Showing posts with label POPULAR FRONTS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label POPULAR FRONTS. Show all posts

Sunday, October 20, 2019

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- For Bob Dylan-Tracing The Roots Of The Roots- The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Mountain Music Performer Roscoe Holcomb Doing "John Henry". You want the roots. You want what influenced Dylan. Hell, you might as well start here.

DVD Review

Down The Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan, White Eagle Productions, 2008


Okay, okay I have gone on and one over the past year or so about the influence of Bob Dylan’s music (and lyrics) on me, and on my generation, the Generation of ’68. But, please, don’t blame me. Blame Bob. After all he could very easily have gone into retirement and enjoyed the fallout from his youthful fame and impressed one and all at his local AARP chapter. But, no, he had to go out on the road continuously, seemingly forever, keeping his name and music front and center. Moreover, the son of a gun has done more reinventions of himself than one could shake a stick at (folk troubadour, symbolic poet in the manner of Rimbaud and Verlaine, heavy metal rocker, blues man, etc.) So, WE are left with forty or so years of work to go through to try to sort it out. In short, can I (or anyone else) help it if he is restless and acts, well, like a rolling stone?

All of this is by way of introduction to a recent (2008) very worthwhile addition to the immense commentary on Bob Dylan’s work, “Down The Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan”. Those influences form the stated central premise of this little documentary, filled with many, many knowledgeable “talking heads” that have, apparently, gotten far more hooked on the "meaning” of Dylan than is healthy. That is, however, a separate question for another day.

Here the commentators are full of information about the recording artists, poets, politicos, and other cultural figures that one way or another influenced Bob Dylan’s work at various periods (mainly the youthful parts) of his life. I, nevertheless, have a sneaking suspension that Brother Dylan is merely a foil for a larger project under the following rubric- Bob Dylan as the vital link, the transmission belt, in the chain of the folk tradition going back over the past century or more up to the present.

In aid of that premise the producers of this documentary have brought in seemingly every big and little contributor to what is known as the “American Songbook”, excluding, incorrectly I believe, Tin Pan Alley. Those who have followed the reviews in this space will not be surprised by the names of the performers who influenced Dylan. They form a virtual who’s who of those who influenced the Generation of ’68 as we tried to sort out what was genuine in the American musical tradition and what was merely pabulum. Thus, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger and Josh White are given ample time, especially the folk troubadour Woody Guthrie, a personal idol of Dylan’s on his way up.

Additionally, the pantheon of country blues artists ‘rediscovered’ during the folk revival of the early 1960’s are well represented by Mississippi John Hurt (his material, along with other country blues artists like Skip James, has been covered by Dylan in his early and late periods). A decent amount of space is given to the influence of the "beats" from the 1950's (his growing up period) not so much for the music as for the sensibility. Not so well known, are the country and western influences which, if one thought about it, seem natural for a ‘country boy’ like Dylan growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota. Number one here, and not by accident, is Hank Williams a similarly, at times, dark lyricist. Less apparent is mention of the influence of The Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers from the white rural and mountain country scene.

Finally, the producers here have not only gotten some very knowledgeable commentators to give their take on Dylan (I especially note Tom Paley from the original New Lost City Ramblers, a fountain of information about the New York folk scene as it developed prior to Dylan's splashy entrance) but have buttressed their case for Dylan’s role as the transmission belt for the traditional folk culture by having younger performers play not his music but the music that influenced him (a standout here is a male-female guitar-banjo couple playing the old classic “Banks Of The Ohio”). Nice touch.

Song to Woody Lyrics

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin' a road other men have gone down
I'm seein' your world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny old world that's a-comin' along
Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn
It looks like it's a-dyin' and it's hardly been born.

Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things I'm a-sayin', and many times more
I'm a-singin' every song, but I can't sing enough
Cause there's not many men done the things that you done.

Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly, too
And to all the good people that traveled with you
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind

I'm a-leavin' tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I'd want to do
Is to say I'd been hittin' some hard travelin' too.

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon




By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the dearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.
Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)
In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         
The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.
I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.
For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

Monday, September 16, 2019

The Centennial Of Pete Seeger’s Birthday (1919-2014)- From The Archives Of Marxism-*On The Passing Of Folklorist And Ardent Stalinist Irwin Silber- A Short Note

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late folklorist and political activist Irwin Silber.

Markin comment:

In a recent post linking to a New York Times obituary concerning the passing of Irwin Silber, well- known folklorist and left political activist I made a point, as I have in this headline, of mentioning his ardent and long time Stalinist inclinations. I also noted in the post that if one wanted examples of that political bent then one could Google the Guardian (U.S.) archive for anti-Trotskyist (using the classic giveaway “Trotskyite”) material that he wrote during the 1970s when his Stalinist bent tilted in the direction of the Maoism. As it turns out, at least for now, I have been unable to Google any articles by Silber, or for that matter the Guardian itself. That newspaper ceased publication in the 1990s and, apparently, no one has deemed it necessary, as of yet, to see that the archives enter cyberspace. However, in order to give a flavor of what I am speaking of I have enclosed the link to a twelve-part series run in the Guardian in 1973 (while Silber was on the editorial staff) by Carl Davidson entitled Left in Form, Right in Essence: A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism. (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/guardian/index.htm).

Let’s make something clear on Stalinism, at least what is essential about it for those who stand in the Trotskyist tradition, while we are on the subject. In the United States, at least when anyone utters the epitaph Stalinist (or Stalin) that conjures up the KGB, gulags, Moscow Trials, slave labor camps, the Cold War, totalitarianism, and assorted other negative labels. As Trotskyists, whose forbears lost the political battle to Stalinism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, we are painfully aware of all of that, including the lost of our historic leader to assassination at the hands of a Stalinist agent in 1940.

But for us, and this is where a bloodline is drawn between the Stalinists and us, including Irwin Silber, it is our perspectives for revolution that distinguish us. In shorthand, does one stand in the tradition of “socialism in one country", or "half a country", or "one island', or whatever political franchise one is craving for and extolling or for international revolution? Does one stand for one-stage workers revolution in the modern age (basically post-1848) or two-stage revolution, first “democratic” (maybe) and then socialist (never, or in the very, very distant future- witness South Africa today for the latest edition). The fight in the international working class movement, at least of its Marxist component, has always, in the end, been fought on that axis. That is the sense is which one Irwin Silber was, from the time he was a pup, an ardent Stalinist.

Note: In the Marxist movement it has always been, or always should have been the case, that in writing political obituaries one should not take a pass on a person’s political life. I have taken my shots at Silber’s politics, and that is that. However, if one reads the whole of the Wikipedia entry one will find that Brother Silber (the brother will be explained presently) wrote a non-political book on the struggles involved with hip and knee replacements. This is one subject on which aging Stalinists and aging Trostkyists can make a principled united front. Hell, we can throw in the anarchists and social democrats as well. That said, back to the political struggles.

Thursday, September 05, 2019

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Archives- *Labor's Untold Story- "The Rebel Girl"- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Click on to link to Wikipedia's entry for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill's "The Rebel Girl", who wound up her career as an abject Stalinist apologist, no question about that. We honor her for her work in the Lawrence strike of 1912 and here work with the International Labor Defense, especially on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. As for the rest, read (and read more than the Wikipedia entry on this one)and decide for yourself. Not everyone who starts out as a young rebel winds up on the side of the "angels"

Every Month Is Labor History Month

This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!

