*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- The Czar Of All The Russias- No Rehab From The International Working Class

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of Trotsky's "History Of The Russian Revolution". Anyone who wants to rehabilitate old Czar Nicolas read Chapter Four, The Tzar and Tzarina" first.

Commentary

On October 2, 2008 the Russian Supreme Court did a legal "rehab" job on the last Czar of all the Russias, Nicolas II, absolving him and the "little family" of any crimes during his reign. Hears me out on this though-, one can do all the "rehab" jobs in the world concerning the crimes of the last Czar but we remember events a little differently including the events of Bloody Sunday massacre of peacefully protesting workers and their families in January 1905 that started the 1905 revolution, the massacre of the Lena Gold Mine workers in 1912 for demanding better working conditions and the destruction of Russia's youth in the massacre of World War I. Leon Trotsky mentioned in his monumental three volume History Of The Russian Revolution, in another context (the struggle against the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in the Soviets), that some forces have to face the dustbin of history. That is the Czar's fate as it was for Charles I in the English Revolution and Louis XVI in the French Revolution. No court can change that fate. Below, for a different point of view but one that reflects the position of our class opponents and their continuing fear of the events of 1917 is a Boston Globe editorial.


**********


The Czar of All The Dissidents? The Boston Globe, October 6, 2008

ANYONE who rejects linear theories of history in favor of cycles had to feel vindicated last week after Russia's Supreme Court rehabilitated Czar Nicholas II and his family, declaring that they were victims of "groundless" political repression when they were murdered, at Lenin's behest, in 1918.

During the Soviet interregnum, schoolchildren were taught that the last czar of all the Russias was a criminal culpable for all of Russia's ills and injustices. The notion that he and the other Romanovs executed along with him could one day be officially deemed victims of the Bolshevik terror - well, for 90 years the kindest thing to be said about such a notion was that it was delusional.

At present, however, all the old villains and bugaboos of the Bolsheviks' political mythology are being celebrated as eternal verities of Mother Russia. Pure, undiluted patriotism is back. The Russian Orthodox Church is respected once again; political leaders pay tribute to the institution and its clerics. And czarist imperial history is held up not as a folly of the past, but as an inspiration for the future. Witness Russia's recent military excursion into Georgia and the Kremlin's warnings about Ukraine.

The most astonishing aspect of the Romanovs' rehabilitation is the implicit logic of the court's ruling. If the last czar was an innocent victim of an act of political repression, then Lenin - that ultimate hero of the Soviet Union - was nothing but a murderous thug. Yet Lenin still reposes in his mausoleum in Red Square.

The day he is banished from that sainted spot will be the day that history has come full circle.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- The Comintern and the GPU:The Attempted Assassination of May 24 (August 1940)

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

From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The 70th Anniversary Of His Death (2010)-

Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?

Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist ( I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-*Books To While Away The Class Struggle By-Professor Patenaude's "Leon Trotsky: Downfall Of A Revolutionary"-The Last Days Of The Old Man

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Leon Trotsky commenting on the Moscow Trials.

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By and Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin


Book Review

Leon Trotsky: Downfall Of A Revolutionary, Betrand Patenaude, Harper, New York, 2009



As I noted in a recent review of Professor Robert Service’s biography, Trotsky, the spirit of the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, animates the political material reviewed in this space, and is some senses the way the materials are presented make no sense without acknowledging that hard truth. I have also noted, as well, that of all the biographies, sketches, memoirs, etc. concerning the life and times of this extraordinary revolutionary that Isaac Deutscher’s three volume Prophet series done in the 1950s and 1960s still, to my mind, is the definitive such study of the man. As I also noted in the above-mentioned review after reading that Trotsky biography and this more specialized volume that centers on the last period of his life and his subsequent assassination by a Stalinist agent down in Mexico in 1940, both which have the benefit of the latest in archival, particularly Soviet archival, material I still hold to that opinion. However, the present book under review, by looking at Trotsky’s life from the perspective of his last years in exile and projecting back to the highlights of his earlier career and deeds was an interesting quick read on Trotsky’s life for those who need a fairly short primer on his life.

