*For May Day- On Revolutionary Fortitude

Click On Title To Link To BAAM Newsletter (local Boston anarchist collective) site for two good introductory articles about the labor struggles of the 19th century and a biographic sketch of the heroic anarchist (and later American Communist Party member) Lucy Parsons, widow of Haymarket martyr Albert Parson and revolutionary fighter in her own right. While my sympathies are clearly with the communist wing on the left wing continuum, especially the struggles led by Leon Trotsky to save the heritage of the Russian Revolution in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the main points of these articles are made by kindred spirits that all labor militants can stand in solidarity with as part of our common labor history.

Guest Commentary

“I was a revolutionary when revolutionaries were as thick as fleas. I was a revolutionary when revolutionaries were as sparse as hen’s teeth. I am a revolutionary.”- Undated, anonymous quote from an Internet source that collects various revolutionary, radical and republican phrases, expressions and words.

Commentary

I was looking for some material that would be different from my commentary on previous May Days. You know something different from paying the traditional homage to the Haymarket Martyrs. Something a little different from the focus of commentary the past few years on immigration rights (although that is always a worthy subject to highlight on this day in immigrant-created America). But also something, as well, that would pay homage to the subjective desire of the now many generations of radicals and revolutionaries who have laid down their heads in the struggle for a socialist future without seeing that course conquer in their life times.

I was intrigued by the anonymous quote posted above both as to who spoke it and when he (or she) was speaking. The quote, as such, hardly has the pithy wisdom in the manner of a quote from, let us say, Che Guevara’s famous dictum-“the role of a revolutionary is to make the revolution”- although it shares that same determined quality. Nor does it evoke the theoretical wisdom of Karl Marx’s equally famous quote which I paraphrase- “philosophers have thus far interpreted the world; the point is to change it”. It nevertheless expresses in a powerful, if prosaic, way an idea about the need to stay the revolutionary course through thick and thin. That idea has an almost timeless quality and unfortunately has been honored more in the breech than the observance by more than one generation of past revolutionaries.

Here is my purely speculative take on the “profile” of the speaker. I picture an old grizzled, bearded 19th century revolutionary, perhaps French but most certainly a rank and file plebeian fighter, who had spent his share of time on the various barricades of those times, speaking to the schoolboys that he was leading into the next fight. The name of the great 19th century French revolutionary Louis Blanqui comes to mind here. It could well have been one of his associates in one of his various revolutionary attempts to overthrow the then existing government. Anyone with any other possible information on the source of the quote or speculation on who spoke it or when is more than welcome to comment.

Of course, as with my use of any cautionary tale there is some more immediate purpose for using the quote. In rough outline the flow and ebb implied in the two periods of the quote reflect the twin poles of my radical political experiences. I am not sure that we could say in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that revolutionaries were thick as fleas but there were plenty around to form the nucleus of a revolutionary organization. The smell of revolution, even if illusionary in the end, was palpably in the air. Today, and for a long time past, revolutionaries have been sparse indeed-mainly having, after given the revolution the best two years of their lives, sold out to the academy, Wall Street or for some other personal reason. I will end with this short comment to tie things up. I am a revolutionary. Are you?

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Louis- Auguste Blanqui

Click on the title to link to a "Marxist Internet Archive" biography of Louis Auguste Blanqui

This is a repost of a January 2009 entry honoring Louis-Auguste Blanqui as a revolutionary militant and here as a Paris Communard as well, on the anniversary of the beginning of the Paris Commune.

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

**********
Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)

EDITOR'S NOTE: With this series Young Spartacus makes available for our readers a contribution presented by Joseph Seymour, a Spartacist League Central Committee member, at the mid-January Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley. "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," reproduced from the verbal presentation with a minimum of editorial abridgement, seeks to debunk the academic/New Left view of Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy by reaffirming the shaping influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two generations of revolution­ary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order. The first part, featured in our Febru­ary issue, discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its in­surrectionary and most radical wing, upheld by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti.
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The history of the French revolu­tionary movement after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the history of the polarization of the left opposition to royal absolutism into its bourgeois conservative, revolutionary democrat­ic and communist component of revo­lutionary democracy, which simultane­ously was transformed through proletarianization.
The two key dividing lines were the successful revolution of 1830 and the Lyons silk weavers’ insurrection of 1834.

Now, at the beginning of this period, 1815, the left opposition to the Bourbon Restoration had three main tendencies. First, the liberal bourgeoisie, whose economic policy was laissez faire, whose power base was the very re­stricted parliament based on a limited franchise, whose political program advocated not democracy but rather an extended franchise and certain rights, and whose main leadership was the wealthy nobleman Lafayette.

Second, there were the Bonapartists, who were mainly centered in the army and whose program was roughly na­tional populism. Until Bonaparte died in 1821, they stood for the restoration of Bonaparte: "Let's kick these for­eigners and their lackeys out of France." Revolutionary nationalism. But they were not committed to eco­nomic laissez faire; they could make certain populist appeals to peasant economic protectionism, and in that sense were even demagogically to the left of the liberals.

Then there were the revolutionary democrats, who in this period (1815-1820) were almost exclusively limited to the student population of Paris. And the vanguard was a small group of revolutionary democrats who, being il­legal, took over a masonic order and named it the Friends of Truth, whose leader was a rather reputable and important figure named Saint Amand Bazard.

These three forces united in their mass on two occasions: the Carbonari Conspiracy of 1821-23, where they were defeated, and the revolution of 1830, where they were in a military sense victorious. But that victory split those component parts asunder.

Carbonari Conspiracy

I will just say a few words about the Carbonari Conspiracy, which was important. First, it had a genuinely mass character, encompassing at its height probably 80,000 activists. In France every revolutionist who was mature, and even some who were not mature, was a member of the Carbonari. It provided the first revolution­ary experience for that generation. The 17-year-old Louis Auguste Blanqui had his first revolutionary experience in the Carbonari and his later secret organizations were modeled on the Carbonari—only cells of three and only one person in the three knew anyone in the cell above, so one had a hier­archy which sealed off the leadership from the base.

In 1821, in response to the gains of the liberals in parliament, the Bourbons moved to the right and rewrote the parliamentary laws. The liberal bour­geois opposition in effect said, "Well, we have no choice but to engage in insurrection." They contacted the radi­cal students and the disgruntled Bonapartists and even democrats in the army, organizing a conspiracy whose main strategy was the subversion of the army. The Carbonari Conspiracy, thus, was a democratic mutiny in the army, financed and organized by the liberal bourgeoisie, utilizing the stu­dent radicals, each seeking to manipu­late and utilize the other.

But the army, in the absence of a general social crisis, was isolated and sufficiently loyal to the regime that the Conspiracy did not work. When someone would say, "Psst, you want to join?," he would get turned in and would be executed. So there was a whole series of executions and abortive mutinies.

The suppression of the Carbonari had a significant effect but, interesting­ly enough, the various forces involved maintained a kind of good will toward each other. They drifted apart. The liberal bourgeoisie went back to parlia­mentary game-playing. The student-based revolutionary democrats, how­ever, did something interesting. They decided to do some fundamental re­thinking of political doctrine, and they soon discovered an eccentric nobleman named Saint-Simon, who actually died about the time they began reading his works.

Discovery of Saint-Simon

Saint-Simon was not a socialist, he was not associated with the revolution­ary movement, but rather he was a technocrat who believed in state eco­nomic planning. He inherited the En­lightenment tradition. He said, "Capi­talism is obviously irrational, production is obviously ungoverned, and I can think of fourteen different ways to improve the economy, but there has to be some kind of centralization."

So Saint Amand Hazard and his cir­cle for a couple of years read this material and came out as the first socialist organization with a revolu­tionary democratic tradition. They were not an odd sect; they actually had experience in revolutionary poli­tics and a real sense for political power.

