Markin comment on this series:
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 just 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 for educational purposes only:
"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.
***********
Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Three-"Chartism" (Young Spartacus-April 1976)
By Joseph Seymour
EDITOR'S NOTE: In this series Young Spartacus has made available for our readers a presentation on the origins of Marxism given by Joseph Seymour, a Central Committee member of the Spartacist League, at the Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley during January. The talk, "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," attempts to debunk the academic/New Left emphasis on Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy. Comrade Seymour demonstrates the decisive influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two preceding generations of revolutionary militants who struggled to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order.
We have serialized the presentation in three parts. The first part discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its insurrectionary and most radical wing maintained by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti. The second installment analyzed the Carbonari conspiracy, the French revolution of 1830 and the continuity of insurrectionary communism; Blanquism. Like the first two parts, this concluding section on British Chartism follows this verbal presentation with only minimum editorial alterations.
********
In the literature on the origins of Marxism the element which I believe is most unappreciated, most misunderstood and most neglected is the shaping impact of the British working-class movement. For it was not the French but the British working class which had forged the most class-conscious and mass revolutionary organizations.
Without his assimilation of the British experience, through his close collaboration with the leaders of Chartism and Engels, Marx could not have learned what is essential in Marxism: the centrality of the mass organizations of the proletariat, the importance of the industrial revolution, the significance of the industrial proletariat. Simply on the basis of the German and French experience Marx could not have transcended a more sober version of Blanquism.
In British Chartism, and only in Chartism, there was a mass, national organization of the proletariat with a revolutionary thrust. At that time the French proletariat remained insufficiently differentiated from the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement as a whole. While less selfconsciously world historic than French communism, British Chartism nevertheless was far more class conscious, far more proletarian and far more massive in character. In this sense, Chartism was a more advanced political movement.
The bourgeois-democratic revolution eclipsed
The British revolutionary movement partially parallels but also sharply contrasts with the French. I will emphasize the contrasts, for they provide the complement which represents the
synthesis of 1840's Marxism.
In the early nineteenth century France was not a feudal society, although a feudal order did control the state apparatus. The French plebeian masses and revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie tended to be organized from the top down by a bourgeoisie prepared to engage in insurrection against the feudal state apparatus, provided they could control the struggle.
But in Britain, since the bourgeois-democratic revolution had occurred early on, there was at this time no feudal order. Rather, the state apparatus was controlled by a landed capitalist class which came into conflict with the rising industrial and commercial class. Given the existence of a semblance of representative government, the tendencies toward bourgeois-democratic revolution after the seventeenth century were muted, except for the one brief crisis in the years 1831-32. From its inception the British bourgeois-democratic revolutionary movement was plebeian. Whereas in France one had a tendency for generals without armies, in Britain the tendency was for armies without generals.
In the early nineteenth century the British working-class movement was characterized by geographical dispersion and a lack of a centralized national organization. But there was a richness, solidity and depth in local organizations which manifested a complete interpenetration of economic and political tasks. In this period the "trade union" was as much an instrument for insurrectionary action as for elementary wage struggles. And in Luddism it was both. The British working class could go from straight trade unionism to cooperativism to democratic agitation to insurrection within the same organizational framework. There was no conception that the organizations of the working class had two purposes— one aimed at the state, the other at the employer. That's a post-1848 phenomenon.
In Britain, unlike France, the revolutionary plebeian masses were dispersed. Since the French bourgeoisie had not yet shed its revolutionary role, Paris was a revolutionary city, as well as a manufacturing city, in a sense that London was not. The British pre-industrial proletariat to a great extent constituted the rural weavers all across northern England—the Lyons silk-weavers writ large. So London was conservative, while the centers of revolution were the small impoverished weaving villages, the mining towns in Wales and Scotland, and the early manufacturing centers like Manchester.
Owenism and the 1832 crisis
During the 1820's the British trade unionists en masse embraced Owenism. A pacifist socialist doctrine, Owenism played in the British context the same role as Saint Simonism in France.
Yet in many respects Owenism was its polar opposite. Saint Simonism was technocratic state socialism which appealed to the democratic intelligentsia. Owenism represented cooperativism which appealed to artisans who were being ruined by the industrial revolution. But this combination of cooperativism and trade unionism was the ideological form and movement by which the British proletariat in its mass came to socialist consciousness.
In 1831-32, partly under the influence of the French revolution of 1830, the British liberal bourgeoisie, with its base in the industrial and commercial classes, was prepared to threaten insurrection to achieve parliamentary reform and topple the parasitic state apparatus. In contrast to France, the workers movement was sufficiently developed that although it, of course, allied with the British liberal bourgeoisie, it did so through its own independent class organizations. All the Owenite socialist trade unionists formed the National Union of the Working Classes as primarily an organization for agitation in favor of universal suffrage. So, the alliance with the bourgeoisie maintained a clear class line.
The period 1831-32 was the only point in modern British history when a bourgeois-democratic revolution might have been possible. Had the Duke of Wellington prevailed, Britain probably would have been shaken by a revolution on an even more radical scale than the 1848 French revolution. But the British landed class lost its nerve and capitulated; they extended the franchise, eliminated the rotten boroughs and gave power to the Whigs, the party of the industrial and commercial classes.
So the bourgeoisie betrayed their proletarian allies, just as the French bourgeoisie led by Lafayette had done in 1830. The franchise which they accepted extended the electorate to little more than ten percent, totally excluding the mass of the proletariat.
This was a great betrayal and was generally recognized as such at the time. In fact, the most advanced elements in the British movement compared the Whigs to the Lafayetteists in France. This was a great blow to the working-class movement. It took about five years for the British working class to regroup, recover and again agitate for universal suffrage.
The movement against the new poor law
The new regime, while liberal in its slight expansion of the franchise and freedoms of expression, pursued directly anti-proletarian laissez faire economic policies. The first measure of the government as a result of the Reform Act was to smash the trade unions and to revoke the "poor laws." Administered by the Anglican Church, "poor law" relief was a form of welfare for those who could not support themselves, an institution going back to Tudor times.
The origin of Chartism as a revolutionary movement lies in the mass
agitation against the new "poor law" legislation, which required recipients
to live sexually segregated in virtue prisons—an 1834 version of force sterilization. The attitude of the British working masses was defiance: "If the government attempts this, we will fight to the death." The mass movement against the "poor law" swept the nor them weaving villages, not when the "poor law" was passed, but a few years later, when Britain entered a severe depression and the masses were appealing for welfare relief.
The early leader of the movement against the new laws, interesting! was not an Owenite but a traditional Methodist minister named J.R. Steven He opposed the elimination of the "po< laws" not in the name of progress b from the traditions of Tory radicalisr "How can you do this to the people England? These laws have stood fi 300 years!" Listen to a typical fire-breathing speech by J.R. Stevens 1839:
"Men of Norwich, fight with your swords, fight with your pistols, fight with your daggers. Women, fight with your nails and teeth [a traditional!! male chauvinist was he, indeed!]. Hu bands and wives, brothers and sister we will war to the knife, so help r God."
—quoted in Mark Hovell,The Chartist Movement
J.R. Stevens was arrested, yet the anti-"poor law" agitation was successful. The regime retreated and never instituted the new "poor law,” although the legislation was not formal repealed.
Contradictions of Chartism
In 1839 the anti-"poor law" movement intersected another, very different political movement. The London labor aristocracy, which had formed the leadership of the National Union of the Working Classes, reconstituted itself as the London Workingmen's Association to propagandize for universal suffrage. While based on a six-point democratic Charter, the London Workingmen's Association restricted its membership to workers. When the violently insurrectionary but defensive "poor law" mass movement was deflected into this movement for universal suffrage and democratic electoral reforms, this intersection produced Chartism.
Chartism embodied a tension which paralleled Blanquism, although in an inverse fashion. Blanquism was based on a communist program, while remaining within the political compass of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Chartism based itself on a bourgeois-democratic program, while representing a purely proletarian, insurrectionary movement.
The stated program of Chartism was not different from English bourgeois radicalism. But its working-class forms of organization, its ulterior socialist program and the violent tone of its propaganda repelled the liberal bourgeoisie. Here is an example of typical Chartist propaganda:
"But though the employment of physical force is as remote as possible from our wishes, the time may come, may perhaps be near, in which the defense of all that is dear to us will compel us to have recourse to it. If our rights as citizens and as men are threatened to be eternally withdrawn from us, if the burden of the nations are always to be disproportionally thrown upon the working classes while property is suffered to remain untaxed, if we are evermore forbidden to purchase our bread in the cheapest market, if a knot of poor law commissioners is always to treat poverty as a crime and to cut asunder the marriage tie, if our addresses to the legislature continue to be visited with contempt and the hope of redress becomes extinguished in our bosoms, then, sir, we honestly tell you we do not mean to submit. On the heads of our oppressors be the guilt and the consequences."
—quoted in Dorothy Thompson, The Early Chartists
Although Chartism had a straightforward democratic program, which even sections of the liberal bourgeoisie could accept, they were not prepared to associate with this kind of propaganda and movement. This was the fundamental contradiction in Chartism: it was a working-class movement with an insurrectionary thrust and an ulterior "levelling11 program, taut with a strictly bourgeois-democratic formal program.
The revolutionary climax: 1839-42
Within Chartism there were four main tendencies. The extreme left were London-based Jacobin communists, led by Bronterre O'Brien, who had translated Buonarroti's work on Babeuf, George Julian Harney and Dr. John Taylor, who had fought with Byron in Greece. They were intensely internationalist and steeped in the French revolutionary tradition. They were reinforced by a group of emigres from the Polish national revolution of 1830, who throughout this period played the role of a revolutionizing and internationalizing factor.
The Chartist masses in the weaving villages of the north were originally organized by Tory radicals like J.R. Stevens. However, this constituency was captured by an Irish nationalist demagogue, named-Feargus O'Connor, who eventually went insane and who displayed • irrationality even in this period.
The right wing of the Chartist movement was based on the London labor aristocracy, which produced quality consumer goods for the wealthy bourgeois market. This wing of the movement was led by William Lovett, who was the original leader of Chartism.
Chartism also had a radical bourgeois appendage, standing outside the workers movement, led by a funny-money crank named Thomas Atwood. He was a banker who argued, "We'll eradicate poverty, unemployment, everything. All we have to do is print more money."
In 1839 the Chartists led a mass campaign to petition parliament. The Chartists convened a series of democratic mass meetings and elected the General Convention of the Industrious Classes, which was the first national, inclusive body with all tendencies, with the proletariat represented more or less in proportion to their strength at the base level.
As it became more and more certain that the petition was going to be rejected, as the hour approached, the Convention faced the question, "What to do next?" The Jacobin communists like Harney and O'Brien began making speeches in favor of insurrection. In response, the bourgeois component split from the Convention.
Significantly, Lovett and the labor aristocracy remained in the Convention to the end. In fact, when Dr. John Taylor, Lovett's main factional opponent, was arrested for agitation, Lovett took the lead in defending him, thereby provoking his own arrest. This strikingly demonstrates the intense class solidarity of Chartism.
A revolutionary crisis had opened. But this crisis was defused by the absence of leadership in the Convention as well as by the competent leadership of the liberal government.
The Convention vacillated. First they voted to call a general strike if the petition was rejected. The very next day, however, they voted to rescind the call for a general strike. Then they voted to undertake a series of economic measures, such as boycotting taxed goods and withholding certain tax payments. But since their constituency was largely unemployed and appealing for welfare under the poor laws, such measures could not be effective. These were weapons suitable to bourgeois radicals, but not to the workers movement.
After the rejection of the petition, the enormous mobilizations and expectations raised by the Convention dissipated in a series of isolated skirmishes and uncoordinated attempts at insurrection. The Jacobin Chartists with the Polish exiled revolutionaries evidently plotted an insurrection but were incapable of mustering the forces and support.
I believe that in 1839 there was the possibility of an uprising like the
Lyons silk weavers' insurrection, but raised to the tenth power. If the government had committed an atrocity, mass violence would certainly have erupted. Of course, there was no possibility of a proletarian revolution in 1839. But there could have been amass proletarian upheaval.
Now, working-class history all too often is discussed in terms of "maturity" and "immaturity." Such terms have an organic, unconscious connotation-the workers movement simply develops automatically. This abstracts from the crucial mechanisms through which historical experiences are transmitted from one proletarian generation to the next.
But in dealing with Chartism in 1839 I believe that the failure of the movement genuinely reflects the "immaturity" of the British working-class movement. Chartism at this time represented the first mass, national working-class movement encompassing all the proletarian tendencies. In the absence of an evolved leadership, and the kinds of historical experiences to produce that leadership, the Chartist* movement could not have generated simply through factional struggle a more competent and capable leadership. Chartism foundered through the several-sided "immaturity" of the working class, not a crisis of leadership in the sense that this is applicable to the present working-class movement.
Revolutionary continuity
In 1842 Chartism passed through another revolutionary climax, which I cannot delve into during this talk. After 1842 the main leadership of Chartism around O'Connor, an unstable and irrational man, attempted to turn the movement into cooperativism. His so-called Chartist land plan involved purchasing land and swindling; finally, O'Connor went bankrupt.
But the left wing of Chartism led by Julian Harney reacted to the defeat in 1842 by turning in a very different direction, a response which contains useful lessons for us today.
Harney realized that after the defeats of 1839 and 1842, the latter quite bloody, the British workers movement was in a depression. Yet Chartism retained its mass following and very considerable organizational resources.
Harney realized that revolutionary upheavals were imminent throughout Europe. Moreover, London was a major center for French, German, Italian and Polish revolutionary exiles. So, Harney devoted his main energies inthe!840's toward these circles and toward revolution in Metternichean Europe, turning his great Chartist newspaper, The Northern Star, into the most internationalist working-class press of its day.
I'll conclude this presentation with an anecdote. But the anecdote illustrates the theme of this entire series of talks: that Marxism originated not as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy, but required an assimilation of the experiences and programs of the previous generations of revolutionary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with a collectivist social order.
Friedrich Engels at the age of 23 was sent from the University of Berlin to Manchester to learn business at one of his father's factories. Being a Utopian socialist Engels first associated himself with the Owenites and contributed to the Owenite press, the New Moral World.
Soon Engels visited Julian Harney in London. Engels explained German True Socialism and described the Hegelian Left, but Harney comprehended very little. Then Engels declared that history had already demonstrated that the bourgeoisie was no longer progressive, that the working class was progressive, and that once the bourgeoisie could be convinced of this they would relinquish power to the proletariat.
Harney, with ten years as a working-class agitator and numerous imprisonments, looked up at him. And he said, "Nonsense.' We're going to have to throw them out.1" The educators too must be educated.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-Auguste Blanqui 1833-Democratic Propaganda
Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
************
From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement
http://wiki.occupyboston.org/wiki/GA/Minutes
Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
**************
Auguste Blanqui 1833-Democratic Propaganda
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.
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Citizen:
The sympathies of the masses, tempered anew by a system of terror, are reawakening more lively than ever. They are a spring that compression has made more energetic and that only asks to be released. It is up to us to favor this movement of expansion. If the doctrinaires were able to flatter themselves that they had crushed democracy with no chance of return it’s because the late catastrophe permitted them to put a halt to propaganda.
Re-establish it and we will move forward.
For the aristocracy is powerless to fight against republicans on the field of ideas. If the press is still an arm in its hands it’s because it uses it to spread slander while we, with the sole force of our doctrines of equality and fraternity, are sure to carry the masses along.