As I also stated in the Service review I admit to being somewhat surprised by Professor Patenaude‘s book. Not, as might be expected, for its veiled liberal disdain for the Soviet experiment and for Bolshevism. That kind of expectation comes with wading into liberal academic territory. It is, moreover, old hat by now and gets one no closer to the core of Trotsky’s place in world revolutionary history than most of the other Trotsky books written from that hardly exclusive perspective. What is surprising is that Professor Patenaude felt the need to write a biography of the fallen revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the year 2009 long after his ghost, and that of the Soviet Union, that he was instrumental in creating, especially its military structure, have left the scene. Furthermore, as with Professor Service’s book, while I believe this book has a certain merit as a contemporary Trotsky primer it certainly has not revealed much new in the way of biographical material despite the opening up of the archives. That is the sense, or one of the senses, that I mean when I say I continue to stand in awe of Isaac Deutscher’s exhaustive study.

For those not familiar with Trotsky’s life the good professor sketchily projects back to his Ukrainian Jewish childhood, his early pre-revolutionary academic activities, and his emersion into the Russian revolutionary milieu in Russia and in exile at the turn of the 20th century. He notes Trotsky’s very public leadership of the Russian revolution of 1905 as chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet and after its defeat its political defense, the pre-World War I free agent journalist period during which he attempted to bring the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions together and earned the scorn of both sides, and the struggle against World War I and the betrayal of internationalism by the Second International. Time is spent on the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia where Trotsky linked his fate with the Bolsheviks and became a central leader of that party and of the Soviet state, the subsequent civil war to defend that October revolution, and Trotsky’s key role in creating the Red Army and the Communist International. He also details the post-Lenin inner-Bolshevik Party struggle where Trotsky’s star started to fate, and in the aftermath his internal and then eternal exiles, highlighted by the Mexican exile, after his defeats at the hands of Stalin, and his fight to create the stillborn Fourth International to replace the Communist International in the fight for world socialist revolution. And, of course, he goes in great depth about the set-up of his assassination at the hands of a Stalinist agent in 1940. Along the way he also gives scope to Trotsky’s wide ranging literary and intellectual interests that permitted him to continue to make his mark on the political world after his exile, to make a living, and to fund his various political projects.

In one sense it is hard for a biographer, any biographer, to say something new about such an open book political man as Leon Trotsky. Both because he wrote much, including his memoirs, about his political life and his positions from early on well before the Russian Revolution of 1905 and because the events that he was associated with left little room for not previously making it onto the pages of history. So what is left for a biographer? Well, since no one has scoured the newly opened archives and found that Trotsky really did take German gold during World War I. Or that he really, as charged in the Moscow trials, was an agent of the Mikado, British imperialism or Hitlerite Germany then what is left is speculation, now apparently endless speculation, about his personal character flaws.

This is actually the ground that makes this book, like Professor Service’s, interesting as he, like others before him detail Trotsky’s prickly personality, his failure to suffer fools gladly (or at all) either close political associates or distant foes, his aloofness and haughtiness that made him less than the perfect choice for leadership of political factions in the struggle for power. Those, in the end, were a key to Trotsky’s political undoing. Professor Patenaude also details more extensively than I have seen elsewhere some of Trotsky private moments like his late life affair with the Mexican surrealist/naturalist artist, Frida Kahlo (and wife of muralist Diego Rivera), his bumpy road passion for his long suffering wife and companion, Natalia, his myriad health issues and his strained relationships with most of his kin folk.

