Markin comment:
In October 2010 I started what I anticipate will be an on-going series, From The Archives Of The Socialist Workers Party (America), starting date October 2, 2010, where I will place documents from, and make comments on, various aspects of the early days of the James P. Cannon-led Socialist Worker Party in America. As I noted in the introduction to that series Marxism, no less than other political traditions, and perhaps more than most, places great emphasis on roots, the building blocks of current society and its political organizations. Nowhere is the notion of roots more prevalent in the Marxist movement that in the tracing of organizational and political links back to the founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the Communist League.
After mentioning the thread of international linkage through various organizations from the First to the Fourth International I also noted that on the national terrain in the Trotskyist movement, and here I was speaking of America where the Marxist roots are much more attenuated than elsewhere, we look to Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor League, Eugene V. Debs' Socialist Party( mainly its left-wing, not its socialism for dentists wing), the Wobblies (IWW, Industrial Workers Of The World), the early Bolshevik-influenced Communist Party and the various formations that led up to the Socialist Workers Party, the section that Leon Trotsky’s relied on most while he was alive. Further, I noted that beyond the SWP that there were several directions to go in but that those earlier lines were the bedrock of revolutionary Marxist continuity, at least through the 1960s.
I am continuing today what I also anticipate will be an on-going series about one of those strands past the 1960s when the SWP lost it revolutionary appetite, what was then the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) and what is now the Spartacist League (SL/U.S.), the U.S. section of the International Communist League (ICL). I intend to post materials from other strands but there are several reasons for starting with the SL/U.S. A main one, as the document below will make clear, is that the origin core of that organization fought, unsuccessfully in the end, to struggle from the inside (an important point) to turn the SWP back on a revolutionary course, as they saw it. Moreover, a number of the other organizations that I will cover later trace their origins to the SL, including the very helpful source for posting this material, the International Bolshevik Tendency.
However as I noted in posting a document from Spartacist, the theoretical journal of ICL posted via the International Bolshevik Tendency website that is not the main reason I am starting with the SL/U.S. Although I am not a political supporter of either organization in the accepted Leninist sense of that term, more often than not, and at times and on certain questions very much more often than not, my own political views and those of the International Communist League coincide. I am also, and I make no bones about it, a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, a social and legal defense organization linked to the ICL and committed, in the traditions of the IWW, the early International Labor Defense-legal defense arm of the Communist International, and the early defense work of the American Socialist Workers Party, to the struggles for freedom of all class-war prisoners and defense of other related social struggles.
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Markin comment on this article:
As has been detailed in other pieces in this space about the fate of the cadre of the Fourth International, including the leading figure, Leon Trotsky, assassinated by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in 1940, that organization was decimated by various forces by the end of World War II and left it without strong theoretical leadership the post-war period. Not strong enough at a time when the seemingly improbable situation developed where non-Leninist (in the early Bolshevik sense) parties were leading overturns of capitalist regimes from Eastern Europe to Asia. This inability to sift through the historic facts was most forcefully felt in the immediate case of Yugoslavia. But, frankly, the post- World War II methodological problems still haunt those of us who stand on the history of the Fourth International, mainly today around the question of whether China is capitalist or not. That makes this pamphlet worthwhile reading to order to try to sort that problem out.
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Circular to the Leadership of All Sections
30 June 1948
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Written: 1948
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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The following unsigned circular was issued by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. The original is in the archives of Natalia Sedova Trotsky at the Trotsky Museum in Coyoacán, Mexico; a photocopy is in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library.
June 30, 1948
Circular No. 16
To the Leadership of All Sections
Comrades,
The Tito affair has an exceptional importance from two points of view: externally for our attitude to Stalinist workers in particular and to revolutionary workers in general, and the conclusions that we can draw in regard to our appreciation of the USSR and Stalinism.
It goes without saying that the leaderships of all sections will have understood immediately the importance of the events and the necessity of taking the initiative in this respect. However, the I.S. thinks it necessary to make known its point of view in order to facilitate prompt and coordinated action of the whole International.
Significance of the Conflict
The resolution of the Cominform and the reply of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party clearly show that the origin of the conflict lies in the attempt of the Kremlin to strangle completely the latter and the Tito government.
GPU agents endeavoured to create a tendency inside the Yugoslav CP to “Russify” it completely, to undermine the personal prestige of Tito and to get rid of him. The Kremlin, estimating that in Yugoslavia it did not possess an absolutely docile instrument, and fearing an independent role on the part of Tito, however limited, attacked him by mobilising at the same time its direct agents in Yugoslavia and the prestige of the Russian Communist Party and the Cominform against the Yugoslav Communists; it attempted to create a faction of its own in the Yugoslav CP capable of overthrowing them.
This is an example of the extreme rigidity of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine, incompatible with the least opposition and which, driven by its own internal logic, is forced to nip in the bud the slightest sign of independence, in order to safeguard its prestige as well as its apparent unity and stability. But the attempt of the Kremlin in Yugoslavia misfired for a whole series of reasons. Tito and the leadership of the CP were strongly entrenched in a movement and a party which they had led during the last few years of struggle under the occupation and immediately after, without the direct support of the Kremlin, and of which they have been considered as the natural leaders. They have constructed on the other hand a strong state apparatus, which inspires them with a different assurance from that which formerly characterised various attempts at opposition in the Communist parties of the capitalist countries in the face of the all-powerful Kremlin. Yugoslavia is the only country of the glacis where the government had not been imposed by the entry of the Red Army and the Soviet occupation, but which had been brought to power by the revolutionary movement of the masses.
Tito personally is a bureaucrat to the hilt; past master in the bureaucratic and GPU Kremlin machine he served for several years and which he has known how to stand up to energetically in his own country.
The resistance of Tito has probably surprised and exasperated Stalin. Before the failure of his attempt, Stalin could either try to secure the unconditional submission of Tito, or eliminate him through the action of his agents in Yugoslavia. Stalin has preferred the former course despite all the inconveniences of mobilising his international machine and openly excommunicating Tito.
We shall see in the days and weeks to come on what supplementary trump cards Stalin has in the long run based his decision, and what will be the breadth of Tito’s resistance.
The Cominform Resolution and the Yugoslav Reply
The charge sheet of the Cominform against Tito is a typical product of the Kremlin machine of lies, calumnies, and amalgams. Tito is accused at the same time of “nationalism,” “Trotskyism,” “Bukharinism,” of basing himself on the kulaks and wishing to destroy the kulaks, etc.... This document is conceived in order to drown the facts of the case in an ocean of assertions, in appearance “Marxist-Leninist,” contradictory and confused, which allows anyone in Stalinist world public opinion or in Yugoslavia to find reasons to criticise and condemn Tito. The reply of the Yugoslav party enables us, naturally without solidarising with it or with Tito, to attack the resolution of the Cominform and the attitude taken by the different Communist parties, who have rushed to align themselves completely with the resolution, without even knowing Tito’s reply and without even publishing in their press an objective résumé of that reply.
The reply of the Yugoslav party shows in effect that its case has been judged by the leaderships of the various Communist parties and the Cominform on the basis of unilateral accusations brought against it by the Russian Communist Party and without it even being able to make known its point of view. Our organisations, in their press, and by special leaflets addressed to the Stalinist workers and to revolutionary workers in general, should underline the enormous proof, afforded by this action of the Kremlin, of the monstrously bureaucratic character of Stalinism. Between one day and the next, a whole party, standing at the head of a country considered to be the vanguard of all glacis countries, was condemned solely on the basis of unilateral accusations, without the contrary point of view of the accused party ever having been discussed by the militants of the Stalinist organisations.
This enables us to make clear before the masses the whole nature of Stalinism and to recall examples from the past, the accusations brought against Trotskyism, the Moscow Trials, etc....
Activities Towards the Yugoslavs
The International Secretariat is preparing a document addressed to the Yugoslav Communist Party which it will try to send to Yugoslavia and circulate amongst the Communist workers of Yugoslavia. We ask all sections, when they receive the text, to transmit it by delegations to Yugoslav consulates and embassies asking them to forward it to the CC of the Yugoslav CP. On the other hand, we ask all sections to let us know immediately any contacts or any means which will permit an intervention on the part of the International in Yugoslavia, and to send by these means their own publications on this subject.
Conclusions on the USSR and Stalinism
The Tito affair permits us to draw important conclusions on the following points:
a) Concerning the stability of the Stalinist bureaucracy;
b) Concerning the question of the extension of Stalinism in the world without rifts, and the revisionist theory of “bureaucratic collectivism”;
c) Concerning the nature of the glacis countries.
The Tito affair shows that the extreme rigidity of the Stalinist bureaucratic machine will have considerable difficulty in incorporating in its complicated and contradictory movements, without cracks, fissures and grave crises, the glacis countries as a bloc, each component part of which has been submitted to a whole series of different economic, historical and political conditions.
Stalinism is not a product that is capable of universal export and in proportion to its expansion its internal contradictions, far from disappearing, become more violent and explosive. The attempted assimilation of the glacis by Stalinism can well produce centrifugal forces in the international Stalinist edifice and even in the USSR itself.
In the Stalin-Tito controversy the Stalinists themselves put their finger on the capitalist nature of the structure of these countries in alleging that the regime of private property in agricultural production, commerce and petty enterprises, that is to say in the essential domain of the whole economy in these countries, where petty individual exploitation constantly engenders capitalism.
Where Is Tito Going?
We should follow with great interest but also with caution the evolution of the Moscow-Belgrade conflict.
The reply of the Yugoslav party indicates that Tito is not ready to capitulate and his reconciliation with the Kremlin remains problematical, if not impossible, after such a passage at arms.
There remain consequently three possibilities:
a) That Tito will be overthrown by the revolt of the Stalinist wing of the Yugoslav party, which does not appear in any case to be very important.
b) That he will maintain his present like of independence, which poses necessarily a more radical rupture with the Kremlin and the Stalinists.
c) That he will go over to American imperialism and the bloc of western democracies. But this last eventuality seems in any case only capable of realisation after a long evolution, his present base having been established on socialist ideas and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles. Above all the most important point for us is not the personal case of Tito, a bureaucrat of the old stock with bonapartist ambitions and tendencies, but the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, the proletariat and poor peasantry placed by the conflict with Moscow in a favourable situation to advance in the path of a more radical rupture with Stalinism.
It is in this direction that the International should act.
The International Secretariat
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An Open Letter to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
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Written: 1948
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 200/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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The following letter by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International was published in the newspaper of the American Socialist Workers Party, the Militant, 26 July 1948.
Paris,
July 1, 1948
To the Central Committee and to All Members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Comrades,
We want to let you know that the attention of the entire international revolutionary workers’ movement is today centered on the conflict in which you have, for some time, been pitted against the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the Cominform.
The official press of the Communist parties is seeking to engulf you in a flood of slanders and insults. Their conduct is a good example of how proletarian democracy is dragged in the mud by these people who operate from Moscow the entire international machine which is at the service of the Soviet bureaucracy.
But we are not in the least duped by this system of slander campaigns which has in the past destroyed so many precious forces in the labor movement. Because under the worst difficulties, we have never ceased for one moment, ever since Lenin died, to continue his struggle in Russia and in the entire world for the world communist revolution, against capitalist and imperialist reaction, and against the Soviet bureaucracy which usurped Lenin’s party and the whole Communist International.
We know with what sinister inflexibility the bureaucratic machine in Moscow tries to nip in the bud every aspiration of independence or even a sign of a critical attitude toward itself. This Soviet bureaucracy has nothing in common with the Bolshevism of Lenin and the genuine defense of what still remains of the October conquests in the Soviet Union. The struggle—which has, since 1927, destroyed in Russia the entire Old Guard of the Bolshevik Party of the days of the October Revolution—was led by the Thermidorians of the Russian Revolution, who were able temporarily to triumph over the proletarian revolutionary wing of Russian Bolshevism.
Now you are in a position to understand, in the light of the infamous campaign of which you are the victims, the real meaning of the Moscow Trials and of the whole Stalinist struggle against Trotskyism.
You hold in your hands a mighty power if only you summon enough strength to persevere on the road of the socialist revolution and its program. This road is also the road of independence from the bureaucratic apparatus of Moscow. Looking for a way out are tremendous forces in the entire world labor movement—now caught in a vise between imperialism led from Washington on the one side, and on the other, the Soviet bureaucracy in the Kremlin, interested solely in keeping its own privileged caste interests in Russia.
Keep up your fight! Deepen the significance of your struggle with Moscow and its international machine! Do not yield to imperialist pressures! Establish a regime of genuine workers’ democracy in your party and in your country! Thereby you will contribute immensely to the rebirth of the international workers’ movement.
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International, the organization which unites around its program of Bolshevism and Leninism 35 sections on the five continents, wants to address itself in this our first message to you not concerning those things about which we must be critical of you with regards to your past and more recent course. We wish rather to take note of the promise in your resistance—the promise of victorious resistance by a revolutionary workers’ party against the most monstrous bureaucratic machine that has ever existed in the labor movement, the Kremlin machine.
We shall presently address to you and to your Congress and to all Yugoslav Communists an open letter in which we shall treat in detail our point of view on the historic meaning of your conflict with Moscow and its Cominform.
Long Live the Yugoslav Socialist Revolution! Long Live the Proletarian World Revolution!
International Secretariat of the Fourth International
*****
An Open Letter
To the Congress, Central Committee and Members of the
Yugoslav Communist Party
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Written: 1948
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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This text of the 13 July 1948 Open Letter from the International Secretariat to the Yugoslav Communist Party corresponds to the English version published in the American Socialist Workers Party’s Fourth International, August 1948. In addition to minor spelling revisions, the first of the two slogans which conclude the letter has been retranslated from the French original.[1] (The Fourth International version read: “Yugoslav Communists Unite for a New Leninist International!”)
Comrades,
At its last session the Cominform passed a resolution excommunicating your party and its leadership. This has deeply stirred the members of Communist parties and revolutionary workers throughout the world. How, indeed, could they fail to be stupefied by such an abrupt about-face by the Cominform leaders who suddenly compel them to disparage a country which only yesterday was proclaimed the best model of “People’s Democracy.” Only three months ago, l’Humanité, central organ of the French Communist Party, sang praises to the “land of Tito.” Today, l’Humanité cannot find a slander too vile with which to besmirch your party.
Only recently, Enver Hoxha, premier of Albania, declared at the fourth session of the Albanian People’s Assembly:
Our people could neither enjoy the fruits of their war victories nor be assured of reconstructing their country and progress toward a better life, if it were not for the powerful, fraternal assistance accorded us in all spheres of life by the new Yugoslavia.
Today, the same Enver Hoxha cynically says:
The Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party and its chieftain Tito have disrupted all the economic and political relations with our country....They aim to transform it into a colony of Yugoslavia....They have tried to suppress its independence....
The servility with which most of the leadership of the Communist parties have carried out the orders handed down from above is surpassed only by their evident dishonesty. Your party is accused of “lack of democracy.” At the same time your accusers set up a hue and cry in which your party is condemned without the Communist party members having been informed objectively about the existing differences, without affording you an opportunity to defend yourselves, without letting the members of various Communist parties become acquainted with the text of your reply to the Cominform resolution.
The double-dealing of these “leaders” is shown even more clearly by their refusal to accept your invitation to attend your Congress. This refusal means nothing else but that the leaders of the Communist parties refuse to acquaint their members with the real situation in Yugoslavia. They prefer to despicably deceive the Communist workers throughout the world rather than “disobey” an order sent by Russia.
These facts, coupled with the treatment you are receiving, illustrate the methods of “persuasion” used by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. They intervene in the life of other Communist parties by means of brutal and ultimatistic ukases; they arbitrarily impose their rule on all parties, without the least consideration for the traditions, experiences or sentiments of the respective party members. At the same time, the leaders of the Russian Communist Party jealously guard their own privileges, regarding as treachery the slightest criticism of their own policies, and arrogating to themselves the right to excommunicate anyone who balks at following slavishly the countless zigzags of their tortuous party line.
The evil you have suddenly discovered, however, has existed for a long time. It existed during the final decade of the Communist International as well as during the five years since its dissolution. The grave sickness of the Communist parties and the main cause of the innumerable setbacks and bloody defeats they have suffered are to be found in the absolute control arrogated to themselves by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. This control has led to a constant subordination of the interests of the socialist revolution, in one country after another, to the episodic needs confronting Russia.
Today the Kremlin is determined to force you to abandon your industrialization policy, just as in January 1945 it forced Thorez to disarm the French partisans for the benefit of de Gaulle. During the Spanish Civil War, when the workers seized the factories, the Kremlin forced the Spanish Communists to declare that this was “treason.” It instructed the German Communist Party to follow the suicidal course from 1930 to 1933 which permitted Hitler to seize power.
But events each time proved that far from rendering the Soviet Union stronger in the face of the imperialist forces, the weakening of the international proletariat isolated the Soviet Union still more and permitted the imperialists to deal terrible blows, such as that of 1941.
Once again today, in order to maintain their absolute sway over the Cominform, the leaders of the Russian Communist Party do not hesitate to employ against your party, policies which play into the hands of American imperialism and which can be utilized by all the enemies of the working class against the Soviet Union itself.
Comrades, you yourselves have already raised the question of the reason for this non-communist conduct of the Russian leadership toward the Communist parties of other countries. In this connection you might indeed have used the term “degeneration” in your reasoning. One should not fear this word, nor its real meaning and content. The outstanding trait of a Bolshevik is his courage in approaching reality and seeing it as it actually is, no matter how bitter the truth, no matter how painful the examination of this reality may be. It is a crime for a communist to deceive the workers or his own comrades—and this happens to be the real crime that the Communist Party leaders of many countries have just committed once again. But it is an even bigger crime to deceive oneself through fear of the sad reality which one does not wish to accept.
It would be the grossest self-deception to assume even for a moment that a country, governed by a party whose conduct toward its sister parties is so utterly non-communist, can nevertheless play the role of the vanguard of socialism. It would be self-deception to assume that policies which led to crises in so many Communist parties can still remain Leninist policies.
Yes, the Soviet Union and the leadership of the Russian Communist Party have degenerated. Yes, they have ceased to represent the vanguard of the world communist forces since the time they subordinated the interests of the world revolution to their own interests. We repeat: They act in their own interests and not those of the Russian proletariat. The interests of the workers and the oppressed of all countries are one and the same, and the interests of communism are indivisible the world over. That is why the abandonment by the Russian leaders of the cause of communism beyond the Soviet frontiers proves beyond doubt that they have abandoned this same cause inside the Soviet Union itself; that is to say, their degeneration is profound.
Causes of the Degeneration of the Soviet Union
However painful it may seem to you, it is now necessary to put your finger on the social origin of this degeneration. In Lenin’s time, and even after, Communist functionaries in both the party and the government strictly adhered to the rule that their salaries could not be higher than the average wage of a skilled worker. Non-Communist specialists and technicians, whom the young Soviet Republic sorely needed, were of necessity paid higher salaries, but they were placed under the strict control of the workers lest they should abuse those advantages which the state had been compelled to grant them. The workers remained the masters in the factories, in the soviets, in the party. Communist discipline was voluntary, arising from the enthusiasm for the class struggle and the victorious revolution. The party’s internal life, along with that of the Communist International at the time, was regulated by discussion, as impassioned as it was free. The most important decisions were reached on the basis of genuine conviction, that is to say, in accord with the experience and level of consciousness of the party members. The party was intimately tied to its class and through these ties brought the entire proletariat into participation in the running of the state and the economy.