Saint-Simonism, therefore, was the first politically significant socialist tendency, although Owenism in Britain, by a very different process, was also achieving a semi-mass character. Saint-Simonism also spread through Germany—one of Marx's high-school teachers was a Saint-Simonian social­ist—and was the first basic socialist doctrine to penetrate the continent.

While one tends to think of early socialist movements as being very primitive, in fact Saint-Simonism was the most technocratic of any socialist doctrine, not the most primitive. And it reflected the close organic ties between the radical democrats-cum-socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie, which at that time was very alienated from the state apparatus held by the Bourbons, who believed that they were living in the seventeenth century. So, certain elements of bourgeois techno­cratic socialism tended to penetrate these circles and became quite faddish. Only in a later period, with mass agitation, were the traditions of Jacobin communism rediscovered.

Revolution of 1830

Now, the next time the left opposi­tion to the Bourbon regime unified for insurrectionary action they were suc­cessful ... much to their surprise. In the limited parliament, despite the various laws, the liberals were still gaining and finally won a majority. Then the king decided to pull a coup
d’état and declared, "We are dissolving parliament, and we are having total censorship of the press."

Some journalists, among them Louis Auguste Blanqui, although he was not a leader, said, "We refuse.' We protest.'" Some of them were arrested, and the cops knocked on the doors.

It was the spark that was needed to set off the Parisian masses. Among them were all these Bonapartist army officers, who were much better than the French army of the day, which had been purged to make it impossible for France to conquer the other countries anymore. After three days of street fighting, the French army was defeated, decisively driven out of Paris.

Now this should have been, as the radicals and the Saint-Simonians ex-pected the beginning of the second French Revolution. Hazard, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, went to his old friend Lafayette. As the historic leader of the liberal opposition Lafayette was now head of the de facto state power, the so-called National Guard, which was the military arm of the bourgeoisie in Paris. And he said, "Look Lafayette, this is my program, it's a communist program. You be a communist dictator, and we'll support you." And Lafayette stared at him.

Then the liberal pretender—the king's cousin—visited Lafayette along with a banker named Lafitte; Lafayette says, “I am a republican"; the liberal pretender exclaims, "So am I"; and the banker says, "Look, you don't want a lot of trouble." So Lafayette says, "Okay," and they went out—there's a famous kiss of reconciliation in front of the masses of -Paris. When the republicans cried "Betrayal!," they were beaten up and suppressed.

So the French Revolution simply led from an attempted absolutist mon­archy to a somewhat more liberal one, although becoming increasingly re­pressive, in which the Parisian masses and particularly the left—the left wing of the left wing being Saint-Simonian socialists—rightly felt themselves betrayed. It took approximately five years for the new regime to consolidate itself, and the period between the revolution of 1830 and the great repression of 1835 was a continued series of attempts, some of them having a mass character, to carry the revolution of 1830 to a successful conclusion.

The first phase of the struggle, spearheaded by the organization called the Society of the Friends of the People, was simply leftist insurrections in Paris. They felt that the masses would never accept this king, and every couple of months they would rally the students, whatever artisans they could collect, and some disgruntled soldiers and simply attack the state. Blanqui was the vice president of the Society of the Friends of the People and was arrested for student agitation. This is for the SYL: in case anybody puts down agitating on campus, you can point to Blanqui, who never thought that agitating on campus was beneath his dignity.

Buonarroti and the Continuity of Revolutionary Jacobinism

Now, by 1832 the revolutionary democrats had gotten a little bloodied, and they formed another organization with a somewhat longer range and propagandistic purpose, called the So­ciety of the Rights of Man. This was the first mass democratic organization in which revolutionary communists were a serious contender for factional power and the first revolutionary or­ganization which intersected and in a certain sense led the mass organiza­tions of the pre-industrial proletariat.

During 1832-34 in the Society of the Rights of Man there were two factions. The orthodox Jacobin faction republished Robespierre's writings, Robespierre's "Rights of Man," and could be called revolutionary bourgeois democrats anticipating social democ­racy. And the other faction, the out­right Jacobin communist faction organized by Buonarroti, also claimed the same historic tradition. The 1833 program of the agents of Buonarroti within the Society of the Rights of Man declared:

"All property, movable or immovable, contained within the national territory, or anywhere possessed by its citizens, belongs to the people, who alone can regulate its distribution. Labor is a debt which every healthy citizen owes to society, idleness ought to be branded as a robbery and as a perpetual source of immorality."

[—Louis Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840}

And it was through the Society of the Rights of Man that Buonarroti in the last four or five years of his life was able to intersect a new revolutionary • generation and win them to the tradi­tions of Jacobin communism.

Class Battles at Lyons

Now, after 1832, the scene of the major revolutionary battles in France shifts to the provincial industrial city of Lyons, which was the main concen­tration of the pre-industrial French working class concentrated in the silk industry, which was producing for the world market. In 1831, as a result of a wage struggle, they had a demonstra­tion, the bourgeois National Guard attacked them, and they attacked back. The army vacillated, because after the revolution of 1830 the army was a little wary of going against the people—they had gone against it and lost. The weavers took over the city, but they had no ulterior political motives. They said, "Here, we don't want the city, you can have it back." So then, of course, the army came in and smashed them.

The silk weavers, however, were or­ganized in a pre-industrial union known as the Mutualists. At the same time there were these burgeoning bourgeois-democratic-cum-communist propa­ganda groups in Lyons which sought to intersect the Mutualists. The leadership of the first unions were not socialists or revolutionary democrats but rather traditionalists heavily influenced by the clergy. It was only through a long period of struggle that the revo­lutionary democrats and the commu­nists among them were able to pene­trate the organizations of the pre-industrial working class and to win the masses.

The relationship between the So­ciety of the Rights of Man and the silkweavers1 union has been described by Louis Blanc, the leading socialist historian writing in the 1840's in his History of Ten Years:

"We have said that a considerable num­ber of Mutualists had entered the Society [the Society of the Rights of M an] but they had done so as individuals, for as the Mutualists societies con­sidered collectively and in its tendency, it is certain that in the period in ques­tion, it was governed by a narrow corporate spirit. Above all, it was bent on preserving its industrial physiog­nomy, its originality, and all that con­stituted for it a situation apart amongst the working classes. No doubt, there were amongst it men exalted above their feelings. But these men did not constitute the majority, all whose in­terests might be summed up in in­creased wages for silk weavers. The influence of the clergy, moreover, over the class of silk weavers in Lyons has always been rather considerable. Now the following was the spirit in which was exercised this influence, of which women were the inconspicuous but ef­ficient agents. The clergy, beholding in the manufacturers but liberals and skeptics, had felt no inclination to damp a disposition to revolt which animated the workmen against them. But at the same time it urged the latter to distrust the republican party but taking advantage of its sympathies. Now this was in fact precisely the conduct to­wards the Society by the leaders of Mutualism; for while they suffered themselves to be charged with repub­licanism, and availed themselves against the manufacturers in the popu­lar diatribes of the Glaneusse [the republican press] they spared nothing to deaden the republican propaganda in the lodges."

Communist Ideology and Proletarian Struggles

The famous dictum of Lenin [in What Is To Be Done?] that socialist ideology must be brought to the proletariat from without is not a programmatic statement. It is not even a theoretical statement. It is an in­disputable historical fact.

The communist movement has a prehistory, and the mass economic organizations of the proletariat have different prehistories. The communist movement arose out of the left wing of the bourgeois-democratic movement and, in its earliest phases, its mass base was essentially the young intel­lectuals concentrated among students. The mass economic organizations of the working class go back to the earli­est mercantilist period, and their earli­est natural leaders tended to be the clergy. The communist movement" arising out of the democratic movement and the trade unions emerging out of the artisan guilds intersect, and the workers movement is shaped by that intersection. But at every point there is a deep ideological struggle between the revolutionary democrats or social­ists and the Catholic priests in France, or the Russian Orthodox priests in Russia, or the Methodists in England.

