Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Pete Seeger performing his classic anti-war song, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy".
Markin comment:
In a week where American President Obama has indeed entrenched himself deeper in Afghanistan (the "Big Poppy") and has gone out of his way, way out of his way, to make it his own "splendid little war" this song seems very, very appropriate.
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Waist Deep In The Big Muddy Lyrics
It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.
We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.
Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
*From “The Rag Blog”- “Bob Feldman 68” Blog- A People’s History Of Afghanistan, Part Twelve
Click on the headline to link to a “The Rag Blog” entry from the “Bob Feldman 68” blog on the history of Afghanistan
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Monday, June 28, 2010
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Gays And The SWP (American Socialist Workers Party)
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
****************
Seduced and Abandoned: The Politics of Opportunism
Gays and the SWP
"Tinkerbell Meets Trotsky: The Revolution Betrayed": With this smirking title as a come-on, Boston's Cay Community News (19 September 1981) reviewed two collections of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) internal documents on gay liberation recently published by gay activists to scandalize the SWP. The document collections, Cay Liberation and Socialism (published by David Thorstad) and No Apologies (published by Scott Forgione and Kurt Hill, with an introduction by Thorstad), cover the SWP's gyrations on the gay question from 1970 to 1979. Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are all ex-SWP members who want to expose the SWP's "betrayal" of gay lifestylist politics. In this they certainly succeed. They and the Cay Community News reviewer, Scott Tucker, an anarchist/gay liberationist, use the sorry story of SWP hypocrisy to denounce Trotskyism as an enemy of freedom for homosexuals.
But the SWP has not had anything in common with Trotskyism for a long time! The authentic Trotskyist tendency in this country, the Spartacist League, has never wavered in its commitment to opposing anti-gay backwardness and the brutal enforcement of sexual puritanism by the capitalist state. From our very inception as an organization and long before the advent of a "gay liberation movement" (and at a time when the SWP was still forcing gay members to resign!), the Spartacist League has fought against all victimization and persecution of homosexuals. But Thorstad & Co. would prefer not to acknowledge our record because their aim is to show that only those who see themselves as gay activists first and foremost can be relied on to defend the democratic rights of homosexuals.
Our commitment to gay rights has never meant patronizing acceptance of gay activists' lifestylist illusions. The Spartacist League has always argued against the dangerously Utopian belief that in this violent, class-divided society "only gays can liberate themselves." On the contrary, only socialist revolution can lay the basis for finally uprooting sick prejudices against "sexual deviance," through providing social alternatives to the stifling monogamous family, the main social institution oppressing women, children and homosexuals. Our aim is not a sectoralist "gay movement" but a revolutionary party based on the working class to lead the struggles of all the oppressed—and in which the best fighters from all sectors of the oppressed will be, not narrow representatives of "their people," but communist revolutionaries.
Lenin's exhortation in What Is To Be Done? (1903) guides our work:
"The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects... who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat." Our principled approach to these questions has attracted to the Spartacist League some of the best elements of the New Left-derived gay liberation milieu, most notably the Los Angeles-based Red Flag Union (formerly Lavender & Red Union), with whom we fused in 1977 (see W&R No. 16, Winter 1977-78, which discusses the key political issues—defense of the Soviet Union, rejection of lifestylism—which laid the programmatic basis for the fusion).
By contrast, the SWP documents published by Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are a testament to the proposition that opportunism doesn't pay. The value of the SWP documents is not, as Thorstad maintains, that they are "the most important such debates ever to occur inside any left-wing group" or that they will prove "essential" to resolving the question of the relationship between the fight against homosexual oppression and the fight for socialism. They are, however, useful for the light they shed on the grotesque zig-zags and utter cynicism of the reformist SWP. That today the SWP now dismisses Thorstad and his "North American Man/Boy Love Association"— currently being victimized by a state witchhunt—as virtual child molesters, as part of the current SWP policy of benign neglect of gay rights, is not merely evidence of their adaptation to homophobia.
The method behind this history of flirtation with and abandonment of this specially oppressed sector is the same tailist approach the SWP brought to what they called the "autonomous mass movements" of feminists, black nationalists, Chicano nationalists, etc. With the proliferation of "do-it-yourself liberation" currents in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the SWP with consummate cynicism authored the proposition that "consistent" anythingism equals socialism and jumped on the gay bandwagon. When the lifestyle radical mood receded the SWP backed away from the gay question. Ultimately, the SWP rediscovered the working class and with predictable opportunist logic decided to "turn" to the unions by pandering to some of the most backward attitudes prevalent among workers, as for example through Barnes & Co.'s despicable defense of anti-homosexual "age of consent" laws.
If we can share the disgust of Thorstad et al. with the SWP's wretched politics, it is for very different reasons. There is a political chasm dividing the petty-bourgeois politics of gay community lifestylism from Marxism. Thorstad at least, has drawn the conclusion from his experiences in and out of the SWP that Marxism has nothing to say to homosexuals: "For years, gay socialists have been trying to develop a synthesis between homosexuality and socialism— After a decade of effort, I am ready to draw the conclusion that the left has failed to meet the challenge of gay liberation." He concludes his introduction to No Apologies by quoting an earlier gay liberationism Kurt Hiller, "The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals
themselves."
Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League contingent in Los Angeles march against anti-homosexual Briggs Initiative, July 1978.
Hill and Forgione (now, respectively, a supporter of the social-democratic Workers Power group and a staff member of Cay Community News) still present themselves as Marxists—of a sort. Littering their own documents with dozens of cutesy-poo illustrations (a cartoon of Lenin, Brezhnev and Trotsky in a gay bath), they conclude their foreword to No Apologies with the slogans "For an understanding of Michael Mouse-Lennonism too!" and "In defense of campy socialists as well as the socialist camp!" Is this the sort of treatment they think will serve "to further a Marxist perspective" on the gay question?
Tucker is an, unabashed anti-Marxist, an anarchist whose sense of political reality is best illustrated by his comment, "The SWP leadership has no sense of proportion if it really believes that transvestism is so much more exotic and eccentric to the masses than Trotskyism itself"! The entire point of his lengthy review is to use the SWP in order to write off "all 57 varieties of Marxism-Leninism" as "unfit for human consumption."
There is, however, a revolutionary alternative to Tucker's anarcho-lifestylism, Thorstad's advocacy of an autonomous gay movement, and Forgiohe/Hill's Mickey-Mouse "Marxism." To develop this theme, it is necessary to delve a little deeper into the SWP's slimy record and into the politics of gay liberationism.
The SWP in the '60s: "Gay is Good"...Maybe
As part of the SWP's political degeneration in the 1960s the organization adopted an unofficial policy of excluding homosexuals. As SWP honcho Jack Barnes admitted in a report to the Political Committee (the SWP top leadership) in November 1970, "Since the early 1960s the party and YSA [Young Socialist Alliance] have been moving toward a policy which proscribes homosexuals from membership" (quoted in Gay Liberation and Socialism, p. 5).
In its earlier revolutionary days the SWP leadership, in particular founding leader James P. Cannon, had a far different attitude. In his contribution to the commemorative book James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, longtime SWP leader Sam Gordon recalled the case of "a young leader of the organization ...[who] had fallen afoul of the New York homosexual laws, and was clapped into jail one day early in the thirties." Cannon, Gordon recalled, got the comrade out. "The case was finally quashed. Our comrade continued to be a leading member...." But in the 1960s the SWP was sloughing off simple decency, as well as revolutionary principles, in its pursuit of success on the cheap.
The hallmark of that New Left era was the SWP's vigorous attempt to mimic and adapt to black nationalism, feminism, Chicano nationalism (the mythical land of "Aztlan") and virtually every other "mass movement"—most importantly the liberal-bourgeois anti-war movement. As Barnes said, "The consistent and irreconcilable liberation struggle of an oppressed nationality is our struggle. If it is irreconcilable and consistent, then it will point toward socialism..." (speech to 1970 SWP convention). As applied to feminism et al. this became "consistent (fill in the blank) will lead to socialism." It was only a matter of time until Barnes & Co. discovered gay liberation. And if "Black is Beautiful" and "Sisterhood is Powerful" became, in the SWP's eyes, "socialist" slogans—then why not "Gay is Good"? Tucker indignantly raises this very point, and indeed, by the SWP's own logic, there's no reason they shouldn't have adopted this equally meaningless slogan as well.
However, there was a layer of SWP "old guard" conservatives, trade-union oriented and socially conservative, who, while they dared not challenge feminism and black nationalism so openly, found the gay movement hard to swallow. By the time the SWP got geared up to drop its ban on homosexual members and mount an intervention into the gay movement, that movement itself was already showing signs of dying down. Spring 1971 was the height of the SWP's brief infatuation with gay liberation: they mobilized heavily for gay marches and for a gay contingent in the April antiwar peace crawl in Washington. The Militant ran gay-oriented articles (many authored by Thorstad) in virtually every issue.
But as Thorstad later recalled, "The party's involvement had hardly begun when the brakes began to be applied" (Gay Liberator, December 1974-January 1975). In May 1971 the SWP announced a "probe" into the gay liberation movement that, in hindsight, was really the beginning of a withdrawal from it. The following year saw a lengthy literary discussion in the SWP's internal bulletin, which forms the bulk of the documents in Thorstad's collection. This concluded with the 1973 SWP convention where a "Memorandum on the Gay Liberation Movement" outlined the Barnes gang's intention to drop gay lib politics.
Without rejecting the sectoralist method which had led the SWP to briefly tail the gay movement, the Memo basically concluded that there was not enough of a movement to tail. This reality was covered with some orthodox Marxist phrases about taking no position on whether gay was better,, worse, or just as good as straight. The gay question, the Memo said, was simply a question of democratic rights, not (as gay activists would have it) a broader struggle to liberate everyone's sexual nature. And in a revealing aside on just how far lifestylist counter-culturalism had been allowed to flower inside the SWP, the Memo authors felt obliged to note that male comrades should not wear dresses and that "sexual activities... have no place at party socials." ,
The Memo, although it praised the gay liberation movement (with the exception of its "ultraleft" [sic] sector), naturally enough was seen as a gross betrayal by the gay liberationists recruited during the SWP's Spring fling, and especially by chief gay spokesman David Thorstad. A wave of quits predictably followed. As Thorstad explained in his December 1973 resignation statement: "It [the Memo] has made it impossible for gays to reconcile their commitment to gay liberation with party membership" (Cay Liberation and Socialism, p. 127).
Anita Bryant and "The Turn"
The SWP dumped the gay movement in '73 mainly because there didn't seem to be a lot of recruits to gain. There was also an element of concession to conservative SWP leaders like Tom Kerry and Nat Weinstein. So it was not unexpected that when, in 1977, Anita Bryant's hate campaign against homosexuals provoked a brief spate of massive demonstrations in U.S. cities, it also provoked a renewed interest in the gay movement in the SWP. SWP leader Doug Jenness authored a "clarification" on the '73 Memo, writing that "...we solidarize with the sentiment of the gay liberation movement that 'gay is good'" interpreting this not as advocacy of homosexuality (which of course it was!) but as a statement that "gay people are just as good as heterosexual people" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 5, 11 June 1977). An SWP gay oppositionist wrote that "since the June 7 Miami referendum, differences over the party's tactical orientation to the gay movement have been completely superceded by dramatic events—The party has responded in a revolutionary fashion to the latest upsurge of the gay movement" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 9 July 1977).
But no sooner had the mass marches ceased than SWP interest in the gay movement ceased. Simultaneously, having watched the black nationalist, feminist, antiwar and other New Left movements die off in the 1970s, the SWP suddenly discovered the working class. That is to say, Barnes & Co. found something new to tail: the liberal wing of the trade-union bureaucracy. The very same people who had been the architects of what they now called the "long detour" from the working class into the various "independent mass movements" of the oppressed now began declaiming the elementary Marxist concept that the working class alone has the social weight to make socialist revolution and serve as the liberator of all the oppressed. Cynical? Certainly. Dishonest? By all means. This "turn" meant not only the end of the SWP's dabbling with gay lifestylist politics, but an adaptation to the most backward attitudes, not just among the working class, but increasingly to new moods of conservatism being enforced by a reactionary bourgeois backlash against the "permissive" 1960s.
In part in a drive to ingratiate themselves with liberal union reformers like Ed Sadlowski of the Steelworkers and Arnold Miller of the Mine Workers, the Barnes leadership sought to purge the SWP of its more flagrantly non-"proletarian" elements. Flamboyant gay liberationists were on the top of the list. It only remained to find a reasonable excuse to publicly ditch the gay orientation. In February 1979 an excuse was found—age-of-consent laws and the turn of part of the gay movement (Thorstad in particular) to the explosive issue of "cross-generational" sex and rights for gay youth.
At a Philadelphia conference to plan for a national gay march on Washington, SWPers took an active part. One of the demands raised was "full rights for gay youth, including revision of age-of-consent laws" (later watered down to "protection for lesbian and gay youth ..."). Little more than a month later the Militant (13 April 1979) ran a major article, "The Class-Struggle Road to Winning Gay Rights," in order to reject the march on Washington and blast the very existence of a "so-called gay movement defined by sexuality." The most vicious thrust was a direct attack on Thorstad for having "foisted" the issue of "man-boy love" on the gay movement.
"The repeal of age-of-consent laws is a reactionary demand..." proclaimed the SWP; "saying that children have the 'right' to 'consent' to sex with adults is exactly like saying children should be able to 'consent' to work in a garment factory twelve hours a day." The Militant even rejected '"non-abusive consensual' sex by adults with children": "Laws designed to protect children from sexual and economic exploitation by adults are historic acquisitions of the working class and should be enforced." The SWP refused to mobilize for the Washington march they had helped to plan. Forgione and Hill fought a losing battle against the new direction internally while Michael Maggi, a former co-thinker of Thorstad's who had seen the light in 1973 and become a loyal Barnesite, termed Thorstad a "baby-fucker" and ordered gay literature in the SWP's New York City bookstore thrown out, according to No Apologies.
The issue of age-of-consent laws (or rather, the frightening, still socially taboo issue of childhood sexuality) is inflammatory. Nonetheless, opposition to such laws must be elementary for defenders of democratic rights for youth, whatever their sexual orientation. As Young Spartacus (Summer 1979) put it:
"Revolutionaries, unlike the social-democratic SWP, oppose any and all legal restrictions by the capitalist state on effectively consensual sexual activity. Get the cops out of the bedrooms! We know that such measures are not designed to protect children but to enforce the sexual morality of the nuclear family, which is at the root of the oppression of women, youth and homosexuals "Those who, like the SWP, join the reactionary chorus calling for the capitalist state to enforce the sexual codes based on the morality of the bourgeois family only help to prop up a key bastion of child abuse and one of the strongest pillars of capitalist oppression."
"Gay Liberation" and Marxism
While Forgione and Hill were making their last stand for gay lifestylism in the SWP, they attempted to claim that the Barnes leadership was going the way of the "sectarian" Spartacist League. As Hill wrote:
"The party leadership appears to have capitulated to the sectarian-workerist traits which we used to blast in our opponents. We ridiculed the 'class struggle' formalism of the sectarians such as the Spartacist League who charged that our attitude toward struggles such as women's liberation and Black liberation was'petty-bourgeois.'We encouraged the developments of these and other mass movements for social change."
—SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22,12
July 1979
In some ways Forgione and Hill were simply the most consistent defenders of the SWP's course throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. "Key terms used in the past/' they wrote, "such as 'best builders' of the 'independent mass struggles/ are giving way to the 'worker-Bolsheviks' of 'labor's strategic line of march'....the party is beginning to drift away from the theoretical acquisitions of the past, 20 years" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22).
Quite so. But what Forgione and Hill cannot comprehend is that what they term "theoretical acquisitions" had been simply opportunist rationales for tailing petty-bourgeois, self-boosting, mutually-conflicting "mass movements" and that Barnes' "turn" was not toward genuine Trotskyism but toward tailing a new "mass movement"—labor reformism.