For those who have not read a previous Trotsky biography and who understand that Professor Patenaude's work is a mere sketch of the vast number of issues and events that Trotsky’s life represented then there is much that can be gleaned from his work. But, I always come back to when dealing with the life of the much maligned, besmirched, and denigrated revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, warts and all, comes as close as any historic figure that has come out of bourgeois society to being the proto-type for the new communist man that humankind has produced thus far. In that sense Leon Trotsky is in need of no certificate of revolutionary good conduct from the good professor, ex-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, this writer or the reader. Enough said.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- *From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay (1940)

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

Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?

Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist (I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding.); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- *From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto (1937)

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons-    *From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The Anniversary Of His Death- Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto (1937)

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

Markin comment:

The name Leon Trotsky hardly needs added comment from this writer. After Marx, Engels and Lenin, and in his case it is just slightly after, Trotsky is our heroic leader of the international communist movement. I would argue, and have in the past, that if one were looking for a model of what a human being would be like in our communist future Leon Trotsky, warts and all, is the closest approximation that the bourgeois age has produced. No bad, right?

Note: For this 70th anniversary memorial I have decided to post articles written by Trotsky in the 1930s, the period of great defeats for the international working class with the rise of fascism and the disorientations of Stalinism beating down on it. This was a time when political clarity, above all, was necessary. Trotsky, as a simple review of his biographical sketch will demonstrate, wore many hats in his forty years of conscious political life: political propagandist and theoretician; revolutionary working class parliamentary leader; razor-sharp journalist (I, for one, would not have wanted to cross swords with him. I would still be bleeding.); organizer of the great October Bolshevik revolution of 1917; organizer of the heroic and victorious Red Army in the civil war against the Whites in the aftermath of that revolution; seemingly tireless Soviet official; literary and culture critic: leader of the Russian Left Opposition in the 1920s; and, hounded and exiled leader of the International Left Opposition in the 1930s.

I have decided to concentrate on some of his writings from the 1930s for another reason as well. Why, with such a resume to choose from? Because, when the deal went down Leon Trotsky’s work in the 1930s, when he could have taken a political dive, I believe was the most important of his long career. He, virtually alone of the original Bolshevik leadership (at least of that part that still wanted to fight for international revolution), had the capacity to think and lead. He harnessed himself to the hard, uphill work of that period (step back, step way back, if you think we are “tilting at windmills” now). In that sense the vile Stalinist assassination in 1940, when Trotsky could still project years of political work ahead, is not among the least of Stalin’s crimes against the international working class. Had Trotsky lived another ten years or so, while he could not have “sucked” revolutions out of the ground, he could have stabilized a disoriented post-World War communist movement and we would probably have a far greater living communist movement today. Thanks for what you did do though, Comrade Trotsky.

*A Snapshot On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Leon Trotsky

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the great 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky. No added comment is needed in this space for the work, life and deeds of this man.

*From "Journey We More Into The Nightmare" A Lenin "YouTube" Bio

Click on the title to link to a "Journey More Into The Nightmare" Website presentation of a copy of a "YouTube" biography Of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader of the Russian revolution.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- *A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Moisei Uritsky

Click on title to link to “Wikipedia”'s entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Moise Uritsky. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Uritsky's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Moisei Uritsky

Click on title to link to “Wikipedia”'s entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Moise Uritsky. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Uritsky's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reasons, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Moisei Uritsky

Click on title to link to “Wikipedia”'s entry for the 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Moise Uritsky. No revolution can succeed without men and women of Uritsky's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Yakov Sverdlov

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive’s 1925 appreciation of Bolshevik leader and general organizer Yakov Sverdlov. Sverdlov, before his early and untimely death, was the 'general secretary' (and jack-of-all-trades) of the Bolshevik organization. It is his position that Joseph Stalin later took over on his way to sole power. A good question: what if Sverdlov had lived?

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Yakov Sverdlov

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive’s 1925 appreciation of Bolshevik leader and general organizer Yakov Sverdlov. Sverdlov, before his early and untimely death, was the 'general secretary' (and jack-of-all-trades) of the Bolshevik organization. It is his position that Joseph Stalin later took over on his way to sole power. A good question: what if Sverdlov had lived?

