Markin comment:
The slogans featured in the headline to the article also posted here today and that is also the subject here, open diplomacy, are simply the beginning of wisdom for leftists- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange! We anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist leftists have not interest, no interest whatsoever, in letting the bourgeois state keep its state secrets secret. Although reading some of the material leaked one can understand why they would want to keep this stuff secret. More to the point is that some of the documentation of sophomoric antics of the “august” international diplomatic community should be placed in books sealed with seven seals-in the interest of human progress-now that we have had our “look-see.”
The key point though, as noted in the article, is our commitment to open diplomacy under the same principles as we have on opening the company books during trade union negotiations. The more we know about the conditions the other side operates under the better we can fight them.
I would also underscore here the point made in the article about the distinction between today’s Wikileaks’ basically ultra-liberal journalistic approach to “shaming” the international bourgeoisie to be less imperialistic and the policy of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early revolutionary period of the 1917 revolution to give ammunition to the international working class to order to help them rise up against their oppressors. That “open diplomacy, openly arrived at,” my friends, should be the norm, under conditions of a world federation of workers republics, in our struggle for an international socialist order.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Soviet Publication of Secret Treaties
(Quote of the Week)
Two weeks after the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution of 1917, Leon Trotsky, then the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, announced the Soviet government’s publication of secret treaties, exposing the machinations of the prior tsarist and Provisional Government regimes and their imperialist allies. Published after the Soviet government had declared Russia’s withdrawal from the carnage of World War I, a war of competing imperialist powers for redivision of the world, the revelations helped foment a wave of struggle by the imperialists’ colonial victims. Most importantly, the Bolsheviks advanced the fight to end the war through proletarian revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries.
In publishing the secret diplomatic documents from the foreign policy archives of Tsarism and of the bourgeois coalition Governments of the first seven months of the revolution, we are carrying out the undertaking which we made when our party was in opposition. Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level. The struggle against the imperialism which is exhausting and destroying the peoples of Europe is at the same time a struggle against capitalist diplomacy, which has cause enough to fear the light of day. The Russian people, and the peoples of Europe and the whole world, should learn the documentary truth about the plans forged in secret by the financiers and industrialists together with their parliamentary and diplomatic agents. The peoples of Europe have paid for the right to this truth with countless sacrifices and universal economic desolation.
The abolition of secret diplomacy is the primary condition for an honest, popular, truly democratic foreign policy. The Soviet Government regards it as its duty to carry out such a policy in practice. That is precisely why, while openly proposing an immediate armistice to all the belligerent peoples and their Governments, we are at the same time publishing these treaties and agreements, which have lost all binding force for the Russian workers, soldiers, and peasants who have taken power into their own hands.
The bourgeois politicians and journalists of Germany and Austria-Hungary may try to make use of the documents published in order to present the diplomacy of the Central Empires in a more advantageous light. But any such attempt would be doomed to pitiful failure, and that for two reasons. In the first place, we intend quickly to place before the tribunal of public opinion secret documents which treat sufficiently clearly of the diplomacy of the Central Empires. Secondly, and more important, the methods of secret diplomacy are as universal as imperialist robbery. When the German proletariat enters the revolutionary path leading to the secrets of their chancelleries, they will extract documents no whit inferior to those which we are about to publish. It only remains to hope that this will take place quickly.
The workers’ and peasants’ Government abolishes secret diplomacy and its intrigues, codes, and lies. We have nothing to hide. Our programme expresses the ardent wishes of millions of workers, soldiers, and peasants. We want peace as soon as possible on the basis of decent coexistence and collaboration of the peoples. We want the rule of capital to be overthrown as soon as possible. In exposing to the entire world the work of the ruling classes, as expressed in the secret diplomatic documents, we address the workers with the call which forms the unchangeable foundation of our foreign policy: “Proletarians of all countries, unite.”
—“Statement by Trotsky on the Publication of the Secret Treaties,” 22 November 1917,
reprinted in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, Vol. 1 (1917-1924), edited by Jane Degras (1951)
Thursday, January 13, 2011
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Free Private Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!-WikiLeaks, Imperialist Lies and Retribution
Markin comment:
The slogans featured in the headline to this article are simply the beginning of wisdom for leftists- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange! We anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist leftists have not interest, no interest whatsoever, in letting the bourgeois state keep its state secrets secret. Although reading some of the material leaked one can understand why they would want to keep this stuff secret. More to the point is that some of the documentation of sophomoric antics of the “august” international diplomatic community should be placed in books sealed with seven seals-in the interest of human progress-now that we have had our “look-see.”
The key point though, as noted in the article, is our commitment to open diplomacy under the same principles as we have on opening the company books during trade union negotiations. The more we know about the conditions the other side operates under the better we can fight them.
I would also underscore here the point made in the article about the distinction between today’s Wikileaks’ basically ultra-liberal journalistic approach to “shaming” the international bourgeoisie to be less imperialistic and the policy of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early revolutionary period of the 1917 revolution to give ammunition to the international working class to order to help them rise up against their oppressors. That “open diplomacy, openly arrived at,” my friends, should be the norm, under conditions of a world federation of workers republics, in our struggle for an international socialist order.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Free Private Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!
WikiLeaks, Imperialist Lies and Retribution
The release by WikiLeaks of some 250,000 State Department cables has provoked a vicious campaign of retaliation by the rulers of U.S. imperialism against Julian Assange, the Web site’s founder, and Army Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking secret material. Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly preparing criminal charges against Assange, an Australian citizen, possibly under the Espionage Act of 1917. Manning faces a court martial and up to 52 years in prison if convicted. He incurred Washington’s wrath when a video of a U.S. war crime in Baghdad was posted last April by WikiLeaks. It showed an Apache helicopter gunning down and killing at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, while the pilots gloated over the carnage.
Manning—if he was, indeed, the source of the leaks—and Assange are courageous individuals who have performed a laudable service by lifting, however slightly, the veil of secrecy and lies that enshrouds the imperialists’ machinations. They richly deserve to be defended by workers and the oppressed throughout the world. Protests in defense of Assange have been held in a number of countries, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions has spoken out for him. It is crucial for the international working class to defend WikiLeaks and Assange and also to demand freedom for Private Manning, who is being held under torturous conditions of solitary confinement at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia.
Though one would hardly guess it from the Obama administration’s frenzied reaction to the latest leaks, they actually contain little in the way of dramatic revelations. The imperialists are, simply, enraged at the slightest light being shed on their workings. A number of the cables are, to be sure, somewhat embarrassing for the U.S. and its client regimes. Thus, the leaked cables reveal that NATO has developed a secret military plan for defense of Poland and the Baltic states against Russia. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Arab countries are revealed to be pressing the U.S. to stage a military attack targeting Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, showing yet again that Iran needs nukes to deter attack by the U.S. or its Israeli proxy. And the Palestinian Authority and Lebanese government are shown to be working with Israel to target, respectively, Hamas and Hezbollah.
The cables also provide an insider’s view of U.S. imperialism’s high-handed operations within the borders of its client states. They show U.S. participation in the operational command of the “drug war” in Mexico, from developing overall strategy to selecting individuals to be targeted. American officials in Yemen negotiated a scheme with that country’s president to disguise U.S. air strikes on suspected Al Qaeda camps as being carried out by the Yemeni government, including when civilians get blown away. Such exposures are not, to say the least, to the benefit of the imperialists or their lackeys. The cables also include a report from the U.S. ambassador to Honduras on the June 2009 overthrow of populist president Manuel Zelaya characterizing the actions of “the military and/or whoever ordered the coup” as “illegal.” Whatever the case, the Obama administration has backed the government brought to power by the coup.
A particularly noteworthy subject covered by a number of the leaked cables is the case of torture victim Khaled el-Masri. A German citizen of Lebanese descent, el-Masri was seized in late 2003 while on vacation in Macedonia and shipped off to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan where he was held in solitary confinement, interrogated and beaten. Even after the CIA established that el-Masri was not the man they thought he was (his name is similar to that of a suspect in the 9/11 attacks), they continued to hold him incommunicado because “he knew too much.” Finally, after nearly five months’ detainment, el-Masri was dumped in a remote part of Albania, never having been charged with a crime.
The cables about el-Masri, which were sent from the U.S. embassies in Germany, Spain and Macedonia in 2006 and 2007, confirm what was long suspected: Berlin did not enforce arrest warrants against 13 CIA operatives accused of involvement in the kidnapping of this German citizen because Washington exerted intense pressure, warning of “potential negative implications for our bilateral relationship” if the case was pursued.
Obama White House: Vicious and Vindictive
Following the release of the video of the helicopter attack in Baghdad, WikiLeaks made public some 76,000 classified military field reports from the Afghanistan occupation that document the brutality inflicted by imperialist forces upon civilians, including by CIA-led forces operating out of bases along the border with Pakistan. Then in October, WikiLeaks published nearly 400,000 field reports on the Iraq war and occupation detailing more than 109,000 deaths, mostly of civilians.
The Obama administration has lashed out in fury against Private Manning by subjecting him to inhuman prison conditions that are clearly intended to break his will. Since his arrest last May, Manning has been held in solitary confinement. He is prohibited from exercising or watching television news programs; guards check on him every five minutes; a light is kept on in his cell, including when he tries to sleep. According to journalist David House, the only person to visit Manning in prison other than his lawyer: “He is being kept in a kind of punitive fashion before his trial and it is definitely weakening his mental state” (BBC News, 24 December 2010).
Manning is, as Assange correctly noted, a political prisoner. Assange, meanwhile, is under house arrest in Britain as he fights a Swedish extradition order citing allegations of “rape” and “sexual molestation.” Those accusations—which boil down to charges of unprotected sex in what were by all accounts consensual relations—are patently trumped-up. Prosecutors in Sweden initially opened, then dropped, then reopened an investigation into the accusations, which were made by a couple of WikiLeaks groupies. In fact, Assange has not been charged with any crime.
As Assange has pointed out, the real threat he faces is the possibility of extradition to the U.S., where both Democratic and Republican politicians are screaming for his head on a pike. Vice President Joe Biden was joined by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in branding Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” The implied threat behind this smear was made explicit by Tom Flanagan, former adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, who declared that Assange “should be assassinated.”
Assange is, basically, an ardent liberal critic of imperialist policy. In the late 1990s, he co-authored an encryption program called Rubberhose that activists in places like East Timor, Russia, Kosovo, Guatemala, Iraq, Sudan and Congo could use to protect sensitive data. In 2009, Amnesty International gave Assange its media award for a WikiLeaks investigation of the killing of hundreds of young men in Kenya by government forces. The fact that U.S. government spokesmen are discussing hitting Assange with the 1917 Espionage Act is a crystal-clear demonstration of how “national interests” are invoked by the capitalist rulers to clamp down on their critics. Meanwhile, Bank of America, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa Europe have done what they can to help shut down Assange’s Web site by blocking payments to WikiLeaks.
The Espionage Act was one of an array of repressive measures adopted after U.S. imperialism’s entry into the First World War to criminalize antiwar activity. It mandated imprisonment for any act deemed to interfere with the recruitment of troops. Haunted by the spectre of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which ripped Russia from the capitalist market and ended its participation in the war, in 1918 Congress passed the Sedition Act that made criticizing the “U.S. form of government” a felony.
Among the first and most prominent targets of the Espionage Act was Socialist Party spokesman Eugene Debs, who was jailed for a June 1918 speech at a workers rally in Canton, Ohio, where he denounced the war as capitalist slaughter and paid tribute to the Bolshevik leaders of the October Revolution. The same law was used in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of spying for the Soviets during World War II, when the U.S. and the USSR were allies. As their son Robert Meeropol declared in a December 29 statement in defense of Assange, the Espionage Act “transformed dissent into treason.” In the early 1970s, the Nixon government tried, unsuccessfully, to use the law to go after Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times shed light on the history of U.S. imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.
While no one knows exactly what the Obama administration is cooking up against Assange, there is no question that the vendetta against him threatens an ominous further attack on free speech, press freedoms and other democratic rights. Commenting on the case of an intelligence consultant hit with the Espionage Act for exposing what he considered wasteful expenditures on eavesdropping programs, the New York Times (11 June 2010) noted that “the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.” As we have repeatedly stressed, Barack Obama, who came into office with broad support from liberals and the left, is simply carrying out his duties as U.S. imperialism’s Commander-in-Chief—from expanding the murderous occupation of Afghanistan to stepping up attacks on democratic rights in the name of the “war on terror.”
The Bolsheviks vs. Secret Diplomacy
The furious reaction of the Obama administration to the WikiLeaks exposures points to the importance the rulers of capitalist imperialism place on secret diplomacy, which, as revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky explained in November 1917, “is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests.” Trotsky made this point in a statement he issued as Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet workers state that had just issued out of the October Revolution. Trotsky was announcing the publication and abrogation of secret treaties hatched by the prior tsarist regime and the bourgeois Provisional Government with their imperialist allies.
Prior to the proletariat’s seizure of power, the Bolshevik Party had demanded the abolition of secret diplomacy and the publication of secret treaties as part of its revolutionary proletarian opposition to World War I, a conflict between competing imperialists for redivision of the world. This demand was raised against the Provisional Government, which, coming to power after the overthrow of the tsar in the February Revolution of 1917, continued Russia’s participation in the war.
Immediately following the October Revolution, the workers state issued a decree on peace removing Russia from the war and demanding of the belligerents a “just, democratic” peace without annexations or indemnities. Two weeks later, the Soviet newspaper Izvestia began publication of treaties concluded during the war. Historian E.H. Carr noted in Volume Three of The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 that publication of the treaties in English in the Manchester Guardian galvanized British radicals and “created a sensation in the United States.” In his Canton speech, Debs declared, “When the Bolsheviki came into power and went through the archives they found and exposed the secret treaties—the treaties that were made between the Czar and the French government, the British government and the Italian government, proposing, after the victory was achieved, to dismember the German Empire and destroy the Central Powers. These treaties have never been denied nor repudiated.”
The October Revolution was a beacon of liberation for the exploited and the oppressed in the advanced capitalist countries and in the colonial and semicolonial world. Along with the Soviet government’s renunciation of predatory agreements reached by prior regimes, publication of the treaties helped spark waves of struggle by those under the boot heel of the imperialists, whose dirty deals were now laid bare.
One of the first treaties to be exposed was the May 1916 agreement between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot, which plotted the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in anticipation of its defeat, along with Germany in WWI. Tsarist Russia approved this pact on condition that it receive part of eastern Anatolia and Constantinople (Istanbul) with its Straits of Dardanelles, a critically strategic passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The exposure of this deal, which was revised at the end of the war in favor of Britain, had an electrifying effect in the Near East, whose peoples expected that the Ottomans’ defeat would result in their self-determination. Strikes and demonstrations swept Egypt in 1919, and the following year in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) the masses stood up to the more than 130,000 British troops deployed to occupy the territory. The Soviet government also disowned plans by the tsarist regime and the imperialists to divide up Persia (Iran).
A similar impact was seen in China, whole chunks of which had been carved up by the Western and Japanese imperialists. The Soviets published a secret treaty signed by Japan and Russia in 1916 that upheld a series of prior secret agreements dividing Manchuria in northeast China into Japanese and Russian spheres of influence. Other areas, such as Inner Mongolia, were similarly demarcated. The Bolsheviks’ renunciation of tsarist annexations and machinations in China made a deep impression on key radical intellectuals and among students returning to China after the war. Many of the students had illusions in U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s promises of “self-determination” and social justice for all peoples. However, with the 1919 Versailles Treaty, the U.S. and other imperialists awarded all of defeated Germany’s territory in China to the Japanese Empire, sparking a wave of mass protest known as the May 4th Movement, some of whose leaders went on to help found the Chinese Communist Party.