What unites all the somewhat disparate elements in the "gay community" is a common commitment to the politics of the gay lifestyle. To the gay liberationist, at bottom simply being openly homosexual is in itself a political act. To the "socialist" gay liberationist, it is even revolutionary. As Forgione put it: "It has been through this struggle for self-affirmation as-an equal human being ('coming out') that has led increasing numbers of lesbians and gay men... to become quite convinced that this society is sick and has to be either radically changed or replaced" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 17, 9 July 1979).
"Coming out" is obviously a personal decision—and one which, given the realities of life in this society, has potentially serious consequences. But for the New Left and its various spin-offs, the personal is political. Quoting anarchist Gustav Landauer in his review, Scott Tucker is quite explicit that the revolution is accomplished by living a revolutionary lifestyle: "The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."
Would that it were so easy to create a new society! The state happens to enforce its morality and its exploitative form of production, with cops, courts, prisons—internationally with MX missiles and armies— and those who go against it are going to get attacked.
The best proof that gay liberation is a petty-bourgeois ideology is that an openly gay lifestyle in a "gay community" is only possible in severely restricted and largely middle-class "gay ghettoes"—West Hollywood, Castro Street, the West Village. What about gay men and lesbians who do not or cannot move to one of these gay islands in a sea of "patriarchal capitalism"? Cay liberation has no answer.
In fact, Forgione and Hill revealed their own petty-bourgeois biases by their violent resistance to the SWP's "turn" to the working class. They took offense when SWP leaders implied that gays were a petty-bourgeois species, and insisted that there are gay workers too. But when it came time to reach out to their "brothers" in the steel and auto plants, Forgione and Hill seemed strangely reluctant. This is not to give any credence to the Barnes gang's "proletarian" credentials, but Forgione and Hill seem to assume that the only role for homosexual socialists is doing "gay work" in the "gay community."
Can homosexuals, as Thorstad insists, liberate themselves? Here the question of "social weight," referred to ad nauseum in the SWP documents, rears its head. For all that the Socialist Workers Party used this concept simply cynically, nonetheless they have a point—and one on which the Spartacist League insisted while Barnes & Co. were hopping on and off the gay liberation bandwagon. We are for "the sexual liberation of everybody"—however, we certainly do not intend to legislate the sexual behavior of future generations by putting our "seal of approval" on any particular sexual mode in this necessarily deforming society—gay, straight, mixed, whatever. That is why we pose our demands in the sexual-personal area negatively: against moralistic state legislation of sexuality. • But more immediately, changing this society means a struggle for power—which means creating a powerful mass party rooted in the working class, which alone has the cohesiveness and social weight, because it produces this society's wealth, to make a socialist revolution. To eliminate the oppression of homosexuals, rooted in the sexual morality of the bourgeois family, it will ultimately be necessary to replace the family with other cooperative institutions in a socialist society. The immediate aftermath of socialist revolution will wipe out all discriminatory laws and criminal sanctions against "deviant" sexual behavior. But a more fundamental transformation is required to change deeply-rooted, ancient attitudes toward sex roles and sexuality. We don't think this is an easy, or simply resolved, question by any means. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal of Marxism has always been the creation of a society in which every individual can develop his potential to the utmost, freed of economic compulsion and attendent psychological miseries.
The job of revolutionaries is to forge a revolutionary vanguard party which can, as Lenin said, serve as a "tribune of the people," fighting all forms of oppression as part of the necessary education of the proletariat in assuming its leading role in the creation of a new society. In the end the "best builders" of rights and freedom for homosexuals will be those who, whatever their sexual orientation, are builders of such a party.
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
****************
Seduced and Abandoned: The Politics of Opportunism
Gays and the SWP
"Tinkerbell Meets Trotsky: The Revolution Betrayed": With this smirking title as a come-on, Boston's Cay Community News (19 September 1981) reviewed two collections of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) internal documents on gay liberation recently published by gay activists to scandalize the SWP. The document collections, Cay Liberation and Socialism (published by David Thorstad) and No Apologies (published by Scott Forgione and Kurt Hill, with an introduction by Thorstad), cover the SWP's gyrations on the gay question from 1970 to 1979. Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are all ex-SWP members who want to expose the SWP's "betrayal" of gay lifestylist politics. In this they certainly succeed. They and the Cay Community News reviewer, Scott Tucker, an anarchist/gay liberationist, use the sorry story of SWP hypocrisy to denounce Trotskyism as an enemy of freedom for homosexuals.
But the SWP has not had anything in common with Trotskyism for a long time! The authentic Trotskyist tendency in this country, the Spartacist League, has never wavered in its commitment to opposing anti-gay backwardness and the brutal enforcement of sexual puritanism by the capitalist state. From our very inception as an organization and long before the advent of a "gay liberation movement" (and at a time when the SWP was still forcing gay members to resign!), the Spartacist League has fought against all victimization and persecution of homosexuals. But Thorstad & Co. would prefer not to acknowledge our record because their aim is to show that only those who see themselves as gay activists first and foremost can be relied on to defend the democratic rights of homosexuals.
Our commitment to gay rights has never meant patronizing acceptance of gay activists' lifestylist illusions. The Spartacist League has always argued against the dangerously Utopian belief that in this violent, class-divided society "only gays can liberate themselves." On the contrary, only socialist revolution can lay the basis for finally uprooting sick prejudices against "sexual deviance," through providing social alternatives to the stifling monogamous family, the main social institution oppressing women, children and homosexuals. Our aim is not a sectoralist "gay movement" but a revolutionary party based on the working class to lead the struggles of all the oppressed—and in which the best fighters from all sectors of the oppressed will be, not narrow representatives of "their people," but communist revolutionaries.
Lenin's exhortation in What Is To Be Done? (1903) guides our work:
"The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects... who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat." Our principled approach to these questions has attracted to the Spartacist League some of the best elements of the New Left-derived gay liberation milieu, most notably the Los Angeles-based Red Flag Union (formerly Lavender & Red Union), with whom we fused in 1977 (see W&R No. 16, Winter 1977-78, which discusses the key political issues—defense of the Soviet Union, rejection of lifestylism—which laid the programmatic basis for the fusion).
By contrast, the SWP documents published by Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are a testament to the proposition that opportunism doesn't pay. The value of the SWP documents is not, as Thorstad maintains, that they are "the most important such debates ever to occur inside any left-wing group" or that they will prove "essential" to resolving the question of the relationship between the fight against homosexual oppression and the fight for socialism. They are, however, useful for the light they shed on the grotesque zig-zags and utter cynicism of the reformist SWP. That today the SWP now dismisses Thorstad and his "North American Man/Boy Love Association"— currently being victimized by a state witchhunt—as virtual child molesters, as part of the current SWP policy of benign neglect of gay rights, is not merely evidence of their adaptation to homophobia.
The method behind this history of flirtation with and abandonment of this specially oppressed sector is the same tailist approach the SWP brought to what they called the "autonomous mass movements" of feminists, black nationalists, Chicano nationalists, etc. With the proliferation of "do-it-yourself liberation" currents in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the SWP with consummate cynicism authored the proposition that "consistent" anythingism equals socialism and jumped on the gay bandwagon. When the lifestyle radical mood receded the SWP backed away from the gay question. Ultimately, the SWP rediscovered the working class and with predictable opportunist logic decided to "turn" to the unions by pandering to some of the most backward attitudes prevalent among workers, as for example through Barnes & Co.'s despicable defense of anti-homosexual "age of consent" laws.
If we can share the disgust of Thorstad et al. with the SWP's wretched politics, it is for very different reasons. There is a political chasm dividing the petty-bourgeois politics of gay community lifestylism from Marxism. Thorstad at least, has drawn the conclusion from his experiences in and out of the SWP that Marxism has nothing to say to homosexuals: "For years, gay socialists have been trying to develop a synthesis between homosexuality and socialism— After a decade of effort, I am ready to draw the conclusion that the left has failed to meet the challenge of gay liberation." He concludes his introduction to No Apologies by quoting an earlier gay liberationism Kurt Hiller, "The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals
themselves."
Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League contingent in Los Angeles march against anti-homosexual Briggs Initiative, July 1978.
Hill and Forgione (now, respectively, a supporter of the social-democratic Workers Power group and a staff member of Cay Community News) still present themselves as Marxists—of a sort. Littering their own documents with dozens of cutesy-poo illustrations (a cartoon of Lenin, Brezhnev and Trotsky in a gay bath), they conclude their foreword to No Apologies with the slogans "For an understanding of Michael Mouse-Lennonism too!" and "In defense of campy socialists as well as the socialist camp!" Is this the sort of treatment they think will serve "to further a Marxist perspective" on the gay question?
Tucker is an, unabashed anti-Marxist, an anarchist whose sense of political reality is best illustrated by his comment, "The SWP leadership has no sense of proportion if it really believes that transvestism is so much more exotic and eccentric to the masses than Trotskyism itself"! The entire point of his lengthy review is to use the SWP in order to write off "all 57 varieties of Marxism-Leninism" as "unfit for human consumption."
There is, however, a revolutionary alternative to Tucker's anarcho-lifestylism, Thorstad's advocacy of an autonomous gay movement, and Forgiohe/Hill's Mickey-Mouse "Marxism." To develop this theme, it is necessary to delve a little deeper into the SWP's slimy record and into the politics of gay liberationism.
The SWP in the '60s: "Gay is Good"...Maybe
As part of the SWP's political degeneration in the 1960s the organization adopted an unofficial policy of excluding homosexuals. As SWP honcho Jack Barnes admitted in a report to the Political Committee (the SWP top leadership) in November 1970, "Since the early 1960s the party and YSA [Young Socialist Alliance] have been moving toward a policy which proscribes homosexuals from membership" (quoted in Gay Liberation and Socialism, p. 5).
In its earlier revolutionary days the SWP leadership, in particular founding leader James P. Cannon, had a far different attitude. In his contribution to the commemorative book James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, longtime SWP leader Sam Gordon recalled the case of "a young leader of the organization ...[who] had fallen afoul of the New York homosexual laws, and was clapped into jail one day early in the thirties." Cannon, Gordon recalled, got the comrade out. "The case was finally quashed. Our comrade continued to be a leading member...." But in the 1960s the SWP was sloughing off simple decency, as well as revolutionary principles, in its pursuit of success on the cheap.
The hallmark of that New Left era was the SWP's vigorous attempt to mimic and adapt to black nationalism, feminism, Chicano nationalism (the mythical land of "Aztlan") and virtually every other "mass movement"—most importantly the liberal-bourgeois anti-war movement. As Barnes said, "The consistent and irreconcilable liberation struggle of an oppressed nationality is our struggle. If it is irreconcilable and consistent, then it will point toward socialism..." (speech to 1970 SWP convention). As applied to feminism et al. this became "consistent (fill in the blank) will lead to socialism." It was only a matter of time until Barnes & Co. discovered gay liberation. And if "Black is Beautiful" and "Sisterhood is Powerful" became, in the SWP's eyes, "socialist" slogans—then why not "Gay is Good"? Tucker indignantly raises this very point, and indeed, by the SWP's own logic, there's no reason they shouldn't have adopted this equally meaningless slogan as well.
However, there was a layer of SWP "old guard" conservatives, trade-union oriented and socially conservative, who, while they dared not challenge feminism and black nationalism so openly, found the gay movement hard to swallow. By the time the SWP got geared up to drop its ban on homosexual members and mount an intervention into the gay movement, that movement itself was already showing signs of dying down. Spring 1971 was the height of the SWP's brief infatuation with gay liberation: they mobilized heavily for gay marches and for a gay contingent in the April antiwar peace crawl in Washington. The Militant ran gay-oriented articles (many authored by Thorstad) in virtually every issue.
But as Thorstad later recalled, "The party's involvement had hardly begun when the brakes began to be applied" (Gay Liberator, December 1974-January 1975). In May 1971 the SWP announced a "probe" into the gay liberation movement that, in hindsight, was really the beginning of a withdrawal from it. The following year saw a lengthy literary discussion in the SWP's internal bulletin, which forms the bulk of the documents in Thorstad's collection. This concluded with the 1973 SWP convention where a "Memorandum on the Gay Liberation Movement" outlined the Barnes gang's intention to drop gay lib politics.
Without rejecting the sectoralist method which had led the SWP to briefly tail the gay movement, the Memo basically concluded that there was not enough of a movement to tail. This reality was covered with some orthodox Marxist phrases about taking no position on whether gay was better,, worse, or just as good as straight. The gay question, the Memo said, was simply a question of democratic rights, not (as gay activists would have it) a broader struggle to liberate everyone's sexual nature. And in a revealing aside on just how far lifestylist counter-culturalism had been allowed to flower inside the SWP, the Memo authors felt obliged to note that male comrades should not wear dresses and that "sexual activities... have no place at party socials." ,
The Memo, although it praised the gay liberation movement (with the exception of its "ultraleft" [sic] sector), naturally enough was seen as a gross betrayal by the gay liberationists recruited during the SWP's Spring fling, and especially by chief gay spokesman David Thorstad. A wave of quits predictably followed. As Thorstad explained in his December 1973 resignation statement: "It [the Memo] has made it impossible for gays to reconcile their commitment to gay liberation with party membership" (Cay Liberation and Socialism, p. 127).
Anita Bryant and "The Turn"
The SWP dumped the gay movement in '73 mainly because there didn't seem to be a lot of recruits to gain. There was also an element of concession to conservative SWP leaders like Tom Kerry and Nat Weinstein. So it was not unexpected that when, in 1977, Anita Bryant's hate campaign against homosexuals provoked a brief spate of massive demonstrations in U.S. cities, it also provoked a renewed interest in the gay movement in the SWP. SWP leader Doug Jenness authored a "clarification" on the '73 Memo, writing that "...we solidarize with the sentiment of the gay liberation movement that 'gay is good'" interpreting this not as advocacy of homosexuality (which of course it was!) but as a statement that "gay people are just as good as heterosexual people" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 5, 11 June 1977). An SWP gay oppositionist wrote that "since the June 7 Miami referendum, differences over the party's tactical orientation to the gay movement have been completely superceded by dramatic events—The party has responded in a revolutionary fashion to the latest upsurge of the gay movement" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 9 July 1977).
But no sooner had the mass marches ceased than SWP interest in the gay movement ceased. Simultaneously, having watched the black nationalist, feminist, antiwar and other New Left movements die off in the 1970s, the SWP suddenly discovered the working class. That is to say, Barnes & Co. found something new to tail: the liberal wing of the trade-union bureaucracy. The very same people who had been the architects of what they now called the "long detour" from the working class into the various "independent mass movements" of the oppressed now began declaiming the elementary Marxist concept that the working class alone has the social weight to make socialist revolution and serve as the liberator of all the oppressed. Cynical? Certainly. Dishonest? By all means. This "turn" meant not only the end of the SWP's dabbling with gay lifestylist politics, but an adaptation to the most backward attitudes, not just among the working class, but increasingly to new moods of conservatism being enforced by a reactionary bourgeois backlash against the "permissive" 1960s.
In part in a drive to ingratiate themselves with liberal union reformers like Ed Sadlowski of the Steelworkers and Arnold Miller of the Mine Workers, the Barnes leadership sought to purge the SWP of its more flagrantly non-"proletarian" elements. Flamboyant gay liberationists were on the top of the list. It only remained to find a reasonable excuse to publicly ditch the gay orientation. In February 1979 an excuse was found—age-of-consent laws and the turn of part of the gay movement (Thorstad in particular) to the explosive issue of "cross-generational" sex and rights for gay youth.
At a Philadelphia conference to plan for a national gay march on Washington, SWPers took an active part. One of the demands raised was "full rights for gay youth, including revision of age-of-consent laws" (later watered down to "protection for lesbian and gay youth ..."). Little more than a month later the Militant (13 April 1979) ran a major article, "The Class-Struggle Road to Winning Gay Rights," in order to reject the march on Washington and blast the very existence of a "so-called gay movement defined by sexuality." The most vicious thrust was a direct attack on Thorstad for having "foisted" the issue of "man-boy love" on the gay movement.