Today all this is changed in the Soviet Union. The soviets are dissolved. The workers do not exercise the slightest control in the factories; instead they are completely at the mercy of the factory manager’s every whim. The discrepancies in basic earnings are even greater than in capitalist countries. Communist functionaries collect salaries as high as those of petty-bourgeois spetzes (specialists). An abyss separates the living conditions of the working masses from those of the bureaucracy which runs the economy and the state. This bureaucracy has completely wiped out inner-party democracy; it has eliminated and murdered the Old Guard Bolsheviks; it has converted the party into a vehicle for protecting its own privileges; it has destroyed the party as the instrument of international communism.
This bureaucracy has today become a closed caste which guards its positions as jealously against the workers at home as it is doing against you.
One of your most remarkable accomplishments in Yugoslavia, just as in the October Revolution in Russia, is the extension of free high school and college education to all children of workers and poor peasants. You must be aware of the fact that as far back as eight years ago the Russian government abolished this enormously progressive development and reintroduced the system of paying for high school and college education, thereby in practice restricting such education to the children of functionaries and well-to-do petty bourgeois, and sentencing the overwhelming majority of children to semi-ignorance. Is this not the best proof that the leaders of the Russian state and party have stopped the forward march toward socialism, and in fact have gone into reverse gear toward an ever increasing social inequality?
The existence of these bureaucratic privileges in Russia, far from being combatted by the leaders of the Communist Party of the USSR, is systematically protected; this also explains at the same time the ideological form assumed by the degeneration of this leadership. In Lenin’s time, the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and of the Communist International, even when directly engaged in negotiations with imperialist powers, openly declared to the world proletariat that capitalism and socialism are two incompatible regimes. Not for one minute did it suspend calling upon the workers of all the capitalist countries to overthrow the rule of their own exploiters, and actively preparing them for it. It always fitted the domestic and foreign policy of the USSR into the framework of the strategy of world socialist revolution, and considered its prime task to be that of giving maximum assistance to the Communist parties of other countries so that they could take advantage of every revolutionary situation which opened up before them for the overthrow of capitalism.
Of course Lenin and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International at that time, could not exclude the possibility, even the necessity, of temporary compromises with imperialism. Every sane revolutionist understands that every war, and certainly the social war of the working class against the capitalist class, is necessarily interrupted by periods of calm, of truces and of armistices. But as Lenin so lucidly explained in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, such compromises in the class struggle are allowed solely on condition “of knowing how to apply these tactics in such a way as to raise and not lower the general level of proletarian class consciousness, revolutionary spirit, ability to fight and to conquer.”
This conception of Lenin flowed logically from the doctrine of the Bolshevik Party and of the Communist International, according to which the socialist revolution can be only the work of the conscious and sovereign working masses.
Results of Degeneration
The social degeneration of the USSR has brought it to a complete revision of these fundamental principles of Leninism. Today it proclaims and makes all the leaders of the parties which follow it also proclaim that capitalism and socialism are two systems which can live side by side in complete peace and harmony. It categorically forbids the leaders of the Communist parties in bourgeois countries to speak of “revolution” or of the overthrow of capitalism in their countries. On the contrary it orders them to restrict their propaganda to the “defense of the national independence” of their own capitalist countries! These same leaders who today accuse you of “misunderstanding the Marxist-Leninist conception of class and of the state” have themselves kept the communist workers of the capitalist countries in the darkest ignorance on these questions. They were not content only to enter the capitalist governments of France, Italy, Belgium, etc. from 1945 to 1947 and to forget everything that Lenin wrote against the reformist Social-Democracy on the impossibility of “conquering” the bourgeois state apparatus from within and on the necessity of destroying it and replacing it with a new workers’ Soviet state apparatus. They have gone so far during this period as to forbid the workers to make use of strikes for improving their miserable living conditions, and this in countries which are the bastions of European capitalism!
All these maneuvers have not in the least deceived the imperialist bourgeoisie, as the emissaries and foreign agents of the leaders of the Russian Communist Party would have us believe. The bourgeoisie has not for a moment given up its view that the Soviet Union is a mortal enemy. But they have confused, disoriented and deceived the workers of the capitalist countries. Only yesterday the workers saw the leaders of the Communist parties opposing their class movements, whereas today such movements are abruptly and bureaucratically launched. Thus the workers have the impression of being the dupes of a policy which is foreign to their own interests and of being utilized solely as a “maneuverable mass” by their leaders.
This policy broke the revolutionary fervor of the masses which, in France, Italy and elsewhere in 1944, equaled the fervor you experienced in your country. This is explained precisely by the fundamental revision of the very conception of socialism wrought by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party. Whereas Lenin and the Communist International in its initial period considered socialist revolution in the capitalist world the product of mass action, the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party is preoccupied exclusively with the military, economic and territorial expansion of the USSR. Whereas Lenin and the Communist International in its initial period considered it their most important task to assist the Communist parties of other countries onto the road of revolutionary mobilization of the masses in their own countries, the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party, contemptuous of foreign Communist parties and workers—as you know well from your own sad experience!—does not in the least hesitate to bar the revolutionary and socialist road to its fellow-parties when this is required by its own sordid considerations. This break with the Leninist conception of world revolution is the most conclusive ideological proof of the profound degeneration of the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party and of its complete rupture with the interests of the world proletariat.
Under these conditions, it seems particularly cynical for the present leaders of the Russian Communist Party and of the Cominform to accuse you of misunderstanding “proletarian internationalism” and of following a nationalist policy. This is said by those same Russian leaders whose chauvinistic propaganda during the war, in which they refused to draw a distinction between the German workers and their Nazi butchers, was chiefly responsible for the absence of a revolution in Germany, whereas in Yugoslavia the partisan movement was able to attract into its ranks thousands of worker-soldiers from the occupation armies. This is said by a Togliatti who did not hesitate to launch, along with the genuine fascists of the MSI (Movimento Sociale dell’Italia), a chauvinist campaign for the return of former colonies to his capitalist country. This is said by a Thorez whose nationalist hysteria on the question of reparations for imperialist France gives untold satisfaction to bourgeois politicians in the Poincaré tradition. Really, these people are certainly in a very poor position to give lessons on internationalism to anybody.
It is no less true, comrades, that the nationalism introduced into the Communist parties corresponds precisely with this same kind of degeneration which you now discern in Russia. No progress can be made toward socialism unless every trace of nationalism is extirpated from the thinking of communist militants. To fight for the right of self-determination of each nation, to struggle against national oppression, continually introduced and extended under imperialism in its decadent phase, is a primary task for the communist movement. And genuine communists are distinguished from petty-bourgeois nationalists precisely by the fact that they conduct this struggle in an internationalist spirit, always drawing a line between the bourgeoisie and proletariat of the imperialist country, carrying on the struggle within the framework of the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of capitalism in their own country. It is particularly necessary to eliminate from propaganda all appeals to a national tradition which can injure the workers of other countries, all attacks against nations as such, all territorial demands based on chauvinist arguments. The Austrian and Italian bourgeoisies are today hoping that the Communist parties of their countries, under the directives from the Cominform, will line up in the capitalist camp to “solve” the problem of Carinthia and Trieste in the interests of imperialism. You must understand that there is only one way to foil the infamous maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and of the leaders of the Cominform against your party: that is to appeal boldly to the international solidarity of the workers, to proclaim aloud the right of peoples to self-determination, and to propose solutions of outstanding problems along this line.
You have settled the national question in your country with some degree of success. A truly communist and internationalist attitude toward international problems would not fail to strengthen immeasurably your position in the consciousness and feeling of millions of workers throughout the entire world.
What Road Will You Follow?
Comrades, your Congress which is about to meet, the delegates which will compose it, and the thousands of communist members whom they will represent, find themselves, on this day following the Cominform resolution against your party, confronting decisions of truly historical import. Three roads are open to you and you must choose one of them. Your choice will decide for years, if not for decades, the fate of your country and of its proletariat, and will exercise a profound influence on the evolution and future of the entire world communist movement.
The first road open to you would be to consider that despite the serious injuries dealt you by the leaders of the Russian Communist Party, it is above all necessary today, in the present world situation, to maintain a complete monolithic unity with the policies and ideology of the Russian Communist Party. There are certainly members in your midst who will propose such a course and will even suggest that it is preferable, under these conditions, to make a public apology and a declaration accepting the “criticism” of the Cominform, even to change your leadership, and wait for a “better occasion” to defend your particular conceptions within the “big communist family.”
Such a decision would be in our opinion an irreparable and tragic error and would do the greatest damage not only to your own party and your own working class but to the international proletariat and communist movement, above all to the workers in the USSR. You must by now know the methods and ideas of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party sufficiently well to understand that that body will never be satisfied by public declarations and political decisions. It will demand that all power in the party and the country should pass into the hands of its own “civil and military agents” and of those among you whom it believes it can manipulate like puppets. It will completely eliminate, along with your present leaders, all cadres which think independently, all members who dare raise their voices in protest. It will completely subordinate the interests of the workers and poor peasants of Yugoslavia to the needs of its own diplomatic maneuvers with imperialism. It will smash your party as an independent force and will deal a terrible blow to the socialist consciousness of the workers of your country. It will wind up by physically liquidating all those who dared resist for a moment. The tragic example of so many old Bolshevik leaders in Russia shows that it never pardons even a passing opposition, even when such pardon has been “bought” a thousand times by self-criticism and breast-beating of the most humiliating kind.
Such a decision would deal an even greater blow to the international communist movement. In all countries, the most courageous and independent Communist members, who are today stirred by your action, would be reduced to silence. The most servile elements would triumph everywhere. The pernicious principle that “whoever criticizes the Soviet government is an agent of imperialism,” which has already cost the international Communist movement so dearly, would be more firmly entrenched than ever. Thousands of sincere revolutionary workers, who have with good cause been revolted by the anti-Leninist policies pursued by the Cominform leaders, would fall back again into passivity and skepticism, thereby increasing the isolation everywhere of the communist forces and thereby strengthening the forces of reaction and imperialism. The road would be cleared for new defeats for the international proletariat.
A second road will certainly be suggested, consisting essentially of retiring into Yugoslavia, repelling the attacks and the eventual violence and provocations of the Cominform and its agents, and attempting to “build socialism” in your own country, while concluding trade relations with the powers of Eastern Europe as well as with those of the imperialist West. We will not conceal from you, comrades, that we consider this second road just as pernicious as the first.
It is completely utopian to think it possible to “maneuver” during a whole period between the USSR and the USA without being subject during this same period to a growing pressure from these two giants. The success of “maneuvers” depends in the final analysis on the relationship of forces, and, on the plane of economic, political and military power, the relationship of forces is obviously not in your favor. American imperialism will gladly make some advances to you for that would increase the weight of its arguments in its conversations with Moscow. But what it is looking for basically is not to support you against the USSR but to conclude a compromise with Russia, if necessary at your expense. Not only would the present leaders of the Russian Communist Party have no hesitation about accepting such a compromise, but they would even work furiously to create the greatest economic difficulties for you so as to force you to capitulate or to surrender completely to Yankee imperialism, in order thereby to “demonstrate” to world working-class opinion that every rupture with Moscow signifies going over to the “American camp.”
On the other hand, you must be aware that imperialism will rapidly become increasingly demanding toward you, especially if it is encouraged along this road by Moscow, as is to be feared. Its pressure will first be concentrated on your trade relations. Its first objective will be to include you in the Marshall Plan zone. In the course of putting this into effect, it will aim subsequently to destroy all the social reforms brought about in Yugoslavia in the past three years. To the extent that Russia will isolate you and that your economic difficulties will increase and imperialist pressure sharpen, reaction within your own country will lift its head. The kulak would attempt to make contact with the international market. American capital would penetrate through all the crevices in your mixed economy in order to help them achieve this. Your days would be numbered.
Every policy set up on the basis of ignoring the international contradictions, which are the all-embracing framework in which all problems of Yugoslav policy are posed; every policy which would pose questions of industrialization independently of the problem of securing equipment by means of international trade, and consequently, independently of the pressure of the capitalist world market; every policy of this kind must be rejected forthright. Otherwise the work undertaken by your party can only meet with complete ruin. In view of the slanderous accusations of the leaders of the Cominform, it is imperative to be sharply conscious of the lurking danger of imperialist pressure, so that you will take no step without carefully considering the consequences on that score. Therein lies the main guarantee of genuine revolutionary and socialist progress on your part.
Finally, there remains the third road, the most difficult, bristling with the most obstacles, the genuine communist road for the Yugoslav party and proletariat. This road is the road of return to the Leninist conception of socialist revolution, of return to a world strategy of class struggle. It must start, in our opinion, with a clear understanding of the fact that the Yugoslav revolutionary forces can only become stronger and consolidate their positions thanks to the conscious support of the working masses of their own country and of the entire world. It means above all to understand that the decisive force on the world arena is neither imperialism with its resources and arms, nor the Russian state with its formidable apparatus. The decisive force is the immense army of workers, of poor peasants and of colonial peoples, whose revolt against their exploiters is steadily rising, and who need only a conscious leadership, a suitable program of action and an effective organization in order to bring the enormous task of world socialist revolution to a successful conclusion.
We do not presume to offer you a blueprint. We understand the tremendous difficulties which you must contend with in a poorly equipped country which has been devastated by war. We desire only to point out to you what are, in our opinion, the main lines through which to concretize this international revolutionary policy—the only policy which will enable you to hold out while waiting for new struggles of the masses, to stimulate them and to conquer with them.
To commit oneself to this road means, especially in Yugoslavia itself, to base oneself openly and completely on the revolutionary dynamics of the masses. The Front committees must be organs which are genuinely elected by the workers of city and country, arising from a tightly knit system of workers and of poor farmers.
They must become genuine state organs and must take the place of the present hybrid organs which are relics of the bourgeois state apparatus. They must be the organs of Soviet democracy, in which all workers will have the right to express their opinions and their criticisms without reservation and without fear of reprisal. The right of workers to organize other workers’ parties must be laid down as a principle, subject only to the condition that they take their place within the framework of Soviet legality. The present hybrid constitution must be revised and a new one, taking its inspiration from the Leninist constitution of 1921, must be set up by an assembly of delegates from the workers’ and poor peasants’ committees.
These decisive political changes must be conceived as the end result of a real mass mobilization, to be brought about by your party through carrying these Leninist ideas into the most distant villages of your country, explaining the differences between the Soviet state and other state forms, and the superiority of the former type. That is the way Lenin did it in 1917, with the greatest simplicity. A vast campaign of re-education must be started, together with a period of discussion and of unhampered expression of opinion by the workers. The latter will express their criticisms of the present state of affairs in their assemblies. The party will finally know, directly, what the real aspirations of the masses are, and will obtain the constructive suggestions of the working-class masses, whose vast creative energy is the surest guarantee of socialism. Your party has nothing to fear from such a development. The confidence of the masses in it will grow enormously and it will become the effective collective expression of the interests and desires of the proletariat of its country.
It will not be enough, however, to reestablish the complete sovereignty of the committees, to change the standing army into a genuine workers’ and peasants’ militia, to replace appointed judges with those elected by the masses, to reestablish and firmly maintain the principle of payment of functionaries on the basis of the average wages of a skilled worker. The problem of the revolutionary transformation of your country is essentially an economic one, in which the question of the peasantry takes first place.
There is but one Leninist way to approach this problem: to seek support from the poor and exploited layers of the country and to be careful not to violate the laws whereby your economy functions, but on the contrary to utilize them in the interests of socialism. The land must be nationalized and a struggle waged against the concentration of income and property in the hands of the kulaks. But these measures cannot be made solely by administrative means, neither by decrees nor by force. What is necessary is that the immense majority of the peasants must view it as in their own interests. For this, a review of the Five Year Plan and the relations between agriculture and industry is necessary. The plan for industrialization must be able, above all things, to guarantee a growing quantity of consumer goods for the peasants. By means of stabilizing the dinar and a strict system of dividing industrial consumer goods, the state can offer more to the small and middle peasant than the kulak will be able to give him. It is necessary at the same time to give the utmost support to the freely formed cooperatives of the small peasants, to reserve all modern working equipment for them, grant them cheap credit, and to establish such conditions for them that they will live better and earn more than the middle peasants who continue to work their lands as individuals. This will prove to be the surest method of isolating the kulak in the village and of developing and accelerating voluntary cooperation locally.
Progress of this kind will be realizable only by changing the method of drawing up and verifying plans. No group of spetzes can ascertain mathematically the real equilibrium between the needs of the workers, those of the peasants, and the capital needs of the economy, upon which equilibrium depends the harmonious planning and development of the country. It is essential that the masses be induced to participate as actively as possible in the work of planning, that the greatest heed be paid to their complaints, and that the needs expressed by them be the primary factor in planning.
Complete sovereignty of the factory committees must be established in the plants, and genuine workers’ control of production must be instituted. The trade unions must be granted their real function, which is to defend the interests of the workers, even against the Soviet state if necessary, as Lenin repeatedly asserted. In a word it is necessary to give the workers and poor peasants the clear feeling that they are the masters in the country, and that the state and the progress of the economy are in direct correspondence with their own interests.
We do not at all conceal that such a policy will encounter very great obstacles in your country and even in your own ranks. A complete re-education of your cadres in the spirit of genuine Leninism would be necessary. Still less do we conceal that world imperialism and the present leadership of the Russian State would furiously attack your policy, for it would appear to them a mortal threat to their acquired positions. But if you will apply the same Leninist principles in your foreign policy, you can be sure of powerful support from the workers and the oppressed of the entire world, and your cause cannot lose.
You would have to make a sharp break with all the practices of traditional secret diplomacy and return to the revolutionary diplomacy practiced in the time of Lenin; you would have to become the champion and active supporter of all colonial peoples revolting against their imperialist masters; you would have to proclaim to the world the conditions for a just peace, without annexations or reparations; you would have to demand the immediate withdrawal of the occupation troops of all the great powers from all occupied countries, and strict application of the right of self-determination of peoples in all disputed questions. With one blow you will gain the sympathy of the Austrian and German masses who today feel themselves deceived and betrayed by all parties. You would have to develop and sharpen your propaganda in favor of the Danubian Federation by giving it its classical communist form and by launching the slogan for the Balkan Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics among the workers and poor peasants of neighboring countries, who would take it up with enthusiasm. And finally it would be necessary to incorporate this propaganda within the concrete framework of propaganda for the SOCIALIST SOVIET UNITED STATES OF EUROPE; to convoke a conference at Belgrade of the trade-union and workers’ representatives from all the countries of Europe, including Germany and Austria; to draw up with them a plan for the economic reconstruction of the continent on a socialist basis, in opposition to the Marshall Plan, and to make this socialist plan the central axis for revolutionary propaganda in Europe and in the world.