As a result of their experiences the leaders of the Mutualists, who were traditionalists and monarchists, appealed to the king and sought reforms, but at every point they were thwarted. Then in 1834 the Orleans monarchy attempted to totally suppress the left opposition, mainly the political opposition, with the so-called Law of Associations, which banned all associations. While these laws were mainly directed at political associations, they also affected the economic organizations of the workers.

So the Lyons silk weavers said, "You attempt to ban our organizations and we will fight." And they fought. There was a mass meeting, jointly called by the Society of the Rights of Man and the silk weavers' union and appealing to
other workers organizations in Lyons; they called a mass demonstration in April, 1834. When the army attempted to suppress the demonstration, the greatest revolutionary violence in France between the revolution of 1830 and those of 1848 occurred in Lyons-six days of fighting, in which hundreds, mainly silk weavers, were killed.

The leaders were repressed in a so-called "Monster Trial," in which both the political left opposition, including virtually all the leaders of the Society of the Rights of Man, and the leaders of the silk weavers were charged with conspiracy and insurrection and were imprisoned. After 1834 Lyons was a Red City for three decades; every com­munist tendency, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Cabet, had an organic base among the silk weavers in Lyons—until the in­dustry essentially disintegrated in the 1860's. But it didn't begin that way.

Blanqui-Insurrectionary Communism

Blanquism as an identifiable doc­trine is a product of the suppression of open insurrectionary activity culmi­nating in the so-called "Monster Trial" of 1835. Blanqui had been a revolu­tionary activist since the age of 17. He had fought in all the street battles and had been decorated for his role in the revolution of 1830 by the new king. Until 1833-34, however, he was simply one of the boys, in no sense distinguish­able, except by his personal courage, from three or four dozen other revo­lutionary democrats.

In prison between 1832 and 1834 he became a communist, but without par­ticular doctrinal sophistication. He al­ways pooh-poohed attempts to describe the nature of communist society. In prison he developed not the goal of communism, which as I said always had a very general characteristic, but strategic conceptions which were so radically different than those of his contemporaries that they constituted a new and distinct political tendency.

Blanqui asked himself two questions. First, why have all of the insurrections since 1830 failed? And second, why did the revolution of 1830, which succeeded in a military sense, also fail, bringing into power a regime which was at best only quantitatively less reactionary than the regime the masses had replaced?

Blanqui rejected the French revolutionary model which had inspired
Buonarroti: you begin with a bloc with the liberals or even the constitutional monarchists, and then you have the gradual radicalization of the revolu­tion. Historical experience had proven impossible the replication of the ex­perience of the French revolution, that is, the gradual radicalization begin­ning with a broad unity of all the op­ponents of the existing regime and then narrowing it down.

Instead, Blanqui insisted that com­munists must overthrow the government and directly rule. So he created what was in fact a secret army: the army was secret from the authorities, and the leadership of the army was secret from the ranks. He organized secret societies, such as the Society of Fam­ilies and later, in the late 1830's, the Society of the Seasons.
In order to enter one of these so­cieties, you were asked questions and you had to give the right answers, the revolutionary catechism. This is the catechism of the Society of the Families, 1836:

"What is the people? The people is the mass of citizens who work. What is the fate of the proletariat under the govern­ment of the rich? Its fate is the same as that of the serf and the Negro. It is clearly a long tale of hardship, fatigue and suffering. Must one make a political or social revolution? One must make a social revolution."

[—Samuel H. Bernstein, Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection]

You answer those three things correct­ly, and three years later you'll be fighting it out with the army in the streets of Paris.

The Society of the Seasons was not only a French organization; it had a German appendage, which for the his­tory of Marxism is important. There was a large German population in Paris in the 1830's, heavily artisan. In Paris there was the so-called German Re­publican Party which contained all of the democrats. A man named Theodore Schuster, who by some curious coincidence was a friend of Buonarroti, formed a faction in the German Republican Party, split the party and from that split arose an organization called the League of the Just. When Buonarroti died in 1837, Blanqui inherited his con­stituency and formed a military bloc with the League of the Just, at that time a handful of communist intellectuals and a base of German artisans.

So, one nice spring day in 1839, a thousand Frenchmen and Germans, largely artisan, met for their routine military exercise in downtown Paris. But this time Blanqui and his lieutenant Barbes walked up and said, "Gentlemen, we are your leadership, and this is it!" They broke into a gun­smith shop, and for the next couple of days they were fighting a very surprised French army.

How did Blanqui recruit this relatively large number of people willing to just walk into the streets of Paris and start shooting? In a certain sense, he didn't. Blanqui rallied the militant wing of the broader revolutionary democratic opposition, which in general tended to be of the plebeian social background. At his trial Blanqui was the only one who was a bourgeois. Everyone else, there were 30 some odd, were all either artisans or shopkeepers. They had nothing to lose.

This indicates an essential aspect of Blanquism which in a certain sense is the key to this talk. Blanquism was the intersection of two currents. On one hand, Blanquism represented the extreme militarist wing of the bourgeois-democratic revolution whose tactics, concepts and whose method of recruit­ment were conditioned by the existence of a broader bourgeois-democratic movement. On the other hand it also represented the nascent collectivist instincts and impulse of the plebeian and particularly urban artisan masses. If one liquidates that dialectical tension, one cannot understand Blanquism. And if one fails to understand Blanquism, then one cannot comprehend this entire period.

To be sure, the Blanqui/Barbes uprising of 1839 was a pure putsch. But Blanqui remained tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution; he proposed a revolutionary provisional government which contained himself and his lieu­tenants, but also one of the leading democratic oppositionists who knew nothing about the putsch. He said, "This is the government, we take power, you're the president." Blanqui assumed that if he overthrew the state, then the more cautious, conservative bourgeois democrats would go along with him, and, moreover, would also be easily won to communism.

In a certain sense Blanqui was right. The king really wanted to execute Barbes, the Blanquist leader who was captured first; it was only fear of a mass insurrection and mass violence if Barbes and Blanqui were executed that prevented it. So that even though this was a pure putsch, it was pro­foundly popular, and the execution of these two revolutionaries would have been not only in the mass unpopular but also not in the interest of the liberal bourgeoisie: the Blanquists had the protection of the bourgeois democrats on the grounds that the revolutionary communists can be used, as in 1830. One is not talking about the Weather-
men. - One is talking about an insur­rectionary act under conditions of severe repression.

Blanqui spent the 1840's in jail. Blanquism as an organized phenomenon disappeared. If you knew the right Paris cafes in the 1840's, you could walk in and somebody would come up to you, start talking, ask for money to buy guns and say, "Well, do you want to come to a meeting?" Dispersed revolutionary activity.

Marx had great respect for Blanqui. He certainly is the only figure in the 19th century who stands comparable to Marx. He was, however, critical and in some ways contemptuous of Blanqui's conceptions of organization.

In the early 1850's Marx wrote a scathing attack on the typical Parisian revolutionary conspirator in the form of a book review ["Review of A. Chenu's 'Les Conspirateurs'," in Saul K. Pad-over, Marx on Revolution]. And Marx said, "Oh, you're a bunch of Bohemians, declassed intellectuals, declassed pro­letarians, easily penetrated by the cops, tending to lead a dissolute life-style." Marx was very prudish, a very straight guy.

What distinguished Marx was his in­sistence that the communists must be tied to the workers—not simply the ex­ceptional workers who were prepared to become professional revolutionaries —the mass of the workers through their established organizations. So that's the negative aspect of Blanquism which quite early on Marx rejected. But in the only two revolutionary situations in which Marx was involved during his lifetime—the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune—Marx and Blanqui were forced together, and Marx on both occasions had to break with right-wing allies.

So, whatever his failing Blanqui insisted, again and again, on certain fundamental truths: namely, that one cannot build communism simply through cooperative bootstrap opera­tions, which were very popular in that period; that you cannot establish com­munism unless the communists wield state power; and that the bourgeoisie is not going to establish a stable par­liamentary democracy in which the communists could establish their con­stituency and by that means take over the government.