But it’s necessary that our voice reach them.
Let us then unite our efforts, citizen, in order to destroy the most odious of monopolies, the monopoly on enlightenment. Let us prove to the proletarians that that they have the right to ease with freedom; to free, common and equal education; to intervene in the government, all of which are forbidden them.
As you see, citizen, we have less a political change in mind than a social re-foundation. The extension of political rights, electoral reform, and universal suffrage can be excellent things, but only as means, not as goals. What our goal is is the equal sharing of the charges and benefits of society, is the total establishment of the reign of equality. Without this radical reorganization all formal modifications in government will be nothing but lies, all revolutions nothing but comedies performed for the benefit of the ambitious.
But it isn’t enough to vaguely declare that all men are equal; it’s not enough to combat the slanders of the evil, to destroy prejudices, and the habits of servility carefully maintained among the people. Through principles it’s necessary to replace the prejudices in their hearts. It’s necessary to convince the proletarians that equality is possible, that it is necessary. They must be penetrated with the sentiment of their dignity and clearly shown their rights and duties.
This must be the direction of our efforts. They will only be effective with the cooperation of all republicans: we appeal to their devotion and ask for their active and disinterested cooperation.
It is evident that new writings with the goal we have just indicated from a republican pen would be the object of perpetual harassment, whatever their moderation. We have resolved to foil the zeal of the police. What is important to us above all is to enlighten the masses. Trials, imprisonments and fines would quickly smash our efforts, despite all of our patriotically inspired perseverance.
We will limit ourselves to propagandizing by reprinting fragments of the best works published in the interests of the people, works that have freely circulated for some time.
We will select those that most clearly deal with the great questions of EQUALITY AND LIBERTY.
Those that tend to establish as the sole basis for social institutions the principle of the BROTHERHOOD of man and as sole guarantee of their lasting quality the responsibility of power.
If the ideas developed by these diverse writings are not always as up to date as those most advanced in their interest in the future might hope, it should be remembered that public instruction is in such a sad state that those truths that are old for the enlightened are new to the proletarian.
The writings we will publish will have four in-12 pages and will appear irregularly in such a way as to form a brochure of ninety-six pages at the end of the year.
For 1 fr. 25 c. 100 copies will be received at home.
It is possible to subscribe for a smaller number.
Those citizens in Paris and the departments who want to second us in these efforts are requested to send their exact names and addresses to Rouanet’s bookstore, Rue Verdelet, no. 6
L-Auguste Blanqui, Hadot-Desages
Our publications will appear irregularly, twice a month.
Since most writings cannot reach the people, who don’t have the means to pay for them, the particular goal that we have proposed is to remedy this situation by a free distribution to proletarians. Those citizens who want to second us in our work should spread among the people the copies they have received buy giving them out.
In order to receive the publications at home it is necessary to subscribe for twenty copies of each publication, postage costs not permitting us to send fewer than this. Subscribers for fewer than twenty copies must get them at the office, Rouanet’s , Rue Verdelet, No 6.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
************
From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-An Embryo Of An Alternate Government Gone Wrong-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement
http://wiki.occupyboston.org/wiki/GA/Minutes
Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.
Markin comment:
I will post any updates from that site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History “ series started in the Fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
**************
Auguste Blanqui 1833-Democratic Propaganda
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Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2004.
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Citizen:
The sympathies of the masses, tempered anew by a system of terror, are reawakening more lively than ever. They are a spring that compression has made more energetic and that only asks to be released. It is up to us to favor this movement of expansion. If the doctrinaires were able to flatter themselves that they had crushed democracy with no chance of return it’s because the late catastrophe permitted them to put a halt to propaganda.
Re-establish it and we will move forward.
For the aristocracy is powerless to fight against republicans on the field of ideas. If the press is still an arm in its hands it’s because it uses it to spread slander while we, with the sole force of our doctrines of equality and fraternity, are sure to carry the masses along.
But it’s necessary that our voice reach them.
Let us then unite our efforts, citizen, in order to destroy the most odious of monopolies, the monopoly on enlightenment. Let us prove to the proletarians that that they have the right to ease with freedom; to free, common and equal education; to intervene in the government, all of which are forbidden them.
As you see, citizen, we have less a political change in mind than a social re-foundation. The extension of political rights, electoral reform, and universal suffrage can be excellent things, but only as means, not as goals. What our goal is is the equal sharing of the charges and benefits of society, is the total establishment of the reign of equality. Without this radical reorganization all formal modifications in government will be nothing but lies, all revolutions nothing but comedies performed for the benefit of the ambitious.
But it isn’t enough to vaguely declare that all men are equal; it’s not enough to combat the slanders of the evil, to destroy prejudices, and the habits of servility carefully maintained among the people. Through principles it’s necessary to replace the prejudices in their hearts. It’s necessary to convince the proletarians that equality is possible, that it is necessary. They must be penetrated with the sentiment of their dignity and clearly shown their rights and duties.
This must be the direction of our efforts. They will only be effective with the cooperation of all republicans: we appeal to their devotion and ask for their active and disinterested cooperation.
It is evident that new writings with the goal we have just indicated from a republican pen would be the object of perpetual harassment, whatever their moderation. We have resolved to foil the zeal of the police. What is important to us above all is to enlighten the masses. Trials, imprisonments and fines would quickly smash our efforts, despite all of our patriotically inspired perseverance.
We will limit ourselves to propagandizing by reprinting fragments of the best works published in the interests of the people, works that have freely circulated for some time.
We will select those that most clearly deal with the great questions of EQUALITY AND LIBERTY.
Those that tend to establish as the sole basis for social institutions the principle of the BROTHERHOOD of man and as sole guarantee of their lasting quality the responsibility of power.
If the ideas developed by these diverse writings are not always as up to date as those most advanced in their interest in the future might hope, it should be remembered that public instruction is in such a sad state that those truths that are old for the enlightened are new to the proletarian.
The writings we will publish will have four in-12 pages and will appear irregularly in such a way as to form a brochure of ninety-six pages at the end of the year.
For 1 fr. 25 c. 100 copies will be received at home.
It is possible to subscribe for a smaller number.
Those citizens in Paris and the departments who want to second us in these efforts are requested to send their exact names and addresses to Rouanet’s bookstore, Rue Verdelet, no. 6
L-Auguste Blanqui, Hadot-Desages
Our publications will appear irregularly, twice a month.
Since most writings cannot reach the people, who don’t have the means to pay for them, the particular goal that we have proposed is to remedy this situation by a free distribution to proletarians. Those citizens who want to second us in our work should spread among the people the copies they have received buy giving them out.
In order to receive the publications at home it is necessary to subscribe for twenty copies of each publication, postage costs not permitting us to send fewer than this. Subscribers for fewer than twenty copies must get them at the office, Rouanet’s , Rue Verdelet, No 6.
From The "RAY O' LIGHT newsletter"-In Celebration of International Working Women's Day-The Courageous Journey of Cindy Sheehan in the Heartland of World Capitalism-
Markin comment:
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
********
The Latest From The “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox” Blog
http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/
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.
*************
RAY O' LIGHT newsletter
March-April 2012 Number 71 Publication of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA
In Celebration of International Working Women's Day-
The Courageous Journey of Cindy Sheehan in the Heartland of World Capitalism
by RAY LIGHT
As the day approaches for the Celebration of International Working Women's Day on March 8th, 2012, the year in which our next U.S. Presidential Election will take place, it is fitting and proper that we recognize, honor and heed the wisdom of Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan, a heroine of legendary courage.
In an extremely moving Mother's Day "Soap Box" Column in 2009, Cindy Sheehan began: "I think many of us know the origins of Mother's Day were for Peace and a universal declaration that we mothers won't send our children to die in wars or kill the children of other mothers." She concluded the column, as follows: "No matter what you personally think of our new president, the Robber Class wars for profit are continuing as bad or even worse than during the last regime and mothers are still losing their children all over the world by and for the empire." ("The More Things Change..." 5-10-09)
Today the Obama Administration maintains a combined military force (U.S. soldiers and even more private mercenaries) of over 200,000 in Afghanistan alone, continues its bestial drone war against the people of Pakistan, has just "completed" a war against Libya that, like Iraq under Bush, seems destined to continue long after their respective chief's of state (Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein) were deposed and murdered on the strength of U.S.-led foreign imperialist intervention, is establishing a large new military presence in Australia as part of a renewed massive U.S. military presence in the Pacific aimed against China and East Asia, and has accelerated the rapid elimination of the civil rights of the people of the USA and rapid militarization of U.S. society itself (begun under Hush) that featured the National Defense Authorization Act (NI)AA) signed into law by Obama on the last day of 2011, less than two months ago.
In this grim setting, Cindy Sheehani entitled a recent thought-provoking "Soap Box" column, "h'cpuhln-dii /or President?" (2-9-12) Sister Sheehan's starting point is: "When I opposed the wars and oppression of civil rights here at home during the Hush scandal, there was a certain segment of the population I knew I could always count on to be in solidarity with me: Liberal Democrats." She continues, "I attended HUGE protests in 2005-2006 before the Democrats took control of Congress in the elections of 2006 - but after that, the protests began to weaken or evaporate."She then cites a Wanliin^loii /'(«/ poll showing that the majority of "liberal" Democrats favor keeping the (iiiantanamo torture facility open, the drone bombing campaigns that have increased by at least 300% since the Bush years, and "the Presidential Assassination Program where Obama can have any American executed by his order."
Sister Sheehan believes that,"... it really doesn't matter who is in the White House - the Empire will crush everyone it rolls over without any qualms - and those people and their loves, dreams, struggles, and especially their lives, always, always, always matter. Period."
On this basis, Sister Sheehan argues that, "to most 'liberal' Democrats, killing by the Imperial Army is only considered wrong if a Republican does it... we are at least able to predict that if a Republican is elected, we will see people out in the streets protesting those murders."
In her own unique way, Cindy Sheehan is teaching a valuable political lesson about the "Republicrat" (Republican-Democratic Party political duopoly) government rule on behalf of Wall Street and U.S. imperialism. And, viewed from her consistent and principled anti-imperialist war stand, she has even begun to expose the role of phony "leftist" organizations in defense of the U.S. Empire. For example, she explains the fact that "the anti-war movement has continued its tailspin because it was mostly populated by 'liberal' Democrats, or other Democratic functionaries like the Communist Party, USA." (My emphasis)
Where does Cindy Sheehan's Strength, Wisdom and Integrity come from?
Like the working class mother who is the main character in Maxim Gorky's classic revolutionary 1907 novel, The Mother, Cindy Sheehan's wisdom stems, in the first place, from deep love and respect for her son, Casey. In both the Gorky novel and in the real life of Cindy Sheehan, love for a son drew the mother into the midst of the political struggles of her society.
In Gorky's more than one hundred year old novel, the male and female revolutionaries are impressively depicted as sharing the responsibility for the conduct of the revolutionary struggle. In the novel, the son has become a revolutionary working class leader in the struggle against the Russian Tsarist Regime. The Mother follows her wonderful son into the ranks of the revolution where she comes into her own as a dignified human being dedicated to the just struggle for freedom for all the oppressed and exploited from tyranny.
In sharp contrast, Cindy Sheehan's son, Casey, grew up (as did Cindy herself) in a non-revolutionary period in the USA, a period of real reaction in the belly of the beast of the world's hegemonic imperialist power. Casey became a U.S. soldier who was part of the U.S. imperialist military occupation of Iraq. So Cindy Sheehan's path toward anti-imperialist and pro-revolutionary activism where she has come into her own as a dignified human being dedicated to the just struggle for freedom for all the oppressed and exploited from tyranny was vastly different, though no less courageous, than the path traversed by The Mother conceived by Maxim Gorky.
On April 4, 2004, Casey was killed by al Sadr resistance fighters only five days after his arrival in Iraq. With the help of a fiercely honest poem by her daughter, Carly,* Cindy Sheehan became transformed through her grief at the loss of Casey, in her own words, "... from an ordinary human being into a crusader";"... from a private mother into a public peace mom;""... from a shy and horrible public speaker into a brave and powerful orator;... from a nonwriter into an able author on fire for the truth." (pages 59 and 60, Peace Mom, 2006)
*One stanza: "Have you ever heard the sound of taps playing at your brother's grave? They say he died so the flag will continue to wave. But I believe he died because they had oil to save. Have you ever heard the sound of taps playing at your brother's grave?" The poem concludes with the line: "Have you ever heard the sound of a nation being rocked to sleep?"
With incredible honesty and courage, Cindy Shoehan confronted the first and most fundamental truth: "I have never called 'terrorists' freedom fighters. I have called the resistance lighters who killed Casey such [freedom fighters], but they are fighting to get the occupying forces out of their country and have a legitimate right to wage a resistance against occupiers. I don't like that they are killing our children, for God's sake, they killed my oldest child; my sweet and wonderful Casey. However, our government is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the people of Iraq." (page 102, Peace Mom)
At the end of 2008, she was even more explicit: "The right of a population to resist being occupied by a foreign country/military/corporation is a basic human right that has been enshrined in international law. I recognize that the person who killed my son, Casey, in Iraq had every right to do so. I am not in any way happy about it, but if Casey's commander-in-chief and vice commander-in-chief had not placed him (immorally and illegally) in the country of Iraq to be an occupier, then the Iraqi would not have killed him. George and Dick knowingly put Casey in harm's way and I won't rest until I see justice for Casey's (and over one-million others) murder. That is also my right: redress for wrong and to see justice finally consummated." ("Occupier/ Occupied," 12-28-08)
It was on this rock-solid basis that, in August 2005, Cindy Sheehan traveled to Crawford, Texas (accompanied by a small band of determined anti-war activists) to demand an answer from President George W. Bush, face to face at his sprawling home ranch, regarding the purpose for which he had sent her deceased son into harm's way in Iraq. This simple but bold action placed Cindy Sheehan in a formidable status from which to deal with Bush. And George W. Bush, coward that he is, was afraid to meet with Cindy Sheehan eyeball to eyeball.
As she has pointed out, if Bush had just met with her it probably would have defused the movement around her before it ever got started. The 26 day encampment which became known around the world as "Camp Casey" never would have been born. And the tremendous boost that the new anti-war heroine contributed to the weak but growing antiwar movement would have been avoided by the U.S. imperialist chieftain. With the U.S. war in Iraq going against the U.S. imperialist army, Cindy Sheehan became a powerful voice for global justice and peace.*
*In 2006, at the World Social Forum in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez with Cindy Sheehan at his side, told the packed crowd that Cindy Sheehan was "Mrs. Hope" while U.S. President George W. Bush was "Mr. Danger."
With her fearlessness and her clear eyed principles, sister Sheehan was also able to quickly learn from her own political experience. After Casey's death, she initially gave George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt about having a non-political "human" motive for meeting with the families of dead soldiers. Then she heard Bush use these meetings for political gain in his next State of the Union Message, even while he never attended any soldiers' funeral services and didn't allow caskets or even photos of the deceased to be shown on television.
She campaigned against Bush in the 2004 election and supported Democratic candidate John Kerry. Thereafter she was once again self-critical, declaring that she would never again support a pro-war democrat after Kerry said he would have waged these same imperialist wars that Bush waged only he would have prosecuted them more successfully.