Your possibilities for action along the road of genuine Leninism disclose themselves to be enormous. But your historical responsibility far surpasses everything which has been outlined above. Millions of workers throughout the world are today profoundly disgusted with the policies and methods used by the present leaders of the Cominform. Unwilling to pass over into the imperialist camp in any guise whatever, they vainly seek a new pole of attraction, a new political leadership. Only the vanguard of this mass has at this time found the road toward our organization, the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL. You can become the mobilization point for this mass of revolutionary workers and thus, with a single blow, completely change the present condition of paralysis within the world working-class movement, the stranglehold of the agents of Washington and of the degenerated Russian bureaucracy. The social struggles which are developing and will develop within all countries will thereby be given the opportunity for a successful revolutionary conclusion. The Third World War, which threatens to throw the USSR and all of Europe into an abyss, can be prevented. The socialist future will unfold in all its glory before humanity.
Comrades, we address this letter to you because we are conscious of the terrible dilemma in which you find yourselves; because we understand exactly the tremendous responsibility weighing upon you, and because we consider it our communist duty to assist you in resolving the present crisis in communism along proletarian and Leninist lines.
We have many and important differences with your past and recent policies. We are in complete disagreement with the theory and practice of “People’s Democracy” for we do not believe in any other road from capitalism to socialism than the dictatorship of the proletariat. We believe that the use and propagation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ways of living (servants, livery, titles, officers’ stripes, decorations) can only serve to demoralize real communists. But we are conscious of the enormous difficulties involved in a discussion between us, in view of the separation in activities which has existed between us for so many years. For this reason we consider it our duty to convey our ideas to you in a long and fruitful discussion, in the course of which we can each advise the other of our experiences in the revolutionary struggle and can clarify our differences in a spirit of genuine proletarian and communist fraternity.
Our organization, the Fourth International, originated in the Left Opposition of the Bolshevik Party, which 25 years ago already saw the germs of the degeneration of the Russian Communist Party which you are discovering today. Hunted, persecuted, expelled, the Left Opposition fought nevertheless for ten years for reintegration into the official Communist movement. Only when the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party surrendered the German proletariat to the executioner Hitler without a struggle, and thereby opened a period of bloody defeats for the world working class, did our movement come to the conclusion that a new revolutionary International had to be built. Since then, the bureaucrats who now lead the Russian State have poured a ceaseless stream of vile slander over our International and no crime has been too sordid for them in their attempts to destroy us. Just as today they call you “agents of imperialism,” so they have labeled us “fascist spies,” when in reality hundreds of our best cadres and leaders gave their lives in the struggle against fascism. Just as today they are organizing the assassination of your leadership, so did they manage to assassinate Leon Trotsky, organizer of the October victory, creator of the Red Army, the greatest leader of the Communist movement since the death of Lenin—Trotsky, who just a few days before his death, expressed his unshakable devotion to communism and to the real Soviet Union of the workers and peasants in his moving “Letter to the Soldiers of the Red Army.”
But all these crimes did not succeed in smashing the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL because nothing can smash genuine Leninism! Today it has sections in 35 different countries on all continents, consisting of battle-tested and experienced revolutionary Communist members who stand for what is best in their class. Although weak in material resources, its Second World Congress, held last April in Paris, demonstrated that it was strong in political cohesion, in program, and in its clear understanding of present-day reality. Today it is launching in all countries a vast campaign protesting against the bureaucratic measures which the Cominform has taken against you. It appeals to communist workers of all countries to send their delegations to Yugoslavia, in order to make a spot check of the real policy followed by your party. Tomorrow it will make your documents known in 20 different languages—for workers’ democracy is not just an idle phrase to the Fourth International, and a communist cannot permit a member to be judged without a hearing. It asks that you allow a delegation from our leadership to attend your Congress, in order to establish contact with the Yugoslav communist movement and to set up fraternal ties which can serve only the interests of the world communist revolution.
Comrades, the cause of communism, of the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat is invincible. No force in the world can prevent the genuine communists from ridding themselves of slanderers and would-be assassins so that they can go forward boldly toward their revolutionary goal. The quicker this task is done, the faster will the world revolution triumph.
Yugoslav Communists, Let Us Unite Our Efforts for a New Leninist International! For the World Victory of Communism!
The International Secretariat of the Fourth International
July 13, 1948
Notes
1 Les congrès de la IVe Internationale, Vol. 3, Bouleversements et crises de l’après-guerre (1946-1950) (Montreuil: Editions La Brèche-PEC, 1988), 394.
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Privas-Marin Resolution on the Yugoslav Crisis
PCI Resolution on the Yugoslavia Crisis
Written: 1948
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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The following resolution, submitted by Privas (Jacques Grimblatt) and Marcel Marin (Marcel Gibelin), was adopted by the Fifth Congress of the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste, held in July 1948. The French text appeared in the PCI’s internal bulletin, La vie du parti No. 1, August 1948. The translation is by the Prometheus Research Library.
The crisis which has broken out in the Cominform between Tito and the Kremlin should be considered from the standpoint:
1) of the underlying causes of this crisis;
2) of the prospects for development of this crisis;
3) of our intervention into these events.
A precise analysis is necessary exactly because of the importance of the repercussions this event is having and will have among the ranks of the Stalinist workers.
1) The Causes of the Crisis
The Stalinist policy has as its underlying line the exploitation of the workers movement for the needs and the defense of the interests exclusively of the privileged bureaucrats of the USSR.
In the countries of the buffer zone this policy takes the concrete form of exploiting these countries: economically, diplomatically and strategically (preferential treaties, privileged treatment of the ruble, exploitation of the economy to benefit the Red Army or the Soviet state).
This policy which preserves capitalist relations in the economy out of fear of the masses, which blocks the development of the buffer zone countries, necessarily creates a profound crisis in these countries. This crisis is expressed in the pressure of the bourgeois elements to re-establish ties with imperialism, and even in halfhearted notions of finding a solution on the part of indigenous Stalinist leaders (Dimitrov proposing a Balkan federation). Against these pressures and notions, in order to contain the crisis while maintaining its exploitation, the Kremlin is obliged increasingly to utilize methods of terror
a) against the bourgeois politicians
b) against the revolutionary elements
c) and even to replace the indigenous Stalinists with direct emissaries of the Kremlin (five “Russian” members on the seven-member Bulgarian PB).
This general situation, the necessary result of the application of the Stalinists’ policy, is governed by military and police measures, but this does not resolve the crisis. If in Yugoslavia the Stalinist CP has been led to resist this Russification, it is because, having assumed full responsibility for the state, it must respond to the needs of Yugoslav society and of each of its components: to assure a minimum of economic stability and to somewhat satisfy the needs of the different social classes. Complete control by the Kremlin absolutely prevents the fulfillment of this task.
If this situation—which is fundamentally that of all the countries of the buffer zone—has provoked active resistance first in Yugoslavia, this is due to its particular situation originating in the struggle of the Yugoslav masses during the occupation, which gave the Yugoslav CP a mass base and much more independence.
Stalin could not permit such independence in a party—especially of the buffer zone—without risking the breakup, not only of the system of exploitation of the buffer zone, but also of the whole hierarchical police state system of world Stalinism.
2) Prospects for the Crisis
One thing is certain: if it is impossible in general for a customary transitional situation to be maintained in the countries of the buffer zone, it is even more impossible in an isolated country.
The importance of the situation that has been created in Yugoslavia is that it objectively poses to the Yugoslav masses—not in general terms, but one could say immediately—the need to choose between socialism and capitalism.
The choice, even if it is still muddled, will necessarily lead to discussion and struggles between currents and classes in Yugoslavia.
The Yugoslav CP can only capitulate to the Kremlin, to the U.S., or embark on the path of revolution—although of course it is not possible to predict today which path will be taken or what the pace of development will be.
In any case, it is almost certain that without an intervention by the proletariat of the buffer zone and of the world, the path taken by the Yugoslav proletariat will not be that of revolution. Capitulation to the Kremlin or to the U.S. would be inevitable.
3) The Thrust of Our Intervention
The first major crack in the Stalinist apparatus is necessarily leading immense masses of Stalinist workers to fundamentally reconsider Stalinist politics. Obviously, we cannot remain indifferent to an event of this importance; rather we must intervene aggressively to help the proletariat as a whole to understand the Stalinist betrayal, and the Yugoslav proletarians to find the path of revolution.
In the Western countries, we must give an overall explanation of the causes of the Yugoslav crisis, demonstrating in particular the Stalinist conception of the defense of the USSR, the counterrevolutionary nature of the ties imposed by Moscow and of the theory and practice of “people’s democracy.”
To the Yugoslav proletarians we will demonstrate that the rupture with Moscow is the indispensable step for the struggle for socialism, and we will indicate the concrete and programmatic paths that make it possible (soviets, proletarian democracy, appeal to proletarians of other countries).
We do not at all reproach the I.S. for appealing to the Yugoslav CP and its CC. This step is appropriate given the relations between the masses and the CP. But we do object to these letters for idealizing Tito and the Yugoslav CP (revolutionary workers party—“continue your struggle for socialism”).*
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* This objection does not in any way signify a disagreement with the I.S. on the nature of the USSR, the buffer zone, and Stalinism.
On the other hand, the issue of La Vérité devoted to Yugoslavia, which defends the point of view of the I.S., provides no useful explanation when it gives the apparatus’ own laws as the cause of the crisis of the apparatus.
If this resolution is adopted, it does not mean that the PCI exempts itself from the discipline of the international leadership.
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Letter on Yugoslavia Sent to the IEC by the RCP (Britain)
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Written: 1948
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 2007/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.
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The following letter to the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International by British Revolutionary Communist Party leader Jock Haston is undated, but apparently written in the summer of 1948 and was never published in the internal bulletins of the American Socialist Workers Party. The text is taken from a photocopy in the collection of the Prometheus Research Library. Excerpts from the Open Letters by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International cited in the text are from a different translation than the English versions reprinted in this bulletin.
To the IEC
Dear Comrades,
The Yugoslav-Cominform dispute offers the Fourth International great opportunities to expose to rank and file Stalinist militants the bureaucratic methods of Stalinism. It is possible to underline the way in which the Stalinist leaderships suppress any genuine discussion on the conflict by distorting the facts and withholding the replies of the YCP leadership from their rank and file. By stressing such aspects of the Yugoslav expulsion, we can have a profound effect on militants in the Communist Parties.
However, our approach to this major event must be a principled one. We cannot lend credence, by silence on aspects of YCP policy and regime, to any impression that Tito or the leaders of the YCP are Trotskyist, and that great obstacles do not separate them from Trotskyism. Our exposure of the bureaucratic manner of the expulsion of the YCP must not mean that we become lawyers for the YCP leadership, or create even the least illusion that they do not still remain, despite the break with Stalin, Stalinists in method and training.
In our opinion, the Open Letters of the IS to the YCP Congress failed to fulfil these absolutely essential conditions. They failed to pose directly and clearly what is wrong, not only with the CPSU, but with the YCP. The whole approach and the general tone of the letters are such as to create the illusion that the YCP leadership are communists, mistaken in the past, and discovering for the first time the evils of the bureaucratic methods of Moscow, instead of leaders who have actively participated in aiding the bureaucracy and acting as its agents in the past.
The letters appear to be based on the perspective that the leaders of the YCP can be won over to the Fourth International. Under the stress of events, strange transformations of individuals have taken place, but it is exceedingly unlikely, to say the least, that Tito and other leaders of the YCP can again become Bolshevik-Leninists. Tremendous obstacles stand in the way of that eventuality: past traditions and training in Stalinism, and the fact that they themselves rest on a Stalinist bureaucratic regime in Yugoslavia. The letters failed to point out the nature of these obstacles, fail to underline that for the leadership of the YCP to become communists, it is necessary for them not only to break with Stalinism, but to repudiate their own past, their present Stalinist methods, and to openly recognise that they themselves bear a responsibility for the building of the machine now being used to crush them. Here it is not a question of communists facing a “terrible dilemma,” with an “enormous responsibility” weighing on them, to whom we offer modest advice: it is a question of Stalinist bureaucrats becoming communists.
The aim of such Open Letters can only be limited. By placing on record a correct and principled analysis of the role of the Stalinist bureaucracy and that of the YCP leadership, by offering aid to the YCP in a clearly defined communist struggle, the Open Letters could be useful propaganda, aiding the approach to the rank and file seeking a communist lead.
As they stand, however, by their silence on fundamental aspects of the regime in Yugoslavia and YCP policy, the letter strike an opportunist note.
It is not our experience that the most courageous and most independent communist militants “are today stimulated by your [the YCP] action.” The Cominform crisis has rather sown confusion in the CP ranks and disorientated its supporters. That is to our advantage. But although it is a relatively easy task to expose the Cominform manoeuvres, there is sufficient truth in some of their accusations against Tito—particularly with regard to the internal regime, the National Front—to cause among Stalinist rank and filers an uneasiness with regard to the leaders of the YCP. That gives us an opportunity to win these militants not to the cause of Tito, but to Trotskyism.
Tito is attempting, and will attempt, to follow an independent course between Moscow and Washington, without altering the bureaucratic machine or turning to proletarian internationalism. A bureaucratic regime, resting as it does mainly on the peasantry, can have no independent perspective between the Soviet Union and American imperialism. The main emphasis of the letters should have been to show the necessity for a radical break with the present policy of the YCP, the introduction of soviet democracy within the party and the country, coupled with a policy of proletarian internationalism. The position must be posed to Yugoslav militants, not as a choice between three alternatives—the Russian bureaucracy, American imperialism, proletarian internationalism—but, first and foremost, as a choice between proletarian democracy within the regime and party, proletarian internationalism, and the present bureaucratic setup which must inevitably succumb before the Russian bureaucracy or American imperialism.
The IS letters analyse the dispute solely on the plane of the “interference” of the CPSU leaders, as if it were here solely a question of that leadership seeking to impose its will without consideration for the “traditions, the experience and the dealings” of militants. But the dispute is not simply one of a struggle of a Communist Party for independence from the decrees of Moscow. It is a struggle of a section of the bureaucratic apparatus for such independence. The stand of Tito represents, it is true, on the one hand the pressure of the masses against the exactions of the Russian bureaucracy, against the “organic unity” demanded by Moscow, discontent at the standards of the Russian specialists, pressure of the peasantry against too rapid collectivisation. But on the other hand, there is the desire of the Yugoslav leaders to maintain an independent bureaucratic position and further aspirations of their own.
It is not sufficient to lay the crimes of international Stalinism at the door of the leadership of the CPSU. Not only in respect to Yugoslavia, but also in respect to other countries, the Open Letter gives the entirely false impression that it is the Russian leadership which is solely responsible. To pose the relations in the international Stalinist movement in the manner of the IS letter—that the leadership of the CPSU “forced Thorez to disarm the French partisans,” “forced the Spanish communists to declare...that the seizure of the factories...was ‘a treason’,” “completely prohibits the leaderships of the Communist Parties in the capitalist countries from speaking of revolution”—can create illusions that the leaders of the national Stalinist parties could be good revolutionists, if only Moscow would let them. It is true that the degeneration of the CPs flowed basically from the degeneration in the Soviet Union. But the sickness of the Stalinist movement is also accountable by the utter corruption of the national leaderships who are bound up in the bureaucratic machine. These leaders actively participate in the preparation of the crimes. So also for Tito, it was not a matter of having been “forced” to carry out the wished of Moscow in the past.
It is impermissible to slur over the nature of the YCP, its identity on fundamental points with other Stalinist parties. Such a slurring over can only disorientate Stalinist workers. Yet every attempt is made by the IS to narrow the gulf that separates the policy of the YCP from Bolshevik-Leninism. What other conclusion can we draw from statements such as the following:
“...the Cominform accuse you of misunderstanding ‘proletarian internationalism’ and of following a nationalist policy. This is said by that same Russian leadership whose chauvinist propaganda during the war...is largely responsible for the absence of a revolution in Germany, whereas [our emphasis] in Yugoslavia the partisan movement was able to draw to its ranks thousands of proletarian soldiers from the armies of occupation. This is said by Togliatti, who has not hesitated to throw himself, alongside the real fascists of the Movimento Sociale el Italia (MSI), in a chauvinistic campaign for the return to the capitalist fatherland of its former colonies. This is said by Thorez, whose nationalist hysteria on the question of reparations for imperialist France delights the bourgeois heirs of Poincaré.”
It is true that the Yugoslav Stalinists settled, with some success, the national problem inside their own country. It was their programme with regard to this question that enabled them to win over members of the quisling armies. But the comrades must be aware that the propaganda of the YCP towards Germany was of the same chauvinistic character as that of the Russian and other Stalinist parties. The IS letter deals with the necessity for proletarian internationalism in the abstract, without taking up the concrete question of YCP policy today and in the past. It was surely necessary to point out concretely what this proletarian internationalism means, by dealing with the past and present policy of the YCP, which has been no whit less chauvinistic than that of other Stalinist parties. The IS mentions Togliatti’s chauvinism, and Thorez’ nationalist hysteria, and leaves the impression of a favourable comparison between the policy of other Stalinist parties and that of the YCP. We cannot be silent on the YCP’s chauvinistic campaign around Trieste, their attitude towards reparations, their uncritical support for the Russian bureaucracy’s demand for reparations from the German people. It is necessary to take up these questions so that it shall be clear precisely what the gulf is between a nationalist and an internationalist policy, and precisely what it is that Yugoslav militants must struggle against.
But there is another aspect of the IS letters which cannot pass by without the IEC adopting an attitude and expressing an opinion.
The World Congress majority adopted a position that the buffer countries, including Yugoslavia, were capitalist countries. It rejected the resolution of the RCP that these economies were being brought into line with that of the Soviet Union and could not be characterised as capitalist. The amendment of the British party to the section “The USSR and Stalinism” was defeated. But it is evident from these letters that the IS has been forced by events to proceed from the standpoint of the British party, that the productive and political relations in Yugoslavia are basically identical with those of the Soviet Union.
If indeed there exists in Yugoslavia a capitalist state, then the IS letters can only be characterised as outright opportunist. For the IS does not pose the tasks in Yugoslavia which would follow if bourgeois relations existed there as the dominant form. The letters are based on conclusions which can only flow from the premise that the basic overturn of capitalism and landlordism has taken place.
The second Open Letter gives several conditions necessary if Yugoslavia is to go forward with true revolutionary and communist progress. Yet nowhere does [it] call for the destruction of bourgeois relations in the economy and the overturn in the bourgeois system and regime. The tasks laid down in the latter are:
“The committees of the Front...must be organs of soviet democracy....
“To revise the present Constitution [based on that of the Soviet Union]....
“To admit in principle the right of the workers to organise other working class parties, on condition that these latter place themselves in the framework of soviet legality....
“To procure the broadest participate of the masses in the sphere of planning....
“To establish the full sovereignty of the factory committees...to set up a real workers’ control of production.”
And so on. Nowhere did the IS deem it necessary to call on the Yugoslav workers to overthrow capitalism. Had the IS been able to base itself on the World Congress document, that would have been their foremost, principled demand. The comrades will remember that the Congress document gives as its first reason why “the capitalist nature of the buffer zone is apparent,” that “Nowhere has the bourgeoisie as such been destroyed or expropriated.” Why no mention of this in the Open Letters? Of all the seven conditions given in the Congress document as making “apparent” the capitalist nature of Yugoslavia and other buffer countries, the IS letter mentions only one—the nationalisation of the land. But even here, the question of the failure to nationalise the land is raised not from the point of view of proving the capitalist nature of Yugoslavia. It is raised to point out, correctly, that the nationalisation of the land is necessary in order to combat the concentration of income and of land in the hands of the kulaks. The question is raised in the general context of the letter, as an aid to the socialist development of agriculture in a country where capitalism and landlordism have been overthrown, but the danger of a new exploitation is still present in the countryside.