Engels, in a much later critique of the Blanquists, observed that Blanqui was a man of the pre-1848 period. But in some ways he was also a man of the post-1914 period—Blanqui above all grasped the centrality of the revolu­tionary overthrow of the state.

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Auguste Blanqui 1880-The Army Enslaved and Oppressed

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

**************
Auguste Blanqui 1880-The Army Enslaved and Oppressed

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: L'armée esclave et opprimée. [n.p.] Paris 1880;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Following the hideous discoveries that are currently provoking public indignation, the guilty — supported by the usual traitors — have impudently taken the offensive and cry out with all their might: “All for the insulted army!” Which should be translated as: “All against the lack of respect for the big brass.”

The army! For the last eight years these same traitors have constantly nailed it to the pillory. For the last eight years all Frenchmen have been voters, except prisoners and soldiers. This is the real insult to the army!

The republic granted suffrage to those with no criminal record. Could it refuse it to the brave men who give the fatherland their blood and their freedom? As a reward for such a sacrifice, can it cross them off the list of citizens? The republic didn’t have the beautiful idea of assimilating men under to the flag to evildoers. Soldiers can vote.

But here’s the thing. Since the “bloody week,” when the men at headquarters (who are Jesuits) had the Parisians massacred by the Chouans, most of the non-commissioned officers and soldiers have given their votes to republican candidates. Every new election was a patriotic conquest. In certain garrisons the difference in the number of votes between the two military parties was as much as ten or eleven to one. If civilian voters had done the same, in just a little while the republic would have carried off the victory. The officers were furious, and the reactionaries concerned. This meant a farewell to their hopes to erect the throne with the help of the army. This meant a farewell to the perpetual refrain of conservatives: “the only resource left to us are the troops.”

This beautiful dream was going to fade away thanks to the votes in the cartridge bags of soldiers that turned against them. But those worthies preferred bullets to this fate. And in a gesture of high treason the so-called National Assembly improvised this evil metamorphosis. The free thinker prostrated himself before slavish thought.

This so-called National Assembly will answer to future legislatures of France. It will answer for having its power usurped in order to take — with the most perverse intentions- universal suffrage from the army, though they saw it as entirely favorable to the cause of progress and liberty.

Yes, to be sure it will have to render some serious accounts, at least if the executive and the legislative don’t enter into a coalition to cap off all the lies, violence, and evil doings that have unfurled over the last ten years with a final coup d'état.

Without a doubt in this case the nation will find a way, for the crime is obvious. It dates from the month of July 1872 and was accomplished with a mixture of hypocrisy and shamelessness that is beyond all measure.

The French will remember that as soldiers and citizens they have constantly shown loyalty, patience, moderation, in painful contrast with the perfidy and the ferocity of their rulers.

The following report on the creation of a sitting national army will prove what should be and what will be the surest safeguard against external aggression and internal Machiavellianism.

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Auguste Blanqui 1872-Eternity Through the Stars-Excerpt

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

**************
Auguste Blanqui 1872-Eternity Through the Stars-Excerpt

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Louis Auguste Blanqui, L'éternité par les astres. Librairie Germer Bailliére, 1872, Paris;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The entire universe is composed of stellar systems. In order to create them nature has only one hundred simple bodies at its disposal. Despite the prodigious profit it knows how to make from its resources, and the incalculable number of combinations these allow its fecundity, the result is necessarily a finite number, like that of the elements themselves. And in order to fill the entire expanse nature must infinitely repeat each of its original or generic combinations.

Every star, whatever it might be, thus exists in infinite number in time and space, not only in one of its aspects, but as it is found in every second of its duration, from birth until death. All the beings spread across its surface, big or little, animate or inanimate, share in this privilege of perennity.

The earth is one of these stars. Every human being is thus eternal in every second of its existence. What I write now in a cell in the fort of Taureau I wrote and will write under the same circumstances for all of eternity, on a table, with a pen, wearing clothing. And so for all.

One after another all these earths are submerged in renovatory flames, to be re-born there and to fall into them again, the monotonous flowing of an hourglass that eternally turns and empties itself. It is something new that is always old; something old that is always new.

Those curious about extra-terrestrial life will nevertheless smile at a mathematical conclusion that grants them not only immortality but eternity. The number of our doubles is infinite in time and space. In all conscience, we can hardly ask for more. These doubles are of flesh and blood, or in pants and coats, in crinoline and chignon. These aren’t phantoms: they are the now eternalized.

There is nevertheless a great defect: there is, alas, no progress! No, these are vulgar re-editions, repetitions. As it is with editions of past worlds, so it is with those of future worlds. Only the chapter of bifurcations remains open to hope. Never forget that all we could have been here, we are somewhere else.

Progress here is only for our nephews. They are luckier than us. All the beautiful things that our globe will see our future descendants have already seen, see now, and will always see in the form of doubles who preceded them and who follow them. Children of a better humanity, they have already scoffed at us and mocked us on dead earths, passing there after us. From living earths from which we have disappeared they continue to condemn us; and on earths to be born, they will forever pursue us with their contempt.

Them and us, as well as all the guests of our planet, are born over again as prisoners of the moment and place that destiny assigns us in its series of avatars. Our perennity is an appendix of its perennity. We are but partial phenomena of its resurrections. Men of the 19th Century, the hour of our apparition is forever fixed, and we are returned always the same, at best with the possibility of happy variants. There is nothing much there to satisfy the thirst for what is better. What then is to be done? I haven’t sought my happiness; I have sought after truth. You will find here neither a revelation nor a prophet, but a simple deduction from the spectral analysis and cosmogony of Laplace. These two discoveries make us eternal. Is this a godsend? We should profit from it. Is it a mystification? We should resign ourselves to it.

But isn’t it a consolation to know ourselves to constantly be, on millions of planets, in the company of our beloved, who is today naught but a memory? Is it another, on the other hand, to think that we have tasted and will eternally taste this happiness in the shape of a double, of millions of doubles! Yet this is what we are. For many of the small minded this happiness through substitutes is somewhat lacking in rapture. They would prefer three or four supplementary years of the current edition to all the duplicates of the infinite. In our century of disillusionment and skepticism we are keen at clinging to things.

But deep down this eternity of man through the stars is melancholy, and sadder still this sequestration of brother-worlds through the barrier of space. So many identical populations that pass each other without suspecting their mutual existence! But yes! It has finally been discovered at the end of the 19th Century. But who will believe it?

And in any event, up till now the past represented barbarism to us, and the future signified progress, science, happiness, illusion! This past has seen brilliant civilizations disappear without leaving a trace on all our double-worlds; and they will disappear without leaving anymore of them. On millions of earths the future will see the ignorance, stupidity, and cruelty of our former ages.

At the present time the entire life of our planet, from birth until death, is being detailed day by day with all its crimes and misfortunes on a myriad of brother-stars. What we call progress is imprisoned on every earth, and fades away with it. Always and everywhere in the terrestrial field the same drama, the same décor; on the same limited stage a boisterous humanity, infatuated with its greatness, believing itself to be the universe, and living in its prison as if it were immense spaces, only to soon fall along with the globe that carried — with the greatest disdain — the burden of its pride. The same monotony, the same immobility on foreign stars. The universe repeats itself endlessly and fidgets in place. Eternity infinitely and imperturbably acts out the same performance.

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Works of Auguste Blanqui 1869-Notes on Positivism

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement

http://wiki.occupyboston.org/wiki/GA/Minutes

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

**************
Works of Auguste Blanqui 1869-Notes on Positivism

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Auguste Blanqui. Instruction pour une prise d'armes. L'Éternité per les astres, hypthèse astronomique et autres textes, Société encyclopédique français, Editions de la Tête de Feuilles. 1972;
Translated: by Andy Blunden and Mitchell Abidor for www.marxists.org, 2003;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1st April 1869
1st April 1869
(Positive Philosophy, No 5, March-April 1869) article by Hippolyte Stupuy, a remark on Condorcet, pages 201 and following.

