A View From The Left-The 1916 Irish Rebellion and the British Workers Movement

Workers Vanguard No. 1098	21 October 2016

A View From The Left-The 1916 Irish Rebellion and the British Workers Movement

The following article, reprinted from Workers Hammer No. 235 (Summer 2016), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, is based on a presentation by comrade Eibhlin McDonald at a 23 April public meeting in London.

One hundred years ago tomorrow, the Easter Rising broke out in Dublin. The armed insurrection against British rule was organised by some 1,000-1,500 militant nationalists, the Volunteers, together with the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). The leadership included James Connolly, a revolutionary socialist. Yet this was a nationalist uprising for an independent Ireland, despite the participation of Connolly and his ICA, a workers militia that had been formed during the Dublin Lockout of 1913, when the city’s employers tried to smash the trade unions.

It began when the rebels seized a number of positions across Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic from the General Post Office. But the majority of the Volunteers were demobilised by the nationalist leaders on the eve of the Rising, leaving the Dublin rebels isolated. Moreover, the arms and ammunition from Germany that were expected by the insurgents did not arrive. A few days before the Rising, Roger Casement, who had been in Germany trying to organise support for an Irish insurrection, was arrested after landing in Ireland on a German submarine.

The British ruling class responded with ferocity to this armed uprising, especially as it came in the midst of World War I, when all of the subject peoples in the British Empire—which in 1916 included India and much of Africa—were expected to be loyal, indeed to fight and die for the “Mother country.”

With overwhelming military force, the British shelled Dublin, destroying much of the city centre. The rebels were forced to surrender after five days. At first, the Rising did not have much popular support, but there was mass public outrage when the leaders were court-martialled and sentenced to death. Fourteen were shot, including Connolly who was executed tied to a chair because he had been wounded in battle and was unable to stand.

The British imperialists launched wave after wave of repression in the years to follow. But even in defeat, the Easter Rising marked the beginning of the end of British rule in Ireland. They were forced to grant independence in 1921-22, but these masters of divide-and-rule engineered the partition of Ireland by inflaming tensions between Protestants and Catholics. The partition was the result of a defeat of the working class in struggle and was accompanied by bloody pogroms against Catholics, as we shall see.

We Marxists honour the Easter Rising as a just struggle for independence of Ireland from British colonial rule. But we are politically opposed to the programme and ideology of nationalism, which lines up the working class behind its “own” capitalist rulers. Unlike nationalists, we’re certainly not advocates of the doomed but heroic “blood sacrifice.” But once the Rising happened, revolutionaries were duty bound to defend it, in contrast to those on the left who regard the capitalist state as inviolable and disavow any attempt to overthrow it.

Karl Marx on Ireland

For British revolutionaries, the question of Ireland, Britain’s oldest colony, has long been a test of their commitment to the overthrow of their “own” capitalist ruling class. Karl Marx insisted: “It is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland.... The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland” (Letter to Engels, 10 December 1869). The crucial importance of internationalist unity between workers in Ireland and Britain becomes obvious from studying the history of working-class struggles. Any revolutionary perspective requires resolute opposition to the politics of the Labour leaders—the left as well as the right wing—as we shall see.

Following on from Marx, Lenin formulated a general policy on the attitude of the revolutionary party to national oppression in the epoch of imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism that developed towards the end of the 19th century. With the advent of imperialism, Lenin stressed, the division of nations into oppressor and oppressed was accentuated. Correspondingly, the tasks of revolutionaries in each country are different: the proletariat of the oppressor nation, as Lenin put it, “must demand freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by ‘their own’ nation. Otherwise the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words.” He insisted that British socialists who do not demand freedom to separate for the colonies and for Ireland “act as chauvinists and lackeys of bloodstained and filthy imperialist monarchies and the imperialist bourgeoisie” (“The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” 1916). Socialists of the oppressed nations, on the other hand, must fight for the fullest unity of the workers of the oppressed nation with those of the oppressor nation.

The attitude of socialists in Britain towards the Easter Rising flowed from their attitude to World War I. The outbreak of the first interimperialist war saw the collapse of the Second International into mutually hostile camps as most parties supported their “own” capitalist rulers. On 4 August 1914, the parliamentary fraction of the German Social Democratic Party, the largest section of the international, voted in favour of war credits. The British Labour Party and trade union leaders, for their part, supported Britain and declared an end to working-class struggle for the duration of the war. The Bolsheviks insisted that revolutionaries must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state. For Lenin, the task of socialists was to seek to turn the imperialist war into a civil war, that is, into proletarian revolution. Further, Lenin saw that the Second International had been destroyed, and that a new revolutionary international must be built through a complete break with the opportunists and social chauvinists.

For Lenin, the attitude of revolutionaries to the Easter Rising was a measure of their commitment to the right of self-determination, and to proletarian internationalism. He argued against other revolutionaries, including Trotsky, who trenchantly opposed the social chauvinists but were dismissive of the Rising. Trotsky claimed that the Irish peasantry, whose struggle for land had been the motor force for previous national revolts, had been pacified by land reform, and thus he argued that the “historical basis for a national revolution has disappeared even in backward Ireland” (“Lessons of the Events in Dublin,” Nashe Slovo, 4 July 1916).

Lenin countered that revolutionaries must take advantage of every outbreak of struggle against imperialism. A national revolt in Europe could be the spark for broader revolutionary struggle, Lenin argued. Indeed, “a blow delivered against the power of the English imperialist bourgeoisie by a rebellion in Ireland is a hundred times more significant politically than a blow of equal force delivered in Asia or in Africa.” “It is the misfortune of the Irish,” Lenin wrote, “that they rose prematurely before the European revolt of the proletariat had had time to mature” (“The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” 1916).

