Pledge to match someone's first-ever donation to our campaign BernieSanders.com

Pledge to match someone's first-ever donation to our campaign

BernieSanders.com<info@berniesanders.com>

7/12/2019 2:50 PM

To  Al Johnsa  

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Al -

We have an outside chance of hitting a pretty significant milestone this fundraising quarter: 1 million donors to our campaign.

Last time, we didn’t reach that number until shortly before the Iowa Caucus. And that was faster than any campaign in history.

This time, we could do it even faster. And as a donor to our campaign, you can play a huge role in making that happen, Al.

We’re asking you to pledge to match someone’s first-ever donation to Bernie. Here’s how it works:

1. You make a donation of $100 or any amount on this page.
2. Leave a short note when you donate encouraging someone else to make their first-ever donation to Bernie.
3. We’ll then send your note to several Bernie supporters, asking them to become a donor and match your donation.

Can you inspire someone to become a donor for the first time and reach our goal of 1 million donors?

Contribute $100 here to match someone’s first-ever donation and we’ll send your message to encourage another Bernie supporter to become a donor.

CONTRIBUTE

There’s no better person to inspire someone to become a donor than someone as committed as you. That’s because this campaign isn’t about Bernie. It’s about all of us.

For every dollar you contribute, you can inspire more people to donate to fulfill your match. And each person you help become a donor brings us that much closer to reaching our 1 million person goal.

This is an ambitious plan, but it’s one that we think has a very good chance to help reach our goal.

Thank you for being a part of it.

In solidarity,

Faiz Shakir
Campaign Manager

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Come to the next monthly STANDOUT FOR BLACK LIVES Ashmont T Station Plaza​ Every fourth Thursday April-Oct. 5:30-6:30 pm

Come to the next monthly 

STANDOUT FOR BLACK LIVES

Ashmont T Station Plaza​

Every fourth Thursday April-Oct.  5:30-6:30 pm

July 25  * August 23  *September 26 * October 26 Please hold these dates!  Spread the Word!  All are welcome!

Hold our banner and Black Lives Matter signs * Hand out fliers

https://www.facebook.com/DorchesterPeopleforPeace    *   www.dotpeace.org

contact: 617-282-3783      

Add your name to my resolution with AOC: “There is a climate emergency which demands a massive-scale mobilization to halt, reverse, and address its consequences and causes.”

Bernie Sanders<info@berniesanders.com>

7/9/2019 4:42 PM

To  alfred johnson  

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Alfred -

Climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Today, I introduced with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a resolution in Congress declaring climate change to be a national emergency. I am writing to ask for your support for this idea. This is how our resolution starts:

There is a climate emergency which demands a massive-scale mobilization to halt, reverse, and address its consequences and causes.

If you agree that climate change is an existential threat, and that we must take urgent, immediate action on this emergency, please add your name to mine right now.

ADD YOUR NAME

Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating harm to the United States and countries around the world.

Yesterday, parts of Washington, DC experienced nearly unprecedented flooding because of a rain storm. Devastating storms regularly rip across the Midwest at increasing scale. Alaska had 90 degree temperatures this weekend, which was the hottest ever recorded.

Yet it is not just the United States. All over the world, you see communities displaced by climate change. People suffer daily because of floods, storms, and more.

Let's be clear. Failure to act decisively on climate change will mean more drought, more famine, more rising sea levels, more floods, more ocean acidification, more extreme weather disturbances, more disease and more human suffering. Climate change is about our survival of the human race.

The good news is that we now have the knowledge and technology to address climate change, and it starts with creating an international energy system that is clean, efficient, and sustainable. The bad news is that we are up against the fossil fuel industry, which is one of the most powerful political forces in the country.

They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns and lobbying every election cycle to protect their interests, while they continue to lie and deny the reality of climate change. And they make billions in profits by continuing to pump, refine, and burn oil, while future generations will be forced to deal with the catastrophic consequences of climate change.

It is past time for the United States to call climate change what it is: an emergency that is an existential threat to humanity that requires an urgent, massive response.

In doing so, we will be going against the fossil fuel industry’s army of lobbyists, PACs, and bought-and-sold legislators. But that is a fight worth having.

The only way that we can be successful in the fight against climate change is if the American people stand up to the fossil fuel industry and make their voices heard. So I’m asking you today:

Add your name if you agree the United States must declare an emergency on climate change and take immediate, large-scale action to reverse its effects. This is an existential threat.