A Revolutionary Perspective
A number of reformist “socialist” organizations around the world have referred positively to the Soviets’ publication of secret treaties in light of the WikiLeaks exposures, only to draw a continuum between the two. While performing a valuable service to the exploited and the oppressed, Julian Assange is what he is: a bourgeois liberal who vainly seeks to rid the imperialist system of its worst excesses through exposure of its crimes. The Bolsheviks had a different purpose. By exposing the deeds of the previous Russian rulers and their imperialist patrons and allies, they helped educate the working class in Russia and internationally. Their program was to extend the October Revolution internationally, which they knew was the only road to achieving a socialist society. However, the revolutionary wave that accompanied and followed the end of World War I in Germany and elsewhere in Europe failed to overthrow the rule of capital, centrally due to the lack of the kind of steeled vanguard party that V.I. Lenin had built in Russia.
While maintaining its revolutionary internationalist perspective and program, the early Soviet workers state itself needed to engage in diplomatic dealings with the capitalist world. Thus it signed the Rapallo Pact, which arranged for the German military and its industrial suppliers to set up operations on Soviet territory. While this gave the German militarists a chance to rearm, it also provided the means to begin the mechanization and modernization of the Red Army and related branches of Soviet industry. This part of the Rapallo Pact had to be kept secret from the victorious Entente powers. As Trotsky wrote of the revolutionary Bolshevik regime: “Wherever it could, it, of course, deceived the class enemies; on the other hand it told the toilers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Only thanks to this did it succeed in winning their trust to a degree never before achieved by any other party in the world” (Their Morals and Ours, 1938).
With the defeat of the 1923 German Revolution, the Soviet workers state, which had suffered greatly from the effects of the interimperialist war and the Civil War that followed the revolution, found itself isolated. Under conditions of scarcity, a new conservative and bureaucratized layer in the party and state apparatus led by Joseph Stalin came to the fore, usurping political power beginning in 1923-24. In place of the banner of world socialist revolution, Stalin in 1924 put forward the false dogma of “socialism in one country,” out of which the corollary of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism inevitably developed. Over time, and against the opposition of Trotsky and his followers who fought to maintain the program of the October Revolution, the Communist Parties were transformed from instruments of revolution into instruments of class collaboration.
Trotsky observed in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), his classic analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy, that “foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals. The degeneration of the governing stratum in the Soviet Union could not but be accompanied by a corresponding change of aims and methods in Soviet diplomacy.” While unconditionally defending the degenerated Soviet workers state against imperialism and domestic capitalist counterrevolution, Trotskyists fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy and return to the road of the October Revolution.
The bureaucracy’s betrayals led to the ultimate undoing of the October Revolution through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. In the aftermath, the imperialists who crow about the “death of communism” are ever more brazen in their rampages from Iraq to Afghanistan and in their assault on democratic rights and the livelihood of workers “at home.” Liberals and the reformist left seize upon revelations of the (everyday) workings of the capitalist rulers—disinformation, secret political police, assassination, etc.—to pressure the imperialists to adopt more “humane” policies. Our aim is to build a workers party of the Bolshevik type. Imperialism and its savage wars and occupations, sold through systematic lying and duplicity, will be defeated only through victorious proletarian revolution which, extended internationally, will lay the basis for the liberation of all humanity in a future communist world.
The slogans featured in the headline to this article are simply the beginning of wisdom for leftists- Free Pvt. Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange! We anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist leftists have not interest, no interest whatsoever, in letting the bourgeois state keep its state secrets secret. Although reading some of the material leaked one can understand why they would want to keep this stuff secret. More to the point is that some of the documentation of sophomoric antics of the “august” international diplomatic community should be placed in books sealed with seven seals-in the interest of human progress-now that we have had our “look-see.”
The key point though, as noted in the article, is our commitment to open diplomacy under the same principles as we have on opening the company books during trade union negotiations. The more we know about the conditions the other side operates under the better we can fight them.
I would also underscore here the point made in the article about the distinction between today’s Wikileaks’ basically ultra-liberal journalistic approach to “shaming” the international bourgeoisie to be less imperialistic and the policy of the Bolsheviks in Russia in the early revolutionary period of the 1917 revolution to give ammunition to the international working class to order to help them rise up against their oppressors. That “open diplomacy, openly arrived at,” my friends, should be the norm, under conditions of a world federation of workers republics, in our struggle for an international socialist order.
***********
Workers Vanguard No. 971
7 January 2011
Free Private Manning! Hands Off Julian Assange!
WikiLeaks, Imperialist Lies and Retribution
The release by WikiLeaks of some 250,000 State Department cables has provoked a vicious campaign of retaliation by the rulers of U.S. imperialism against Julian Assange, the Web site’s founder, and Army Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking secret material. Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly preparing criminal charges against Assange, an Australian citizen, possibly under the Espionage Act of 1917. Manning faces a court martial and up to 52 years in prison if convicted. He incurred Washington’s wrath when a video of a U.S. war crime in Baghdad was posted last April by WikiLeaks. It showed an Apache helicopter gunning down and killing at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, while the pilots gloated over the carnage.
Manning—if he was, indeed, the source of the leaks—and Assange are courageous individuals who have performed a laudable service by lifting, however slightly, the veil of secrecy and lies that enshrouds the imperialists’ machinations. They richly deserve to be defended by workers and the oppressed throughout the world. Protests in defense of Assange have been held in a number of countries, and the Australian Council of Trade Unions has spoken out for him. It is crucial for the international working class to defend WikiLeaks and Assange and also to demand freedom for Private Manning, who is being held under torturous conditions of solitary confinement at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia.
Though one would hardly guess it from the Obama administration’s frenzied reaction to the latest leaks, they actually contain little in the way of dramatic revelations. The imperialists are, simply, enraged at the slightest light being shed on their workings. A number of the cables are, to be sure, somewhat embarrassing for the U.S. and its client regimes. Thus, the leaked cables reveal that NATO has developed a secret military plan for defense of Poland and the Baltic states against Russia. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Arab countries are revealed to be pressing the U.S. to stage a military attack targeting Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, showing yet again that Iran needs nukes to deter attack by the U.S. or its Israeli proxy. And the Palestinian Authority and Lebanese government are shown to be working with Israel to target, respectively, Hamas and Hezbollah.
The cables also provide an insider’s view of U.S. imperialism’s high-handed operations within the borders of its client states. They show U.S. participation in the operational command of the “drug war” in Mexico, from developing overall strategy to selecting individuals to be targeted. American officials in Yemen negotiated a scheme with that country’s president to disguise U.S. air strikes on suspected Al Qaeda camps as being carried out by the Yemeni government, including when civilians get blown away. Such exposures are not, to say the least, to the benefit of the imperialists or their lackeys. The cables also include a report from the U.S. ambassador to Honduras on the June 2009 overthrow of populist president Manuel Zelaya characterizing the actions of “the military and/or whoever ordered the coup” as “illegal.” Whatever the case, the Obama administration has backed the government brought to power by the coup.
A particularly noteworthy subject covered by a number of the leaked cables is the case of torture victim Khaled el-Masri. A German citizen of Lebanese descent, el-Masri was seized in late 2003 while on vacation in Macedonia and shipped off to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan where he was held in solitary confinement, interrogated and beaten. Even after the CIA established that el-Masri was not the man they thought he was (his name is similar to that of a suspect in the 9/11 attacks), they continued to hold him incommunicado because “he knew too much.” Finally, after nearly five months’ detainment, el-Masri was dumped in a remote part of Albania, never having been charged with a crime.
The cables about el-Masri, which were sent from the U.S. embassies in Germany, Spain and Macedonia in 2006 and 2007, confirm what was long suspected: Berlin did not enforce arrest warrants against 13 CIA operatives accused of involvement in the kidnapping of this German citizen because Washington exerted intense pressure, warning of “potential negative implications for our bilateral relationship” if the case was pursued.
Obama White House: Vicious and Vindictive
Following the release of the video of the helicopter attack in Baghdad, WikiLeaks made public some 76,000 classified military field reports from the Afghanistan occupation that document the brutality inflicted by imperialist forces upon civilians, including by CIA-led forces operating out of bases along the border with Pakistan. Then in October, WikiLeaks published nearly 400,000 field reports on the Iraq war and occupation detailing more than 109,000 deaths, mostly of civilians.
The Obama administration has lashed out in fury against Private Manning by subjecting him to inhuman prison conditions that are clearly intended to break his will. Since his arrest last May, Manning has been held in solitary confinement. He is prohibited from exercising or watching television news programs; guards check on him every five minutes; a light is kept on in his cell, including when he tries to sleep. According to journalist David House, the only person to visit Manning in prison other than his lawyer: “He is being kept in a kind of punitive fashion before his trial and it is definitely weakening his mental state” (BBC News, 24 December 2010).
Manning is, as Assange correctly noted, a political prisoner. Assange, meanwhile, is under house arrest in Britain as he fights a Swedish extradition order citing allegations of “rape” and “sexual molestation.” Those accusations—which boil down to charges of unprotected sex in what were by all accounts consensual relations—are patently trumped-up. Prosecutors in Sweden initially opened, then dropped, then reopened an investigation into the accusations, which were made by a couple of WikiLeaks groupies. In fact, Assange has not been charged with any crime.
As Assange has pointed out, the real threat he faces is the possibility of extradition to the U.S., where both Democratic and Republican politicians are screaming for his head on a pike. Vice President Joe Biden was joined by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell in branding Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” The implied threat behind this smear was made explicit by Tom Flanagan, former adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, who declared that Assange “should be assassinated.”
Assange is, basically, an ardent liberal critic of imperialist policy. In the late 1990s, he co-authored an encryption program called Rubberhose that activists in places like East Timor, Russia, Kosovo, Guatemala, Iraq, Sudan and Congo could use to protect sensitive data. In 2009, Amnesty International gave Assange its media award for a WikiLeaks investigation of the killing of hundreds of young men in Kenya by government forces. The fact that U.S. government spokesmen are discussing hitting Assange with the 1917 Espionage Act is a crystal-clear demonstration of how “national interests” are invoked by the capitalist rulers to clamp down on their critics. Meanwhile, Bank of America, MasterCard, PayPal and Visa Europe have done what they can to help shut down Assange’s Web site by blocking payments to WikiLeaks.
The Espionage Act was one of an array of repressive measures adopted after U.S. imperialism’s entry into the First World War to criminalize antiwar activity. It mandated imprisonment for any act deemed to interfere with the recruitment of troops. Haunted by the spectre of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which ripped Russia from the capitalist market and ended its participation in the war, in 1918 Congress passed the Sedition Act that made criticizing the “U.S. form of government” a felony.
Among the first and most prominent targets of the Espionage Act was Socialist Party spokesman Eugene Debs, who was jailed for a June 1918 speech at a workers rally in Canton, Ohio, where he denounced the war as capitalist slaughter and paid tribute to the Bolshevik leaders of the October Revolution. The same law was used in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of spying for the Soviets during World War II, when the U.S. and the USSR were allies. As their son Robert Meeropol declared in a December 29 statement in defense of Assange, the Espionage Act “transformed dissent into treason.” In the early 1970s, the Nixon government tried, unsuccessfully, to use the law to go after Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times shed light on the history of U.S. imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants.
While no one knows exactly what the Obama administration is cooking up against Assange, there is no question that the vendetta against him threatens an ominous further attack on free speech, press freedoms and other democratic rights. Commenting on the case of an intelligence consultant hit with the Espionage Act for exposing what he considered wasteful expenditures on eavesdropping programs, the New York Times (11 June 2010) noted that “the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.” As we have repeatedly stressed, Barack Obama, who came into office with broad support from liberals and the left, is simply carrying out his duties as U.S. imperialism’s Commander-in-Chief—from expanding the murderous occupation of Afghanistan to stepping up attacks on democratic rights in the name of the “war on terror.”
The Bolsheviks vs. Secret Diplomacy
The furious reaction of the Obama administration to the WikiLeaks exposures points to the importance the rulers of capitalist imperialism place on secret diplomacy, which, as revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky explained in November 1917, “is a necessary tool for a propertied minority which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests.” Trotsky made this point in a statement he issued as Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet workers state that had just issued out of the October Revolution. Trotsky was announcing the publication and abrogation of secret treaties hatched by the prior tsarist regime and the bourgeois Provisional Government with their imperialist allies.
Prior to the proletariat’s seizure of power, the Bolshevik Party had demanded the abolition of secret diplomacy and the publication of secret treaties as part of its revolutionary proletarian opposition to World War I, a conflict between competing imperialists for redivision of the world. This demand was raised against the Provisional Government, which, coming to power after the overthrow of the tsar in the February Revolution of 1917, continued Russia’s participation in the war.
Immediately following the October Revolution, the workers state issued a decree on peace removing Russia from the war and demanding of the belligerents a “just, democratic” peace without annexations or indemnities. Two weeks later, the Soviet newspaper Izvestia began publication of treaties concluded during the war. Historian E.H. Carr noted in Volume Three of The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923 that publication of the treaties in English in the Manchester Guardian galvanized British radicals and “created a sensation in the United States.” In his Canton speech, Debs declared, “When the Bolsheviki came into power and went through the archives they found and exposed the secret treaties—the treaties that were made between the Czar and the French government, the British government and the Italian government, proposing, after the victory was achieved, to dismember the German Empire and destroy the Central Powers. These treaties have never been denied nor repudiated.”
The October Revolution was a beacon of liberation for the exploited and the oppressed in the advanced capitalist countries and in the colonial and semicolonial world. Along with the Soviet government’s renunciation of predatory agreements reached by prior regimes, publication of the treaties helped spark waves of struggle by those under the boot heel of the imperialists, whose dirty deals were now laid bare.
One of the first treaties to be exposed was the May 1916 agreement between Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François Georges-Picot, which plotted the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in anticipation of its defeat, along with Germany in WWI. Tsarist Russia approved this pact on condition that it receive part of eastern Anatolia and Constantinople (Istanbul) with its Straits of Dardanelles, a critically strategic passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The exposure of this deal, which was revised at the end of the war in favor of Britain, had an electrifying effect in the Near East, whose peoples expected that the Ottomans’ defeat would result in their self-determination. Strikes and demonstrations swept Egypt in 1919, and the following year in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) the masses stood up to the more than 130,000 British troops deployed to occupy the territory. The Soviet government also disowned plans by the tsarist regime and the imperialists to divide up Persia (Iran).
A similar impact was seen in China, whole chunks of which had been carved up by the Western and Japanese imperialists. The Soviets published a secret treaty signed by Japan and Russia in 1916 that upheld a series of prior secret agreements dividing Manchuria in northeast China into Japanese and Russian spheres of influence. Other areas, such as Inner Mongolia, were similarly demarcated. The Bolsheviks’ renunciation of tsarist annexations and machinations in China made a deep impression on key radical intellectuals and among students returning to China after the war. Many of the students had illusions in U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s promises of “self-determination” and social justice for all peoples. However, with the 1919 Versailles Treaty, the U.S. and other imperialists awarded all of defeated Germany’s territory in China to the Japanese Empire, sparking a wave of mass protest known as the May 4th Movement, some of whose leaders went on to help found the Chinese Communist Party.