As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-*From The Pages Of The Communist International- From The Third Congress- "On Tactics" (1921)

Click on the headline to link to the Communist International Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.


Markin comment:

This article goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in this day's other posts.

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-*From The American Communist Movement Archives- On The United Front Question- A View From History

Markin comment:

This post is presented as a contribution to the continuing discussion on the vital question of the united front tactic in the struggle for our communist future. On this question, as I know from bitter and frustrating personal experience, we need all the education we can get.

*********

On the United Front- based on the RCY "National Bureau Document on the United Front," 3 July 1973. (RCY is the Revolutionary Communist Youth, the then youth group of the Spartacist League/U.S.-Markin)

The united front (UF), as embodied in the work of the early Communist International (CI) and the subsequent struggle of Trotsky for a revolutionary international, grew out of the experience of building the Bolshevik party. The struggle over the UF in the CI was due to what might be called the "uneven and combined development" of the parties and groups, especially in Western Europe, which rallied to the Bolshevik Revolution and the CI. These parties and groups had their origins in social democracy (Germany, France, Italy) and often represented the fusion of left-wing social democracy with revolutionary syndicalism (U.S. and France). Their schooling in social democracy gave them a conception of the party as a "party of the whole class," or as one of the most articulate and left-wing exponents of this conception, Rosa Luxemburg, stated in Leninism or Marxism?:

"The fact is that the Social Democracy is not joined to the organization of the proletariat. It is itself the proletariat." (emphasis in original)

Although she was in the forefront of the fight against Bernsteinism which saw the transformation of capitalism into socialism as organic and evolutionary, yet, like Bernstein, she saw the transformation of consciousness within the working class, from capitalist to socialist consciousness, as an organic, evolutionary, undifferentiated process. Luxemburg saw the party and class consciousness emerging organically from "the struggle itself." For Lenin the "struggle itself," the experiences of the masses of workers, were shaped both materially and ideologically by bourgeois society. From the "struggle itself" at best only trade-union consciousness could emerge. Scientific socialism had to be brought to, joined to, the "struggle itself." For Luxemburg, the party represented the proletariat as it is. Such a party can at best be only a party of trade unionism, of reformism. For Lenin the party represented the proletariat as it must be if it is to carry through its historic mission of the socialist reconstruction of society.

Thus, the common error of left-wing social democracy was the liquidation of the party into the class:

"...the Social Democratic movement cannot allow the ejection of an air-tight partition between the class-conscious nucleus of the proletariat already in the party and its immediate popular environment, the nonparty sections of the proletariat."

—Leninism or Marxism?

The party is seen as an "all-inclusive" bloc of tendencies of which the central apparatus, the party functionaries, the party bureaucracy, is seen as the most conservative since it is the most distant from the "struggle itself," while the ranks of the party, and even the non-party workers, are seen as subjectively more revolutionary. This is, of course, often the case in social-democratic parties and reformist trade unions, but this is precisely because these organizations have merged with the "struggle itself" which, confined to the laws of the capitalist market, never transcend the simple battle to exchange labor power for its equivalent, i.e., never transcend wage slavery. Within this context, democratic centralism is seen simply as the subordination of the revolutionary ranks to the conservative apparatus. Indeed, democratic centralism is the appropriate form only for a revolutionary party. Luxemburg's fears that the German Social Democracy's (SPD) adoption of democratic centralism would mean simply the subordination of the revolutionary wing of the party to the Kautskyites was well-founded. But it was her responsibility, while struggling for the maximum freedom within the SPD, to build a revolutionary democratic-centralist faction within it.

Thus, while Luxemburg's history as a heroic revolutionary is unimpeachable (it is not accidental that our tendency has adopted the name "Spartacist"), her views on party discipline, party building and the relationship between the party and the class were simply the most left-wing expression of social-democratic organizational norms. These norms equated the party with the class or placed the class above the party, denied the necessary vanguard role of the party of proletarian revolution and, hence, were fundamentally liquidationist.

The UF: Class Unity and Communist Hegemony

For the CI and Trotsky the UF had two equally important and inseparable aims: class unity and communist hegemony. Flowing from the dual nature of the UF is the necessity to maintain both the complete organizational independence of the communist party and the complete freedom to criticize one's temporary allies within the UF. The dual nature of the UF is captured in the CI slogan, "March separately, strike together." Each participant in the UF retains its organizational identity; agreement in the UF need pertain only to the details of the specific action to be carried out and can only be reached through unanimous agreement. Another slogan which captures the dual nature of the UF is "freedom of criticism, unity in action." Organizations like the Class Struggle League which take the definition of the UF and substitute it for the definition of the combat party effectively liquidate the party into the UF. This is the very essence of centrism.

The struggle for the UF at the Third and Fourth CI Congresses represented the recognition that the post-WWI revolutionary upsurge had passed over the heads of many of its national sections because they were unable to lead a majority of the working class into battle for the conquest of power. By the Third Congress the upsurge had already begun to recede, taking off the agenda, at least for the immediate period, the conquest of power, and placing on the agenda the conquest of the masses.

The need for the UF flowed from the fact that the majority of workers in most countries had gone through the post-war revolutionary upsurge retaining their allegiance to the reformist leaderships in the trade unions and the social-democratic parties. At the same time, capitalism itself, in the wake of the receding revolutionary tide, went on the offensive. It was not a question of a "revolutionary offensive" as was seen by the "ultra-lefts" in the CI, but of a capitalist offensive that was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles to fight for their life, to fight simply to maintain the organizational gains and standard of living they had won in the past. This situation placed on the agenda the need for a united workers front against the capitalist offensive.
The question was posed to the national sections of the CI: What was to be done in the face of the capitalist offensive which drove even reformist organizations to battle and intensified the objective need in the proletariat for class unity? The majority of the CI drew the conclusion that propaganda and agitation alone were not sufficient to break the mass of workers from their reformist leaderships. The infamy of the reformists, fighting capacity of the communists and viability of the communist program had to be demonstrated in action. A period in which the reformists are drawn into battle, albeit in a half-hearted, partial way, is precisely the best time to expose their infamy through common action side by side with them, where the workers can measure in their own immediate experiences and struggle the fighting capacity and program of the communists vs. those of their reformist leadership.

In the CI discussions a distinction was drawn between the "UF from above" which was an agreement reached between communist and non-communist leaderships to carry out a particular class action and the "UF from below" which was a direct appeal made to non-communist workers over the heads of their leaders. Certain members of the CI wanted the UF to mean only "from below" believing that agreements with opportunists must necessarily be opportunist agreements. Trotsky and others arguing against this viewpoint stated that if the rank and file of organizations were not ready to march under the leadership of the communists during the post-war upsurge, they would not break with their leaderships to march with communist calls to action now. Now that capitalism had taken the offensive and the revisionist and reformist leaderships of proletarian organizations were forced to call class actions or at least forced to talk of calling them, it was necessary to intersect this development. Communists should not only participate in partial and defensive struggles but should initiate them when necessary and fight to win the leadership of them when possible. Therefore, agreements with reformist and centrist leaders could not be precluded, though communists should be ever ready to break with the centrists and reformists when their vacillations become a brake on the struggle. In the course of such a break the communists might very well go over to a "UF from below." In any case either the reformists and centrists would refuse to enter into common struggle with the communists, in which case they would be discredited, or their pusillanimous behavior in the course of the struggle would tend to discredit them and enhance the authority of the communists.