Not only are the main tasks posed in the Open Letter identical to those to be carried out to cleanse a state similar in productive and political relations to the Soviet Union, but we must add that the impression given is that these relations are a great deal healthier than in Russia.
The articles appearing in our international press revealed one thing: the thesis adopted by the World Congress failed to provide a clear guide to the problems that arose from the Cominform-Yugoslav split and the tasks of the revolutionaries in connection with the regime and its economic base.
We appeal to the IEC to reject the orientation in the Open Letter, and to correct and repair the damage which has been done, by re-opening the discussion on the buffer zones and bringing our position into correspondence with the real economic and political developments of these countries.
With fraternal greetings,
Yours
J. Haston
on behalf of the Central Committee, RCP
Thursday, January 20, 2011
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-Revolutionary Marxists at the International Socialist Conference, September 5-8, 1915
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
Revolutionary Marxists at the International Socialist Conference, September 5-8, 1915
Published: Sotsial-Demokat No. 45–46, October 11, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 389-393.
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ideological struggle at the Conference was waged between a compact group of internationalists, revolutionary Marxists, and the vacillating near-Kautskyites, who formed the Right wing of the Conference. The unitedness of the former group is one of the most important facts and greatest achievements of the Conference. After a year of war, the trend represented by our Party proved the only trend in the International to adopt a fully definite resolution as well as a draft manifesto based on the latter, and to unite the consistent Marxists of Russia, Poland, the Lettish territory, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Holland.
What arguments did the vacillating elements advance against us? The Germans admitted that we were advancing towards revolutionary battles, but, they said, we do not have to proclaim from the house-tops such things as fraternisation in the trenches, political strikes, street demonstrations and civil war. Such things are done, they said, but not spoken of. Others added: this is childishness, verbal pyro-technics.
The German semi-Kautskyites castigated themselves for these ridiculously, indecently contradictory and evasive speeches by passing a resolution of sympathy and a declaration on the need to “follow the example” of the members of the R.S.D.L. Duma group, who distributed Sotsial-Dernokrat, our Central Organ, which proclaimed civil war from the housetops.
You are following the bad example set by Kautsky, we replied to the Germans; in word, you recognise the impending revolution; in deed, you refuse to tell the masses about it openly, to call for it, and indicate the most concrete means of struggle which the masses are to test and legitimise in the course of the revolution. In 1847, Marx and Engels, who were living abroad-the German philistines were horrified at revolutionary methods of struggle being spoken of from abroad!-called for revolution, in their celebrated Manifesto of the Communist Party; they spoke forthright of the use of force, and branded as contemptible any attempt to conceal the revolutionary aims, tasks and methods of the struggle. The Revolution of 1848 proved that Marx and Engeis alone had applied the correct tactics to the events. Several years prior to the 1905 Revolution in Russia, Plekhanov, who was then still a Marxist, wrote an unsigned article in the old Iskra of 1901, expressing the editorial board’s views on the coming insurrection, on ways of preparing it, such as street demonstrations, and even on technical devices, such as using wire in combating cavalry. The Russian revolution proved that the old iskrists alone had approached the events with the correct tactics. We are now faced with the following alternative: either we are really and truly con-vinced that the war is creating a revolutionary situation in Europe, and that all the economic and socio-political cir-cumstances of the imperialist period are leading up to a revolution of the proletariat-in which case we are in duty bound to explain to the masses the need for revolution, call for it, create the necessary organisations, and speak fear-lessly and most concretely of the various methods of the forcible struggle and its “technique”. This duty of ours does not depend upon whether the revolution will be strong enough, or whether it will arrive with a first or a second imperialist war, etc. Or else we are not convinced that the situation is revolutionary, in which case there is no sense in our just talking about a war against war. In that ease, we are, in fact, national liberal-labour politicians of the S|dekum-Plekhanov or Kautsky variety.
The French delegates also declared that the present situation in Europe, as they saw it, would lead to revolu-tion. But, they said, first, “we have not come here to pro-vide a formula for a Third international”; secondly, the French worker “believes nobody and nothing”; he is demoral-ised and satiated with anarchist and Hervéist phrases. The former argument is unreasonable, because the joint compromise manifesto does “provide a formula” for a Third International, though it is inconsistent, incomplete and not given sufficient thought. The latter argument is very impor-tant as a very serious factual argument, which takes the specific situation in France into account, nut. in the meaning of defence of the fatherland, or the enemy invasion, but in taking note of the “sore points” in the French labour move-ment. The only thing that logically follows from this, however, is that .the French socialists would perhaps join general European revolutionary action by the proletariat more slowly than others, and not that such action is un-necessary. The question as to how rapidly, in which way and in which particular forms the proletariat of the various countries ai+e capable of taking revolutionary action was riot raised at the Conference and could not have been. The con-ditions for this are not yet ripe. For the present it is our task to jointly propagandise the correct tactics and leave it to events to indicate the tempo of the movement, and the modifications in the mainstream (according to nation, locality and trade). If the French proletariat has been demor-alised by anarchist phrases, it has been demoralised by Mfllerandism too, and it is not our business to increase this demoralisation by leaving things unsaid in the mani-festo.
It was none other than Merrheim who uttered the characteristic and profoundly correct phrase: “The [Socialist] Party, Jouhaux [secretary of the General Confederation of Labour][1] and the government are three heads under one bonnet.” This is the truth, a fact proved by the experience of the year of struggle waged by the French international-ists against the Party and Messrs. 3 ouhaux, There is, however, only one conclusion to be drawn: the government cannot be fought unless the opportunist parties and the leaders of anarchosyndicalism are fought against. Unlike our resolution, the joint manifesto merely indicated the tasks in the struggle but did not say everything that should have been said about them.
Arguing against our tactics, one of the Italians said: “Your tactics come either too late [since the war has already begun] or too soon [because the war has not yet created the conditions for revolution]; besides, you propose to ‘change the programme’ of the International, since all our propaganda has always been conducted ‘against violence’.” It was very easy for us to reply to this by quoting Jules Guesde in En garde! to the effect that not a single influential leader of the Second International ever rejected the use of violence and direct revolutionary methods of the struggle in general. It has always been argued that the legal struggle, parliamentarism and insurrection are inter-linked, and must inevitably pass into each other according to the changes in the conditions of the movement. From the same book, En garde!, we quoted a passage in a speech delivered by Guesde in 1899, in which he spoke of the possibility of a war for markets, colonies, etc., and went on to say that if there were any French, German and British Millerands in such a war, then “what would become of international working-class solidarity?” In this speech Guesde condemned himself in advance. As for declaring propaganda of revolution “inopportune”, this objection rests on a confusion of concepts usual among socialists in the Romance countries: they confuse the beginning of a revolution with open and direct propaganda for revolution. In Russia, nobody places the beginning of the 1905 Revolution before January 1905,[2] whereas revolutionary propaganda, in the very narrow sense of the word, the propaganda and the preparation of mass action, demonstrations, strikes, barricades, had been conducted for years prior to that. The old Iskra, for instance, began to propagandise the matter at the end of 1900, as Marx did in 1847, when nobody thought as yet of the beginning of a revolution in Europe.
After a revolution has begun, it is “recognised” even by the liberals and its other enemies; they often recognise it so as to deceive and betray it. Before the revolution, revolutionaries foresee it, realise its inevitability, make the masses understand its necessity, and explain its course and methods to the masses.
By the irony of history, Kautsky and his friends, who tried to take out of Grimm’s hands the initiative of convening the Conference, and attempted to disrupt the Conference of the Left wing (Kautsky’s closest friends even went on a tour for this purpose, as Grimm disclosed at the Conference), were the very ones who pushed the Conference to the left. By their deeds, the opportunists and the Kautskyites have proved the correctness of the stand taken by our Party.
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
Revolutionary Marxists at the International Socialist Conference, September 5-8, 1915
Published: Sotsial-Demokat No. 45–46, October 11, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 389-393.
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ideological struggle at the Conference was waged between a compact group of internationalists, revolutionary Marxists, and the vacillating near-Kautskyites, who formed the Right wing of the Conference. The unitedness of the former group is one of the most important facts and greatest achievements of the Conference. After a year of war, the trend represented by our Party proved the only trend in the International to adopt a fully definite resolution as well as a draft manifesto based on the latter, and to unite the consistent Marxists of Russia, Poland, the Lettish territory, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Holland.
What arguments did the vacillating elements advance against us? The Germans admitted that we were advancing towards revolutionary battles, but, they said, we do not have to proclaim from the house-tops such things as fraternisation in the trenches, political strikes, street demonstrations and civil war. Such things are done, they said, but not spoken of. Others added: this is childishness, verbal pyro-technics.
The German semi-Kautskyites castigated themselves for these ridiculously, indecently contradictory and evasive speeches by passing a resolution of sympathy and a declaration on the need to “follow the example” of the members of the R.S.D.L. Duma group, who distributed Sotsial-Dernokrat, our Central Organ, which proclaimed civil war from the housetops.
You are following the bad example set by Kautsky, we replied to the Germans; in word, you recognise the impending revolution; in deed, you refuse to tell the masses about it openly, to call for it, and indicate the most concrete means of struggle which the masses are to test and legitimise in the course of the revolution. In 1847, Marx and Engels, who were living abroad-the German philistines were horrified at revolutionary methods of struggle being spoken of from abroad!-called for revolution, in their celebrated Manifesto of the Communist Party; they spoke forthright of the use of force, and branded as contemptible any attempt to conceal the revolutionary aims, tasks and methods of the struggle. The Revolution of 1848 proved that Marx and Engeis alone had applied the correct tactics to the events. Several years prior to the 1905 Revolution in Russia, Plekhanov, who was then still a Marxist, wrote an unsigned article in the old Iskra of 1901, expressing the editorial board’s views on the coming insurrection, on ways of preparing it, such as street demonstrations, and even on technical devices, such as using wire in combating cavalry. The Russian revolution proved that the old iskrists alone had approached the events with the correct tactics. We are now faced with the following alternative: either we are really and truly con-vinced that the war is creating a revolutionary situation in Europe, and that all the economic and socio-political cir-cumstances of the imperialist period are leading up to a revolution of the proletariat-in which case we are in duty bound to explain to the masses the need for revolution, call for it, create the necessary organisations, and speak fear-lessly and most concretely of the various methods of the forcible struggle and its “technique”. This duty of ours does not depend upon whether the revolution will be strong enough, or whether it will arrive with a first or a second imperialist war, etc. Or else we are not convinced that the situation is revolutionary, in which case there is no sense in our just talking about a war against war. In that ease, we are, in fact, national liberal-labour politicians of the S|dekum-Plekhanov or Kautsky variety.
The French delegates also declared that the present situation in Europe, as they saw it, would lead to revolu-tion. But, they said, first, “we have not come here to pro-vide a formula for a Third international”; secondly, the French worker “believes nobody and nothing”; he is demoral-ised and satiated with anarchist and Hervéist phrases. The former argument is unreasonable, because the joint compromise manifesto does “provide a formula” for a Third International, though it is inconsistent, incomplete and not given sufficient thought. The latter argument is very impor-tant as a very serious factual argument, which takes the specific situation in France into account, nut. in the meaning of defence of the fatherland, or the enemy invasion, but in taking note of the “sore points” in the French labour move-ment. The only thing that logically follows from this, however, is that .the French socialists would perhaps join general European revolutionary action by the proletariat more slowly than others, and not that such action is un-necessary. The question as to how rapidly, in which way and in which particular forms the proletariat of the various countries ai+e capable of taking revolutionary action was riot raised at the Conference and could not have been. The con-ditions for this are not yet ripe. For the present it is our task to jointly propagandise the correct tactics and leave it to events to indicate the tempo of the movement, and the modifications in the mainstream (according to nation, locality and trade). If the French proletariat has been demor-alised by anarchist phrases, it has been demoralised by Mfllerandism too, and it is not our business to increase this demoralisation by leaving things unsaid in the mani-festo.
It was none other than Merrheim who uttered the characteristic and profoundly correct phrase: “The [Socialist] Party, Jouhaux [secretary of the General Confederation of Labour][1] and the government are three heads under one bonnet.” This is the truth, a fact proved by the experience of the year of struggle waged by the French international-ists against the Party and Messrs. 3 ouhaux, There is, however, only one conclusion to be drawn: the government cannot be fought unless the opportunist parties and the leaders of anarchosyndicalism are fought against. Unlike our resolution, the joint manifesto merely indicated the tasks in the struggle but did not say everything that should have been said about them.
Arguing against our tactics, one of the Italians said: “Your tactics come either too late [since the war has already begun] or too soon [because the war has not yet created the conditions for revolution]; besides, you propose to ‘change the programme’ of the International, since all our propaganda has always been conducted ‘against violence’.” It was very easy for us to reply to this by quoting Jules Guesde in En garde! to the effect that not a single influential leader of the Second International ever rejected the use of violence and direct revolutionary methods of the struggle in general. It has always been argued that the legal struggle, parliamentarism and insurrection are inter-linked, and must inevitably pass into each other according to the changes in the conditions of the movement. From the same book, En garde!, we quoted a passage in a speech delivered by Guesde in 1899, in which he spoke of the possibility of a war for markets, colonies, etc., and went on to say that if there were any French, German and British Millerands in such a war, then “what would become of international working-class solidarity?” In this speech Guesde condemned himself in advance. As for declaring propaganda of revolution “inopportune”, this objection rests on a confusion of concepts usual among socialists in the Romance countries: they confuse the beginning of a revolution with open and direct propaganda for revolution. In Russia, nobody places the beginning of the 1905 Revolution before January 1905,[2] whereas revolutionary propaganda, in the very narrow sense of the word, the propaganda and the preparation of mass action, demonstrations, strikes, barricades, had been conducted for years prior to that. The old Iskra, for instance, began to propagandise the matter at the end of 1900, as Marx did in 1847, when nobody thought as yet of the beginning of a revolution in Europe.
After a revolution has begun, it is “recognised” even by the liberals and its other enemies; they often recognise it so as to deceive and betray it. Before the revolution, revolutionaries foresee it, realise its inevitability, make the masses understand its necessity, and explain its course and methods to the masses.
By the irony of history, Kautsky and his friends, who tried to take out of Grimm’s hands the initiative of convening the Conference, and attempted to disrupt the Conference of the Left wing (Kautsky’s closest friends even went on a tour for this purpose, as Grimm disclosed at the Conference), were the very ones who pushed the Conference to the left. By their deeds, the opportunists and the Kautskyites have proved the correctness of the stand taken by our Party.
The Latest From The “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox” Blog
Click on the headline to link to Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog for the latest from her site.
Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
Markin comment:
I find Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox rather a mishmash of eclectic politics and basic old time left-liberal/radical thinking. Not enough, not nearly enough, in our troubled times but enough to take the time to read about and get a sense of the pulse (if any) of that segment of the left to which she is appealing. One though should always remember, despite our political differences, her heroic action in going down to hell-hole Texas to confront one President George W. Bush when many others were resigned to accepting the lies of that administration or who “folded” their tents when the expected end to the Iraq War did not materialize. Hats off on that one, Cindy Sheehan.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
From The "UJP" Website- National Day of Action to Stop FBI Raids and Repression- January 25, 2010- All Out In Defense Of The Chicago And Minnosota Anti-War Fighters
Click on the headline to link to a Boston UPJ Web site posting calling for nation-wide demonstrations in defense of the Chicago and Minnesota anti-war activists facing the federal grand juries.
Markin comment:
As I noted in an entry concerning a demonstration on behalf of jailed whistleblower Pvt. Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange in Boston on January 15, 2010 being out on the public square in defense of our basic democratic rights has lately taken on some urgency. I noted that the defense of those old-fashioned democratic rights began with the defense of Manning and Assange. But it hardly ends there. The cases of the Minnesota and Chicago anti-war activists who are facing the grand juries on January 25, 2010 also fall under that defense. All out in their defense.
Frankly these Chicago and Minnesota anti-war committee cases, as I pointed in a commentary about the use of a government informer in the cases, reposted below, make no sense, but one would spent much worthless time speculating on the whys and wherefores of the manner in which the American imperial state defends itself. Better spend our time on the streets protesting yet another egregious act. Obama- Hands Off The Anti-War Fighters!- Troops Out Of Afghanistan and Iraq Now!
******
January 14, 2010
From The UJP Website- A Report-Government Informer Infiltrated Minnesota Activist Groups- And A Case Study
Markin comment:
It seems impossible that this government, this monstrously over-fed imperialist government, with more security agencies than it knows what to do with, would seriously bother with the doings of the minuscule organized extra-parliamentary left in America , or in this case just some, mainly, ad hoc anti-war committees. But they are, and as long as the class struggle goes on, in today‘s low tide doldrums or when our time comes, they will continue to do so.
This “interest” reminds me of the heyday of the anti-communist “red scare” of the 1950s when the long gone and unlamented FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had so many of his agents undercover in the American Communist Party that they were reporting on each other. That was another time when one had reason to wonder about the why of such as interest by governmental bureaucrats since the party had been decimated by the purges from the trades unions, academia, and the entertainment industries, and by the internal problems caused by the contradictions of Stalinism after the death of Stalin (chiefly Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and the Hungarian events of 1956).
All this report tells us though, really, is what we already knew. That the government, no matter the administration, has always done, is doing, and will continue to do infiltrations of left groups. All we can do is be cautious, not get catch up in some hare-brained scheme hatched by anybody, known or unknown, and, frankly, in these quasi-democratic times just do our business of anti-capitalist, anti-war propaganda as best we can in the open. For as long as we can.
Markin comment:
As I noted in an entry concerning a demonstration on behalf of jailed whistleblower Pvt. Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange in Boston on January 15, 2010 being out on the public square in defense of our basic democratic rights has lately taken on some urgency. I noted that the defense of those old-fashioned democratic rights began with the defense of Manning and Assange. But it hardly ends there. The cases of the Minnesota and Chicago anti-war activists who are facing the grand juries on January 25, 2010 also fall under that defense. All out in their defense.
Frankly these Chicago and Minnesota anti-war committee cases, as I pointed in a commentary about the use of a government informer in the cases, reposted below, make no sense, but one would spent much worthless time speculating on the whys and wherefores of the manner in which the American imperial state defends itself. Better spend our time on the streets protesting yet another egregious act. Obama- Hands Off The Anti-War Fighters!- Troops Out Of Afghanistan and Iraq Now!
******
January 14, 2010
From The UJP Website- A Report-Government Informer Infiltrated Minnesota Activist Groups- And A Case Study
Markin comment:
It seems impossible that this government, this monstrously over-fed imperialist government, with more security agencies than it knows what to do with, would seriously bother with the doings of the minuscule organized extra-parliamentary left in America , or in this case just some, mainly, ad hoc anti-war committees. But they are, and as long as the class struggle goes on, in today‘s low tide doldrums or when our time comes, they will continue to do so.