A Revolutionary Perspective
A number of reformist “socialist” organizations around the world have referred positively to the Soviets’ publication of secret treaties in light of the WikiLeaks exposures, only to draw a continuum between the two. While performing a valuable service to the exploited and the oppressed, Julian Assange is what he is: a bourgeois liberal who vainly seeks to rid the imperialist system of its worst excesses through exposure of its crimes. The Bolsheviks had a different purpose. By exposing the deeds of the previous Russian rulers and their imperialist patrons and allies, they helped educate the working class in Russia and internationally. Their program was to extend the October Revolution internationally, which they knew was the only road to achieving a socialist society. However, the revolutionary wave that accompanied and followed the end of World War I in Germany and elsewhere in Europe failed to overthrow the rule of capital, centrally due to the lack of the kind of steeled vanguard party that V.I. Lenin had built in Russia.
While maintaining its revolutionary internationalist perspective and program, the early Soviet workers state itself needed to engage in diplomatic dealings with the capitalist world. Thus it signed the Rapallo Pact, which arranged for the German military and its industrial suppliers to set up operations on Soviet territory. While this gave the German militarists a chance to rearm, it also provided the means to begin the mechanization and modernization of the Red Army and related branches of Soviet industry. This part of the Rapallo Pact had to be kept secret from the victorious Entente powers. As Trotsky wrote of the revolutionary Bolshevik regime: “Wherever it could, it, of course, deceived the class enemies; on the other hand it told the toilers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Only thanks to this did it succeed in winning their trust to a degree never before achieved by any other party in the world” (Their Morals and Ours, 1938).
With the defeat of the 1923 German Revolution, the Soviet workers state, which had suffered greatly from the effects of the interimperialist war and the Civil War that followed the revolution, found itself isolated. Under conditions of scarcity, a new conservative and bureaucratized layer in the party and state apparatus led by Joseph Stalin came to the fore, usurping political power beginning in 1923-24. In place of the banner of world socialist revolution, Stalin in 1924 put forward the false dogma of “socialism in one country,” out of which the corollary of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism inevitably developed. Over time, and against the opposition of Trotsky and his followers who fought to maintain the program of the October Revolution, the Communist Parties were transformed from instruments of revolution into instruments of class collaboration.
Trotsky observed in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), his classic analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy, that “foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals. The degeneration of the governing stratum in the Soviet Union could not but be accompanied by a corresponding change of aims and methods in Soviet diplomacy.” While unconditionally defending the degenerated Soviet workers state against imperialism and domestic capitalist counterrevolution, Trotskyists fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy and return to the road of the October Revolution.
The bureaucracy’s betrayals led to the ultimate undoing of the October Revolution through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. In the aftermath, the imperialists who crow about the “death of communism” are ever more brazen in their rampages from Iraq to Afghanistan and in their assault on democratic rights and the livelihood of workers “at home.” Liberals and the reformist left seize upon revelations of the (everyday) workings of the capitalist rulers—disinformation, secret political police, assassination, etc.—to pressure the imperialists to adopt more “humane” policies. Our aim is to build a workers party of the Bolshevik type. Imperialism and its savage wars and occupations, sold through systematic lying and duplicity, will be defeated only through victorious proletarian revolution which, extended internationally, will lay the basis for the liberation of all humanity in a future communist world.
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War(1915)
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War
Published: Sotsial-Demorkrat No. 43, July 26, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demorkrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 275-280.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.
This is axiomatic, and disputed only by conscious partisans or helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists. Among the former, for instance, is Semkovsky of the Organising Committee (No. 2 of its Izvestia), and among the latter, Trotsky and Bukvoyed,[2] and Kautsky in Germany. To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105).
This is an instance of high-flown phraseology with which Trotsky always justifies opportunism. A “revolutionary struggle against the war” is merely an empty and meaning less exclamation, something at which the heroes of the Second International excel, unless it means revolutionary action against one’s own government even in wartime. One has only to do some thinking in order to understand this. Wartime revolutionary action against one’s own government indubitably means, not only desiring its defeat, but really facilitating such a defeat. ("Discerning reader”: note that this does not mean “blowing up bridges”, organising unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and ·in general helping the government defeat the revolutionaries.)
The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany. (Bukvoyed and Semkovsky give more direct expression to the “thought”, or rather want of thought, which they share with Trotsky.) But Trotsky regards this as the “methodology of social-patriotism"! To help people that are unable to think for themselves, the Berne resolution (Sotsial Demokrat No. 40)[1] made it clear, that in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its own government. Bukvoyed and Trotsky preferred to avoid this truth, while Semkovsky (an opportunist who is more useful to the working class than all the others, thanks to his naively frank reiteration of bourgeois wisdom) blurted out the following: “This is nonsense, because either Germany or Russia can win” (Izvestia No. 2).
Take the example of the Paris Commune. France was defeated by Germany but the workers were defeated by Bismarck and Thiers! Had Bukvoyed and Trotsky done a little thinking, they would have realised that they have adopted the viewpoint on the war held by governments and the bourgeoisie, i.e., that they cringe to the “political methodology of social-patriotism”, to use Trotsky’s pretentious language.
A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war is, on the one hand, facilitated by military reverses ("defeats") of governments; on the other hand, one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby facilitating defeat.
The reason why the chauvinists (including the Organising Committee and the Chkheidze group) repudiate the defeat “slogan” is that this slogan alone implies a consistent call for revolutionary action against one’s own government in wartime. Without such action, millions of ultra-revolutionary phrases such as a war against “the war and the conditions, etc." are not worth a brass farthing.
Anyone who would in all earnest refute the “slogan” of defeat for one’s own government in the imperialist war should prove one of three things: (1) that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary, or (2) that a revolution stemming from that war is impossible, or (3) that co-ordination and mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries. The third point is particularly important to Russia, a most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible. That is why the Russian Social-Democrats had to be the first to advance the “theory and practice” of the defeat “slogan”. The tsarist government was perfectly right in asserting that the agitation conducted by the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group in the Duma—the sole instance in the International, not only of parliamentary opposition but of genuine revolutionary anti-government agitation among the masses—that this agitation has weakened Russia’s “military might” and is likely to lead to its defeat. This is a fact to which it is foolish to close one’s eyes.
The opponents of the defeat slogan are simply afraid of themselves when they refuse to recognise the very obvious fact of the inseparable link between revolutionary agitation against the government and helping bring about its defeat.
Are co-ordination and mutual aid possible between the Russian movement, which is revolutionary in the bourgeois- democratic sense, and th socialist movement in the West? No socialist who has publicly spoken on the matter during the last decade has doubted this, the movement among the Austrian proletariat after October 17, 1905,[3] actually proving it possible.
Ask any Social-Democrat who calls himself an internationalist whether or not he approves of an understanding between the Social-Democrats of the various belligerent countries on joint revolutionary action against all belligerent governments. Many of them will reply that it is impossible, as Kautsky has done (Die Neue Zeit, October 2, 1914), thereby fully proving his social-chauvinism. This, on the one hand, is a deliberate and vicious lie, which clashes with the generally known facts and the Basle Manifesto. On the other hand, if it were true, the opportunists would be quite right in many respects!
Many will voice their approval of such an understanding. To this we shall say: if this approval is not hypocritical, it is ridiculous to think that, in wartime and for the conduct of a war, some “formal” understanding is necessary, such as the election of representatives, the arrangement of a meeting, the signing of an agreement, and the choice of the day and hour! Only the Semkovskys are capable of thinking so. An understanding on revolutionary action even in a single country, to say nothing of a number of countries, can be achieved only by the force of the example of serious revolutionary action, by launching such action and developing it. However, such action cannot be launched without desiring the defeat of the government, and without contributing to such a defeat. The conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war cannot be “made”, any more than a revolution can be “made”. It develops out of a number of diverse phenomena, aspects, features, characteristics and consequences of the imperialist war. That development is impossible without a series of military reverses and defeats of governments that receive blows from their own oppressed classes.
To repudiate the defeat slogan means allowing one’s revolutionary ardour to degenerate into an empty phrase, or sheer hypocrisy.
What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of “neither victory nor defeat” (Semkovsky in Izvestia No. 2; also the entire Organising Committee in No. 1). This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, “retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”. “The significance of our August 4 vote was that we are not for war but against defeat," David, a leader of the opportunists, writes in his book. The Organising Committee, together with Bukvoyed and Trotsky, stand on fully the same ground as David when they defend the “neither-victory nor-defeat” slogan.
On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.
When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.
Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an -enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing ·governments, of the present-day ruling classes.
Let us look at the question from yet another angle. The war cannot but evoke among the masses the most turbulent sentiments, which upset the usual sluggish state of mass mentality. Revolutionary tactics are impossible if they are not adjusted to these new turbulent sentiments.
What are the main currents of these turbulent sentiments? They are: (1) Horror and despair. Hence, a growth of religious feeling. Again the churches are crowded, the reactionaries joyfully declare. “Wherever there is suffering there is religion," says the arch-reactionary Barr s. He is right, too. (2) Hatred of the “enemy”, a sentiment that is carefully fostered by the bourgeoisie (not so much by the priests), arid is of economic and political value only to the bourgeoisie. (3) Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie—the sentiment of all class-conscious workers who understand, on the one hand, that war is a “continuation of the politics” of imperialism, which they counter by a “continuation” of their hatred of their class enemy, and, on the other hand, that “a war against war” is a banal phrase unless it means a revolution against their own government. Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie cannot be aroused unless their defeat is desired; one cannot be a sincere opponent of a civil (i.e., class) truce without arousing hatred of one’s own government and bourgeoisie!
Those who stand for the “neither-victory-nor-defeat” slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of inter national revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task. It is the proletariat in the most backward of the belligerent. Great Powers which, through the medium of their party, have had to adopt—especially in view of the shameful treachery of the German and French Social-Democrats— revolutionary tactics that are quite unfeasible unless they “contribute to the defeat” of their own government, but which alone lead to a European revolution, to the permanent peace of socialism, to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] See p. 163 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] Bukvoyed-D. Ryazanov.
[3] This refers to the tsar’s manifesto promulgated on October 17 (30), 1905. It promised "civil liberties" and a “legislative Duma”. The manifesto was a concession wrested from the tsarist regime by the revolution, but that concession by no means decided the fate of the revolution as the liberals and Mensheviks claimed, The Bolsheviks exposed the real meaning of the Manifesto and called upon the masses to continue the struggle and overthrow the autocracy.
The first Russian revolution exerted a great revolutionising influence on the working-class movement in other countries, in particular in Austria-Hungary. Lenin pointed out that the news about the tsar’s concession and his manifesto, with its promise of “liberties”, “played a decisive part in the final victory of universal suffrage in Austria”.
Mass demonstrations took place in Vienna and other industrial cities in Austria-Hungary. In Prague barricades were put up. As a result, universal suffrage was introduced in Austria.
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War
Published: Sotsial-Demorkrat No. 43, July 26, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demorkrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 275-280.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2003 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government.
This is axiomatic, and disputed only by conscious partisans or helpless satellites of the social-chauvinists. Among the former, for instance, is Semkovsky of the Organising Committee (No. 2 of its Izvestia), and among the latter, Trotsky and Bukvoyed,[2] and Kautsky in Germany. To desire Russia’s defeat, Trotsky writes, is “an uncalled-for and absolutely unjustifiable concession to the political methodology of social-patriotism, which would replace the revolutionary struggle against the war and the conditions causing it, with an orientation—highly arbitrary in the present conditions—towards the lesser evil” (Nashe Slovo No. 105).
This is an instance of high-flown phraseology with which Trotsky always justifies opportunism. A “revolutionary struggle against the war” is merely an empty and meaning less exclamation, something at which the heroes of the Second International excel, unless it means revolutionary action against one’s own government even in wartime. One has only to do some thinking in order to understand this. Wartime revolutionary action against one’s own government indubitably means, not only desiring its defeat, but really facilitating such a defeat. ("Discerning reader”: note that this does not mean “blowing up bridges”, organising unsuccessful strikes in the war industries, and ·in general helping the government defeat the revolutionaries.)
The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany. (Bukvoyed and Semkovsky give more direct expression to the “thought”, or rather want of thought, which they share with Trotsky.) But Trotsky regards this as the “methodology of social-patriotism"! To help people that are unable to think for themselves, the Berne resolution (Sotsial Demokrat No. 40)[1] made it clear, that in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its own government. Bukvoyed and Trotsky preferred to avoid this truth, while Semkovsky (an opportunist who is more useful to the working class than all the others, thanks to his naively frank reiteration of bourgeois wisdom) blurted out the following: “This is nonsense, because either Germany or Russia can win” (Izvestia No. 2).
Take the example of the Paris Commune. France was defeated by Germany but the workers were defeated by Bismarck and Thiers! Had Bukvoyed and Trotsky done a little thinking, they would have realised that they have adopted the viewpoint on the war held by governments and the bourgeoisie, i.e., that they cringe to the “political methodology of social-patriotism”, to use Trotsky’s pretentious language.
A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war is, on the one hand, facilitated by military reverses ("defeats") of governments; on the other hand, one cannot actually strive for such a conversion without thereby facilitating defeat.
The reason why the chauvinists (including the Organising Committee and the Chkheidze group) repudiate the defeat “slogan” is that this slogan alone implies a consistent call for revolutionary action against one’s own government in wartime. Without such action, millions of ultra-revolutionary phrases such as a war against “the war and the conditions, etc." are not worth a brass farthing.
Anyone who would in all earnest refute the “slogan” of defeat for one’s own government in the imperialist war should prove one of three things: (1) that the war of 1914-15 is not reactionary, or (2) that a revolution stemming from that war is impossible, or (3) that co-ordination and mutual aid are possible between revolutionary movements in all the belligerent countries. The third point is particularly important to Russia, a most backward country, where an immediate socialist revolution is impossible. That is why the Russian Social-Democrats had to be the first to advance the “theory and practice” of the defeat “slogan”. The tsarist government was perfectly right in asserting that the agitation conducted by the Russian Social-Democratic Labour group in the Duma—the sole instance in the International, not only of parliamentary opposition but of genuine revolutionary anti-government agitation among the masses—that this agitation has weakened Russia’s “military might” and is likely to lead to its defeat. This is a fact to which it is foolish to close one’s eyes.
The opponents of the defeat slogan are simply afraid of themselves when they refuse to recognise the very obvious fact of the inseparable link between revolutionary agitation against the government and helping bring about its defeat.
Are co-ordination and mutual aid possible between the Russian movement, which is revolutionary in the bourgeois- democratic sense, and th socialist movement in the West? No socialist who has publicly spoken on the matter during the last decade has doubted this, the movement among the Austrian proletariat after October 17, 1905,[3] actually proving it possible.
Ask any Social-Democrat who calls himself an internationalist whether or not he approves of an understanding between the Social-Democrats of the various belligerent countries on joint revolutionary action against all belligerent governments. Many of them will reply that it is impossible, as Kautsky has done (Die Neue Zeit, October 2, 1914), thereby fully proving his social-chauvinism. This, on the one hand, is a deliberate and vicious lie, which clashes with the generally known facts and the Basle Manifesto. On the other hand, if it were true, the opportunists would be quite right in many respects!