We have a president who not only believes that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government, but is pursuing policies which make a frightening situation even worse. Further, we have a major political party, the Republican Party, that marches in lockstep behind the ignorance of the president.

But in our campaign, we have an opportunity for the U.S. to be a leader in the global fight against climate change.

Thank you for being a part of this fight.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders

ADD YOUR NAME

 

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Oh What Might Have Been-When Irish-Town Tradition Couldn't Hold A Good Woman Down-Or Could It

By Frank Jackman

Most of the time when you write stuff, particularly “slice of life” stuff it is based on a tip, maybe something you read or heard. Today though I am writing about the fate of one Delores Jamison (nee Riley) from the Acre neighborhood of North Adamsville where I grew up whose life took some small but decisive turns which despite the title of this piece did bring a good woman down. See Delores was the mother of a close friend, Kenny, who passed away from cancer many years ago but whose memory and then that of his mother got jogged when I heard a segment on the local NPR affiliate in Boston WBUR. That segment dealt with the 50^th anniversary of Life magazine’s controversial issue in which they had photographs of all those killed in Vietnam during a week in June of 1969. That segment centered on James Hickey who was several years younger than me and had grown up in Quincy a few towns over from my own hometown. His story was so familiar, so much like Kenny’s and my own that it started the memory in motion.       

I did not know Delores Riley really well since she was usually somewhat sickly (from having had four boys close together which her delicate frame never really recovered from) and overwrought with having to tend to too many children. Kenny and I would tend not to stay at his house for that very reason. Apparently though Delores had not always been so out of sorts and that is really what this remembrance is about. About decisions she made, or did not make, which led to her falling under the cracks in life. About decisions really that confronted almost everybody who lived or was raised in the Acre, in North Adamsville.

From what I could gather (Kenny never knew much and from a pretty early age stayed out of the house and over with his grandmother) about Delores’ early life it was conventionally middle class for the hellbroth 1930s Great Depression days. Her gruff, grumpy father Daniel had married late and had been an officer in the town fire department which meant he had a steady income all during the Depression. Owed the house he was born in over in the better Atlantic section of town, had married Anna and had three children with her. Anna by all accounts was “a saint” for putting up with him but also being a kind person to all in that neighborhood. That heavily Irish neighborhood, always called Irishtown by residence and strangers alike- which will play some small part in what happens later. Delores was a fairly bright and industrious student and graduated from North Adamsville High in 1942 and subsequently went to a business school in Boston.       

Normally, at least directly for a young woman, the war raging in Europe and the Pacific would not affect her as much as for the vast array of young men the military machine was eating up on two fronts. Once Delores finished that business school she got a job at the Hingham Naval Base about twenty miles from home. This is where the vagaries, maybe slightly the fog of war, came into play. Since the naval base needed protection, a detachment of Marines (really soldiers for the Navy) including rotated battle-tested young Prescott Jamison was stationed there. As things went Delores and Prescott met at a USO dance at the base on a Friday night (many details from this period are missing except Prescott must have had something since he was called ‘the Sheik” in gest by his fellows and in earnest by young women). Fairly shortly, although maybe not so for wartime, they were married since Prescott was scheduled to be discharged fairly soon after that.     

This is really where things began to fall apart (part of this from Kenny but also part from his pious grandmother when I would visit Kenny there as he sought shelter from the home storms). See Prescott was from coal country down in Kentucky, down in well-known Hazard, had dropped out of school in either the ninth or tenth grade to work the mines. When Pearl Harbor came in December 1941 he enlisted the next day in the Marines, saw the island-hopping battles of the Pacific with now hallowed names, and after suffering wounds was rotated to Hingham. He like many down in Appalachia was strict Primitive Baptist (meaning you had to take a dunking in the river to be baptized according to Kenny).   

That was the first strike. No, actually the first strike was when Daniel saw the good-looking Prescott and nixed the guy from day one. Reason: although Daniel was not a religious man he knew he hated Protestants of any kind and told Prescott so. (Anna the really pious of the pair would after a while ignore his religion but at the time supported her husband.) The second strike was that the couple under Roman Catholic doctrine could not marry in the church but only the rectory which occurred by their choice without her parents present (his parents by then both dead, he the youngest of eleven children). The third strike, the decisive strike was that he was uneducated for anything but coalmining not an industry found around North Adamsville.       