This “interest” reminds me of the heyday of the anti-communist “red scare” of the 1950s when the long gone and unlamented FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had so many of his agents undercover in the American Communist Party that they were reporting on each other. That was another time when one had reason to wonder about the why of such as interest by governmental bureaucrats since the party had been decimated by the purges from the trades unions, academia, and the entertainment industries, and by the internal problems caused by the contradictions of Stalinism after the death of Stalin (chiefly Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin and the Hungarian events of 1956).
All this report tells us though, really, is what we already knew. That the government, no matter the administration, has always done, is doing, and will continue to do infiltrations of left groups. All we can do is be cautious, not get catch up in some hare-brained scheme hatched by anybody, known or unknown, and, frankly, in these quasi-democratic times just do our business of anti-capitalist, anti-war propaganda as best we can in the open. For as long as we can.
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-The Draft Resolution of the Left Wing at Zimmerwald(1915)
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 the 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 Draft Resolution of the Left Wing at Zimmerwald
Written: Written prior to August 20 (September 2) 1915
Published: First published in 1930 in Lenin Miscellany XIV. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 345-348.
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The present war has been engendered by imperialism. Capitalism has already achieved that highest stage. Society’s productive forces and the magnitudes of capital have outgrown the narrow limits of the individual national states. Hence the striving on the part of the Great Powers to enslave other nations and to seize colonies as sources of raw material and spheres of investment of capital. The whole world is merging into a single economic organism; it has been carved up among a handful of Great Powers. The objective conditions for socialism have fully matured, and the present war is a war of the capitalists for privileges and monopolies that might delay the downfall of capitalism.
The socialists, who seek to liberate labour from the yoke of capital and who defend the world-wide solidarity of the workers, are struggling against any kind of oppression and inequality of nations. When the bourgeoisie was a progressive class, and the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and oppression by other nations stood on the historical order of the day, the socialists, as invariably the most consistent and most resolute of democrats, recognised “defence of the fatherland” in the meaning implied by those aims, and in that meaning alone. Today too, should a war of the oppressed nations against the oppressor Great Powers break out in the east of Europe or in the colonies, the socialists’ sympathy would be wholly with the oppressed.
The war of today, however, has been engendered by an entirely different historical period, in which the bourgeoisie, from a progressive class, has turned reactionary. With both groups of belligerents, this war is a war of slaveholders, and is designed to preserve and extend slavery; it is a war for the repartitioning of colonies, for the “right” to oppress other nations, for privileges and monopolies for Great-Power capital, and for the perpetuation of wage slavery by splitting up the workers of the different countries and crushing them through reaction. That is why, on the part of both warring groups, all talk about “defence of the fatherland” is deception of the people by the bourgeoisie. Neither the victory of any one group nor a return to the status quo can do anything either to protect the freedom of most countries in the world from imperialist oppression by a handful of Great Powers, or to ensure that the working class keep even its present modest cultural gains. The period of a relatively peaceful capitalism has passed, never to return. Imperialism has brought the working class unparalleled intensification of the class struggle, want, and unemployment, a higher cost of living, and the strengthening of oppression by the trusts, of militarism, and the political reactionaries, who are raising their heads in all countries, even the freest.
In reality, the “defence of the fatherland” slogan in the present war is tantamount to a defence of the “right” of one’s “own” national bourgeoisie to oppress other nations; it is in fact a national liberal-labour policy, an alliance between a negligible section of the workers and their “own” national bourgeoisie, against the mass of the proletarians and the exploited. Socialists who pursue such a policy are in fact chauvinists, social-chauvinists. The policy of voting for war credits, of joining governments, of Burgfrieden,[1] and the like, is a betrayal of socialism. Nurtured by the conditions of the “peaceful”, period which has now come to an end, opportunism has now matured to a degree that calls for a break with socialism; it has become an open enemy to the proletariat’s movement for liberation. The working class cannot achieve its historic aims without waging a most resolute struggle against both forthright opportunism and social-chauvinism (the majorities in the Social-Democratic parties of France, Germany and Austria; Hyndman, the Fabians and the trade unionists in Britain; Rubanovich, Plekhanov and Nasha Zarya in Russia, etc.) and the so-called Centre, which has surrendered the Marxist stand to the chauvinists.
Unanimously adopted by socialists of the entire world in anticipation of that very kind of war among the Great Powers which has now broken out, the Basle Manifesto of 1912 distinctly recognised the imperialist and reactionary nature of that war, declared it criminal for workers of one country to shoot at workers of another country, and proclaimed the approach of the proletarian revolution in connection with that very war. Indeed, the war is creating a revolutionary situation, is engendering revolutionary sentiments and unrest in the masses, is arousing in the finer part of the proletariat a realisation of the perniciousness of opportunism, and is intensifying the struggle against it. The masses’ growing desire for peace expresses their disappointment, the defeat of the bourgeois lie regarding the defence of the fatherland, and the awakening of their revolutionary consciousness. In utilising that temper for their revolutionary agitation, and not shying away in that agitation from considerations of the defeat of their “own” country, the socialists will not deceive the people with the hope that, without the revolutionary overthrow of the present-day governments, a possibility exists of a speedy democratic peace, which will be durable in some degree and will preclude any oppression of nations, a possibility of disarmament, etc. Only the social revolution of the proletariat opens the way towards peace and freedom for the nations.
The imperialist war is ushering in the era of the social revolution. All the objective conditions of recent times have put the proletariat’s revolutionary mass struggle on the order of the day. It is the duty of socialists, while making use of every means of the working class’s legal struggle, to subordinate each and every of those means to this immediate and most important task, develop the workers’ revolutionary consciousness, rally them in the international revolutionary struggle, promote and encourage any revolutionary action, and do everything possible to turn the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war for the expropriation of the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and the realisation of socialism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] A class truce.—Ed.
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 the 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 Draft Resolution of the Left Wing at Zimmerwald
Written: Written prior to August 20 (September 2) 1915
Published: First published in 1930 in Lenin Miscellany XIV. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 345-348.
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The present war has been engendered by imperialism. Capitalism has already achieved that highest stage. Society’s productive forces and the magnitudes of capital have outgrown the narrow limits of the individual national states. Hence the striving on the part of the Great Powers to enslave other nations and to seize colonies as sources of raw material and spheres of investment of capital. The whole world is merging into a single economic organism; it has been carved up among a handful of Great Powers. The objective conditions for socialism have fully matured, and the present war is a war of the capitalists for privileges and monopolies that might delay the downfall of capitalism.
The socialists, who seek to liberate labour from the yoke of capital and who defend the world-wide solidarity of the workers, are struggling against any kind of oppression and inequality of nations. When the bourgeoisie was a progressive class, and the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and oppression by other nations stood on the historical order of the day, the socialists, as invariably the most consistent and most resolute of democrats, recognised “defence of the fatherland” in the meaning implied by those aims, and in that meaning alone. Today too, should a war of the oppressed nations against the oppressor Great Powers break out in the east of Europe or in the colonies, the socialists’ sympathy would be wholly with the oppressed.
The war of today, however, has been engendered by an entirely different historical period, in which the bourgeoisie, from a progressive class, has turned reactionary. With both groups of belligerents, this war is a war of slaveholders, and is designed to preserve and extend slavery; it is a war for the repartitioning of colonies, for the “right” to oppress other nations, for privileges and monopolies for Great-Power capital, and for the perpetuation of wage slavery by splitting up the workers of the different countries and crushing them through reaction. That is why, on the part of both warring groups, all talk about “defence of the fatherland” is deception of the people by the bourgeoisie. Neither the victory of any one group nor a return to the status quo can do anything either to protect the freedom of most countries in the world from imperialist oppression by a handful of Great Powers, or to ensure that the working class keep even its present modest cultural gains. The period of a relatively peaceful capitalism has passed, never to return. Imperialism has brought the working class unparalleled intensification of the class struggle, want, and unemployment, a higher cost of living, and the strengthening of oppression by the trusts, of militarism, and the political reactionaries, who are raising their heads in all countries, even the freest.
In reality, the “defence of the fatherland” slogan in the present war is tantamount to a defence of the “right” of one’s “own” national bourgeoisie to oppress other nations; it is in fact a national liberal-labour policy, an alliance between a negligible section of the workers and their “own” national bourgeoisie, against the mass of the proletarians and the exploited. Socialists who pursue such a policy are in fact chauvinists, social-chauvinists. The policy of voting for war credits, of joining governments, of Burgfrieden,[1] and the like, is a betrayal of socialism. Nurtured by the conditions of the “peaceful”, period which has now come to an end, opportunism has now matured to a degree that calls for a break with socialism; it has become an open enemy to the proletariat’s movement for liberation. The working class cannot achieve its historic aims without waging a most resolute struggle against both forthright opportunism and social-chauvinism (the majorities in the Social-Democratic parties of France, Germany and Austria; Hyndman, the Fabians and the trade unionists in Britain; Rubanovich, Plekhanov and Nasha Zarya in Russia, etc.) and the so-called Centre, which has surrendered the Marxist stand to the chauvinists.
Unanimously adopted by socialists of the entire world in anticipation of that very kind of war among the Great Powers which has now broken out, the Basle Manifesto of 1912 distinctly recognised the imperialist and reactionary nature of that war, declared it criminal for workers of one country to shoot at workers of another country, and proclaimed the approach of the proletarian revolution in connection with that very war. Indeed, the war is creating a revolutionary situation, is engendering revolutionary sentiments and unrest in the masses, is arousing in the finer part of the proletariat a realisation of the perniciousness of opportunism, and is intensifying the struggle against it. The masses’ growing desire for peace expresses their disappointment, the defeat of the bourgeois lie regarding the defence of the fatherland, and the awakening of their revolutionary consciousness. In utilising that temper for their revolutionary agitation, and not shying away in that agitation from considerations of the defeat of their “own” country, the socialists will not deceive the people with the hope that, without the revolutionary overthrow of the present-day governments, a possibility exists of a speedy democratic peace, which will be durable in some degree and will preclude any oppression of nations, a possibility of disarmament, etc. Only the social revolution of the proletariat opens the way towards peace and freedom for the nations.
The imperialist war is ushering in the era of the social revolution. All the objective conditions of recent times have put the proletariat’s revolutionary mass struggle on the order of the day. It is the duty of socialists, while making use of every means of the working class’s legal struggle, to subordinate each and every of those means to this immediate and most important task, develop the workers’ revolutionary consciousness, rally them in the international revolutionary struggle, promote and encourage any revolutionary action, and do everything possible to turn the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war for the expropriation of the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and the realisation of socialism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] A class truce.—Ed.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Once Again, From The Time Of Radio Days- Sentimental Journey- The Fifties-They Shoot Record Players Don’t They? - A CD Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Dinah Washington performing What A Difference A Day Makes.
CD Review
Sentimental Journey, Volume 4 (1954-1959), Rhino Records, 1993
As I noted in a recent review of an earlier volume of this series (1942-1946) I am a child of rock ‘n’ roll, no question. I also noted that I have filled this space with plenty of material about my likes and dislikes from the classic period of that genre, the mid-1950s, when we first heard that different jail-break beat, a beat our parents could not “hear,” as we of the generation of ’68 earned our spurs and started down that long teenage process of going our own way. And further I noted , as much as we were determined to have our own music on our own terms, wafting through every household, every household that had a radio in the background, and more importantly, had the emerging sounds from television was our parents’ music.
In that review I also noted that some the World War II era music “spoke” to me, or at least it did not offend my ear (especially a classic like Lena Horne on Stormy Weather). This volume, however, as it intersected my generation’s jail-breakout rock beat, or should I say interfered with that breakout, is something else again. This material is nothing but a rearguard action, for the most part, to keep everything quiet, to be nice and, to hope, hope to high heaven that they (and you know, if you are of a certain age, who the they were) didn’t drop the bomb and ruin a Saturday chaste date. The cover art featured here of boy and girl sitting dreamily in a car (maybe dad’s, maybe in discretionary dollars new teen America, his own, but his, one way or another) looking out at the expanse says it all. The ain’t some reckless little rock ‘n’ roll scene, not even sweet, beatified be-bop. This is the music of older, "square" brothers and sisters caught in between “jump” forties and “rock” mid-fifties.
It is almost impossible to pick stick outs here and apologies to someone like Tony Bennett who actually did some better stuff later but here is all I can even come close to advising anyone under the age of one hundred (today) to hear:
Memories Are Made Of This, Dean Martin (martini, or whatever, in hand, Dino ain’t rocking, he’ll leave that for his son); Just In Time, Tony Bennett (already noted above); What A Difference A Day Makes, Dinah Washington (Jesus, what is a serious, be-bop jazz singer, “torch” too, and with great phrasing doing in this thing-except to prove my overall point as the exception).
CD Review
Sentimental Journey, Volume 4 (1954-1959), Rhino Records, 1993
As I noted in a recent review of an earlier volume of this series (1942-1946) I am a child of rock ‘n’ roll, no question. I also noted that I have filled this space with plenty of material about my likes and dislikes from the classic period of that genre, the mid-1950s, when we first heard that different jail-break beat, a beat our parents could not “hear,” as we of the generation of ’68 earned our spurs and started down that long teenage process of going our own way. And further I noted , as much as we were determined to have our own music on our own terms, wafting through every household, every household that had a radio in the background, and more importantly, had the emerging sounds from television was our parents’ music.
In that review I also noted that some the World War II era music “spoke” to me, or at least it did not offend my ear (especially a classic like Lena Horne on Stormy Weather). This volume, however, as it intersected my generation’s jail-breakout rock beat, or should I say interfered with that breakout, is something else again. This material is nothing but a rearguard action, for the most part, to keep everything quiet, to be nice and, to hope, hope to high heaven that they (and you know, if you are of a certain age, who the they were) didn’t drop the bomb and ruin a Saturday chaste date. The cover art featured here of boy and girl sitting dreamily in a car (maybe dad’s, maybe in discretionary dollars new teen America, his own, but his, one way or another) looking out at the expanse says it all. The ain’t some reckless little rock ‘n’ roll scene, not even sweet, beatified be-bop. This is the music of older, "square" brothers and sisters caught in between “jump” forties and “rock” mid-fifties.
It is almost impossible to pick stick outs here and apologies to someone like Tony Bennett who actually did some better stuff later but here is all I can even come close to advising anyone under the age of one hundred (today) to hear:
Memories Are Made Of This, Dean Martin (martini, or whatever, in hand, Dino ain’t rocking, he’ll leave that for his son); Just In Time, Tony Bennett (already noted above); What A Difference A Day Makes, Dinah Washington (Jesus, what is a serious, be-bop jazz singer, “torch” too, and with great phrasing doing in this thing-except to prove my overall point as the exception).
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-On the Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism(1915)
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
On the Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism
Published: Supplement to Sotsial-Demokrat No. 42, June 1, 1915. Published according to the text of the Supplement.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 199-204.
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most interesting and most recent material for this topical problem has been provided by the International Conference of Socialist Women, which adjourned recently in Berne.[1] The readers will find below an account of the Conference and the texts of two resolutions-the one adopted and the one rejected. In the present article we would like to discuss only one aspect of the question.
Representatives of the women’s organisations attached to the Organising Committee; women members of Troelstra’s party in Holland; women from the Swiss organisations that are hostile to Berner Tagwacht for its allegedly excessive Leftist leanings; the French representative, who is unwilling to disagree on any important point with the official party, which is known to adhere to the social-chauvinist point of view; the women of Britain, who are hostile to the idea of a clear line of division between pacifism and revolutionary proletarian tactics-all these agreed with the “Left” German Social-Democrat women on one resolution. The representatives of women’s organisations connected with our Party’s Central Committee disagreed with them, preferring to remain in isolation for the time being rather than join a bloc of this kind.
What is the gist of this disagreement? What principles and general political significance are involved in this conflict?
At first glance, the middle-of-the-road resolution, which has united the opportunists and part of the Left wing looks very fitting and correct in principle. The war has been declared an imperialist one, the “defence of the fatherland” idea has been condemned, the workers have been called upon to hold mass demonstrations, etc., etc. It might seem that our resolution was different only in the use of several sharper expressions such as “betrayal”, “opportunism”, “withdrawal from bourgeois governments”, etc.
It is undoubtedly from this standpoint that criticism will he levelled against the withdrawal of the representatives of the women’s organisations connected with our Party’s Central Committee.
However, if we give the matter more attention, without confining ourselves to a purely “formal” recognition of one truth or another, we will realise that such criticism is quite groundless.
Two world-outlooks, two appraisals of the war and the tasks of the International, two tactics of the proletarian parties clashed at the Conference. One view holds that there has been no collapse of the international; no deep and grave obstacles to a return from chauvinism to socialism; no strong “internal enemy” in the shape of opportunism; no direct and obvious betrayal of socialism by opportunism. The conclusion to be drawn might be worded as follows: let us condemn nobody; let us “amnesty” those who have violated the Stuttgart and the Basic resolutions; let us merely advise that the course followed should be more to the left and that the masses be called upon to hold demonstrations.
The other, view is diametrically opposed to the former on each of the points enumerated above. Nothing is more harmful or more disastrous to the proletarian cause than a continuation of inner-Party diplomacy towards the opportunists and social-chauvinists. The majority resolution proved acceptable to the opportunist delegates and to the adherents of the present-day official parties just because it is imbued with the spirit of diplomacy. Such diplomacy is being used to throw dust in the eyes of the working masses, which at present are led by the official social-patriots. An absolutely erroneous and harmful idea is being inculcated upon the working masses, the idea that the present-day SocialDemocratic parties, with their present Executives, are capable of changing their course from an erroneous to a correct one.
That is not the case. It is a most egregious and pernicious illusion. The present-day Social-Democratic parties and their Executives are incapable of seriously changing their course. In practice everything will remain as before; the “Left” wishes expressed in the majority resolution will remain innocent wishes; an unerring political instinct prompted this in the adherents of Troelstra’s party and of the present Executive of the French party, when they voted for such a resolution. It is only when it is most actively supported by the present Executives of the Social-Democratic parties that an appeal for mass demonstrations can acquire a serious and practical significance.
Can one expect such support? Obviously not, It is common knowledge that such an appeal will meet, not with support, but with stubborn (and mostly covert) resistance from the Executives.
If the workers were told this in a straightforward way, they would know the truth; they would know that to give effect to “Left” wishes, a radical change is necessary in the line of the Social-Democratic parties; a most stubborn struggle is necessary against the opportunists with their “Centrist” friends. As it is, the workers have been lulled by “Left” wishes, while the Conference re/used to call by name, loudly and clearly, the evil which must be combated if those wishes are to be realised.
The diplomatic leaders, who are at present conducting a chauvinist policy within the Social-Democratic parties, will make excellent use of the weakness, the indecision and the insufficient clarity of the majority resolution. Astute parliamentarians that they are, they will distribute the roles among themselves: some of them will say that the “serious” arguments of Kautsky and Co. were not appreciated or analysed, and that therefore they must be discussed in a wider gathering; others will say, “Were we not right when we said that no deep-seated differences existed, if the women adherents of the Troelstra and Guesde-Sembat parties were able to agree with the Left-wing German women?”