"The repeal of age-of-consent laws is a reactionary demand..." proclaimed the SWP; "saying that children have the 'right' to 'consent' to sex with adults is exactly like saying children should be able to 'consent' to work in a garment factory twelve hours a day." The Militant even rejected '"non-abusive consensual' sex by adults with children": "Laws designed to protect children from sexual and economic exploitation by adults are historic acquisitions of the working class and should be enforced." The SWP refused to mobilize for the Washington march they had helped to plan. Forgione and Hill fought a losing battle against the new direction internally while Michael Maggi, a former co-thinker of Thorstad's who had seen the light in 1973 and become a loyal Barnesite, termed Thorstad a "baby-fucker" and ordered gay literature in the SWP's New York City bookstore thrown out, according to No Apologies.
The issue of age-of-consent laws (or rather, the frightening, still socially taboo issue of childhood sexuality) is inflammatory. Nonetheless, opposition to such laws must be elementary for defenders of democratic rights for youth, whatever their sexual orientation. As Young Spartacus (Summer 1979) put it:
"Revolutionaries, unlike the social-democratic SWP, oppose any and all legal restrictions by the capitalist state on effectively consensual sexual activity. Get the cops out of the bedrooms! We know that such measures are not designed to protect children but to enforce the sexual morality of the nuclear family, which is at the root of the oppression of women, youth and homosexuals "Those who, like the SWP, join the reactionary chorus calling for the capitalist state to enforce the sexual codes based on the morality of the bourgeois family only help to prop up a key bastion of child abuse and one of the strongest pillars of capitalist oppression."
"Gay Liberation" and Marxism
While Forgione and Hill were making their last stand for gay lifestylism in the SWP, they attempted to claim that the Barnes leadership was going the way of the "sectarian" Spartacist League. As Hill wrote:
"The party leadership appears to have capitulated to the sectarian-workerist traits which we used to blast in our opponents. We ridiculed the 'class struggle' formalism of the sectarians such as the Spartacist League who charged that our attitude toward struggles such as women's liberation and Black liberation was'petty-bourgeois.'We encouraged the developments of these and other mass movements for social change."
—SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22,12
July 1979
In some ways Forgione and Hill were simply the most consistent defenders of the SWP's course throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. "Key terms used in the past/' they wrote, "such as 'best builders' of the 'independent mass struggles/ are giving way to the 'worker-Bolsheviks' of 'labor's strategic line of march'....the party is beginning to drift away from the theoretical acquisitions of the past, 20 years" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22).
Quite so. But what Forgione and Hill cannot comprehend is that what they term "theoretical acquisitions" had been simply opportunist rationales for tailing petty-bourgeois, self-boosting, mutually-conflicting "mass movements" and that Barnes' "turn" was not toward genuine Trotskyism but toward tailing a new "mass movement"—labor reformism.
What unites all the somewhat disparate elements in the "gay community" is a common commitment to the politics of the gay lifestyle. To the gay liberationist, at bottom simply being openly homosexual is in itself a political act. To the "socialist" gay liberationist, it is even revolutionary. As Forgione put it: "It has been through this struggle for self-affirmation as-an equal human being ('coming out') that has led increasing numbers of lesbians and gay men... to become quite convinced that this society is sick and has to be either radically changed or replaced" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 17, 9 July 1979).
"Coming out" is obviously a personal decision—and one which, given the realities of life in this society, has potentially serious consequences. But for the New Left and its various spin-offs, the personal is political. Quoting anarchist Gustav Landauer in his review, Scott Tucker is quite explicit that the revolution is accomplished by living a revolutionary lifestyle: "The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."
Would that it were so easy to create a new society! The state happens to enforce its morality and its exploitative form of production, with cops, courts, prisons—internationally with MX missiles and armies— and those who go against it are going to get attacked.
The best proof that gay liberation is a petty-bourgeois ideology is that an openly gay lifestyle in a "gay community" is only possible in severely restricted and largely middle-class "gay ghettoes"—West Hollywood, Castro Street, the West Village. What about gay men and lesbians who do not or cannot move to one of these gay islands in a sea of "patriarchal capitalism"? Cay liberation has no answer.
In fact, Forgione and Hill revealed their own petty-bourgeois biases by their violent resistance to the SWP's "turn" to the working class. They took offense when SWP leaders implied that gays were a petty-bourgeois species, and insisted that there are gay workers too. But when it came time to reach out to their "brothers" in the steel and auto plants, Forgione and Hill seemed strangely reluctant. This is not to give any credence to the Barnes gang's "proletarian" credentials, but Forgione and Hill seem to assume that the only role for homosexual socialists is doing "gay work" in the "gay community."
Can homosexuals, as Thorstad insists, liberate themselves? Here the question of "social weight," referred to ad nauseum in the SWP documents, rears its head. For all that the Socialist Workers Party used this concept simply cynically, nonetheless they have a point—and one on which the Spartacist League insisted while Barnes & Co. were hopping on and off the gay liberation bandwagon. We are for "the sexual liberation of everybody"—however, we certainly do not intend to legislate the sexual behavior of future generations by putting our "seal of approval" on any particular sexual mode in this necessarily deforming society—gay, straight, mixed, whatever. That is why we pose our demands in the sexual-personal area negatively: against moralistic state legislation of sexuality. • But more immediately, changing this society means a struggle for power—which means creating a powerful mass party rooted in the working class, which alone has the cohesiveness and social weight, because it produces this society's wealth, to make a socialist revolution. To eliminate the oppression of homosexuals, rooted in the sexual morality of the bourgeois family, it will ultimately be necessary to replace the family with other cooperative institutions in a socialist society. The immediate aftermath of socialist revolution will wipe out all discriminatory laws and criminal sanctions against "deviant" sexual behavior. But a more fundamental transformation is required to change deeply-rooted, ancient attitudes toward sex roles and sexuality. We don't think this is an easy, or simply resolved, question by any means. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal of Marxism has always been the creation of a society in which every individual can develop his potential to the utmost, freed of economic compulsion and attendent psychological miseries.
The job of revolutionaries is to forge a revolutionary vanguard party which can, as Lenin said, serve as a "tribune of the people," fighting all forms of oppression as part of the necessary education of the proletariat in assuming its leading role in the creation of a new society. In the end the "best builders" of rights and freedom for homosexuals will be those who, whatever their sexual orientation, are builders of such a party.
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for "Communism and homosexuality".
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Summer 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Defense of democratic rights for homosexuals is part of the historic tradition of Marxism. In the 1860s, the prominent lawyer J.B. von Schweitzer was tried, found guilty and disbarred for homosexual activities in Mannheim, Germany. The socialist pioneer Ferdinand Lassalle aided von Schweitzer, encouraging him to join Lassalle's Universal German Workingmen's Association in 1863. After Lassalle's death, von Schweitzer was elected the head of the group, one of the organizations that merged to form the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD itself waged a long struggle in the late 19th century against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which made homosexual acts (for males) a crime. August Bebel and other SPD members in the Reichstag attacked the law, while the SPD's party paper Vorwarts reported on the struggle against state persecution of homosexuals.
In 1895 one of the most infamous anti-homosexual outbursts of the period targeted Oscar Wilde, one of the leading literary lights of England (where homosexuality had been punishable by death until 1861). Wilde had some socialist views of his own: his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," was smuggled into Russia by young radicals. When the Marquess of Queensberry called him a sodomist, Wilde sued for libel. Queensberry had Wilde successfully prosecuted and sent to prison for being involved with Queensberry's son. The Second International took up Wilde's defense. In the most prestigious publication of the German Social Democracy, "Die Neue Zeit", Eduard Bernstein, later known as a revisionist but then speaking as a very decent Marxist, argued that there was nothing sick about homosexuality, that Wilde had committed no crime, that every socialist should defend him and that the people who put him on trial were the criminals.
Upon coming to power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolshevik Party began immediately to undercut the old bourgeois prejudices and social institutions responsible for the oppression of both women and homosexuals— centrally the institution of the family. They sought to create social alternatives to relieve the crushing burden of women's drudgery in the family, and abolished all legal impediments to women's equality, while also abolishing all laws against homosexual acts. Stalin's successful political counterrevolution rehabilitated the reactionary ideology of bourgeois society, glorifying the family unit. In 1934 a law making homosexual acts punishable by imprisonment was introduced, and mass arrests of homosexuals took place. While defending the socialized property forms of the USSR against capitalist attack, we Trotskyists fight for political revolution in the USSR to restore the liberating program and goals of the early Bolsheviks, including getting the state out of private sexual life. As Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the USSR in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody isinjured and no one's interests are encroached upon
"Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
—quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement 1864-1935
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Summer 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Defense of democratic rights for homosexuals is part of the historic tradition of Marxism. In the 1860s, the prominent lawyer J.B. von Schweitzer was tried, found guilty and disbarred for homosexual activities in Mannheim, Germany. The socialist pioneer Ferdinand Lassalle aided von Schweitzer, encouraging him to join Lassalle's Universal German Workingmen's Association in 1863. After Lassalle's death, von Schweitzer was elected the head of the group, one of the organizations that merged to form the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD itself waged a long struggle in the late 19th century against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which made homosexual acts (for males) a crime. August Bebel and other SPD members in the Reichstag attacked the law, while the SPD's party paper Vorwarts reported on the struggle against state persecution of homosexuals.
In 1895 one of the most infamous anti-homosexual outbursts of the period targeted Oscar Wilde, one of the leading literary lights of England (where homosexuality had been punishable by death until 1861). Wilde had some socialist views of his own: his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," was smuggled into Russia by young radicals. When the Marquess of Queensberry called him a sodomist, Wilde sued for libel. Queensberry had Wilde successfully prosecuted and sent to prison for being involved with Queensberry's son. The Second International took up Wilde's defense. In the most prestigious publication of the German Social Democracy, "Die Neue Zeit", Eduard Bernstein, later known as a revisionist but then speaking as a very decent Marxist, argued that there was nothing sick about homosexuality, that Wilde had committed no crime, that every socialist should defend him and that the people who put him on trial were the criminals.
Upon coming to power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolshevik Party began immediately to undercut the old bourgeois prejudices and social institutions responsible for the oppression of both women and homosexuals— centrally the institution of the family. They sought to create social alternatives to relieve the crushing burden of women's drudgery in the family, and abolished all legal impediments to women's equality, while also abolishing all laws against homosexual acts. Stalin's successful political counterrevolution rehabilitated the reactionary ideology of bourgeois society, glorifying the family unit. In 1934 a law making homosexual acts punishable by imprisonment was introduced, and mass arrests of homosexuals took place. While defending the socialized property forms of the USSR against capitalist attack, we Trotskyists fight for political revolution in the USSR to restore the liberating program and goals of the early Bolsheviks, including getting the state out of private sexual life. As Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the USSR in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody isinjured and no one's interests are encroached upon
"Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
—quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement 1864-1935
*From The "Bob Feldman '68" Blog- "The Ballad Of Harvey Milk"
Click on the headline to link to a "Bob Feldman '68" blog entry- his song "The Ballad Of Harvey Milk" that connects right in with today's theme on the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 1969.
*Remember Stonewall 1969-The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Click On To Link To Guest Commentator Amy Rath's, Editor Of "The Women And Revolution" Pages Of The Working Class Newspaper "Workers Vanguard", Review Of "Milk' in 2009.
The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.
DVD Review
The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984
In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.
Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.
This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White. And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.
Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think that is the right school) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.
Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 efforts by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet" (a seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.
The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.
DVD Review
The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984
In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.
Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.
This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White. And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.
Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think that is the right school) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.
Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 efforts by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet" (a seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
***From The "Workers' Press" Blog- Labor History Celebration in St. Louis: Commemorating the Strike of 1877
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers' Press" Blog entry- "Labor History Celebration in St. Louis: Commemorating the Strike of 1877."
http://workerspress.blogspot.com/2010/06/labor-history-celebration-in-st-louis.html
Markin comment:
This is an early important (and little known) action by a then important section of the American labor movement in the emerging industrial Midwest "heartland". Moreover, that strike (and other labor actions elsewhere that year) occurred in the same year that the Republican Party, including segments of its Radical Republican wing, sold out Radical Reconstruction in the South (by among other things removing the last of the Federal troops there at a time when such action left blacks and their white supporters virtually defenseless against white racial reaction), in order to get one Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House.
http://workerspress.blogspot.com/2010/06/labor-history-celebration-in-st-louis.html
Markin comment:
This is an early important (and little known) action by a then important section of the American labor movement in the emerging industrial Midwest "heartland". Moreover, that strike (and other labor actions elsewhere that year) occurred in the same year that the Republican Party, including segments of its Radical Republican wing, sold out Radical Reconstruction in the South (by among other things removing the last of the Federal troops there at a time when such action left blacks and their white supporters virtually defenseless against white racial reaction), in order to get one Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House.
*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The United Front
Click on the headline to link to a "Leon Trotsky Internet Archives" online copy of "On The United Front" from his 1921 Volume One of "The First Five Years Of The Communist International".
Markin comment:
It is always worthwhile to go back and read Leon Trotsky on many subjects, but it is especially worthwhile on an issue like the proper ways to use the united front as a tactic in our arsenal in the struggle for working class power.
Markin comment:
It is always worthwhile to go back and read Leon Trotsky on many subjects, but it is especially worthwhile on an issue like the proper ways to use the united front as a tactic in our arsenal in the struggle for working class power.
*From The "Renegade Eye" Blog- Once Again On The Ex-Afghan Commander, General McChrystal- A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to line to a "Renegade Eye" Blog entry on the ex-Afghan Commander, General McChrystal.
Markin comment:
Who? Oh ya, that guy Obama dumped for his 'real' choice General Petraeus. And that is old, old news indeed. What is also old news, at least at this space, but nevertheless bears repeating, and will always bear repeating, is -Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries (Not Just General McChrystal) From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Who? Oh ya, that guy Obama dumped for his 'real' choice General Petraeus. And that is old, old news indeed. What is also old news, at least at this space, but nevertheless bears repeating, and will always bear repeating, is -Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries (Not Just General McChrystal) From Afghanistan!
*From "The Rag Blog"- Free Class-War Prisoner Marilyn Buck Now!
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry for a benefit in Texas for class-war prisoner and information about her and her case these days.
Markin comment:
I will just repeat here a comment that I have made previously on an entry on "The Rag Blog" on Marilyn Buck's case:
"Every young leftist militant, hell, every old leftist militant and even those who have lost their way since the 1960s and forgot what we were fighting for then, and now, should read this story. It tells two tales- if you go up against the American imperial state you better be ready to win, or else. And it also tells that there really was some very, very good human material, like Marilyn Buck, in the 1960s with which we could have built that better world we were fighting for if we could have understood the first tale better. I wish, and I wish like crazy, that we had a few more, actually quite a few more, militants like Marilyn Buck these days. Let's get moving. All honor to Marilyn Buck and the other fighters, like Mumia, still behind bars for "seeking that newer world."
Markin comment:
I will just repeat here a comment that I have made previously on an entry on "The Rag Blog" on Marilyn Buck's case:
"Every young leftist militant, hell, every old leftist militant and even those who have lost their way since the 1960s and forgot what we were fighting for then, and now, should read this story. It tells two tales- if you go up against the American imperial state you better be ready to win, or else. And it also tells that there really was some very, very good human material, like Marilyn Buck, in the 1960s with which we could have built that better world we were fighting for if we could have understood the first tale better. I wish, and I wish like crazy, that we had a few more, actually quite a few more, militants like Marilyn Buck these days. Let's get moving. All honor to Marilyn Buck and the other fighters, like Mumia, still behind bars for "seeking that newer world."
*From "The Rag Blog" - A Now Old News Guest Commentary On Ex- Afghan Commander- General McChrystal
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" post for an old news now guest commentary on American ex- Afghan commander, General Stanley McChrystal. Who?