I guess they tried going down to Kentucky but that was worse than up North for work (and Prescott’s kin did not like Roman Catholic Delores anymore than her father liked Protestants) and so they returned. Returned and Delores started with much trouble having those four closely aged boys and to find shelter in the North Adamsville Housing Authority (the notorious “projects” evilly conjured up even today). Without help from her father. As the reader can imagine with work hard to get (Prescott last hired, first laid off a familiar refrain) things were always tight and Kenny believes something in her snapped early on and she decided to treat a hostile world including her sons hostilely (that verified by Kenny’s sibling recently).

We already know this story cannot end well (except Anna accepting Prescott and having them in when Daniel was not around and later when he was in a nursing home). And it did not end well. What has always intrigued me, always when Kenny would tell his tales of woe was why a young girl, probably pretty innocent as most Irish girls were, decided to forsake the neighborhood boys (some of whom were interested I gather) and stake her life on Prescott. One answer came to mind early on when I knew Kenny that grandfather Daniel drove his daughter from his door.  What has always also intrigued me is whether Delores ever regretted her decisions. According to Kenny no matter what was happening to the family Delores never regretted marrying her “Sheik.” Called his name from her death bed.     

Legendary Musician David Bartholomew Passes At 100- Take Your Elvis Pick-"One Night With You" Or "One Night Of Sin"y

Workers Vanguard No. 1157 21 June 2019 From the Archives of Workers Vanguard The Truth About the Tiananmen Uprising

Workers Vanguard No. 1157	21 June 2019

From the Archives of Workers Vanguard

The Truth About the Tiananmen Uprising

The mass protests centered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 30 years ago are falsely presented by the bourgeois media as a student movement for Western “democracy,” long an imperialist rallying cry for capitalist counterrevolution. In fact, as we stressed at the time, the entry of masses of workers into the protests marked an incipient proletarian political revolution against the ruling Chinese Communist Party bureaucracy. After the 3-4 June 1989 slaughter of working people and students by the Deng Xiaoping regime, millions of workers across China continued to wage mass strikes and protests, driven by anger over official corruption and the effects of “market reforms.” This underlines that the aims and class character of the Tiananmen uprising were fundamentally different from the current protests in Hong Kong.

The brittle Stalinist caste in China censors references to the Tiananmen events, ever fearful that the working class will again push to take charge of society. We reprint below our article, “Defend Chinese Workers!” (WV No. 480, 23 June 1989), written shortly after the Tiananmen massacre.

*   *   *

The June 4 massacre at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square brought China to the brink of civil war. The mass outpouring of defiance heralded the Chinese proletarian political revolution against the corrupt and despised Stalinist bureaucracy. For the moment the Deng regime has weathered the storm and is now cracking down, striking first and hardest at the working class. But the decrepit bureaucratic caste, which has opened the doors of China to massive capitalist encroachment and shamelessly allied itself with U.S. imperialism, can be shattered. The central lesson of the Beijing spring and the urgent task which stands before the Chinese workers is the forging of an authentic communist party, an internationalist vanguard.

On June 15 in Shanghai, the commercial center of China and an industrial powerhouse with four million workers, the first death sentences were handed down. The victims are three workers: Xu Guoming, Bian Hanwu and Yan Xuerong, accused of stopping and burning a train which on June 6 plowed through a Shanghai crowd protesting the Beijing massacre, killing six demonstrators. On June 16, in Beijing eight more workers accused of taking part in “riots” against government troops were sentenced to die. In China judicial appeals are quickly dispatched with, and it is expected that the sentences will soon be carried out, with a bullet to the back of the neck. Families of those executed are charged for the cost of the bullet! Racist New York cops would be green with envy.

To date there have been over 1,000 arrests, including leaders of the Beijing Autonomous Student Union and the Autonomous Workers Union and their counterparts in China’s other major cities. Premier Li Peng vowed that there would be many more arrests, and called for punishment “without mercy.” Students are paraded on television wearing manacles. Arrested workers are marched through the streets with signs describing their “crimes” of “instigating social unrest” and “spreading rumors.” Commenting on the executions, the New York Times (16 June) noted: “It may be significant that they were workers, rather than students, because the Government has been particularly alarmed about the prospect of workers joining the unrest and going on strike.”

The Western media usually describes the oppositional forces in China as “the student movement for democracy.” But it was the beginnings of a working-class revolt against Deng’s program of “building socialism with capitalist methods” which gave the protests their mass and potentially revolutionary nature. Organized workers’ contingents started to participate in the marches, and it was the threat of a general strike which led Li Peng to order martial law in mid-May. Moreover, the outpouring of hundreds of thousands of working people into the streets stymied the regime’s attempted crackdown then. When the troops attacked unarmed people in Beijing on June 4, thousands of workers battled them with whatever came to hand.