A pile of nonsense and sillinesses concerning Christianity and the Middle Ages wrongly attacked by the Revolutionaries, according to the author. Claimed benefits of Catholicism and feudalism. Execrable doctrines of historical fatalism, fatalism in humanity. Everything that happens is for the good, for only what exists, is solely that which happens.

Catholicism is irreproachable so long as it is the strongest. Its wrongs begin only with its weakness. Feudalism also is a good thing as long as it crushes. It becomes plague only by virtue of its decline.

The most audacious misrepresentation of the facts just as inept for the justification of this sinister theory of progress as for things carrying on the same. The grotesque self-satisfaction of these systematisers (in their pedantry). Their alleged sociology sets itself up as an almost mathematical science. The most stupid observations, more (manifestly) ridiculous, presented (unashamedly) as scientifically demonstrated truths.

Auguste Comte did not discover anything in any domain. He classified, categorised, pedantised. His system varies according to his liking of (events and of) the circumstances. This alleged founder of positive science ultimately threw himself into the extravagances of mysticism. This destroyer of dogmas improvised his own religion of humanity with its sacraments and priesthood. Why? The coup d’état [by Napoleon, December 1851] terrified him. It manifested the sudden and unexpected triumph of the past. To bend it and seduce it, he offered an ultra-aristocratic religion, the system of the castes, the control of the masses, the absolute domination of the rich, all the accumulated insanities of Brahmanism and Christianity.

Why do the orthodox disciples refuse to follow him along these lines? By what right do they foreswear this outcome of his philosophy, while proclaiming Comte the supreme prophet who has uttered the last word of humanity?

They speak on his behalf but at the same time disavow him! If he was extravagant in his last prophecies, he cannot infallible in the first.

Positivism, which accuses everyone outside of itself of wrong and travesty, and claims to be the negation of Protestantism, Deism, Atheism, is the very model of negation, thorough, systematic scepticism to the point of the absurdity, dressed up as religion. It is not Positivism, but Negativism, or rather Nihilism. It is a rationalisation, a deception, a trick.

To show its sociological science, it tortures and disguises the historical record with an audacity which would make even Father [Jean] Loriquet jealous. And this is an imposing audacity. It is enough for it to be entitled science, dressed up with a name universally respected so as to turn it into something sacrosanct. Nobody dares to look it in the eye. One must be humble and take off your hat to it.

One also has to say that it has the protection of the cowards, very powerful protection. It is used as shelter for atheists and for shamefaced materialists who make a point of living in peace with the reigning force and never get mixed up with the radical movement. If it were not for this support, the spoon-fed doctrines of distortion and of the equivocation would soon have sunk. But, no matter what one says, the cowards are a first-class rampart.

“Spiritual authority, though respectable and respected in the Middle Ages,” said Stupuy page 203, “discredited itself more and more in the 16th century due the public spectacle of its misconduct and by the endless conflicts surrounding its elections (with the papal elections) ... “.

How could the misconduct of the popes and the scandals of the Conclave in 16th century be compared, even at a stretch, with the infamies (depravity) and the atrocities of the papal competitions of 8th, 9th, 10th centuries, the time when he depicts the spiritual authority as being so established!

Respectable, because it is uncontested and omnipotent thanks to wiping out its opponents (its ferocity). Christianity would certainly not have got very far without (lived only by) violence. Right from the start violence was its single method (the use of the rack which is its ...). Already by the 1st century, in the Dark Ages, it proceeds by force (oppression), spying, calumny. It has as a citadel its organisation, for its weapon, all forms of violence. This formidable organisation resists all, triumphs over all. The first victim is the Roman Empire. Victorious, Christianity is maintained, like that which it conquered, by crushing.

Without this system, it would have died in its cradle, and once master, would not have lasted two hundred years if it had relaxed. Its militia, its wars without quarter, the steel, the flame, torture, enslavement, trickery, the shackling of thought laying siege to every individual, the immediate crushing of any opposition, consolidated it through the centuries and past all obstacles. Fire, carnage, destruction mark its road.

What would have happened, if Christianity had succumbed in any of the fights in which it triumphed? No one can say, even speculate. Even the briefest conjecture on this subject would be a silliness, Because things followed this course, it seems that they could not have followed any other. The accomplished fact has an irresistible power. It is destiny even. The spirit (finds itself) is overwhelmed by it and does not dare to revolt (to resist). It has no foundation. It could base itself only on a vacuum (on nothing).

What a terrible force for the fatalists of history, admirers of this accomplished fact! All the atrocities of the victor, its long series of crimes are coldly transformed into a regular, inescapable evolution, like that of nature. Nothing stops these imperturbable systematisers. Jean XII, Marozie, Théodora, Mathilde, etc, constitute a respectable and respected “spiritual authority"! All that is, is legitimate, useful, essential. One must simply observe the natural procession of things, obligatory for mankind. Unparalleled logic without peer, everything is connected and follows one from another, there is a constant relationship to be found in events, each time is the product of the previous time.

What a beautiful discovery and what a beautiful argument! Without doubt, all things are interconnected and enmeshed with one another. Every second follows according the second before. But the gears of human things are not fatalistic like that of the natural universe. They are modifiable at every moment. A couple are going to marry. I kill the man and take the woman. The children of this woman will then be mine. Couldn’t they have been those of the man who was killed? The murder intervened and changed the father. There is always relationship, but the descent? (is very different).

Nevertheless, it is immoral, it is a crime to glorify the past, to justify it by alleged immutable laws, to call upon the dignity of history which demands respect or even indulgence for the horrors of times gone by. To speak about the services of Catholicism could be, at certain moments, a deception, an illusion of the times. Today however, after the lessons of recent years, one may no longer, in the name of fatalism, plead the cause of this harmful religion. From beginning to end, it has produced nothing and will do only evil. It was no more useful for humanity than small pox, the plague or cholera are necessary to a man’s health.

The doctrine of continuous progress is a fantasy of times of transition. It gave a few years of vogue to Catholicism under the reign of Louis-Philippe. It was one of the forms of the reaction against the mercenary attitude, a reaction to democracy caused by the boiling over and cynical outpouring of material interests. The middle class established without shame the worship of the golden calf and seemed to set it up as the universal religion. Honest thoughts, ideas of social justice were outlawed, self-enrichment at all costs was proclaimed the only virtue.

For a moment, in the initial disgust at this stench, the Revolution forgot the crimes of Catholicism and remembered only its spirituality, and almost had the illusion of seeing in its deposed adversary, an ally against the filthy enemy which had emerged suddenly before it. The Middle Ages were suddenly and universally the fashion, in the popular camp, by mistake and naivety, and among the conservatives by instinct and calculation. This was a shallow unanimity! The mistake disappeared (dissipated, cleared up), the instinct was made into a doctrine. Everything again took on its own colour. The future recognised in Christianity its enemy mortal, the past its last farewell.

Positivism, sewn (attached) to the coat-tails of a Prophet, remains fixed in the admiration of the Middle Ages. Auguste Comte, at the time of this transitory passion, laid down the foundations of his heavy sociological construction. It would have been better if the disciples had buried themselves in the brickwork of their Master. They distort, they cripple history to make it fit in with the ravings of the new holy books. The Bible was a divine inspiration. The volumes of Auguste Count are revealed science. Which is the worse impertinence?

In its systematisation of the Middle Ages, positivism sacrifices with neither pity nor scruple all the martyrs of thought and justice, Abélard, Arnaud de Brescia, Rienzi, etc. Certainly, it does not dare condemn them, it confines itself to concealing their names or their roles, and to simply erasing from history the great figures which contradict its thesis of the legitimacy of the Papacy ... legitimate, and rational, just so long as they had a value in preserving the very powerful, to be damned, as soon as they no longer succeeded in preserving it from decline.

