SWP revolved around what alternative policy to put forward for
occupied Europe, a difference that only widened with the development of events
in Europe. The Majority, led by Cannon and E.R. Frank (Bert Cochran) simply
posed the demand of the Socialist United States of Europe – and that only. The
Minority of Morrison (Albert Goldman), Cassidy (Felix Morrow) and Marc Loris
(Van Heijenoort) began with differences among themselves. Loris posed the
national struggle as the key issue, developing slogans around national
liberation whilst drawing a line of demarcation with the Three Theses
by counterposing the role of the working class and its party in order to give
the struggle a working class character. Goldman and Morrow reaffirmed that the
main demand and slogans had to be for a Socialist United States of Europe, but
equally pointed to the importance of the struggle for national liberation.
Whilst a coalescence of views developed around Van Heijenoort, Goldman and
Morrow, the differences of the three of them with the Majority of the SWP
increased rapidly. Whilst the Minority, in my opinion, attempted to understand
the process and proposed a way for the Trotskyists to tackle it, the Majority,
pointing to Hitler’s ‘New Order’ in Europe, replaced serious analysis by
extensive quotations from Trotsky about the reactionary character of the
European states in the period of imperialism – an historical truism, as recent
developments have proved in Western Europe, but a truth that fails to take into
account all the other factors that existed and still do exist in Europe. Even
Hitler, in spite of his ‘New Order’, had to maintain the separate states and
many of the divisions between them.
This conflict of ideas and policies developed and widened with the growing
breakdown of Nazism and the Nazi occupations in Europe. It seems quite clear to
me that the struggle for national liberation under a socialist banner had to be
the main demand. In this context the way forward was shown by the actions of
Tito of Yugoslavia. We do not have to apologise for Tito’s ruthless, barbaric,
cynical and opportunist actions (his treatment of the Trotskyists reflects his
whole attitude) to be able to admit that his approach to national liberation won
the day. This argument, in fact, is stated in Section 7 of the Resolution on
the National Question in Europe issued by the Central Committee of the RCP
when it says that “in opposition to the military formations of the bourgeois-led
and inspired Resistance movements, the proletarian party must counterpose and
organise independent military formations of the working class, as well as its
own independent military formation”. In other words, it was necessary to
establish a basic concept about what should be the attitude and action of the
workers in the struggle for national liberation even in an occupied imperialist
country.
But the reality in Europe was that the Trotskyists were extremely weak and
not really capable of creating such a force, though such formations were
possible in such places as Vietnam, tangential to the problems of Europe. This
question of the weakness of Trotskyism vis-Ã -vis the liberation movement was, in
my opinion, dealt with up to a point, by Section 8 of the above mentioned
resolution, which stated that “as a part of its tactics the revolutionary party
must send members into the Resistance Movement to create a conscious
proletarian opposition to the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois leaders …”,
though this demand was really a position presented after the events. Moreover,
it does not discuss or deal with the Stalinist forces inside the liberation
movement, and this was of major importance, as events proved in Vietnam, where
the Trotskyists were of some substance.
Moreover, in which of the resistance movements should the Trotskyists have
most actively participated – those controlled by the Stalinists or by the
bourgeoisie? This was not dealt with – and it was no academic question. It could
be a matter of life or death, but the problem could essentially only he answered
in the given context of each liberation movement, or each section of the
liberation movement. For example, should you have participated in the Stalinist
forces, where you were liable to be bumped off, particularly if you were
awkward, or have taken advantage of the growing opposition to Stalin’s policy,
as in Greece, where the Stalinist forces were sold down the river by Stalin and
his local henchmen? I think that the record of the Trotskyists in occupied
Europe was not outstanding – not due to a lack of individual heroism, but on the
grounds of understanding, which therefore affected our ability to tackle the
extremely difficult situation we were in.
This weakness had a knock-on effect, for with the breakdown of the Nazi
occupation essentially by military means, the still small and weak Trotskyist
movement, whilst growing very slowly, was faced with a gigantic problem. The
answers emerged in the next and most important stage of the conflict, to begin
with between the Majority and Minority of the SWP, in which the British movement
became increasingly involved, the Majority of the RCP supporting Goldman, Morrow
and Van Heijenoort, and the Minority around Healy supporting the SWP Majority
around Cannon and Cochran. No one questioned the assumption of the emerging
European revolution, though already large elements of doubt were beginning to
form as to the pattern that would emerge and what tactics should be adopted
towards it.