The turn against her and toward a passive attitude toward U.S. imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq on the part of the U.S. antiwar movement (as it began a rapid decline) ironically took place with the 2006 election victory for the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress! This victory was largely seen by liberals, revisionists, Trotskyites and other opportunists as an outcome that would result in the winding down of these wars. Instead, as we had predicted, the emergence of a Democratic majority in the House and Senate provided U.S. imperialism with greater flexibility; it allowed U.S. imperialism through the close cooperation of the Republican President and the Democratic Congress to carry out the "surge" in Iraq. And, as Cindy Sheehan pointed out, the U.S. anti-war movement has been in a "tailspin" ever since.
In 2008, having met with Hillary Clinton and having already dealt with her pro-Bush war criminal role as a U.S. Senator, Cindy also saw through Democratic candidate Obama. She was supportive (as were we) of Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, an Afro-American former Congresswoman from Georgia who had strongly opposed and exposed the U.S. imperialist character of the Bush-led wars and continues today to oppose Obama's wars on Libya, etc.
In 2008, Cindy Sheehan learned and helped many of us learn the full extent of the political bankruptcy of the so-called "U.S. Left."*
*In 2007, we had written,"... the USA today has a solidly imperialist bourgeois electoral system that promotes two wings of an imperialist bourgeois war party, an imperialist bourgeois mass media ... and even to some extent an imperialist bourgeois proletariat and anti-war movement..." ("2007 Country Report - USA," Ray O' Light Newsletter #45, July-August 2007)
The 2008 Cindy Sheehan Campaign to take Nancy Pelosi's Congressional Seat
At the time of the 2008 U.S. election, Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker of the House of Representatives and thus second in line of Presidential Succession, after only the sitting Vice President. By virtue of her position, since the president was a Republican, she was also the leader of the national Democratic Party* Her lofty and powerful position in the U.S. government and the Democratic Party, however, could only be maintained if she were re-elected to her House seat, representing approximately one-four hundred and thirty-fifth of the U.S. population, not a huge number of people. Moreover, her Congressional district covered much of San Francisco, California, among the most "anti-war" of all the 435 Congressional districts in the USA. Finally, as pointed out above, following the 2006 election when the Democrats won majority control of both houses of Congress, rather than stopping the imperialist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq and bringing the U.S. troops home, as so many had anticipated, the Congressional Democrats, led by Pelosi, provided fresh support for the Bush-Cheney Regime that was manifested in an immediate troop "surge" in Iraq.
It was in this setting that the by now renowned anti-war heroine, Cindy Sheehan, living in the Pelosi district, launched her campaign to win the Congressional seat and retire the war criminal Pelosi.** What a great opportunity for the relatively weak U.S. anti-war movement and organized left to strike a powerful blow against the U.S. Empire and its brutal imperialist wars on the oppressed peoples! Our small vanguard organization struggled mightily with Bay Area opportunists from the CPUSA, from Workers World Party, from the Afro-American "left," from the U.S.-Philippine radical movement, and a host of other organizations and individuals, attempting to rally them to roll their sleeves up and get involved in the Sheehan Congressional campaign. All to no avail!
Our small organization did what we could to support the campaign including hands-on campaign work. But almost no other left
*In that role, Pelosi publicly promised before the 2006 election that the Democratic Party would not seek impeachment charges against Bush and Cheney, if the Democrats were to win a Congressional majority.
**In the aftermath of the 2008 election, with both a Democratic President and a larger Democratic majority in Congress, the Republican Party in its desperation leaked the fact that U.S. imperialism would have preferred to leave in the shadows. Nancy Pelosi, as the leader of the "opposition" party, had been briefed about the torture being used by the Bush Regime from the beginning of the War of Terror and, at the very least by her silence, had given her consent to its use.
organizations in the Bay Area or around the country saw the Sheehan campaign as a real opportunity to advance proletarian international solidarity with the oppressed peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, the Philippines and elsewhere being terrorized and murdered by "our own" imperialists. They refused to see or to act on this great opportunity, provided by Cindy Sheehan and her campaign, to strike a powerful blow against U.S. imperialism. They refused to take on the Democratic Party and thus strike a powerful blow against Wall Street's "Republicrat" political rule.
Nancy Pelosi, the arch war criminal, waltzed back into Congress. Yet, despite the abandonment of her campaign by the organized U.S. left and her shoestring budget and barebones staff, Cindy Sheehan won a larger percentage of the vote than the Republican candidate, underscoring the opportunity that was missed.
Cindy Sheehan, through her own political experience, has thus come to deeply understand the depth of the opportunist betrayal of the U.S. and international working class and oppressed peoples and the valuable service that the opportunists provide to the U.S. Empire. No wonder her recent observation about the right revisionist CPUSA as an organization of "Democratic functionaries" is so accurate.
And despite the best efforts of all kinds of slick opportunists - from gentle and kind to brutal and bullying — starting with Democratic Party liberal operatives, despite personal attacks including from her husband's family, and myriad other obstacles, she has continued on her principled and at times lonely march against U.S. imperialist war abroad and at home.
Some Political Lessons of Cindy Sheehan for the Global Anti-Imperialist and International Communist Movements
The courage and fearlessness of Cindy Sheehan, to me, reaches its height with her acknowledgment and public recognition of her own share of responsibility in the death of her beloved son, Casey! As she courageously expressed it, "Yes, before I could blame George Bush, or the media, or Congress, or the American people, for Casey's death, I had to realize that I also had quite a bit of my dear boy's blood on my own hands." (page 130, Peace Mom) It is because of this ultimate self-criticism that Cindy Sheehan has had the incredible strength to keep her eye on the prize and persevere in her principled and consistent communist movement.*
Indeed, those proletarian fighters in the USA and around the world who are serious about rebuilding a substantial international communist movement have a number of things to learn from sister Cindy Sheehan.
1. Sister Sheehan recognizes the relative responsibility of all U.S. citizens for the imperialist wars against the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, et al. She recognizes that her privileged comfortable apathy had helped lay the basis for Casey to go into the U.S. military in the first place. She recognizes the role of T.V. and mass entertainment, commercialism and material obsession that helped keep someone like her from dealing seriously enough with the politics of U.S. society until after Casey's death. This position is in stark opposition to the bourgeois approach of all kinds of opportunists and bourgeois nationalists in state power who have been so ready to dissociate the masses of imperialist society from a "handful" of evil rulers. One example: At the beginning of Chinese rapprochement with President Nixon and U.S. imperialism, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai proposed a toast to the "Great American People" at a time when U.S. imperialism, backed by U.S. society, was carrying out one of the most barbaric imperialist wars in history against the heroic Vietnamese people. If the masses and the working class in an imperialist country have no responsibility for the criminal conduct of its ruling class and government, how will they ever be able to become responsible for overthrowing and smashing them?
Sister Sheehan's approach reflects the greater responsibility for the criminal conduct of U.S. imperialism of the more privileged sectors of U.S. imperialist society, the educators, the mass media, the Democratic and Republican Party functionaries, the "Republicrat" chieftains like the Clintons, Kerry, Obama, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, the two George Bushes, Dick Cheney, John McCain and ultimately the Corporate CEOS of Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, and the bankers on Wall Street.
*One is reminded of the U.S. working class heroine, Crystal Lee Sutton, the real "Norma Rae," who in the midst of the bitter unionization campaign in a small North Carolina mill town in the 1970's sat her three children down and told them exactly who their daddies were and how they came to be, pre-empting any attempt by the powers that be to try to shame or blackmail her into submission. Thereafter, sister Crystal was fearless and never lost sight of the prize of power for poor and working people no matter the obstacles.
2. Related to point #1, Sister Sheehan's courageous approach to the killing of her son, Casey, by Iraqis fighting for their freedom, provides a model for the revolutionary approach to imperialist occupation troops. It is remarkable that Sister Sheehan insists that she is a pacifist, while recognizing that the person in Iraq who killed her son had "every right to do so." Her principled approach to the imperialist military forces is the only approach that leads to decisive national democratic and socialist military victory over imperialism instead of a negotiated compromise settlement that fails to dislodge the old comprador and imperialist-sponsored ruling system and keeps the working class and the masses from really coming into their own and taking power.
3 Sister Sheehan's approach to the U.S. Empire, her clear call for the
revolutionary defeat of "her own" imperialist state, is exemplary. In
the first place, her approach exposes the opportunist treachery of
all those in state power or in control of significant areas who seek
rapprochement with U.S. imperialism instead of national liberation
from U.S. imperialism (which paves the way to socialism).
4 Sister Sheehan's approach to the people of the USA, "her country,"
and her approach to the people of the rest of the world is a
tremendous example of genuine internationalism. Says Sister
Sheehan," I went from being the mom who did everyone's laundry,
packed lunches, kissed boo-boos, tucked in at night, cleaned up the
messes, to being someone who fights for all humanity's children not
just her own." (ibid., pages 127 and 128)
Cindy Sheehan's internationalist approach to the children of the world challenges the communists of the world to become consistent proletarian internationalists. Such forces understand and operate on the basis of the fact that the struggle for socialism is a global struggle and that our struggle against monopoly capitalism and imperialism and all the comprador, semi-feudal and other reactionary forces connected to international capital is interconnected. A defeat in one area of the world is a defeat for all. And a victory in one area of the world is a victory for all.
Finally, in Commemoration of International Working Women's Day in 2012, let all the women and men who are inspired by the courage and convictions and the political life of Cindy Sheehan express our determination to follow in her footsteps. Let us live like Cindy, with our heads held high and our backs straight and fight together for a better future for all humanity.
I place some material in this space which may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. Off hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these entries. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts.
********
The Latest From The “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox” Blog
http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/
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.
*************
RAY O' LIGHT newsletter
March-April 2012 Number 71 Publication of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA
In Celebration of International Working Women's Day-
The Courageous Journey of Cindy Sheehan in the Heartland of World Capitalism
by RAY LIGHT
As the day approaches for the Celebration of International Working Women's Day on March 8th, 2012, the year in which our next U.S. Presidential Election will take place, it is fitting and proper that we recognize, honor and heed the wisdom of Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan, a heroine of legendary courage.
In an extremely moving Mother's Day "Soap Box" Column in 2009, Cindy Sheehan began: "I think many of us know the origins of Mother's Day were for Peace and a universal declaration that we mothers won't send our children to die in wars or kill the children of other mothers." She concluded the column, as follows: "No matter what you personally think of our new president, the Robber Class wars for profit are continuing as bad or even worse than during the last regime and mothers are still losing their children all over the world by and for the empire." ("The More Things Change..." 5-10-09)
Today the Obama Administration maintains a combined military force (U.S. soldiers and even more private mercenaries) of over 200,000 in Afghanistan alone, continues its bestial drone war against the people of Pakistan, has just "completed" a war against Libya that, like Iraq under Bush, seems destined to continue long after their respective chief's of state (Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein) were deposed and murdered on the strength of U.S.-led foreign imperialist intervention, is establishing a large new military presence in Australia as part of a renewed massive U.S. military presence in the Pacific aimed against China and East Asia, and has accelerated the rapid elimination of the civil rights of the people of the USA and rapid militarization of U.S. society itself (begun under Hush) that featured the National Defense Authorization Act (NI)AA) signed into law by Obama on the last day of 2011, less than two months ago.
In this grim setting, Cindy Sheehani entitled a recent thought-provoking "Soap Box" column, "h'cpuhln-dii /or President?" (2-9-12) Sister Sheehan's starting point is: "When I opposed the wars and oppression of civil rights here at home during the Hush scandal, there was a certain segment of the population I knew I could always count on to be in solidarity with me: Liberal Democrats." She continues, "I attended HUGE protests in 2005-2006 before the Democrats took control of Congress in the elections of 2006 - but after that, the protests began to weaken or evaporate."She then cites a Wanliin^loii /'(«/ poll showing that the majority of "liberal" Democrats favor keeping the (iiiantanamo torture facility open, the drone bombing campaigns that have increased by at least 300% since the Bush years, and "the Presidential Assassination Program where Obama can have any American executed by his order."
Sister Sheehan believes that,"... it really doesn't matter who is in the White House - the Empire will crush everyone it rolls over without any qualms - and those people and their loves, dreams, struggles, and especially their lives, always, always, always matter. Period."
On this basis, Sister Sheehan argues that, "to most 'liberal' Democrats, killing by the Imperial Army is only considered wrong if a Republican does it... we are at least able to predict that if a Republican is elected, we will see people out in the streets protesting those murders."
In her own unique way, Cindy Sheehan is teaching a valuable political lesson about the "Republicrat" (Republican-Democratic Party political duopoly) government rule on behalf of Wall Street and U.S. imperialism. And, viewed from her consistent and principled anti-imperialist war stand, she has even begun to expose the role of phony "leftist" organizations in defense of the U.S. Empire. For example, she explains the fact that "the anti-war movement has continued its tailspin because it was mostly populated by 'liberal' Democrats, or other Democratic functionaries like the Communist Party, USA." (My emphasis)
Where does Cindy Sheehan's Strength, Wisdom and Integrity come from?
Like the working class mother who is the main character in Maxim Gorky's classic revolutionary 1907 novel, The Mother, Cindy Sheehan's wisdom stems, in the first place, from deep love and respect for her son, Casey. In both the Gorky novel and in the real life of Cindy Sheehan, love for a son drew the mother into the midst of the political struggles of her society.
In Gorky's more than one hundred year old novel, the male and female revolutionaries are impressively depicted as sharing the responsibility for the conduct of the revolutionary struggle. In the novel, the son has become a revolutionary working class leader in the struggle against the Russian Tsarist Regime. The Mother follows her wonderful son into the ranks of the revolution where she comes into her own as a dignified human being dedicated to the just struggle for freedom for all the oppressed and exploited from tyranny.
In sharp contrast, Cindy Sheehan's son, Casey, grew up (as did Cindy herself) in a non-revolutionary period in the USA, a period of real reaction in the belly of the beast of the world's hegemonic imperialist power. Casey became a U.S. soldier who was part of the U.S. imperialist military occupation of Iraq. So Cindy Sheehan's path toward anti-imperialist and pro-revolutionary activism where she has come into her own as a dignified human being dedicated to the just struggle for freedom for all the oppressed and exploited from tyranny was vastly different, though no less courageous, than the path traversed by The Mother conceived by Maxim Gorky.
On April 4, 2004, Casey was killed by al Sadr resistance fighters only five days after his arrival in Iraq. With the help of a fiercely honest poem by her daughter, Carly,* Cindy Sheehan became transformed through her grief at the loss of Casey, in her own words, "... from an ordinary human being into a crusader";"... from a private mother into a public peace mom;""... from a shy and horrible public speaker into a brave and powerful orator;... from a nonwriter into an able author on fire for the truth." (pages 59 and 60, Peace Mom, 2006)
*One stanza: "Have you ever heard the sound of taps playing at your brother's grave? They say he died so the flag will continue to wave. But I believe he died because they had oil to save. Have you ever heard the sound of taps playing at your brother's grave?" The poem concludes with the line: "Have you ever heard the sound of a nation being rocked to sleep?"