The UF: Sharpening the Political Struggle

Thus the tactic of the UF should never be seen as a cessation of political struggle, as a non-aggression pact or mutual amnesty with other tendencies. The CI slogan for the UF—"freedom of criticism, unity in action"—anticipated that the UF would sharpen the political struggle and exacerbate hostilities between communist and non-communist leaderships. The UF as a political weapon in the struggle for communist hegemony is often put forth in anticipation that reformists and centrists will refuse to participate in common action with the communists, even though the former have committed themselves, at least verbally, to such actions. Whether these non-communist leaderships of proletarian organizations refuse to respond to the UF call or respond only in a half-hearted way, the call can serve to discredit their authority over the non-communist workers and "set the base against the top."

An important international application of the CI UF tactic was the CI call for common class action with the Second International and the Vienna Union or "Two-and-a-Half International." Negotiations for common action broke down, and the Two-and-a-Half International was forced to move to the right to prevent its membership from engaging in common battles with the communists. This eventually drove the Vienna Union into fusion with the Second International. While CI members who were skeptical about the UF policy considered the fusion of the Two-and-a-Half International and Second International a defeat, Trotsky and other CI supporters of the UF considered the fusion to be a positive gain for the communists in as much as it cleared the path of an obstacle between the communists and the reformists. There was no longer a third pole which claimed to be both "revolutionary" and non-communist, thereby confusing militant workers and creating obstacles in the class struggle.

Likewise, in the late '60s, Progressive Labor Party (PL) was an obstacle between the SL and those sections of the New Left which were moving leftward toward proletarian socialism. PL's verbal commitment to a pro-working-class and non-exclusionist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) provided the framework in which the UF could be applied to a whole series of issues, from the question of military recruiting on campus, strike support and the question of unemployment, to whether SDS should be an explicitly socialist organization. The application of the UF tactic to PL essentially offered PL two choices. Either it could carry through with its verbal commitment to a pro-working-class non-exclusionist SDS and conduct common actions with the SL/RCY which would ultimately force it to break with its Stalinist heritage, or it could retreat to the right. PL took the latter course which, while dashing our hopes of winning a section of the PL cadre, removed PL as an obstacle to our recruitment of those sections of the New Left 'which were moving in a proletarian socialist direction.

The struggle for communist hegemony has as its aim the. political polarization of all ostensible revolutionary organizations into revolutionary and non-revolutionary components, and the regroupment of all organizations, tendencies and factions which stand for revolutionary Marxism into the united Leninist vanguard party. The UF is an important component of the regroupment tactic for it is precisely through common action that the political struggle of counterpoised programs can reach its sharpest expression. Thus, it was both full political discussion (Zinoviev's famous speech at Halle) and common action that won a majority of the German Independent Socialists over to the German CP. The center of our regroupment orientation during the late '60s was PL/SDS. PL/SDS' abandonment of a proletarian perspective and their capitulation to academic liberalism with the "anti-racist textbook" campaign combined with our acquisition of groups and tendencies from the PL periphery (like the Buffalo Marxist Collective) are both the negative and positive confirmations of the correctness of our regroupment perspective for that period.

Ultra-Left and Opportunist Opposition to the UF

Rejection of the UF or of the "UF from above," while often clothed in the rhetoric of revolutionary intransigence, in reality represented a kind of political passivity, conservatism and lack of revolutionary will. Such "leftism" was, in fact, an acceptance of the status quo and the division of the workers movement into the communists who had revolutionary intransigence and the reformists who had the working class. Opposition to the UF came not only from the left but also from the right, especially from those groups whose break with social democracy had been organizational but not methodological.

Most of Trotsky's CI polemics in defense of the UF were directed against centrist elements in the French CP which resisted communist organizational norms, refused to support international democratic centralism or Leninist functioning in their own party, refused to subordinate their press, parliamentarian or trade-union fractions to party discipline, publicly attacked the CI in their press and in public meetings, resisted carrying out communist propaganda in the military or in the trade unions and refused to take up the fight against French colonialism. It was the left wing of the French CP, those former Socialists and syndicalists who supported Lenin's break with social democracy during WWI and who immediately declared themselves for the CI who fought for the UF within the French party. It was those centrist elements whose break with social democracy was belated and who resisted affiliation with the CI and the purge of the social-chauvinist traitors from their ranks who also fought against the UF. Thus opposition to the UF produced its own "united front" running from Hermann Goiter and Bordiga on the left to Frossard on the right. Opportunist opposition to the UF like that of ultra-leftism is based on political passivity and conservatism. The opportunist projects his own opportunism on to the UF. He cannot conceive of alliances aside from the deals that are made in the back rooms of parliament and trade-union offices: mutual accommodation and non-aggression pacts. Trained in the school of social democracy where the party is conceived of as blocs of diverse tendencies, the centrist who holds a liquidationist conception of the party cannot conceive of the UF except as liquidationist. Reluctant to break with his reformist cronies, the centrist is now unwilling to turn around and do battle with them in common action. Hostility to the UF is simply an inverted non-aggression pact with the reformists, an implicit agreement not to fight them on their own turf.

Stalin and the UF

With Stalin's ascent to power and the conversion of the CI from an instrument of world revolution into an instrument of realpolitik diplomacy based on the narrow, conservative interests of the Soviet bureaucracy, the UF was degraded as a tactic for class unity and transformed into an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution. In China the "bloc from within" was transformed into the complete liquidation of the Chinese CP into the Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT was made a "sympathizer" section of the CI, Chiang Kai-shek was made a "fraternal" member of the I.E.C. and the KMT army was equipped with Soviet arms and trained by Soviet military advisors, but kept entirely in the control of the warlords like Chiang who ran the KMT. By the Second KMT Congress in January 1926 the Chinese CP held one-fifth of the total seats on the KMT Central Executive Committee, headed the Peasant and Organization Departments and (through Chou En-lai) Whampoa Academy which trained the leading military cadre. Even so, Chiang was able through his control over the army, beginning with the 20 March 1926 coup in Canton and culminating in the March 1927 suppression of the Shanghai uprising, to turn the "bloc from within" into the block upon which the Chinese CP was beheaded.

In Britain the CI UF policy was embodied in the "Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee" which was formed in May 1925 between the leaderships of the British and Russian trade unions. The Committee served to give a revolutionary cover to the British trade-union leadership's betrayal of the 1926 General Strike and the Committee broke up only after the British union leaders broke with it a year later. The position of the Trotskyist Left Opposition was that the original formation of the Anglo-Russian Committee was tactically defensible as the Committee represented a temporary alliance with British trade-union leaders who, under mass working-class pressure, were moving slightly leftward and were willing, for at least a short period, to come out for the defense of the Soviet Union and international trade-union unity, and it was necessary to hold them to these positions. Under the impact of the sharpening class struggle culminating in a pre-revolutionary situation it should have been anticipated that these reformist union leaders would be driven over into the defense of the bourgeois order. To maintain a bloc with them under these conditions was simply to lend the prestige of the Bolshevik Revolution and communism to these strike breakers.