The Cannon faction started from the opinions of Trotsky in 1940, as if they
were the final word, proclaiming that the revolution was here and almost
asserting that the European Trotskyists had already emerged as a power to lead
the revolutionary struggle. On the other hand the SWP Minority and the RCP
Majority pointed to the re-emergence of a strengthened Social Democracy and
Stalinism, posing the question of a short and probably unstable period of
bourgeois democracy, counterposing the need to struggle for the maximum amount
of democracy in capitalist society, to build up the Trotskyist movement and to
expose the limitations of this democracy so that the struggle could go beyond
it. Demands, for example, in Belgium and Italy for a republic instead of a
monarchy, were expressions of this concept. Realising that they were totally out
of touch with reality, the SWP Majority took on board some of the slogans and
demands of the Minority, but without in any way altering their basic position.
This policy on the part of Cannon & Co of trying to take the sting out of
the criticism of their policy without really altering anything was the hallmark
of the period. Pablo admitted as much in his reply to Morrow in agreement with
the majority of the SWP when he wrote:
It is perfectly true that at that time there was general agreement in the
European Secretariat that the first critical documents of Comrade Morrow, and
especially his criticism of the Resolution of the December 1943 NC Plenum of the
SWP contained some correct observations on the tempo of development of the
revolutionary situation in Europe, the importance of democratic slogans, and the
dangers of sectarianism in our International.
But this sectarianism was not confined to the SWP. When Europe was
reconquered a similar phenomenon re-emerged with Pierre Frank's grandiose theory
of Bonapartism in Europe and the argument that Stalinism, much weaker than ever
before, was capitulating to Western imperialism, theories that were propounded
as the essence of Trotskyism against which only revisionists could disagree.
Trotsky's own argument, when replying to the Shachtman faction which was quoting
him to prove he was wrong, was forgotten:
Every historical prognosis is always conditional, and the more concrete the
prognosis the more conditional it is. A prognosis is not a promissary note which
can be cashed on a given date. Prognosis outlines only the definite trends of
the development. But along with these trends a different order of forces and
tendencies operate, which at a certain moment begin to
predominate.
The polemic arose over the type of regime arising from the Allied imperialist
victory, the strength or weakness of the Soviet Union, the role and power of
Stalinism and Social Democracy, the future potential of the European economy,
whether cyclical boom or complete collapse; and, slightly later on, the
character of the regimes of the countries occupied and controlled by the Soviet
government. It was precisely in understanding and tackling these problems that
the weakness of the Trotskyist movement was shown: without Trotsky's genius we
were an ordinary bunch of revolutionaries incapable of understanding the process
on which we claimed to be experts.
Part 5: The Legacy of Confusion
Front an historical it negative point of view, the fact that Trotskyism
remains and grows whilst the Right Opposition, Maoism, Titoism, etc., have
disappeared, proves the solid foundation built by Trotsky. But an example of the
quality of our thinking was the argument between Mandel and Tony Cliff as to
whether a boom was emerging precisely when the post-war boom was taking off.
Mandel argued that it was not happening and tried to justify his position as
Trotskyism by arguing that the original version of Capital had
a different meaning than the English translation. Unfortunately for him he was
arguing against Cliff, who probably had as good a knowledge of German as he.
When we get to the point that a competent economist tries to argue that a boom
is not emerging when it is developing in front of his eyes we realise the
intellectual crisis of Trotskyism.
The question of the boom was also related in its own way to the possibility
of a bourgeois democratic regime and its length and stability. To begin with the
arguments about the regimes of bourgeois democracy related to the political
situation that emerged after the war. The SWP Minority and afterwards the RCP
Majority, pointed to the existence of such types of regime after the First World
War, where they rested not on a solid material basis, but on the political
superstructure, counterposing this to the concept of Bonapartism, which, whilst
generally accepted by the SWP, was given its sharpest expression by Pierre
Frank. The original concept, justifiable on the basis of available knowledge,
held that what would emerge after the war would be an economy very much inferior
to the 1918-39 period, and that the regimes of bourgeois democracy would be a
mere spasm, providing no solid future foundation for bourgeois democracy. The
polemic thus become an argument about a re-run of 1918-39 in a modified form,
and was not only about what regimes would arise after the war, but also about
the function of these regimes. The Minority argued that because of the
relationship of forces a bourgeois-democratic regime would arise, albeit
extremely unstable, whose function would be to halt the process of revolution
and to carry out the counter-revolution in a democratic form since the
establishment of a regime of military dictatorship was not possible. The
sharpest expression of this formula, though based upon the arguments of the SWP
Minority, was that of the RCP Majority, of a ‘bourgeois democratic
counter-revolution in the period of decline of the bourgeoisie’. Although this
was vastly superior to the argument of the SWP and the IEC of the Fourth
International, insofar as it corresponded closer to reality, it was,
nonetheless, inherently flawed. The essence of the bankruptcy of the concept of
the Majority was shown in an incident that had more the quality of farce than of
realism. The April 1946 Conference in Paris was organised as an illegal meeting
– in a relatively democratic society.