With incredible honesty and courage, Cindy Shoehan confronted the first and most fundamental truth: "I have never called 'terrorists' freedom fighters. I have called the resistance lighters who killed Casey such [freedom fighters], but they are fighting to get the occupying forces out of their country and have a legitimate right to wage a resistance against occupiers. I don't like that they are killing our children, for God's sake, they killed my oldest child; my sweet and wonderful Casey. However, our government is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the people of Iraq." (page 102, Peace Mom)
At the end of 2008, she was even more explicit: "The right of a population to resist being occupied by a foreign country/military/corporation is a basic human right that has been enshrined in international law. I recognize that the person who killed my son, Casey, in Iraq had every right to do so. I am not in any way happy about it, but if Casey's commander-in-chief and vice commander-in-chief had not placed him (immorally and illegally) in the country of Iraq to be an occupier, then the Iraqi would not have killed him. George and Dick knowingly put Casey in harm's way and I won't rest until I see justice for Casey's (and over one-million others) murder. That is also my right: redress for wrong and to see justice finally consummated." ("Occupier/ Occupied," 12-28-08)
It was on this rock-solid basis that, in August 2005, Cindy Sheehan traveled to Crawford, Texas (accompanied by a small band of determined anti-war activists) to demand an answer from President George W. Bush, face to face at his sprawling home ranch, regarding the purpose for which he had sent her deceased son into harm's way in Iraq. This simple but bold action placed Cindy Sheehan in a formidable status from which to deal with Bush. And George W. Bush, coward that he is, was afraid to meet with Cindy Sheehan eyeball to eyeball.
As she has pointed out, if Bush had just met with her it probably would have defused the movement around her before it ever got started. The 26 day encampment which became known around the world as "Camp Casey" never would have been born. And the tremendous boost that the new anti-war heroine contributed to the weak but growing antiwar movement would have been avoided by the U.S. imperialist chieftain. With the U.S. war in Iraq going against the U.S. imperialist army, Cindy Sheehan became a powerful voice for global justice and peace.*
*In 2006, at the World Social Forum in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez with Cindy Sheehan at his side, told the packed crowd that Cindy Sheehan was "Mrs. Hope" while U.S. President George W. Bush was "Mr. Danger."
With her fearlessness and her clear eyed principles, sister Sheehan was also able to quickly learn from her own political experience. After Casey's death, she initially gave George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt about having a non-political "human" motive for meeting with the families of dead soldiers. Then she heard Bush use these meetings for political gain in his next State of the Union Message, even while he never attended any soldiers' funeral services and didn't allow caskets or even photos of the deceased to be shown on television.
She campaigned against Bush in the 2004 election and supported Democratic candidate John Kerry. Thereafter she was once again self-critical, declaring that she would never again support a pro-war democrat after Kerry said he would have waged these same imperialist wars that Bush waged only he would have prosecuted them more successfully.
The turn against her and toward a passive attitude toward U.S. imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq on the part of the U.S. antiwar movement (as it began a rapid decline) ironically took place with the 2006 election victory for the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress! This victory was largely seen by liberals, revisionists, Trotskyites and other opportunists as an outcome that would result in the winding down of these wars. Instead, as we had predicted, the emergence of a Democratic majority in the House and Senate provided U.S. imperialism with greater flexibility; it allowed U.S. imperialism through the close cooperation of the Republican President and the Democratic Congress to carry out the "surge" in Iraq. And, as Cindy Sheehan pointed out, the U.S. anti-war movement has been in a "tailspin" ever since.
In 2008, having met with Hillary Clinton and having already dealt with her pro-Bush war criminal role as a U.S. Senator, Cindy also saw through Democratic candidate Obama. She was supportive (as were we) of Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, an Afro-American former Congresswoman from Georgia who had strongly opposed and exposed the U.S. imperialist character of the Bush-led wars and continues today to oppose Obama's wars on Libya, etc.
In 2008, Cindy Sheehan learned and helped many of us learn the full extent of the political bankruptcy of the so-called "U.S. Left."*
*In 2007, we had written,"... the USA today has a solidly imperialist bourgeois electoral system that promotes two wings of an imperialist bourgeois war party, an imperialist bourgeois mass media ... and even to some extent an imperialist bourgeois proletariat and anti-war movement..." ("2007 Country Report - USA," Ray O' Light Newsletter #45, July-August 2007)
The 2008 Cindy Sheehan Campaign to take Nancy Pelosi's Congressional Seat
At the time of the 2008 U.S. election, Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker of the House of Representatives and thus second in line of Presidential Succession, after only the sitting Vice President. By virtue of her position, since the president was a Republican, she was also the leader of the national Democratic Party* Her lofty and powerful position in the U.S. government and the Democratic Party, however, could only be maintained if she were re-elected to her House seat, representing approximately one-four hundred and thirty-fifth of the U.S. population, not a huge number of people. Moreover, her Congressional district covered much of San Francisco, California, among the most "anti-war" of all the 435 Congressional districts in the USA. Finally, as pointed out above, following the 2006 election when the Democrats won majority control of both houses of Congress, rather than stopping the imperialist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq and bringing the U.S. troops home, as so many had anticipated, the Congressional Democrats, led by Pelosi, provided fresh support for the Bush-Cheney Regime that was manifested in an immediate troop "surge" in Iraq.
It was in this setting that the by now renowned anti-war heroine, Cindy Sheehan, living in the Pelosi district, launched her campaign to win the Congressional seat and retire the war criminal Pelosi.** What a great opportunity for the relatively weak U.S. anti-war movement and organized left to strike a powerful blow against the U.S. Empire and its brutal imperialist wars on the oppressed peoples! Our small vanguard organization struggled mightily with Bay Area opportunists from the CPUSA, from Workers World Party, from the Afro-American "left," from the U.S.-Philippine radical movement, and a host of other organizations and individuals, attempting to rally them to roll their sleeves up and get involved in the Sheehan Congressional campaign. All to no avail!
Our small organization did what we could to support the campaign including hands-on campaign work. But almost no other left
*In that role, Pelosi publicly promised before the 2006 election that the Democratic Party would not seek impeachment charges against Bush and Cheney, if the Democrats were to win a Congressional majority.
**In the aftermath of the 2008 election, with both a Democratic President and a larger Democratic majority in Congress, the Republican Party in its desperation leaked the fact that U.S. imperialism would have preferred to leave in the shadows. Nancy Pelosi, as the leader of the "opposition" party, had been briefed about the torture being used by the Bush Regime from the beginning of the War of Terror and, at the very least by her silence, had given her consent to its use.
organizations in the Bay Area or around the country saw the Sheehan campaign as a real opportunity to advance proletarian international solidarity with the oppressed peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, the Philippines and elsewhere being terrorized and murdered by "our own" imperialists. They refused to see or to act on this great opportunity, provided by Cindy Sheehan and her campaign, to strike a powerful blow against U.S. imperialism. They refused to take on the Democratic Party and thus strike a powerful blow against Wall Street's "Republicrat" political rule.
Nancy Pelosi, the arch war criminal, waltzed back into Congress. Yet, despite the abandonment of her campaign by the organized U.S. left and her shoestring budget and barebones staff, Cindy Sheehan won a larger percentage of the vote than the Republican candidate, underscoring the opportunity that was missed.
Cindy Sheehan, through her own political experience, has thus come to deeply understand the depth of the opportunist betrayal of the U.S. and international working class and oppressed peoples and the valuable service that the opportunists provide to the U.S. Empire. No wonder her recent observation about the right revisionist CPUSA as an organization of "Democratic functionaries" is so accurate.
And despite the best efforts of all kinds of slick opportunists - from gentle and kind to brutal and bullying — starting with Democratic Party liberal operatives, despite personal attacks including from her husband's family, and myriad other obstacles, she has continued on her principled and at times lonely march against U.S. imperialist war abroad and at home.
Some Political Lessons of Cindy Sheehan for the Global Anti-Imperialist and International Communist Movements
The courage and fearlessness of Cindy Sheehan, to me, reaches its height with her acknowledgment and public recognition of her own share of responsibility in the death of her beloved son, Casey! As she courageously expressed it, "Yes, before I could blame George Bush, or the media, or Congress, or the American people, for Casey's death, I had to realize that I also had quite a bit of my dear boy's blood on my own hands." (page 130, Peace Mom) It is because of this ultimate self-criticism that Cindy Sheehan has had the incredible strength to keep her eye on the prize and persevere in her principled and consistent communist movement.*
Indeed, those proletarian fighters in the USA and around the world who are serious about rebuilding a substantial international communist movement have a number of things to learn from sister Cindy Sheehan.
1. Sister Sheehan recognizes the relative responsibility of all U.S. citizens for the imperialist wars against the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, et al. She recognizes that her privileged comfortable apathy had helped lay the basis for Casey to go into the U.S. military in the first place. She recognizes the role of T.V. and mass entertainment, commercialism and material obsession that helped keep someone like her from dealing seriously enough with the politics of U.S. society until after Casey's death. This position is in stark opposition to the bourgeois approach of all kinds of opportunists and bourgeois nationalists in state power who have been so ready to dissociate the masses of imperialist society from a "handful" of evil rulers. One example: At the beginning of Chinese rapprochement with President Nixon and U.S. imperialism, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai proposed a toast to the "Great American People" at a time when U.S. imperialism, backed by U.S. society, was carrying out one of the most barbaric imperialist wars in history against the heroic Vietnamese people. If the masses and the working class in an imperialist country have no responsibility for the criminal conduct of its ruling class and government, how will they ever be able to become responsible for overthrowing and smashing them?
Sister Sheehan's approach reflects the greater responsibility for the criminal conduct of U.S. imperialism of the more privileged sectors of U.S. imperialist society, the educators, the mass media, the Democratic and Republican Party functionaries, the "Republicrat" chieftains like the Clintons, Kerry, Obama, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, the two George Bushes, Dick Cheney, John McCain and ultimately the Corporate CEOS of Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin, and the bankers on Wall Street.
*One is reminded of the U.S. working class heroine, Crystal Lee Sutton, the real "Norma Rae," who in the midst of the bitter unionization campaign in a small North Carolina mill town in the 1970's sat her three children down and told them exactly who their daddies were and how they came to be, pre-empting any attempt by the powers that be to try to shame or blackmail her into submission. Thereafter, sister Crystal was fearless and never lost sight of the prize of power for poor and working people no matter the obstacles.
2. Related to point #1, Sister Sheehan's courageous approach to the killing of her son, Casey, by Iraqis fighting for their freedom, provides a model for the revolutionary approach to imperialist occupation troops. It is remarkable that Sister Sheehan insists that she is a pacifist, while recognizing that the person in Iraq who killed her son had "every right to do so." Her principled approach to the imperialist military forces is the only approach that leads to decisive national democratic and socialist military victory over imperialism instead of a negotiated compromise settlement that fails to dislodge the old comprador and imperialist-sponsored ruling system and keeps the working class and the masses from really coming into their own and taking power.
3 Sister Sheehan's approach to the U.S. Empire, her clear call for the
revolutionary defeat of "her own" imperialist state, is exemplary. In
the first place, her approach exposes the opportunist treachery of
all those in state power or in control of significant areas who seek
rapprochement with U.S. imperialism instead of national liberation
from U.S. imperialism (which paves the way to socialism).
4 Sister Sheehan's approach to the people of the USA, "her country,"
and her approach to the people of the rest of the world is a
tremendous example of genuine internationalism. Says Sister
Sheehan," I went from being the mom who did everyone's laundry,
packed lunches, kissed boo-boos, tucked in at night, cleaned up the
messes, to being someone who fights for all humanity's children not
just her own." (ibid., pages 127 and 128)
Cindy Sheehan's internationalist approach to the children of the world challenges the communists of the world to become consistent proletarian internationalists. Such forces understand and operate on the basis of the fact that the struggle for socialism is a global struggle and that our struggle against monopoly capitalism and imperialism and all the comprador, semi-feudal and other reactionary forces connected to international capital is interconnected. A defeat in one area of the world is a defeat for all. And a victory in one area of the world is a victory for all.
Finally, in Commemoration of International Working Women's Day in 2012, let all the women and men who are inspired by the courage and convictions and the political life of Cindy Sheehan express our determination to follow in her footsteps. Let us live like Cindy, with our heads held high and our backs straight and fight together for a better future for all humanity.
The Latest From The Private Bradley Manning Support Network-Free Bradley Manning Now!-Report from July 16th motion hearing and vigil
Click on the headline to link to the Private Bradley Manning Support Network for the latest information on his case and activities on his behalf .
*********
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq war timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Private Manning. The entry below can serve as a continuing rationale for my (and your) support to this honorbale whistleblower.
From the American Left History Blog, March 28, 2012
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning On Wednesday April 25th - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Private Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Private Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Manning Now!
*********
We of the anti-war movement were not able to do much to affect the Bush- Obama Iraq war timetable but we can save the one hero of that war, Private Manning. The entry below can serve as a continuing rationale for my (and your) support to this honorbale whistleblower.
From the American Left History Blog, March 28, 2012
Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning On Wednesday April 25th - A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner
Markin comment:
Last year I wrote a little entry in this space in order to motivate my reasons for standing in solidarity with a March 20th rally in support of Private Manning at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia where he was then being held. I have subsequently repeatedly used that entry, Why I Will Be Standing In Solidarity With Private Bradley Manning At Quantico, Virginia On Sunday March 20th At 2:00 PM- A Personal Note From An Ex-Soldier Political Prisoner, as a I have tried to publicize his case in blogs and other Internet sources, at various rallies, and at marches, most recently at the Veterans For Peace Saint Patrick’s Day Peace Parade in South Boston on March 18th.
After I received information from the Bradley Manning Support Network about the latest efforts on Private Manning’s behalf scheduled for April 24th and 25th in Washington and Fort Meade respectively I decided that I would travel south to stand once again in proximate solidarity with Brother Manning at Fort Meade on April 25th. In that spirit I have updated, a little, that earlier entry to reflect the changed circumstances over the past year. As one would expect when the cause is still the same, Private Manning's freedom, unfortunately most of the entry is still in the same key. And will be until the day he is freed by his jailers. And I will continue to stand in proud solidarity with Private Manning until that great day.
*****
Of course I will be standing at the front gate to the Fort Meade , Maryland on April 25th because I stand in solidarity with the actions of Private Bradley Manning in bringing to light, just a little light, some of the nefarious doings of this government, Bush-like or Obamian. If he did such acts they are no crime. No crime at all in my eyes or in the eyes of the vast majority of people who know of the case and of its importance as an individual act of resistance to the unjust and barbaric American-led war in Iraq. I sleep just a shade bit easier these days knowing that Private Manning (or someone) exposed what we all knew, or should have known- the Iraq war and the Afghan war justification rested on a house of cards. American imperialism’s gun-toting house of cards, but cards nevertheless.
Of course I will also be standing at the front gate of Fort Meade, Maryland on April 25th because I am outraged by the treatment meted out to Private Manning, presumably an innocent man, by a government who alleges itself to be some “beacon” of the civilized world. Bradley Manning had been held in solidarity at Quantico and other locales for over 500 days, and has been held without trial for much longer, as the government and its military try to glue a case together. The military, and its henchmen in the Justice Department, have gotten more devious although not smarter since I was a soldier in their crosshairs over forty years ago.
Now the two reasons above are more than sufficient for my standing at the front gate at Fort Meade on April 25th although they, in themselves, are only the appropriate reasons that any progressive thinking person would need to show up and shout to the high heavens for Private Manning’s freedom. I have an additional reason though, a very pressing personal reason. As mentioned above I too was in the military’s crosshairs as a citizen-soldier during the height of the Vietnam War. I will not go into the details of that episode, this comment after all is about brother soldier Manning, other than that I spent my own time in an Army stockade for, let’s put it this way, working on the principle of “what if they gave a war and nobody came”.
Forty years later I am still working off that principle, and gladly. But here is the real point. During that time I had outside support, outside civilian support, that rallied on several occasions outside the military base where I was confined. Believe me that knowledge helped me get through the tough days inside. So on April 25th I will be just, once again, as I have been able to on too few other occasions over years, paying my dues for that long ago support. You, Brother Manning, are a true winter soldier. We were not able to do much about the course of the Iraq War (and little thus far on Afghanistan) but we can move might and main to save the one real hero of that whole mess.