The Women’s Conference should not have aided Scheidemann, Haase, Kautsky, Vandervelde, Hyndman, Guesde, Sembat, Plekhanov and others to blunt the vigilance of the working masses. On the contrary, it should have tried to rouse them and declared a decisive war against opportunism. Only in that case would the result have been, not a hope that the “leaders” named above would “reform”, but a mustering of forces for an arduous and bitter struggle.
Consider the way the opportunists and the “Centrists” violated the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions. That is the crux of the matter. Try to visualise, clearly and without diplomacy, what has actually taken place.
Foreseeing war, the International convenes and unanimously decides, should war break out, to work “to hasten the downfall of capitalism”; to work in the spirit of the Commune, of October and December 1905 (the exact words of the Basle resolution!); to work in a spirit that will consider it a “crime” if “the workers of one country shoot at the workers of another country”.
A line of action in an internationalist, proletarian, and revolutionary spirit is indicated here with perfect clarity, a clarity that cannot be improved within the limits of legality.
Then war broke out—the very kind of war and exactly along the lines foreseen at Basic. The official parties acted in an absolutely contrary spirit: not like internationalists but like nationalists; not in a proletarian but in a bourgeois way; not in a revolutionary direction but in the direction of ultra-opportunism. If we say to the workers that this was downright treachery to the socialist cause, we thereby reject all evasions and subterfuges, all sophisms a la Kautsky and Axeirod. We clearly indicate the extent and the power of the evil; we clearly call for a struggle against that evil, not for conciliation with it.
What about the majority resolution? It does not contain a word of censure for the traitors, or a single word about opportunism, but merely a simple repetition of the ideas expressed in the Basle resolution! One might think that nothing serious has happened, that an accidental and minor error has been made which calls merely for a repetition of the old decision, or that a disagreement has arisen which is inconsequent and not of principle, and can be papered over!
This is downright mockery of the International’s decisions, mockery of the workers. As a matter of fact, the social-chauvinists wish nothing else but a simple repetition of the old decisions, if only nothing changes in practice. This is, in fact, a tacit and hypocritically disguised amnesty for the social-chauvinist adherents of most of the present parties. We know that there are many who would follow this path and confine themselves to several Left phrases. However, their road is not for us. We have followed a different road, and will go on following it; we want to help the working-class movement and the actual construction of a working class party, in the spirit of irreconcilability towards opportunism and social-chauvinism.
Part of the German women delegates seem to have been afraid of a very clear resolution for reasons relating only to the tempo of the development of the struggle against chauvinism within a single party, namely, their own. Such reasoning was obviously out of place and erroneous, since the international resolution did not and could not deal with either the speed or the concrete conditions of the struggle against social-chauvinism within the individual countries; in this respect, the autonomy of the various parties is beyond dispute. The proclamation was needed, from an international tribune, of an irrevocable break with social-chauvinism in the entire direction and character of Social-Democratic work. Instead of that, the majority resolution once more reiterated the old error, that of the Second International, which diplomatically veiled opportunism and the gap between word and deed. We repeat: this is a road we shall not take.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] The International Conference of Socialist Women held in Berne on March 26-28, 1915, dealt with the attitude to the war. It was convened on the initiative of the women organisations attached to the C.C. R.S.D.L.P., with the active participation of Clara Zetkin, loader of the international women’s movement. Twenty-nine delegates from Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, Russia and Poland attended the Conference, the Russian delegation including N. K. Krupskaya and Inessa Arrnand.
The report on the International Conference of Socialist Women was published in the Supplement to Sotsial-Demokrat No. 42 of June 1, 1915.
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
On the Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism
Published: Supplement to Sotsial-Demokrat No. 42, June 1, 1915. Published according to the text of the Supplement.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 199-204.
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
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most interesting and most recent material for this topical problem has been provided by the International Conference of Socialist Women, which adjourned recently in Berne.[1] The readers will find below an account of the Conference and the texts of two resolutions-the one adopted and the one rejected. In the present article we would like to discuss only one aspect of the question.
Representatives of the women’s organisations attached to the Organising Committee; women members of Troelstra’s party in Holland; women from the Swiss organisations that are hostile to Berner Tagwacht for its allegedly excessive Leftist leanings; the French representative, who is unwilling to disagree on any important point with the official party, which is known to adhere to the social-chauvinist point of view; the women of Britain, who are hostile to the idea of a clear line of division between pacifism and revolutionary proletarian tactics-all these agreed with the “Left” German Social-Democrat women on one resolution. The representatives of women’s organisations connected with our Party’s Central Committee disagreed with them, preferring to remain in isolation for the time being rather than join a bloc of this kind.
What is the gist of this disagreement? What principles and general political significance are involved in this conflict?
At first glance, the middle-of-the-road resolution, which has united the opportunists and part of the Left wing looks very fitting and correct in principle. The war has been declared an imperialist one, the “defence of the fatherland” idea has been condemned, the workers have been called upon to hold mass demonstrations, etc., etc. It might seem that our resolution was different only in the use of several sharper expressions such as “betrayal”, “opportunism”, “withdrawal from bourgeois governments”, etc.
It is undoubtedly from this standpoint that criticism will he levelled against the withdrawal of the representatives of the women’s organisations connected with our Party’s Central Committee.
However, if we give the matter more attention, without confining ourselves to a purely “formal” recognition of one truth or another, we will realise that such criticism is quite groundless.
Two world-outlooks, two appraisals of the war and the tasks of the International, two tactics of the proletarian parties clashed at the Conference. One view holds that there has been no collapse of the international; no deep and grave obstacles to a return from chauvinism to socialism; no strong “internal enemy” in the shape of opportunism; no direct and obvious betrayal of socialism by opportunism. The conclusion to be drawn might be worded as follows: let us condemn nobody; let us “amnesty” those who have violated the Stuttgart and the Basic resolutions; let us merely advise that the course followed should be more to the left and that the masses be called upon to hold demonstrations.
The other, view is diametrically opposed to the former on each of the points enumerated above. Nothing is more harmful or more disastrous to the proletarian cause than a continuation of inner-Party diplomacy towards the opportunists and social-chauvinists. The majority resolution proved acceptable to the opportunist delegates and to the adherents of the present-day official parties just because it is imbued with the spirit of diplomacy. Such diplomacy is being used to throw dust in the eyes of the working masses, which at present are led by the official social-patriots. An absolutely erroneous and harmful idea is being inculcated upon the working masses, the idea that the present-day SocialDemocratic parties, with their present Executives, are capable of changing their course from an erroneous to a correct one.
That is not the case. It is a most egregious and pernicious illusion. The present-day Social-Democratic parties and their Executives are incapable of seriously changing their course. In practice everything will remain as before; the “Left” wishes expressed in the majority resolution will remain innocent wishes; an unerring political instinct prompted this in the adherents of Troelstra’s party and of the present Executive of the French party, when they voted for such a resolution. It is only when it is most actively supported by the present Executives of the Social-Democratic parties that an appeal for mass demonstrations can acquire a serious and practical significance.
Can one expect such support? Obviously not, It is common knowledge that such an appeal will meet, not with support, but with stubborn (and mostly covert) resistance from the Executives.
If the workers were told this in a straightforward way, they would know the truth; they would know that to give effect to “Left” wishes, a radical change is necessary in the line of the Social-Democratic parties; a most stubborn struggle is necessary against the opportunists with their “Centrist” friends. As it is, the workers have been lulled by “Left” wishes, while the Conference re/used to call by name, loudly and clearly, the evil which must be combated if those wishes are to be realised.
The diplomatic leaders, who are at present conducting a chauvinist policy within the Social-Democratic parties, will make excellent use of the weakness, the indecision and the insufficient clarity of the majority resolution. Astute parliamentarians that they are, they will distribute the roles among themselves: some of them will say that the “serious” arguments of Kautsky and Co. were not appreciated or analysed, and that therefore they must be discussed in a wider gathering; others will say, “Were we not right when we said that no deep-seated differences existed, if the women adherents of the Troelstra and Guesde-Sembat parties were able to agree with the Left-wing German women?”
The Women’s Conference should not have aided Scheidemann, Haase, Kautsky, Vandervelde, Hyndman, Guesde, Sembat, Plekhanov and others to blunt the vigilance of the working masses. On the contrary, it should have tried to rouse them and declared a decisive war against opportunism. Only in that case would the result have been, not a hope that the “leaders” named above would “reform”, but a mustering of forces for an arduous and bitter struggle.
Consider the way the opportunists and the “Centrists” violated the Stuttgart and Basle resolutions. That is the crux of the matter. Try to visualise, clearly and without diplomacy, what has actually taken place.
Foreseeing war, the International convenes and unanimously decides, should war break out, to work “to hasten the downfall of capitalism”; to work in the spirit of the Commune, of October and December 1905 (the exact words of the Basle resolution!); to work in a spirit that will consider it a “crime” if “the workers of one country shoot at the workers of another country”.
A line of action in an internationalist, proletarian, and revolutionary spirit is indicated here with perfect clarity, a clarity that cannot be improved within the limits of legality.
Then war broke out—the very kind of war and exactly along the lines foreseen at Basic. The official parties acted in an absolutely contrary spirit: not like internationalists but like nationalists; not in a proletarian but in a bourgeois way; not in a revolutionary direction but in the direction of ultra-opportunism. If we say to the workers that this was downright treachery to the socialist cause, we thereby reject all evasions and subterfuges, all sophisms a la Kautsky and Axeirod. We clearly indicate the extent and the power of the evil; we clearly call for a struggle against that evil, not for conciliation with it.
What about the majority resolution? It does not contain a word of censure for the traitors, or a single word about opportunism, but merely a simple repetition of the ideas expressed in the Basle resolution! One might think that nothing serious has happened, that an accidental and minor error has been made which calls merely for a repetition of the old decision, or that a disagreement has arisen which is inconsequent and not of principle, and can be papered over!
This is downright mockery of the International’s decisions, mockery of the workers. As a matter of fact, the social-chauvinists wish nothing else but a simple repetition of the old decisions, if only nothing changes in practice. This is, in fact, a tacit and hypocritically disguised amnesty for the social-chauvinist adherents of most of the present parties. We know that there are many who would follow this path and confine themselves to several Left phrases. However, their road is not for us. We have followed a different road, and will go on following it; we want to help the working-class movement and the actual construction of a working class party, in the spirit of irreconcilability towards opportunism and social-chauvinism.
Part of the German women delegates seem to have been afraid of a very clear resolution for reasons relating only to the tempo of the development of the struggle against chauvinism within a single party, namely, their own. Such reasoning was obviously out of place and erroneous, since the international resolution did not and could not deal with either the speed or the concrete conditions of the struggle against social-chauvinism within the individual countries; in this respect, the autonomy of the various parties is beyond dispute. The proclamation was needed, from an international tribune, of an irrevocable break with social-chauvinism in the entire direction and character of Social-Democratic work. Instead of that, the majority resolution once more reiterated the old error, that of the Second International, which diplomatically veiled opportunism and the gap between word and deed. We repeat: this is a road we shall not take.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] The International Conference of Socialist Women held in Berne on March 26-28, 1915, dealt with the attitude to the war. It was convened on the initiative of the women organisations attached to the C.C. R.S.D.L.P., with the active participation of Clara Zetkin, loader of the international women’s movement. Twenty-nine delegates from Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, Russia and Poland attended the Conference, the Russian delegation including N. K. Krupskaya and Inessa Arrnand.
The report on the International Conference of Socialist Women was published in the Supplement to Sotsial-Demokrat No. 42 of June 1, 1915.
***Artist's Corner- Bottecelli's "The Birth Of Venus"
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Botticelli's The Birth Of Venus.
Markin comment:
Personally, my tastes run more to modern art but every once in a while those early Renaissance artists, as here, take your breathe away and you stand, rightly, humbled before their creativity and mastery.
Markin comment:
Personally, my tastes run more to modern art but every once in a while those early Renaissance artists, as here, take your breathe away and you stand, rightly, humbled before their creativity and mastery.
Monday, January 17, 2011
*Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘50s Song Night- The Teen Queens’ “Eddie My Love” (1956) - A 55th Anniversary, Of Sorts- An Alternate Take- For Those Who Waited By The Midnight Phone
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Teen Queens performing the classic Eddie My Love.
Markin comment:
This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hard working, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.
EDDIE MY LOVE
(Aaron Collins / Maxwell Davis / Sam Ling)The Teen Queens - 1956
The Fontane Sisters - 1956
The Chordettes - 1956
Dee Dee Sharp - 1962
Also recorded by:
Lillian Briggs; Jo Ann Campbell; The Sweethearts.
Eddie, my love, I love you so
How I wanted for you, you'll never know
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait to long
Eddie, please write me one line
Tell me your love is still only mine
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
(Transcribed from the Teen Queens
recording by Mel Priddle - May 2006)
**********
Come closer will you, because I have got a story to tell, come on away from that midnight phone waiting and maybe put on The Teen Queens’ Eddie My Love like I have on right now or some other teen trauma tune, sad, sad tune to help drown your sorrows while I’m telling the story,
Yes, get away from that midnight telephone call wait by your bedside table and listen up a minute or two because I’ve got a story to tell, a 1950s teen story to tell, or let’s make it a 1950s teen story, and if it works out for 1960s, 1970s, 2000s teens except the techno-gadgets ways to wait, to wait that midnight call are different, well, well there you have it,
and let’s make it a boy-girl story, although I know, and you know I know, that it could have been a boy-boy, girl-girl, whatever story and that’s okay by me, except that it wouldn’t be okay, okay as a public 1950s story,
and let’s make it a Saturday night, a hard by the phone, waiting Saturday night, maybe midnight, maybe not, maybe you cried or brooded yourself to sleep before that hour, that teen dread hour when all dreams came crashing to the floor, like a million guys and girls know about, and if you don’t then, maybe move on, but I think I know who I’m talking to,
and let’s make it a winter night, a long hard winter night, wind maybe blowing up a little, maybe a little dusting of snow, and just that many more dark hours until the dawn and facing another day without…,
and let’s make it, oh the hell with that let’s make it get to the story and we’ll work out the scenic details as we go along.
I’ll tell you, Betty’s got it bad, yes, Betty from across the way, from the house across the way where right now I can see her in her midnight waiting bedroom window, staring off, staring off somewhere but I know, I know, what ‘s wrong with her. Her Eddie’s flown the coop, and has not been heard from for a while.
Yes, Betty’s got it bad, and it’s too bad because she deserves better. Let me tell you the story behind the story, although I can already see that you might know what’s coming. Yes, I know the story because Betty’s best friend, Sue, gave me the details when I saw Betty moping around, moping around day after day like there was going to be no tomorrow, especially after school with her head down, head moping down after the mailman came.
Yes, I know, I know Sue, old best friend Sue, is nothing but a mantrap and has flirted with more guys in this town than you could shake a stick at, including Eddie (keep that between us, please). Hell, now that I think about it, I’ll get this thing all balled up. Let Betty, old true to Eddie, Betty tell her story herself, or at least through Sue, and I’ll just write it down my way, and you be the judge.
“Last summer, oh sweet sixteen last summer, old innocent girlish sweet paper dream last summer, Eddie, Eddie Cooper, Eddie with the hot cherry red, dual exhaust, heavy silver chrome, radio- blasting, ’55 Chevy (my brother Timmy told me about cars and their doo-dads, I just like to look good in them and the ’55 is the “boss”), that I knew I would be just crazy to sit in, and give the “look”, the superior “I’m with a hot guy, and sitting in a hot car , bow down peasants look,” came rumbling and tumbling into town.
Summer beach time, soaking up the sun down between the yacht clubs beach time, summer not a care in the world time , Sue, my best friend Sue, my best friend Sue and all that stuff they say about her and the boys is just fantasy, men fantasy, and I were sitting just talking about this and that, oh well, about boys, and I was telling her the latest about Billy, Billy from the neighborhood, who I had been going out with for ages, more or less, Billy with the reading too many books and wanting to talk poetry or “beat” stuff, Billy, Billy with the no car, or sometimes car but no “boss” car, never, when Eddie, Eddie, Eddie John Cooper, parked his honey Chevy and came over to us, through all that sand and all,
Eddie gave Sue the once over, like guys will do automatically, even though I secretly thrill to know that that once over is just a game because even as he came over the sand I could see he had eyes, big blue eyes, for me, only me,
We talked, idle talk, sex in the air talk, but don’t talk about talk, still talk a lot for a summer beach day, and I knew, I swear I knew he wanted to ask me out for later, or maybe right there to ride in his car but three’s company, and for once I couldn’t shake Sue, my best friend Sue, Sue with the million boyfriends so she says, who I could see was taken in by his big blued-eyed, black haired, tight tee-shirt, blue jean-ed charm too.
Truce, Sue truce, as we walked home, Eddie-less, a few blocks away. Truce, except that I heard a big engine, a big “boss” car engine, coming up behind me as I hit the sidewalk in front of my house, and dream, dream wake me up, it was Eddie, Eddie John Cooper and that cherry ’57 Chevy. He said, and I will never forget this, “Hop in,” and opened the door. I was suppose to have a “date”, some donk poetry reading date with Billy, ah, Billy who. We were off as soon as I close that cherry door.
And we were off, off for a sweet summer of love, ’55 Chevy love and okay, truth, because I know that Sue probably blabbed it around but I let Eddie take me to the back seat of that warm-bodied Chevy one night, and some nights after that. But let me just tell you this about Sue, my best friend Sue, honest, she’s the one who told me what to do with a boy, ya, she told me everything.
Come late August as summer beach love drew to an end and those damn school bells seemed ready to ring, Eddie, out of school Eddie my love, told me he had a job offer in another state and he needed to take the job to support his mother and his ’57 Chevy.
I started crying, crying like crazy, trying to make him stay, stay with his ever-lovin’ Betty but no he had to go. He didn’t know about a phone, or a phone call, but he said he would write and I haven’t heard from him since even though I wear out the mailman every day.”
Christ my heart bleeds for Betty every time I think about what Eddie has done, and see, I know Eddie, no I don’t know Eddie personally but I know Eddie stuff, stuff that has been going on since Adam and Eve, hell, probably before that.
But Betty, Betty, sweet Betty, I hate to break it to you but Eddie, Eddie John Cooper ain’t coming back. And old Eddie ain’t writing and it ain’t because he doesn’t have the three cents for a stamp, no Eddie, well, enough of that, let's just say Eddie’s moved on.
And Betty, Betty hold onto your Eddie My Love dream for a moment. But Betty, tomorrow, not tomorrow tomorrow but some tomorrow you‘ve got to move on. And Betty then why don’t you call your Billy. I’ll be here by the phone, the midnight phone.
Markin comment:
This space is noted for politics mainly, and mainly the desperate political fight against various social, economic and moral injustices and wrongs in this wicked old world, although the place where politics and cultural expression, especially post-World War II be-bop cultural expression, has drawn some of my interest over the past several years. The most telling example of that interest is in the field of popular music, centrally the blues, city and country, good woman on your mind, hard working, hard drinking blues and folk music, mainly urban, mainly protest to high heaven against the world’s injustices smite the dragon down, folk music. Of late though the old time 1950s kid, primordial, big bang, jail-break rock and roll music that set us off from earlier generations has drawn my attention. Mostly by reviewing oldies CDs but here, and occasionally hereafter under this headline, specifically songs that some future archaeologists might dig up as prime examples of how we primitives lived ,and what we listened to back in the day.