The Labour Party had passed umpteen “anti-war” resolutions—right up to a few days before the war broke out. For example, on 1 August 1914, prominent British Labour Party leaders signed a resolution calling for demonstrations against war and proclaiming: “Down with class rule” and “Down with war.” Among its signatories was one Arthur Henderson.

Three days later, Henderson signed a document issued by the trade union leaders, calling for support to Britain against Germany, on the grounds that Britain’s imperialist rival was “seeking to become the dominant power in Europe, with the Kaiser the dictator over all.” The Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) declared an end to working-class struggle for the duration of the war. In May 1915 Arthur Henderson, then leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, became a member of the wartime coalition government. He was a member of the cabinet when the 1916 Easter Rising broke out.

Henderson was accused of having led the cheering in Parliament when news of the executions of the leaders of the Rising was received. Henderson denied it, but said he would not “violate Ministerial confidences” in order to reveal what he had said about the executions. It hardly matters whether he cheered or not. He was in the cabinet that ordered the repression in Ireland.

The Dublin Lockout of 1913

Another Labour MP [Member of Parliament] and leader of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), J.H. Thomas, has been aptly described as a “fervid imperialist” in relation to Ireland. Thomas’s hostility to James Connolly was already evident during the Dublin Lockout of 1913. The capitalists of Dublin came together and locked out their workers in opposition to the efforts of [union leader] Jim Larkin and Connolly to unionise the workforce. Larkin, aided by Connolly, led the workers of Dublin in some five months of bitter class war, in a seminal battle for the trade union movement in Ireland and in Britain.

At a time when the trade unions consisted overwhelmingly of skilled craft workers, Larkin and Connolly worked wonders on both sides of the Irish Sea by organising the unskilled workers into the unions. In Belfast, this meant recruiting Catholic workers as well as Protestants, and also women textile workers into the unions. In Britain, drawing the huge layer of unskilled workers into the unions injected tremendous vitality into the trade union movement and contributed to a wave of class struggle known as the Great Unrest during the period 1910-1914.

During the Lockout, Connolly and Larkin appealed for support from the British trade unions. The working class had tremendous sympathy with the Dublin workers. But the solidarity that was sorely needed was sabotaged by the TUC and Labour leaders, including the left-talking dockers’ leader, Ben Tillett. The British dockers and railway workers were key to defeating the Dublin bosses: had they blockaded goods destined for Dublin by boat and train they would have shut down the city. At one stage, two train drivers in South Wales, who were members of ASLEF rail union, were sacked for refusing to carry goods destined for Dublin. Some 30,000 railway workers went on strike in their support. NUR leader Thomas was instrumental in smashing the strike, getting his members back to work and actually ordering them to replace the two victimised ASLEF members, whom he described as “a disgrace” to trade unionism. Jim Larkin caustically described Thomas as “a double-eyed traitor to his class.”

It comes as no surprise then that Thomas condemned the Easter Rising and declared that “there was no Labour leader in this country who did not deplore the recent rebellion in Ireland.” Labour “left” MP George Lansbury published the most popular anti-war newspaper in England. But as a pacifist, Lansbury condemned the Easter Rising, saying: “No lover of peace can do anything but deplore the outbreak in Dublin” (quoted in Geoffrey Bell, Hesitant Comrades, 2016).

As I mentioned, the executions of the leaders of the Rising caused outrage in Ireland. Even among those in Britain who condemned the Rising, some thought the executions were a step too far. But Will Thorne, a London Labour MP, demanded in Parliament to know when Roger Casement would be tried, pointing out that he was “the forerunner of this movement,” i.e., of the rebels who led the Rising (quoted in Hesitant Comrades). Casement was a courageous figure: from an Irish Protestant background, he grew up believing the Empire was bringing progress to Africa. But he was disgusted by the atrocities perpetrated on the native peoples at the behest of the imperialists in the Belgian Congo (and in the Putumayo region of Peru) and became an opponent of British imperialist rule, including in his native Ireland.

At the time of his arrest for attempting to secure German military aid for the Easter Rising, Casement had much popular sympathy. Faced with growing demands for clemency in his case, the British authorities released excerpts from what they claimed were Casement’s diaries indicating he was homosexual. The British kept the diaries secret for decades after his death, giving rise to much doubt about their authenticity. When Casement was charged with high treason, and the public were being fed lurid allegations of his homosexuality, many of his liberal friends, including the novelist Joseph Conrad, shamefully refused to petition for clemency. He was hanged in London’s Pentonville prison in August 1916.

On the Question of Obtaining German Arms

From the point of view of the working class, obtaining military support, including from an imperialist power, is not a problem in and of itself—if it is for a just war. It would have been a different matter had the Irish nationalists placed their forces under the command of the German military, which they did not. However, nationalists frequently do place themselves under the military command of an imperialist power, becoming their proxies in unjust wars. For example, today in Syria and Iraq, the Kurdish nationalists are the “boots on the ground” for the U.S. imperialists. We have no side in Syria’s squalid civil war between the Assad military and the rebel forces dominated by different Islamists. But we do have a side against the U.S. and other imperialist powers. And while we are implacable opponents of everything ISIS stands for, we take a military side with ISIS when it aims its fire against the imperialist armed forces and their proxies in the region, including the Kurdish nationalist forces.

The British Left and the Easter Rising

Among the opponents of the war and of social chauvinism in the British Labour movement, a prominent voice was that of Sylvia Pankhurst, at the time a leader in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Pankhurst said there is only “one reply to the Irish Rebellion and that is the demand that Ireland should be allowed to govern itself.” Pankhurst had few illusions in parliamentary reform—the struggle for votes for women met with violent resistance from the British state and suffrage was grudgingly granted only after the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Pankhurst, to her credit, had clearly taken the side of the working class by supporting Larkin and Connolly in the Dublin Lockout. She broke from her bourgeois-feminist family and went on to become a socialist and later, briefly, a communist.