Justifying the massacre to his colleagues and military commanders, Deng reportedly stated: “If we had not suppressed them, they would have brought about our collapse. I myself, and all of you commanding officers present, would have been shoved under the guillotine” (New York Times, 17 June). This bureaucracy, which grotesquely calls itself Communist, knows well that it rules in place of the proletariat. The Deng regime has more or less tolerated a “pro-democracy” student movement for the past decade. Indeed, many of the student leaders were sons and daughters of top bureaucrats.

So why the savage repression at the very first signs of working-class protest? Is it because these old Stalinists want to maintain “totalitarian” control over everything that happens in China? Hardly. After all, Deng & Co. have opened up the Chinese economy to foreign investors and local capitalist entrepreneurs, for which they have been lavishly praised by the Western bourgeois media.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, in both China and the Soviet bloc, is a parasitic caste resting upon a collectivized (i.e., proletarian) economy. Because the bureaucrats do not own the means of production, because they do not have the myriad threads of social control of a ruling capitalist class, their power stems from monopolizing political control of the governing apparatus. Since they claim to rule in the interests of the workers, they cannot tolerate any independent workers organization. Any real workers movement necessarily challenges the legitimacy of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Hence, the historic instability of China, the Soviet Union and other bureaucratically degenerated/deformed workers states.

The Far Eastern Economic Review (22 June) quotes one observer:

“This leadership is politically unstable and will remain unstable. Whatever arrangements are made now—once Deng dies it will come unglued. Everybody in China knows this. And everybody knows that everybody knows.”

The bureaucracy is rent, with those favoring a crackdown in the ascendancy over those who sought to co-opt the student protests. The army is divided as well. Despite the provocative repression, which pales in comparison to the bloodletting of the Cultural Revolution, not to mention the 1927 Shanghai massacre under Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, attempts to organize independent student and labor groups will no doubt continue. But the indispensable condition for workers’ victory is the construction of a Trotskyist party, raising the banner of Bolshevik internationalism against the Stalinist fraud of building “socialism in one country” or “with capitalist methods.”

For Bolshevik Internationalism!

Parallel with the death sentences meted out to workers, Deng’s regime is conducting a Big Lie campaign, the scope of which is outdone only by its cynicism. The Tiananmen Square massacre “never happened,” claims Li Peng. At the same time, the Deng regime is trying to appeal to Chinese nationalism and xenophobia by blaming the “riots” on “bourgeois liberal” ideas imported from the West, while denouncing the U.S. in particular for “interfering” in China’s affairs.

To be sure, many of the students displayed illusions in Western-style “democracy.” At the same time, they repeatedly sang the Internationale, the international socialist workers anthem. But it is the Deng regime itself which has fostered illusions by its military alliance with American imperialism against the Soviet Union and its glorification of Western capitalism, while unleashing powerful internal forces toward capitalist restoration. A few years ago the president of the New York Stock Exchange visited Beijing to advise the government on setting up a stock and bond market. The head of the Bank of China greeted this personification of Wall Street with the honorific title of “elder brother.” Is it any wonder, then, that many students—who for the most part are children of the ruling bureaucracy—idealize capitalist America?

For its part, U.S. imperialism certainly did not incite the protest movement but rather was deeply embarrassed by it. The Bush White House is torn between maintaining its military alliance with the Chinese Stalinists against the USSR and exploiting the Beijing massacre for anti-Communist purposes. Thus the U.S. embassy in Beijing has harbored the pro-Western dissident Fang Lizhi while Bush merely “deplored” the June 4 massacre and temporarily restricted military cooperation with the People’s Republic. And U.S. capitalists and financiers are not about to cut back their lucrative business dealings with Deng’s China.

Nonetheless, the events of June 4 have to some degree changed the attitude of American imperialism toward the People’s Republic of China. The U.S. ruling class believes, with some justification, that the massacre and ensuing repression will greatly increase anti-Communist sentiment in China. They dream of counterrevolution in the not-so-distant future. Thus the New York Times (19 June) quotes, with evident approval, a senior Communist Party leader who predicts that “it will be the reaction to Deng in his later years that ends the system of socialism in China.” Of course, the bourgeois media always equates Stalinism with communism, and the overthrow of Stalinist rule with capitalist restoration. Yet Chinese workers want to preserve and defend the social achievements of the Chinese Revolution—guaranteed employment (“the iron rice bowl”), a stable cost of living and a relatively egalitarian society.