Markin comment:
Who? Oh, ya, that guy Obama dumped for his 'real' choice General Petraeus. And that is old, old news indeed. What is also old news, at least at this space, but nevertheless bears repeating, and will always bear repeating, is -Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries (Not Just General McChrystal) From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
Who? Oh, ya, that guy Obama dumped for his 'real' choice General Petraeus. And that is old, old news indeed. What is also old news, at least at this space, but nevertheless bears repeating, and will always bear repeating, is -Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries (Not Just General McChrystal) From Afghanistan!
*From The "SteveLendmanBlog"- An Update On The Class-War Prisoner Lynne Stewart's Case- Free Lynne Stewart- She Must Not Die In Jail
Click on the headline to link to the "SteveLendmanBlog" entry- "Updating Lynne Stewart's "Love Struggle:" Part II."
Markin comment:
The headline says it all- Lynne Stewart's "Love Struggle:" Part II and Free Lynne Stewart (and he co-workers). Lynne Stewart must not die in jail.
Markin comment:
The headline says it all- Lynne Stewart's "Love Struggle:" Part II and Free Lynne Stewart (and he co-workers). Lynne Stewart must not die in jail.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
*From “The Rag Blog”- “Bob Feldman 68” Blog- A People’s History Of Afghanistan, Part Eleven
Click on the headline to link to a “The Rag Blog” entry from the “Bob Feldman 68” blog on the history of Afghanistan
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
*The Latest From The "Transport Workers Solidarity Committee" Website- "Actions In Defense of The Palestinian People On The West Coast Docks"
Click on the headline to link to the latest from the "Transport Workers Solidarity Committee" Website- "Actions In Defense of The Palestinian People On The West Coast Docks."
Markin comment:
Every action by the international working class, including unionized dock workers who have a militant history on the American West Coast docks, to slow down the Israeli war machine, even if only symbolically, is a step in the right direction. Totally End The Blockade of Gaza! All Honor To The Flotilla Blockade Breakers! Down With U.S Aid To Israel! Defend The Palestinian People!
Markin comment:
Every action by the international working class, including unionized dock workers who have a militant history on the American West Coast docks, to slow down the Israeli war machine, even if only symbolically, is a step in the right direction. Totally End The Blockade of Gaza! All Honor To The Flotilla Blockade Breakers! Down With U.S Aid To Israel! Defend The Palestinian People!
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-"From Weimar to Hitler:Feminism and Fascism"- A Guest Commentary
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1981 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
***********
From Weimar to Hitler: Feminism and Fascism
Among the proliferation of tracts excoriating the evils of pornography which have dominated feminist writing recently, another theme has made a modest splash. An off our backs (December 1980) article by Carol Anne Douglas, titled "german feminists and the right: can it happen here? “worried:
"With recession, inflation and unemployment growing and Ronald Reagan running for president (of course, he couldn't win), the Moral Majority bellowing in the land and the ERA dying a lingering death, it seemed like a good time to read about German history.... What signs were there of impending fascism? Did feminists see the signs? How did they act as fascism drew near? Why did some women become Nazis?" Douglas' article reviewed four recent books on German feminism and fascism. Ms. magazine has also published a two-part series by Gloria Steinem on the same theme, "The Nazi Connection," which however does not mention a single feminist organization or individual by name.
Weimar Germany—A "Fortress of Feminism"
For feminists the struggle against patriarchy is theoretically the highest imperative; and Nazi Germany was, in the words of feminist Adrienne Rich, "patriarchy in its purest, most elemental form." There is undoubtedly an inherent contradiction between feminism as a variant of bourgeois liberalism, committed to the quest for more individual liberties for women within the confines of capitalist society, and fascism; but at certain conjunctures it has been subordinated. It is beyond doubt, for example, that the Third Reich enjoyed broad support among German feminists.
Why? Certainly no one can argue that they were duped. Hitler was even more forthright about his program for women than Mussolini had been. Whereas Mussolini had conciliated feminists in 1923 by granting the vote to women in local elections, the original Nazi program called for the abolition of women's suffrage, and Hitler stated in Mein Kampf: "The message of women's emancipation is a message discovered solely by the Jewish intellect and its content is stamped by the same spirit." Equal rights for women, said Hitler, actually meant a deprivation of rights, since it involved women in areas where they would necessarily be inferior, i.e., public life. Gottfried Feder, one of the Nazi Party's founding "theoreticians," wrote:
"The Jew has stolen woman from us through the forms of sex democracy. We, the youth, must march out to kill the dragon so that we may again attain the most holy thing in the world, the woman as maid and servant."
—quoted in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics
Nor can it be argued that Hitler triumphed because the organized feminist •movement was weak. In the words of Kate Millett, by 1925 in Germany "feminism was in fact a fortress." She points out that in that year Gertrud Baumer, the most authoritative spokesman of middle-class German feminism, was a member of the Reichstag and a high official in the Ministry of the Interior.
Millett's explanation of feminist support to Hitler is that between 1925 and 1933, when Hitler came to power, the feminist movement was gutted and perverted by Nazi infiltration. In fact, though, the German feminism of 1933 evolved inevitably and organically from what it had been even prior to World War I.
The overwhelmingly predominant German feminist coalition, the Bund Deutscner frauenverene (BDF— Federation of German Women's Associations), which had almost a million members in 1925, had grown increasingly conservative since 1908. Faced with the possibility that its membership would endorse the legalization of abortion, the right wing of the BDF persuaded the large and extremely reactionary German-Evangelical Women's League (Deutsch-evangelischer Frauenbund) to join and use its voting power to defeat the proposal. This maneuver was followed by the ousting of president Marie Stritt in 1910 and her replacement by the far more conservative Baumer and the expulsion of two "left-wing" tendencies, the Bund fur Mutterschutz (League for the Protection of Motherhood) in 1910 and a small pacifist faction in 1915 (which went on to help found the liberal pacifist Women's International League for Peace and Freedom).
Lest feminists be tempted to overstate the importance of the loss of these "radicals," it should be noted that the Bund fir Mutterschutz, which was strongly influenced by sexual libertarian Helene Stocker and whose manifesto advocated an end to "the capitalist rule of man" and the establishment of a matriarchy, sought to create colonies in the countryside for unmarried mothers and their children as a way of promoting "German racial health." Racially "unhealthy" mothers were not admitted. "It is indeed disturbing/' complains Carol Anne Douglas, "that the first women to endorse sexual freedom were racists." The explanation for the BDF's early conservatism lies not in the departure of these small dissident elements but in the fact that it existed from its inception in a highly politically class-differentiated society with a mass working-class party—the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had, moreover, developed a strong socialist women's movement. Left-leaning and working-class women who wanted to fight their oppression joined the SPD, not the BDF.
The Socialist Women's Movement versus the BDF
The SPD's women's movement was founded in the 1890s by Clara Zetkin, and was based on the Marxist understanding that women must be organized as part of the revolutionary proletarian movement, given the indissoluble connection between women's oppression, the family and the private ownership of property. It was from the beginning counterposed to bourgeois feminism. By 1914 the SPD women's organizations had a membership of 175,000, while Zetkin's journal Die Gleichheit (Equality) had a circulation of 124,000.
It was Zetkin who addressed the Third World Congress of the Communist International with the powerful statement:
"There is only one movement; there is only one organization of women communists within the Communist Party, together with male communists. The tasks and goals of the communists are our tasks, our goals. No autonomous organization, no doing your own thing which in any way lends itself to splitting the revolutionary forces and diverting them from their great goals of the conquest of political power by the proletariat and the construction of communist society."
—Protokolle des IV. Weltkongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale, p. 725
While the SPD's record on women's rights was far from spotless (it sometimes dropped the demand for female suffrage in local elections, and in the name of "modesty" discouraged the open discussion of abortion and contraception), it was the staunchest fighter for the advancement of German women in the early 20th century. In 1895 the party introduced a female suffrage motion into the Reichstag and in 1896 stood almost alone in opposing the male supremacist Civil Code. The SPD campaigned for the protection of working women and for equality of women in education and jobs. It supported equal pay for equal work and daycare centers for working mothers. The SPD also criticized Germany's abortion laws, favored the availability of contraceptives and ran educational courses to train and promote women as leaders of the proletarian movement.
In contrast, during the same period, the middle-class feminist BDF held the position that only a minority of women had either the ability or the need to enter politics or pursue a career, and it was taken for granted that those who did so would remain unmarried. Thus the BDF supported the law requiring women schoolteachers to resign if they married (just as later in 1930 it did not oppose the measure introduced into the Reichstag—supported by all major political parties except the German Communist Party [KPD]— providing for the dismissal of married women from public service).
World War I exposed the internal rottenness of the SPD, which supported the imperialist German war effort (as of course the BDF did). Many left-wing cadres of the SPD's women's work left with the anti-war minority, some joining the large Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), others the much smaller group of revolutionary socialists who formed the Spartakusbund in 1916 and later the KPD. Despite heroic efforts and personal courage, these socialists were unable to properly take advantage of the revolutionary crises sweeping Germany after the war. The Weimar Republic was consolidated with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and the bloody defeat of the Spartacists.
Puffed up with self-importance, the petty-bourgeois and reformist caretakers of the Kaiser's shattered state indulged in grandiose illusions in their historic role. In 1919 the program of the BDF proclaimed its aim to "unite German women of every party and world-view, in order to express their national solidarity and to effect the common idea of the cultural mission of women." This program declared housekeeping and childbearing women's proper destiny, rejecting the idea that men and women were equal. It advocated "eugenic" policies and the sterilization of "anti-social" elements and actively campaigned for higher birth rates. BDF member Adele Schreiber advocated the sterilization of "drinkers"; Elsie Luders fought for the elimination of interracial marriages; and the German Colonial Women’s League, whose sole reason for existence was to oppose the marriage of German men living in the colonies to non-Caucasian native women, joined the BDF.
The BDF vehemently supported the reconquest of territory lost by Germany in the war. While claiming all political parties were divisive and supporting the ideal of an organic national community (Voksgemen-schaft), it was in reality anti-communist, and largely associated with small bourgeois parties such as the Deutsche Demokratische Partei. Throughout the Weimar years it expended most of its .energy in the same endeavor that consumes contemporary middle-class feminists like Susan- Brownmiller and Robin Morgan—campaigning against pornography. The BDF also worked for stricter censorship of films, books and plays and against contraception and "licentiousness."
Fascism: Capitalism Takes a Different Form
The post-war chaos in Weimar Germany and the world depression of 1929, and above all the perceived inability of the workers movement to break through the impasse, threw masses of frustrated and impoverished petty bourgeois into the arms of the Nazis. Yet Hitler and his radical-lumpen street gangs would never have attained state power had not the bourgeoisie thrown its support to him, seeing in the Nazi movement a tool to crush once and for all the workers movement and open the road again for unimpeded German imperialism.
As Trotsky explained in his brilliant analysis of fascism, fascism is the continuation of capitalism in another form. Understanding this helps explain why masses of German bourgeois feminists who had loyally supported the Kaiser and/or the Weimar Republic did not find it so difficult to accept the Third Reich as well. In his 1932 article, "What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat," Trotsky pointed out the
essence of fascism:
"At the moment that the 'normal' police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium—the turn of the fascist 'regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpen-proletariat; all the countless "human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy— When a state turns fascist...it means, primarily and above all, that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism."
In Germany, the bourgeoisie had the opportunity to resort to this system only because the proletariat, paralyzed by the treachery of its political leadership— the reformist SPD and the Stalinized KPD— did not accomplish the socialist revolution instead.
Feminists Go With Hitler
By 1930 the BDF—that "fortress" of feminism-opposed contraception, sexual libertarianism and abortion on demand, defended the family and reaffirmed that woman's proper destiny lay in marriage and motherhood. By 1932 the feminists joined in the general attack then being made on the parliamentary system and urged the establishment of a corporate state on the Italian model but with the exception that one of the "corporations" would consist of women.
The feminists of the BDF, like their husbands and brothers hit by the chaos and depression, were disillusioned with impotent Weimar parliamentarian-ism, and thus welcomed the "national revolution" promised by Hitler, seeking promise even in his statement that "equal rights for women means that they experience the esteem that they deserve in the areas for which nature has intended them." BDF president Agnes von Zahn-Harnack proclaimed that feminists could "do nothing but approve a nationalist government and stand by it" and that the BDF would "do all it can to help us work together, and will certainly take up personal contacts with the best women in National Socialism."
In the last elections of the thirties in which Germans exercised any freedom of choice—those of March 1933—the BDF gave considerable support to the Nazis and expressed the hope that Hitler would soon introduce a "biological policy" to preserve the German family and a "Law of Preservation" to protect it from "asocial persons." ^Bourgeois feminists in other advanced capitalist countries would not have found BDF racism so shocking; conventional bourgeois sociology at the time took for granted that "asocial" types and "lesser races" were genetically inferior.)
The key point about the BDF's accommodation to Hitler is that it followed at every crucial point the class interests of the bourgeoisie, of its husbands and brothers—and was willing to subordinate to that end even its very conservative, upper-class goals of giving bourgeois women more access to the privileges of upper-class men. Accepting the bourgeois mystique of the sacred nuclear family, and imbued with the nationalist aspirations of its class, the BDF was unable to argue against Hitler's mystical, racist, zoological view of human society.
Hitler came to power, and proceeded to ruthlessly crush the workers movement. The most powerful proletariat in Western Europe was smashed, its organizations ripped apart, its spirit broken for a generation, all without striking a blow in its own defense. And in this triumphant wave of reactionary terror the bourgeois feminist BDF too was simply swept aside.
In April the Nazi government ordered the BDF to expel its Jewish affiliate, the Judischer Frauenbund (JFB—League of Jewish Women), its largest single organizational member, and join the Nazi mass women's organizations being formed. BDF leader Gertrud Bamumer publicly supported this move, stating that she believed the Nazi women's organizations were merely larger versions of the BDF—"a new, spiritually different phase of the women's movement"—and advised her followers to accommodate themselves to the new order. In June 1933 the BDF was formally dissolved by its membership.
Contemporary feminists are outraged by this forced dissolution of the BDF, characterizing it as a manifestation of naked fascist .tyranny. But if there was a voice raised against it at the time, it was the voice of president von Zahn-Harnack, who argued that the BDF should not be dissolved—because its aims were thoroughly compatible with those of National Socialism! She cited the organization's support for "eugenic" policies and the sterilization of "anti-social elements/' its condemnation of the Revolution of 1918 and the Versailles Treaty and its recognition of men's and women's "different spheres." To no avail—the vote for dissolution carried and this was the end of the "fortress of feminism."
The fate of the Judisher Frauenbund, which had shared all the illusions of the BDF in an educational, respectable, middle-class orientation and loyalty to German society, was perhaps the most tragic. Retreating into the Jewish community, where it had always carried on social work (like teaching young women to become maids and servants), the JFB urged its members to "lie low," not to act loud or ostentatious and to be • "good Germans." After Crystal Night, November 10, 1938, when the Nazis burned their orphanages and dissolved the organization, Jewish feminists ended up at railroad stations, making up food packets for Jews being deported to concentration camps. At the bitter end in 1942 there were only eight women carrying on at the Berlin train station, until they too were shipped away to die.
As for Gertrud Baumer, she continued to publish the BDF's Die Frau throughout the Nazi regime, later claiming that its Christian mystical emphasis was a form of resistance to Nazism. But as off our backs noted, "Considering that they allowed her to continue undisturbed, they weren't too threatened."
And Mussolini, Too
The German feminist movement was of course stamped with the particular experience of German bourgeois society, but it should not be thought that the BDF's response to fascism represented a particular, German idiosyncrasy. In Italy, too, every major feminist organization voluntarily supported fascism during the early years of Mussolini's premiership on the basis that it was stamping out socialism, which was seen as the greatest danger.