Many will voice their approval of such an understanding. To this we shall say: if this approval is not hypocritical, it is ridiculous to think that, in wartime and for the conduct of a war, some “formal” understanding is necessary, such as the election of representatives, the arrangement of a meeting, the signing of an agreement, and the choice of the day and hour! Only the Semkovskys are capable of thinking so. An understanding on revolutionary action even in a single country, to say nothing of a number of countries, can be achieved only by the force of the example of serious revolutionary action, by launching such action and developing it. However, such action cannot be launched without desiring the defeat of the government, and without contributing to such a defeat. The conversion of the imperialist war into a civil war cannot be “made”, any more than a revolution can be “made”. It develops out of a number of diverse phenomena, aspects, features, characteristics and consequences of the imperialist war. That development is impossible without a series of military reverses and defeats of governments that receive blows from their own oppressed classes.
To repudiate the defeat slogan means allowing one’s revolutionary ardour to degenerate into an empty phrase, or sheer hypocrisy.
What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of “neither victory nor defeat” (Semkovsky in Izvestia No. 2; also the entire Organising Committee in No. 1). This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, “retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”. “The significance of our August 4 vote was that we are not for war but against defeat," David, a leader of the opportunists, writes in his book. The Organising Committee, together with Bukvoyed and Trotsky, stand on fully the same ground as David when they defend the “neither-victory nor-defeat” slogan.
On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.
When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.
Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an -enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing ·governments, of the present-day ruling classes.
Let us look at the question from yet another angle. The war cannot but evoke among the masses the most turbulent sentiments, which upset the usual sluggish state of mass mentality. Revolutionary tactics are impossible if they are not adjusted to these new turbulent sentiments.
What are the main currents of these turbulent sentiments? They are: (1) Horror and despair. Hence, a growth of religious feeling. Again the churches are crowded, the reactionaries joyfully declare. “Wherever there is suffering there is religion," says the arch-reactionary Barr s. He is right, too. (2) Hatred of the “enemy”, a sentiment that is carefully fostered by the bourgeoisie (not so much by the priests), arid is of economic and political value only to the bourgeoisie. (3) Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie—the sentiment of all class-conscious workers who understand, on the one hand, that war is a “continuation of the politics” of imperialism, which they counter by a “continuation” of their hatred of their class enemy, and, on the other hand, that “a war against war” is a banal phrase unless it means a revolution against their own government. Hatred of one’s own government and one’s own bourgeoisie cannot be aroused unless their defeat is desired; one cannot be a sincere opponent of a civil (i.e., class) truce without arousing hatred of one’s own government and bourgeoisie!
Those who stand for the “neither-victory-nor-defeat” slogan are in fact on the side of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists, for they do not believe in the possibility of inter national revolutionary action by the working class against their own governments, and do not wish to help develop such action, which, though undoubtedly difficult, is the only task worthy of a proletarian, the only socialist task. It is the proletariat in the most backward of the belligerent. Great Powers which, through the medium of their party, have had to adopt—especially in view of the shameful treachery of the German and French Social-Democrats— revolutionary tactics that are quite unfeasible unless they “contribute to the defeat” of their own government, but which alone lead to a European revolution, to the permanent peace of socialism, to the liberation of humanity from the horrors, misery, savagery and brutality now prevailing.
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Notes
[1] See p. 163 of this volume.—Ed.
[2] Bukvoyed-D. Ryazanov.
[3] This refers to the tsar’s manifesto promulgated on October 17 (30), 1905. It promised "civil liberties" and a “legislative Duma”. The manifesto was a concession wrested from the tsarist regime by the revolution, but that concession by no means decided the fate of the revolution as the liberals and Mensheviks claimed, The Bolsheviks exposed the real meaning of the Manifesto and called upon the masses to continue the struggle and overthrow the autocracy.
The first Russian revolution exerted a great revolutionising influence on the working-class movement in other countries, in particular in Austria-Hungary. Lenin pointed out that the news about the tsar’s concession and his manifesto, with its promise of “liberties”, “played a decisive part in the final victory of universal suffrage in Austria”.
Mass demonstrations took place in Vienna and other industrial cities in Austria-Hungary. In Prague barricades were put up. As a result, universal suffrage was introduced in Austria.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917) -Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism-HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED (1914)
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism
HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 35, December 12, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 94-101.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For decades, German Social-Democracy was a model to the Social-Democrats of Russia, even somewhat more than to the Social-Democrats of the whole world. It is therefore clear that there can be no intelligent, i.e., critical, attitude towards the now prevalent social-patriotism or “socialist” chauvinism, without a most precise definition of one’s attitude towards German Social-Democracy, What was it in the past? What is it today? What will it be in the future?
A reply to the first of these questions may be found in Der Weg zur Macht, a pamphlet written by K. Kautsky in 1909 and translated into many European languages. Containing a most complete exposition of the tasks of our times, it was most advantageous to the German Social-Democrats (in the sense of the promise they held out), and moreover came from the pen of the most eminent writer of the Second International. We shall recall the pamphlet in some detail; this will be the more useful now since those forgotten ideals are so often barefacedly cast aside.
Social-Democracy is a “revolutionary party” (as stated in the opening sentence of the pamphlet), not only in the sense that a steam engine is revolutionary, but “also in another sense”. It wants conquest of political power by the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Heaping ridicule on “doubters of the revolution”, Kautsky writes: “In any important movement and uprising we must, of course, reckon with the possibility of defeat. Prior to the struggle, only a fool can consider himself quite certain of victory.” However, to refuse to consider the possibility of victory would he “a direct betrayal of our cause”. A revolution in connection with a war, he says, is possible both during and after a war. It is impossible to determine at which particular moment the sharpening of class antagonisms will lead to revolution, but, the author continues, “I can quite definitely assert that a revolution that war brings in its wake, will break out either during or immediately after the war”; nothing is more vulgar, we read further, than the theory of “the peaceful growing into socialism”. “Nothing is more erroneous,” he continues, “than the opinion that a cognition of economic necessity means a weakening of the will ... . The will, as a desire for struggle,” he says, “is determined, first, by the price of the struggle, secondly, by a sense of power, and thirdly, by actual power.” When an attempt was made, incidentally by Vorwärts, to interpret Engels’s famous preface to The Class Struggles in France in the meaning of opportunism, Engels became indignant, and called shameful any assumption that he was a “peaceful worshipper of legality at any price”.[1] “We have every reason to believe,” Kautsky goes on to say, “that we are entering upon a period of struggle for state power.” That struggle may last for decades; that is something we do not know, but “it will in all probability bring about, in the near future, a considerable strengthening of the proletariat, if not its dictatorship, in Western Europe”. The revolutionary elements are growing, Kautsky declares: out of ten million voters in Germany in 1895, there were six million proletarians and three and a half million people interested in private property; in 1907 the latter grew by 0.03 million, and the former by 1.6 million! “The rate of the advance becomes very rapid as soon as a time of revolutionary ferment comes.” Class antagonisms are not blunted but, on the contrary, grow acute; prices rise, and imperialist rivalry and militarism are rampant. “A new era of revolution” is drawing near. The monstrous growth of taxes would “long ago have led to war as the only alternative to revolution ... had not that very alternative of revolution stood closer after a war than after a period of armed peace...”. “A world war Is ominously imminent,” Kautsky continues, “and war means also revolution.” In 1891 Engels had reason to fear a premature revolution in Germany; since then, however, “the situation has greatly changed”. The proletariat “can no longer speak of a premature revolution” (Kautsky’s italics). The petty bourgeoisie is downright unreliable and is ever more hostile to the proletariat, but in a time of crisis it is “capable of coming over to our side in masses”. The main thing is that Social-Democracy “should remain unshakable, consistent, and irreconcilable”. We have undoubtedly entered a revolutionary period.
This is how Kautsky wrote in times long, long past, fully five years ago. This is what German Social-Democracy was, or, more correctly, what it promised to be. This was the kind of Social-Democracy that could and had to be respected.
See what the selfsame Kautsky writes today. Here are the most important statements in his article “Social-Democracy in Wartime” (Die Neue Zeit No. 1, October 2, 1914): “Our Party has far more rarely discussed the question of how to behave in wartime than how to prevent war .... Never is government so strong, never are parties so weak, as at the outbreak of war .... Wartime is least of all favourable to peaceful discussion .... Today the practical question is: victory or defeat for one’s own country.” Can there be an understanding among the parties of the belligerent countries regarding anti-war action? “That kind of thing has never been tested in practice. We have always disputed that possibility ....” The difference between the French and German socialists is “not one of principle” (as both defend their fatherlands) .... “Social-Democrats of all countries have an equal right or an equal obligation to take part in the defence of the fatherland: no nation should blame the other for doing so ....” “Has the International turned bankrupt?” “Has the Party rejected direct defence of its party principles in wartime?” (Mehring’s questions in the same issue.) “That is an erroneous conception .... There are no grounds at all for such pessimism .... The differences are not fundamental .... Unity of principles remains .... To disobey wartime laws would simply lead to suppression of our press.” Obedience to these laws “implies rejection of defence of party principles just as little as similar behaviour of our party press under that sword of Damocles—the Anti-Socialist Law.”
We have purposely quoted from the original because it is hard to believe that such things could have been written. It is hard to find in literature (except in that coming from downright renegades) such smug vulgarity, such shameful departure from the truth, such unsavoury subterfuge to cover up the most patent renunciation both of socialism in general and of precise international decisions unanimously adopted (as, for instance, in Stuttgart and particularly in Basic) precisely in view of the possibility of a European war just like the present! It would be disrespectful towards the reader were we to treat Kautsky’s arguments in earnest and try to analyse them: if the European war differs in many respects from a simple “little” anti-Jewish pogrom, the “socialist” arguments in favour of participation in such a war fully resimhle the “democratic” arguments in favour of participation in an anti-Jewish pogrom. One does not analyse arguments in favour of a pogrom; one only points them out so as to put their authors to shame in the sight of all class-conscious workers.
But how could it have come to pass, the reader will ask, that the leading authority in the Second International, a writer who once defended the views quoted at the beginning of this article, has sunk to something that is worse than being a renegade? That will not be understood, we answer, only by those who, perhaps unconsciously, consider that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and that it is not difficult to “forgive and forget”, etc., i.e., by those who regard the matter from the renegade’s point of view. Those, however, who have earnestly and sincerely professed socialist convictions and have held the views set forth in the beginning of this article will not be surprised to learn that “Vorwdrts is dead” (Martov’s expression in the Paris Gobs) and that Kautsky is “dead”. The political bankruptcy of individuals is not a rarity at turning points in history. Despite the tremendous services he has rendered, Kautsky has never been among those who, at great crises, immediately take a militant Marxist stand (recall his vacillations on the issue of Millerandism[2]).
It is such times that we are passing through. “You shoot first, Messieurs the Bourgeoisie!”[3] Engels wrote in 1891, advocating, most correctly, the use of bourgeois legality by us, revolutionaries, in the period of so-called peaceful constitutional development. Engels’s idea was crystal clear: we class-conscious workers, he said, will be the next to shoot; it is to our advantage to exchange ballots for bullets (to go over to civil war) at the moment the bourgeoisie itself has broken the legal foundation it has laid down. In 1909 Kautsky voiced the undisputed opinion held by all revolutionary Social-Democrats when he said that revolution in Europe cannot now be premature and that war means revolution.
“Peaceful” decades, however, have not passed without leaving their mark. They have of necessity given rise to opportunism in all countries, and made it prevalent among parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other “leaders”. There is no country in Europe where, in one form or another, a long and stubborn struggle has not been conducted against opportunism, the latter being supported in a host of ways by the entire bourgeoisie, which is striving to corrupt and weaken the revolutionary proletariat. Fifteen years ago, at the outset of the Bernstein controversy, the selfsame Kautsky wrote that should opportunism turn from a sentiment into a trend, a split would be imminent. In Russia, the old Iskra,[4] which created the Social-Democratic Party of the working class, declared, in an article which appeared in its second issue early in 1901, under the title of “On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century”, that the revolutionary class of the twentieth century, like the revolutionary class of the eighteenth century—the bourgeoisie, had its own Gironde and its own Mountain.[5]
The European war is a tremendous historical crisis, the beginning of a new epoch. Like any crisis, the war has aggravated deep-seated antagonisms and brought them to the surface, tearing asunder all veils of hypocrisy, rejecting all conventions and deflating all corrupt or rotting authorities. (This, incidentally, is the salutary and progressive effect of all crises, which only the dull-witted adherents of “peaceful evolution” fail to realise.) The Second International, which in its twenty-five or forty-five years of existence (according to whether the reckoning is from 1870 or 1889) was able to perform the highly important and useful work of expanding the influence of socialism and giving the socialist forces preparatory, initial and elementary organisation, has played its historical role and has passed away, overcome, not so much by the von Kiucks as by opportunism. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the empty-headed busy-bodies (if not the intriguing lackeys of the chauvinists and the opportunists) labour at the task of bringing together Vandervelde and Sembat with Kautsky and Haase, as though we had another Ivan Ivanovich, who has called Ivan Nikiforovich a “gander”, and has to he urged by his friends to make it up with his enemy.[6] An International does not mean sitting at the same table and having hypocritical and pettifogging resolutions written by people who think that genuine internationalism consists in German socialists justifying the German bourgeoisie’s call to shoot down French workers, and in French socialists justifying the French bourgeoisie’ call to shoot down German workers in the name of the “defence of the fatherland”! The International consists in the coming together (first ideologically, then in due time organisationally as well) of people who, in these grave days, are capable of defending socialist internationalism in deed, i.e., of mustering their forces and “being the next to shoot” at the governments and the ruling classes of their own respective “fatherlands”. This is no easy task; it calls for much preparation and great sacrifices and will be accompanied by reverses. However, for the very reason that it, is no easy task, it must be accomplished only together with those who wish to perform it and are not afraid of a complete break with the chauvinists and with the defenders of social-chauvinism.
Such people as Pannekoek are doing more than anyone else for the sincere, not hypocritical restoration of a socialist, not a chauvinist, International. In an article entitled “The Collapse of the International”, Pannekoek said: “If the leaders get together in an attempt to patch up their differences, that will be of no significance at all.”
Let us frankly state the facts; in any case the war will compel us to do so, if not tomorrow, then the day after. Three currents exist in international socialism: (1) the chauvinists, who are consistently pursuing a policy of opportunism; (2) the consistent opponents of opportunism, who in all countries have already begun to make themselves heard (the opportunists have routed most of them, but “defeated armies learn fast”), and are capable of conducting revolutionary work directed towards civil war; (3) confused and vacillating people, who at present are following in the wake of the opportunists and are causing the proletariat most harm by their hypocritical attempts to justify opportunism, something that they do almost scientifically and using the Marxist (sic!) method. Some of those who are engulfed in the latter current can be saved and restored to socialism, but only through a policy of a most decisive break and split with the former current, with all those who are capable of justifying the war credits vote, “the defence of the fatherland”, “submission to wartime laws”, a willingness to be satisfied with legal means only, and the rejection of civil war. Only those who pursue a policy like this are really building up a socialist International. For our part, we, who have established links with the Russian Collegium of the Central Committee and with the leading elements of the working-class movement in St. Petersburg, have exchanged opinions with them and become convinced that we are agreed on the main points, are in a position, as editors of the Central Organ, to declare in the name of our Party that only work conducted in this direction is Party work and Social-Democratic work.