The British Socialist Party had been formed in 1912 as a fusion of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation with other socialists. The BSP underwent a split during the war, at its Easter 1916 conference, when the left wing took over and adopted an anti-war position. The split led to the departure of Hyndman, an anti-Jewish bigot and all-round social chauvinist. The BSP’s newspaper, the Call (4 May 1916), described the Easter Rising as “this latest phase of the war for liberation” and had no hesitation “in fixing full responsibility for the antecedents of the affair on the shoulders of successive British governments.”

Perhaps the most surprising response to the Easter Rising and the executions came from the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). The SLP, based primarily in Scotland, had been formed on the model of the party of the same name in the U.S. founded by Daniel DeLeon. Connolly was a former leader of the Scottish party. At the time of the Easter Rising, the SLP in Scotland was facing severe state repression for its role in organising militant strikes in strategic munitions industries in Glasgow, in the midst of war. The SLP’s main leaders—including Arthur MacManus, John Muir, Thomas Clark—had been arrested. John Maclean, who was a leader of the Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) but not a member of the SLP, was also arrested and imprisoned.

However, state repression alone doesn’t explain why the SLP’s monthly newspaper, the Socialist, said next to nothing on the Easter Rising, or on the execution of Connolly, their former comrade. Moreover it didn’t carry an obituary for Connolly until three years after his death, and during that time the paper carried very little coverage of Ireland. While the SLP led valiant strikes and the party press opposed the war, they maintained a strict separation between their political line on the war and their trade union activity. In an extreme example, when John Muir was in court for his role in organising the munitions strikes, he cravenly swore that the strike was purely over economic issues and that he was for the war and war production. This shameful performance contrasts with John Maclean who used his trial as an opportunity to indict the capitalist system and the war.

Muir should have been expelled for dragging the SLP’s record on the war through the mud, but the SLP kept him in their ranks. Had they fought for their anti-war line in the CWC, it would have split the leadership. Undoubtedly, had the SLP defended the Easter Rising and opposed Connolly’s execution, it would also have required combating anti-Catholic prejudices among Protestant workers in Glasgow, which had its own version of the Catholic-Protestant division that was prevalent in Belfast. Even such momentous trade union struggle as that which was waged on the Clyde [river in Glasgow] during World War I could not, in and of itself, overcome the divisions that existed, and thus could not arrive at the level of consciousness needed to overthrow the capitalist ruling class through socialist revolution. That requires a different kind of party.

Among the avowedly revolutionary parties of the time, Lenin’s party was unique. By 1912 the Bolsheviks had carried out a complete break with the opportunists in Russia. As early as 1902, in his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, Lenin insisted that the revolutionary should aspire not to be “the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects” in order to “clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” Above all, Lenin insisted on the party’s responsibility to bring the working class to revolutionary consciousness. The principles and programme that Lenin hammered out for the Bolsheviks, which he then generalised following the collapse of the Second International into social chauvinism in 1914, were central to the forging of the party into the instrument that would lead the proletariat to victory in the 1917 October Revolution.

From the Easter Rising to Partition

The years after Connolly’s execution saw a resurgence of anti-British sentiment in Ireland, led by Sinn Fein. There was also a renewed wave of working-class struggles that continued through the war of independence of 1919-21. In the South, for example, as well as the Limerick Soviet, in which striking workers took over and ran the city, there were land seizures and workers protests. In 1919, Belfast saw a tremendous strike throughout the city. The majority of the strikers were Protestant, and the head of the strike committee, Charles MacKay, was a socialist of Catholic origin. The strike provided an opening for the sectarian divide to be transcended and could have given a tremendous impetus to the struggle for an Irish workers republic. But the Protestant bosses in Belfast played on Protestant fears that they would become an oppressed minority in an independent Ireland ruled by the Sinn Fein nationalists. Meanwhile the British Lord Lieutenant in Dublin released some of the Sinn Fein leaders who had been imprisoned, calculating that their Irish nationalism would incite Protestant workers’ hostility towards their Catholic counterparts and undermine proletarian unity.

Not long after the defeat of the Belfast strikes, in the summer of 1920 a wave of bloody attacks swept through the shipyards and spread to other workplaces, targeting mainly Catholics. Some 10,000 Catholic men and 1,000 Catholic women were driven out of their jobs. Many Catholic homes and shops were burned in “five weeks of ruthless persecution by boycott, fire, plunder and assault” in a wave of terror that was compared to the pogroms against Jews in tsarist Russia (quoted in Hesitant Comrades). Several hundred of the expelled workers were members of the carpenters union.

At the same time, 1920 was also the year of the “Hands Off Russia” campaign, in which workers in Britain mobilised in the thousands and forced the British government to stop shipments of arms to capitalist armies fighting against Soviet Russia. Among others, the carpenters union had also passed “Hands Off Ireland” motions. In Belfast, carpenters union members went on strike when a group of Protestant shipyard workers produced revolvers declaring they would drive out every Sinn Feiner—meaning every Catholic, every trade union militant and socialist—from their jobs. Only 600 out of 2,000 obeyed the strike call. But the Loyalist scabs were expelled from the union. The carpenters union leaders appealed for other unions to prevent goods and raw materials from going into Belfast, arguing that the trade union movement had a role to play in ending the sectarian strife—by standing up for its own principles.

The anti-Catholic pogroms in Belfast paved the way for Partition, a major defeat for the perspective of a workers republic. In opposition to Irish independence, the British backed the Ulster Loyalists and engineered the setting up of the Orange statelet in the North, a police state which institutionalised discrimination against the Catholic minority. Independence in the South led to the creation of a repressive Catholic state, which was rooted in the oppression of women. The poisonous legacy of Partition was to create an oppressed Catholic minority in the North, interpenetrated with a distinct Protestant community, which in turn harbours legitimate fears that they would become an oppressed minority in a Catholic-dominated united Ireland.