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- *A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution-Nadezhda Krupskaya

Click on title to link to Nadezhda Krupskaya Internet Archive's copy of a section of her very important work, "Reminiscences Of Lenin". This is inside stuff and required reading for those who want to get an idea of Lenin as a developing revolutionary leader.

Markin comment:


No revolution can succeed without men and women of Krupskaya's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reasons, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, still holds today.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- *In Honor Of Leon Trotsky's Birthday- Trotsky 's Political Memoir "My Life" (1930)

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives copy of the chapters of his "My Life" written in 1930 ten years before his death. This is the way a political memoir should be written but seldom, especially these days, is.

*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- From The Film Archives-In Honor Of The Birthday Anniversary Of Bolshevik Leader Leon Trotsky

Click on title to link to part one (of five, just click from part one) of YouTube's film clips detailing the highlights (and lows) of the life and death of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky. In Honor Of His Birthday Anniversary.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- *In Honor Of The Great Russian October 1917 Revolution- A Very Personal View

Click on title to link to one of YouTube's film clips of the "Russian Revolution". Some are in English, some are in Russian, some are absurd. Good luck in sorting them out. But honor the 100th anniversary of that watershed event.


Commentary/Reflections


Today, as we honor the 100th anniversary of the Great Russian October 1917 revolution I am in a reflective mood. Although the resulting Soviet Union that I spend a great part of my adult political arguing in the defense of is no more that bright shining moment in 1917 still lingers in my soul. Perhaps that mood is a result of once again having to think about the seemingly daunting task of making the American October. Perhaps that mood is a result of a certain disappointment over the blasé reaction of many, who should have known better, to the latest imperial moves by the Obama administration in Afghanistan when the called for reaction was anger and an urge to action.

Or perhaps it is a result of the grinding down, no, the virtual atomization of the American working class (and by extension the international working class) symbolized by the high unemployment rates and the failure to response to the capitalist deprivations of the past several years. Whatever the cause today, at least, I am thinking back to the little accumulation of factors; many that I am sure have been lost in the mist of time that made me so receptive to the siren call of the victory of the first workers state although I was two generations removed from its actuality.

As communists, particularly those of us who follow the ideas generated by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, we are always talking about stages of human consciousness: ruling class consciousness; working class consciousness; political consciousness; international working class consciousness;, and revolutionary consciousness are all mixed together. Clearly, and certainly based on my own personal experiences, there is no straight line development of political consciousness much less that one is born a Bolshevik. However, many life circumstances sure as hell can pave the road. I have spend no little time in this space over the past several years relating relevant incidents and commentary from my lifetime of left wing personal and political experiences. I do not intent to repeat those observations here. I actually want to go back to my youth and recount some things that, now, make my political direction seem more like that straight line mentioned above.

Having grown up in a dirt- poor working class family and living in those early days of the post- World War II “American Century” which promised unheard of prosperity after the trials and tribulations of the 1930s Great Depression and the World War II fight certainly made a deep impression on me. Moreover, living in an almost exclusively working poor environment with all of its adverse pathologies, also gives one, of necessity, a much distorted world view. As I pointed out in a commentary last year it was a very long time before I knew that there was anything other than being poor. Although I sensed it on the few occasions that I came up against middle class and rich kids. So early on I knew that there was an us, and them. And I definitely was with us-whatever that meant.