The idea of a split in the German Social-Democratic movement may seem alarming to many in its “unusualness”. The objective situation, however, goes to show that either the unusual will come to pass (after all, Adler and Kautsky did declare, at the last session of the International Socialist Bureau[7] in July 1914, that they did not believe in miracles, and therefore did not believe in a European war!) or we shall witness the painful decomposition of what was once German Social-Democracy. In conclusion, we would like to remind those who are too prone to “trust” the (former) German Social-Democrats that people who have been our opponents on a number of issues have arrived at the idea of such a split. Thus Martov has written in Gobs: “Vorwarts is dead .... A Social-Democracy which publicly renounces the class struggle would do better to recognise the facts as they are, temporarily disband its organisation, and close down its organs.” Thus Plekhanov is quoted by Gobs as having saidin a report: “I am very much against splits, but if principles are sacrificed for the integrity of the organisation, then better a split than false unity.” Plekhanov was referring to the German radicals: he sees a mote in the eye of the Germans, but not the beam in his own eye. This is an individual feature in him; over the past ten years we have all grown quite used to Plekhanov’s radicalism in theory and opportunism in practice. However, if even persons with such “oddities” begin to talk of a split among the Germans, it is a sign of the times.
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Notes
[1] In its issue of March 30, 1895, Vorwärts published a summary and several extracts from Engels’s preface to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, omitting very important propositions on the revolutionary role of the proletariat, which evoked a vehement protest from Engels. In his letter to Kautsky of April 1, 1895, he wrote: “To my astonishment I see in the Vorwärts today an extract from my ‘Introduction’, printed without my prior knowledge and trimmed in such a fashion that 1 appear as a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price” (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 568).
Engels insisted on the “Introduction” being published in full. In 1895 it was published in the journal Die Neue Zeit, but with considerable deletions, these at the instance of the German Social-Democratic Party leadership. Seeking to justify their reformist tactics, the leaders of German Social-Democracy subsequently began to interpret their version of the “Introduction” as Engels’s renunciation of revolution, armed uprisings and barricade fighting. The original text of the “Introduction” was first published in the Soviet Union in 1955 (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962,Vol. I, pp. 118-38).
[2] Millerandtsm—an opportunist trend named after the French "socialist" Millerand, who in 1899 joined the reactionary bourgeois government of France and helped the bourgeoisie in conducting its policy.
The admissibility of socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments was discussed at the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900. The Congress adopted Kautsky’s conciliatory resolution condemning socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments but permitting it in certain “exceptional” cases. The French socialists used this proviso to justify their joining the bourgeois government at the beginning of the First World War.
[3] See F. Engels, Socialism in Germany, Section I.
[4] Iskra (The Spark)-the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in 1900. It played a decisive part in the establishmeat of the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class. The first issue appeared in Leipzig in December 1900; it was subsequently published in Munich, in London (from July 1902) and in Geneva (from the spring of 1903). On Lenin’s initiative and with his direct participation,the fskra editorial hoard drew up the Party programme, which was published in Iskra No. 21, and prepared the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. which marked the beginning of a revolutionary Marxist party in Russia. Soon after the Congress, the Mensheviks, helped by Plekhanov, gained control of Iskra, so that, beginning with issue No. 52, Iskra ceased being an organ of revolutionary Marxism.
[5] The Mountain (Montagne) and the Gironde-the two political groups of the bourgeoisie during the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. The Montagnards, or Jacobins, was the name given to the more resolute representatives of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary class of the time, who stood for the abolition of absolutism and the feudal system. Unlike the Jacobins, the Girondists vacillated between revolution and counter-revolution, and sought agreement with the monarchy.
Lenin called the opportunist trend in Social-Democracy the “socialist Gironde” , and the revolutionary Social-Democrats the “proletarian Jacobins” , “the Mountain”. After the R.S.D.L.P. split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin frequently stressed that the Mensheviks epresented the Girondist trend in the working-class movement.
[6] Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich-characters in Gogol’s Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Iran Nikiforovich. The quarrel between these two provincial landowners, whose names have become proverbial, started on a most insignificant pretext, and dragged on endlessly.
[7] The International Socialist Bureau-the executive body of the Second International, established by decision of the ParisCongressof 1900. From 1905 Lenin was member of the LS.B. as representative of the R.S.D.L.P.
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
*******
V. I. Lenin
Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism
HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CAN BE RESTORED
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 35, December 12, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 94-101.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For decades, German Social-Democracy was a model to the Social-Democrats of Russia, even somewhat more than to the Social-Democrats of the whole world. It is therefore clear that there can be no intelligent, i.e., critical, attitude towards the now prevalent social-patriotism or “socialist” chauvinism, without a most precise definition of one’s attitude towards German Social-Democracy, What was it in the past? What is it today? What will it be in the future?
A reply to the first of these questions may be found in Der Weg zur Macht, a pamphlet written by K. Kautsky in 1909 and translated into many European languages. Containing a most complete exposition of the tasks of our times, it was most advantageous to the German Social-Democrats (in the sense of the promise they held out), and moreover came from the pen of the most eminent writer of the Second International. We shall recall the pamphlet in some detail; this will be the more useful now since those forgotten ideals are so often barefacedly cast aside.
Social-Democracy is a “revolutionary party” (as stated in the opening sentence of the pamphlet), not only in the sense that a steam engine is revolutionary, but “also in another sense”. It wants conquest of political power by the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Heaping ridicule on “doubters of the revolution”, Kautsky writes: “In any important movement and uprising we must, of course, reckon with the possibility of defeat. Prior to the struggle, only a fool can consider himself quite certain of victory.” However, to refuse to consider the possibility of victory would he “a direct betrayal of our cause”. A revolution in connection with a war, he says, is possible both during and after a war. It is impossible to determine at which particular moment the sharpening of class antagonisms will lead to revolution, but, the author continues, “I can quite definitely assert that a revolution that war brings in its wake, will break out either during or immediately after the war”; nothing is more vulgar, we read further, than the theory of “the peaceful growing into socialism”. “Nothing is more erroneous,” he continues, “than the opinion that a cognition of economic necessity means a weakening of the will ... . The will, as a desire for struggle,” he says, “is determined, first, by the price of the struggle, secondly, by a sense of power, and thirdly, by actual power.” When an attempt was made, incidentally by Vorwärts, to interpret Engels’s famous preface to The Class Struggles in France in the meaning of opportunism, Engels became indignant, and called shameful any assumption that he was a “peaceful worshipper of legality at any price”.[1] “We have every reason to believe,” Kautsky goes on to say, “that we are entering upon a period of struggle for state power.” That struggle may last for decades; that is something we do not know, but “it will in all probability bring about, in the near future, a considerable strengthening of the proletariat, if not its dictatorship, in Western Europe”. The revolutionary elements are growing, Kautsky declares: out of ten million voters in Germany in 1895, there were six million proletarians and three and a half million people interested in private property; in 1907 the latter grew by 0.03 million, and the former by 1.6 million! “The rate of the advance becomes very rapid as soon as a time of revolutionary ferment comes.” Class antagonisms are not blunted but, on the contrary, grow acute; prices rise, and imperialist rivalry and militarism are rampant. “A new era of revolution” is drawing near. The monstrous growth of taxes would “long ago have led to war as the only alternative to revolution ... had not that very alternative of revolution stood closer after a war than after a period of armed peace...”. “A world war Is ominously imminent,” Kautsky continues, “and war means also revolution.” In 1891 Engels had reason to fear a premature revolution in Germany; since then, however, “the situation has greatly changed”. The proletariat “can no longer speak of a premature revolution” (Kautsky’s italics). The petty bourgeoisie is downright unreliable and is ever more hostile to the proletariat, but in a time of crisis it is “capable of coming over to our side in masses”. The main thing is that Social-Democracy “should remain unshakable, consistent, and irreconcilable”. We have undoubtedly entered a revolutionary period.
This is how Kautsky wrote in times long, long past, fully five years ago. This is what German Social-Democracy was, or, more correctly, what it promised to be. This was the kind of Social-Democracy that could and had to be respected.
See what the selfsame Kautsky writes today. Here are the most important statements in his article “Social-Democracy in Wartime” (Die Neue Zeit No. 1, October 2, 1914): “Our Party has far more rarely discussed the question of how to behave in wartime than how to prevent war .... Never is government so strong, never are parties so weak, as at the outbreak of war .... Wartime is least of all favourable to peaceful discussion .... Today the practical question is: victory or defeat for one’s own country.” Can there be an understanding among the parties of the belligerent countries regarding anti-war action? “That kind of thing has never been tested in practice. We have always disputed that possibility ....” The difference between the French and German socialists is “not one of principle” (as both defend their fatherlands) .... “Social-Democrats of all countries have an equal right or an equal obligation to take part in the defence of the fatherland: no nation should blame the other for doing so ....” “Has the International turned bankrupt?” “Has the Party rejected direct defence of its party principles in wartime?” (Mehring’s questions in the same issue.) “That is an erroneous conception .... There are no grounds at all for such pessimism .... The differences are not fundamental .... Unity of principles remains .... To disobey wartime laws would simply lead to suppression of our press.” Obedience to these laws “implies rejection of defence of party principles just as little as similar behaviour of our party press under that sword of Damocles—the Anti-Socialist Law.”
We have purposely quoted from the original because it is hard to believe that such things could have been written. It is hard to find in literature (except in that coming from downright renegades) such smug vulgarity, such shameful departure from the truth, such unsavoury subterfuge to cover up the most patent renunciation both of socialism in general and of precise international decisions unanimously adopted (as, for instance, in Stuttgart and particularly in Basic) precisely in view of the possibility of a European war just like the present! It would be disrespectful towards the reader were we to treat Kautsky’s arguments in earnest and try to analyse them: if the European war differs in many respects from a simple “little” anti-Jewish pogrom, the “socialist” arguments in favour of participation in such a war fully resimhle the “democratic” arguments in favour of participation in an anti-Jewish pogrom. One does not analyse arguments in favour of a pogrom; one only points them out so as to put their authors to shame in the sight of all class-conscious workers.
But how could it have come to pass, the reader will ask, that the leading authority in the Second International, a writer who once defended the views quoted at the beginning of this article, has sunk to something that is worse than being a renegade? That will not be understood, we answer, only by those who, perhaps unconsciously, consider that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and that it is not difficult to “forgive and forget”, etc., i.e., by those who regard the matter from the renegade’s point of view. Those, however, who have earnestly and sincerely professed socialist convictions and have held the views set forth in the beginning of this article will not be surprised to learn that “Vorwdrts is dead” (Martov’s expression in the Paris Gobs) and that Kautsky is “dead”. The political bankruptcy of individuals is not a rarity at turning points in history. Despite the tremendous services he has rendered, Kautsky has never been among those who, at great crises, immediately take a militant Marxist stand (recall his vacillations on the issue of Millerandism[2]).
It is such times that we are passing through. “You shoot first, Messieurs the Bourgeoisie!”[3] Engels wrote in 1891, advocating, most correctly, the use of bourgeois legality by us, revolutionaries, in the period of so-called peaceful constitutional development. Engels’s idea was crystal clear: we class-conscious workers, he said, will be the next to shoot; it is to our advantage to exchange ballots for bullets (to go over to civil war) at the moment the bourgeoisie itself has broken the legal foundation it has laid down. In 1909 Kautsky voiced the undisputed opinion held by all revolutionary Social-Democrats when he said that revolution in Europe cannot now be premature and that war means revolution.
“Peaceful” decades, however, have not passed without leaving their mark. They have of necessity given rise to opportunism in all countries, and made it prevalent among parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other “leaders”. There is no country in Europe where, in one form or another, a long and stubborn struggle has not been conducted against opportunism, the latter being supported in a host of ways by the entire bourgeoisie, which is striving to corrupt and weaken the revolutionary proletariat. Fifteen years ago, at the outset of the Bernstein controversy, the selfsame Kautsky wrote that should opportunism turn from a sentiment into a trend, a split would be imminent. In Russia, the old Iskra,[4] which created the Social-Democratic Party of the working class, declared, in an article which appeared in its second issue early in 1901, under the title of “On the Threshold of the Twentieth Century”, that the revolutionary class of the twentieth century, like the revolutionary class of the eighteenth century—the bourgeoisie, had its own Gironde and its own Mountain.[5]
The European war is a tremendous historical crisis, the beginning of a new epoch. Like any crisis, the war has aggravated deep-seated antagonisms and brought them to the surface, tearing asunder all veils of hypocrisy, rejecting all conventions and deflating all corrupt or rotting authorities. (This, incidentally, is the salutary and progressive effect of all crises, which only the dull-witted adherents of “peaceful evolution” fail to realise.) The Second International, which in its twenty-five or forty-five years of existence (according to whether the reckoning is from 1870 or 1889) was able to perform the highly important and useful work of expanding the influence of socialism and giving the socialist forces preparatory, initial and elementary organisation, has played its historical role and has passed away, overcome, not so much by the von Kiucks as by opportunism. Let the dead bury their dead. Let the empty-headed busy-bodies (if not the intriguing lackeys of the chauvinists and the opportunists) labour at the task of bringing together Vandervelde and Sembat with Kautsky and Haase, as though we had another Ivan Ivanovich, who has called Ivan Nikiforovich a “gander”, and has to he urged by his friends to make it up with his enemy.[6] An International does not mean sitting at the same table and having hypocritical and pettifogging resolutions written by people who think that genuine internationalism consists in German socialists justifying the German bourgeoisie’s call to shoot down French workers, and in French socialists justifying the French bourgeoisie’ call to shoot down German workers in the name of the “defence of the fatherland”! The International consists in the coming together (first ideologically, then in due time organisationally as well) of people who, in these grave days, are capable of defending socialist internationalism in deed, i.e., of mustering their forces and “being the next to shoot” at the governments and the ruling classes of their own respective “fatherlands”. This is no easy task; it calls for much preparation and great sacrifices and will be accompanied by reverses. However, for the very reason that it, is no easy task, it must be accomplished only together with those who wish to perform it and are not afraid of a complete break with the chauvinists and with the defenders of social-chauvinism.
Such people as Pannekoek are doing more than anyone else for the sincere, not hypocritical restoration of a socialist, not a chauvinist, International. In an article entitled “The Collapse of the International”, Pannekoek said: “If the leaders get together in an attempt to patch up their differences, that will be of no significance at all.”
Let us frankly state the facts; in any case the war will compel us to do so, if not tomorrow, then the day after. Three currents exist in international socialism: (1) the chauvinists, who are consistently pursuing a policy of opportunism; (2) the consistent opponents of opportunism, who in all countries have already begun to make themselves heard (the opportunists have routed most of them, but “defeated armies learn fast”), and are capable of conducting revolutionary work directed towards civil war; (3) confused and vacillating people, who at present are following in the wake of the opportunists and are causing the proletariat most harm by their hypocritical attempts to justify opportunism, something that they do almost scientifically and using the Marxist (sic!) method. Some of those who are engulfed in the latter current can be saved and restored to socialism, but only through a policy of a most decisive break and split with the former current, with all those who are capable of justifying the war credits vote, “the defence of the fatherland”, “submission to wartime laws”, a willingness to be satisfied with legal means only, and the rejection of civil war. Only those who pursue a policy like this are really building up a socialist International. For our part, we, who have established links with the Russian Collegium of the Central Committee and with the leading elements of the working-class movement in St. Petersburg, have exchanged opinions with them and become convinced that we are agreed on the main points, are in a position, as editors of the Central Organ, to declare in the name of our Party that only work conducted in this direction is Party work and Social-Democratic work.