This positivism is truly a rare impudence. It is positivism which discovered the sun, the moon and stars. It is continually making up a mass of things as marvellous as they are ignored, such as bread, wine, candles, etc. Nothing existed before it. It veritably created, arranged (enumerated) everything. Its process of manufacture is curious. It consists in bogging down in a vast marsh of what everyone already knows, two words of the most limpid water. In this way, the simple truth: “One is always a part of one’s own time,” positivism gives to the world twisted in fifty unreadable pages.

Other discoveries by the same method: “All epochs (produce) have retrograde stages and the advanced stages.” Who had discovered (found) that and many other things before Auguste Comte? It is surely he who planted a whole a positive nose in the middle of our faces. Until the arrival of this Messiah, we had only false noses (cardboard noses).

* * *
From its alleged science of sociology, as well as from its philosophy of history, positivism excludes the idea of justice. It does not admit that the law of progress (but at the same time) continues fatalism. Each thing is excellent in its time since it takes place (marks a stage) in the series of improvements (the relationship of progress). All is always the best of all possibilities. There is no criterion to appreciate the good or the bad. Any such criterion would be preconceived, a priori, metaphysics.

The experiment of the centuries shows that the only agent of progress is education, that the light spouts (almost) only out of the exchange (and the shock) of human thought, that consequently all that supports and multiplies this exchange is to the good, all that removes it or obstructs it is evil. However, Christianity has as a fundamental principle the destruction of freedom of thought and the communication of thought. From this observation, it is therefore the darkness and the evil.

Hay! that’s all metaphysics and twaddle! the positivist answers. The truth it is that, it doesn’t matter by what means, Christianity fought and reigned over 1500 years, and was necessarily progressive throughout this period of struggle and power. It started to become evil and an obstacle to progress only from its decline, and only because it declined. – However, at the beginning, at its apogee and in its decline, its method was always the same: “extermination of the thought” That doesn’t matter! Hosannah! Glory to its triumph! Hurrah! (Hou! Hou!) Down! Down! with its defeat!

Such is positive philosophy, as generous as it is just, as noble as it is comforting.

The mania of progress nevertheless, to these blind systematisers, goes up until the charge of retrograde movement and of negative impetus, which is made against the renaissance of Greco-Latin art, and according to them this victory over the infamous work of the Middle Ages is a retreat. It broke the regular evolution of Christianity! It fraudulently introduced old-fashioned paganism into the new world (modernity). Antiquity is an intruder who deceived us; (while causing an ebb tide in the river of the ages) because it made the flow of the ages go back up.

It is true that in reappearing in that day, like the Rhone after its disappearance [under Lake Geneva], antiquity was able to give the lie to (blast) the infatuation of continuous development. Stopping short, then repressed in the night the Middle Ages, it reinstated the idea of freedom on the ruins of the Christiano-absolutist tradition, and the Republic was preserved (remained) in safekeeping in the entrails of the Greek and Latin idioms.

Thus, this theory of uninterrupted and fatalistic progress is false. For Greco-Roman civilisation leapt over Christianity to regenerate modern civilisation in spite of it, against it. There is no clearer proof that this religion, this terrible disease, for nearly two thousand years kept humanity nailed to a bed of sorrows.

If science had a birth, it is with the printing press, which rested on the old world (Antiquity), delivered (saved) of the tiger which had watched over it from the cradle. The positivists like science and sing its praises. Eh! bien, it is the daughter of Antiquity. Christianity failed to kill it. Witch! to the stake! shouted this infamy. Science did not escape without punishment, witness Roger Bacon, Raymond Lully and so many others. She lives again today in order to punish the monster. By what right are the panegyrists of the assassin made the cantors of the victim?

Positivism is just one long series of tricks. The first and best are its name, which grabs for itself the right to all that is truth and reality! It is joined with science from the beginning and endorses it by this marriage. “Positive science,” say the vulgar. “Before Comte there only existed negative science.”

However, this coupling is a redundancy: would “lighting lamp” [lumière éclatante] be more ridiculous, but what does the sin of pleonasm count for positivist gibberish, this corroding scab on our language?

* * *
Positivism calls each of the various known sciences ‘particular science’, and science in general, positive philosophy, that is to say, Comtist classification. It thus modestly installs (introduces) in the humanities as the Science of Sciences, what? the fantasies of a pedant! A nomenclature without any practical value, without any current application, a useless trinket (toy) to be put away (to look good) under a bell jar (glass).

The public carries on and follows, with their eyes closed, quite dazed by the appalling gibberish which seems to them at least to have come out of the cave of Trophonius ...

The whole value of positivism is its materialism. Take away this quality, and nothing any more remains but errors and impertinence. No-one demonstrates the truth of materialism better and, strange to say! it refuses to draw the conclusion and treats materialism as metaphysics. What a joke!

Eh! Messieurs,

You give your qualities to others so ponderously,
and we do not accept them so slowly.

To affirm, in the name of the experiment, the mortality of the soul and the eternity of matter, but to refuse the characterisation of materialist, is a refinement of casuistry inaccessible to the intelligence of a simple mortal. What is materialism, if not the doctrine which declares the universe infinite in time and space, and the spirit a property inseparable from the nervous substance, in life as in death?

With its twisting and turning and its subtleties, positivism more or less says the same thing. To be frank, where is the difference between the two doctrines? – ah! here: one just a particularism – German-style; the other, the universality of human knowledge. So has positivism invented this knowledge? no, it quite simply strings them together in a rosary and delivers up this rosary as its own work.

Positivism is a demigod who knows all, which embraces all, from the furthest boundaries of transcendental mathematics to the meanest details of sociology, past, present and future. Atop its omniscient throne, with a scornful glance, it turns its back on the Myrmidon [loyal followers of Achilles] who dare to make a similar claim and says to them as to a weak insect: “What is there between us?”


* * *
Page 375 – (positive philosophy, No 3, Déc Nov. 1869) article from The Revolution by Littré.

The dreadful pathos of Aug. Comte on the philosophies of Voltaire and Rousseau. The bad faith of the so called Prophet [Révélateur] who makes the pretence of recognising in the 18th century only two schools, both the one and the other deist, without uttering a word about the materialist and atheist school represented by the Pléiade: Diderot, d'Holbach, d'Alembert, Lamétrie, etc (Helvétius, etc).

The good man had his reasons to erase this Pléiade. Put simply, he wanted to invent atheism in the name of positivism. Following the example of the Master, the disciples also pretend to see in atheism only a metaphysics. But take away from their gibberish the atheistic idea and the materialism, and what remains? a whimsical system of classification (of collating). With this word: “positivism”, it almost succeeded in posing as the creators of all the social sciences.

What terrible gibberish is this style of Aug. Comte! could a similar writer ever extract something serious from his brain? [The positivist Emile] Littré finds in this patois an explanation of the reactionary consequences of Thermidor.

“It is”, he says, “the interference (sic) of the Reaction in the Thermidorian movement. Robespierre’s violence had made the reaction imminent.”

This reason is that of Diaforius: “Why does opium make one sleep? – Because it has a dormitive property”; “From whence comes the interference of the Reaction in the Thermidorian movement?” What made it possible? Having already been crushed, why was it that it could raise its head and triumph so suddenly?

The fault was with the composition of the parliaments, all bad without exception, since 1789. The Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, the Convention were collections of egoistical and cowardly bourgeois, rows of nonentities and mediocrities where people with talent were to be found in small number and rarer still were people of any character.

Crushed by the Revolutionary minority on May 31, then recalled thanks to being rescued from the dictatorship of Robespierre by the Montagnards, the retrograde majority of the Convention found itself free on 9 Thermidor and in control the next day.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Below, translated by Mitchell Abidor.