While the working masses of China enthusiastically supported the 1949 Revolution, they have become ever more alienated from the Maoist-Stalinist bureaucracy. The bond between the people and the Communist Party created by the revolution was broken during the Cultural Revolution—the bloody factional and clique warfare launched and manipulated by Chairman Mao. While unleashing massive demonstrations of student youth, the bureaucrats feared the spectre of workers in revolt. When Shanghai workers organized a “Workers Headquarters” at a mass rally in 1966, and 2,500 of them commandeered a train to take their demands directly to Mao in Beijing, the head of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, Ch’en Po-ta, insisted:

“As workers, their main job is to work. Joining in the Revolution is only secondary. They must therefore go back to work. They can take part in the Revolution outside working hours.”

— quoted in Neale Hunter, Shanghai Journal (1969)

Yet there remained a deep loyalty to the People’s Republic, indicated by the universal belief that the People’s Liberation Army would never fire on the people. Thus the Tiananmen Square massacre is a truly traumatic experience for China. The present repression may restore a certain surface stability to China for awhile. The working class has been forced back but has by no means been crushed. The unemployment, inflation and gross inequality spawned by Deng’s “reforms” will continue to fuel popular discontent. As Beijing tries to pay peasants for the fall harvest with worthless IOUs, famine looms. And with an estimated l00 million excess rural laborers, many of whom wander from place to place, it could provoke a mammoth peasant revolt.

The Deng regime is doddering, brittle and now widely hated. The only road forward remains the proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy, combined with socialist revolution against capitalist rule—not least in Hong Kong, Taiwan and strategic Japan. For Lenin’s Communism! For a Chinese Trotskyist Party, section of a reforged Fourth International.

From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-Principles Involved in the War Issue (1916)

From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-Principles Involved in the War Issue (1916)

Markin comment:

It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).

Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin

Principles Involved in the War Issue

Published: First published in 1931 in Lenin Miscellany XVII. Written in German in December 1916. Translated from the German. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 23, pages 152-160.
Translated: M. S. Levin, The Late Joe Fineberg and and Others
Transcription\Markup: R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README


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Swiss Left Social-Democrats are unanimous in rejecting the defence of the fatherland principle in the present war. The proletariat, at any rate its best elements, is likewise opposed to defence of the fatherland.

Hence, on this most burning issue confronting contemporary socialism in general and the Swiss Socialist Party in particular, it would appear that necessary unity has been achieved. Closer examination, however, is bound to lead us to the conclusion that it is only seeming unity.

For there is absolutely no clarity, let alone unanimity, that a declaration against defence of the fatherland places exceptionally high demands on the revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary viability of the party that makes such a declaration, providing, of course, that it is not reduced to a hollow phrase. And such a declaration does become a hollow phrase if we merely reject defence of the fatherland without being fully aware of, i.e., without appreciating, the demands implied, without realising that all propaganda, agitation, organisation, in short, the sum total of party activity must be radically changed, “regenerated” (to use Karl Liebknecht’s expression) and adapted to the supreme revolutionary tasks.

Let us carefully consider what rejection of fatherland defence implies, if we approach it as a serious political slogan that must really be carried out.

First. We call on the proletarians and the exploited of all the belligerent countries, and of all countries faced with the danger of war, to reject defence of the fatherland. We definitely know now, from the experience of several of the warring countries, what this actually implies in the present war. It implies rejection of all the foundations of modern bourgeois society, the undermining of the very roots of the modern social system, and not only in theory, not only “in general”, but in practice, directly and immediately. Is it not clear that this can be accomplished only if we go beyond the firm theoretical conviction that capitalism has fully matured for its transformation into socialism and accept the practical, direct and immediate carrying out of such transformation, i.e., the socialist revolution?

Yet that is nearly always lost sight of in discussing refusal to defend the fatherland. At best there is “theoretical” acceptance of the fact that capitalism is ripe for transformation into socialism. But immediate, radical change of all aspects of party activity in the spirit of the directly imminent socialist revolution—that is shunned!

The people, it is alleged, are not prepared for that!