The fundamental crisis of Trotskyism emerged from the confusion and the
inability to understand the war and the immediate post-war world. This was
crucial. It is true that the fifties struck a heavy blow at our movement, and
whilst no movement can avoid being affected by major external events, how one
comes out of it is the measure of the quality of a movement. The Bolshevik Party
also suffered major blows after 1905, and furthermore made serious mistakes,
such as boycotting the Duma, but because its basic concepts were sound it
overcame them, and already by 1914 it was growing fast with a number of deputies
in the Duma. But the contrary is true of the Trotskyist movement, instead of
building further on the foundations laid by Trotsky it has confused and
dissipated them.
The two fundamentals on which our failure is most sharply shown are the
Russian question, including Eastern Europe, and the development of the
capitalist economy.
Whilst the thesis of- the bourgeois-democratic counter-revolution seemed to
be adequate, and was far superior to that of the Bonapartist military
dictatorship expounded by the majority of the SWII, it soon became clear that it
was not adequate in itself. Counter-revolution, after all, is the mirror image
of revolution, so to speak, and is therefore limited in time and space.
It soon became clear after the war that a new situation had already emerged.
Felix Morrow noted that the post-war period was not a re-run of 1918-39. The
policy and actions of reformism in particular were flourishing because they were
based on a sound material basis. This new phenomenon not only destroyed many of
the organisations that were unable to understand the change. It also destroyed
the best and most capable elements – not only Morrow, who became a rabid
anti-Trotskyist, or Van Heijenoort, who dropped out arid became theoretically
anti-Marxist, but almost the entire leadership of the Majority of the RCP, whose
leading members capitulated to bourgeois reformism.
The destruction of the RCP reflected this theoretical collapse of its
leadership: the bankruptcy of the official leadership of the Fourth
International took a different form – low level thinking and empirical changing
after the event.
New epoch
Yet the problems that they faced were in and of themselves not new, even if
this was a fundamentally different period from that of 1918-39. Already during
the early ’twenties the Bolsheviks themselves had become involved in many of
these problems. Bukharin was taken up in further interpreting the role of the
state, using as his basis the experience of Germany during the First World War.
But the most important polemic was between Trotsky and Kondratiaev, based upon
the statistics and diagram of the development of capitalism that had been
published in The Times. In The Curve of Capitalist
Development published in 1923 as part of the continuing argument, Trotsky
quotes Engels: “It is self evident that this unavoidable neglect of
contemporary changes in the economic situation, of the very basis of all the
proceedings subject to examination, must be a source of error” (his
emphasis). Developing the argument further, he writes:
But when a serious change occurs in the situation, all the more so a sharp
turn, such general explanations reveal their complete inadequacy, and become
wholly transformed into empty truisms. In such cases it is invariably necessary
to probe analytically much more deeply in order to determine the qualitative
aspect, and if possible also to measure quantitatively the impulse of economics
upon politics. These ‘impulses’ represent the dialectical terms of the ‘tasks’
that originate in the dynamic foundations and are submitted for solution in the
sphere of the superstructure.
The arguments about bourgeois democracy without a material base become empty
truisms when we have the unique phenomenon that whilst Marx in
Capital could argue about the historic function and need for a
reserve army of unemployed, Western Europe, including Britain, was so short of
workers that millions were brought into Europe, guest workers in Germany,
France, etc., and immigrants into Britain. Again, the material standard of
living increased fairly rapidly; in other words, the material foundation for
reformism in the advanced countries existed. It was precisely this problem that
needed to be analysed and understood, and the policy, programme and tactics that
flowed from it.