April 8,1869

The source of progress is the communication of thought. Evil is thus all that opposes this communication, and good all that favors and multiplies it. In this regard the discovery of the printing press was the greatest benefit, and Christianity the greatest scourge, to afflict humanity. To enchain the human spirit to an immutable dogma, and to demand in principle and to practice in fact systematic destruction in order to maintain this so-called absolute truth and the eternal immobilization of thought: is this not to attack all of humanity? The crime par excellence is thus everything that has as its goal the prolongation of the existence of that religion of death, and our first obligation is the annihilation at whatever price of so horrible a plague.

* * *
In the trial of the past before the future contemporary memoirs are the witnesses, history the judge, and the verdict almost always an iniquity, either through the falsity of its depositions, or the absence – or the ignorance – of the tribunal. Fortunately the appeal remains forever open, and the light of future centuries, cast from afar on past centuries, denounces there the verdict of the shadows.

3/21/69

Catholicism is the first and last support of all oppression. It blesses the coffin of that which expires, and the cradle of that which is being born.

4/15/69

The liberals lie about what they did yesterday, on what they are doing today, and on what they'll do tomorrow.

“Revue Positive” (March-April 1869) article by Wirouboff on Russian drunkenness. Masterpiece of pedantic stupidity and positivist cretinism. The essence of this lovely work is the powerlessness of governments to do anything, to change anything, to modify anything in the peoples they dominate. All of history is the proof of this, is it not? O triumph of sociology!

3/29/69

In violent situations that place life at permanent risk either slaves crushed by terror are needed, or souls exalted by enthusiasm. The profession of a soldier, and even more that of a sailor, is only possible for the two extremes: the dolt or the hero.

* * *
The qualification of “Catholic” given to atheists despite themselves is the worst of outrages. In the registers of prisons, in census documents, that mark is applied to their shoulders. They are made the prisoners of Catholicism. It’s the inquisition in action.

That we weigh down the atheist with the most insulting epithets: so be it. He will willingly accept them as compliments. But Catholic! A name that represents all he hates and holds in contempt; a name that forcibly enrolls him under the enemy flag and makes him the official soldier of his persecutors!

It is thus that the so-called majorities are formed in the name of which people are oppressed. The prosecutions for working on Sunday, the churches built at great cost for a handful of real Catholics, the inquisitorial condemnations by tribunals, all rely on the mass of the indifferent – and even adversaries – disguised as Papist sectarians.

This name inflicted through violence must be rejected, and justice done on the insolent locutions that outlaw all that is not of the Christian sect. Everywhere this name of Christian is substituted for that of man, as if one ceased to be a man on ceasing to be a Christian.

* * *
Whatever the heterodox of Positivism might say, Comte’s second manner existed in germ in his first. He always professed a great respect for Catholicism, limiting himself to saying: “You were sublime in your time, but that time has passed. You are now rancid and rococo. Lay yourself down with dignity in your coffin, like those old savages who can no longer carry out scalpings and voluntarily leave for the Land of the Great Spirit. Off with you, good man. Off to the other world and make room for your natural heir, sacrosanct Positivism.”

“Morale independante” of 3/26/69

Morality defines respect for one’s own person and dignity as respect for the person and dignity of others. An entirely passive morality. “Don’t allow yourself to be impinged upon, and don’t impinge upon others.” This is a narrow, roguish, bristly, barricaded, selfish individualism. It is isolation.

True morality is active. It’s the mutualist idea, solidarity, association, common action...

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Works of Auguste Blanqui 1866-Manual for an Armed Insurrection

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

*******************
Works of Auguste Blanqui 1866-Manual for an Armed Insurrection

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Auguste Blanqui. Instruction pour une prise d'armes. L'Éternité per les astres, hypthèse astronomique et autres textes, Société encyclopédique français, Editions de la Tête de Feuilles. 1972;
Transcribed: for www.marxists.org, by Andy Blunden;
Translated: by Andy Blunden, 2003;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I. Preliminary
This program is purely military and leaves entirely to the side the political and social question, which this isn’t the place for: besides, it goes without saying, that the revolution must (effectively work against the tyranny of the capital, and) reconstitute society on the basis of justice.

A Parisian insurrection which repeats the old mistakes no longer has any chance of success today.

In 1830, popular fervor alone was enough to bring down a power surprised and terrified by an armed insurrection, an extraordinary event, which had one chance in a thousand.

That was good once. The lesson was learnt by the government, which remained monarchical and counter-revolutionary, although it was the result of a revolution. They began to study street warfare, and the natural superiority of art and discipline over inexperience and confusion was soon re-established.

However, it will be said, in 1848 the people triumphed using the methods of 1830. So be it. But let us not have any illusions! The victory of February [1830] was nothing but a stroke of luck. If Louis-Philippe had seriously defended himself, supremacy would have remained with the uniforms.

The proof is the June days. It is here that one can see how disastrous were the tactics, or rather the absence of tactics of the insurrection. Never had they had such a favourable position: ten chances against one.

On one side, the Government in total anarchy, demoralized troops: on the other, all the workers were solid and almost certain of success. Why did they succumb? Owing to lack of organisation. To account for their defeat, it is enough to analyze their strategy.

The uprising breaks out. At once, in the workers’ districts, the barricades go up here and there, aimlessly, at a multitude of points.

Five, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty men, brought together by chance, the majority without weapons, they start to overturn carriages, dig up paving stones and pile them up to block the roads, sometimes in the middle of a street, more often at intersections. Many of these barriers would present hardly any obstacle to the cavalry.

Sometimes, after the crude beginnings of preparing their defenses, the builders leave to go in the search of rifles and ammunition.

In June, one could count more than sixty barricades; about thirty or so alone carried the burdens of the battle. Of the others, nineteen or twenty did not fire a shot. From there, glorious bulletins made a lot of noise about the removal of fifty barricades, where there was not a soul.

While some are tearing the paving stones from the streets, other small bands are disarming the corps de garde or seizing gunpowder and weapons from the armories. All this is done without coordination or direction, at the mercy of individual imagination.

Little by little, however, a certain number of barricades, higher, stronger, better built, are chosen by defenders, who concentrate there. It is not calculation, but chance which determines the site of these principal fortifications. Just a few, by a kind of military inspiration rather than design, occupy the large intersections.

During this first period of the insurrection, the troops, on their side, gather. The generals receive and study the police reports. They take good care not to let their detachments venture out without unquestionable data, for fear of failure which would demoralize the soldiers. As soon as they have determined the positions of the insurrectionists, they mass the regiments at various points which will constitute from now on the base of their operations.

Both armies are in position. Let us look at their manoeuvres. Here will be laid bare the vice of popular tactics, the undoubted cause of the disaster.

Neither direction nor general command, not even coordination between the combatants. Each barricade has its particular group, more or less numerous, but always isolated. Whether it numbers ten or one hundred men, it does not maintain any communication with the other positions. Often there is not even a leader to direct the defence, and if there is, his influence is next to nil. The fighters do whatever comes into their head. They stay, they leave, they return, according to their good pleasure. In the evening, they go to sleep.

In consequence of these continual comings and goings, the number of citizens remaining at the barricades varies rapidly by a third, a half, sometimes by three quarters. Nobody can count on anybody. From this grows distrust of their capacity to succeed and thus, discouragement.

Nothing is known of what is happening elsewhere and they do not trouble themselves further. Rumors circulate, some black, some rosy. They listen peaceably to the cannons and the gunfire, while drinking at the wine merchants. As for sending relief to the positions under attack, there is not even the thought of it. “Let each defends his post, and all will be well,” say the strongest. This singular reasoning is because the majority of the insurgents fight in their own district, a capital fault which has disastrous consequences, in particular the denunciation by their neighbors, after the defeat.

For with such a system, defeat is certain. It comes at the end in the person of two or three regiments which fall upon the barricade and crush their few remaining defenders. The whole battle is just the monotonous repetition of this invariable maneuver. While the insurrectionists smoke their pipes behind heaps of paving stones, the enemy successively concentrates all his forces against one point, then on to a second, a third, a fourth, and thereby exterminates the insurrection one bit at a time.