The idea of a split in the German Social-Democratic movement may seem alarming to many in its “unusualness”. The objective situation, however, goes to show that either the unusual will come to pass (after all, Adler and Kautsky did declare, at the last session of the International Socialist Bureau[7] in July 1914, that they did not believe in miracles, and therefore did not believe in a European war!) or we shall witness the painful decomposition of what was once German Social-Democracy. In conclusion, we would like to remind those who are too prone to “trust” the (former) German Social-Democrats that people who have been our opponents on a number of issues have arrived at the idea of such a split. Thus Martov has written in Gobs: “Vorwarts is dead .... A Social-Democracy which publicly renounces the class struggle would do better to recognise the facts as they are, temporarily disband its organisation, and close down its organs.” Thus Plekhanov is quoted by Gobs as having saidin a report: “I am very much against splits, but if principles are sacrificed for the integrity of the organisation, then better a split than false unity.” Plekhanov was referring to the German radicals: he sees a mote in the eye of the Germans, but not the beam in his own eye. This is an individual feature in him; over the past ten years we have all grown quite used to Plekhanov’s radicalism in theory and opportunism in practice. However, if even persons with such “oddities” begin to talk of a split among the Germans, it is a sign of the times.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] In its issue of March 30, 1895, Vorwärts published a summary and several extracts from Engels’s preface to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, omitting very important propositions on the revolutionary role of the proletariat, which evoked a vehement protest from Engels. In his letter to Kautsky of April 1, 1895, he wrote: “To my astonishment I see in the Vorwärts today an extract from my ‘Introduction’, printed without my prior knowledge and trimmed in such a fashion that 1 appear as a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price” (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 568).
Engels insisted on the “Introduction” being published in full. In 1895 it was published in the journal Die Neue Zeit, but with considerable deletions, these at the instance of the German Social-Democratic Party leadership. Seeking to justify their reformist tactics, the leaders of German Social-Democracy subsequently began to interpret their version of the “Introduction” as Engels’s renunciation of revolution, armed uprisings and barricade fighting. The original text of the “Introduction” was first published in the Soviet Union in 1955 (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Moscow, 1962,Vol. I, pp. 118-38).
[2] Millerandtsm—an opportunist trend named after the French "socialist" Millerand, who in 1899 joined the reactionary bourgeois government of France and helped the bourgeoisie in conducting its policy.
The admissibility of socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments was discussed at the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900. The Congress adopted Kautsky’s conciliatory resolution condemning socialists’ participation in bourgeois governments but permitting it in certain “exceptional” cases. The French socialists used this proviso to justify their joining the bourgeois government at the beginning of the First World War.
[3] See F. Engels, Socialism in Germany, Section I.
[4] Iskra (The Spark)-the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper, founded by Lenin in 1900. It played a decisive part in the establishmeat of the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class. The first issue appeared in Leipzig in December 1900; it was subsequently published in Munich, in London (from July 1902) and in Geneva (from the spring of 1903). On Lenin’s initiative and with his direct participation,the fskra editorial hoard drew up the Party programme, which was published in Iskra No. 21, and prepared the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P. which marked the beginning of a revolutionary Marxist party in Russia. Soon after the Congress, the Mensheviks, helped by Plekhanov, gained control of Iskra, so that, beginning with issue No. 52, Iskra ceased being an organ of revolutionary Marxism.
[5] The Mountain (Montagne) and the Gironde-the two political groups of the bourgeoisie during the French bourgeois revolution of 1789. The Montagnards, or Jacobins, was the name given to the more resolute representatives of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary class of the time, who stood for the abolition of absolutism and the feudal system. Unlike the Jacobins, the Girondists vacillated between revolution and counter-revolution, and sought agreement with the monarchy.
Lenin called the opportunist trend in Social-Democracy the “socialist Gironde” , and the revolutionary Social-Democrats the “proletarian Jacobins” , “the Mountain”. After the R.S.D.L.P. split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin frequently stressed that the Mensheviks epresented the Girondist trend in the working-class movement.
[6] Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich-characters in Gogol’s Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Iran Nikiforovich. The quarrel between these two provincial landowners, whose names have become proverbial, started on a most insignificant pretext, and dragged on endlessly.
[7] The International Socialist Bureau-the executive body of the Second International, established by decision of the ParisCongressof 1900. From 1905 Lenin was member of the LS.B. as representative of the R.S.D.L.P.
*Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- At The Dawn Of Bourgeois Society-“Order & Disorder In Early Modern England”
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late Marxist professor, Christopher Hill.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By and Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Order & Disorder In Early Modern England, edited by Anthony Fletcher & John Stevenson, Cambridge University Press, 1985
Blame on the late British Marxist historian of the 17th century English Revolution, Christopher Hill, who exposed us to every oddball sect from panters to ranters, shakers to quakers, and then some. Blame it on Gerrard Winstanley and his primitive communist experiment up on Saint George’s Hill in the midst of the English revolution in 1649. Hell, blame it on Oliver Cromwell or the historical materialist trend that drove me to an intense interest in all aspects of the 17th century English revolution, and the threads that led up it. And thus to this book that deals, in a group of several essays, with various aspects of the creation of the British bourgeois order in the wake of the English segment of the Protestant Reformation.
It is no mean task to separate out various trends, various customs, various traditions and examine them closely to see where they fall in the scheme of society, any society, as it turned away from an earlier, more traditional and ceremonial (and, frankly, more laid back) way of organizing society, and controlling it so that things do not totally get out of hand as new forces come to the fore. That is the essence of the essays here as subjects as diverse as the role of the emerging Puritan ethic in keeping the social order at the local level, the inertia of the old ways, the changing ethos (and personnel) of the local governing bodies, interesting thing on the women question (scolds, witches, and hen-pecked husband, cuckolds, and various community shaming rituals, of men and women, but mostly women, for example), the struggle for agricultural modernization (the drainers and the fens men, primitive rural capitalists, and other tidbits to round out the picture as far as the records and historical speculation permit). A nice feature, one that could be usefully employed more widely in academic circles, is that the copious footnotes for each essay are on the same page as the notation. Praise be.
My favorite essay of the lot is J.S. Morrill and J.D. Walter’s Order and Disorder in the English Revolution, as could be expected. The authors are well-known to me from previous monograms. Obviously, revolution, almost be definition, is gong to create disorder and order (a new order, if you can keep it, and keep state power long enough to stabilize it). What is interesting in this essay is their analysis of the ebb and flow of “disorder” that reflected the various stages of the unfolding revolution (and its demise by the restoration in 1660 with the return of kingship, lordship, and state church still, disturbingly, with us today). Much of this had to with proximity with military action, but not always. The more interesting point, and one that I tend to agree with, is not how much disorder the revolution brought but how much order remained during the whole period, especially at the local level and outside the "hotbed" cities. Many historians, including revolutionary historians like Leon Trotsky, have noted this phenomenon. Some places are physically left untouched, others have already had their local revolution bringing no overt opposition, or those on the fence have decided to wait and see which way the winds will blow. The point for revolutionaries, in this case those like Oliver Cromwell, John Milton and the Levelers who defended the overthrow of the monarchy, was to avoid rankling local sensibilities. When they couldn’t the cry for a return to monarchy came through. Copious footnotes on this essay also give one plenty of sources to research further on this key aspect of revolution.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By and Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Order & Disorder In Early Modern England, edited by Anthony Fletcher & John Stevenson, Cambridge University Press, 1985
Blame on the late British Marxist historian of the 17th century English Revolution, Christopher Hill, who exposed us to every oddball sect from panters to ranters, shakers to quakers, and then some. Blame it on Gerrard Winstanley and his primitive communist experiment up on Saint George’s Hill in the midst of the English revolution in 1649. Hell, blame it on Oliver Cromwell or the historical materialist trend that drove me to an intense interest in all aspects of the 17th century English revolution, and the threads that led up it. And thus to this book that deals, in a group of several essays, with various aspects of the creation of the British bourgeois order in the wake of the English segment of the Protestant Reformation.
It is no mean task to separate out various trends, various customs, various traditions and examine them closely to see where they fall in the scheme of society, any society, as it turned away from an earlier, more traditional and ceremonial (and, frankly, more laid back) way of organizing society, and controlling it so that things do not totally get out of hand as new forces come to the fore. That is the essence of the essays here as subjects as diverse as the role of the emerging Puritan ethic in keeping the social order at the local level, the inertia of the old ways, the changing ethos (and personnel) of the local governing bodies, interesting thing on the women question (scolds, witches, and hen-pecked husband, cuckolds, and various community shaming rituals, of men and women, but mostly women, for example), the struggle for agricultural modernization (the drainers and the fens men, primitive rural capitalists, and other tidbits to round out the picture as far as the records and historical speculation permit). A nice feature, one that could be usefully employed more widely in academic circles, is that the copious footnotes for each essay are on the same page as the notation. Praise be.
My favorite essay of the lot is J.S. Morrill and J.D. Walter’s Order and Disorder in the English Revolution, as could be expected. The authors are well-known to me from previous monograms. Obviously, revolution, almost be definition, is gong to create disorder and order (a new order, if you can keep it, and keep state power long enough to stabilize it). What is interesting in this essay is their analysis of the ebb and flow of “disorder” that reflected the various stages of the unfolding revolution (and its demise by the restoration in 1660 with the return of kingship, lordship, and state church still, disturbingly, with us today). Much of this had to with proximity with military action, but not always. The more interesting point, and one that I tend to agree with, is not how much disorder the revolution brought but how much order remained during the whole period, especially at the local level and outside the "hotbed" cities. Many historians, including revolutionary historians like Leon Trotsky, have noted this phenomenon. Some places are physically left untouched, others have already had their local revolution bringing no overt opposition, or those on the fence have decided to wait and see which way the winds will blow. The point for revolutionaries, in this case those like Oliver Cromwell, John Milton and the Levelers who defended the overthrow of the monarchy, was to avoid rankling local sensibilities. When they couldn’t the cry for a return to monarchy came through. Copious footnotes on this essay also give one plenty of sources to research further on this key aspect of revolution.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917) -A German Voice on the War(1914)
Markin comment:
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
****
V. I. Lenin
A German Voice on the War
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 34, December 5, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 92-93.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
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“In a single night the aspect of the world has changed... . Everyone puts the blame on his neighbour, everyone claims to be on the defensive, to act only in a state of urgent defence. Everyone, don’t you see, is defending only his most sacred values, the hearth, the fatherland... . National vainglory and national aggressiveness triumph... . Even the great international working class obeys national orders, workers are killing one another on the battlefields... . Our civilisation has proved bankrupt... . Writers of European fame are not ashamed to come forth as ragingly blind chauvinists... . We had too much faith in the possibility of imperialist madness being curbed by the fear of economic ruin... . We are going through an undisguised imperialist struggle for mastery of the world. There is no trace anywhere of a struggle for great ideas, except perhaps the overthrow of the Russian Minotaur ... the tsar and his grand dukes who have delivered to the hangmen the noblest men of their country... . But do we not see how noble France, the bearer of ideals of liberty, has become the ally of the hangman tsar? How honest Germany ... is breaking its word and is strangling unhappy neutral Belgium? ... How will it all end? If poverty becomes too great, if despair gains the upper hand, if brother recognises his brother in the uniform of an enemy, then perhaps something very unexpected may still come, arms may perhaps be turned against those who are urging people into the war and nations that have been made to hate one another may perhaps forget that hatred, and suddenly unite. We do not want to be prophets, but should the European war bring us one step closer to a European social republic, then this war, after all, will not have been as senseless as it seems at present.”
Whose voice is this? Perhaps one coming from a German Social-Democrat?
Far from it! Headed by Kautsky, the German Social Democrats have become “wretched counter-revolutionary windbags”,[2] as Marx called those Social-Democrats who, after the publication of the Anti-Socialist Law, behaved “in accord with the circumstances”, in the manner of Haase, Kautsky, Südekum and Co. today.
No, our quotation is from a magazine of petty-bourgeois Christian democrats published by a group of kind-hearted little churchmen in Zurich (Neue Wege, Blätter für religiöse Arbeit,[1] September, 1914). That is the limit of humiliation we have come to: God-fearing philistines go as far as to say that it would not be bad to turn weapons against those who “are urging people into the war”, while “authoritative” Social-Democrats like Kautsky “scientifically” defend the most despicable chauvinism, or, like Plekhanov, declare the propaganda of civil war against the bourgeoisie a harmful “utopia”!
Indeed, if such “Social-Democrats” wish to be in the majority and to form the official “International”(= an alliance for international justification of national chauvinism), then is it not better to give up the name of “Social-Democrats”, which has been besmirched and degraded by them, and return to the old Marxist name of Communists? Kautsky once threatened to do that when the opportunist Bernsteinians[3] seemed to be close to conquering the German party officially. What was an idle threat from his lips will perhaps become action to others.
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Notes
[1] New Ways, Pages for Religious Work.—Ed.
[2] See Marx’s letter to F. A. Sorge of September 19, 1879.
[3] This refers to the followers of the revisionist Bernstein, leader of the opportunist trend in German Social-Democracy, which arose at the end of the nineteenth century.
It would seem almost unnecessary to comment on Lenin’s Bolshevik positions on imperialist war, as exemplified by his analysis of the war that he actually had to fight against, World War I. Those positions reflected his understanding that with that war the nature of capitalism had changed, definitively, from a progressive step for humankind to just a squalid, never-ending struggle among “thieves” for control of the world’s resources. It would have seemed almost unnecessary to mention this, that is, for earlier leftist generations who were familiar with his various slogans centrally-“the main enemy is at home” (adapted from German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht-“not one penny, not one man for the imperialist war”- “turn the guns the other way” (toward your own rulers)-and, specific to Bolsheviks- “fight for a new workers international, the Third International” (to replace bankrupt Second International).
Now, especially after the past several anti-war rallies that I have attended, I am not sure who among the attendees is familiar with his work. With all the pacifist, stop war in general, peace now, let all men and women be brothers and sisters rhetoric ringing in my ears I have to assume not. More importantly, I do not see such slogans (or anything close to them) emblazoned on any banners lately. Thus, in a month when we of the international communist movement honor Lenin anyway (along with the aforementioned Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the revolution) this series will try to familiarize those who seek a better struggle against imperialist war than is being presented now with “red” anti-war positions.
****
V. I. Lenin
A German Voice on the War
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 34, December 5, 1914. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 92-93.
Translated:
Transcription\Markup: D. Walters and R. Cymbala
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive 2002 (2005). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
Other Formats: Text • README
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“In a single night the aspect of the world has changed... . Everyone puts the blame on his neighbour, everyone claims to be on the defensive, to act only in a state of urgent defence. Everyone, don’t you see, is defending only his most sacred values, the hearth, the fatherland... . National vainglory and national aggressiveness triumph... . Even the great international working class obeys national orders, workers are killing one another on the battlefields... . Our civilisation has proved bankrupt... . Writers of European fame are not ashamed to come forth as ragingly blind chauvinists... . We had too much faith in the possibility of imperialist madness being curbed by the fear of economic ruin... . We are going through an undisguised imperialist struggle for mastery of the world. There is no trace anywhere of a struggle for great ideas, except perhaps the overthrow of the Russian Minotaur ... the tsar and his grand dukes who have delivered to the hangmen the noblest men of their country... . But do we not see how noble France, the bearer of ideals of liberty, has become the ally of the hangman tsar? How honest Germany ... is breaking its word and is strangling unhappy neutral Belgium? ... How will it all end? If poverty becomes too great, if despair gains the upper hand, if brother recognises his brother in the uniform of an enemy, then perhaps something very unexpected may still come, arms may perhaps be turned against those who are urging people into the war and nations that have been made to hate one another may perhaps forget that hatred, and suddenly unite. We do not want to be prophets, but should the European war bring us one step closer to a European social republic, then this war, after all, will not have been as senseless as it seems at present.”