But that is ridiculously inconsistent. Either, or. Either we do not proclaim immediate rejection of defence of the fatherland—or we immediately develop, or begin to develop, systematic propaganda for immediate socialist revolution. In a certain sense the “people”, of course, are “not prepared” either to reject fatherland defence or accept socialist revolution. But that does not justify two years—two years!—of procrastination and delay in starting to systematically prepare them!

Second. What is being opposed to the policy of defence of the fatherland and civil peace? Revolutionary struggle against the war, “revolutionary mass actions”, as recognised by the 1915 Aarau Party Congress resolution. No doubt a very good decision, but ... but the party’s record since that congress, the party’s actual policy, show that it has remained a paper decision.

What is the aim of revolutionary mass struggle? The party has made no official statement, nor is the question being discussed in general. It is either taken for granted, or frankly admitted, that the aim is “socialism”. Socialism is being opposed to capitalism (or imperialism).

That, however, is absolutely illogical (theoretically) and void of all practical meaning. Illogical because it is too general, too nebulous. “Socialism” in general, as an aim, as the opposite of capitalism (or imperialism), is accepted now not only by the Kautsky crowd and social—chauvinists, but by many bourgeois social politicians. However, it is no longer a matter of contrasting two social systems, but of formulating the concrete aim of the concrete “revolutionary mass struggle” against a concrete evil, namely, the present high cost of living, the present war danger or the present war.

The whole Second International of 1889–1914 opposed socialism to capitalism in general, and it was precisely this too general “generalisation” that brought on its bankruptcy. It ignored the specific evil of its age, which Frederick Engels nearly thirty years ago, on January 10, 1887, characterised in the following words:

“...a certain petty-bourgeois socialism finds representation in the Social-Democratic Party itself, and even in the ranks of the Reichstag group. This is done in the following way: while the fundamental views of modern socialism and the demand for the transformation of all the means of production into social property are recognised as justified, the realisation of this is declared possible only in the distant future, a future which for all practical purposes is quite out of sight. Thus, for the present one has to have recourse to mere social patchwork...” (The Housing Question, Preface).[1]

The concrete aim of “revolutionary mass struggle” can only be concrete measures of socialist revolution, and not “socialism” in general. The Dutch comrades have given a precise definition of these concrete measures in their programme (published in the Bulletin of the International Socialist Committee No. 3, Berne, February 29, 1916): annulment of the national debt, expropriation of the banks and big industry. When we suggest that these absolutely concrete measures be included in an official party resolution, and be systematically explained in the most popular form, in day-to-day party propaganda at public meetings, in parliamentary speeches, in legislative proposals—we get the same procrastinating, evasive and thoroughly sophistical reply that the people are not yet prepared for this, and so on and so forth!

The point is, however, that we should begin preparing them right now, and firmly stick to this work!

Third, the party has “accepted” revolutionary mass struggle. Very well. But is the party capable of waging it? Is it preparing for it? Is it studying these problems, gathering together the necessary material, setting up the proper bodies and organisations? Is it discussing the issues among the people and with the people?

Nothing of the kind! The party clings to its old line—a thoroughly parliamentarian, thoroughly trade union, thoroughly reformist and thoroughly legalistic line. The party remains manifestly incapable of facilitating the revolutionary mass struggle and leading it. It is obviously making no preparations whatever for this. The old routine rules supreme and the “new” words (rejection of fatherland defence, revolutionary mass struggle) remain mere words! And the Lefts, failing to realise this, are not mustering their forces, systematically, perseveringly and in all fields of party activity, to combat the evil.

One can only shrug one’s shoulders on reading, for in stance, the following phrase (the last) in Grimm’s theses on the war issue:

“In conjunction with trade union organisations, party bodies must in this event [i.e., the calling of a mass railway strike if there is a danger of war, etc.] take all the necessary measures.”

The theses were published in the summer, and on September 16, the Schweizerische Metallarbeiter-Zeitung,[2] issued over the names of its editors, 0. Schneeberger and K. Dürr, contained the following phrase (I was on the verge of saying, the following official reply to Grimm’s theses or pious wishes):

“...The phrase ‘the worker has no fatherland’ is in very poor taste at a time when the workers of all Europe, in their overwhelming majority, have for two years been standing shoulder to shoulder with the bourgeoisie on the battlefields against the ‘enemies’ of their fatherland, while those who remain at home want to ‘live through it’ despite all the poverty and hardship. Should we be attacked by a foreign power we shall doubtlessly see the same picture in Switzerland too!!!”