The accumulating failures of Stalin's 1924-27 policies of conciliating the colonial bourgeoisie and trade-union reformists abroad and the kulaks at home led straight to the "third period" policies of liquidating the kulaks and completely undoing the work of the Third and Fourth Congresses in regard to the UF. The UF "from below" was proclaimed to be the only permissible tactic for the CI sections.

The UF: Strategy or Tactic?

There is a tendency to conclude from Trotsky's strong polemics in defense of the UF in his German writings that the UF is not simply a tactic but a strategy. For example, a 1966 International Committee document which was probably authored by the Organisation Communiste Internationalist states:

'"Class against class' is the very cement which binds together the transitional slogans as a whole. "That is why the Workers' United Front is not simply a slogan, but a strategic axis in the policy of Trotskyist organizations. The strategy of the United Front is embodied in various tactical expressions which range from limited agreements for united actions between different organizations to the Soviets, the 'natural form of the united front at the time of combat,' as Leon Trotsky said in Whither France?" —quoted in Spartacist Internal Information Bulletin No. 19

Trotsky repeats time and time again in What Next? (from which the "soviet is the highest form of the united front" quote is taken) that the UF is a tactic and not a strategy, and that to consider the UF a strategy rather than a tactic is the essence of centrism. What Next? is not only a polemic against the ultra-left sectarian policies of the Stalintern, but it is also a polemic against the UF and soviet fetishism of centrist groups like the SAP (Socialist Workers Party of Germany). For example, Trotsky states:

"In any case, the policy of the united front cannot serve as a program for a revolutionary party. And in the meantime, the entire activity of the SAP is now being built on it. As a result, the policy of the united front is carried over into the party itself, that is, it serves to smear over the contradictions between the various tendencies. And that is precisely the fundamental function of centrism."

—The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany

Even more succinctly Trotsky states in "Centrism and the Fourth International":

"A centrist swears readily by the policy of the united front, emptying it of its revolutionary content and transforming it from a tactical method into a supreme principle." —Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1933-34

In his polemic against the UF fetishism of groups like the SAP and the Brandlerites, Trotsky polemicized against the conception that the UF is for all times and all places, a kind of workers' parliament where the various tendencies hold endless debates and draw up endless resolutions (the fantasy world of the National Caucus of Labor Committees during its strike-support proto-soviet coalition days). The UF can only be a reality during periods of social struggle, when the need for sharp class battles makes class unity a burning objective necessity that shakes the ranks of the non-communist workers' organizations from their lethargy and day-to-day humdrum organizational parochialism, and places strongly before them the need for class unity that transcends their particular organizations; or during unsettled periods in the left movement when the possibilities of and necessity for regroupment clearly exist. Only then will the road be opened for the communist party to approach the non-communist worker and his organizations with the call for a real UF.

The trade unions, the workers militia, the Soviets are all forms of the UF precisely because they are organizations which stand above parties, and reflect the uneven development of the consciousness of the working class. At the same time they represent the needs of the class for unity in its struggle with capitalism. But to see only the class-unity side of the UF (whether in reference to unions or Soviets) is the mistake of centrism. The UF is equally important because it provides one of the roads for the communist party to conquer the class. "Class unity around a revolutionary program" necessarily means class unity led by the vanguard party which embodies that revolutionary program, or it is meaningless. Programs do not exist suspended in midair, they are necessarily embodied in parties. As Trotsky states in What Next?:

"The interests of the class cannot be formulated otherwise than in the shape of a program; the program cannot be defended otherwise than by creating the party. "The class, taken by itself, is only material for exploitation. The proletariat assumes an independent role only at that moment when from a social class in itself it becomes a political class for itself. This cannot take place otherwise than through the medium of a party. The party is that historical organ by means of which the class becomes class conscious. To say that 'the class stands higher than the party,' is to assert that the class in the raw stands higher than the class which is on the road to class consciousness. Not only is this incorrect; it is reactionary."

The question is not: What strategy for the party?—the UF. The question is: What strategy must be put forth in the course of the UF? This can only be answered by the struggle of parties. The answer to What Next? can only be programmatic and will be found in the party that embodies the necessary revolutionary program. As Trotsky points out, the Soviets by themselves are incapable of leading the proletariat to power. "Everything depends upon the party that leads the Soviets" (The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany).

The "People's Front"

It is important to answer certain questions that have arisen on the left concerning the relation between the popular front, which generally takes the form of a parliamentary bloc, and class-collaborationist non-parliamentary movements, like the Socialist Workers Party's (SWP) National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC). This question obviously has disturbed enough members of the SWP/YSA for the organization to issue an,"Education for Socialists" pamphlet entitled Alliances and the Revolutionary Party: The Tactic of the United Front and How It Differs from the Popular Front by Les Evans, and another pamphlet in the same series which included the first two chapters of James Burnham's The People's Front: The New Betrayal, which was first published by the SWP in 1937. What the SWP will no longer republish is the last chapter of Burnham's pamphlet which describes how the Stalinists applied the People's Front to the U.S. where they were not strong enough to bargain away proletarian revolution for ministerial posts. Burnham writes:

"Most significant of all is the application of the People's Front policy to 'anti-war work.' Through a multitude of pacifist organizations, and especially through the directly controlled American League against War and Fascism, the Stalinists aim at the creation of a 'broad, classless, People's Front of all those opposed to war.' The class-collaborationist character of the People's Front policy is strikingly revealed through the Stalinist attitude in these organizations. They rule out in advance the Marxist analysis of war as necessarily resulting from the inner conflicts of capitalism and therefore genuinely opposed only by revolutionary class struggle against the capitalist order; and, in contrast, maintain that all persons, from whatever social class or group, whether or not opposed to capitalism, can 'unite' to stop war."

The Trotskyist movement has long held that the application of the popular-front policy in the U.S. has always taken the form of "single-issue broad-based coalitions" against war, fascism, racism or some other injustice. The application of the "People's Front" strategy formulated at the Seventh Congress of the CI to countries where the CPs did not have sufficient strength to demand of the bourgeoisie ministerial posts, has always taken the form of "anti-imperialist," "antiwar," "anti-fascist," etc. coalitions.

The popular front is a political bloc, which may or may not take the form of a governmental coalition, in which the politics of the working-class component of the bloc are subordinated to the politics of the bourgeoisie, to the defense of the bourgeois state and capitalism. The bourgeoisie, as the ruling class, is supremely self-conscious of its own class interests. Any ongoing coalition or alliance with the bourgeoisie must necessarily take place on the bourgeoisie's own terms, and on the basis of their politics. It is not necessary for the bourgeoisie as a whole, or even a section of the bourgeoisie, to play an active role in the political bloc for the popular front to exist. Thus Browder, as a loyal technician of the popular front may have offered to shake hands with J.P. Morgan, but no one has ever accused Browder of breaking with the popular front when Morgan did not reciprocate. Likewise, during the Spanish Civil War, the bourgeoisie, by and large, supported Franco, not the Republican Popular Front. Azana and his Radicals were nothing more than a handful of lawyers and professors, nonetheless they constituted what Trotsky called the "shadow of the bourgeoisie," i.e., their presence in the popular front was the guarantee to the Spanish and world bourgeoisie that the Republic stood for the defense of capitalism and the bourgeois order:

"Politically most striking is the fact that the Spanish Popular Front lacked in reality even a parallelogram of forces. The bourgeoisie's place was occupied by its shadow. Through the medium of the Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists, the Spanish bourgeoisie subordinated the proletariat to itself without even bothering to participate in the Popular Front.