Whose voice is this? Perhaps one coming from a German Social-Democrat?
Far from it! Headed by Kautsky, the German Social Democrats have become “wretched counter-revolutionary windbags”,[2] as Marx called those Social-Democrats who, after the publication of the Anti-Socialist Law, behaved “in accord with the circumstances”, in the manner of Haase, Kautsky, Südekum and Co. today.
No, our quotation is from a magazine of petty-bourgeois Christian democrats published by a group of kind-hearted little churchmen in Zurich (Neue Wege, Blätter für religiöse Arbeit,[1] September, 1914). That is the limit of humiliation we have come to: God-fearing philistines go as far as to say that it would not be bad to turn weapons against those who “are urging people into the war”, while “authoritative” Social-Democrats like Kautsky “scientifically” defend the most despicable chauvinism, or, like Plekhanov, declare the propaganda of civil war against the bourgeoisie a harmful “utopia”!
Indeed, if such “Social-Democrats” wish to be in the majority and to form the official “International”(= an alliance for international justification of national chauvinism), then is it not better to give up the name of “Social-Democrats”, which has been besmirched and degraded by them, and return to the old Marxist name of Communists? Kautsky once threatened to do that when the opportunist Bernsteinians[3] seemed to be close to conquering the German party officially. What was an idle threat from his lips will perhaps become action to others.
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Notes
[1] New Ways, Pages for Religious Work.—Ed.
[2] See Marx’s letter to F. A. Sorge of September 19, 1879.
[3] This refers to the followers of the revisionist Bernstein, leader of the opportunist trend in German Social-Democracy, which arose at the end of the nineteenth century.
From The "Renegade Eye" Blog-"Republicrats Target Social Security"
Click on the headline to link to the above article via the Renegade Eye blog.
From The "International Socialist Review" Website- The Student Upsurge In Britain
Click on the headline to link to an International Socialist Review online article on the student upsurge in Britain.
Markin comment on this article:
Or rather on an archival article from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (1972) giving my comments on the question of youth vanguardism posed in that article. The comments used for that article, reposted below, can be aptly applied to the thrust of this article.
"This 1972 RCY Newletter article is more directly timely than some of the other material I have placed under this headline. In 2010 there were significant student strikes in Europe as well as important, if smaller and more localized (mainly California), student strikes in the United States against budget cuts to public education, including, critically, public higher education. The obvious need is to link up the student struggles against budget cuts, increased tuition, and harder financial aid standards with the other struggles of the working class to defend its historic and hard fought gains like pensions, social services, and health care, as noted in France where masses of students came out to support the struggle against raising pension eligibility ages. There will be more such struggles ahead, in Europe and elsewhere.
Sometimes student struggles have their own parochial quality (around specific campus issues like dormitory regulations, etc.), other times they intersect the working class. What is important to remember is that it is the working class that has the social power (and has had it for a long time now, although mainly unused) to bring society to a standstill but also to win victories, defensive or offensive as the case may be, against the bourgeoisie. That simple fact, as the article here alludes to, often got lost in the old days of the 1960s old New Left. Youth vanguardism was rampant. The assumption then (and maybe now, a little) was that the working class, at least in the advanced capitalist countries had been “bought off” (at least relatively) and therefore was no longer, as Marx and his followers projected, a potentially revolutionary force. A very dangerous, but very common notion then, and now as well.
This time around, hopefully, we will not have to “relive” history on that question. At least for those of us who have seen a few things, especially the volatility of the petty bourgeois students, over time. There is, unfortunately, nothing inherently revolutionary about youth, in itself, all self-image to the contrary. Let’s, however, not neglect to work in that milieu and see what flies out in the days ahead.
Note: In the interest of full disclosure, as I have mentioned before, I did not come to Marxism early in my political career (I was nothing but a left-liberal and then soft social-democrat, at best), not did I, in many ways come to this strategy willingly. Along the way I had imbibed in virtually every leftist political fad or trend, including the above-mentioned youth vanguardism. I have written about my “conversion” elsewhere but the point here is, although I came from nowhere but deep in the heart of the working poor, I did not see that class as “worthy” of ruling in its own interests. No I preferred Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Harrington (author of The Other America and leading social democrat in those days), hell, even Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman if it came down to it. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and the working class, no way. Well, we learn a few things in life, and one that should be etched on every militant leftist’s brain is those who make the stuff of society must rule. Labor must rule. Simple, right?"
Markin comment on this article:
Or rather on an archival article from the Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (1972) giving my comments on the question of youth vanguardism posed in that article. The comments used for that article, reposted below, can be aptly applied to the thrust of this article.
"This 1972 RCY Newletter article is more directly timely than some of the other material I have placed under this headline. In 2010 there were significant student strikes in Europe as well as important, if smaller and more localized (mainly California), student strikes in the United States against budget cuts to public education, including, critically, public higher education. The obvious need is to link up the student struggles against budget cuts, increased tuition, and harder financial aid standards with the other struggles of the working class to defend its historic and hard fought gains like pensions, social services, and health care, as noted in France where masses of students came out to support the struggle against raising pension eligibility ages. There will be more such struggles ahead, in Europe and elsewhere.
Sometimes student struggles have their own parochial quality (around specific campus issues like dormitory regulations, etc.), other times they intersect the working class. What is important to remember is that it is the working class that has the social power (and has had it for a long time now, although mainly unused) to bring society to a standstill but also to win victories, defensive or offensive as the case may be, against the bourgeoisie. That simple fact, as the article here alludes to, often got lost in the old days of the 1960s old New Left. Youth vanguardism was rampant. The assumption then (and maybe now, a little) was that the working class, at least in the advanced capitalist countries had been “bought off” (at least relatively) and therefore was no longer, as Marx and his followers projected, a potentially revolutionary force. A very dangerous, but very common notion then, and now as well.
This time around, hopefully, we will not have to “relive” history on that question. At least for those of us who have seen a few things, especially the volatility of the petty bourgeois students, over time. There is, unfortunately, nothing inherently revolutionary about youth, in itself, all self-image to the contrary. Let’s, however, not neglect to work in that milieu and see what flies out in the days ahead.
Note: In the interest of full disclosure, as I have mentioned before, I did not come to Marxism early in my political career (I was nothing but a left-liberal and then soft social-democrat, at best), not did I, in many ways come to this strategy willingly. Along the way I had imbibed in virtually every leftist political fad or trend, including the above-mentioned youth vanguardism. I have written about my “conversion” elsewhere but the point here is, although I came from nowhere but deep in the heart of the working poor, I did not see that class as “worthy” of ruling in its own interests. No I preferred Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Harrington (author of The Other America and leading social democrat in those days), hell, even Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman if it came down to it. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and the working class, no way. Well, we learn a few things in life, and one that should be etched on every militant leftist’s brain is those who make the stuff of society must rule. Labor must rule. Simple, right?"
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- The Fight, The Very Long Fight, To Break With The Democrats- “McGovern And The New Left” (1972)
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Markin comment on this article:
As I have mentioned, many times before, in previous comments about my early political career as late as 1968 I was in the throes of “enchantment” with the Democratic Party left-wing as the be all and end all for progressive political struggle. I have mentioned the name Robert Kennedy whom I tramped around the country for in the spring of 1968. And, although I am red-faced with embarrassment every time I say it to this day, I humped around the country for Hubert Horatio Humphrey in the fall of that year. Why? To “fight the right” in the personage of one Richard Milhous Nixon, later the President of the United States and artless common criminal.
And that is exactly the point of the article and my placing it in this space, given the recent political calculus around support (now fading support) for current President Barack Obama as the “progressive”, progressive black Democratic candidate to boot, against today’s version of the political right. Some things never change and some people never learn any lessons but that doesn’t mean that they should not be put out there. Break with the Democrats!, obviously, for those of use who fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government as part of the struggle for our communist future is simply the beginning of wisdom. Needless to say , really needless to say in this case, breaking with the Republicans, Greens, and other assorted non-worker class programs falls under that same umbrella.
Note: There is one distinction that should be noted between 1972 and 2011 when reading this article . Today (or rather 2008) the push for Obama (or Hilary Clinton, for that matter) represented something a move to the left (or to politics)by the youth, if only momentarily, the push for George McGovern in 1972 by elements of the left that should have and did know better actually represented a step to the right, and, more importantly a step, a long step back to the rat hole (nice term, right?) of bourgeois politics. And we have been stuck there ever since. Forward!
*********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth (forebear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs) Newsletter, Number 14, October-November 1972
McGOVERN AND THE NEW LEFT
The New Left entered its death agony when SDS fell apart, George McGovern is now attempt¬ing to bury the corpse.
The New Left was rooted in the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, particularly the campus milieu. Born as the advance youth guard of liberal, Social Democratic and bourgeois idealism, it was tied to the Kennedy wing of the ruling class. While the early alliance broke down, symbolized by the sellout of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Convention, it produced no qualitative break, SDS was still willing to go "part of the way with LBJ." But the inability of the capitalists to realize even its minimal promises of peace and civil rights eventually drove the New Left further and further away from conscious, active support. But most of the New Left activists did not move in the direction of the working class. The New Left, having broken pragmatically with the ruling class, saw little hope in the American proletariat still immersed in the reaction and passivity of Cold War red purges. Instead, it oriented in an empirical manner to what was currently in motion—the "Third World," oppressed minorities, and even the students themselves.
But it is now 1972. The "Third World" is not toppling U.S. imperialism. Rather, Mao is inviting Nixon to China. The black nationalist movement is in ruins, with its most militant and best known expression, the Black Panther Party, morally disgraced, split and physically defeated by the repressive apparatus of the state. And the Vietnam war continues, despite the election of three so-called "peace" candidates.
The repeated failures of the New Left have clearly demonstrated the bankruptcy of its theoretical conceptions. Some of its components have drawn the correct conclusion that only the working class has the power to destroy imperialism. Most of them have returned to the waiting arms of the liberal bourgeoisie.
Bloc of 5! Classes
Important in this process is the role played by the Stalinist DRV-NLF itself. The NLF's struggle against U.S. imperialism and bourgeois liberalism's embracing of the American war effort in Vietnam helped create the New Left. Yet this moral and political authority which the NLF possessed has now facilitated the capitulation of the New Left. The 7-point Peace Plan sellout and the all but open support for McGovern in the pages of Nhari Dan by the Hanoi bureaucracy all served to further disorient those rooted in impressionism.
According to the June 1972 Liberated Guardian:
"... Nixon could encourage a coup in Saigon led by someone with the stature of Big Minn. Such a coup would at some point in the future lead to the tripartite coalition the NLF has been seeking ....
"If Nixon can work out such a deal the left must educate the American people about the war sufficiently so that people will see the defeat for just that. Nixon will be seen as a loser rather than a peace-maker."
Thus, according to the Liberated Guardian, if the NLF forms a coalition government with Nixon's consent with a treacherous compradore like Minh, this is not a sellout but a victory! The extent to which political degeneration has taken place can be seen in the fact that not even the Chinese Communist Party, when they were chasing Chiang Kai-shek as an ally, ever stooped to declaring that the comprador bourgeoisie was somehow a friend of the "people."
But what is the nature of the "tripartite coalition"? If there is any way of preventing the gains that the construction of even a deformed (Stalinist) workers state would produce, short of a U.S. battlefield victory, the NLF's "coalition" is it. It is proposed precisely in order to avoid the dangerous necessity of taking power through a social revolution carried to completion by the working class and poor peasants. Once set in motion the revolution might well transcend the confines the Stalinist bureaucracy seeks to keep it in.
Thus, during the Tet offensive, when the NLF was at the height of its influence among the urban masses, it refused to establish Soviets. When Quang Tri was taken during the spring offensive, private property was declared sacrosanct, and a new government established composed predomi¬nantly of Saigon's ex-officials
"Small and Vacillating" Rifts
The Spring Offensive which could have sent Thieu packing allowed McGovern, as the representative of outright bourgeois defeatism, to gain leadership of the Democratic Party, The misleadership and defeats of the New Left aided him in gaining almost unchallenged hegemony over the campus population,, As spring student strikes took intermissions during the Democratic Party primaries, students, mostly in the newly enfranchised 18-21 year-old group, provided the door-bell ringing, caucus-packing machinery that enabled McGovern to take advantage of the rise of bourgeois defeatism. The pact was sealed at the Democratic Convention with the dumping of Daley and the New Leftish quotas of Blacks, women and youth.
The tide of pro-Mc-Govern sentiment that has swept the campus milieu has dragged with it almost the entire New Left to one degree or another. The opportunist rationales used to justify capitulation have been endless.
Remarkable in its own way for cynicism and sophism is the Guardian. In the lead article of 23 August 1972, it explained in detail that McGovern is an imperialist politician, essentially no different than the others, but then went on to speak "... of the necessity to take advantage of every rift and antagonism, however small and vacillating [our emphasis], that exist among the ranks of the bourgeoisie.". We do no oppose the the growing trend of those among the masses who intend to vote for McGovern..."
But the bourgeoisie is not a monolithic entity. There are always "small and vacillating" rifts within it. There were "small and vacillating" rift between Hitler and Goebbels. Not only is the Guardian advocating a bloc with one section of the bourgeoisie, but it is using a rationale that could equally justify such a bloc at any time o place. This is the logic of naked capitulationism
Left Moves Right
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, after years' attempting wrecking jobs on the Left for being "too political" have shown up with shorn loci deep in the McGovern camp. But what is more natural, since the two of them have continuous: stated in the past that there was no difference between the "exploiters" on the Left and the bourgeoisie? The remnants of Weatherman are hoping that McGovern will lessen the repression, enabling them to walk unimpeded to the land of milk, hone and "power to the people." Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger and other "movement" individuals popularized by the bourgeois press have adopted the slogan "Evict Nixon."
The SWP has continued to recruit from its series of Pop Fronts by preaching their "independence" from all political parties. When attacked from either the right or the left, the SWP could simply chant "We're for non-exclusion. Every body should vote for who they want." Of course this "line" succeeded beyond their wildest dream (or nightmares)—NPAC and SMC supporters are voting for who they choose... McGovern.' And the SWP's response? "After McGovern—Us" as the tell their members, planning on a tremendous influx of new, but non-socialist, recruits through the Jenness-Pulley campaign as disillusioned McGovern supporters swarm to the SWV/YSA after the elections.
The orthodox Maoists of the Revolutionary Union (RU) claim that they are to the left of the SWP; in wishing to build a "mass independent anti imperialist movement." Through the Attica Brigade, an "anti-imperialist" marching society that they are currently involved in, they have issued leaflet urging McGovern supporters to build the mass anti-imperialist movement, since it was after all, this "movement" which built McGovern
Likewise, the Maoist groups participating in the People's Solidarity Committee (Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization—formerly Young Lords, Venceremos, I Wor Kuen, Black Workers Congress, and others, including the RU push the slogan "Defeat Nixon" without mentioning McGovern, thus giving the latter backhanded support.