The only just resolution to these national antagonisms lies in the overthrow of capitalism on both islands. Our perspective is for an Irish workers republic within a voluntary federation of workers republics in these Isles. It is important to know that the situation that emerged from Partition was not the only possible outcome. Above all it was a result of defeats and betrayals of workers in struggle. And it is rich in lessons for the many struggles that we will face in the course of building a revolutionary party.

*****Four Ways To Support Freedom For Chelsea Manning- President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

*****Four Ways To Support Freedom For Chelsea Manning- President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!

 

 

 

Note that this image is PVT Manning’s preferred photo.

The Struggle Continues …

Four  Ways To Support Heroic Wikileaks Whistle-Blower Chelsea  Manning

*Sign the public petition to President Obama – Sign online http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/chelseamanning  “President Obama, Pardon Pvt. Manning,” and make copies to share with friends and family!

You  can also call (Comments”202-456-1111), write The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500, e-mail-(http://www.whitehouse.gov’contact/submitquestions-and comments) to demand that President Obama use his constitutional power under Article II, Section II to pardon Private Manning now.

*Start a stand -out, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, in your town square to publicize the pardon and clemency campaigns.  Contact the Private Manning SupportNetwork for help with materials and organizing tips https://www.chelseamanning.org/

*Contribute to the Private  Manning Defense Fund- now that the trial has finished funds are urgently needed for pardon campaign and for future military and civilian court appeals. The hard fact of the American legal system, military of civilian, is the more funds available the better the defense, especially in political prisoner cases like Private Manning’s. The government had unlimited financial and personnel resources to prosecute Private Manning at trial. And used them as it will on any future legal proceedings. So help out with whatever you can spare. For link go to https://www.chelseamanning.org/

*Write letters of solidarity to Private Manning while she is serving her sentence. She wishes to be addressed as Chelsea and have feminine pronouns used when referring to her. Private Manning’s mailing address: Chelsea E. Manning, 89289, 1300 N. Warehouse Road, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027-2304.

Private Manning cannot receive stamps or money in any form. Photos must be on copy paper. Along with “contraband,” “inflammatory material” is not allowed. Six page maximum.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-one-year-after-her-conviction-chelsea-manning-must-be-released-2014-07-30   

Markin comments (Winter 2014):   

There is no question now that Chelsea Manning’s trial, if one can called what took place down in Fort Meade a trial in the summer of 2013 rather than a travesty, a year after her conviction on twenty plus counts and having received an outrageous thirty-five year sentence essentially for telling us the truth about American atrocities and nefarious actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else the American government can stick its nose that her case has dropped from view. Although she occasionally gets an Op/Ed opportunity, including in the New York Times, a newspaper which while recoiling at the severity of the sentence in the immediate reaction did not question the justice of the conviction, and has several legal moves going from action to get the necessary hormonal treatments reflecting her real sexual identity (which the Army has stonewalled on and which even the New York Times has called for implementing) to now preparing the first appeal of her conviction to another military tribunal the popular uproar against her imprisonment has become a hush. While the appeals process may produce some results, perhaps a reduction in sentence, the short way home for her is a presidential pardon right now. I urge everybody to Google Amnesty International and sign on to the online petition to put the pressure on President Barack Obama for clemency.                   

I attended some of the sessions of Chelsea Manning’s court-martial in the summer of 2013 and am often asked these days in speaking for her release about what she could expect from the various procedures going forward to try to “spring” her from the clutches of the American government, or as I say whenever I get the chance to “not leave our buddy behind” in the time-honored military parlance. I have usually answered depending on what stage her post-conviction case is in that her sentence was draconian by all standards for someone who did not, although they tried to pin this on her, “aid the enemy.” Certainly Judge Lind though she was being lenient with thirty-five years when the government wanted sixty (and originally much more before some of the counts were consolidated). The next step was to appeal, really now that I think about it, a pro forma appeal to the commanding general of the Washington, D.C. military district where the trial was held. There were plenty of grounds to reduce the sentence but General Buchanan backed up his trial judge in the winter of 2014. Leaving Chelsea supporters right now with only the prospect of a presidential pardon to fight for as the court appeals are put together which will take some time. This is how I put the matter at one meeting:

“No question since her trial, conviction, and draconian sentence of thirty-five years imposed by a vindictive American government heroic Wiki-leaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning’s has fallen off the radar. The incessant news cycle which has a short life cycle covered her case sporadically, covered the verdict, covered the sentencing and with some snickers cover her announcement directly after the sentencing that she wanted to live as her true self, a woman. (A fact that her supporters were aware of prior to the announcement but agreed that the issue of her sexual identity should not get mixed up with her heroic actions during the pre-trial and trial periods.) Since then despite occasional public rallies and actions her case had tended, as most political prisoner cases do, to get caught up in the appeals process and that keeps it out of the limelight.”            

Over the past year or so Chelsea Manning has been honored and remembered by the Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade in Boston in such events as the VFP-led Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade, the Memorial Day anti-war observance, the yearly Gay Pride Parade, the Rockport July 4^th parade, the VFP-led Veterans Day Peace Parade, and on December 17^th her birthday. We have marched with a banner calling for her freedom, distribute literature about her case and call on one and all to sign the pardon petitions. The banner has drawn applause and return shouts of “Free Chelsea.” The Smedley Butler Brigade continues to stand behind our sister. We will not leave her behind. We also urge everybody to sign the Amnesty International on-line petition calling on President Obama to use his constitutional authority to pardon Chelsea Manning

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/usa-one-year-after-her-conviction-chelsea-manning-must-be-released-2014-07-30  

Additional Markin comment on his reasons for supporting Chelsea Manning:

I got my start in working with anti-war GIs back in the early 1970s after my own military service was over. After my own service I had felt a compelling need to fight the monster from the outside after basically fruitless and difficult efforts inside once I got “religion” on the war issue first-hand. That work included helping create a couple of GI coffeehouses near Fort Devens in Massachusetts and down at Fort Dix in New Jersey in order for GIs to have a “friendly” space in which to think through what they wanted to do in relationship to the military.