After Mussolini's march on Rome both the Consiglio nazionale delle Donne italiane (CNDI—National Council of Italian Women) and the Glornale della donna (Journal of Woman) openly offered their help m the work of "national reconstruction." And they did help. Feminists played an important role in several major fascist propaganda campaigns, including those for a ruralization policy, an increased birth rate and against strikes. The task of organizing urban women to resist strikes was carried out largely by the journals Voce Nuova (New Voice) and Glornale de//a donna, while in the countryside La donna nei camp/ (The Woman in the Fields) urged women to refuse to participate in strikes and persuade their men to do the same.
Nonetheless, by the late '20s the contradictions inherent in a "feminist-fascist" ideology became pronounced. The Genoese feminist newspaper, La Chiosa (The Comment), for example, ran an editorial in 1927 which complained:
"... we wish to ask our good Fascist camerada what you have done recently for women's rights, to educate and elevate women? In Fascism there seems to be a spirit of inexplicable, yet ferocious, anti-feminism."
—quoted in Alexander De Grand, "Women Under Italian Fascism," Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1976
Too late. After supporting Mussolini, even capitulating to the fascists' insistence on the primacy of the patriarchial family, such feminists' uncomprehending complaints met their inevitable response. The government simply transformed La Chiosa into a fashion and movie magazine.
What Does "Consistent Feminism" Lead To?
We have expressed contempt over the years for the reformist Socialist Workers Party's idiotic slogan "consistent feminism leads to socialism." While mass movements of oppressed women have been a motor force of revolution in the backward societies of the "countries of the East," bourgeois feminism in the advanced countries has led to many things—the doctrine of war between the sexes, reformist schemes like "affirmative action," recently to a moralistic campaign against pornography—but never to socialism.
Indeed, if the experience of the BDF and Italian feminism proves anything, it is that there is in fact no such thing as "consistent feminism." The specific program and character of various feminist groups in various historical periods, while all in some sense a response to the special oppression of women, is determined essentially by class considerations. The accommodation of the BDF to fascism- reflected the broader failure of bourgeois liberalism in a period of intense capitalist crisis, as well as the fundamental hostility of the bourgeois class to proletarian revolution, the only way out for the exploited and oppressed.
For today's petty-bourgeois feminists, mired in the myth of the "sisterhood" of all women, the accommodation of their "fortress of feminism" to Hitler must remain forever a source of confusion and mystery. But for us revolutionary Marxists, it is only one more striking confirmation of our position that women's liberation is above all a question of class struggle.
Much of the current rad-lib worry about "Nazism now?" in the face of the Reagan years in fact reflects only liberal illusions that the ousted Democrats were somehow qualitatively better, even though both capitalist parties are equally war-mongering enforcers of austerity on the working class. Reagan's no fascist, but he is certainly the most right-wing politician to run the American state in the last 50 years and is riding a backlash of conservatism at all levels of society. In this atmosphere of reaction, of course Nazi and fascist terror groups feel emboldened. Fascists run openly for election on both Democratic and Republican tickets; communists, labor organizers, blacks and women are slaughtered and their KKK/Nazi killers get off scot free in Greensboro, North Carolina, while Klan crosses flare in victory across the nation. Where has been the feminist response to this immediate upsurge of tiny race-hate, terror groups?
It has been the "consistent socialists" of the Spartacist League who have called for the mobilization of labor to smash this Nazi terror in the egg. Feminist Kate Millett, who has agonized at some length in print about the vicissitudes of being a woman in Nazi Germany, refused to endorse a demonstration to stop the fascist scum from "celebrating" Hitler's birthday in downtown San Francisco last April 19. Like the Socialist Workers Party, which actually champions "free speech" for fascists, Ms. Millett was more concerned about the safety of these thugs than about those whom they would murder. The rally, which was supported and heavily built by the Spartacist League, turned Out 1,200 people to let the Nazis know San Francisco is a labor town, not a Nazi town—and they didn't dare show their faces. No thanks to Millett, or those bourgeois feminists who tell women to pin their hopes on the capitalist system of "law and order."
The experience of German feminism only confirms the fact that no matter how large or powerful a feminist movement is created, the fate of women is the fate of the working class. The fight to smash fascism today— like the fight to stop Hitler in Germany— is above all the fight to forge a revolutionary proletarian party which can, as the "tribune of the people," lead the working class and all the oppressed to victory over capitalism, and end forever its inevitable, periodic crises and poisonous ideologies.
The following is an article from the Spring 1981 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
***********
From Weimar to Hitler: Feminism and Fascism
Among the proliferation of tracts excoriating the evils of pornography which have dominated feminist writing recently, another theme has made a modest splash. An off our backs (December 1980) article by Carol Anne Douglas, titled "german feminists and the right: can it happen here? “worried:
"With recession, inflation and unemployment growing and Ronald Reagan running for president (of course, he couldn't win), the Moral Majority bellowing in the land and the ERA dying a lingering death, it seemed like a good time to read about German history.... What signs were there of impending fascism? Did feminists see the signs? How did they act as fascism drew near? Why did some women become Nazis?" Douglas' article reviewed four recent books on German feminism and fascism. Ms. magazine has also published a two-part series by Gloria Steinem on the same theme, "The Nazi Connection," which however does not mention a single feminist organization or individual by name.
Weimar Germany—A "Fortress of Feminism"
For feminists the struggle against patriarchy is theoretically the highest imperative; and Nazi Germany was, in the words of feminist Adrienne Rich, "patriarchy in its purest, most elemental form." There is undoubtedly an inherent contradiction between feminism as a variant of bourgeois liberalism, committed to the quest for more individual liberties for women within the confines of capitalist society, and fascism; but at certain conjunctures it has been subordinated. It is beyond doubt, for example, that the Third Reich enjoyed broad support among German feminists.
Why? Certainly no one can argue that they were duped. Hitler was even more forthright about his program for women than Mussolini had been. Whereas Mussolini had conciliated feminists in 1923 by granting the vote to women in local elections, the original Nazi program called for the abolition of women's suffrage, and Hitler stated in Mein Kampf: "The message of women's emancipation is a message discovered solely by the Jewish intellect and its content is stamped by the same spirit." Equal rights for women, said Hitler, actually meant a deprivation of rights, since it involved women in areas where they would necessarily be inferior, i.e., public life. Gottfried Feder, one of the Nazi Party's founding "theoreticians," wrote:
"The Jew has stolen woman from us through the forms of sex democracy. We, the youth, must march out to kill the dragon so that we may again attain the most holy thing in the world, the woman as maid and servant."
—quoted in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics
Nor can it be argued that Hitler triumphed because the organized feminist •movement was weak. In the words of Kate Millett, by 1925 in Germany "feminism was in fact a fortress." She points out that in that year Gertrud Baumer, the most authoritative spokesman of middle-class German feminism, was a member of the Reichstag and a high official in the Ministry of the Interior.
Millett's explanation of feminist support to Hitler is that between 1925 and 1933, when Hitler came to power, the feminist movement was gutted and perverted by Nazi infiltration. In fact, though, the German feminism of 1933 evolved inevitably and organically from what it had been even prior to World War I.
The overwhelmingly predominant German feminist coalition, the Bund Deutscner frauenverene (BDF— Federation of German Women's Associations), which had almost a million members in 1925, had grown increasingly conservative since 1908. Faced with the possibility that its membership would endorse the legalization of abortion, the right wing of the BDF persuaded the large and extremely reactionary German-Evangelical Women's League (Deutsch-evangelischer Frauenbund) to join and use its voting power to defeat the proposal. This maneuver was followed by the ousting of president Marie Stritt in 1910 and her replacement by the far more conservative Baumer and the expulsion of two "left-wing" tendencies, the Bund fur Mutterschutz (League for the Protection of Motherhood) in 1910 and a small pacifist faction in 1915 (which went on to help found the liberal pacifist Women's International League for Peace and Freedom).
Lest feminists be tempted to overstate the importance of the loss of these "radicals," it should be noted that the Bund fir Mutterschutz, which was strongly influenced by sexual libertarian Helene Stocker and whose manifesto advocated an end to "the capitalist rule of man" and the establishment of a matriarchy, sought to create colonies in the countryside for unmarried mothers and their children as a way of promoting "German racial health." Racially "unhealthy" mothers were not admitted. "It is indeed disturbing/' complains Carol Anne Douglas, "that the first women to endorse sexual freedom were racists." The explanation for the BDF's early conservatism lies not in the departure of these small dissident elements but in the fact that it existed from its inception in a highly politically class-differentiated society with a mass working-class party—the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had, moreover, developed a strong socialist women's movement. Left-leaning and working-class women who wanted to fight their oppression joined the SPD, not the BDF.
The Socialist Women's Movement versus the BDF
The SPD's women's movement was founded in the 1890s by Clara Zetkin, and was based on the Marxist understanding that women must be organized as part of the revolutionary proletarian movement, given the indissoluble connection between women's oppression, the family and the private ownership of property. It was from the beginning counterposed to bourgeois feminism. By 1914 the SPD women's organizations had a membership of 175,000, while Zetkin's journal Die Gleichheit (Equality) had a circulation of 124,000.
It was Zetkin who addressed the Third World Congress of the Communist International with the powerful statement:
"There is only one movement; there is only one organization of women communists within the Communist Party, together with male communists. The tasks and goals of the communists are our tasks, our goals. No autonomous organization, no doing your own thing which in any way lends itself to splitting the revolutionary forces and diverting them from their great goals of the conquest of political power by the proletariat and the construction of communist society."
—Protokolle des IV. Weltkongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale, p. 725
While the SPD's record on women's rights was far from spotless (it sometimes dropped the demand for female suffrage in local elections, and in the name of "modesty" discouraged the open discussion of abortion and contraception), it was the staunchest fighter for the advancement of German women in the early 20th century. In 1895 the party introduced a female suffrage motion into the Reichstag and in 1896 stood almost alone in opposing the male supremacist Civil Code. The SPD campaigned for the protection of working women and for equality of women in education and jobs. It supported equal pay for equal work and daycare centers for working mothers. The SPD also criticized Germany's abortion laws, favored the availability of contraceptives and ran educational courses to train and promote women as leaders of the proletarian movement.
In contrast, during the same period, the middle-class feminist BDF held the position that only a minority of women had either the ability or the need to enter politics or pursue a career, and it was taken for granted that those who did so would remain unmarried. Thus the BDF supported the law requiring women schoolteachers to resign if they married (just as later in 1930 it did not oppose the measure introduced into the Reichstag—supported by all major political parties except the German Communist Party [KPD]— providing for the dismissal of married women from public service).
World War I exposed the internal rottenness of the SPD, which supported the imperialist German war effort (as of course the BDF did). Many left-wing cadres of the SPD's women's work left with the anti-war minority, some joining the large Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), others the much smaller group of revolutionary socialists who formed the Spartakusbund in 1916 and later the KPD. Despite heroic efforts and personal courage, these socialists were unable to properly take advantage of the revolutionary crises sweeping Germany after the war. The Weimar Republic was consolidated with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and the bloody defeat of the Spartacists.
Puffed up with self-importance, the petty-bourgeois and reformist caretakers of the Kaiser's shattered state indulged in grandiose illusions in their historic role. In 1919 the program of the BDF proclaimed its aim to "unite German women of every party and world-view, in order to express their national solidarity and to effect the common idea of the cultural mission of women." This program declared housekeeping and childbearing women's proper destiny, rejecting the idea that men and women were equal. It advocated "eugenic" policies and the sterilization of "anti-social" elements and actively campaigned for higher birth rates. BDF member Adele Schreiber advocated the sterilization of "drinkers"; Elsie Luders fought for the elimination of interracial marriages; and the German Colonial Women’s League, whose sole reason for existence was to oppose the marriage of German men living in the colonies to non-Caucasian native women, joined the BDF.
The BDF vehemently supported the reconquest of territory lost by Germany in the war. While claiming all political parties were divisive and supporting the ideal of an organic national community (Voksgemen-schaft), it was in reality anti-communist, and largely associated with small bourgeois parties such as the Deutsche Demokratische Partei. Throughout the Weimar years it expended most of its .energy in the same endeavor that consumes contemporary middle-class feminists like Susan- Brownmiller and Robin Morgan—campaigning against pornography. The BDF also worked for stricter censorship of films, books and plays and against contraception and "licentiousness."
Fascism: Capitalism Takes a Different Form
The post-war chaos in Weimar Germany and the world depression of 1929, and above all the perceived inability of the workers movement to break through the impasse, threw masses of frustrated and impoverished petty bourgeois into the arms of the Nazis. Yet Hitler and his radical-lumpen street gangs would never have attained state power had not the bourgeoisie thrown its support to him, seeing in the Nazi movement a tool to crush once and for all the workers movement and open the road again for unimpeded German imperialism.
As Trotsky explained in his brilliant analysis of fascism, fascism is the continuation of capitalism in another form. Understanding this helps explain why masses of German bourgeois feminists who had loyally supported the Kaiser and/or the Weimar Republic did not find it so difficult to accept the Third Reich as well. In his 1932 article, "What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat," Trotsky pointed out the
essence of fascism:
"At the moment that the 'normal' police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium—the turn of the fascist 'regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpen-proletariat; all the countless "human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy— When a state turns fascist...it means, primarily and above all, that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism."
In Germany, the bourgeoisie had the opportunity to resort to this system only because the proletariat, paralyzed by the treachery of its political leadership— the reformist SPD and the Stalinized KPD— did not accomplish the socialist revolution instead.
Feminists Go With Hitler
By 1930 the BDF—that "fortress" of feminism-opposed contraception, sexual libertarianism and abortion on demand, defended the family and reaffirmed that woman's proper destiny lay in marriage and motherhood. By 1932 the feminists joined in the general attack then being made on the parliamentary system and urged the establishment of a corporate state on the Italian model but with the exception that one of the "corporations" would consist of women.
The feminists of the BDF, like their husbands and brothers hit by the chaos and depression, were disillusioned with impotent Weimar parliamentarian-ism, and thus welcomed the "national revolution" promised by Hitler, seeking promise even in his statement that "equal rights for women means that they experience the esteem that they deserve in the areas for which nature has intended them." BDF president Agnes von Zahn-Harnack proclaimed that feminists could "do nothing but approve a nationalist government and stand by it" and that the BDF would "do all it can to help us work together, and will certainly take up personal contacts with the best women in National Socialism."
In the last elections of the thirties in which Germans exercised any freedom of choice—those of March 1933—the BDF gave considerable support to the Nazis and expressed the hope that Hitler would soon introduce a "biological policy" to preserve the German family and a "Law of Preservation" to protect it from "asocial persons." ^Bourgeois feminists in other advanced capitalist countries would not have found BDF racism so shocking; conventional bourgeois sociology at the time took for granted that "asocial" types and "lesser races" were genetically inferior.)
The key point about the BDF's accommodation to Hitler is that it followed at every crucial point the class interests of the bourgeoisie, of its husbands and brothers—and was willing to subordinate to that end even its very conservative, upper-class goals of giving bourgeois women more access to the privileges of upper-class men. Accepting the bourgeois mystique of the sacred nuclear family, and imbued with the nationalist aspirations of its class, the BDF was unable to argue against Hitler's mystical, racist, zoological view of human society.
Hitler came to power, and proceeded to ruthlessly crush the workers movement. The most powerful proletariat in Western Europe was smashed, its organizations ripped apart, its spirit broken for a generation, all without striking a blow in its own defense. And in this triumphant wave of reactionary terror the bourgeois feminist BDF too was simply swept aside.
In April the Nazi government ordered the BDF to expel its Jewish affiliate, the Judischer Frauenbund (JFB—League of Jewish Women), its largest single organizational member, and join the Nazi mass women's organizations being formed. BDF leader Gertrud Bamumer publicly supported this move, stating that she believed the Nazi women's organizations were merely larger versions of the BDF—"a new, spiritually different phase of the women's movement"—and advised her followers to accommodate themselves to the new order. In June 1933 the BDF was formally dissolved by its membership.
