Friday, January 18, 2013

Spartacist Canada No. 175
Winter 2012/2013

The Communist Party of Canada and the Quebec National Question

Part Two: From the Great Depression to the Cold War

We print below the concluding part of an edited presentation by comrade Charles Galarneau at the Twelfth National Conference of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste, held in the summer of 2011. Part One, which appeared in SC No. 174 (Fall 2012), covered the early history of the socialist movement in Quebec and the stance toward the Quebec national question of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) from its origins through the 1920s.

For revolutionaries in binational or multinational states, the experiences and work of the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky provide a peerless example of a revolutionary approach to the national question. The Bolsheviks steadfastly championed all struggles against national oppression and Great Russian chauvinism in the tsarist empire, which Lenin termed a “prison house of peoples.” Lenin combatted nationalism as a bourgeois ideology while fighting for the rights of oppressed peoples with the methods of proletarian class struggle, a stance that was crucial to the Bolshevik victory in the 1917 Russian Revolution.

The opportunity for the early Canadian Communists to draw the lessons of the Bolshevik approach to the national question and apply them to Quebec was foreclosed by the rise of Stalinism, which wrecked the CPC as it did Communist parties around the world. The Trotskyist movement, whose founding leaders in the U.S. and Canada were expelled from the Communist parties starting in 1928, carried forward the fight for authentic revolutionary Marxism.

At the end of Part One, comrade Galarneau noted that while the CPC increased its organizing work in Quebec starting in 1929, its “theoretical political views of the Quebec national question actually got worse over the next few years. The party went from its previous agnosticism to openly denying the right to self-determination and, at least for the next dozen years or so, the very existence of a Quebec nation.”



The CPC’s Montreal youth leader Fred Rose played a leading role in the debates on Quebec. At the CPC’s Sixth Convention in 1929, he won the fight for the party to pay more attention to Quebec. However, in a January 1931 Young Worker article Rose then complained that “the discussion developed into a polemic as to whether or not the French Canadians are an oppressed minority,” instead of finding ways to “lay down a concrete line for work.” From this implicitly chauvinist irritation, he would go on to lay out a more explicit line a few months after the Seventh Convention in 1934:

“There being no French Canadian economy, but rather a Canadian economy it is obvious that there is no such thing as a French Canadian nation apart from Canadians as a nation but rather a Canadian nation of which the French Canadians (they are the biggest single racial group in Canada) are the basic group….

“The French Canadian bourgeoisie got its share either separately or jointly with the English Canadians. As for the ‘rights’ that the masses can enjoy under capitalism, the French Canadians have lingual and other so-called ‘democratic’ rights to the same extent as the English Canadians. The Canadian working class can use both the French and the English language in the fight against the bourgeoisie.”

Worker, 19 January 1935, quoted in Bernard Gauvin, Les Communistes et la Question Nationale au Québec (1981)

Among other things, this schema conveniently skipped over the “so-called” democratic right of self-determination, i.e., the right to separate, which the Québécois did not and still do not possess under Canadian rule.

The party did recognize the particular superexploitation of the Québécois workers, but this was simply put down to an “economic” discrepancy (or remnants of Quebec’s supposed “feudal” past) which should be addressed by reforms from the federal government. CPC leader Stewart Smith spelled this out in a 1938 Daily Clarion article:

“Today the struggle for economic improvements for the Canadian people involves the most vigorous struggle against the terrible exploitation of the French-Canadian people of Quebec….

“The significance of any national social legislation, equally applicable in all parts of Canada is that it would tend to break through the double yoke of exploitation of the French-Canadians. It would mean a change in the relationships between the French-Canadian people and the rest of Canada, who have led the fight for unemployment insurance, the hope of economic improvement for themselves.”

—quoted in Gauvin

This kind of condescending federal-reformism would soon cause enormous damage for the party in Quebec.

True, in later years the CPC would evolve a less openly chauvinist line. In 1943, it started speaking of “national” equality for French Canada and formally endorsed the right to self-determination in 1952. But this was never anything more than a hypocritical nod to Leninism, as the party has to this day remained a deeply Canadian nationalist outfit. Indeed, party leader and Stalinist hardliner Tim Buck revived the “Canadian independence” slogan in the late 1940s, which as I noted earlier was a blatant capitulation to Canadian nationalism (see Part One).

Stanley Ryerson and the Quebec National Question

Hypocritical, yes—except, I think, for one leading member of the Communist Party. Here I need to break our narrative and speak about another fascinating and quite contradictory character in this story.