Private Manning I hope that you will hear us and hear about our rally in your defense outside the gates. Better yet, everybody who reads this piece join us and make sure that he can hear us loud and clear. And let us shout to high heaven against this gross injustice-Free Private Manning Now!
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- At The Head Of The Algonquin Roundtable-Dorothy Parker’s Complete Stories
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the writer and critic Dorothy Parker
Book Review
Dorothy Parker: The Complete Stories, Dorothy Parker, Penguin Books, 1995
I love short stories, probably because given my main preoccupations in life with politics and associated questions the short story has allowed me to read a full story and be done with it at one sitting. Strangely (or maybe not given past educational circumstances) in the American section of the pantheon of the Western literary canon from the first half (roughly) of the twentieth century most of those short story writers were men. You know the litany-London, Hemingway (above all, Hemingway), Fitzgerald, James M. Cain, James T. Farrell and so on (and throw in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Damon Runyon, and Ring Lardner to add fuel to the fire).
And then, as if to point out graphically all its glaring inequity, right alongside of the “big boys” there was Dorothy Parker. I was crazy for her stuff from the time (whatever or whenever the exact time I am not sure of right now) I read “Big Blonde” (included here naturally) in high school back in the 1960s. And as was (and is) my wont I went to every library and bookstore around to get her other stuff, stuff like “Soldiers of the Republic” since I was also mad about the Spanish Civil War. Of course I then needed to read up on the fabled Algonquin Roundtable in New York City that she sat in as well as material about her political writings (she wrote material on the Sacco and Vanzetti case and participated in other labor and left causes)
Now, for those who have maybe only read “Big Blonde” let’s say, it is not obvious, not obvious at all, to me why a hard scrabble son of the working- class from up in mill town Olde Saco, Maine would be attracted to Parker’s stories. Stories mainly published for women readers of women’s magazines (pardon me, the folks at The New Yorker) like “You Were Perfectly Fine,” “Lady With A Lamp,” or “From the Diary Of A New York Lady,” all centered somewhere in midtown Manhattan among the Mayfair swells of the day (late 1920s –1930s) and mainly centered on the travails of the lounge around, shop around, lunch around, sleep around women of that set. But like Fitzgerald and the Ivy League swells that he portrayed endlessly, the Hobey Bakers, the Dink Divers, etc. she knew her milieu and knew how the write like hell about them. And knew their foibles and follies to a “t.” There, simple enough.
Note: I wonder in the post-feminist (or third- wave feminist, take your choice) world of the 2000s with all the changes wrought over the past several decades in male-female relationships whether stories about the caddish and unsentimental men that Dorothy Parker wrote about and the self-absorbed, fretful women who “longed” to satisfy them at a great personal and social cost would “sell” today. Are there any women like that anymore? (Or guys?) What do you think? I know one thing she would be forced, forced by the market if for no other reason, to be much more explicit in her then just titillating references to homosexuality, lesbianism, adultery, incest, class, race and just plain fooling around. Women readers (and men) would demand it or she would be relegated to Good Housekeeping magazine.
Book Review
Dorothy Parker: The Complete Stories, Dorothy Parker, Penguin Books, 1995
I love short stories, probably because given my main preoccupations in life with politics and associated questions the short story has allowed me to read a full story and be done with it at one sitting. Strangely (or maybe not given past educational circumstances) in the American section of the pantheon of the Western literary canon from the first half (roughly) of the twentieth century most of those short story writers were men. You know the litany-London, Hemingway (above all, Hemingway), Fitzgerald, James M. Cain, James T. Farrell and so on (and throw in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Damon Runyon, and Ring Lardner to add fuel to the fire).
And then, as if to point out graphically all its glaring inequity, right alongside of the “big boys” there was Dorothy Parker. I was crazy for her stuff from the time (whatever or whenever the exact time I am not sure of right now) I read “Big Blonde” (included here naturally) in high school back in the 1960s. And as was (and is) my wont I went to every library and bookstore around to get her other stuff, stuff like “Soldiers of the Republic” since I was also mad about the Spanish Civil War. Of course I then needed to read up on the fabled Algonquin Roundtable in New York City that she sat in as well as material about her political writings (she wrote material on the Sacco and Vanzetti case and participated in other labor and left causes)
Now, for those who have maybe only read “Big Blonde” let’s say, it is not obvious, not obvious at all, to me why a hard scrabble son of the working- class from up in mill town Olde Saco, Maine would be attracted to Parker’s stories. Stories mainly published for women readers of women’s magazines (pardon me, the folks at The New Yorker) like “You Were Perfectly Fine,” “Lady With A Lamp,” or “From the Diary Of A New York Lady,” all centered somewhere in midtown Manhattan among the Mayfair swells of the day (late 1920s –1930s) and mainly centered on the travails of the lounge around, shop around, lunch around, sleep around women of that set. But like Fitzgerald and the Ivy League swells that he portrayed endlessly, the Hobey Bakers, the Dink Divers, etc. she knew her milieu and knew how the write like hell about them. And knew their foibles and follies to a “t.” There, simple enough.
Note: I wonder in the post-feminist (or third- wave feminist, take your choice) world of the 2000s with all the changes wrought over the past several decades in male-female relationships whether stories about the caddish and unsentimental men that Dorothy Parker wrote about and the self-absorbed, fretful women who “longed” to satisfy them at a great personal and social cost would “sell” today. Are there any women like that anymore? (Or guys?) What do you think? I know one thing she would be forced, forced by the market if for no other reason, to be much more explicit in her then just titillating references to homosexuality, lesbianism, adultery, incest, class, race and just plain fooling around. Women readers (and men) would demand it or she would be relegated to Good Housekeeping magazine.
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradtion-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)
Markin comment on this series:
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 just 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 for educational purposes only:
"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.
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Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)
EDITOR'S NOTE: With this series Young Spartacus makes available for our readers a contribution presented by Joseph Seymour, a Spartacist League Central Committee member, at the mid-January Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley. "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," reproduced from the verbal presentation with a minimum of editorial abridgement, seeks to debunk the academic/New Left view of Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy by reaffirming the shaping influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two generations of revolutionary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order. The first part, featured in our February issue, discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its insurrectionary and most radical wing, upheld by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti.
*********
The history of the French revolutionary movement after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the history of the polarization of the left opposition to royal absolutism into its bourgeois conservative, revolutionary democratic and communist component of revolutionary democracy, which simultaneously was transformed through proletarianization.
The two key dividing lines were the successful revolution of 1830 and the Lyons silk weavers’ insurrection of 1834.
Now, at the beginning of this period, 1815, the left opposition to the Bourbon Restoration had three main tendencies. First, the liberal bourgeoisie, whose economic policy was laissez faire, whose power base was the very restricted parliament based on a limited franchise, whose political program advocated not democracy but rather an extended franchise and certain rights, and whose main leadership was the wealthy nobleman Lafayette.
Second, there were the Bonapartists, who were mainly centered in the army and whose program was roughly national populism. Until Bonaparte died in 1821, they stood for the restoration of Bonaparte: "Let's kick these foreigners and their lackeys out of France." Revolutionary nationalism. But they were not committed to economic laissez faire; they could make certain populist appeals to peasant economic protectionism, and in that sense were even demagogically to the left of the liberals.
Then there were the revolutionary democrats, who in this period (1815-1820) were almost exclusively limited to the student population of Paris. And the vanguard was a small group of revolutionary democrats who, being illegal, took over a masonic order and named it the Friends of Truth, whose leader was a rather reputable and important figure named Saint Amand Bazard.
These three forces united in their mass on two occasions: the Carbonari Conspiracy of 1821-23, where they were defeated, and the revolution of 1830, where they were in a military sense victorious. But that victory split those component parts asunder.
Carbonari Conspiracy
I will just say a few words about the Carbonari Conspiracy, which was important. First, it had a genuinely mass character, encompassing at its height probably 80,000 activists. In France every revolutionist who was mature, and even some who were not mature, was a member of the Carbonari. It provided the first revolutionary experience for that generation. The 17-year-old Louis Auguste Blanqui had his first revolutionary experience in the Carbonari and his later secret organizations were modeled on the Carbonari—only cells of three and only one person in the three knew anyone in the cell above, so one had a hierarchy which sealed off the leadership from the base.
In 1821, in response to the gains of the liberals in parliament, the Bourbons moved to the right and rewrote the parliamentary laws. The liberal bourgeois opposition in effect said, "Well, we have no choice but to engage in insurrection." They contacted the radical students and the disgruntled Bonapartists and even democrats in the army, organizing a conspiracy whose main strategy was the subversion of the army. The Carbonari Conspiracy, thus, was a democratic mutiny in the army, financed and organized by the liberal bourgeoisie, utilizing the student radicals, each seeking to manipulate and utilize the other.
But the army, in the absence of a general social crisis, was isolated and sufficiently loyal to the regime that the Conspiracy did not work. When someone would say, "Psst, you want to join?," he would get turned in and would be executed. So there was a whole series of executions and abortive mutinies.
The suppression of the Carbonari had a significant effect but, interestingly enough, the various forces involved maintained a kind of good will toward each other. They drifted apart. The liberal bourgeoisie went back to parliamentary game-playing. The student-based revolutionary democrats, however, did something interesting. They decided to do some fundamental rethinking of political doctrine, and they soon discovered an eccentric nobleman named Saint-Simon, who actually died about the time they began reading his works.
Discovery of Saint-Simon
Saint-Simon was not a socialist, he was not associated with the revolutionary movement, but rather he was a technocrat who believed in state economic planning. He inherited the Enlightenment tradition. He said, "Capitalism is obviously irrational, production is obviously ungoverned, and I can think of fourteen different ways to improve the economy, but there has to be some kind of centralization."
So Saint Amand Hazard and his circle for a couple of years read this material and came out as the first socialist organization with a revolutionary democratic tradition. They were not an odd sect; they actually had experience in revolutionary politics and a real sense for political power.
Saint-Simonism, therefore, was the first politically significant socialist tendency, although Owenism in Britain, by a very different process, was also achieving a semi-mass character. Saint-Simonism also spread through Germany—one of Marx's high-school teachers was a Saint-Simonian socialist—and was the first basic socialist doctrine to penetrate the continent.
While one tends to think of early socialist movements as being very primitive, in fact Saint-Simonism was the most technocratic of any socialist doctrine, not the most primitive. And it reflected the close organic ties between the radical democrats-cum-socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie, which at that time was very alienated from the state apparatus held by the Bourbons, who believed that they were living in the seventeenth century. So, certain elements of bourgeois technocratic socialism tended to penetrate these circles and became quite faddish. Only in a later period, with mass agitation, were the traditions of Jacobin communism rediscovered.
Revolution of 1830
Now, the next time the left opposition to the Bourbon regime unified for insurrectionary action they were successful ... much to their surprise. In the limited parliament, despite the various laws, the liberals were still gaining and finally won a majority. Then the king decided to pull a coup
d’état and declared, "We are dissolving parliament, and we are having total censorship of the press."
Some journalists, among them Louis Auguste Blanqui, although he was not a leader, said, "We refuse.' We protest.'" Some of them were arrested, and the cops knocked on the doors.
It was the spark that was needed to set off the Parisian masses. Among them were all these Bonapartist army officers, who were much better than the French army of the day, which had been purged to make it impossible for France to conquer the other countries anymore. After three days of street fighting, the French army was defeated, decisively driven out of Paris.
Now this should have been, as the radicals and the Saint-Simonians ex-pected the beginning of the second French Revolution. Hazard, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, went to his old friend Lafayette. As the historic leader of the liberal opposition Lafayette was now head of the de facto state power, the so-called National Guard, which was the military arm of the bourgeoisie in Paris. And he said, "Look Lafayette, this is my program, it's a communist program. You be a communist dictator, and we'll support you." And Lafayette stared at him.
Then the liberal pretender—the king's cousin—visited Lafayette along with a banker named Lafitte; Lafayette says, “I am a republican"; the liberal pretender exclaims, "So am I"; and the banker says, "Look, you don't want a lot of trouble." So Lafayette says, "Okay," and they went out—there's a famous kiss of reconciliation in front of the masses of -Paris. When the republicans cried "Betrayal!," they were beaten up and suppressed.
So the French Revolution simply led from an attempted absolutist monarchy to a somewhat more liberal one, although becoming increasingly repressive, in which the Parisian masses and particularly the left—the left wing of the left wing being Saint-Simonian socialists—rightly felt themselves betrayed. It took approximately five years for the new regime to consolidate itself, and the period between the revolution of 1830 and the great repression of 1835 was a continued series of attempts, some of them having a mass character, to carry the revolution of 1830 to a successful conclusion.
The first phase of the struggle, spearheaded by the organization called the Society of the Friends of the People, was simply leftist insurrections in Paris. They felt that the masses would never accept this king, and every couple of months they would rally the students, whatever artisans they could collect, and some disgruntled soldiers and simply attack the state. Blanqui was the vice president of the Society of the Friends of the People and was arrested for student agitation. This is for the SYL: in case anybody puts down agitating on campus, you can point to Blanqui, who never thought that agitating on campus was beneath his dignity.
Buonarroti and the Continuity of Revolutionary Jacobinism
Now, by 1832 the revolutionary democrats had gotten a little bloodied, and they formed another organization with a somewhat longer range and propagandistic purpose, called the Society of the Rights of Man. This was the first mass democratic organization in which revolutionary communists were a serious contender for factional power and the first revolutionary organization which intersected and in a certain sense led the mass organizations of the pre-industrial proletariat.
During 1832-34 in the Society of the Rights of Man there were two factions. The orthodox Jacobin faction republished Robespierre's writings, Robespierre's "Rights of Man," and could be called revolutionary bourgeois democrats anticipating social democracy. And the other faction, the outright Jacobin communist faction organized by Buonarroti, also claimed the same historic tradition. The 1833 program of the agents of Buonarroti within the Society of the Rights of Man declared:
"All property, movable or immovable, contained within the national territory, or anywhere possessed by its citizens, belongs to the people, who alone can regulate its distribution. Labor is a debt which every healthy citizen owes to society, idleness ought to be branded as a robbery and as a perpetual source of immorality."
[—Louis Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840}
And it was through the Society of the Rights of Man that Buonarroti in the last four or five years of his life was able to intersect a new revolutionary • generation and win them to the traditions of Jacobin communism.
Class Battles at Lyons
Now, after 1832, the scene of the major revolutionary battles in France shifts to the provincial industrial city of Lyons, which was the main concentration of the pre-industrial French working class concentrated in the silk industry, which was producing for the world market. In 1831, as a result of a wage struggle, they had a demonstration, the bourgeois National Guard attacked them, and they attacked back. The army vacillated, because after the revolution of 1830 the army was a little wary of going against the people—they had gone against it and lost. The weavers took over the city, but they had no ulterior political motives. They said, "Here, we don't want the city, you can have it back." So then, of course, the army came in and smashed them.
The silk weavers, however, were organized in a pre-industrial union known as the Mutualists. At the same time there were these burgeoning bourgeois-democratic-cum-communist propaganda groups in Lyons which sought to intersect the Mutualists. The leadership of the first unions were not socialists or revolutionary democrats but rather traditionalists heavily influenced by the clergy. It was only through a long period of struggle that the revolutionary democrats and the communists among them were able to penetrate the organizations of the pre-industrial working class and to win the masses.