Contemporary feminists are outraged by this forced dissolution of the BDF, characterizing it as a manifestation of naked fascist .tyranny. But if there was a voice raised against it at the time, it was the voice of president von Zahn-Harnack, who argued that the BDF should not be dissolved—because its aims were thoroughly compatible with those of National Socialism! She cited the organization's support for "eugenic" policies and the sterilization of "anti-social elements/' its condemnation of the Revolution of 1918 and the Versailles Treaty and its recognition of men's and women's "different spheres." To no avail—the vote for dissolution carried and this was the end of the "fortress of feminism."
The fate of the Judisher Frauenbund, which had shared all the illusions of the BDF in an educational, respectable, middle-class orientation and loyalty to German society, was perhaps the most tragic. Retreating into the Jewish community, where it had always carried on social work (like teaching young women to become maids and servants), the JFB urged its members to "lie low," not to act loud or ostentatious and to be • "good Germans." After Crystal Night, November 10, 1938, when the Nazis burned their orphanages and dissolved the organization, Jewish feminists ended up at railroad stations, making up food packets for Jews being deported to concentration camps. At the bitter end in 1942 there were only eight women carrying on at the Berlin train station, until they too were shipped away to die.
As for Gertrud Baumer, she continued to publish the BDF's Die Frau throughout the Nazi regime, later claiming that its Christian mystical emphasis was a form of resistance to Nazism. But as off our backs noted, "Considering that they allowed her to continue undisturbed, they weren't too threatened."
And Mussolini, Too
The German feminist movement was of course stamped with the particular experience of German bourgeois society, but it should not be thought that the BDF's response to fascism represented a particular, German idiosyncrasy. In Italy, too, every major feminist organization voluntarily supported fascism during the early years of Mussolini's premiership on the basis that it was stamping out socialism, which was seen as the greatest danger.
After Mussolini's march on Rome both the Consiglio nazionale delle Donne italiane (CNDI—National Council of Italian Women) and the Glornale della donna (Journal of Woman) openly offered their help m the work of "national reconstruction." And they did help. Feminists played an important role in several major fascist propaganda campaigns, including those for a ruralization policy, an increased birth rate and against strikes. The task of organizing urban women to resist strikes was carried out largely by the journals Voce Nuova (New Voice) and Glornale de//a donna, while in the countryside La donna nei camp/ (The Woman in the Fields) urged women to refuse to participate in strikes and persuade their men to do the same.
Nonetheless, by the late '20s the contradictions inherent in a "feminist-fascist" ideology became pronounced. The Genoese feminist newspaper, La Chiosa (The Comment), for example, ran an editorial in 1927 which complained:
"... we wish to ask our good Fascist camerada what you have done recently for women's rights, to educate and elevate women? In Fascism there seems to be a spirit of inexplicable, yet ferocious, anti-feminism."
—quoted in Alexander De Grand, "Women Under Italian Fascism," Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1976
Too late. After supporting Mussolini, even capitulating to the fascists' insistence on the primacy of the patriarchial family, such feminists' uncomprehending complaints met their inevitable response. The government simply transformed La Chiosa into a fashion and movie magazine.
What Does "Consistent Feminism" Lead To?
We have expressed contempt over the years for the reformist Socialist Workers Party's idiotic slogan "consistent feminism leads to socialism." While mass movements of oppressed women have been a motor force of revolution in the backward societies of the "countries of the East," bourgeois feminism in the advanced countries has led to many things—the doctrine of war between the sexes, reformist schemes like "affirmative action," recently to a moralistic campaign against pornography—but never to socialism.
Indeed, if the experience of the BDF and Italian feminism proves anything, it is that there is in fact no such thing as "consistent feminism." The specific program and character of various feminist groups in various historical periods, while all in some sense a response to the special oppression of women, is determined essentially by class considerations. The accommodation of the BDF to fascism- reflected the broader failure of bourgeois liberalism in a period of intense capitalist crisis, as well as the fundamental hostility of the bourgeois class to proletarian revolution, the only way out for the exploited and oppressed.
For today's petty-bourgeois feminists, mired in the myth of the "sisterhood" of all women, the accommodation of their "fortress of feminism" to Hitler must remain forever a source of confusion and mystery. But for us revolutionary Marxists, it is only one more striking confirmation of our position that women's liberation is above all a question of class struggle.
Much of the current rad-lib worry about "Nazism now?" in the face of the Reagan years in fact reflects only liberal illusions that the ousted Democrats were somehow qualitatively better, even though both capitalist parties are equally war-mongering enforcers of austerity on the working class. Reagan's no fascist, but he is certainly the most right-wing politician to run the American state in the last 50 years and is riding a backlash of conservatism at all levels of society. In this atmosphere of reaction, of course Nazi and fascist terror groups feel emboldened. Fascists run openly for election on both Democratic and Republican tickets; communists, labor organizers, blacks and women are slaughtered and their KKK/Nazi killers get off scot free in Greensboro, North Carolina, while Klan crosses flare in victory across the nation. Where has been the feminist response to this immediate upsurge of tiny race-hate, terror groups?
It has been the "consistent socialists" of the Spartacist League who have called for the mobilization of labor to smash this Nazi terror in the egg. Feminist Kate Millett, who has agonized at some length in print about the vicissitudes of being a woman in Nazi Germany, refused to endorse a demonstration to stop the fascist scum from "celebrating" Hitler's birthday in downtown San Francisco last April 19. Like the Socialist Workers Party, which actually champions "free speech" for fascists, Ms. Millett was more concerned about the safety of these thugs than about those whom they would murder. The rally, which was supported and heavily built by the Spartacist League, turned Out 1,200 people to let the Nazis know San Francisco is a labor town, not a Nazi town—and they didn't dare show their faces. No thanks to Millett, or those bourgeois feminists who tell women to pin their hopes on the capitalist system of "law and order."
The experience of German feminism only confirms the fact that no matter how large or powerful a feminist movement is created, the fate of women is the fate of the working class. The fight to smash fascism today— like the fight to stop Hitler in Germany— is above all the fight to forge a revolutionary proletarian party which can, as the "tribune of the people," lead the working class and all the oppressed to victory over capitalism, and end forever its inevitable, periodic crises and poisonous ideologies.
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"- In Defense Of Historical Materialism-In The Matter Of Stephen Jay Gould
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the American scientist Stephen Jay Gould.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1992 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Punctured Equilibrium
Stephen Jay Gould and the Mismeasure of Marx
The following article is reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 563, 73 November 1992.
Stephen Jay Could describes himself as a teacher of biology, geology and the history of science. He is a rare commodity in the contemporary scientific world: one who is both an original thinker in his field and a facile communicator of science to the general public. He brings to mind another great popularizer of science, the late Isaac Asimov, who combined an academic career as a biochemist with a prodigious literary output (nearly 500 books), especially of science fiction, which attracted an entire generation of future scientists. Gould has dealt with science fact rather than fiction. His writings on natural history, which we Spartacists have found thought-provoking, are perhaps best known in his collections of essays (e.g., Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb) and books including The Mismeasure of Man and Wonderful Life.
Gould is also quite unusual in contemporary American science for forthrightly acknowledging that Marx and Engels had prescient insights on human biological and sociological evolution—a question which fascinates both Gould and ourselves. We were struck, therefore, by how far Gould strays from a scientific approach in his October 1992 column in Natural History, where he writes that the "Soviet collapse" signifies that "Marx's economics has failed spectacularly, at least in the largest and longest experiment ever carried out in its name."
Gould's column, "Life in a Punctuation," extensively quotes from an article by David Warsh, "Redeeming Karl Marx" (Boston Globe, 3 May 1992). Warsh begins with the statement, "So much for communism, Russian-style." But then he asks, "what has happened to Karl Marx?... Does that mean that Marx will be consigned to the intellectual scrap heap? Probably not. As a symbol, he'll be around as long as people hunger for justice—a tarnished but evocative figure, in whose name great crimes have been committed, not unlike other great religious figures, Jesus and Mohammed." It's hardly "redemption" to reduce Marx, the dialectical materialist and revolutionary, to the role of a religious figure. But Warsh acknowledges the enduring power of Marx's ideas, adding that "you don't need even a smattering of recondite economics to understand Marx's enduring place in the modern world. His memorial is the word revolution...."
Warsh in his article cites Marx as the father of the "idea of punctuated equilibrium," which was developed by Gould and his associate Miles Eldredge in the early 1970s in the field of evolutionary biology. This is an application in the field of natural science of Marx's refutation of gradualism and his understanding that the development of history proceeds through revolutionary leaps. Gould describes the counterrevolutionary transformation taking place in the former Soviet Union also as a "punctuation." Drawing on observations gleaned during a brief trip to Moscow and Leningrad last summer, he arrives at his conclusion about the "failed experiment" of Marxist economics. Gould's wrongheaded conclusion is based on a misunderstanding of what Marxism represents, and ignores the whole historical development which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 1917 October Revolution and its subsequent development was no isolated lab test in a Petri dish! Any evaluation of what happened in the former USSR that leaves out the historic context, the tremendous external pressures upon it and its impact on the rest of the world, cannot be scientific, and will certainly be wrong.
Gould does not pretend to be a political theorist per se, but when he addresses such questions, we can ask that he do so with the rigor that he would apply in his own field. We doubt that he would make such sweeping statements about scientific opponents without a careful study of their works. Gould's view of the Soviet collapse reminds us a bit of a would-be biologist coming upon a mass of drowned caribou at a river crossing and, upon viewing the evidence before his eyes, pronouncing the species not viable. Gould has trenchantly pointed to the influence of political bias in shaping scientific views. In a 1978 workshop on dialectics at Harvard, he remarked that "it's not irrelevant that my daddy raised me a Marxist" (Science and Nature No. 2, 1979). But what did he learn as Marxism?
And why does Gould, a member of the advisory board of the journal Rethinking Marxism, lend credence to the current bourgeois brouhaha over the "death of communism"? Let us put forward our own hypothesis: that Gould confuses Marxism with its falsification, Stalinism, which has indeed been struck a mortal blow. We find it remarkable that in his remarks on the Soviet Union he never mentions the name Leon Trotsky. Even conservative bourgeois historians recognize the need to address Trotsky's analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, if only in an attempt to refute it. And in a broader methodological sense, Gould accepts the Stalinist caricature of Marxism as a kind of mechanistic determinism. "He was still a child of his mechanistic age," writes Gould, and "embodied a related conviction that directions of change are progressive, predictable and well-nigh inevitable." Marx "hoped for a predictive theory of history, with progressive stages proceeding in a punctuational manner from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism and finally to true communism."
This comes not from Marx but from Stalin's primer on Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 1938 edition, or one of those unreadable Soviet "diamat" manuals that present a mechanical and deterministic distortion of dialectical materialism. Marx, in his 1857-58 manuscripts on pre-capitalist economic formations, the Grundrisse, also wrote of an "Asiatic mode of production" in ancient Mesopotamia, India, China and elsewhere. Yet these writings were suppressed by the Kremlin for decades, because
they didn't fit into Stalin's simplistic schema, which reduced Marxism to a pseudo-materialist catechism. In contrast, Trotsky wrote, in his speech on "Radio, Science, Technology, and Society" (March 1926):
"Liberal scholars—now they are no more—commonly used to depict the whole of the history of mankind as a continuous line of progress. This was wrong. The line of progress is curved, broken, zigzagging. Culture now advances, now declines. There was the culture of ancient Asia, there was the culture of antiquity, of Greece and Rome, then European culture began to develop, and now American culture is rising in skyscrapers."
Or consider Rosa Luxemburg's poignant phrase from World War I, that mankind faces the stark alternatives: socialism or barbarism.
In fact, even in the first lines of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels noted that class struggles ended "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." This is a theme which echoes throughout their later writings. Engels' 1891 introduction to Marx's The Civil War in France warned of the dangers of a European war involving tens of millions of men at arms. This was written over two decades before the cataclysm of World War I. Marx and Engels' dialectical outlook showed how existing and developing economic forces pave the way for social change but don't automatically "determine" that this or that political leadership will accomplish a particular historically possible task.
Gould acknowledges his intellectual debt to Marx—and to Engels—whose dialectical and materialist analysis unlocked an understanding of historical forces, and has been clearly shown to apply equally well to the natural sciences. Lenin, in his 1913 biographical sketch of Marx, quoted from Engels, with his own bracketed notes:
"Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics [from the destruction of idealism, including Hegelianism] and apply it in the materialist conception of Nature....
"Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich [this was written before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!] and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature's process is dialectical and not metaphysical."
This has been proved in virtually every field of science, from quantum mechanics to mathematics to recent developments in the understanding of how consciousness and perception occur in the human brain, and to Gould's own area of biology.
Consciousness and Contingency
The basic premise of Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" is that species are stable for long periods, on the multimillion-year scale of geological time, until some geographical isolation separates a formerly genetically "homogeneous" population, or some climatic change or catastrophic event opens up new niches into which new species rapidly evolve. This "punctuation" is then followed by a new stasis. The nature of the changes during the "punctuation" are governed by what Gould calls "contingency"—i.e., along the rocky road of evolution, genetic change is essentially random and nature's path unpredictable, subject to the impact of powerful environmental events.
This is fine, so far as natural history is concerned. But when Gould considers a complex social question such as the USSR, his concept of "punctuation" guts Marxism of its key factor: the "contingent" factor is not nature's random choice but rather the presence or absence of conscious leadership. Take the work Gould cites, Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx describes in great detail how at many key points in the period 1848-51, the faction-ridden French bourgeoisie could have moved to prevent Bonaparte's coup d'etat. Marx lays bare that the fundamental question was a clash of class forces: the proletariat lacked the strength and leadership to take power in its own name, while the bourgeoisie, in fear of the ghosts of 1789 (and the proletarian masses of 1848), dawdled and surrendered political power to Bonaparte in order to preserve its economic class interests. And the bourgeoisie's response was no accidental fluke of "contingency"—the big financiers made a conscious choice that their sacred property was better defended by the empire than by the republic.
One might ask Gould, if Marx and Engels were such mechanical determinists, convinced that communism inevitably follows from capitalism as night from day, why then did they devote so much time to organizing a revolutionary political party, from the Communist League to the First and Second Internationals?
What does it mean, as Gould claims, that "Marx's economics has failed"? The economic system which issued out of the October Revolution proved the power of centralized planning. In describing his visit to Russia, Gould describes the Moscow subway system as "the world's best," and applauds "the wonderful paleontological museum in Moscow...one of the world's best both in content and display." How does Gould account for these achievements? Is it "Marx's economics" or capitalist market forces that are responsible for the fact that the museum is now closed indefinitely? Central planning performed wonders in transforming the Soviet Union from a backward peasant country to a modern industrial and military power that was capable of defeating the Nazi juggernaut
in World War II and was the first to launch satellites into space. As American Trotskyist leader James R Cannon said in 1939:
"The Russian revolution showed in practice, by example, how the workers' revolution is to be made.... By its victory, and its reorganization of the social system, the Russian revolution has proved for all time the superiority of nationalized property and planned economy over capitalist private property, and planless competition and anarchy in production."
—The Struggle for a Proletarian Party
So what did happen in the USSR? Where Gould claims that the Soviet collapse proved Marxism wrong, Trotsky long ago predicted that the continued domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy would necessarily lead to capitalist restoration. In his article, "The Class Nature of the Soviet State" (October 1933), he wrote: "The further unhindered development of bureaucratism must lead inevitably to the cessation of economic and cultural growth, to a terrible social crisis and to the downward plunge of the entire society. But this would imply not only the collapse of the proletarian dictatorship but also the end of bureaucratic domination. In place of the workers' state would come not 'social bureaucratic' but capitalist relations."