The overwhelming majority of the exploiters of all political shades openly went over to the camp of Franco. Without any theory of 'permanent revolution,' the Spanish bourgeoisie understood from the outset that the revolutionary mass movement, no matter how it starts, is directed against private ownership of land and the means of production, and that it is utterly impossible to cope with this movement by democratic measures.

"That is why only insignificant debris from the possessing classes remained in the republican camp: Messrs. Azafia, Companys, and the like—political attorneys of the bourgeoisie but not the bourgeoisie itself. Having staked everything on a military dictatorship, the possessing classes were able, at the same time, to make use of their political representatives of yesterday in order to paralyze, disorganize, and afterward strangle the socialist movement of the masses in 'republican' territory.

"Without in the slightest degree representing the Spanish bourgeoisie, the left republicans still less represented the workers and peasants. They represented no one but themselves. Thanks, however, to their allies—the Socialists, Stalinists, and Anarchists—these political phantoms played the decisive role in the revolution. How? Very simply. By incarnating the principles of the 'democratic revolution,' that is, the inviolability of private property."

—Trotsky, "The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning"

The mere fact that the Italian CP courts the bourgeois parties, though it is unable to capture even one lonely splinter left Christian Democrat, is sufficient to brand the CP's politics and appetites as for the popular front. Even before the Radicals entered the recent French "Union of the Left," the CP-SP bloc was popular-frontist both in its program and its appetites.

NPAC, WONAAC, SDS and Pop Frontism

The reason that we characterize NPAC, Women's National Abortion Action Coalition (WONAAC) and SDS (after SDS had locked onto its "anti-racist textbook" campaign) as popular fronts is precisely because they attempted to reduce the program for struggling against fundamental aspects of capitalism—imperialism, sexual and racial oppression—to campaigns which consisted primarily of parades in the case of NPAC, parades mixed with legislative motions that were beneath parliamentarian cretinism in the case of WONAAC, and the SDS caricature of parliamentarian cretinism (i.e., calling on Congress and state legislatures to censure racist textbooks). Thus, the SWP and PL offered themselves up to the bourgeoisie as safety valves for the popular discontent with various aspects of capitalist oppression, channeling social discontent into avenues which were both socially impotent and diffusive but which would serve to reinforce illusions about capitalist institutions, capitalist politicians and academic liberalism.

When the SWP first adopted the "single-issue" coalition gimmick in the anti-war movement, they claimed this strategy was not popular-frontist because no section of the bourgeoisie accepted the "single issue" of "Out Now." However, as soon as the U.S. bourgeoisie realized that a decisive military victory was impossible in Vietnam, and the bourgeoisie became defeatist, it was precisely the program of the SWP/NPAC they adopted. As more and more capitalist politicians not only endorsed the "Out Now" slogan and also NPAC parades, the SWP suddenly discovered that the bourgeoisie had "capitulated" to the SWP. But what was fundamental was the question of program, and the program of NPAC was not revolutionary defeatism but bourgeois defeatism, not utilizing imperialist war to advance the class struggle, but ending the war so as to disrupt U.S. imperialist hegemony as little as possible.

Likewise, WONAAC's successive dilutions of its program (from opposition to abortion laws to opposition only to "anti-abortion laws" in order to keep up with the parliamentarian maneuvers of Bella Abzug) was an explicitly conscious effort to tailor program to the needs of their bourgeois allies. PL and SDS went from getting thrown out of the July 1971 NPAC conference because of their vocal opposition to Vance Hartke's presence, to printing articles in support of McGovern for President in the pages of New Left Notes. The "anti-racist textbook" campaign, like NPAC and WONAAC, led straight to Miami Beach and the 1972 Democratic Party Convention, where the SWP/YSA could watch on television the consummation of seven years of "single-issue coalition" politics as the Democratic Party sucked in both the "activists" and issues of past campaigns. Even more despicable was the sight of SDS, on its knees before the entrance to the Democratic Party Convention, begging McGovern to adopt its "anti-racism bill" as a plank in the Democratic Party platform. The difference between the SWP and PL and the CP in Chile, Ceylon, post-WWII France and republican Spain is that the SWP and PL did not have social power to send delegates to the Democratic Party Convention, though their politics were clearly represented by their erstwhile allies within the convention hall. Also, the bourgeoisie did not need a McGovern-Gus Hall-Linda Jenness-SDS government.

A descriptive distinction can be drawn between popular-front alliances among two or more separate political parties (e.g., the French Union of the Left) and popular-frontist groups (e.g., NPAC, WONAAC, SDS). One can point to the 1930s, where the European CPs, for the most part, entered into popular-front alliances, whereas the CPUSA, lacking the mass working-class base to sell to the bourgeoisie in exchange for ministerial portfolios, built various antiwar, anti-racist, class-collaborationist front groups paralleling the activities of the European CPs. The attitude of Trotskyists, of course, is no different toward these socially weaker popular-frontist formations. We are as opposed to entry into SDS [see "SDS Destroyed by Liberalism," RCY Newsletter No. 12, May-June 1972] as into the Union of the Left, whose size and social roots, however, make it a greater obstacle to the growth of revolutionary consciousness within the working class than the former. The People's Front was never conceived of as only a government coalition, although that is, for the Stalinists, the "highest form" of the People's Front. The People's Front has always meant the political subordination of the left to the program of the liberal bourgeoisie.

Excluding the Bourgeoisie

The "exclusion of the bourgeoisie" has been one of our key demands at anti-war and women's liberation conferences. The exclusion of the bourgeoisie from social movements which claim to fight the basic injustices of capitalism has been a fundamental position of the Marxist movement since Marx polemicized against those Utopian Socialists such as Robert Owen who thought the bourgeoisie could be won to socialism. Ending imperialist war and the oppression of women and blacks means ending capitalism, and what was simply Utopian for the predecessors of Marx, becomes in the mouths of those who claim to be Marxists rank opportunism.

The prerequisite for an organization to be characterized as part of the working-class movement, even if it is thoroughly reformist, is the exclusion of the bourgeoisie. Even here there are exceptions, for the European CPs may occasionally attract a petty capitalist into its ranks. However, this is most clear with an organization like the British Labour Party whose leadership has a perennial appetite to administer British imperialism, but whose formal politics claim to stand in the tradition of class-struggle socialism and whose by-laws exclude members of the bourgeoisie. Thus, we distinguish the reformist politics of the Labour Party program, which it will betray when it gets into power, from the explicitly capitalist politics of the popular front, which are beneath reformism, and which the popular front will carry out if it gets into power. Thus both the Labour Party and the French Union of the Left had the same appetite to administer their respective national capitalisms, but in order to do so the Labour Party must betray its program when in power, while the Union of the Left will carry it out. Thus, with the Labour Party campaigning in its own name and on its own program, we can give it critical support, pointing out that its program is partial, limited, reformist, etc., and that the Labour Party will betray this program once in power. But for the Union of the" Left there is no such contradiction to exploit. The Union of the Left will simply carry out the program it promises, for all it promises is to be better defenders of the bourgeois order than the explicitly capitalist parties. Critical support is an application of the UF, the counter-position of the program of proletarian revolution to that of reformism, a momentary pact from "above" to put the Labour Party into power, which very soon goes over to a UF "from below" when the Labour Party calls out the cops and army to defend the factories, when the workers through industrial action, try to collect on the Labour Party's electoral promises.