So that is predicate-but how does that take one away from what in most cases is a turning inward away from society rather than to defiantly fighting the monsters. That, my friends is not a simple story and do not believe those who give too quick an answer to how they developed their world view. It is a mix of impressions, understandings, misunderstandings and turning points. Hell, some of it is just happenstance, or at least it seems that way. How explain that in the heart of the Joe McCarthy-led “red scare” I did not hate communists. I did not want to turn anyone I suspected in to the government. In fact a quick run through of my political trajectory that I have made people laugh at is that when told that someone was a communist (by this I mean a Stalinist, the only game in town that I was aware of at the time) I said, in my best “family of the left” voice- so what that is one more for our side. When I moved left and was actively searching for communists to unite with I could only find them deep inside the Democratic Party. And when I seriously took up a Marxist worldview I dreaded running into them.

But enough of that. What do you make of this- In 1960 I distinctly remembered rooting for the Soviet Union to win more gold medals than the United States at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Or, being in a frenzy to get a copy of the “Communist Manifesto”, although for fairly long time to use it as a political opponent of that world view. (Which I got by sending away to the Government Printing Office. The reason that the GPO had it was that it was part of the ‘evidence’ from the famous 1960 San Francisco sessions of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) the one that were being demonstrated against as one of the first acts of the 1960s rebellion in the North or West.). Or being non-plussed when a high school history teacher called me a “Bolshevik” (I wasn’t… then) for some minor disobedience. Those are all well and good examples but let’s leave it at this. All of this was the stuff that made up, helter-skelter, the development of my political class consciousness. I like to think that all of that was natural for a working class kid. Hey, a theory that says labor must rule should be like moth to a flame for a working class kid. I have never regretted sticking with my class. And I never have regretted my “softness” for the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. Except this- Forward to more Octobers!

*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"- Fight For A Revolutionary Workers Party- A Guest Commentary

Click on the headline to link to a "Workers Vanguard" article, dated November 7, 2008, concerning the struggle to create a revolutionary labor party in America.

Markin comment:

I will "steal" the quote from Bertolt Brecht used in the above-linked article. It fits better than any commentary that I could provide about the nature of the times, and the tasks ahead.

**********

Taking my cue from Workers Vanguard No. 921 (26 September), I am going to start with a quote from Bertolt Brecht. This is from a poem called “Those Who Take the Meat from the Table,” written in the 1930s in the midst of the Great Depression:

Those who take the meat from the table
Teach contentment.
Those for whom the taxes are destined
Demand sacrifice.
Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry
Of wonderful times to come.
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.

*The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-LessonsForToday- Up Close And Personal- John Reed and The Russian Revolution Of 1917

Click on title to link to the John Reed Internet Archives.

BOOK REVIEW


This is the Anniversary of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. It is fitting that I review a book that did much to give Westerners a bird's-eye view of what happened during that tumultuous year. Forward To New Octobers!


Ten Days That Shook The World, John Reed, New American Library Edition, New York, 1967



I, on more than one occasion, have mentioned that for a detailed history of the ebb and flow of the Russian Revolution of 1917 from February to October of that year your man is the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s "History of the Russian Revolution" is partisan history at its best. One does not and should not, at least in this day in age, ask historians to be ‘objective’. One simply asks that the historian present his or her narrative and analysis and get out of the way. Trotsky meets that criterion. I have also mentioned in that same context that there are other excellent sources on this subject, depending on your needs. If you are looking for a general history of the revolution or want an analysis of what the revolution meant for the fate of various nations after World War I or its affect on world geopolitics look elsewhere. E.H. Carr’s "History of the Bolshevik Revolution" offers an excellent multi-volume set that tells that story through the 1920’s. Or if you want to know what the various parliamentary leaders, both bourgeois and Soviet, were thinking and doing from a moderately leftist viewpoint read Sukhanov’s "Notes on the Russian Revolution". If you need a more journalistic account for the period of the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks and the immediate aftermath, the book under review, John Reed’s classic "Ten Days That Shook the World" is invaluable.