What is this if not “Kautsky” policy, the policy of the impotent phrase, Left declaration and opportunist practice, when, on the one hand, resolutions are proposed urging the party, “in conjunction with trade union organisations”, to call for revolutionary mass strikes, and, on the other, no struggle is waged against the Grütli, i.e., social-patriot, reformist and thoroughly legalistic, trend and its supporters within the party and the trade unions?

Are we “educating” the masses or corrupting and demoralising them if we fail daily to say and prove that “leading” comrades like 0. Schneeberger, K. Dürr, P. Pflüger, H. Greulich, Huber and many others hold exactly the same social-patriot views and pursue exactly the same social-patriot policy as the one Grimm so “courageously” exposes and castigates... when it concerns the Germans (in Germany) and not the Swiss? Rail against the foreigners, but protect one’s “own” “fellow-citizens”.... Is that “internationalist”? Is that “democratic”?

This is how Hermann Greulich describes the position of the Swiss workers, the crisis of Swiss socialism and also the substance of Grütli policy within the Socialist Party:

“...The standard of living has risen insignificantly and only for the top strata [hear! hear!] of the proletariat. The mass of workers continue to live in poverty, beset by worry and hardship. That is why, from time, to time, doubts arise as to the correctness of the path we have been following. The critics are looking for new paths and place special hope on more resolute action. Efforts are being made in that direction, but as a rule [?] they fail [??] and this increases the urge to revert to the old tactics [a case of the wish being father to the thought?].... And now the world war ... drastic decline in the standard of living, amounting to outright poverty for those sections which in the past still enjoyed tolerable conditions. Revolutionary sentiments are spreading. [Hear! hear!] In truth, the party leadership has not been equal to the tasks confronting it and all too often succumbs [??] to the influence of hot heads [??].... The Grütli-Verein Central Committee is committed to a ‘practical national policy’ which it wants to operate outside the party... Why has it not pursued it within the party? [Hear! hear!] Why has it nearly always left it to me to fight the ultra-radicals?” (Open Letter to the Hottingen Grütli-Verein, September 26, 1916.)

So speaks Greulich. It is not at all, therefore, a matter (as the Grütlians in the party think, and hint in the press, while the Grütlians outside the party say so openly) of a few “evil-minded foreigners” wanting, in a fit of personal impatience, to inject a revolutionary spirit into the labour movement, which they regard through “foreign spectacles”. No, it is none other than Hermann Greulich—whose political role is tantamount to that of a bourgeois Labour Minister in a small democratic republic—who tells us that only the upper strata of the workers are somewhat better off now, while the mass is steeped in poverty, and that “revolutionary sentiments are spreading” not because of the accursed foreign “instigators”, but because of “the drastic decline in the standard of living”.

And so?

And so, we shall be absolutely right if we say:

[[DOUBLE-LEFT-BOX-ENDS:
Either the Swiss people will suffer hardships that will increase with every passing week and they will be faced daily with the threat of involvement in the imperialist war, i.e., of being killed in the capitalists’ interests, or they will follow the advice of the finest part of their proletariat, muster all their forces and carry out a socialist revolution. ]]

Socialist revolution? Utopia! “A remote and practically indefinable” possibility!...

It is no more a utopia than rejection of fatherland defence in the present war or revolutionary mass struggle against it. One should not be deafened by one’s own words or frightened by the words of others. Nearly everyone is prepared to accept revolutionary struggle against the war. But one must visualise the magnitude of the task of ending the war by revolution! No, it is not a utopia. The revolution is maturing in all countries and the question now is not whether to continue to live in tranquillity and tolerable conditions, or plunge into some reckless adventure. On the contrary, the question is whether to continue to suffer hardship and be thrown into the holocaust to fight for alien interests, or to make great sacrifices for socialism, for the interests of nine-tenths of mankind.

Socialist revolution, we are told, is a utopia! The Swiss people, thank God, have no “separate” or “independent” language, but speak the three world languages of the neighbouring warring countries. It is not surprising, therefore, that they are in such close touch with developments in these countries. In Germany, things have reached a point where the economic life of 66 million people is directed from one centre. The national economy of a country of 66 million is run from this one centre. Tremendous sacrifices are imposed on the vast majority of the people in order that the “upper 30,000” can pocket thousands of millions in war profits, and that millions die in the shambles for the enrichment of these “finest and noblest” representatives of the nation. And in the fase of these facts, of this experience, is it “utopian” to believe that a small nation, with no monarchy or Junkers, with a very high level of capitalism and perhaps better organised in various unions than in any other capitalist country, will try to save itself from hunger and the danger of war by doing the very same thing that has already been practically tested in Germany? With the difference, of course, that in Germany millions are being killed and maimed to enrich a few, open the road to Baghdad, conquer the Balkans, whereas in Switzerland it is merely a matter of expropriating a maximum of 30,000 bourgeois, i.e., not condemning them to perish, but to the “horrible fate” of receiving “only” 6,000–10,000 francs income and giving the rest to the socialist workers’ government in order to ward off hunger and the war danger.