The popular fighters do not take care to counter this easy task. Each group awaits its turn philosophically and would not venture to run to the aid of a neighbor in danger. No! “He will defend his post; he cannot give up his post.”

This is how one perishes through absurdity!

When, thanks to such grave faults, the great Parisian revolt of 1848 was shattered like glass by the most pitiful of governments, what catastrophe should we not fear if we begin again with the same stupidity, before a savage militarism, which now has in its service the recent conquests of science and technology: railways, the electric telegraph, rifled cannon, the breech-loading rifles?

For example, something we should not count as one of the new advantages of the enemy is the strategic thoroughfares which now furrow the city in all the directions. They are feared, but wrongly. There is nothing about them to be worried about. Far from having created a danger for the insurrection, as people think, on the contrary they offer a mixture of disadvantages and advantages for the two parties. If the troops circulate with more ease along them, on the other hand they are also heavily exposed and in the open.

Such streets are unusable under gunfire. Moreover, balconies are miniature bastions, providing lines of fire on their flanks, which ordinary windows do not. Lastly, these long straight avenues deserve perfectly the name of boulevard that is given to them. They are indeed true boulevards, which constitute the natural front of a very great strength.

The weapon par excellence in street warfare is the rifle. The cannon makes more noise than effect. Artillery could have serious impact only by the use of incendiaries. But such an atrocity, employed systematically on a large scale, would soon turn against its authors and would be to their loss.

The grenade, which people have the bad habit of calling a bomb, is generally secondary, and subject besides to a mass of disadvantages. It consumes a lot of powder for little effect, is very dangerous to handle, has no range and can only be used from windows. Paving stones do almost as much harm but are not so expensive. The workers do not have money to waste.

For the interior of houses, the revolver and the bayonet, sword, sabre and dagger. In a boarding house, a pike or eight-foot long halberd would triumph over the bayonet.

The army has only two great advantages over the people: the breech-loading rifle and organisation. This last especially is immense, irresistible. Fortunately one can deprive him of this advantage, and in this case ascendancy passes to the side of the insurrection.

In civil disorders, with rare exceptions soldiers march only with loathing, by force and brandy. They would like to be elsewhere and more often look behind than ahead. But an iron hand retains them as slaves and victims of a pitiless discipline; without any affection for authority, they obey only fear and are lacking in any initiative. A detachment which is cut off is a lost detachment. The commanders are not unaware of this, and worry above all to maintain communication between all their forces. This need cancels out a portion of their manpower.

In the popular ranks, there is nothing like this. There one fights for an idea. There only volunteers are found, and what drives them is enthusiasm, not fear. Superior to the adversary in devotion, they are much more still in intelligence. They have the upper hand over him morally and even physically, by conviction, strength, fertility of resources, promptness of body and spirit, they have both the head and the heart. No troop in the world is the equal of these elite men.

So what do they lack in order to vanquish? They lack the unity and coherence which, by having them all contribute to the same goal, fosters all those qualities which isolation renders impotent. They lack organisation. Without it, they haven’t got a chance. Organisation is victory; dispersion is death.

June 1848 put this truth beyond question. What would be the case today? With the old methods, the entire people would succumb should the troops decide to hold out, and they will hold out, so long as they see before them only irregular forces, without direction. On the other hand, the very sight of a Parisian army in good order operating according to tactical regulations would strike the soldiers dumb and make them drop their resistance.

A military organisation, especially when it has to be improvised on the battle field, is no small business for our party. It presupposes a commander-in-chief and, up to a certain point, the usual series of officers of all ranks. Where to find this personnel? Revolutionary and socialist middle-class men are rare and the few that there are fight only the war of the pen. These gentlemen imagine they can turn the world upside down with their books and their newspapers, and for sixteen years they have scribbled as far as the eye can see, without being tired out by their difficulties; with an equine patience, they suffer the bit, the saddle and the riding crop, and never a kick! Damn that! Return the blows? That’s for louts.

These heroes of the inkstand profess the same scorn for the sword as officers for their slices of bread and butter. They do not seem to suspect that force is the only guarantee of freedom; that people are slaves wherever the citizens are ignorant of art of soldiery and give up the privilege to a caste or a corporate body.

In the republics of antiquity, among the Greeks and Romans, everyone knew and practiced the art of war. The professional soldier was an unknown species. Cicero was a general, Caesar a lawyer. By taking off the toga and donning the uniform, they would begin as colonel or captain and would acquit themselves ably. As long as it is not the same in France, we will remain civilians fit to be cut down at mercy of the officer caste.

Thousands of the educated young, working-class and bourgeois tremble under a detested yoke. To break it, do they think of taking up the sword? No! The pen, always the pen, only the pen. Why the one and not the other, as the duty of a republican requires? In times of tyranny, to write is fine, to fight is better, when the enslaved pen remains powerless. Eh bien, no! They publish a pamphlet, then go into prison, but they do not think of opening a manual of military tactics, to learn there in twenty-four hours the trade which constitutes all the power of our oppressors, and which would put in our hands our revenge and their punishment.

But what is the good of these complaints? it is the stupid practice of our time to deplore something instead of doing something about it. Jeremiads are the fashion. Jeremiah poses in all the attitudes, he cries, whips, he dogmatizes, he dominates, he thunders, the plague of all plagues. Let us leave these elegizers, these grave-diggers of freedom! The duty of a revolutionist is the fight, the fight come what may, the fight until death.

Do the cadres lack for the forming of an army? Eh bien! We must improvise them on the ground even, in the course of action. The people of Paris will provide all the elements, former soldiers, ex-national guards. Their scarcity will oblige us to reduce to a minimum the number of officers and NCOs. But no matter. The zeal, the ardor, the intelligence of the volunteers, will make up for this deficit.

The essential thing is to organize. No more of these tumultuous risings, with ten thousand isolated heads, acting at random, in disorder, without any overall design, each in their local area and acting according to their own whim! No more of these ill-conceived and badly made barricades, which waste time, encumber the streets, and block circulation, as necessary to one party as the other. As much as the troops, the Republican must have freedom of his movements.

No useless racing about, hurly-burly, clamoring! Every minute and every step is equally precious. Above all, do not hole up in our own district as the insurrectionists have never failed to do, to their great harm. This mania, after having caused the defeat, facilitates proscriptions. We must cure ourselves of this under penalty of catastrophe.

From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Works of Auguste Blanqui 1866-Proclamation to Parisians

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

************
Works of Auguste Blanqui 1866-Proclamation to Parisians

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Source: Auguste Blanqui. Instruction pour une prise d'armes. L'Eternite par les astres, hypothese astronomique et autres textes, Societe encyclopedique francaise, Editions de la tete de feuilles. 1972;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Parisians:

Sixteen years of gags! Sixteen years of outrages! France scoffed at, pillaged, trampled upon! Wasn’t that enough? No! Now hunger tears at the guts of the people!

Bonaparte promised glory and prosperity. Prosperity! Yes, he alone devoured 400 million francs, 25 million a year, 70,000 francs a day. He gorged with gold his Mamelukes, speculators, camp followers, priests. All he left to you to satisfy your hunger, was the rubble of demolitions.

Glory! We know it: Mexico, Mentana. And that’s only a beginning. From here on out all soldiers between 20 and 30 are soldiers...soldiers of the Pope.

They’ll have the honor of dying for the Jesuits, and Father Hyacinthe promises to hear their confessions on the battlefield.

To those who escape that glory, they’ll distribute soup at the doors of churches and barracks.

No more workshops! No more marriages! All of that is revolutionary. Nothing but palaces and prisons, convents and whorehouses!....

To arms, Parisians! Enough is enough! You received freedom from your fathers; you will not leave servitude to your sons.

The oppressors have filled the cup to the brim. To arms! Let punishment fall like lightning on their outrages. The hour of the great revolution of the people has sounded! Let us march!