Trotsky pounded away at this theme, warning in his article "The Workers' State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism" (February 1935) that: "The inevitable collapse of the Stalinist political regime will lead to the establishment of Soviet democracy only in the event that the removal of Bonapartism comes as the conscious act of the proletarian vanguard. In all other cases, in place of Stalinism there could only come the fascist-capitalist counterrevolution." And again in his comprehensive analysis of the Stalinist degeneration, The Revolution Betrayed (1937), he sharply posed the two alternatives: "Will the bureaucrat devour the workers' state, or will the working class clean up the bureaucrat?" How Gould missed this and other writings by Trotsky is a mystery to us, particularly since Trotsky's archives are located in Harvard's Houghton Library, just a short walk from the buildings in which Could works.
Stalinism vs. Marxism
The program of Marxism is world proletarian revolution. Marx insisted that the construction of socialism would occur on the basis of an international division of labor and on the highest level of development of the productive forces, "because without it only want is made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities begins again and all the old crap must revive" (The German Ideology [1846]). Only with the "universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established," he wrote, for without this "each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism." Lenin and Trotsky stood for this internationalist perspective; they looked on the Russian Revolution as the first step in a European-wide revolution. In fact, none of the Bolshevik cadres thought that the Russian Revolution could survive without international extension, above all to Germany.
The idea that "socialism" could be built in a single country (and a backward one at that), surrounded by imperialist enemies, is a nationalist perversion of Marxism. One of the early exponents of such a "theory" was the revisionist German Social Democrat Georg Vollmar; at least he was honest about his revision of Marxism and sought to apply it to advanced capitalist Germany, not backward Russia. Even Stalin himself repudiated the very idea in his pamphlet "Foundations of Leninism" issued in the spring of 1924:
"The principal task of socialism—the organization of socialist production—has still to be fulfilled. Can this task be fulfilled, can the final victory of socialism be achieved in one country, without the joint efforts of the proletarians in several advanced countries? No, it cannot. To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient; this is proved by the history of our revolution. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required."
Several months later, Stalin reversed himself and the first edition of his pamphlet was withdrawn. Now Stalin declared that the Soviet Union "can and must build a socialist society" within the confines of a single country.
Stalin's dogma of "socialism in one country" was the ideological afterbirth of a political counterrevolution which defeated Leninist internationalism and brought to power a nationalist bureaucratic caste. The failure of the German Revolution of 1923 greatly assisted the consolidation of this conservative stratum. The fact that Stalin had to ruthlessly purge and murder all the Bolshevik cadres who had led the October Revolution should be sufficiently sanguinary evidence of the gulf between the bureaucracy and Marxism. Trotsky characterized the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule as a degenerated workers state and called for a proletarian political revolution to restore soviet democracy.
The October Revolution was an enormous leap forward for mankind—the first time that the proletariat took state power in its own name. Such a conquest had to be defended; Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought the degeneration of the revolution, and they fought to unconditionally defend the Soviet Union against counterrevolution, despite and against Stalin. The Soviet system hardly developed in a bell jar. The Civil War of 1918-20, in which 14 foreign armies invaded the young Soviet republic, devastated the country. A generation later the Nazi invaders killed 27 million Soviet citizens and turned much of Russia into scorched earth. Twice the economy was rebuilt on socialized property forms, despite the constant capitalist economic pressure, most recently manifested in a colossal arms race designed to bankrupt the Soviet economy.
In the absence of soviet workers democracy, the planned economy could only go so far. As Trotsky predicted, when the period of extensive growth under Stalin gave way to the need for intensive development, for qualitative improvements in productivity, the bureaucratic "command" economy began to founder. Congenitally hostile to promoting the spread of revolution internationally, the Stalinist bureaucracy finally saw no way out but the introduction of market relations. Under Gorbachev the bureaucracy scuttled central planning as a conscious choice. The result of abandoning planning in a planned economy, however bureaucratically distorted, was economic chaos that spurred the drive for power by emerging capitalist forces. Compounding that problem are the consequences of the fragmenting of the USSR: the economy had been organized on an all-Union basis.
Today various Stalinist remnants are arguing that the Soviet Union was a "failed model of socialism," the result of the proletariat seizing power in backward Russia. This completely abstracts the question from its historical context. Amid the carnage of the First World War, the imperialist chain broke at its "weakest link," in Lenin's words. The key to the Russian Revolution was the conscious factor: the Bolshevik Party, rooted in the working class and with a program for proletarian power. In contrast, that very "contingent" factor was lacking in Germany—the Communist Party there was only constituted in December 1918, and it proved inadequate in the 1923 revolutionary crisis. Had the German proletariat made its October, subsequent history would have been very different. The isolation of the Soviet Union would have been broken and the way opened for socialist revolutions throughout Europe, cutting off the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy. And a certain Austrian-born corporal would have spent the rest of his days hanging out in Munich beer halls.
But that's not the way it worked out, and mankind has suffered greatly with the outcome. Gould's essay cites Marx's aphorism from The Eighteenth Brumaire that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please." He might also have included the rest of the sentence: "they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."
"Punctuating to a Better Place"
Gould astutely observes that "Russia is presently in the midst of a punctuation that must soon resolve itself in one way or another—into some form of promise or prosperity, or some species of chaos and dissolution." In his own way, Gould sees something that we have insisted on since Yeltsinite counterrevolution gained the ascendancy in August 1991: that this ushered in an unstable interregnum. From our statement then that Moscow workers should have torn down Yeltsin's barricades, to our call for workers committees to seize control over food supplies last winter, we have called for workers political revolution to sweep away the capitalist-restorationist regimes and place the proletariat in power.
Gould reports on the economic and social disintegration in the rush to capitalist counterrevolution; this is apparent even in his anecdotal observations from July 1992. Institutes and museums are closed for lack of rubles to pay the staff; people meet in impromptu market areas desperately seeking otherwise unobtainable items. The cataclysmic descent into the "free market" has already provided such capitalist virtues as homelessness, unemployment, street crime and the collapse of medical care. The New York Times (4 October 1992) reports that 60 percent of Soviet children now have rickets. According to the bourgeois sages, these and other ills are related to the previous Communist (Stalinist) regime's environmental crimes, but rickets is not due to mercury or PCBs— it is due to malnutrition: the lack of vitamin D.
Gould has done great service in his voluminous writings debunking wrongheaded and outright racist ideas found in the scientific literature, noting that scientists are influenced by the dominant ideologies of the societies in which they live. In The Mismeasure of Man he states:
"Scientists needn't become explicit apologists for their class or culture in order to reflect these pervasive aspects of life.... I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information."
Yet when considering the situation in Russia, Gould himself is held in thrall by the triumphalism of bourgeois anti-communism. He takes the "pure information" of the Soviet collapse to assert the failure of Marxism.
Gould applies contingency to human society in a mechanistic fashion, downplaying the role of consciousness, historically and materially conditioned. Human beings are not snails. In the October Revolution, accident played its role, yet it was the greatest achievement of human consciousness playing itself out on the stage of history. We Trotskyists seek the revival of the liberating goals of the October Revolution, not only in the former USSR, but across the planet. Socialism will make modern technique, science, culture and education available to all, with a corresponding explosion in creative human achievement.
In the end, Gould offers what amounts to a pious hope, "Perhaps we will punctuate to a better place." Or maybe not. Rejecting the mechanistic determinism which he falsely ascribes to Marx, Gould opts for what is essentially a religious outlook, hoping that "accident" will be beneficial. But the "punctuation" could be very negative: instead of evolution, there could be involution, or a cataclysmic descent into barbarism. It is upon the resolution of the crisis of proletarian leadership that the future of humanity depends.
We have enjoyed Gould's articles in the past and we look forward to more. Regarding Marx and the Soviet developments, his conclusions are impressionistic. Can he apply to those questions the scientific approach he applies in his own field? As Plekhanov said of the misconceptions of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola: "We should be very glad if it were so; it is pleasant to have intelligent people agree with you. And if he did not agree with us, regretfully we would repeat that this intelligent man is mistaken."
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1992 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
*******
Punctured Equilibrium
Stephen Jay Gould and the Mismeasure of Marx
The following article is reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 563, 73 November 1992.
Stephen Jay Could describes himself as a teacher of biology, geology and the history of science. He is a rare commodity in the contemporary scientific world: one who is both an original thinker in his field and a facile communicator of science to the general public. He brings to mind another great popularizer of science, the late Isaac Asimov, who combined an academic career as a biochemist with a prodigious literary output (nearly 500 books), especially of science fiction, which attracted an entire generation of future scientists. Gould has dealt with science fact rather than fiction. His writings on natural history, which we Spartacists have found thought-provoking, are perhaps best known in his collections of essays (e.g., Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb) and books including The Mismeasure of Man and Wonderful Life.
Gould is also quite unusual in contemporary American science for forthrightly acknowledging that Marx and Engels had prescient insights on human biological and sociological evolution—a question which fascinates both Gould and ourselves. We were struck, therefore, by how far Gould strays from a scientific approach in his October 1992 column in Natural History, where he writes that the "Soviet collapse" signifies that "Marx's economics has failed spectacularly, at least in the largest and longest experiment ever carried out in its name."
Gould's column, "Life in a Punctuation," extensively quotes from an article by David Warsh, "Redeeming Karl Marx" (Boston Globe, 3 May 1992). Warsh begins with the statement, "So much for communism, Russian-style." But then he asks, "what has happened to Karl Marx?... Does that mean that Marx will be consigned to the intellectual scrap heap? Probably not. As a symbol, he'll be around as long as people hunger for justice—a tarnished but evocative figure, in whose name great crimes have been committed, not unlike other great religious figures, Jesus and Mohammed." It's hardly "redemption" to reduce Marx, the dialectical materialist and revolutionary, to the role of a religious figure. But Warsh acknowledges the enduring power of Marx's ideas, adding that "you don't need even a smattering of recondite economics to understand Marx's enduring place in the modern world. His memorial is the word revolution...."
Warsh in his article cites Marx as the father of the "idea of punctuated equilibrium," which was developed by Gould and his associate Miles Eldredge in the early 1970s in the field of evolutionary biology. This is an application in the field of natural science of Marx's refutation of gradualism and his understanding that the development of history proceeds through revolutionary leaps. Gould describes the counterrevolutionary transformation taking place in the former Soviet Union also as a "punctuation." Drawing on observations gleaned during a brief trip to Moscow and Leningrad last summer, he arrives at his conclusion about the "failed experiment" of Marxist economics. Gould's wrongheaded conclusion is based on a misunderstanding of what Marxism represents, and ignores the whole historical development which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 1917 October Revolution and its subsequent development was no isolated lab test in a Petri dish! Any evaluation of what happened in the former USSR that leaves out the historic context, the tremendous external pressures upon it and its impact on the rest of the world, cannot be scientific, and will certainly be wrong.
Gould does not pretend to be a political theorist per se, but when he addresses such questions, we can ask that he do so with the rigor that he would apply in his own field. We doubt that he would make such sweeping statements about scientific opponents without a careful study of their works. Gould's view of the Soviet collapse reminds us a bit of a would-be biologist coming upon a mass of drowned caribou at a river crossing and, upon viewing the evidence before his eyes, pronouncing the species not viable. Gould has trenchantly pointed to the influence of political bias in shaping scientific views. In a 1978 workshop on dialectics at Harvard, he remarked that "it's not irrelevant that my daddy raised me a Marxist" (Science and Nature No. 2, 1979). But what did he learn as Marxism?
And why does Gould, a member of the advisory board of the journal Rethinking Marxism, lend credence to the current bourgeois brouhaha over the "death of communism"? Let us put forward our own hypothesis: that Gould confuses Marxism with its falsification, Stalinism, which has indeed been struck a mortal blow. We find it remarkable that in his remarks on the Soviet Union he never mentions the name Leon Trotsky. Even conservative bourgeois historians recognize the need to address Trotsky's analysis of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, if only in an attempt to refute it. And in a broader methodological sense, Gould accepts the Stalinist caricature of Marxism as a kind of mechanistic determinism. "He was still a child of his mechanistic age," writes Gould, and "embodied a related conviction that directions of change are progressive, predictable and well-nigh inevitable." Marx "hoped for a predictive theory of history, with progressive stages proceeding in a punctuational manner from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism and finally to true communism."
This comes not from Marx but from Stalin's primer on Dialectical and Historical Materialism, 1938 edition, or one of those unreadable Soviet "diamat" manuals that present a mechanical and deterministic distortion of dialectical materialism. Marx, in his 1857-58 manuscripts on pre-capitalist economic formations, the Grundrisse, also wrote of an "Asiatic mode of production" in ancient Mesopotamia, India, China and elsewhere. Yet these writings were suppressed by the Kremlin for decades, because
they didn't fit into Stalin's simplistic schema, which reduced Marxism to a pseudo-materialist catechism. In contrast, Trotsky wrote, in his speech on "Radio, Science, Technology, and Society" (March 1926):
"Liberal scholars—now they are no more—commonly used to depict the whole of the history of mankind as a continuous line of progress. This was wrong. The line of progress is curved, broken, zigzagging. Culture now advances, now declines. There was the culture of ancient Asia, there was the culture of antiquity, of Greece and Rome, then European culture began to develop, and now American culture is rising in skyscrapers."
Or consider Rosa Luxemburg's poignant phrase from World War I, that mankind faces the stark alternatives: socialism or barbarism.
In fact, even in the first lines of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels noted that class struggles ended "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." This is a theme which echoes throughout their later writings. Engels' 1891 introduction to Marx's The Civil War in France warned of the dangers of a European war involving tens of millions of men at arms. This was written over two decades before the cataclysm of World War I. Marx and Engels' dialectical outlook showed how existing and developing economic forces pave the way for social change but don't automatically "determine" that this or that political leadership will accomplish a particular historically possible task.
Gould acknowledges his intellectual debt to Marx—and to Engels—whose dialectical and materialist analysis unlocked an understanding of historical forces, and has been clearly shown to apply equally well to the natural sciences. Lenin, in his 1913 biographical sketch of Marx, quoted from Engels, with his own bracketed notes:
"Marx and I were pretty well the only people to rescue conscious dialectics [from the destruction of idealism, including Hegelianism] and apply it in the materialist conception of Nature....
"Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern natural science that it has furnished extremely rich [this was written before the discovery of radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements, etc.!] and daily increasing materials for this test, and has thus proved that in the last analysis Nature's process is dialectical and not metaphysical."
This has been proved in virtually every field of science, from quantum mechanics to mathematics to recent developments in the understanding of how consciousness and perception occur in the human brain, and to Gould's own area of biology.
Consciousness and Contingency
The basic premise of Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" is that species are stable for long periods, on the multimillion-year scale of geological time, until some geographical isolation separates a formerly genetically "homogeneous" population, or some climatic change or catastrophic event opens up new niches into which new species rapidly evolve. This "punctuation" is then followed by a new stasis. The nature of the changes during the "punctuation" are governed by what Gould calls "contingency"—i.e., along the rocky road of evolution, genetic change is essentially random and nature's path unpredictable, subject to the impact of powerful environmental events.
This is fine, so far as natural history is concerned. But when Gould considers a complex social question such as the USSR, his concept of "punctuation" guts Marxism of its key factor: the "contingent" factor is not nature's random choice but rather the presence or absence of conscious leadership. Take the work Gould cites, Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx describes in great detail how at many key points in the period 1848-51, the faction-ridden French bourgeoisie could have moved to prevent Bonaparte's coup d'etat. Marx lays bare that the fundamental question was a clash of class forces: the proletariat lacked the strength and leadership to take power in its own name, while the bourgeoisie, in fear of the ghosts of 1789 (and the proletarian masses of 1848), dawdled and surrendered political power to Bonaparte in order to preserve its economic class interests. And the bourgeoisie's response was no accidental fluke of "contingency"—the big financiers made a conscious choice that their sacred property was better defended by the empire than by the republic.
One might ask Gould, if Marx and Engels were such mechanical determinists, convinced that communism inevitably follows from capitalism as night from day, why then did they devote so much time to organizing a revolutionary political party, from the Communist League to the First and Second Internationals?