Some wanted help to apply for the then tough to get discharge for conscientious objection. Tough because once inside the military, at least this was the way things went then, the military argued against the depth of the applying soldier’s convictions and tended to dismiss such applications out of hand. Only after a few civil court cases opened up the application process later when the courts ruled that the military was acting arbitrarily and capriciously in rejecting such applications out of hand did things open up a little in that channel. Others wanted to know their rights against what they were told by their officers and NCOs. But most, the great majority, many who had already served in hell-hole Vietnam, wanted a place, a non-military place, a non-GI club, where they could get away from the smell, taste, and macho talk of war.

Although there are still a few places where the remnants of coffeehouses exist like the classic Oleo Strut down at Fort Hood in Texas the wars of the past decade or so has produced no great GI resistance like against the Vietnam War when half the Army in America and Vietnam seemed to be in mutiny against their officers, against their ugly tasks of killing every “gook” who crossed their path for no known reason except hubris, and against the stifling of their rights as citizens. At one point no anti-war march was worthy of the name if it did not have a contingent of soldiers in uniform leading the thing. There are many reasons for this difference in attitude, mainly the kind of volunteer the military accepts but probably a greater factor is that back then was the dominance of the citizen-soldier, the draftee, in stirring things up, stirring things up inside as a reflection of what was going on out on the streets and on the campuses. I still firmly believe that in the final analysis you have to get to the “cannon fodder,” the grunts, the private soldier if you want to stop the incessant war machine. Since we are commemorating, if that is the right word the 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I check out what happened, for example, on the Russian front when the desperate soldiers left the trenches during 1917 after they got fed up with the Czar, with the trenches, with the landlords, and the whole senseless mess.

Everyone who has the least bit of sympathy for the anti-war struggles of the past decade should admire what Chelsea Manning has done by her actions releasing that treasure trove of information about American atrocities in Iraq and elsewhere. She has certainly paid the price for her convictions with a draconian sentence. It is hard to judge how history will record any particular heroic action like hers but if the last real case with which her action can be compared with is a guide, Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers, she should find an honored spot. Moreover Chelsea took her actions while in the military which has its own peculiar justice system. Her action, unlike back in Vietnam War times, when the Army was half in mutiny was one of precious few this time out. Now that I think about she does not have to worry about her honored place in history. It is already assured. But just to be on the safe side let’s fight like hell for her freedom. We will not leave our sister Chelsea behind.              

 

Reflections In The Aftermath Of The 40th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

Reflections In The Aftermath Of The 40^th Anniversary Of Bruce Springsteen’s First Album Born To Run- And More

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Last year, 2015, I like a billion other citizen-music critics meaning no more than that I wrote a small sketch about the 40^th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen’s iconic first widely admired album, Born To Run (“iconic” a word now attached to every half-baked event and fully-baked person that has ever come to the surface with the slightest bit of renown but until the fever flavor of the month gets replaced by a more sober assessment like enigmatic I will follow the herd on this one) and placed my assessment in various blogs that I follow and other relevant social media sites but also no less than I had the same right as professional music critics to commemorate a milestone event in my own trek through life.

 

Since then I have been thinking about what I said back then and I have some additional things that might be of interest to “Bruce Springsteen nation” even though we will presumably not be commemorating the anniversary of the first distribution of that album for about another ten years. Part of the impetus for reflecting on the album was that one night my old Carver High School friends Bart Webber, Sam Eaton and Jack Callahan were discussing my sketch at one of our periodic get-togethers at the Rusty Nail, a bar we hang out in of late near Kenmore Square in Boston, now that we are all retired or semi-retired and have time to philosophize over some high-shelf scotches and whiskeys. (For those who do not frequent bars, are tee-totallers, or are just curious that “high-shelf” designation is important especially to four guys who grew up “from hunger” down in Carver, then the cranberry capital of the world or close to it who when young and thirsty drank Southern Comfort, low-shelf whiskeys like Johnny Walker Black, no scotches high-shelf or low, and if pressed hard drunk Thunderbird or Ripple wines.)

 

That night we got, as we have been doing since those high school days when we hung out in front of Jack Slack’s bowling alleys pining away, into a dispute, although we always called it a beef back then about the virtues of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics on stuff like Thunder Road and Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out. Their collective wisdom was that Bruce “spoke” to that Saturday night “chicken run” everything is all right down at the far end of the beach as long as you have your honey on board, take your baby for a ride, see the sights but get the hell out of Carver at all costs unless we wanted to wind up like our parents tied by a million cords to the freaking bogs. Me, well me, I thought they all had had too much to drink that night, maybe too much to dream too since while I am willing to give Bruce plenty of simpatico for merely having survived his youth in Jersey a few years after us that we were driven much more by guys like the literary on the road Jack Kerouac, the poetic mad monk Moloch-hunter Allen Ginsburg, and muse musically by Bob Dylan. They raised a collective sigh and then made the inevitable comment that covers all our disputes these days that I had probably done too much grass/ cousin/speed/hash or any combination thereof and the chickens have finally come home to roost. Here in my updated version of that sketch from last year reflecting that conversation with my friends. I hope it will hold everybody’s tongues until mid-2025 when we have to think through the damn thing again:                               

 

“I got my ‘religion’ on Bruce Springsteen ass-backward (something unkind souls of my acquaintance, that trio of corner boys who still think I am addled by the acid trips of my youth and therefore feel free to discount everything I have said for the past forty years, would say was a more generalized condition), meaning, my meaning anyway, was that I was not an E Street Irregular back in the day, the day we are commemorating with this little sketch, the day when Bruce Springsteen busy in the subterranean world around New York City trying to catch on well after the folk minute and acid rock moments had played out sprung his sweet baby everything is all right Saturday night Jersey boy of a different kind magic on the rock and roll scene with the album Born To Run on a candid world. You see I was in a monastery then, or might as well have been, and did not get the news of the new dispensation, that a small stab was being attempted to create a “new breeze” after the previous breeze had played out a few years before, that there was a new “max daddy” rock and roll star out in the firmament and so I let that past. (As will be explained presently there were reasons for that, reasons that the in-tune Bart, Sam and Jack did not have to deal and they could track the rise of Springsteen in the normal progressive of their rock musical interests.)  