The relationship between the Society of the Rights of Man and the silkweavers1 union has been described by Louis Blanc, the leading socialist historian writing in the 1840's in his History of Ten Years:
"We have said that a considerable number of Mutualists had entered the Society [the Society of the Rights of M an] but they had done so as individuals, for as the Mutualists societies considered collectively and in its tendency, it is certain that in the period in question, it was governed by a narrow corporate spirit. Above all, it was bent on preserving its industrial physiognomy, its originality, and all that constituted for it a situation apart amongst the working classes. No doubt, there were amongst it men exalted above their feelings. But these men did not constitute the majority, all whose interests might be summed up in increased wages for silk weavers. The influence of the clergy, moreover, over the class of silk weavers in Lyons has always been rather considerable. Now the following was the spirit in which was exercised this influence, of which women were the inconspicuous but efficient agents. The clergy, beholding in the manufacturers but liberals and skeptics, had felt no inclination to damp a disposition to revolt which animated the workmen against them. But at the same time it urged the latter to distrust the republican party but taking advantage of its sympathies. Now this was in fact precisely the conduct towards the Society by the leaders of Mutualism; for while they suffered themselves to be charged with republicanism, and availed themselves against the manufacturers in the popular diatribes of the Glaneusse [the republican press] they spared nothing to deaden the republican propaganda in the lodges."
Communist Ideology and Proletarian Struggles
The famous dictum of Lenin [in What Is To Be Done?] that socialist ideology must be brought to the proletariat from without is not a programmatic statement. It is not even a theoretical statement. It is an indisputable historical fact.
The communist movement has a prehistory, and the mass economic organizations of the proletariat have different prehistories. The communist movement arose out of the left wing of the bourgeois-democratic movement and, in its earliest phases, its mass base was essentially the young intellectuals concentrated among students. The mass economic organizations of the working class go back to the earliest mercantilist period, and their earliest natural leaders tended to be the clergy. The communist movement" arising out of the democratic movement and the trade unions emerging out of the artisan guilds intersect, and the workers movement is shaped by that intersection. But at every point there is a deep ideological struggle between the revolutionary democrats or socialists and the Catholic priests in France, or the Russian Orthodox priests in Russia, or the Methodists in England.
As a result of their experiences the leaders of the Mutualists, who were traditionalists and monarchists, appealed to the king and sought reforms, but at every point they were thwarted. Then in 1834 the Orleans monarchy attempted to totally suppress the left opposition, mainly the political opposition, with the so-called Law of Associations, which banned all associations. While these laws were mainly directed at political associations, they also affected the economic organizations of the workers.
So the Lyons silk weavers said, "You attempt to ban our organizations and we will fight." And they fought. There was a mass meeting, jointly called by the Society of the Rights of Man and the silk weavers' union and appealing to
other workers organizations in Lyons; they called a mass demonstration in April, 1834. When the army attempted to suppress the demonstration, the greatest revolutionary violence in France between the revolution of 1830 and those of 1848 occurred in Lyons-six days of fighting, in which hundreds, mainly silk weavers, were killed.
The leaders were repressed in a so-called "Monster Trial," in which both the political left opposition, including virtually all the leaders of the Society of the Rights of Man, and the leaders of the silk weavers were charged with conspiracy and insurrection and were imprisoned. After 1834 Lyons was a Red City for three decades; every communist tendency, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Cabet, had an organic base among the silk weavers in Lyons—until the industry essentially disintegrated in the 1860's. But it didn't begin that way.
Blanqui-Insurrectionary Communism
Blanquism as an identifiable doctrine is a product of the suppression of open insurrectionary activity culminating in the so-called "Monster Trial" of 1835. Blanqui had been a revolutionary activist since the age of 17. He had fought in all the street battles and had been decorated for his role in the revolution of 1830 by the new king. Until 1833-34, however, he was simply one of the boys, in no sense distinguishable, except by his personal courage, from three or four dozen other revolutionary democrats.
In prison between 1832 and 1834 he became a communist, but without particular doctrinal sophistication. He always pooh-poohed attempts to describe the nature of communist society. In prison he developed not the goal of communism, which as I said always had a very general characteristic, but strategic conceptions which were so radically different than those of his contemporaries that they constituted a new and distinct political tendency.
Blanqui asked himself two questions. First, why have all of the insurrections since 1830 failed? And second, why did the revolution of 1830, which succeeded in a military sense, also fail, bringing into power a regime which was at best only quantitatively less reactionary than the regime the masses had replaced?
Blanqui rejected the French revolutionary model which had inspired
Buonarroti: you begin with a bloc with the liberals or even the constitutional monarchists, and then you have the gradual radicalization of the revolution. Historical experience had proven impossible the replication of the experience of the French revolution, that is, the gradual radicalization beginning with a broad unity of all the opponents of the existing regime and then narrowing it down.
Instead, Blanqui insisted that communists must overthrow the government and directly rule. So he created what was in fact a secret army: the army was secret from the authorities, and the leadership of the army was secret from the ranks. He organized secret societies, such as the Society of Families and later, in the late 1830's, the Society of the Seasons.
In order to enter one of these societies, you were asked questions and you had to give the right answers, the revolutionary catechism. This is the catechism of the Society of the Families, 1836:
"What is the people? The people is the mass of citizens who work. What is the fate of the proletariat under the government of the rich? Its fate is the same as that of the serf and the Negro. It is clearly a long tale of hardship, fatigue and suffering. Must one make a political or social revolution? One must make a social revolution."
[—Samuel H. Bernstein, Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection]
You answer those three things correctly, and three years later you'll be fighting it out with the army in the streets of Paris.
The Society of the Seasons was not only a French organization; it had a German appendage, which for the history of Marxism is important. There was a large German population in Paris in the 1830's, heavily artisan. In Paris there was the so-called German Republican Party which contained all of the democrats. A man named Theodore Schuster, who by some curious coincidence was a friend of Buonarroti, formed a faction in the German Republican Party, split the party and from that split arose an organization called the League of the Just. When Buonarroti died in 1837, Blanqui inherited his constituency and formed a military bloc with the League of the Just, at that time a handful of communist intellectuals and a base of German artisans.
So, one nice spring day in 1839, a thousand Frenchmen and Germans, largely artisan, met for their routine military exercise in downtown Paris. But this time Blanqui and his lieutenant Barbes walked up and said, "Gentlemen, we are your leadership, and this is it!" They broke into a gunsmith shop, and for the next couple of days they were fighting a very surprised French army.
How did Blanqui recruit this relatively large number of people willing to just walk into the streets of Paris and start shooting? In a certain sense, he didn't. Blanqui rallied the militant wing of the broader revolutionary democratic opposition, which in general tended to be of the plebeian social background. At his trial Blanqui was the only one who was a bourgeois. Everyone else, there were 30 some odd, were all either artisans or shopkeepers. They had nothing to lose.
This indicates an essential aspect of Blanquism which in a certain sense is the key to this talk. Blanquism was the intersection of two currents. On one hand, Blanquism represented the extreme militarist wing of the bourgeois-democratic revolution whose tactics, concepts and whose method of recruitment were conditioned by the existence of a broader bourgeois-democratic movement. On the other hand it also represented the nascent collectivist instincts and impulse of the plebeian and particularly urban artisan masses. If one liquidates that dialectical tension, one cannot understand Blanquism. And if one fails to understand Blanquism, then one cannot comprehend this entire period.
To be sure, the Blanqui/Barbes uprising of 1839 was a pure putsch. But Blanqui remained tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution; he proposed a revolutionary provisional government which contained himself and his lieutenants, but also one of the leading democratic oppositionists who knew nothing about the putsch. He said, "This is the government, we take power, you're the president." Blanqui assumed that if he overthrew the state, then the more cautious, conservative bourgeois democrats would go along with him, and, moreover, would also be easily won to communism.
In a certain sense Blanqui was right. The king really wanted to execute Barbes, the Blanquist leader who was captured first; it was only fear of a mass insurrection and mass violence if Barbes and Blanqui were executed that prevented it. So that even though this was a pure putsch, it was profoundly popular, and the execution of these two revolutionaries would have been not only in the mass unpopular but also not in the interest of the liberal bourgeoisie: the Blanquists had the protection of the bourgeois democrats on the grounds that the revolutionary communists can be used, as in 1830. One is not talking about the Weather-
men. - One is talking about an insurrectionary act under conditions of severe repression.
Blanqui spent the 1840's in jail. Blanquism as an organized phenomenon disappeared. If you knew the right Paris cafes in the 1840's, you could walk in and somebody would come up to you, start talking, ask for money to buy guns and say, "Well, do you want to come to a meeting?" Dispersed revolutionary activity.
Marx had great respect for Blanqui. He certainly is the only figure in the 19th century who stands comparable to Marx. He was, however, critical and in some ways contemptuous of Blanqui's conceptions of organization.
In the early 1850's Marx wrote a scathing attack on the typical Parisian revolutionary conspirator in the form of a book review ["Review of A. Chenu's 'Les Conspirateurs'," in Saul K. Pad-over, Marx on Revolution]. And Marx said, "Oh, you're a bunch of Bohemians, declassed intellectuals, declassed proletarians, easily penetrated by the cops, tending to lead a dissolute life-style." Marx was very prudish, a very straight guy.
What distinguished Marx was his insistence that the communists must be tied to the workers—not simply the exceptional workers who were prepared to become professional revolutionaries —the mass of the workers through their established organizations. So that's the negative aspect of Blanquism which quite early on Marx rejected. But in the only two revolutionary situations in which Marx was involved during his lifetime—the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune—Marx and Blanqui were forced together, and Marx on both occasions had to break with right-wing allies.
So, whatever his failing Blanqui insisted, again and again, on certain fundamental truths: namely, that one cannot build communism simply through cooperative bootstrap operations, which were very popular in that period; that you cannot establish communism unless the communists wield state power; and that the bourgeoisie is not going to establish a stable parliamentary democracy in which the communists could establish their constituency and by that means take over the government.
Engels, in a much later critique of the Blanquists, observed that Blanqui was a man of the pre-1848 period. But in some ways he was also a man of the post-1914 period—Blanqui above all grasped the centrality of the revolutionary overthrow of the state.
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 just 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 for educational purposes only:
"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.
*********
Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)
EDITOR'S NOTE: With this series Young Spartacus makes available for our readers a contribution presented by Joseph Seymour, a Spartacist League Central Committee member, at the mid-January Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley. "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," reproduced from the verbal presentation with a minimum of editorial abridgement, seeks to debunk the academic/New Left view of Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy by reaffirming the shaping influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two generations of revolutionary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order. The first part, featured in our February issue, discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its insurrectionary and most radical wing, upheld by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti.
*********
The history of the French revolutionary movement after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the history of the polarization of the left opposition to royal absolutism into its bourgeois conservative, revolutionary democratic and communist component of revolutionary democracy, which simultaneously was transformed through proletarianization.
The two key dividing lines were the successful revolution of 1830 and the Lyons silk weavers’ insurrection of 1834.
Now, at the beginning of this period, 1815, the left opposition to the Bourbon Restoration had three main tendencies. First, the liberal bourgeoisie, whose economic policy was laissez faire, whose power base was the very restricted parliament based on a limited franchise, whose political program advocated not democracy but rather an extended franchise and certain rights, and whose main leadership was the wealthy nobleman Lafayette.
Second, there were the Bonapartists, who were mainly centered in the army and whose program was roughly national populism. Until Bonaparte died in 1821, they stood for the restoration of Bonaparte: "Let's kick these foreigners and their lackeys out of France." Revolutionary nationalism. But they were not committed to economic laissez faire; they could make certain populist appeals to peasant economic protectionism, and in that sense were even demagogically to the left of the liberals.
Then there were the revolutionary democrats, who in this period (1815-1820) were almost exclusively limited to the student population of Paris. And the vanguard was a small group of revolutionary democrats who, being illegal, took over a masonic order and named it the Friends of Truth, whose leader was a rather reputable and important figure named Saint Amand Bazard.
These three forces united in their mass on two occasions: the Carbonari Conspiracy of 1821-23, where they were defeated, and the revolution of 1830, where they were in a military sense victorious. But that victory split those component parts asunder.
Carbonari Conspiracy
I will just say a few words about the Carbonari Conspiracy, which was important. First, it had a genuinely mass character, encompassing at its height probably 80,000 activists. In France every revolutionist who was mature, and even some who were not mature, was a member of the Carbonari. It provided the first revolutionary experience for that generation. The 17-year-old Louis Auguste Blanqui had his first revolutionary experience in the Carbonari and his later secret organizations were modeled on the Carbonari—only cells of three and only one person in the three knew anyone in the cell above, so one had a hierarchy which sealed off the leadership from the base.
In 1821, in response to the gains of the liberals in parliament, the Bourbons moved to the right and rewrote the parliamentary laws. The liberal bourgeois opposition in effect said, "Well, we have no choice but to engage in insurrection." They contacted the radical students and the disgruntled Bonapartists and even democrats in the army, organizing a conspiracy whose main strategy was the subversion of the army. The Carbonari Conspiracy, thus, was a democratic mutiny in the army, financed and organized by the liberal bourgeoisie, utilizing the student radicals, each seeking to manipulate and utilize the other.
But the army, in the absence of a general social crisis, was isolated and sufficiently loyal to the regime that the Conspiracy did not work. When someone would say, "Psst, you want to join?," he would get turned in and would be executed. So there was a whole series of executions and abortive mutinies.
The suppression of the Carbonari had a significant effect but, interestingly enough, the various forces involved maintained a kind of good will toward each other. They drifted apart. The liberal bourgeoisie went back to parliamentary game-playing. The student-based revolutionary democrats, however, did something interesting. They decided to do some fundamental rethinking of political doctrine, and they soon discovered an eccentric nobleman named Saint-Simon, who actually died about the time they began reading his works.
Discovery of Saint-Simon
Saint-Simon was not a socialist, he was not associated with the revolutionary movement, but rather he was a technocrat who believed in state economic planning. He inherited the Enlightenment tradition. He said, "Capitalism is obviously irrational, production is obviously ungoverned, and I can think of fourteen different ways to improve the economy, but there has to be some kind of centralization."
So Saint Amand Hazard and his circle for a couple of years read this material and came out as the first socialist organization with a revolutionary democratic tradition. They were not an odd sect; they actually had experience in revolutionary politics and a real sense for political power.
Saint-Simonism, therefore, was the first politically significant socialist tendency, although Owenism in Britain, by a very different process, was also achieving a semi-mass character. Saint-Simonism also spread through Germany—one of Marx's high-school teachers was a Saint-Simonian socialist—and was the first basic socialist doctrine to penetrate the continent.
While one tends to think of early socialist movements as being very primitive, in fact Saint-Simonism was the most technocratic of any socialist doctrine, not the most primitive. And it reflected the close organic ties between the radical democrats-cum-socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie, which at that time was very alienated from the state apparatus held by the Bourbons, who believed that they were living in the seventeenth century. So, certain elements of bourgeois technocratic socialism tended to penetrate these circles and became quite faddish. Only in a later period, with mass agitation, were the traditions of Jacobin communism rediscovered.
Revolution of 1830
Now, the next time the left opposition to the Bourbon regime unified for insurrectionary action they were successful ... much to their surprise. In the limited parliament, despite the various laws, the liberals were still gaining and finally won a majority. Then the king decided to pull a coup
d’état and declared, "We are dissolving parliament, and we are having total censorship of the press."