What does it mean, as Gould claims, that "Marx's economics has failed"? The economic system which issued out of the October Revolution proved the power of centralized planning. In describing his visit to Russia, Gould describes the Moscow subway system as "the world's best," and applauds "the wonderful paleontological museum in Moscow...one of the world's best both in content and display." How does Gould account for these achievements? Is it "Marx's economics" or capitalist market forces that are responsible for the fact that the museum is now closed indefinitely? Central planning performed wonders in transforming the Soviet Union from a backward peasant country to a modern industrial and military power that was capable of defeating the Nazi juggernaut
in World War II and was the first to launch satellites into space. As American Trotskyist leader James R Cannon said in 1939:
"The Russian revolution showed in practice, by example, how the workers' revolution is to be made.... By its victory, and its reorganization of the social system, the Russian revolution has proved for all time the superiority of nationalized property and planned economy over capitalist private property, and planless competition and anarchy in production."
—The Struggle for a Proletarian Party
So what did happen in the USSR? Where Gould claims that the Soviet collapse proved Marxism wrong, Trotsky long ago predicted that the continued domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy would necessarily lead to capitalist restoration. In his article, "The Class Nature of the Soviet State" (October 1933), he wrote: "The further unhindered development of bureaucratism must lead inevitably to the cessation of economic and cultural growth, to a terrible social crisis and to the downward plunge of the entire society. But this would imply not only the collapse of the proletarian dictatorship but also the end of bureaucratic domination. In place of the workers' state would come not 'social bureaucratic' but capitalist relations."
Trotsky pounded away at this theme, warning in his article "The Workers' State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism" (February 1935) that: "The inevitable collapse of the Stalinist political regime will lead to the establishment of Soviet democracy only in the event that the removal of Bonapartism comes as the conscious act of the proletarian vanguard. In all other cases, in place of Stalinism there could only come the fascist-capitalist counterrevolution." And again in his comprehensive analysis of the Stalinist degeneration, The Revolution Betrayed (1937), he sharply posed the two alternatives: "Will the bureaucrat devour the workers' state, or will the working class clean up the bureaucrat?" How Gould missed this and other writings by Trotsky is a mystery to us, particularly since Trotsky's archives are located in Harvard's Houghton Library, just a short walk from the buildings in which Could works.
Stalinism vs. Marxism
The program of Marxism is world proletarian revolution. Marx insisted that the construction of socialism would occur on the basis of an international division of labor and on the highest level of development of the productive forces, "because without it only want is made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities begins again and all the old crap must revive" (The German Ideology [1846]). Only with the "universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established," he wrote, for without this "each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism." Lenin and Trotsky stood for this internationalist perspective; they looked on the Russian Revolution as the first step in a European-wide revolution. In fact, none of the Bolshevik cadres thought that the Russian Revolution could survive without international extension, above all to Germany.
The idea that "socialism" could be built in a single country (and a backward one at that), surrounded by imperialist enemies, is a nationalist perversion of Marxism. One of the early exponents of such a "theory" was the revisionist German Social Democrat Georg Vollmar; at least he was honest about his revision of Marxism and sought to apply it to advanced capitalist Germany, not backward Russia. Even Stalin himself repudiated the very idea in his pamphlet "Foundations of Leninism" issued in the spring of 1924:
"The principal task of socialism—the organization of socialist production—has still to be fulfilled. Can this task be fulfilled, can the final victory of socialism be achieved in one country, without the joint efforts of the proletarians in several advanced countries? No, it cannot. To overthrow the bourgeoisie the efforts of one country are sufficient; this is proved by the history of our revolution. For the final victory of socialism, for the organization of socialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a peasant country like Russia, are insufficient; for that the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are required."
Several months later, Stalin reversed himself and the first edition of his pamphlet was withdrawn. Now Stalin declared that the Soviet Union "can and must build a socialist society" within the confines of a single country.
Stalin's dogma of "socialism in one country" was the ideological afterbirth of a political counterrevolution which defeated Leninist internationalism and brought to power a nationalist bureaucratic caste. The failure of the German Revolution of 1923 greatly assisted the consolidation of this conservative stratum. The fact that Stalin had to ruthlessly purge and murder all the Bolshevik cadres who had led the October Revolution should be sufficiently sanguinary evidence of the gulf between the bureaucracy and Marxism. Trotsky characterized the Soviet Union under Stalinist rule as a degenerated workers state and called for a proletarian political revolution to restore soviet democracy.
The October Revolution was an enormous leap forward for mankind—the first time that the proletariat took state power in its own name. Such a conquest had to be defended; Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought the degeneration of the revolution, and they fought to unconditionally defend the Soviet Union against counterrevolution, despite and against Stalin. The Soviet system hardly developed in a bell jar. The Civil War of 1918-20, in which 14 foreign armies invaded the young Soviet republic, devastated the country. A generation later the Nazi invaders killed 27 million Soviet citizens and turned much of Russia into scorched earth. Twice the economy was rebuilt on socialized property forms, despite the constant capitalist economic pressure, most recently manifested in a colossal arms race designed to bankrupt the Soviet economy.
In the absence of soviet workers democracy, the planned economy could only go so far. As Trotsky predicted, when the period of extensive growth under Stalin gave way to the need for intensive development, for qualitative improvements in productivity, the bureaucratic "command" economy began to founder. Congenitally hostile to promoting the spread of revolution internationally, the Stalinist bureaucracy finally saw no way out but the introduction of market relations. Under Gorbachev the bureaucracy scuttled central planning as a conscious choice. The result of abandoning planning in a planned economy, however bureaucratically distorted, was economic chaos that spurred the drive for power by emerging capitalist forces. Compounding that problem are the consequences of the fragmenting of the USSR: the economy had been organized on an all-Union basis.
Today various Stalinist remnants are arguing that the Soviet Union was a "failed model of socialism," the result of the proletariat seizing power in backward Russia. This completely abstracts the question from its historical context. Amid the carnage of the First World War, the imperialist chain broke at its "weakest link," in Lenin's words. The key to the Russian Revolution was the conscious factor: the Bolshevik Party, rooted in the working class and with a program for proletarian power. In contrast, that very "contingent" factor was lacking in Germany—the Communist Party there was only constituted in December 1918, and it proved inadequate in the 1923 revolutionary crisis. Had the German proletariat made its October, subsequent history would have been very different. The isolation of the Soviet Union would have been broken and the way opened for socialist revolutions throughout Europe, cutting off the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy. And a certain Austrian-born corporal would have spent the rest of his days hanging out in Munich beer halls.
But that's not the way it worked out, and mankind has suffered greatly with the outcome. Gould's essay cites Marx's aphorism from The Eighteenth Brumaire that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please." He might also have included the rest of the sentence: "they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."
"Punctuating to a Better Place"
Gould astutely observes that "Russia is presently in the midst of a punctuation that must soon resolve itself in one way or another—into some form of promise or prosperity, or some species of chaos and dissolution." In his own way, Gould sees something that we have insisted on since Yeltsinite counterrevolution gained the ascendancy in August 1991: that this ushered in an unstable interregnum. From our statement then that Moscow workers should have torn down Yeltsin's barricades, to our call for workers committees to seize control over food supplies last winter, we have called for workers political revolution to sweep away the capitalist-restorationist regimes and place the proletariat in power.
Gould reports on the economic and social disintegration in the rush to capitalist counterrevolution; this is apparent even in his anecdotal observations from July 1992. Institutes and museums are closed for lack of rubles to pay the staff; people meet in impromptu market areas desperately seeking otherwise unobtainable items. The cataclysmic descent into the "free market" has already provided such capitalist virtues as homelessness, unemployment, street crime and the collapse of medical care. The New York Times (4 October 1992) reports that 60 percent of Soviet children now have rickets. According to the bourgeois sages, these and other ills are related to the previous Communist (Stalinist) regime's environmental crimes, but rickets is not due to mercury or PCBs— it is due to malnutrition: the lack of vitamin D.
Gould has done great service in his voluminous writings debunking wrongheaded and outright racist ideas found in the scientific literature, noting that scientists are influenced by the dominant ideologies of the societies in which they live. In The Mismeasure of Man he states:
"Scientists needn't become explicit apologists for their class or culture in order to reflect these pervasive aspects of life.... I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information."
Yet when considering the situation in Russia, Gould himself is held in thrall by the triumphalism of bourgeois anti-communism. He takes the "pure information" of the Soviet collapse to assert the failure of Marxism.
Gould applies contingency to human society in a mechanistic fashion, downplaying the role of consciousness, historically and materially conditioned. Human beings are not snails. In the October Revolution, accident played its role, yet it was the greatest achievement of human consciousness playing itself out on the stage of history. We Trotskyists seek the revival of the liberating goals of the October Revolution, not only in the former USSR, but across the planet. Socialism will make modern technique, science, culture and education available to all, with a corresponding explosion in creative human achievement.
In the end, Gould offers what amounts to a pious hope, "Perhaps we will punctuate to a better place." Or maybe not. Rejecting the mechanistic determinism which he falsely ascribes to Marx, Gould opts for what is essentially a religious outlook, hoping that "accident" will be beneficial. But the "punctuation" could be very negative: instead of evolution, there could be involution, or a cataclysmic descent into barbarism. It is upon the resolution of the crisis of proletarian leadership that the future of humanity depends.
We have enjoyed Gould's articles in the past and we look forward to more. Regarding Marx and the Soviet developments, his conclusions are impressionistic. Can he apply to those questions the scientific approach he applies in his own field? As Plekhanov said of the misconceptions of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola: "We should be very glad if it were so; it is pleasant to have intelligent people agree with you. And if he did not agree with us, regretfully we would repeat that this intelligent man is mistaken."
Friday, June 25, 2010
*From The "Green Left Global News" Blog- American West Coast Dock Actions In Defense Of The Palestinian People
Click on the headline to link a"Green Left Global News" Blog entry on- American West Coast Dock Actions In Defense Of The Palestinian People.
Markin comment:
Every action by the international working class, including unionized dock workers who have a militant history on the American West Coast docks, to slow down the Israeli war machine, even if only symbolically, is a step in the right direction. Totally End The Blockade of Gaza! All Honor To The Flotilla Blockade Breakers! Down With U.S Aid To Israel! Defend The Palestinian People!
Markin comment:
Every action by the international working class, including unionized dock workers who have a militant history on the American West Coast docks, to slow down the Israeli war machine, even if only symbolically, is a step in the right direction. Totally End The Blockade of Gaza! All Honor To The Flotilla Blockade Breakers! Down With U.S Aid To Israel! Defend The Palestinian People!
*Another Look At The Underside Of The English Revolution-Professor Underdown’s View- “Revel, Riot, And Rebellion”
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the late Marxist historian, Professor Christopher Hill.
Book Review
Revel, Riot, And Rebellion, David Underdown, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985
No question, to my mind at least, that the late Professor Christopher Hill did yeoman’s, no, more than yeoman’s work in opening up the subject of the English revolution of the mid-1600s beyond the disputes between the various upper classes who defended and opposed the rule of Charles I. Professor Hill brought to life all sorts of information about the plebeians masses, their religious (and irreligious) seekings, their support to new political ideas and their attempts to eke out a space for themselves in the upheavals of those times. Of course Hill’s long-lived ground-breaking work was just that, a start.
Naturally the vast amount of material on the English revolution that Professor Hill wrote about in his long career from the religious and literary interpretations of the Bible, the infant democratic political struggles by the Levellers and Diggers, the embryonic emergence of primitive communist doctrine around the figure of Gerrard Winstanley, the unraveling of the myriad religious sects and quasi-sects from Quakers to Shakers, the reaction against the plebeian masses in the post-Restoration period under the guidance of Charles II, and above all, the place of poet and revolutionary propagandist, John Milton, in the scheme of Commonwealth politics and the literature of defeat begged for more work. And Professor Underdown’s work here reflects one aspect of that scheme. Here the good professor looks at popular politics at a level below the surface and in more localized detail that Professor Hill only got a chance to sketch out.
Revolutions, as a rule, produce more varied and exotic ideas in a short period than are produced in decades during less turbulent times. Some of the more outlandish ones never even see the light of day during peaceful times. Thus, Professor Underdown’s task would have been rather daunting if he hadn’t limited his investigation to a few counties, and those in a particular geographic area that permits both a close analysis of why one side or the other went with Parliament or the crown and of the thinking of the plebeian masses. Moreover, he has grounded his work in an understanding of the way inhabitants of different locales (forest lands, arable land, urban clothing-producing areas, etc.) created there own political traditions from church-ales, to “skimmingtons”, to all manner of local customs, church-based or secular, including popular sports. This work is not for a reader who is not already somewhat familiar with the period of the English revolution. If you are not go read a little of Professor Hill then come back here for an in-depth view of what the fuss was all about.
Book Review
Revel, Riot, And Rebellion, David Underdown, Oxford University Press, New York, 1985
No question, to my mind at least, that the late Professor Christopher Hill did yeoman’s, no, more than yeoman’s work in opening up the subject of the English revolution of the mid-1600s beyond the disputes between the various upper classes who defended and opposed the rule of Charles I. Professor Hill brought to life all sorts of information about the plebeians masses, their religious (and irreligious) seekings, their support to new political ideas and their attempts to eke out a space for themselves in the upheavals of those times. Of course Hill’s long-lived ground-breaking work was just that, a start.
Naturally the vast amount of material on the English revolution that Professor Hill wrote about in his long career from the religious and literary interpretations of the Bible, the infant democratic political struggles by the Levellers and Diggers, the embryonic emergence of primitive communist doctrine around the figure of Gerrard Winstanley, the unraveling of the myriad religious sects and quasi-sects from Quakers to Shakers, the reaction against the plebeian masses in the post-Restoration period under the guidance of Charles II, and above all, the place of poet and revolutionary propagandist, John Milton, in the scheme of Commonwealth politics and the literature of defeat begged for more work. And Professor Underdown’s work here reflects one aspect of that scheme. Here the good professor looks at popular politics at a level below the surface and in more localized detail that Professor Hill only got a chance to sketch out.
Revolutions, as a rule, produce more varied and exotic ideas in a short period than are produced in decades during less turbulent times. Some of the more outlandish ones never even see the light of day during peaceful times. Thus, Professor Underdown’s task would have been rather daunting if he hadn’t limited his investigation to a few counties, and those in a particular geographic area that permits both a close analysis of why one side or the other went with Parliament or the crown and of the thinking of the plebeian masses. Moreover, he has grounded his work in an understanding of the way inhabitants of different locales (forest lands, arable land, urban clothing-producing areas, etc.) created there own political traditions from church-ales, to “skimmingtons”, to all manner of local customs, church-based or secular, including popular sports. This work is not for a reader who is not already somewhat familiar with the period of the English revolution. If you are not go read a little of Professor Hill then come back here for an in-depth view of what the fuss was all about.
From The New America Foundation- "The Year Of The Drone"
Click on the headline to link to a "The New America Foundation" study on the use of drones by the American government.
Markin comment:
Usually, I do not, directly at least, post academic or private foundation-related materials on this site, although I certainly use such materials in my comments. This report, however, is worthy of inclusion as the use of "drones" and other hi-tech, non-human (and even more non-humane, as well)killing machines come to the forefront in modern warfare.
Markin comment:
Usually, I do not, directly at least, post academic or private foundation-related materials on this site, although I certainly use such materials in my comments. This report, however, is worthy of inclusion as the use of "drones" and other hi-tech, non-human (and even more non-humane, as well)killing machines come to the forefront in modern warfare.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
*Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By-Bruce Springsteen's "The Ghost Of Tom Joad"
Click on the title to link a "YouTube" film clip of Bruce Springsteen performing "The Ghost Of Tom Joad." Tom Joad is a central figure in John Steinbeck's classic Great Depression novel, "The Grapes Of Wrath."
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
In this series, presented under the headline “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here. Markin.
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