Saturday, July 13, 2019

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-*Poet's Corner- The Work of Chile's Pablo Neruda

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda.

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Chant to Bolivar

Our Father thou art in Heaven,
in water, in air
in all our silent and broad latitude
everything bears your name, Father in our dwelling:
your name raises sweetness in sugar cane
Bolivar tin has a Bolivar gleam
the Bolívar bird flies over the Bolivar volcano
the potato, the saltpeter, the special shadows,
the brooks, the phosphorous stone veins
everything comes from your extinguished life
your legacy was rivers, plains, bell towers
your legacy is our daily bread, oh Father.


From The Heights Of Maccho Picchu

Rise up to be born with me, brother.
Give me your hand from the deep
Zone seeded by your sorrow.
You won’t return from under the rocks.
You won’t return from your subterranean time.
Your hardened voice won’t return.
Your gouged-out eyes won’t return.

Look at me from the depth of the earth,
laborer, weaver, silent shepherd:
tamer of wild llamas like spirit images:
construction worker on a daring scaffold:
waterer of the tears of the Andes:
jeweler with broken fingers:
farmer trembling as you sow:
potter, poured out into your clay:
bring to the cup of this new life
your old buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow,
Tell me, “Here I was punished,
Because the jewel didn’t shine or the earth
Didn’t yield grain or stones on time.”
Show me the stone you fell over
And the wood on which they crucified you,
Make a spark from the old flints for me,
For the old lamps to show the whips still stuck
After centuries in the old wounds
And the axes shining with blood.
I come to speak for your dead mouth.
Across the earth come together all
The silent worn-out lips
And from the depth speak to me all this long night
Like I was pinned down there with you.
Tell me all, chain by chain,
Link by link and step by step,
Sharpen the knives which you hid,
Put them in my breast and in my hand,
Like a river of yellow lighting
Like a river of buried jaguars
And let me weep, hours, days, years,
For blind ages, cycles of stars.

Give me silence, water, hope.

Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.

Stick bodies to me like magnets.

Draw near to my veins and my mouth.

Speak through my words and my blood.


La Muerta

Si de pronto no existes,
si de pronto no vives,
yo seguiré viviendo.

No me atrevo,
no me atrevo a escribirlo,
si te mueres.

Yo seguiré viviendo.

Porque donde no tiene voz un hombre
allí, mi voz.

Donde los negros sean apaleados,
yo no puedo estar muerto.
Cuando entren en la cárcel mis hermanos
entraré yo con ellos.

Cuando la victoria,
no mi victoria,
sino la gran Victoria llegue,
aunque esté mudo debo hablar:
yo la veré llegar aunque esté ciego.

No, perdóname.
Si tú no vives,
si tú, querida, amor mío, si tú
te has muerto,
todas las hojas caerán en mi pecho,
lloverá sobre mi alma noche y día,
la nieve quemará mi corazón,
andaré con frío y fuego
y muerte y nieve,
mis pies querrán marchar hacia donde tú duermes, pero seguiré vivo,
porque tú me quisiste sobre
todas las cosas indomable,
y, amor, porque tú sabes que soy no sólo un hombre
sino todos los hombres

Friday, May 10, 2019

*From The Archives-POPULAR FRONT POLITICS AND THE IRAQ ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT

Click on title to link to Karl Marx's 1850, yes that is not a misprint the question has been with us for a long time, 1850 "Address Of The Central Committee Of The Communist League" which deals with the popular fronts of his day in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848.

COMMENTARY

DOWN WITH THE WAR! DOWN WITH THE WAR BUDGET!


Radicals and revolutionaries, including Marxist revolutionaries, have been struggling with the implications of popular front politics at least since the European Revolutions of 1848. At that time, due more to the question of political immaturity and inexperience, left-wing working class militants and their allies tried to line up with, and in most cases in subordination to, their national bourgeoisies in the fights for the demands of the classic bourgeois revolutions. And for their troubles these same ‘allies’ suppressed these militants and their demands once the situation became too ‘hot’ and the various capitalist parties made their peace with the old regimes. One of the great lessons that Karl Marx (and his co-thinker Frederich Engels) derived from that turn of events was an understanding that an essential ingredient to successful socialist revolution was the need for independent working class organization and action and a political break with the capitalist parties.

Of course, as latter working class history has made painfully clear that seemingly elemental task has been easier said than done. Since Marx's time time endless numbers of ‘socialist’ politicians and ‘vanguard’ political organizations have broken their teeth on denying the truth of his assertions. One need only think of the classic Popular Fronts in Spain and France the 1930’s and Chile in the 1970’s created explicitly by leftwing forces to act as brakes on developing revolutionary situations to know that such a strategy means political death for the revolution and the physical destruction of revolutionary cadre for decades.


What gives? What do those historic events have to do with today’s opposition to the war in Iraq? Simple, while not all popular fronts are created equal they all serve the same ends. As a primer one should know that the popular front is a left-wing political strategy where its advocates call on all ‘progressive’ forces and people of ‘good will’ including capitalist parties and politicians to unite around some ‘good old cause’. Well, what is wrong with that? On democratic issues such as the right to vote or opposition to government snooping and in political defense cases not a thing. Except we call that a united front. Why? Because depending on the case the fight is a limited one, the time is short and there is no political reason not to gain the support of as many people as possible. No, the popular front is a very different animal. It is a conscious strategy on the part of some left-wing forces to limit the aims of any particular fight to those acceptable to the capitalist parties.

For those who do not believe the import of such distinctions let me give one example. Take a simple slogan like –STOP THE WAR. In the build-up to the Iraq War that did not have a bad sound, if not particularly poliitcally sophisticated. Big burly former football linebackers and pacifist little old ladies in tennis shoes could agree to that. However, until early 2006 this was still the central slogan of the anti-war movement. The more appropriate IMMEDIATE, UNCONDITIONAL WITHDRAWAL OF ALL UNITED STATES AND ALLIED TROOPS FROM IRAQ did not get official sanction until that time. Why? Because those big burly football players and gentile old ladies did not want to go that far? Hell, no. The real reason was no ‘respectable’ capitalist politician, except maybe Congressman Kucinich on a good day, was making that call. And that is the rub. The case of the various umbrella anti-war coalitions such as the ANSWER Coalition and United For Peace and Justice here in America (and elsewhere as this is decidedly an international phenomena) are classic examples of a non-parliamentary popular front. Any thoughtful militant who wonders why the anti-war movement here is spinning its wheels can look to that conscious strategy on the part of the current anti-war leaderships as the root cause of the dilemma.

I have noted above, at least twice, the fact that the popular front strategy is a conscious one on the part of those ‘progressives’ who pursue it. And for those who do not want to make a revolution or are just serious about 'pressure' politics on the face of it that policy makes sense. The capitalist parties and their politicians have no need, except as electoral cannon fodder, to seek an on-going bloc with non-parliamentary leftwing forces. One should note that it has only been this year (2007) that even minor league Democratic politicians have gotten on the platforms at anti-war events. No, this is strictly a strategy pursued by 'get rich quick' artists of the left who pursue this course in order to be at one with the ‘masses’ or not get ‘isolated’ from the political consciousness of the masses. That at the end of the day the wily (and in some case not so wily, take John Kerry in 2004, for example) capitalist politicians reap the rewards of this political treachery seems not to have occurred to these same artists. The next battleground on the fight against the popular front will be on the upcoming war budget. It will not be pretty. However, those are the central slogans for the immediate future. You will definitely see the limits of popular front politics on that one. DOWN WITH THE WAR, DOWN WITH THE WAR BUDGET, BREAK WITH THE CAPITALIST PARTIES.