“Here comes reason for that ass-backward part though. See I really was ‘unavailable’ in that 1975 year since I was one among some guys, really a lot of guys although that was something I didn’t know until many years later, some Vietnam veterans who were living under bridges, along the riverbanks, along the railroad tracks of the East Coast from about Boston in summer (the area which I had come from since Carver is about thirty miles south of Boston) to D.C. maybe a little further south as the weather got colder trying to cope as best we could with the ‘real’ world when we got home. The post ‘Nam ‘real’ world that just wasn’t the same as before we left from home and our standard dreams of marriage, white picket fence houses, kids and dogs after whatever we left of ourselves in burning, shooting, napalming, molesting a whole race of very busy people with whom we had not quarrel, no quarrel at all. Plenty of guys, most probably if anybody took a survey on the subject of post-war adjustment, got back and just went to their standard dream lives. Others of us, me and my brothers under the bridge, took a detour, a wrong detour but a detour and so the old hangout with the buddies world of high school chatting about girls with didn’t have or if we did have didn’t have dough to take out properly, about cars we didn’t have either and mostly just hung out talking about music, about what we talk about since we always had a spare quarter to play the latest tunes on Jack Slack’s jukebox, or our leader madman Frankie Riley did, seemed very far away. The fight to keep warm, to keep doped up, to keep from jail except when we wanted to be “vagged” to get indoors and some food and a shower, and most of all to keep moving, something that I still feel even today at times, is what drove our sullen dreams.      

“So we, me, were not doing a very good job of getting along with our lives, mostly. Not succeeding against the drugs (my personal problem from cocaine to meth and back depending on when you ran into me, if you dared), the liquors (my boy Seaside Sean from up in Hampton Falls in New Hampshire who gathered a fistful of medals in Vietnam and who tossed them over the fence at the United States Supreme Court building in that famous VVAW demonstration earlier in the decade unlike me who only survived because a couple of black kids from Harlem saved my ass a couple of times although later not their own, whom I couldn’t save one night when the DTs got to him so bad he went down into the Hudson River from the nearest bridge he was so lost), the petty robberies (Jesus, holding up White Hen convenient stores with my hands so shaky I could barely keep the gun from jumping out of them and if the young girl behind the register had decided to take a stand I probably would not be writing this, at least not as a free man), and the fight to stay away from the labor market. Work which seemed so irrelevant then, work for what purpose if your dreams were not of white picket fences,  the curse of the ‘lost boys of the bridges,’ the boys who wanted no connection  with Social Security numbers, VA forms, forwarding  addresses, hell even General Post Office boxes just in case some dunning repo man, or some angry wife was looking for support, support none of us could give for crying out loud why do you think we worked the stinking garbage strewn rivers, rode the dreamless smoke streams trains, faced the rats mano y mano under the bridges. Work if pressed up against the wall only at some day labor joint giving false social security numbers, pearl-diving where no question were asked as long as the dishes and pans didn’t pile up, or in-kinf for a few nights reprieve from the bridges at some Sally (Salvation Army) harbor lights mission. Not the time to be worrying about grabbing that girl heading to Thunder Road.  

“Yeah, tough times, tough times indeed, and a lot of guys had a close call, a very close call, including me, and a lot of guys like now with our brethren Afghan and Iraq soldier brothers and sisters didn’t make it, guys like Sean who if you looked at him you could not believe how gone he really was with that baby-face of his I still see now, still see as he trogged his way to that night bridge and just let himself free fall I hope somebody up in Hampton Falls claimed him for we, I, couldn’t do so since I was on the run myself, didn’t make it but are not on the walls in black granite  down in D.C.-although maybe they should be.

“Of course Brother Springsteen immortalized the Brothers Under The Bridge living out in Southern California along the arroyos, riverbanks, and railroad tracks of the West in a song which I heard some guys playing one night when I was at a VA hospital in the early 1980s trying to get well for about the fifteenth time (meth again, damn I can still feel the rushes, still want my sweet jesus high, when I say the word) and that was that. I cried that night for my lost youth, for Sean, for the guys who played the song over and over again, Saigon, long gone… no way long gone. The next step, after a few more months of recovery,  was easy because ever since I was kid once I grabbed onto something that moved me some song, some novel, some film I checked out everything by the songwriter, author, director I could get my hands on.          

“Once I did grab a serious chunk of Springsteen’s work, grabbed some things from the local library since my ready cash supply was low I admit I got embarrassed. Admitted to myself that I sure was a long gone daddy back in 1975 and few years thereafter. How could I not have gravitated earlier to a guy who was singing the high hymnal songs of the holy goof corner boys who I grew up with, the guys out in the streets making all that noise (and where are they now, Frankie, Markin, Josh, Jimmy, Tiny, Dread, and a few other who faded in and out over the high school years).