Some journalists, among them Louis Auguste Blanqui, although he was not a leader, said, "We refuse.' We protest.'" Some of them were arrested, and the cops knocked on the doors.
It was the spark that was needed to set off the Parisian masses. Among them were all these Bonapartist army officers, who were much better than the French army of the day, which had been purged to make it impossible for France to conquer the other countries anymore. After three days of street fighting, the French army was defeated, decisively driven out of Paris.
Now this should have been, as the radicals and the Saint-Simonians ex-pected the beginning of the second French Revolution. Hazard, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, went to his old friend Lafayette. As the historic leader of the liberal opposition Lafayette was now head of the de facto state power, the so-called National Guard, which was the military arm of the bourgeoisie in Paris. And he said, "Look Lafayette, this is my program, it's a communist program. You be a communist dictator, and we'll support you." And Lafayette stared at him.
Then the liberal pretender—the king's cousin—visited Lafayette along with a banker named Lafitte; Lafayette says, “I am a republican"; the liberal pretender exclaims, "So am I"; and the banker says, "Look, you don't want a lot of trouble." So Lafayette says, "Okay," and they went out—there's a famous kiss of reconciliation in front of the masses of -Paris. When the republicans cried "Betrayal!," they were beaten up and suppressed.
So the French Revolution simply led from an attempted absolutist monarchy to a somewhat more liberal one, although becoming increasingly repressive, in which the Parisian masses and particularly the left—the left wing of the left wing being Saint-Simonian socialists—rightly felt themselves betrayed. It took approximately five years for the new regime to consolidate itself, and the period between the revolution of 1830 and the great repression of 1835 was a continued series of attempts, some of them having a mass character, to carry the revolution of 1830 to a successful conclusion.
The first phase of the struggle, spearheaded by the organization called the Society of the Friends of the People, was simply leftist insurrections in Paris. They felt that the masses would never accept this king, and every couple of months they would rally the students, whatever artisans they could collect, and some disgruntled soldiers and simply attack the state. Blanqui was the vice president of the Society of the Friends of the People and was arrested for student agitation. This is for the SYL: in case anybody puts down agitating on campus, you can point to Blanqui, who never thought that agitating on campus was beneath his dignity.
Buonarroti and the Continuity of Revolutionary Jacobinism
Now, by 1832 the revolutionary democrats had gotten a little bloodied, and they formed another organization with a somewhat longer range and propagandistic purpose, called the Society of the Rights of Man. This was the first mass democratic organization in which revolutionary communists were a serious contender for factional power and the first revolutionary organization which intersected and in a certain sense led the mass organizations of the pre-industrial proletariat.
During 1832-34 in the Society of the Rights of Man there were two factions. The orthodox Jacobin faction republished Robespierre's writings, Robespierre's "Rights of Man," and could be called revolutionary bourgeois democrats anticipating social democracy. And the other faction, the outright Jacobin communist faction organized by Buonarroti, also claimed the same historic tradition. The 1833 program of the agents of Buonarroti within the Society of the Rights of Man declared:
"All property, movable or immovable, contained within the national territory, or anywhere possessed by its citizens, belongs to the people, who alone can regulate its distribution. Labor is a debt which every healthy citizen owes to society, idleness ought to be branded as a robbery and as a perpetual source of immorality."
[—Louis Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840}
And it was through the Society of the Rights of Man that Buonarroti in the last four or five years of his life was able to intersect a new revolutionary • generation and win them to the traditions of Jacobin communism.
Class Battles at Lyons
Now, after 1832, the scene of the major revolutionary battles in France shifts to the provincial industrial city of Lyons, which was the main concentration of the pre-industrial French working class concentrated in the silk industry, which was producing for the world market. In 1831, as a result of a wage struggle, they had a demonstration, the bourgeois National Guard attacked them, and they attacked back. The army vacillated, because after the revolution of 1830 the army was a little wary of going against the people—they had gone against it and lost. The weavers took over the city, but they had no ulterior political motives. They said, "Here, we don't want the city, you can have it back." So then, of course, the army came in and smashed them.
The silk weavers, however, were organized in a pre-industrial union known as the Mutualists. At the same time there were these burgeoning bourgeois-democratic-cum-communist propaganda groups in Lyons which sought to intersect the Mutualists. The leadership of the first unions were not socialists or revolutionary democrats but rather traditionalists heavily influenced by the clergy. It was only through a long period of struggle that the revolutionary democrats and the communists among them were able to penetrate the organizations of the pre-industrial working class and to win the masses.
The relationship between the Society of the Rights of Man and the silkweavers1 union has been described by Louis Blanc, the leading socialist historian writing in the 1840's in his History of Ten Years:
"We have said that a considerable number of Mutualists had entered the Society [the Society of the Rights of M an] but they had done so as individuals, for as the Mutualists societies considered collectively and in its tendency, it is certain that in the period in question, it was governed by a narrow corporate spirit. Above all, it was bent on preserving its industrial physiognomy, its originality, and all that constituted for it a situation apart amongst the working classes. No doubt, there were amongst it men exalted above their feelings. But these men did not constitute the majority, all whose interests might be summed up in increased wages for silk weavers. The influence of the clergy, moreover, over the class of silk weavers in Lyons has always been rather considerable. Now the following was the spirit in which was exercised this influence, of which women were the inconspicuous but efficient agents. The clergy, beholding in the manufacturers but liberals and skeptics, had felt no inclination to damp a disposition to revolt which animated the workmen against them. But at the same time it urged the latter to distrust the republican party but taking advantage of its sympathies. Now this was in fact precisely the conduct towards the Society by the leaders of Mutualism; for while they suffered themselves to be charged with republicanism, and availed themselves against the manufacturers in the popular diatribes of the Glaneusse [the republican press] they spared nothing to deaden the republican propaganda in the lodges."
Communist Ideology and Proletarian Struggles
The famous dictum of Lenin [in What Is To Be Done?] that socialist ideology must be brought to the proletariat from without is not a programmatic statement. It is not even a theoretical statement. It is an indisputable historical fact.
The communist movement has a prehistory, and the mass economic organizations of the proletariat have different prehistories. The communist movement arose out of the left wing of the bourgeois-democratic movement and, in its earliest phases, its mass base was essentially the young intellectuals concentrated among students. The mass economic organizations of the working class go back to the earliest mercantilist period, and their earliest natural leaders tended to be the clergy. The communist movement" arising out of the democratic movement and the trade unions emerging out of the artisan guilds intersect, and the workers movement is shaped by that intersection. But at every point there is a deep ideological struggle between the revolutionary democrats or socialists and the Catholic priests in France, or the Russian Orthodox priests in Russia, or the Methodists in England.
As a result of their experiences the leaders of the Mutualists, who were traditionalists and monarchists, appealed to the king and sought reforms, but at every point they were thwarted. Then in 1834 the Orleans monarchy attempted to totally suppress the left opposition, mainly the political opposition, with the so-called Law of Associations, which banned all associations. While these laws were mainly directed at political associations, they also affected the economic organizations of the workers.
So the Lyons silk weavers said, "You attempt to ban our organizations and we will fight." And they fought. There was a mass meeting, jointly called by the Society of the Rights of Man and the silk weavers' union and appealing to
other workers organizations in Lyons; they called a mass demonstration in April, 1834. When the army attempted to suppress the demonstration, the greatest revolutionary violence in France between the revolution of 1830 and those of 1848 occurred in Lyons-six days of fighting, in which hundreds, mainly silk weavers, were killed.
The leaders were repressed in a so-called "Monster Trial," in which both the political left opposition, including virtually all the leaders of the Society of the Rights of Man, and the leaders of the silk weavers were charged with conspiracy and insurrection and were imprisoned. After 1834 Lyons was a Red City for three decades; every communist tendency, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Cabet, had an organic base among the silk weavers in Lyons—until the industry essentially disintegrated in the 1860's. But it didn't begin that way.
Blanqui-Insurrectionary Communism
Blanquism as an identifiable doctrine is a product of the suppression of open insurrectionary activity culminating in the so-called "Monster Trial" of 1835. Blanqui had been a revolutionary activist since the age of 17. He had fought in all the street battles and had been decorated for his role in the revolution of 1830 by the new king. Until 1833-34, however, he was simply one of the boys, in no sense distinguishable, except by his personal courage, from three or four dozen other revolutionary democrats.
In prison between 1832 and 1834 he became a communist, but without particular doctrinal sophistication. He always pooh-poohed attempts to describe the nature of communist society. In prison he developed not the goal of communism, which as I said always had a very general characteristic, but strategic conceptions which were so radically different than those of his contemporaries that they constituted a new and distinct political tendency.
Blanqui asked himself two questions. First, why have all of the insurrections since 1830 failed? And second, why did the revolution of 1830, which succeeded in a military sense, also fail, bringing into power a regime which was at best only quantitatively less reactionary than the regime the masses had replaced?
Blanqui rejected the French revolutionary model which had inspired
Buonarroti: you begin with a bloc with the liberals or even the constitutional monarchists, and then you have the gradual radicalization of the revolution. Historical experience had proven impossible the replication of the experience of the French revolution, that is, the gradual radicalization beginning with a broad unity of all the opponents of the existing regime and then narrowing it down.
Instead, Blanqui insisted that communists must overthrow the government and directly rule. So he created what was in fact a secret army: the army was secret from the authorities, and the leadership of the army was secret from the ranks. He organized secret societies, such as the Society of Families and later, in the late 1830's, the Society of the Seasons.
In order to enter one of these societies, you were asked questions and you had to give the right answers, the revolutionary catechism. This is the catechism of the Society of the Families, 1836:
"What is the people? The people is the mass of citizens who work. What is the fate of the proletariat under the government of the rich? Its fate is the same as that of the serf and the Negro. It is clearly a long tale of hardship, fatigue and suffering. Must one make a political or social revolution? One must make a social revolution."
[—Samuel H. Bernstein, Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection]
You answer those three things correctly, and three years later you'll be fighting it out with the army in the streets of Paris.
The Society of the Seasons was not only a French organization; it had a German appendage, which for the history of Marxism is important. There was a large German population in Paris in the 1830's, heavily artisan. In Paris there was the so-called German Republican Party which contained all of the democrats. A man named Theodore Schuster, who by some curious coincidence was a friend of Buonarroti, formed a faction in the German Republican Party, split the party and from that split arose an organization called the League of the Just. When Buonarroti died in 1837, Blanqui inherited his constituency and formed a military bloc with the League of the Just, at that time a handful of communist intellectuals and a base of German artisans.
So, one nice spring day in 1839, a thousand Frenchmen and Germans, largely artisan, met for their routine military exercise in downtown Paris. But this time Blanqui and his lieutenant Barbes walked up and said, "Gentlemen, we are your leadership, and this is it!" They broke into a gunsmith shop, and for the next couple of days they were fighting a very surprised French army.
How did Blanqui recruit this relatively large number of people willing to just walk into the streets of Paris and start shooting? In a certain sense, he didn't. Blanqui rallied the militant wing of the broader revolutionary democratic opposition, which in general tended to be of the plebeian social background. At his trial Blanqui was the only one who was a bourgeois. Everyone else, there were 30 some odd, were all either artisans or shopkeepers. They had nothing to lose.
This indicates an essential aspect of Blanquism which in a certain sense is the key to this talk. Blanquism was the intersection of two currents. On one hand, Blanquism represented the extreme militarist wing of the bourgeois-democratic revolution whose tactics, concepts and whose method of recruitment were conditioned by the existence of a broader bourgeois-democratic movement. On the other hand it also represented the nascent collectivist instincts and impulse of the plebeian and particularly urban artisan masses. If one liquidates that dialectical tension, one cannot understand Blanquism. And if one fails to understand Blanquism, then one cannot comprehend this entire period.
To be sure, the Blanqui/Barbes uprising of 1839 was a pure putsch. But Blanqui remained tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution; he proposed a revolutionary provisional government which contained himself and his lieutenants, but also one of the leading democratic oppositionists who knew nothing about the putsch. He said, "This is the government, we take power, you're the president." Blanqui assumed that if he overthrew the state, then the more cautious, conservative bourgeois democrats would go along with him, and, moreover, would also be easily won to communism.
In a certain sense Blanqui was right. The king really wanted to execute Barbes, the Blanquist leader who was captured first; it was only fear of a mass insurrection and mass violence if Barbes and Blanqui were executed that prevented it. So that even though this was a pure putsch, it was profoundly popular, and the execution of these two revolutionaries would have been not only in the mass unpopular but also not in the interest of the liberal bourgeoisie: the Blanquists had the protection of the bourgeois democrats on the grounds that the revolutionary communists can be used, as in 1830. One is not talking about the Weather-
men. - One is talking about an insurrectionary act under conditions of severe repression.
Blanqui spent the 1840's in jail. Blanquism as an organized phenomenon disappeared. If you knew the right Paris cafes in the 1840's, you could walk in and somebody would come up to you, start talking, ask for money to buy guns and say, "Well, do you want to come to a meeting?" Dispersed revolutionary activity.
Marx had great respect for Blanqui. He certainly is the only figure in the 19th century who stands comparable to Marx. He was, however, critical and in some ways contemptuous of Blanqui's conceptions of organization.
In the early 1850's Marx wrote a scathing attack on the typical Parisian revolutionary conspirator in the form of a book review ["Review of A. Chenu's 'Les Conspirateurs'," in Saul K. Pad-over, Marx on Revolution]. And Marx said, "Oh, you're a bunch of Bohemians, declassed intellectuals, declassed proletarians, easily penetrated by the cops, tending to lead a dissolute life-style." Marx was very prudish, a very straight guy.
What distinguished Marx was his insistence that the communists must be tied to the workers—not simply the exceptional workers who were prepared to become professional revolutionaries —the mass of the workers through their established organizations. So that's the negative aspect of Blanquism which quite early on Marx rejected. But in the only two revolutionary situations in which Marx was involved during his lifetime—the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune—Marx and Blanqui were forced together, and Marx on both occasions had to break with right-wing allies.
So, whatever his failing Blanqui insisted, again and again, on certain fundamental truths: namely, that one cannot build communism simply through cooperative bootstrap operations, which were very popular in that period; that you cannot establish communism unless the communists wield state power; and that the bourgeoisie is not going to establish a stable parliamentary democracy in which the communists could establish their constituency and by that means take over the government.
Engels, in a much later critique of the Blanquists, observed that Blanqui was a man of the pre-1848 period. But in some ways he was also a man of the post-1914 period—Blanqui above all grasped the centrality of the revolutionary overthrow of the state.
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- She’s Got To Hold On
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Hold On.
Hold On Lyrics-Tom Waits
They hung a sign up in our town
"if you live it up, you won't
live it down"
So, she left Monte Rio, son
Just like a bullet leaves a gun
With charcoal eyes and Monroe hips
She went and took that California trip
Well, the moon was gold, her
Hair like wind
She said don't look back just
Come on Jim
Oh you got to
Hold on, Hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
You gotta hold on
Well, he gave her a dimestore watch
And a ring made from a spoon
Everyone is looking for someone to blame
But you share my bed, you share my name
Well, go ahead and call the cops
You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops
She said baby, I still love you
Sometimes there's nothin left to do
Oh you got to
Hold on, hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you got to
Just hold on.
Well, God bless your crooked little heart St. Louis got the best of me
I miss your broken-china voice
How I wish you were still here with me
Well, you build it up, you wreck it down
You burn your mansion to the ground
When there's nothing left to keep you here, when
You're falling behind in this
Big blue world
Oh you go to
Hold on, hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
You got to hold on
Down by the Riverside motel,
It's 10 below and falling
By a 99 cent store she closed her eyes
And started swaying
But it's so hard to dance that way
When it's cold and there's no music
Well your old hometown is so far away
But, inside your head there's a record
That's playing, a song called
Hold on, hold on
You really got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
And just hold on.