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Monday, December 11, 2017

From The Archives-*ON THE DEATH OF GENERAL PINOCHET OF CHILE

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1935 article, "On The Seventh Congress Of The Communist International".

COMMENTARY

NO LEFTIST MOURNS THE DEATH OF THE ‘BUTCHER’ OF THE POPULAR FRONT ALLENDE GOVERNMENT-BUT, FOR HIS CRIMES AGAINST THE CHILEAN WORKING CLASS HE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DIE IN BED

FORGET DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS AND GREENS- BUILD A WORKERS PARTY THAT FIGHTS FOR A WORKERS GOVERNMENT


Today, Monday December 11, 2006, brings news of the death of old age of the notorious Chilean dictator, General Pinochet, infamous as the “butcher” of the democratically elected Popular Front government of Socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. As a result of the Pinochet-led coup against that government thousands of his fellow citizens and some foreign nationals were rounded up and executed, imprisoned or forced into exile. Not a pretty picture and goes a long way to explaining why his political opponents (as well as victims) are dancing in the streets of Santiago today. The real tragedy , however, was that he was able to rule so long and get away with his role in that suppression without having to face the wrath of his victims, mainly leftists and working class trade unionists. He should not have died in his sleep. However, that is not what is important about the Chilean events. In fact the passing of the General and the details of his nefarious career are best left to The New York Times obituary writers. Pinochet’s death, however, brings back to this writer the need to outline the lessons to be learned by militant leftists about what happened over thirty years ago with the rise and fall of Allende’s Popular Front government in Chile- and how to avoid those same mistakes again.

Why is such an analysis important today? For those who have been attentive to the developments in Central and Latin America there is every indication that some big battles by the working class and its allies are on the agenda, some have already occurred as in Mexico. Right now this is being played out mainly on the parliamentary level with the election of left nationalists and ‘soft’ socialists in such places as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Chile, Peru and the near victory of Obrador in Mexico. In the grand scheme of things the first impulses of the masses to the left almost inevitably take parliamentary form and this wave appears to be no exception. That is why it is necessary for militants to be prepared and forewarned about reliance on a parliamentary strategy on the road to socialism- it aint going to happen on that road, boys and girls.

The following paragraphs are taken from my review of Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (see April 2006 archives) and sums up the experience of popular fronts in the modern era. Trotsky is all his later writing was adamantly opposed to participation in such formations by revolutionaries and he was not wrong on this issue. The experience of the Russian revolution, the only revolution that has overcome the problem of the popular front, should be etched in every militant’s mind.

Trotsky-

“All revolutions, and the Russian Revolution is no exception, after the first flush of victory over the overthrown old regime, face attempts by the more moderate revolutionary elements to suppress counterposed class aspirations in the interest of unity of the various classes that made the initial revolution. Thus, we see in the English Revolution of the 17th century a temporary truce between the rising bourgeoisie and yeoman farmers and pious urban artisans who formed the backbone of Cromwell’s New Model Army. In the Great French Revolution of the 18th century the struggle from the beginning depended mainly on the support of the lower urban plebian classes. As these revolutions demonstrate later after the overturn of the old order other classes through their parties which had previously remained passive enter the arena and try to place a break on revolutionary developments. Their revolutionary goals have been achieved in the initial overturn- for them the revolution is over.

They most commonly attempt to rule by way of some form of People’s Front government. This is a common term of art in Marxist terminology in the modern era that is used to represent a trans-class formation of working class and capitalist parties which ultimately have counterposed interests. The Russian Revolution also suffered a Popular Front period under various combinations and guises supported by ostensible socialists, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, from February to October. One of the keys to Bolshevik success in October was that, with the arrival of Lenin from exile in April, the Bolsheviks shifted their strategy and tactics to a position of political opposition to the parties of the popular front. Later history has shown us in Spain in the 1930’s and more recently in Chile in the 1970’s how deadly support to such popular front formations can for revolutionaries. The various parliamentary popular fronts in France, Italy and elsewhere show the limitations in another less dramatic but no less dangerous fashion. In short, political support for Popular Fronts means the derailment of the revolution or worst. This is a hard lesson, paid for in blood, that all manner of reformist socialists try deflect or trivialize in pursuit of being at one with the ‘masses’. Witness today’s efforts, on a much lesser scale, by ostensible socialists to get all people of ‘good will, etc.’, including liberal and not so liberal Democrats under the same tent in the opposition to the American invasion of Iraq.”

A shorthand way to put this accumulated experience can be expressed this way. No political support to popular front formations. Military support to such formations against right-wing military attack or imperialist intervention. That, my friends, is sound revolutionary policy. Forward.


THIS IS PART OF A SERIES OF ARTICLES OF COMMENTARY ON THE 2006-2008 ELECTION CYCLE UNDER THE HEADLINE- FORGET THE DONKEYS, ELEPHANTS,
GREENS-BUILD A WORKERS PARTY!

Thursday, October 12, 2017

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Entry Of The International Brigades Into The Spanish Civil War All Honor To The Memory Of The "Premature" Anti-Fascist Fighters

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Entry Of The International Brigades Into The Spanish Civil War All Honor To The Memory Of The "Premature" Anti-Fascist  Fighters




Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the International Brigades and their role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39.
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Saturday, May 20, 2006

"Viva La Quince Brigada"- The Abraham Lincoln Battalion In The Spanish Civil War

BOOK REVIEW

THE ODYSSEY OF THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE: AMERICANS IN THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, Peter N. Carroll, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1994.

AS WE HEAD INTO THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY IN JULY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR MILITANTS NEED TO STUDY THIS IMPORTANT EVENT OF INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS HISTORY. THE WRITER WILL BE REVIEWING AND COMMENTING ON SEVERAL ASPECTS OF THAT FIGHT FOR MILITANTS TODAY.

I have been interested, as a pro-Republican partisan, in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 since I was a teenager. My first term paper was on this subject. What initially perked my interest, and remains of interest, is the passionate struggle of the Spanish working class to create its own political organization of society, its leadership of the struggle against Spanish fascism and the romance surrounding the entry of the International Brigades, particularly the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th Brigade, into the struggle.

Underlying my interests has always been a nagging question of how that struggle could have been won by the working class. The Spanish proletariat certainly was capable of both heroic action and the ability to create organizations that reflected its own class interests i.e. the worker militias and factory committees. Of all modern working class uprisings after the Russian revolution Spain showed the most promise of success. Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky noted in one of his writings on Spain that the Spanish proletariat at the start of its revolutionary period had a higher political consciousness than the Russian proletariat in 1917. That calls into question the strategies put forth by the parties of the Popular Front, including the Spanish Communist Party- defeat Franco first, and then make the social transformation of society. Mr. Carroll’s book while not directly addressing that issue nevertheless demonstrates through the story of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion how the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and through it the policy of the Communist International in calling for international brigades to fight in Spain aided in the defeat of that promising revolution.