If we do not, as mentioned above, expect our historians to be ‘objective’ then we have a lesser expectation of those journalists who write the ‘first draft of history’. Reed makes no bones about the fact that that he is a partisan of the Bolshevik-led social revolution that he was witnessing. He, nevertheless, tells his story reasonably well for those who are not partisans. Moreover, Reed seems to have been everywhere in Petersburg during those days. He is as likely to have been reporting from Petersburg’s Winter Palace, the seat of the Kerensky's Provisional Government, as Smolny, the seat of the insurgent Soviets. We can find him among the bourgeois politicians of the City Duma or at the Russian Army General Staff headquarters. Hell, he was also in Moscow when things were hot there as the Soviet forces tried to seize the Kremlin. He is at meetings large-Peasant Soviet size- or in some back room at Smolny with Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee that directed the uprising. To that extent, as a free lancer on the move, he covers physically during this period much more territory than Trotsky could as central director of the action and thus has more first hand observations.

Reed’s style tends toward straight forward reportage with little obvious sense of irony in the various situations that he is witnessing. Of course, against Trotsky’s masterly ironic sense he is bound to suffer by comparison. Nevertheless Reed gets us into places like the City Duma and into the heads of various characters like the Mayor of Petersburg that Trotsky, frankly, displayed no interest in dealing with. Probably the greatest compliment that one could pay Reed is that he is widely quoted as a reliable source in many historical accounts from Trotsky on the winning side to someone like Kerensky on the losing side. For those who want a quick but serious overview of the dynamic of the October Revolution then here is your man. Add in his companion Louise Bryant’s separate account, "Six Month In Red Russia" (if you can find it), and some very good primary source poster, pamphlet and newspaper material in the appendices of Reed’s book and you are on your way.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- From The Archives Of The Spartacist League (U.S.)- Trotskyism, What It Isn't and What It Is!

Click on the headline to link to the article described in the title.

Markin comment:

In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.

After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Deb’s Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.

Today I am starting what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.

However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.

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Markin comment on this article.

The name Leon Trotsky, his Marxist-driven strategic doctrine of permanent revolution, the leading role that he played in the pre-1917 Russian revolutionary movement as a free-lancer, the role that he played in the October revolution as a hard converted Bolshevik, his later military leadership of the defense of that revolution against the Whites and all manner of counter-revolutionaries and his epic battles for the soul of that revolution against the ascendant international Stalinist bureaucracy have occasioned so many lies wrapped in so many distortions wrapped in so many obfuscations, although not wrapped in any enigmas, that I for one when I was just a young (well, maybe not so young at that) revolutionary starting out I just had to learn more.

In those days it was hard because you had to wade through the Moscow-centered orthodox Stalinist slanders, the orthodox Maoist-centered Chinese Stalinist misunderstandings, hell, the Albanian Stalinist-centered goofiness thrown against his revolutionary virtue. That task muddled through, it was still necessary, as this article's subject indicates, to see who was marching in step, or at least half-step, with Trotsky and his Fourth Internationalist movement and who was preening. This last task, as wading once against through this article brought back to mind, was tough learning for a young man steeped in "anti-sectarian", "anti-cultish" social democracy. But I did learn more, and the more I learned the easier it was to see who was wagging the dog’s tail (like that expression?) and who was acting as an agent of the Mikado, the Argentine German Nazi underground, MI6, the CIA, some phantom Trotskyist lonelyhearts club, or your dear Aunt Sally. In any case it was not, I repeat, not Leon Trotsky. But as I constantly reiterate, old comrade Trotsky have never been, is not now, and will not be in need in the future of my certificate of revolutionary good conduct, that of any state agency, or yours. Still you have to investigate, as simply an intelligent proposition, his legacy for yourselves. And this is a decent primer.

The100thAnniversaryYearOfTheBolshevik-LedOctoberRevolution-Lessons- *From The Film Archives-In Honor Of The Birthday Anniversary Of Bolshevik Leader Leon Trotsky

Click on title to link to part one (of five, just click from part one) of YouTube's film clips detailing the highlights (and lows) of the life and death of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky. In Honor Of His Birthday Anniversary.