No Steps Forward, Another Back
The role of PL/SDS is particularly unfortunate The WSA was the pro-working-class wing of the old SDS. Its victory through political struggle over RYM offered the possibility of winning a large part of the New Left to the side of the working class. But PL was incapable of taking advantage of that opportunity. Having no conception of the rob that a communist youth organization could play it formalized its incapacity into the "theory" that "students cannot tell workers what to do," Even at its most post-split left point, PL specifically, emphatically and repeatedly rejected the idea that SDS should be a socialist youth group. PL could think of nothing better for SDS than wretched gimmicks like the Campus Worker-Student Alliance strategy or endless PL unemployment marches. Having no strategy for pro-working-class students, it was inevitable that SDS should sink back into the swamp of New Leftism, carried away by the McGovern tide.
Miami, McGovern and Mindless Activism
At the Democratic Convention, when McGovern stated at a Prisoners of War wives' meeting that -he would keep troops in Thailand until the prisoners were returned, SDS gathered up a flock of indignant liberals to "confront" him at his headquarters, McGovern, joined by national TV, met them personally, and informed them that the state¬ment meant nothing, since he had previously promised to withdraw all troops from Indochina regardless of other NLF activity.
An SDSer then handed McGovern their "anti-racism" bill, requesting his signature. He pointed out that the bill which forbade police to "assault a minority person except in provable self-defense" (and when don't the police claim self-defense?)said nothing about assaults on whites. The SDSer then stated that the Senator had the old bill, and immediately set off for a copy of the new bill for his signature. Rarely has SDS disgraced itself so utterly and publicly.
"Political Working Class" for McGovern
The resolution of the National Caucus of Labor Committees at the Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy conference stated that "TUAD will refuse all support to candidates for public office who advocate wage controls in any form" (our emphasis). Given the proper situation, not only might a bourgeois candidate denounce wage controls (and in fact McGovern has said that Nixon's wage controls are "unfair") but he could conceivably mouth every one of the points in the NCLC program, only to drop them after the election, as the bourgeois state remains intact. The NCLC's failure to declare their opposition to all bourgeois candidates, regardless of what they say, exposes their incapacity to take a clear working-class line.
In the last analysis, despite their bitter denunciations of him, the NCLC serves as a left cover for McGovern's economic schemes, just as the SWP serves as a left cover for his peace promises.
It is not simply that McGovern is a capitalist candidate—indeed the NCLC has shown a willingness in the past to bloc with the CIA-compromised Socialist Party against the rest of the left, when they attacked the then pro-working-class Worker-Student Alliance wing of SDS in the SP's New America.
McGovern represents an attempt by one bourgeois wing to draw all wings of the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia under its banner. Therefore, McGovern came up with his "plan," which, though considerably more modest than the NCLC's schemes, is fundamentally of the same species. Such reform platforms of the early McGovern-NCLC have traditionally served as the programs of Popular Fronts. How radical and deep-going they are is determined by the depth of the working-class radicalization and militancy that they are designed to dissipate. And when the crisis is over the program is burned. Whether the promises of the Popular Front are minimal or far-reaching is irrelevant, as they are worth no more than the paper they are printed on, as McGovern's abandonment of his pre-nomination platform shows.
No Middle Road
If leaflets, bull sessions or simple activism were enough to end the war, the war would have been ended long ago. If ringing door-bells and lesser evilism in elections were enough, the war would never have gotten started. From Eisenhower with his promise to "go personally to Korea and bring the boys home," through Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, with his "secret peace plan," all American presidents have been "peace candidates" of one form or another. But unable to fight its way out of the pragmatism which gave it birth, the New Left has continued like a punch-drunk fighter to reel from one post-election knock-out to another. The New Left has spent virtually its entire existence trying to find a middle road between reformism and revolution, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It has not yet understood that no such middle road exists.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*********
Markin comment on this article:
As I have mentioned, many times before, in previous comments about my early political career as late as 1968 I was in the throes of “enchantment” with the Democratic Party left-wing as the be all and end all for progressive political struggle. I have mentioned the name Robert Kennedy whom I tramped around the country for in the spring of 1968. And, although I am red-faced with embarrassment every time I say it to this day, I humped around the country for Hubert Horatio Humphrey in the fall of that year. Why? To “fight the right” in the personage of one Richard Milhous Nixon, later the President of the United States and artless common criminal.
And that is exactly the point of the article and my placing it in this space, given the recent political calculus around support (now fading support) for current President Barack Obama as the “progressive”, progressive black Democratic candidate to boot, against today’s version of the political right. Some things never change and some people never learn any lessons but that doesn’t mean that they should not be put out there. Break with the Democrats!, obviously, for those of use who fight for a workers party that fights for a workers government as part of the struggle for our communist future is simply the beginning of wisdom. Needless to say , really needless to say in this case, breaking with the Republicans, Greens, and other assorted non-worker class programs falls under that same umbrella.
Note: There is one distinction that should be noted between 1972 and 2011 when reading this article . Today (or rather 2008) the push for Obama (or Hilary Clinton, for that matter) represented something a move to the left (or to politics)by the youth, if only momentarily, the push for George McGovern in 1972 by elements of the left that should have and did know better actually represented a step to the right, and, more importantly a step, a long step back to the rat hole (nice term, right?) of bourgeois politics. And we have been stuck there ever since. Forward!
*********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth (forebear of the Spartacus Youth Clubs) Newsletter, Number 14, October-November 1972
McGOVERN AND THE NEW LEFT
The New Left entered its death agony when SDS fell apart, George McGovern is now attempt¬ing to bury the corpse.
The New Left was rooted in the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, particularly the campus milieu. Born as the advance youth guard of liberal, Social Democratic and bourgeois idealism, it was tied to the Kennedy wing of the ruling class. While the early alliance broke down, symbolized by the sellout of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Convention, it produced no qualitative break, SDS was still willing to go "part of the way with LBJ." But the inability of the capitalists to realize even its minimal promises of peace and civil rights eventually drove the New Left further and further away from conscious, active support. But most of the New Left activists did not move in the direction of the working class. The New Left, having broken pragmatically with the ruling class, saw little hope in the American proletariat still immersed in the reaction and passivity of Cold War red purges. Instead, it oriented in an empirical manner to what was currently in motion—the "Third World," oppressed minorities, and even the students themselves.
But it is now 1972. The "Third World" is not toppling U.S. imperialism. Rather, Mao is inviting Nixon to China. The black nationalist movement is in ruins, with its most militant and best known expression, the Black Panther Party, morally disgraced, split and physically defeated by the repressive apparatus of the state. And the Vietnam war continues, despite the election of three so-called "peace" candidates.
The repeated failures of the New Left have clearly demonstrated the bankruptcy of its theoretical conceptions. Some of its components have drawn the correct conclusion that only the working class has the power to destroy imperialism. Most of them have returned to the waiting arms of the liberal bourgeoisie.
Bloc of 5! Classes
Important in this process is the role played by the Stalinist DRV-NLF itself. The NLF's struggle against U.S. imperialism and bourgeois liberalism's embracing of the American war effort in Vietnam helped create the New Left. Yet this moral and political authority which the NLF possessed has now facilitated the capitulation of the New Left. The 7-point Peace Plan sellout and the all but open support for McGovern in the pages of Nhari Dan by the Hanoi bureaucracy all served to further disorient those rooted in impressionism.
According to the June 1972 Liberated Guardian:
"... Nixon could encourage a coup in Saigon led by someone with the stature of Big Minn. Such a coup would at some point in the future lead to the tripartite coalition the NLF has been seeking ....
"If Nixon can work out such a deal the left must educate the American people about the war sufficiently so that people will see the defeat for just that. Nixon will be seen as a loser rather than a peace-maker."
Thus, according to the Liberated Guardian, if the NLF forms a coalition government with Nixon's consent with a treacherous compradore like Minh, this is not a sellout but a victory! The extent to which political degeneration has taken place can be seen in the fact that not even the Chinese Communist Party, when they were chasing Chiang Kai-shek as an ally, ever stooped to declaring that the comprador bourgeoisie was somehow a friend of the "people."
But what is the nature of the "tripartite coalition"? If there is any way of preventing the gains that the construction of even a deformed (Stalinist) workers state would produce, short of a U.S. battlefield victory, the NLF's "coalition" is it. It is proposed precisely in order to avoid the dangerous necessity of taking power through a social revolution carried to completion by the working class and poor peasants. Once set in motion the revolution might well transcend the confines the Stalinist bureaucracy seeks to keep it in.
Thus, during the Tet offensive, when the NLF was at the height of its influence among the urban masses, it refused to establish Soviets. When Quang Tri was taken during the spring offensive, private property was declared sacrosanct, and a new government established composed predomi¬nantly of Saigon's ex-officials
"Small and Vacillating" Rifts
The Spring Offensive which could have sent Thieu packing allowed McGovern, as the representative of outright bourgeois defeatism, to gain leadership of the Democratic Party, The misleadership and defeats of the New Left aided him in gaining almost unchallenged hegemony over the campus population,, As spring student strikes took intermissions during the Democratic Party primaries, students, mostly in the newly enfranchised 18-21 year-old group, provided the door-bell ringing, caucus-packing machinery that enabled McGovern to take advantage of the rise of bourgeois defeatism. The pact was sealed at the Democratic Convention with the dumping of Daley and the New Leftish quotas of Blacks, women and youth.
The tide of pro-Mc-Govern sentiment that has swept the campus milieu has dragged with it almost the entire New Left to one degree or another. The opportunist rationales used to justify capitulation have been endless.
Remarkable in its own way for cynicism and sophism is the Guardian. In the lead article of 23 August 1972, it explained in detail that McGovern is an imperialist politician, essentially no different than the others, but then went on to speak "... of the necessity to take advantage of every rift and antagonism, however small and vacillating [our emphasis], that exist among the ranks of the bourgeoisie.". We do no oppose the the growing trend of those among the masses who intend to vote for McGovern..."
But the bourgeoisie is not a monolithic entity. There are always "small and vacillating" rifts within it. There were "small and vacillating" rift between Hitler and Goebbels. Not only is the Guardian advocating a bloc with one section of the bourgeoisie, but it is using a rationale that could equally justify such a bloc at any time o place. This is the logic of naked capitulationism
Left Moves Right
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, after years' attempting wrecking jobs on the Left for being "too political" have shown up with shorn loci deep in the McGovern camp. But what is more natural, since the two of them have continuous: stated in the past that there was no difference between the "exploiters" on the Left and the bourgeoisie? The remnants of Weatherman are hoping that McGovern will lessen the repression, enabling them to walk unimpeded to the land of milk, hone and "power to the people." Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger and other "movement" individuals popularized by the bourgeois press have adopted the slogan "Evict Nixon."
The SWP has continued to recruit from its series of Pop Fronts by preaching their "independence" from all political parties. When attacked from either the right or the left, the SWP could simply chant "We're for non-exclusion. Every body should vote for who they want." Of course this "line" succeeded beyond their wildest dream (or nightmares)—NPAC and SMC supporters are voting for who they choose... McGovern.' And the SWP's response? "After McGovern—Us" as the tell their members, planning on a tremendous influx of new, but non-socialist, recruits through the Jenness-Pulley campaign as disillusioned McGovern supporters swarm to the SWV/YSA after the elections.
The orthodox Maoists of the Revolutionary Union (RU) claim that they are to the left of the SWP; in wishing to build a "mass independent anti imperialist movement." Through the Attica Brigade, an "anti-imperialist" marching society that they are currently involved in, they have issued leaflet urging McGovern supporters to build the mass anti-imperialist movement, since it was after all, this "movement" which built McGovern
Likewise, the Maoist groups participating in the People's Solidarity Committee (Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization—formerly Young Lords, Venceremos, I Wor Kuen, Black Workers Congress, and others, including the RU push the slogan "Defeat Nixon" without mentioning McGovern, thus giving the latter backhanded support.
No Steps Forward, Another Back
The role of PL/SDS is particularly unfortunate The WSA was the pro-working-class wing of the old SDS. Its victory through political struggle over RYM offered the possibility of winning a large part of the New Left to the side of the working class. But PL was incapable of taking advantage of that opportunity. Having no conception of the rob that a communist youth organization could play it formalized its incapacity into the "theory" that "students cannot tell workers what to do," Even at its most post-split left point, PL specifically, emphatically and repeatedly rejected the idea that SDS should be a socialist youth group. PL could think of nothing better for SDS than wretched gimmicks like the Campus Worker-Student Alliance strategy or endless PL unemployment marches. Having no strategy for pro-working-class students, it was inevitable that SDS should sink back into the swamp of New Leftism, carried away by the McGovern tide.
Miami, McGovern and Mindless Activism
At the Democratic Convention, when McGovern stated at a Prisoners of War wives' meeting that -he would keep troops in Thailand until the prisoners were returned, SDS gathered up a flock of indignant liberals to "confront" him at his headquarters, McGovern, joined by national TV, met them personally, and informed them that the state¬ment meant nothing, since he had previously promised to withdraw all troops from Indochina regardless of other NLF activity.
An SDSer then handed McGovern their "anti-racism" bill, requesting his signature. He pointed out that the bill which forbade police to "assault a minority person except in provable self-defense" (and when don't the police claim self-defense?)said nothing about assaults on whites. The SDSer then stated that the Senator had the old bill, and immediately set off for a copy of the new bill for his signature. Rarely has SDS disgraced itself so utterly and publicly.
"Political Working Class" for McGovern
The resolution of the National Caucus of Labor Committees at the Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy conference stated that "TUAD will refuse all support to candidates for public office who advocate wage controls in any form" (our emphasis). Given the proper situation, not only might a bourgeois candidate denounce wage controls (and in fact McGovern has said that Nixon's wage controls are "unfair") but he could conceivably mouth every one of the points in the NCLC program, only to drop them after the election, as the bourgeois state remains intact. The NCLC's failure to declare their opposition to all bourgeois candidates, regardless of what they say, exposes their incapacity to take a clear working-class line.
In the last analysis, despite their bitter denunciations of him, the NCLC serves as a left cover for McGovern's economic schemes, just as the SWP serves as a left cover for his peace promises.
It is not simply that McGovern is a capitalist candidate—indeed the NCLC has shown a willingness in the past to bloc with the CIA-compromised Socialist Party against the rest of the left, when they attacked the then pro-working-class Worker-Student Alliance wing of SDS in the SP's New America.
McGovern represents an attempt by one bourgeois wing to draw all wings of the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia under its banner. Therefore, McGovern came up with his "plan," which, though considerably more modest than the NCLC's schemes, is fundamentally of the same species. Such reform platforms of the early McGovern-NCLC have traditionally served as the programs of Popular Fronts. How radical and deep-going they are is determined by the depth of the working-class radicalization and militancy that they are designed to dissipate. And when the crisis is over the program is burned. Whether the promises of the Popular Front are minimal or far-reaching is irrelevant, as they are worth no more than the paper they are printed on, as McGovern's abandonment of his pre-nomination platform shows.
No Middle Road
If leaflets, bull sessions or simple activism were enough to end the war, the war would have been ended long ago. If ringing door-bells and lesser evilism in elections were enough, the war would never have gotten started. From Eisenhower with his promise to "go personally to Korea and bring the boys home," through Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, with his "secret peace plan," all American presidents have been "peace candidates" of one form or another. But unable to fight its way out of the pragmatism which gave it birth, the New Left has continued like a punch-drunk fighter to reel from one post-election knock-out to another. The New Left has spent virtually its entire existence trying to find a middle road between reformism and revolution, between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It has not yet understood that no such middle road exists.
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