Mr. Carroll chronicles anecdotally how individual militants were recruited, transported, fought and died as ‘premature anti-fascists’ in that struggle. No militant today, or ever, can deny the heroic qualities of the volunteers and their commitment to defeat fascism- the number one issue for militants of that generation-despite the fatal policy of the the various party leaderships. Such individuals were desperately needed then, as now, if revolutionary struggle is to succeed. However, to truly honor their sacrifice we must learn the lessons of that defeat through mistaken strategy as we fight today. Interestingly, as chronicled here, and elsewhere in the memoirs of some veterans, many of the surviving militants of that struggle continued to believe that it was necessary to defeat Franco first, and then fight for socialism. This was most dramatically evoked by the Lincolns' negative response to the Barcelona uprising of 1937-the last time a flat out fight for leadership of the revolution could have galvanized the demoralized workers and peasants for a desperate struggle against Franco.

Probably the most important part of Mr. Carroll’s book is tracing the trials and tribulations of the volunteers after their withdrawal from Spain in late 1938. Their organization-the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade- was constantly harassed and monitored by the United States government for many years as a Communist 'front' group. Individuals also faced prosecution and discrimination for their past association with the Brigades. He also traces the aging and death of that cadre. In short, this book is a labor of love for the subjects of his treatment. Whatever else this writer certainly does not disagree with that purpose. If you want to read about what a heroic part of the vanguard of the international working class looked like in the 1930’s, look here. Viva la Quince Brigada!!
Labels: abraham lincoln brigade, AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY, international brigades, SPAIN 1936, spanish civil war


posted by Markin at 7:53 AM

2 Comments:
markin said...
Two Songs Of The Spanish Civil War: "Viva La Quince Brigada" And "El Paso Del Ebro"


By Thomas Keyes
Apr. 16, 2005

“¡Viva La Quince Brigada!” (Long Live the Fifteenth Brigade!) and “El Paso del Ebro” (Crossing the Ebro) are two songs of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) sung to the same melody. The original version of the song goes back to the time of the Napoleonic Wars, but I haven’t found the lyrics for that version. The lyrics of these two songs both pertain to the later war, since both mention aircraft. “¡Viva La Quince Brigada!” is also called “¡Ay, Manuela!”, while “El Paso del Ebro” is also called “¡Ay, Carmela!” “Manuela” and “Carmela” are women’s names.

Unfortunately, the two audible versions that I was able to find on the Web are somewhat different from the song as I know it, and not as good in my opinion, but perhaps they are more authentic. I have known “¡Viva La Quince Brigada!” since the 1960’s, but to date have not learned “El Paso del Ebro”. I just like the music for its own sake and for its value as a souvenir of Spanish culture. I don’t take sides on the Spanish Civil War, because I don’t know much about it. Incidentally, the Ebro is a major river in the north of Spain. The Jarama, mentioned in the first song, is another river.

I have provided my own translations, for those who cannot manage the very easy Spanish lyrics. Below are the URL’s for the music:

http://idd003x0.eresmas.net/mp3/El%20Paso%20Del%20Ebro.mp3

http://personales.ya.com/altavoz/midis/elpasodelebro.mid

VIVA LA QUINCE BRIGADA (Spanish Lyrics)

Viva la quince brigada,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Viva la quince brigada,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Que se ha cubierto de gloria.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Que se ha cubierto de gloria.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

Luchamos contra los moros,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Luchamos contra los moros,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Mercenarios y fascistas.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Mercenarios y fascistas.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

Solo es nuestro deseo,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Solo es nuestro deseo,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Acabar con el fascismo.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Acabar con el fascismo.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

En los frentes de Jarama,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
En los frentes de Jarama,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
No tenemos ni aviones,
Ni tanques, ti cañones.
No tenemos ni aviones,
Ni tanques, ti cañones.

Ya salimos de España,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Ya salimos de España,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
A luchar en otros frentes,
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
A luchar en otros frentes,
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

EL PASO DEL EBRO (Spanish Lyrics)

El ejército del Ebro,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
El ejército del Ebro,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Una noche el río paso.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Una noche el río paso.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Y a las tropas invasoras,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Y a las tropas invasoras,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Buena paliza les dio,
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Buena paliza les dio,
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

El furor de los traidores,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
El furor de los traidores,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Lo descarga su aviación.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Lo descarga su aviación.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Pero nada pueden bombas,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Pero nada pueden bombas,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Donde sobra corazón.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Donde sobra corazón.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Contraataques muy rabiosos,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Contraataques muy rabiosos,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Deberemos resistir.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Deberemos resistir.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Pero igual que combatimos,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Pero igual que combatimos,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Prometemos combatir.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Prometemos combatir.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

VIVA LA QUINCE BRIGADA (English Translation)
Long live the fifteenth brigade,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Long live the fifteenth brigade,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Which has covered itself with glory.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Which has covered itself with glory.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

We are fighting against the Moors,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We are fighting against the Moors,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Mercenaries and fascists.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
Mercenaries and fascists.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

It’s our sole desire,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
It’s our sole desire,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
To be done with fascism.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
To be done with fascism.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

On the front lines of the Jarama,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
On the front lines of the Jarama,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We have neither airplanes,
Tanks nor cannon.
We have neither airplanes,
Tanks nor cannon.

We’re already leaving Spain,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We’re already leaving Spain,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
To fight on other fronts.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!
To fight on other fronts.
¡Ay, Manuela! ¡Ay, Manuela!

EL PASO DEL EBRO (English Lyrics)

The army of the Ebro,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
The army of the Ebro,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Crossed the river one night.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Crossed the river one night.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

And to the invading troops.
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
And to the invading troops.
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
It gave a sound beating.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
It gave a sound beating.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

The fury of the traitors,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
The fury of the traitors,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
They discharge with their airplanes.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
They discharge with their airplanes.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

But bombs can do nothing,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
But bombs can do nothing,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Where there’s a lot of heart.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
Where there’s a lot of heart.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

Very rabid counterattacks,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
Very rabid counterattacks,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We will owe it to resist.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
We will owe it to resist.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

But as we have fought,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
But as we have fought,
Rumba la, rumba la, rumba la,
We promise to fight.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!
We promise to fight.
¡Ay, Carmela! ¡Ay, Carmela!

2:30 PM


markin said...
Lyrics to Jarama Valley :

by Woody Guthrie

There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama
It’s a place that we all know so well
It was there that we fought against the Fascists
We saw a peacful valley turn to hell

From this valley they say we are going
But don’t hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We’ll set this valley free 'fore we’re through

We were men of the Lincoln Battalion
We’re proud of the fight that we made
We know that you people of the valley
Will remember our Lincoln Brigade

From this valley they say we are going
But don’t hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We’ll set this valley free 'fore we’re through

You will never find peace with these Fascists
You’ll never find friends such as we
So remember that valley of Jarama
And the people that’ll set that valley free

From this valley they say we are going
Don’t hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We’ll set this valley free 'fore we’re through

All this world is like this valley called Jarama
So green and so bright and so fair
No fascists can dwell in our valley
Nor breathe in our new freedom’s air

From this valley they say we are going
Do not hasten to bid us adieu
Even though we lost the battle at Jarama
We’ll set this valley free 'fore we’re through

[ Jarama Valley Lyrics on http://www.lyricsmania.com/