EDDIE MY LOVE
(Aaron Collins / Maxwell Davis / Sam Ling)The Teen Queens - 1956
The Fontane Sisters - 1956
The Chordettes - 1956
Dee Dee Sharp - 1962
Also recorded by:
Lillian Briggs; Jo Ann Campbell; The Sweethearts.
Eddie, my love, I love you so
How I wanted for you, you'll never know
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait to long
Eddie, please write me one line
Tell me your love is still only mine
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
You left me last September
To return to me before long
But all I do is cry myself to sleep
Eddie, since you've been gone
Eddie, my love, I'm sinking fast
The very next day might be my last
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
Please, Eddie, don't make me wait too long
(Transcribed from the Teen Queens
recording by Mel Priddle - May 2006)
**********
Come closer will you, because I have got a story to tell, come on away from that midnight phone waiting and maybe put on The Teen Queens’ Eddie My Love like I have on right now or some other teen trauma tune, sad, sad tune to help drown your sorrows while I’m telling the story,
Yes, get away from that midnight telephone call wait by your bedside table and listen up a minute or two because I’ve got a story to tell, a 1950s teen story to tell, or let’s make it a 1950s teen story, and if it works out for 1960s, 1970s, 2000s teens except the techno-gadgets ways to wait, to wait that midnight call are different, well, well there you have it,
and let’s make it a boy-girl story, although I know, and you know I know, that it could have been a boy-boy, girl-girl, whatever story and that’s okay by me, except that it wouldn’t be okay, okay as a public 1950s story,
and let’s make it a Saturday night, a hard by the phone, waiting Saturday night, maybe midnight, maybe not, maybe you cried or brooded yourself to sleep before that hour, that teen dread hour when all dreams came crashing to the floor, like a million guys and girls know about, and if you don’t then, maybe move on, but I think I know who I’m talking to,
and let’s make it a winter night, a long hard winter night, wind maybe blowing up a little, maybe a little dusting of snow, and just that many more dark hours until the dawn and facing another day without…,
and let’s make it, oh the hell with that let’s make it get to the story and we’ll work out the scenic details as we go along.
I’ll tell you, Betty’s got it bad, yes, Betty from across the way, from the house across the way where right now I can see her in her midnight waiting bedroom window, staring off, staring off somewhere but I know, I know, what ‘s wrong with her. Her Eddie’s flown the coop, and has not been heard from for a while.
Yes, Betty’s got it bad, and it’s too bad because she deserves better. Let me tell you the story behind the story, although I can already see that you might know what’s coming. Yes, I know the story because Betty’s best friend, Sue, gave me the details when I saw Betty moping around, moping around day after day like there was going to be no tomorrow, especially after school with her head down, head moping down after the mailman came.
Yes, I know, I know Sue, old best friend Sue, is nothing but a mantrap and has flirted with more guys in this town than you could shake a stick at, including Eddie (keep that between us, please). Hell, now that I think about it, I’ll get this thing all balled up. Let Betty, old true to Eddie, Betty tell her story herself, or at least through Sue, and I’ll just write it down my way, and you be the judge.
“Last summer, oh sweet sixteen last summer, old innocent girlish sweet paper dream last summer, Eddie, Eddie Cooper, Eddie with the hot cherry red, dual exhaust, heavy silver chrome, radio- blasting, ’55 Chevy (my brother Timmy told me about cars and their doo-dads, I just like to look good in them and the ’55 is the “boss”), that I knew I would be just crazy to sit in, and give the “look”, the superior “I’m with a hot guy, and sitting in a hot car , bow down peasants look,” came rumbling and tumbling into town.
Summer beach time, soaking up the sun down between the yacht clubs beach time, summer not a care in the world time , Sue, my best friend Sue, my best friend Sue and all that stuff they say about her and the boys is just fantasy, men fantasy, and I were sitting just talking about this and that, oh well, about boys, and I was telling her the latest about Billy, Billy from the neighborhood, who I had been going out with for ages, more or less, Billy with the reading too many books and wanting to talk poetry or “beat” stuff, Billy, Billy with the no car, or sometimes car but no “boss” car, never, when Eddie, Eddie, Eddie John Cooper, parked his honey Chevy and came over to us, through all that sand and all,
Eddie gave Sue the once over, like guys will do automatically, even though I secretly thrill to know that that once over is just a game because even as he came over the sand I could see he had eyes, big blue eyes, for me, only me,
We talked, idle talk, sex in the air talk, but don’t talk about talk, still talk a lot for a summer beach day, and I knew, I swear I knew he wanted to ask me out for later, or maybe right there to ride in his car but three’s company, and for once I couldn’t shake Sue, my best friend Sue, Sue with the million boyfriends so she says, who I could see was taken in by his big blued-eyed, black haired, tight tee-shirt, blue jean-ed charm too.
Truce, Sue truce, as we walked home, Eddie-less, a few blocks away. Truce, except that I heard a big engine, a big “boss” car engine, coming up behind me as I hit the sidewalk in front of my house, and dream, dream wake me up, it was Eddie, Eddie John Cooper and that cherry ’57 Chevy. He said, and I will never forget this, “Hop in,” and opened the door. I was suppose to have a “date”, some donk poetry reading date with Billy, ah, Billy who. We were off as soon as I close that cherry door.
And we were off, off for a sweet summer of love, ’55 Chevy love and okay, truth, because I know that Sue probably blabbed it around but I let Eddie take me to the back seat of that warm-bodied Chevy one night, and some nights after that. But let me just tell you this about Sue, my best friend Sue, honest, she’s the one who told me what to do with a boy, ya, she told me everything.
Come late August as summer beach love drew to an end and those damn school bells seemed ready to ring, Eddie, out of school Eddie my love, told me he had a job offer in another state and he needed to take the job to support his mother and his ’57 Chevy.
I started crying, crying like crazy, trying to make him stay, stay with his ever-lovin’ Betty but no he had to go. He didn’t know about a phone, or a phone call, but he said he would write and I haven’t heard from him since even though I wear out the mailman every day.”
Christ my heart bleeds for Betty every time I think about what Eddie has done, and see, I know Eddie, no I don’t know Eddie personally but I know Eddie stuff, stuff that has been going on since Adam and Eve, hell, probably before that.
But Betty, Betty, sweet Betty, I hate to break it to you but Eddie, Eddie John Cooper ain’t coming back. And old Eddie ain’t writing and it ain’t because he doesn’t have the three cents for a stamp, no Eddie, well, enough of that, let's just say Eddie’s moved on.
And Betty, Betty hold onto your Eddie My Love dream for a moment. But Betty, tomorrow, not tomorrow tomorrow but some tomorrow you‘ve got to move on. And Betty then why don’t you call your Billy. I’ll be here by the phone, the midnight phone.
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-On Young Vanguardism (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 far as I know the youth group of this organization, the Workers League, no longer exits (I will stand corrected if the case is otherwise) but that is not as important as the question posed in the article about youth vanguardism. In America that question, the question of who would lead the revolution, has been resolved by time and history. Not the youth, at least not youth as an undifferentiated mass, and certainly not youth as Ipod/facebook/myspace/sidekick/whatever nation. Nevertheless, as the student upsurges in Europe, especially France and Great Britain, portent this question could come up again. Moreover, this article is a nice exposition on the relationship between the revolutionary party and its youth auxiliary, and what it should not be.
********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forbears of the Young Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 10-January/February 1972
Workers League Youth Vanguardism: Fake Youth Conference
NEW YORK--The Workers League "Conference for Youth to Fight Back" held December 18 re¬presented yet another in the WL's long series of attempts to set up a youth front group in the U.S. ("Revolt,” "YoungWorkers League, “etc.) Tim Wohlforth followed the precedent set by his mentor, Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League, right down the line in setting up his youth conference just like the British Young Socialists, the street-demonstration, rock-band low-level youth group Healy personally runs.
Wohlforth himself set the tone of the conference, which was youth vanguardist through and through. "Youth will bring consciousness to the working class, " "Youth will force the trade unions to take up the struggle, " he drummed into his audience, which consisted mostly of high school students, most of whom have probably never attended a radical political meeting before. The other speeches given, one by a member of the Young Socialists, who in her opening remarks attacked the Spartacist League, and one by a Peruvian attacking the Partido Obrero Revolucionario of Bolivia, went over the heads of most of the audience, whose questions were naive ones such as "Will we lose our freedom under socialism?, " "What is Stalinism?, " etc. When the question of unity of the left was raised, Lucy St. John said, “We are the only revolutionary tendency in the world!" The young audience was thus whipped into shape, warned to avoid other groups on the left—all of which, according to the WL, embody betrayal itself-revisionism, Stalinism or reformism.
What was omitted is as important as what was said. During the hour or so of audience questions about "unity,” Wohlforth and Co. never used, much less explained, the term "united front.” Such vital questions as racial and sex¬ual oppression and imperialism were not even marginally mentioned.
In order to appeal to youth militancy, Wohlforth exaggerated fascistic elements in the U. S. today. He warned, “We'll all be in concentration camps in a few years if something isn't done—that's how far they'll go!"
The entire conference was run in extreme bureaucratic fashion, with questions left inadequately answered or unanswered altogether. Political opponents were excluded on sight. One speaker, suspected of being a supporter of the Labor Committee, was ordered to sit down in the middle of asking a question.
Youth Manipulation
At the end of the speeches, voting took place. On what, one may well ask--on the "program" (the leaflet handed out for the conference), on having a steering committee (for what?), and to have an "action" sometime in March. There was no discussion, there was no explanation of what this voting meant, of whether it is the founding of a youth organization, of the relation of youth to the party, no explanation of anything.
This "democratic" gesture—the vote—was a cynical and disgusting manipulation of potentially serious young militants. To ram through this "program,” to manipulate young militants who lack the experience to see through this trickery--or if they do, who will walk out disgusted by what they believe to be "socialism"--is a crime against the revolutionary movement.
Of course, we realize the WL could not afford discussion on its "program,” could not afford comparison to other radical groups, particularly to the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY), the youth section of the Spartacist League. The RCY is not a front group, but a Trotskyist youth group affiliated to the SL along Leninist lines of organization. The RCY sees the working class, not the undifferentiated "youth" as the vanguard of the revolution. The SL-RCY passed out a leaflet criticizing the "program" and had available the RCY program, organizational rules and youth-party relations document in pamphlet form. (Our founding conference spent two full days going over these documents, following two months of pre-conference discussion, and only after this thorough and democratic discussion, voted and approved them!)
WL Youth "Program"
The WL "program" is notable for its lack of Trotskyist politics—the word "socialist" ap¬pears only once, and then as the unspecified program for the future "labor party,” which is called for without a single reference to the strug¬gle against the reactionary trade union bureaucracy. The "program" is largely economist in content; for example, the section on the Vietnam war does not even mention military support to the NLF against imperialism! Its primary purpose is stated as building "the widest campaign among the youth"—which youth, Wohlforth made clear at the conference, is "all youth who want to fight back, " recruited at the dances, at the sporting events, off the streets, anywhere and everywhere! This assumes the undifferentiated "youth" to be inherently revolutionary, a capitulation to petty-bourgeois misconceptions. (In typical flip-flop fashion, Wohlforth took the opposite position a few nights earlier at Stony Brook, where driven to a rage by opposition questions from the floor, he screamed, "The WL is entirely hostile to the middle class!", also a thoroughly un-Marxist position, since the middle class is an intermediate social class and in periods of social crisis elements drawn from the middle class can be won to the proletarian revolutionary cause.)
The WL youth conference represented a profound capitulation to the petty-bourgeois mood of youth vanguardism~-the idea that "the youth,” who are in fact drawn from all social classes, are. inherently revolutionary. Given strong working-class leadership, other oppressed groups (youth, ethnic minorities, women, etc.) can be a valuable component of the revolutionary movement. But without deep political and organizational ties to the Trotskyist proletarian van¬guard organization, the militant radicalism of other social groupings only reinforces New Left, poly-vanguardist illusions.
The WL's approach to building a youth group is not just an aberration, but flows directly and consistently from the real "method" of the WL which sacrifices Marxist principle to the opportunities of the moment. We have assembled a few of the more glaring examples of the opportunism of the WL which have led us to characterize this group as counterfeit Trotskyists and what Lenin called "political bandits. "
Some Questions for the WL
The WL supported the reactionary and racist strike of NYC police in Jan. 1971, claiming that cops are workers too, and in fact-were leading the struggle of all NYC labor. How can they simultaneously defend the Panthers or the Attica prisoners, most of whom were put there by the same cops? If there hadn't been a riot, would they have supported the demands of the Attica Correction Officers—all AFSCME members—for better riot equipment?
The WL characterized the Panthers as a black version of the Weathermen and "proto-fascist" in Oct. 1969, and thereby on the other side of the class line. Yet a year later the WL hailed Huey Newton for embracing "dialectics"(shortly before he embraced the church).
While now attacking the Mao Tse Tung government of China for its criminal support of the West Pakistan government for cheap diplomatic advantage, they fail to mention that the WL called for support to Mao during the Cultural Revolution because "Mao's line has not been one of capitulation to imperialism.”
Instead of a policy of revolutionary defeatism on both sides in the India-Pakistani war, the WL urges support for India, thereby subordinating the just Bengali struggle to the ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie, and abandoning Trot¬sky's theory of Permanent Revolution which states that only through proletarian revolution can even bourgeois-democratic demands be real¬ized in the colonial countries.
The WL denounces the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionaro for its popular frontist maneuvers. Yet the WL itself called for support to the Allende Popular Front in Chile, claiming "as a step in this understanding the workers must hold Allende to his promises.” (21 Sept '70). This formulation "to support insofar as... “was the same rationale used by Stalin to support Kerensky in 1917, and was fought by Lenin.
The WL condemned any participation in the NPAC April 24 demonstration as class collaboration, then turned around and defended the right of imperialist U. S. Senator Hartke to speak "against the war" at the July 4 NPAC conference, joining with goon squads of the reformist SWP to beat up and expel Spartacists, RCYers and others who oppose class collaboration in the anti-war movement.
Does the WL still defend excluding any reference to either racial oppression or the Vietnam war from their "labor party" program as they did in 1968 when they formed "Trade Unionists for a Labor Party"?
For years the WL touted its cynical toadying to Gerry Healy's SLL in England as "internationalism" and passed off the "International Committee"—a rotten bloc between the SLL and the French OCI, along with their respective satellites—as a disciplined international organization. The IC split has now ripped away this "internationalist" facade from what was all along a non-aggression pact papering over basic and long-standing differences.
Don't Be Fooled!
These are only a selection of the twists and turns and 180 degree shifts in line of the WL in the recent past. They are typical of the entire history of this group since its inception. The Spartacist League wrote in 1970: "Faced with such a history, the much vaunted 'Marxist method' that Wohlforth teaches his members is of necessity a profound cynicism which cannot but erode and destroy the backbone of those who start out by seeking revolution and end up following Wohlforth ever deeper into the mire, " We say to young militants seeking the path of revolutionary communism: do not take the "fools gold" of the Workers League for good coin. There is a lot more than loud speeches and big banners involved in becoming a professional revolutionist.
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 far as I know the youth group of this organization, the Workers League, no longer exits (I will stand corrected if the case is otherwise) but that is not as important as the question posed in the article about youth vanguardism. In America that question, the question of who would lead the revolution, has been resolved by time and history. Not the youth, at least not youth as an undifferentiated mass, and certainly not youth as Ipod/facebook/myspace/sidekick/whatever nation. Nevertheless, as the student upsurges in Europe, especially France and Great Britain, portent this question could come up again. Moreover, this article is a nice exposition on the relationship between the revolutionary party and its youth auxiliary, and what it should not be.
********
From The Revolutionary Communist Youth Newsletter (forbears of the Young Spartacus Youth Clubs), Number 10-January/February 1972
Workers League Youth Vanguardism: Fake Youth Conference
NEW YORK--The Workers League "Conference for Youth to Fight Back" held December 18 re¬presented yet another in the WL's long series of attempts to set up a youth front group in the U.S. ("Revolt,” "YoungWorkers League, “etc.) Tim Wohlforth followed the precedent set by his mentor, Gerry Healy of the British Socialist Labour League, right down the line in setting up his youth conference just like the British Young Socialists, the street-demonstration, rock-band low-level youth group Healy personally runs.
Wohlforth himself set the tone of the conference, which was youth vanguardist through and through. "Youth will bring consciousness to the working class, " "Youth will force the trade unions to take up the struggle, " he drummed into his audience, which consisted mostly of high school students, most of whom have probably never attended a radical political meeting before. The other speeches given, one by a member of the Young Socialists, who in her opening remarks attacked the Spartacist League, and one by a Peruvian attacking the Partido Obrero Revolucionario of Bolivia, went over the heads of most of the audience, whose questions were naive ones such as "Will we lose our freedom under socialism?, " "What is Stalinism?, " etc. When the question of unity of the left was raised, Lucy St. John said, “We are the only revolutionary tendency in the world!" The young audience was thus whipped into shape, warned to avoid other groups on the left—all of which, according to the WL, embody betrayal itself-revisionism, Stalinism or reformism.
What was omitted is as important as what was said. During the hour or so of audience questions about "unity,” Wohlforth and Co. never used, much less explained, the term "united front.” Such vital questions as racial and sex¬ual oppression and imperialism were not even marginally mentioned.
In order to appeal to youth militancy, Wohlforth exaggerated fascistic elements in the U. S. today. He warned, “We'll all be in concentration camps in a few years if something isn't done—that's how far they'll go!"
The entire conference was run in extreme bureaucratic fashion, with questions left inadequately answered or unanswered altogether. Political opponents were excluded on sight. One speaker, suspected of being a supporter of the Labor Committee, was ordered to sit down in the middle of asking a question.
Youth Manipulation
At the end of the speeches, voting took place. On what, one may well ask--on the "program" (the leaflet handed out for the conference), on having a steering committee (for what?), and to have an "action" sometime in March. There was no discussion, there was no explanation of what this voting meant, of whether it is the founding of a youth organization, of the relation of youth to the party, no explanation of anything.
This "democratic" gesture—the vote—was a cynical and disgusting manipulation of potentially serious young militants. To ram through this "program,” to manipulate young militants who lack the experience to see through this trickery--or if they do, who will walk out disgusted by what they believe to be "socialism"--is a crime against the revolutionary movement.
Of course, we realize the WL could not afford discussion on its "program,” could not afford comparison to other radical groups, particularly to the Revolutionary Communist Youth (RCY), the youth section of the Spartacist League. The RCY is not a front group, but a Trotskyist youth group affiliated to the SL along Leninist lines of organization. The RCY sees the working class, not the undifferentiated "youth" as the vanguard of the revolution. The SL-RCY passed out a leaflet criticizing the "program" and had available the RCY program, organizational rules and youth-party relations document in pamphlet form. (Our founding conference spent two full days going over these documents, following two months of pre-conference discussion, and only after this thorough and democratic discussion, voted and approved them!)