“Singing about getting out on that Jack Keroauc-drenched hitchhike highway that I dreamed of from my youth, of hitting the open road and searching for the great American West blue-pink night that before ‘Nam every one of my corner boys dreamed of and Sam, Sam Lowell even did, did hit that road, of hitting the thunder road in some crash out Chevy looking for Mary or whatever that dish’s name was, looking for that desperate girl beside him when he took that big shift down in the midnight “chicken run,” in taking that girl down to the Jersey shore everything is alright going hard into the sweated carnival night. Later getting all retro-folkie, paying his Woody and Pete dues looking for the wide Missouri, looking for the heart of Saturday night with some Rosalita too (and me with three busted marriages to show for those dreams), and looking, I swear that he must have known my story for my own ghost of Tom Joad coming home bleeding, bleeding a little banged up, out of the John Steinbeck Okie night, coming home from Thunder Road maybe dancing in the streets if the mood took him to that place that you could see in his eyes when he got going, coming home from down in Jungle-land the place of crashed dreams out along the Southern Pacific road around Gallup, New Mexico  dreaming of his own Phoebe Snow. Yeah, thanks Bruce, thanks from a brother under the bridge.”

 

 

 

 

*****The Latest From The "Fight For $15"It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.

*****The Latest From The "Fight For $15"It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.

Click below to link to the Fight For $15 website  for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

http://fightfor15.org/april15/

@timfranzen

http://fightfor15.org/april15/

 

Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now in the early 2000s unlike in their youth not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions, (or unions now rather consciously led by union leaders who have no or only attenuated links to past militant labor actions like strikes, plant sit-downs, hot-cargo of struck goods, general strikes and such and would go into a dead faint if such actions were forced upon them and are so weakened as to be merely dues paying organizations forwarding monies to the Democratic “friends of labor” Party). They had come of political age as anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell. Ralph from the hard-shell experience of having fought for the beast in the Central Highlands in that benighted country and who became disgusted with what he had done, his buddies had done, and his government had done to make animals out of them destroying simple peasants caught in a vicious cross-fire and Sam, having lost his closest high school hang around guy, Jeff Mullin, blown away in some unnamed field near some hamlet that he could not pronounce or spell correctly. The glue that brought them together, brought them together for a lifetime friendship and political comity (with some periods of statutory neglect to bring up families in Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively) the ill-fated actions on May Day 1971 in Washington when they attempted along with several thousands of others to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. All those efforts got them a few days detention in RFK stadium where they had met almost accidently and steel-strong bonds of brotherhood from then on.     

They had seen high times and ebbs, mostly ebbs once the 1960s waves receded before the dramatic events of 9/11 and more particularly the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 called off what they had termed the “armed truce” with the United States government over the previous couple of decades. So Ralph and Sam were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement which was not inconsiderable for a couple of months especially in hotbeds like New York, Boston, L.A. and above all the flagship home away from home of radical politics, San Francisco but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight the movement was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”).

Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy when his father retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s that had been run by a hometown friend in his many absences. However having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.   

So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011   travel down to the Wall Street “private” plaza (and site of many conflicts and stand-offs between the Occupy forces on the ground and then Mayor Blumberg and his itchy cops) which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after Mayor Blumberg and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise acting in some concert as it turned out once the dust settled and “freedom of information” acts were invoked to see what the bastards were up to).

Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer having learned a painfully hard lesson on May Day 1971 and on a number of other occasions later when Ralph and Sam and their comrades decided to get “uppity” and been slapped down more than once although they at least had gone into those actions with their eyes wide open had been the reaction of the “leadership” in folding up the tents (literally and figuratively).

Thereafter the movement had imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which as they also painfully knew had done   much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it over drinks at Jack Higgins’ Grille in Boston more than once in their periodic reunions when Ralph came to town, how each generation had to face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked. 

Working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well. Sam, more interested in writing than Ralph who liked to think more than write but who contributed his fair share of ideas to the “program,” wrote the material up and had it posted on various site which elicited a respectable amount of comment at the time. They also got into the old time spirit by participating in the latest up and coming struggle- the fight for a minimum wage of $15 an hour although even that seems paltry for the needs of today’s working people to move up in the world:      

The 2016 Vote That Really Matters-California Propositions: Yes on 62, No on 66!-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

The 2016 Vote That Really Matters-California Propositions: Yes on 62, No on 66!-Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Workers Vanguard No. 1096	23 September 2016

California Propositions: Yes on 62, No on 66!

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Last year, the United States ranked fifth in the world in the number of people executed at the hands of the state, coming in just behind Saudi Arabia. While the medieval rulers of that country behead the accused in a public square, America’s capitalist rulers prefer the more “humane” method of lethal injection, perpetrated out of public view in prison death chambers. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected a suit brought by three death row inmates in Oklahoma against the state’s use of a drug that is the chemical equivalent of being burned alive. Arguing that the inmates had failed to come up with an “available and preferable” means of being put to death, the Court’s majority decision written by Justice Samuel Alito concluded:

“While most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether.”

Indeed, the purpose of the death penalty is to inflict cruel and unusual punishment as a statement of the ultimate authority of the state and its monopoly on the means of violence. A barbaric legacy of medieval torture, its endurance in the United States is rooted in the origins of American capitalism, which was built on the hideously brutalized labor of black chattel slaves.

The profits that were wrung out of the slave trade and plantation labor were maintained through terror and murder. After the defeat of the Southern slavocracy in the Civil War and the dismantling of Radical Reconstruction by the Northern bourgeoisie, Jim Crow segregation was enforced by lynch mobs. By the 1930s, such extralegal murder was increasingly supplanted by state-sanctioned executions. Black men and women accounted for over two-thirds of those put to death between 1930 and 1967, when amid the mass struggles of the civil rights movement a de facto moratorium on capital punishment was temporarily imposed. Today, more than 40 percent of those on death row are black.

As Marxists, we oppose the death penalty on principle—for the guilty as well as the innocent. We do not accord the state the right to determine who lives and who dies. Our opposition to capital punishment extends as well to China, North Korea and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states, where execution is a prop for the rule of the parasitic bureaucracies.