This process of the curve of capitalist development has been relatively
lately raised by Mandel in Late Capitalism and by Richard B.
Day, in my opinion both incorrectly.
The assumption that imperialism is the final stage of capitalism is being
proved incorrect. Many factors on which it rested have been invalidated by
events, such as the colonial empires, and the dominance of finance capital.
Similarly, examining modern capitalism without taking the Stalinist bloc into
account is absurd. In this context it is interesting that both Rudolf Hilferding
(the father of the theory of imperialism) and Leon Trotsky were both moving away
from the position that it was imperialism and no more. They were moving in
different directions, but both questioned the continuing development of
imperialism. For example, in the introduction to his Stalin
Trotsky equated the then period (1940) with a renaissance period, and said: “The
epoch of the Renaissance was an epoch of struggles between two worlds”. The
article The USSR and War also posed the problem. Van Heijenoort refers
to Trotsky developing and changing his concepts of the period ahead. Trotsky was
not pessimistic and when his critics tried to imply that The USSR and
War was a pessimistic document he thought that the issue should be resolved
by the war. His time scale was wrong, but the basic concept is still valid; in
spite of Van Heijenoort's beliefs, the working class has not been defeated. This
digression from the basic argument about the period is just to point out that
such a reassessment is within the revolutionary Marxist tradition.
Already in 1940 Trotsky was posing the question of the struggle of the social
systems and, although the idea was still in the development stage, it is clear
in which direction he was moving. The development of political and economic
events after the war showed that our concepts, based upon pre-war events, were
out of touch with reality. It is as if Trotsky himself had posed the question in
The Curve of Capitalist Development: “But when a serious change occurs
in the situation, all the more so a sharp turn, such general explanations reveal
their complete inadequacy, and become transformed into empty truisms.” Our
answers became empty truisms based upon pre-war factors. The need as advocated
to “probe analytically much more deeply” was not done in most cases, and only in
the last 10-15 years has some serious effort been put in, in my opinion
incorrectly, since Mandel tried both to move and to standstill at the same
time.
In my opinion what Trotsky called “the curve of capitalist development” and
Kondratiaev a cycle (though they are not identical in shape) was a cycle, not
the internal business cycle of Kondratiaev, but a structural cycle based upon
internal and external factors that stabilised a new dominant economic pattern
(in this case no longer imperialism but a new type of capitalist structure). An
examination of the structure of the economy today and the imperialism of
pre-1914 shows vast and fundamental differences, not just a difference based
upon the historical development of a process, but radical structural changes.
The five basic points that Lenin put forward as a summary of his definition of
imperialism no longer correspond to reality.
The colonial empires, the sources of raw material and the surplus
exploitation of the ‘colonial areas’ no longer play the role they did, even if
elements still exist. Similarly, despite the fact that the big monopolies have
grown larger and even more powerful, overriding them all is the role of the
state. Finally, and most important of all, we have a major conflict and
competing social systems that have emerged, which has supplied the political
motive (although there are economic factors as well) for the dominance of the
state.
But in a sense this is secondary to the basic problem of understanding the
historical process and the ability, based upon this understanding, to change the
world. Although the term ‘imperialism’ has acquired a certain image, and it is
not unnatural to use it in the way that Lenin used the term ‘Workers and
Peasants’ Government’, imperialism meant more than that. Our basic and broad
world outlook flowed from this concept; the theory of Permanent Revolution, for
example, can only be conceived during the period of imperialism. Therefore, and
herein lie the weakness and confusion of the present day Trotskyist theories,
only on the basis of this new epoch can our theories emerge. Our theories and
actions must be examined on this premise. To note a few:
The national question and the struggle for national independence must be
understood and applied according to this period and not to imperialism or the
middle of the nineteenth century.
Our understanding of the Soviet bloc, etc, must be based upon the same
premises.
Understanding is not the be-all and end-all, but without that understanding
we cannot move in the right direction.
All this may seem a far cry from the original focus of this article, the
Proletarian Military Policy. But it was during the Second World War when the
character and weakness of the present Trotskyist movement emerged, and the PMP
cannot be investigated in isolation from the rest of the policies of the
movement. The problems encountered with the PMP very much exemplified the
general problems the movement faced at the time. Perhaps we were not strong
enough to apply the Proletarian Military Policy, but our inability really to
understand the events which unfolded during the war lies at the heart of our
present weaknesses.