WL Youth "Program"
The WL "program" is notable for its lack of Trotskyist politics—the word "socialist" ap¬pears only once, and then as the unspecified program for the future "labor party,” which is called for without a single reference to the strug¬gle against the reactionary trade union bureaucracy. The "program" is largely economist in content; for example, the section on the Vietnam war does not even mention military support to the NLF against imperialism! Its primary purpose is stated as building "the widest campaign among the youth"—which youth, Wohlforth made clear at the conference, is "all youth who want to fight back, " recruited at the dances, at the sporting events, off the streets, anywhere and everywhere! This assumes the undifferentiated "youth" to be inherently revolutionary, a capitulation to petty-bourgeois misconceptions. (In typical flip-flop fashion, Wohlforth took the opposite position a few nights earlier at Stony Brook, where driven to a rage by opposition questions from the floor, he screamed, "The WL is entirely hostile to the middle class!", also a thoroughly un-Marxist position, since the middle class is an intermediate social class and in periods of social crisis elements drawn from the middle class can be won to the proletarian revolutionary cause.)
The WL youth conference represented a profound capitulation to the petty-bourgeois mood of youth vanguardism~-the idea that "the youth,” who are in fact drawn from all social classes, are. inherently revolutionary. Given strong working-class leadership, other oppressed groups (youth, ethnic minorities, women, etc.) can be a valuable component of the revolutionary movement. But without deep political and organizational ties to the Trotskyist proletarian van¬guard organization, the militant radicalism of other social groupings only reinforces New Left, poly-vanguardist illusions.
The WL's approach to building a youth group is not just an aberration, but flows directly and consistently from the real "method" of the WL which sacrifices Marxist principle to the opportunities of the moment. We have assembled a few of the more glaring examples of the opportunism of the WL which have led us to characterize this group as counterfeit Trotskyists and what Lenin called "political bandits. "
Some Questions for the WL
The WL supported the reactionary and racist strike of NYC police in Jan. 1971, claiming that cops are workers too, and in fact-were leading the struggle of all NYC labor. How can they simultaneously defend the Panthers or the Attica prisoners, most of whom were put there by the same cops? If there hadn't been a riot, would they have supported the demands of the Attica Correction Officers—all AFSCME members—for better riot equipment?
The WL characterized the Panthers as a black version of the Weathermen and "proto-fascist" in Oct. 1969, and thereby on the other side of the class line. Yet a year later the WL hailed Huey Newton for embracing "dialectics"(shortly before he embraced the church).
While now attacking the Mao Tse Tung government of China for its criminal support of the West Pakistan government for cheap diplomatic advantage, they fail to mention that the WL called for support to Mao during the Cultural Revolution because "Mao's line has not been one of capitulation to imperialism.”
Instead of a policy of revolutionary defeatism on both sides in the India-Pakistani war, the WL urges support for India, thereby subordinating the just Bengali struggle to the ambitions of the Indian bourgeoisie, and abandoning Trot¬sky's theory of Permanent Revolution which states that only through proletarian revolution can even bourgeois-democratic demands be real¬ized in the colonial countries.
The WL denounces the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionaro for its popular frontist maneuvers. Yet the WL itself called for support to the Allende Popular Front in Chile, claiming "as a step in this understanding the workers must hold Allende to his promises.” (21 Sept '70). This formulation "to support insofar as... “was the same rationale used by Stalin to support Kerensky in 1917, and was fought by Lenin.
The WL condemned any participation in the NPAC April 24 demonstration as class collaboration, then turned around and defended the right of imperialist U. S. Senator Hartke to speak "against the war" at the July 4 NPAC conference, joining with goon squads of the reformist SWP to beat up and expel Spartacists, RCYers and others who oppose class collaboration in the anti-war movement.
Does the WL still defend excluding any reference to either racial oppression or the Vietnam war from their "labor party" program as they did in 1968 when they formed "Trade Unionists for a Labor Party"?
For years the WL touted its cynical toadying to Gerry Healy's SLL in England as "internationalism" and passed off the "International Committee"—a rotten bloc between the SLL and the French OCI, along with their respective satellites—as a disciplined international organization. The IC split has now ripped away this "internationalist" facade from what was all along a non-aggression pact papering over basic and long-standing differences.
Don't Be Fooled!
These are only a selection of the twists and turns and 180 degree shifts in line of the WL in the recent past. They are typical of the entire history of this group since its inception. The Spartacist League wrote in 1970: "Faced with such a history, the much vaunted 'Marxist method' that Wohlforth teaches his members is of necessity a profound cynicism which cannot but erode and destroy the backbone of those who start out by seeking revolution and end up following Wohlforth ever deeper into the mire, " We say to young militants seeking the path of revolutionary communism: do not take the "fools gold" of the Workers League for good coin. There is a lot more than loud speeches and big banners involved in becoming a professional revolutionist.
From The Lenin Internet Archives- Lenin And The Fight Against Imperialist War (1914-1917)-The Question of the Unity of Internationalists(1915)
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 Question of the Unity of Internationalists
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 41, May 1, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 188-191.
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
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The war has led to a grave crisis in the whole of international socialism. Like any other crisis, the present crisis of socialism has revealed ever more clearly the inner contradictions lying deep within it; it has torn off many a false and conventional mask, and has shown up in the sharpest light what is outmoded and rotten in socialism, and what its further growth and advance towards victory will depend on.
Practically all Social-Democrats in Russia realise that. the old divisions and groupings are, if not obsolescent, then at least undergoing a transformation. In the forefront is the division on the main issue raised by the war, viz., the division into “internationalists” and “social-patriots”. We have taken these terms from the editorial in Nashe Slovo No. 42, and for the time being shall not deal with the question of whether they should be supplemented by contrasting revolutionary Social-Democrats with national liberal-labour politicians.
It is not a matter of names, to be sure; the gist of the main present-day division has been correctly indicated in Nashe Slovo . The internationalists, it says, are “united in their negative attitude towards social-patriotism as represented by Plekhanov”. The editors call upon the “now disunited groups” “to come to an understanding and unite for at least a single act-expressing the attitude of Russian Social-Democrats towards the present. war and Russian social-patriotism”.
Besides this appeal through the press, the editors of Nashe Slovo have sent a letter to us and the Organising Committee, proposing that, with their participation, a conference be called to discuss the matter. In our reply we spoke of the necessity “to clarify certain preliminary questions, so as to know whether we are at one in the main issue”. We stressed two such preliminary questions: (1) no declaration would help unmask the “social-patriots” (the editors naming Plekhanov, Alexinsky, and the well-known group of Petrograd liquidationist writers who support the XYZ journal[1] who “falsify the will of the advanced proletariat of Russia” (the expression used by the editors of Nashe Slovo); to unmask the social-patriots, a protracted struggle is necessary; (2) what grounds were there to count the Organising Committee among the “internationalists”?
On the other hand, the Organising Committee’s secretariat abroad sent us a copy of its reply to Nashe Slovo, which, in short, asserted that a “preliminary” selection of certain groups and the “exclusion of others” were out of the question; and that “invitations to the conference should be sent to the representatives abroad of all party centres and groups that attended ... the Brussels Conference of the International Socialist Bureau before the war” (letter of March 25, 1915).
Thus, the Organising Committee has declined on principle to confer with the internationalists alone, since it wishes also to confer with the social-patriots (the Plekhanov and the Alexinsky trends are known to have been represented at Brussels). The same spirit marked the resolution of the Social-Democrats gathered in Nervi (Nashe Slovo No. 53), which was adopted following Yonov’s report (and obviously expressed the views of this representative of the most radical and internationalist elements in the Bund).
This resolution, which is highly characteristic and valuable in helping us specify the “middle road” being sought by many socialists living abroad, expresses sympathy with Nashe Slovo’s “principles”, but at the same time expresses disagreement with Nashe S/ova’s stand, “which consists in creating organisational divisions, uniting internationalist socialists alone, and defending the necessity of splits within socialist proletarian parties that have historically come into being”. In the opinion of the gathering, Nashe Slovo’s “one-sided handling” (of these questions) is “highly detrimental to clarification of problems connected with the restoration of the International”.
We have already pointed out that the views of Axeirod, the Organising Committee’s official representative, are social-chauvinist. Neither in the press nor in its correspondence has Nashe Slovo made any reply to this. We have pointed out that the Burid’s stand is the same, with a bias towards Germanophile chauvinism. The Nervi resolution has born this out in a manner which, if indirect, is highly significant: it has declared that unification of internationalists alone is harmful and schismatic. The question has been presented with a clarity that is most praiseworthy.
Still clearer is the Organising Committee’s reply, which expresses, not an oblique attitude towards the issue, but one that is straightforward and formal. We must confer, it says, not without the social-patriots, but with them.
We should be thankful to the Organising Committee for its letter to Nashe Slovo, confirming the correctness of our opinion of that body.
Does that mean that Nashe Slovo’s entire idea of uniting the internationalists has been wrecked? No, it does not. While there exist ideological solidarity and a sincere desire to combat social-patriotism, no failure of any conferences can check unity among internationalists. At the disposal of the editors of Nashe Slovo is the great instrument of a daily paper. They can do something immeasurably more businesslike and serious than calling conferences and issuing declarations; they can invite all groups, and themselves start: (1) to immediately evolve full, precise, unequivocal and perfectly clear definitions of the content of internationalism (it being a fact that Vandervelde, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lensch, and Haenisch also call themselves internationalists!), of opportunism, the collapse of the Second International, the tasks and the methods of combating socialpatriotism, etc.; (2) to rally forces for a severe struggle for certain principles, not only abroad, but mainly in Russia.
Indeed, can anyone deny that there is no other way towards the victory of internationalism over social-patriotism, and that there can be none? Half a century of Russian political emigration (and thirty years of Social-Democratic emigration)-have these not shown that all declarations, conferences, etc., abroad are powerless, insignificant, and empty, unless they are supported by a lasting movement of some social stratum in Russia? Does not the present war also teach us that everything that is immature or decaying, everything that is conventional or diplomatic, will collapse at the first blow?
During the eight months of war, all Social-Democratic centres, groups, currents, and shades of opinion have held conferences with all and sundry, and have come out with “declarations”, i.e., made their opinions known to the public. Today the task is different, and closer to action: more distrust of resonant declarations and spectacular conferences; more energy in evolving precise replies and advice to writers, propagandists, agitators, and all thinking workers, written in a way that cannot but be understood; more clarity and purposefulness in mustering the forces for a long-term effort to give effect to such advice.
Much has been given to the editors of Nashe Slovo—after all, they are a daily paper!—and they will have much to answer for if they fail to carry out even this “minimum programme”.
A final remark: in May 1910, exactly five years ago, we made mention, in our press abroad, of a highly outstanding political fact, of “far greater significance” than the conferences and declarations of many very “powerful” Social-Democratic centres, i. e., the fact of the formation in Russia of a group of legalist writers working in the selfsame XYZ journal. What has been shown by the facts during these five years, so eventful in the history of the labour movement in Russia and the whole world? Have not the facts shown that in Russia we have a certain social nucleus to rally the elements of a national liberal-labour party (after the “European” pattern)? What are the conclusions forced on all Social-Democrats by the circumstance that, with the exception of Voprosy Strakhovaniya,[2] we see, in Russia, the open expression only of this current, Nashe Dyelo, Strahhovaniye Rabochikh, Severny Gobs,[3] Maslov and Plekhanov?
So we repeat: more distrust of resonant declarations, and more courage in facing grave political realities.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Lenin is referring to Nasha Zarya, a journal of the Menshevik liquidators.
[2] Voprosy Strakhovaniya (Problems of Insurance)—a Bolshevik legal journal, published at intervals in St. Petersburg from October 1913 to March 1918. It worked, not only for the achievement of workers’ insurance, but also for the Bolshevik “uncurtailed slogans” of an eight-hour day, confiscation of the landed estates, and a democratic republic. The Bolsheviks A. N. Vinokurov, N. A. Skripnik, P. I. Stuka, N. M. Shvernik and others contributed to the journal.
[3] Severny Gales (Voice of the North)—Menshevik weekly, publshed in Petrograd from January to March 1915.
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.
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V. I. Lenin
The Question of the Unity of Internationalists
Published: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 41, May 1, 1915. Published according to the text in Sotsial-Demokrat.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [197[4]], Moscow, Volume 21, pages 188-191.
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.
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The war has led to a grave crisis in the whole of international socialism. Like any other crisis, the present crisis of socialism has revealed ever more clearly the inner contradictions lying deep within it; it has torn off many a false and conventional mask, and has shown up in the sharpest light what is outmoded and rotten in socialism, and what its further growth and advance towards victory will depend on.
Practically all Social-Democrats in Russia realise that. the old divisions and groupings are, if not obsolescent, then at least undergoing a transformation. In the forefront is the division on the main issue raised by the war, viz., the division into “internationalists” and “social-patriots”. We have taken these terms from the editorial in Nashe Slovo No. 42, and for the time being shall not deal with the question of whether they should be supplemented by contrasting revolutionary Social-Democrats with national liberal-labour politicians.
It is not a matter of names, to be sure; the gist of the main present-day division has been correctly indicated in Nashe Slovo . The internationalists, it says, are “united in their negative attitude towards social-patriotism as represented by Plekhanov”. The editors call upon the “now disunited groups” “to come to an understanding and unite for at least a single act-expressing the attitude of Russian Social-Democrats towards the present. war and Russian social-patriotism”.
Besides this appeal through the press, the editors of Nashe Slovo have sent a letter to us and the Organising Committee, proposing that, with their participation, a conference be called to discuss the matter. In our reply we spoke of the necessity “to clarify certain preliminary questions, so as to know whether we are at one in the main issue”. We stressed two such preliminary questions: (1) no declaration would help unmask the “social-patriots” (the editors naming Plekhanov, Alexinsky, and the well-known group of Petrograd liquidationist writers who support the XYZ journal[1] who “falsify the will of the advanced proletariat of Russia” (the expression used by the editors of Nashe Slovo); to unmask the social-patriots, a protracted struggle is necessary; (2) what grounds were there to count the Organising Committee among the “internationalists”?
On the other hand, the Organising Committee’s secretariat abroad sent us a copy of its reply to Nashe Slovo, which, in short, asserted that a “preliminary” selection of certain groups and the “exclusion of others” were out of the question; and that “invitations to the conference should be sent to the representatives abroad of all party centres and groups that attended ... the Brussels Conference of the International Socialist Bureau before the war” (letter of March 25, 1915).
Thus, the Organising Committee has declined on principle to confer with the internationalists alone, since it wishes also to confer with the social-patriots (the Plekhanov and the Alexinsky trends are known to have been represented at Brussels). The same spirit marked the resolution of the Social-Democrats gathered in Nervi (Nashe Slovo No. 53), which was adopted following Yonov’s report (and obviously expressed the views of this representative of the most radical and internationalist elements in the Bund).
This resolution, which is highly characteristic and valuable in helping us specify the “middle road” being sought by many socialists living abroad, expresses sympathy with Nashe Slovo’s “principles”, but at the same time expresses disagreement with Nashe S/ova’s stand, “which consists in creating organisational divisions, uniting internationalist socialists alone, and defending the necessity of splits within socialist proletarian parties that have historically come into being”. In the opinion of the gathering, Nashe Slovo’s “one-sided handling” (of these questions) is “highly detrimental to clarification of problems connected with the restoration of the International”.
We have already pointed out that the views of Axeirod, the Organising Committee’s official representative, are social-chauvinist. Neither in the press nor in its correspondence has Nashe Slovo made any reply to this. We have pointed out that the Burid’s stand is the same, with a bias towards Germanophile chauvinism. The Nervi resolution has born this out in a manner which, if indirect, is highly significant: it has declared that unification of internationalists alone is harmful and schismatic. The question has been presented with a clarity that is most praiseworthy.
Still clearer is the Organising Committee’s reply, which expresses, not an oblique attitude towards the issue, but one that is straightforward and formal. We must confer, it says, not without the social-patriots, but with them.
We should be thankful to the Organising Committee for its letter to Nashe Slovo, confirming the correctness of our opinion of that body.
Does that mean that Nashe Slovo’s entire idea of uniting the internationalists has been wrecked? No, it does not. While there exist ideological solidarity and a sincere desire to combat social-patriotism, no failure of any conferences can check unity among internationalists. At the disposal of the editors of Nashe Slovo is the great instrument of a daily paper. They can do something immeasurably more businesslike and serious than calling conferences and issuing declarations; they can invite all groups, and themselves start: (1) to immediately evolve full, precise, unequivocal and perfectly clear definitions of the content of internationalism (it being a fact that Vandervelde, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lensch, and Haenisch also call themselves internationalists!), of opportunism, the collapse of the Second International, the tasks and the methods of combating socialpatriotism, etc.; (2) to rally forces for a severe struggle for certain principles, not only abroad, but mainly in Russia.
Indeed, can anyone deny that there is no other way towards the victory of internationalism over social-patriotism, and that there can be none? Half a century of Russian political emigration (and thirty years of Social-Democratic emigration)-have these not shown that all declarations, conferences, etc., abroad are powerless, insignificant, and empty, unless they are supported by a lasting movement of some social stratum in Russia? Does not the present war also teach us that everything that is immature or decaying, everything that is conventional or diplomatic, will collapse at the first blow?
During the eight months of war, all Social-Democratic centres, groups, currents, and shades of opinion have held conferences with all and sundry, and have come out with “declarations”, i.e., made their opinions known to the public. Today the task is different, and closer to action: more distrust of resonant declarations and spectacular conferences; more energy in evolving precise replies and advice to writers, propagandists, agitators, and all thinking workers, written in a way that cannot but be understood; more clarity and purposefulness in mustering the forces for a long-term effort to give effect to such advice.
Much has been given to the editors of Nashe Slovo—after all, they are a daily paper!—and they will have much to answer for if they fail to carry out even this “minimum programme”.
A final remark: in May 1910, exactly five years ago, we made mention, in our press abroad, of a highly outstanding political fact, of “far greater significance” than the conferences and declarations of many very “powerful” Social-Democratic centres, i. e., the fact of the formation in Russia of a group of legalist writers working in the selfsame XYZ journal. What has been shown by the facts during these five years, so eventful in the history of the labour movement in Russia and the whole world? Have not the facts shown that in Russia we have a certain social nucleus to rally the elements of a national liberal-labour party (after the “European” pattern)? What are the conclusions forced on all Social-Democrats by the circumstance that, with the exception of Voprosy Strakhovaniya,[2] we see, in Russia, the open expression only of this current, Nashe Dyelo, Strahhovaniye Rabochikh, Severny Gobs,[3] Maslov and Plekhanov?
So we repeat: more distrust of resonant declarations, and more courage in facing grave political realities.
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Notes
[1] Lenin is referring to Nasha Zarya, a journal of the Menshevik liquidators.
[2] Voprosy Strakhovaniya (Problems of Insurance)—a Bolshevik legal journal, published at intervals in St. Petersburg from October 1913 to March 1918. It worked, not only for the achievement of workers’ insurance, but also for the Bolshevik “uncurtailed slogans” of an eight-hour day, confiscation of the landed estates, and a democratic republic. The Bolsheviks A. N. Vinokurov, N. A. Skripnik, P. I. Stuka, N. M. Shvernik and others contributed to the journal.
[3] Severny Gales (Voice of the North)—Menshevik weekly, publshed in Petrograd from January to March 1915.
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