In the U.S., the death penalty, while rooted in anti-black racism, is upheld as the ultimate punishment for anyone deemed as a threat to the capitalist social order. Working-class fighters who have been killed at the hands of the state include: the Haymarket anarchists, abolitionists and labor organizers who fought for the eight-hour day, hanged in 1877; IWW organizer Joe Hill, shot by a firing squad in 1915; anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti, sent to the electric chair in 1927.

Hundreds of other labor militants have died at the hands of strikebreaking cops and scabs. But it was out of such struggles that the industrial unions in this country were forged in the 1930s, bringing black workers, who were among the most militant fighters, into their ranks. And it will be out of future hard-fought working-class battles that the vital instrument for getting rid of this decaying system of exploitation, racial oppression and state-sanctioned murder will be forged: a multiracial revolutionary workers party to lead the fight for a socialist America.

The Death Penalty Debate

America’s imperialist rulers are accustomed to killing on massive scales—from the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the killing fields of Vietnam, to today’s wars, occupations and drone strikes against the peoples of the Near East. At home, the rulers’ racist cops have a kill rate that is greater by orders of magnitude than that of any other advanced capitalist country, with one study putting it at 70 times that of the combined total of seven European countries. The U.S. also holds a commanding global lead in the numbers of people behind bars, claiming 22 percent of the world’s prison population.

Exposure of cases of innocent men and women sentenced to death, and in some cases executed, has stoked growing antipathy toward capital punishment. The number of executions is down considerably, especially compared to the late 1990s. But for much of the bourgeoisie the main concern is not the justice system’s proclivity to frame up and kill innocent people nor the unspeakable torture inflicted by the drug cocktails used to carry out executions. Instead, what concerns a wing of the bourgeoisie, Democrats and Republicans alike, is that it is spending too much money on prisons and that the death penalty is similarly too expensive. On the other side are those who believe that only the most monstrous measures of repression can keep the working class, black people and the poor sufficiently cowed in the face of increasing destitution. This debate is reflected in various state referendums that will be voted on as part of the November elections.

In Nebraska, where a Republican-dominated legislature voted to repeal the death penalty in 2015 arguing that “taxpayers have not gotten the bang for their buck,” there will be a state referendum on maintaining capital punishment. In Oklahoma, a resolution calling to amend the state’s constitution to enshrine the death penalty, deny that it is “cruel and unusual” punishment and allow for any method of execution, will be on the ballot. In California, which leads the nation in the number of people on death row, there will be two propositions representing both sides in the death penalty debate.

Proposition 66, which is endorsed by a cabal of state prosecutors, cops and prison guards, calls for speeding up executions. To get around the legal challenges to lethal injections, it would make the state’s cocktail of death secret. It would also cut back the appeals process for death row inmates—rights that were already curtailed by Bill Clinton’s gutting of habeas corpus in the 1990s—while forcing lawyers, however inexperienced, to take their cases.

In opposition, Proposition 62 known as “The Justice That Works Act,” calls for replacing the death penalty with life in prison without parole. A CounterPunch (29 August) article “Death to the Death Penalty in California” by Marjorie Cohn, a law professor and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild, argues that Prop. 62 would guarantee “that the worst criminals would never be released,” require “convicted murderers to work and pay restitution” to their victims and “save taxpayers $150 million per year.”

Such is the cruel calculus of death at the hands of the capitalist state, weighing the costs of legal murder against the expense of relegating prisoners to a living death on what class-war political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal so aptly calls “life row.” Nonetheless, as principled opponents of the death penalty, we welcome any measure against state-sanctioned murder. We say: vote “yes” on Prop. 62, “no” on Prop. 66! As we wrote in calling for a vote for a similar proposition on the California ballot in 2012 (WV No. 1009, 28 September 2012):

“As revolutionary Marxists, we do not seek to advise the bourgeoisie on the more ‘humane’ or ‘just’ administration of its increasingly decrepit and depraved rule. Whether it is the death penalty, life in prison without parole or imprisonment in general, we oppose the entire machinery of violence that is the capitalist state.”

As Marxists, we understand that ending the death penalty will not fundamentally change the violently racist and oppressive nature of capitalist class rule. It will not free the innocent, like Mumia, languishing in America’s dungeons or spare the victims of racist police executions on the streets. Nor will it alter the slower death of the growing ranks of the poor, jobless and homeless, or the agony of the sick lacking proper medical care. Our purpose is to fight to forge the nucleus of the revolutionary workers party that will lead the proletariat in overthrowing this system through socialist revolution. When those who labor rule, the death penalty will be abolished for good and the capitalists’ prisons smashed as the initial steps in the emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed.

From the Archives of Marxism-Friedrich Engels' “From the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom”

Workers Vanguard No. 1096	23 September 2016

From the Archives of Marxism-Friedrich Engels' “From the Kingdom of Necessity to the Kingdom of Freedom”

We publish below excerpts from Friedrich Engels’ 1880 work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In explaining scientific socialism, Engels makes clear that only through the conquest of power by the working class and the expropriation of the capitalist class can the benefits of science, technology and education be available to all, laying the material basis for the full liberation of humanity. The excerpts below are taken from the Marx and Engels Selected Works (Progress Publishers, 1976).

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.

What is, then, the position of modern socialism in this connection?

The present structure of society—this is now pretty generally conceded—is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the feudal system, with the privileges it conferred upon individuals, entire social ranks and local corporations, as well as with the hereditary ties of subordination which constituted the framework of its social organisation. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class....

The perfecting of machinery is making human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the economising of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing thus destroys its own home market. “The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.” (Marx’s Capital, p. 671)....

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonising of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange with the socialised character of the means of production. And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of Nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself....

Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realisation were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times....

Division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself has become an obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually, a hindrance to development.

This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialised appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties—this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.

With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history—only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom....

To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.