JLB Note: It really doesn’t take much these days, these old time memory be-fogged days, to have some snippet come swirling out of the air, some caught phrase in a passing conversation, some half-glanced word mentioned on some media outlet, some fragrance smelled from long ago soaps, perfumes, downy billows, to get me into that frame of mind to speak of old time Olde Saco (that is up in Maine for the unknowing heathens). The Olde Saco of the 1960s dying textile mills, of various working- class rites of passage, of teenage this and that, and most of all of the French-Canadian (on my mother Delores’ side, the side that counted, nee LeBlanc) ethos, pathos, and bathos that permeated the town. And of course, of F-C loves, lost and found.
The genesis of this particular air-borne swirl came via YouTube when I was searching for Tom Waits’ knows-skid-row-in-his-heart version of Yip Harsburg’s Brother Can You Spare A Dime? and I noticed his Hold On as part of his available playlist (the list of other stuff by an artist located on the right side of the screen if that is not what it is called). Upon listening that song brought to mind one Yvette Genet, her mad passion for men (boys really but I will get to that below), her mad passion for poetry and her mad passion for the “beats,” for the odd and unusual in grey old 1960s Olde Saco. She was to pay a dear price for those passions on October 23, 1964 (that date is important to the story, to my memory of her, and to her fate so I mention here first).
*********
They kicked Yvette Genet out of town, kicked her out calling her a social disease, kicked her out before she could give every boy (and maybe every man but that was left unspoken) in town some social disease [a sexually transmitted disease, venereal disease, the “clap” for the less sensitive-JLB] they said. They kicked her out and told her in no uncertain terms not to come back on that fateful October 23, 1964 day. The day, night really, they found her, well, buck naked in her big ’56 Chevy (bought courtesy of some old-time flame for her “favors” from what I had heard) down in back of the parking lot of Jimmy Jake’s Diner with an identically clad under-aged boy (meaning not out of high school) going at it hammer and tongs. [Having sex, big old sex, in some odd position, not missionary-style for the less sensitive-JLB]
Hey, I had better back up and clarify this kicking out, this Yvette kicking out thing, before you get the wrong idea, or maybe better half-wrong idea about growing up in Olde Saco. Before you thing I grew up in the Stone Age or something and not at the threshold of the sexual revolution here in America. Of course, as far as I know, sex, consensual (and unfortunately not consensual too) under-aged sex, illicit sex, sex with somebody not you betrothed, or anything like that has been going on since, well, since Adam and Eve. Even in Olde Saco, and maybe especially in Olde Saco (the “summer guest” part of the town near the ocean anyway when about forty bars and clubs lure every available taste).
What got Yvette Genet on the wrong side of things was that she, all of eighteen, all of Gallic beauty (thin, blonde hair, natural, natural as any blonde’s can be, no bosom like most all F-C [French- Canadian] girls and a come hither smile that said “welcome,” welcome not in a lewd way but in a you-are-a- man-and- I-like men way) did what she pleased, and where, as the incident at Jimmy Jake’s Diner (not exactly out in the boondocks) gives graphic expression to. And that was too much for the madames of the Atlantic section of Olde Saco (the men, if they said anything or thought anything probably were half-thinking about that buck naked scene), the F-C quarters. A place with its own ethos derived from generations of previous Gallic F-C Roman Catholics and on the surface very, very proper.
They, the good F-C mothers, the good merchants who catered to the F-C community, the good F-C priests (with their own lusts, or wanna-be lusts),
“froze” Yvette out just as surely as any medieval town did with their scorning parades, and their various physical acts of isolating of the “different.” So Yvette left, left with a tank full of gas (according to Stewball “Stu” who worked as a gas jockey at Jimmy Jake’s Gas Station [the one adjoining the diner, not the one of Atlantic Avenue]), left first for Portland where she could blend into the crowd, and then headed west. The reason I knew all this, and knew of her whereabouts for a while, was her brother Johnny (okay, okay Jean) was a good friend of mine at Olde Saco High School where we ran track together.
I wondered, wondered for a time (a long teenage time, a couple of years before I graduated from high school and lost track of Yvette, and Johnny, as I made my own trek west) why she had to leave. Sure she liked sex, liked showing the boys a good time. But no boy that I knew (or man when I later got to that stage) ever complained, privately anyway, about that charm. About that certain charm in connection with any girl/woman. She also was something of a “beatnik,” or what passed for beat in far-removed and last news Olde Saco in 1964 when that was getting to be old hat elsewhere. Johnny said she loved poetry. Howling into that good night Allen Ginsberg, Olde Saco South mill town (Lowell, Massachusetts) million word on the road Jack Kerouac, zen buddha wordsmith Gary Snyder, mad street gangster saint out of some Catholic Worker shelter Gregory Corso. Names that I was starting to recognize and “dig.” (Along with a madness for T.S Eliot modern wastelands and John Milton ancient paradise losts, figure that out for yourselves). She also didn’t go to Ste. Brigitte’s like she should, and that had those very catholic rite watching madames in a tizzy (and the priests too, once the madams gave their marching orders) . But mainly, I guess, she made a point, a very big point of being independent, enough to make her stand out way before women learned to run amok and have nobody (or almost nobody think twice about it).
Enough of Olde Saco, its witchcraft traditions, its fake exorcisms, and its babble. This is after all about Yvette. I told you about her going to Portland (hey, I just thought, the Maine Portland not the Oregon one. They don’t consider it proper to have sex there either from what I heard, at least non-politically correct sex.). There she worked in a topless bar for a while for coffee and cakes, took a couple of classes in poetry at Bowdoin (quoting Ginsberg’ Howl from memory I heard later, much later, when I ran into an English professor from there at some anti-war march and he mentioned her after he made the Olde Saco connection), and met some wrong gee, some grifter, some Faro Jack, some five- card stud player, and headed west.
The heading west part was harder to pin down, as Johnny got fewer and fewer phone calls and letters from her (more often just some postcard from some Podunk town like Olde Saco as she, they, passed through). What we pieced together (and this was pure speculation on our part) was that she was “showing the boys a good time” for dough to keep them in coffee and cakes when Faro Jack hit a rough patch with the cards. [Read: worked as a prostitute, hooker, whore, for the less sensitive.]
But Yvette was also working on her own poetry. She sent Johnny (and mentioned to him to show it to me) a poem one time that had gotten published in some now forgotten poetry journal. And when you think about it our speculation wasn’t that far off, she loved sex and poetry. Like I said I lost contact with Johnny and thus her later story but I like to think that her charms (she really was beautiful in that “who was that woman who just passed by subtle Gallic way” that has you thinking, hell, that drove to distraction, some later sleepless night about some unnamed, maybe un-nameable, fragrance) and her poetry allowed her to hold on.
Oh, yes, and that boy, that under-aged buck naked boy sitting (actually lying down) in a big old two-toned ’56 Chevy, brought courtesy of some guy for Yvette’s favors, down in the back of Jimmy Jake’s Diner, that was me, Josh Breslin. But that is a story for another day. Yah, I hope she held on.
Hold On Lyrics-Tom Waits
They hung a sign up in our town
"if you live it up, you won't
live it down"
So, she left Monte Rio, son
Just like a bullet leaves a gun
With charcoal eyes and Monroe hips
She went and took that California trip
Well, the moon was gold, her
Hair like wind
She said don't look back just
Come on Jim
Oh you got to
Hold on, Hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
You gotta hold on
Well, he gave her a dimestore watch
And a ring made from a spoon
Everyone is looking for someone to blame
But you share my bed, you share my name
Well, go ahead and call the cops
You don't meet nice girls in coffee shops
She said baby, I still love you
Sometimes there's nothin left to do
Oh you got to
Hold on, hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here, you got to
Just hold on.
Well, God bless your crooked little heart St. Louis got the best of me
I miss your broken-china voice
How I wish you were still here with me
Well, you build it up, you wreck it down
You burn your mansion to the ground
When there's nothing left to keep you here, when
You're falling behind in this
Big blue world
Oh you go to
Hold on, hold on
You got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
You got to hold on
Down by the Riverside motel,
It's 10 below and falling
By a 99 cent store she closed her eyes
And started swaying
But it's so hard to dance that way
When it's cold and there's no music
Well your old hometown is so far away
But, inside your head there's a record
That's playing, a song called
Hold on, hold on
You really got to hold on
Take my hand, I'm standing right here
And just hold on.
JLB Note: It really doesn’t take much these days, these old time memory be-fogged days, to have some snippet come swirling out of the air, some caught phrase in a passing conversation, some half-glanced word mentioned on some media outlet, some fragrance smelled from long ago soaps, perfumes, downy billows, to get me into that frame of mind to speak of old time Olde Saco (that is up in Maine for the unknowing heathens). The Olde Saco of the 1960s dying textile mills, of various working- class rites of passage, of teenage this and that, and most of all of the French-Canadian (on my mother Delores’ side, the side that counted, nee LeBlanc) ethos, pathos, and bathos that permeated the town. And of course, of F-C loves, lost and found.
The genesis of this particular air-borne swirl came via YouTube when I was searching for Tom Waits’ knows-skid-row-in-his-heart version of Yip Harsburg’s Brother Can You Spare A Dime? and I noticed his Hold On as part of his available playlist (the list of other stuff by an artist located on the right side of the screen if that is not what it is called). Upon listening that song brought to mind one Yvette Genet, her mad passion for men (boys really but I will get to that below), her mad passion for poetry and her mad passion for the “beats,” for the odd and unusual in grey old 1960s Olde Saco. She was to pay a dear price for those passions on October 23, 1964 (that date is important to the story, to my memory of her, and to her fate so I mention here first).
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They kicked Yvette Genet out of town, kicked her out calling her a social disease, kicked her out before she could give every boy (and maybe every man but that was left unspoken) in town some social disease [a sexually transmitted disease, venereal disease, the “clap” for the less sensitive-JLB] they said. They kicked her out and told her in no uncertain terms not to come back on that fateful October 23, 1964 day. The day, night really, they found her, well, buck naked in her big ’56 Chevy (bought courtesy of some old-time flame for her “favors” from what I had heard) down in back of the parking lot of Jimmy Jake’s Diner with an identically clad under-aged boy (meaning not out of high school) going at it hammer and tongs. [Having sex, big old sex, in some odd position, not missionary-style for the less sensitive-JLB]
Hey, I had better back up and clarify this kicking out, this Yvette kicking out thing, before you get the wrong idea, or maybe better half-wrong idea about growing up in Olde Saco. Before you thing I grew up in the Stone Age or something and not at the threshold of the sexual revolution here in America. Of course, as far as I know, sex, consensual (and unfortunately not consensual too) under-aged sex, illicit sex, sex with somebody not you betrothed, or anything like that has been going on since, well, since Adam and Eve. Even in Olde Saco, and maybe especially in Olde Saco (the “summer guest” part of the town near the ocean anyway when about forty bars and clubs lure every available taste).
What got Yvette Genet on the wrong side of things was that she, all of eighteen, all of Gallic beauty (thin, blonde hair, natural, natural as any blonde’s can be, no bosom like most all F-C [French- Canadian] girls and a come hither smile that said “welcome,” welcome not in a lewd way but in a you-are-a- man-and- I-like men way) did what she pleased, and where, as the incident at Jimmy Jake’s Diner (not exactly out in the boondocks) gives graphic expression to. And that was too much for the madames of the Atlantic section of Olde Saco (the men, if they said anything or thought anything probably were half-thinking about that buck naked scene), the F-C quarters. A place with its own ethos derived from generations of previous Gallic F-C Roman Catholics and on the surface very, very proper.
They, the good F-C mothers, the good merchants who catered to the F-C community, the good F-C priests (with their own lusts, or wanna-be lusts),
“froze” Yvette out just as surely as any medieval town did with their scorning parades, and their various physical acts of isolating of the “different.” So Yvette left, left with a tank full of gas (according to Stewball “Stu” who worked as a gas jockey at Jimmy Jake’s Gas Station [the one adjoining the diner, not the one of Atlantic Avenue]), left first for Portland where she could blend into the crowd, and then headed west. The reason I knew all this, and knew of her whereabouts for a while, was her brother Johnny (okay, okay Jean) was a good friend of mine at Olde Saco High School where we ran track together.
I wondered, wondered for a time (a long teenage time, a couple of years before I graduated from high school and lost track of Yvette, and Johnny, as I made my own trek west) why she had to leave. Sure she liked sex, liked showing the boys a good time. But no boy that I knew (or man when I later got to that stage) ever complained, privately anyway, about that charm. About that certain charm in connection with any girl/woman. She also was something of a “beatnik,” or what passed for beat in far-removed and last news Olde Saco in 1964 when that was getting to be old hat elsewhere. Johnny said she loved poetry. Howling into that good night Allen Ginsberg, Olde Saco South mill town (Lowell, Massachusetts) million word on the road Jack Kerouac, zen buddha wordsmith Gary Snyder, mad street gangster saint out of some Catholic Worker shelter Gregory Corso. Names that I was starting to recognize and “dig.” (Along with a madness for T.S Eliot modern wastelands and John Milton ancient paradise losts, figure that out for yourselves). She also didn’t go to Ste. Brigitte’s like she should, and that had those very catholic rite watching madames in a tizzy (and the priests too, once the madams gave their marching orders) . But mainly, I guess, she made a point, a very big point of being independent, enough to make her stand out way before women learned to run amok and have nobody (or almost nobody think twice about it).
Enough of Olde Saco, its witchcraft traditions, its fake exorcisms, and its babble. This is after all about Yvette. I told you about her going to Portland (hey, I just thought, the Maine Portland not the Oregon one. They don’t consider it proper to have sex there either from what I heard, at least non-politically correct sex.). There she worked in a topless bar for a while for coffee and cakes, took a couple of classes in poetry at Bowdoin (quoting Ginsberg’ Howl from memory I heard later, much later, when I ran into an English professor from there at some anti-war march and he mentioned her after he made the Olde Saco connection), and met some wrong gee, some grifter, some Faro Jack, some five- card stud player, and headed west.
The heading west part was harder to pin down, as Johnny got fewer and fewer phone calls and letters from her (more often just some postcard from some Podunk town like Olde Saco as she, they, passed through). What we pieced together (and this was pure speculation on our part) was that she was “showing the boys a good time” for dough to keep them in coffee and cakes when Faro Jack hit a rough patch with the cards. [Read: worked as a prostitute, hooker, whore, for the less sensitive.]
But Yvette was also working on her own poetry. She sent Johnny (and mentioned to him to show it to me) a poem one time that had gotten published in some now forgotten poetry journal. And when you think about it our speculation wasn’t that far off, she loved sex and poetry. Like I said I lost contact with Johnny and thus her later story but I like to think that her charms (she really was beautiful in that “who was that woman who just passed by subtle Gallic way” that has you thinking, hell, that drove to distraction, some later sleepless night about some unnamed, maybe un-nameable, fragrance) and her poetry allowed her to hold on.
Oh, yes, and that boy, that under-aged buck naked boy sitting (actually lying down) in a big old two-toned ’56 Chevy, brought courtesy of some guy for Yvette’s favors, down in the back of Jimmy Jake’s Diner, that was me, Josh Breslin. But that is a story for another day. Yah, I hope she held on.
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