The Great Powers, however, will never tolerate a socialist Switzerland and will use their immensely superior strength to crush the socialist revolution at the very beginning!

That, undoubtedly, would be so if, first, the beginnings of a revolution in Switzerland did not generate a class movement of solidarity in neighbouring countries, and, second, if these Great Powers were not tied up in a “war of attrition” which has practically exhausted the patience of the most patient peoples. Military intervention by the mutually hostile Great Powers would, in present circumstances, only be the prelude to revolution flaring up throughout the whole of Europe.

Perhaps you think I am so naïve as to believe that such issues as socialist revolution can be resolved by “persuasion”?

No. I only wish to illustrate, and, what is more, merely one partial issue, the change that must take place in all party propaganda if we want to approach the question of rejection of fatherland defence with all the seriousness it deserves. That is only an illustration, and it concerns only one partial issue. I lay claim to no more.

It would be absolutely wrong to believe that immediate struggle for socialist revolution implies that we can, or should, abandon the fight for reforms. Not at all. We cannot know beforehand how soon we shall achieve success, how soon the objective conditions will make the rise of this revolution possible. We should support every improvement, every real economic and political improvement in the position of the masses. The difference between us and the reformists (i.e., the Grütlians in Switzerland) is not that we oppose reforms while they favour them. Nothing of the kind. They confine themselves to reforms and as a result stoop—in the apt expression of one (rare!) revolutionary writer in the Schweizerische Metallarbeiter-Zeitung (No. 40)—to the role of “hospital orderly for capitalism”. We tell the workers: vote for proportional representation, etc., but don’t stop at that. Make it your prime duty systematically to spread the idea of immediate socialist revolution, prepare for this revolution and radically reconstruct every aspect of party activity. The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms, but we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms (in such a manner) that—to oversimplify the matter for the sake of clarity—five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.

Socialist revolution is impossible without a hard revolutionary mass struggle in which many sacrifices have to be made. But we would be inconsistent if we accepted the revolutionary mass struggle and the desire for an immediate end to the war while, at the same time, rejecting immediate socialist revolution! The former without the latter is nil, a hollow sound.

Nor can we avoid hard struggle within the party. It would be sheer make-believe, hypocrisy, philistine “head-in-the sand” policy to imagine that “internal peace” can rule within the Swiss Social-Democratic Party. The choice is not between “internal peace” and “inner-party struggle”. Suffice it to read Hermann Greulich’s letter mentioned above and examine developments in the party over the past several years to appreciate the utter fallacy of any such supposition.

The real choice is this: either the present concealed forms of inner-party struggle, with their demoralising effect on the masses, or open principled struggle between the internationalist revolutionary trend and the Grütli trend inside and outside the party.

An “inner struggle” in which Hermann Greulich attacks the “ultra-radicals” or the “hotheads”, without naming these monsters and without precisely defining their policy, and Grimm publishes articles in the Berner Tagwacht larded with hints and only comprehensible to one out of a hundred readers, articles in which he castigates those who see things through “foreign spectacles”, or those “actually responsible” for the draft resolutions he finds so annoying—that kind of inner struggle demoralises the masses, who see, or guess, that it is a “quarrel among leaders” and do not understand what it is really all about.

But a struggle in which the Grütli trend within the party—and it is much more important and dangerous than outside the party—will be forced openly to combat the Left, while both trends will everywhere come out with their own independent views and policies, will fight each other on matters of principle, allowing the mass of party comrades, and not merely the “leaders”, to settle fundamental issues—such a struggle is both necessary and useful, for it trains in the masses independence and ability to carry out their epoch-making revolutionary mission.


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Notes
[1] See Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1962, pp. 549–50.

[2] Schweizerische Metallarbeiter-Zeitung (Swiss Metalworkers’ Gazette)—a weekly paper founded in Berne in 1902; adopted a social-chauvinist position during the First World War.