Born in 1911 into a wealthy and iconic Toronto bourgeois family, and with maternal lineages going back to a French military commander who had arrived in New France in the 17th century, young Stanley Bréhaut Ryerson was sent to study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1931. From there he travelled through Italy and Spain, experiencing first hand some deep-going class struggle, including the beginnings of what would become the Spanish Civil War. He got involved with the French Communist Party in Paris, where in 1932 he took part in the 200,000-strong funeral procession for Zéphyrin Camélinat, the last surviving member of the Paris Commune of 1871.

On Ryerson’s return to Toronto, Tim Buck rapidly worked to advance this young intellectual. The party direly lacked good writers at the time and Buck saw Ryerson, a fluent French speaker, as a natural fit to represent the leadership in the CPC’s Montreal branches.

Stanley Ryerson was a contradictory political figure whose stature as an intellectual seems to have given him a degree of independence that had become extinct for most everyone else in “Tim Buck’s Party.” Yet he was also a central leader of a party that stood out for its servility to the dictates of the Kremlin Stalinists. A Central Committee member from 1935 to 1969, he was unswerving in his loyalty to Tim Buck.

Throughout this period and after, Ryerson’s primary theoretical pursuit was the understanding of Canadian history—most centrally, the Quebec national question—and some of his historical works are of lasting value to the working class. His views on Quebec contributed to his eventual exit from the CPC in 1971, unfortunately into the arms of the bourgeois-nationalist Parti Québécois (he died in 1998). But prior to this, he published in 1968 a significant work of history entitled Unequal Union: Confederation and the Roots of Conflict in the Canadas, 1815-1873. I read it recently in the French translation and I have to say that any communist doing work in this country now or in the future ought to read this book.

Back in 1937 Ryerson published the pamphlet Le Réveil du Canada Français (The Awakening of French Canada) and an article in the CPC’s French-language Clarté, “La Rébellion de 1837, Bataille Pour la Démocratie!” (Rebellion of 1837, A Battle for Democracy!), under the party name E. Roger. These were polemics against reactionary French Canadian nationalism. While perfectly in line with the CPC’s chauvinist line on the national question, Ryerson’s pieces added a new dimension of looking back to the “tradition” of 1837, as a way of mobilizing French Canadians in the “anti-fascist” struggle for “democracy.”

Unlike in 1837, when one could envision a progressive bourgeois struggle against the British aristocrats and overlords, in the 1930s this was an expression of the crudest Stalinist class collaboration. Indeed by this time, the struggle for “democracy” which Ryerson invoked was simply the ideological justification for the betrayals of the popular front. In Europe, the Stalinized Communist International sought to ingratiate itself with the bourgeoisies of the democratic imperialist powers through the containment of revolutionary proletarian movements. In practice, this meant class-collaborationist alliances with and participation in the governments of the bourgeoisie under the cover of “fighting fascism.” The popular front in Spain was the guarantor of the bourgeois order, ensuring the betrayal and defeat of the Spanish Revolution. In Canada, it meant pandering to Canadian nationalism and imperialism, as we shall see.

Stanley Ryerson would spend the rest of his life adjusting the politics of these first 1937 essays. This eventually led to the aforementioned Unequal Union. But as early as 1943, he published French Canada, A Study in Canadian Democracy. In this work, largely devoted to grotesque justifications for Canadian imperialism, Ryerson nonetheless wrote in direct contraposition to the CPC’s line:

“It is important to understand the fact that the democratic struggle of the French-Canadian people during the whole of the preceding period [before Confederation] had been a struggle for the right of national self-determination, for their right as a nation to choose their own form of state….

“The French-Canadian attitude towards the Confederation proposals was dominated by a profound concern lest the right to their own state be denied them by the English-Canadian majority.”

During heated debates at a 1945 National Committee meeting of the party, Ryerson went so far as to denounce “great nation chauvinism” in the central party leadership. He evidently got away with that, as he did with a 1946 article in which he argued outright in favour of the call for the right of self-determination for Quebec. As I mentioned, the party would eventually adopt that line in 1952.

But it was already too late. In 1947, the party’s line on the Quebec national question was still openly chauvinist, and so was the treatment of its Quebec leaders. Tim Buck’s bureaucratic machinery would literally cut off a whole arm and throw away an entire generation of Québécois would-be communists, rather than admit any doubt about his infallibility. So let’s look at that story, and at a couple of other powerful characters.

The Communist Party in Quebec

But first, let’s go play some softball! Young Henri Gagnon had obtained his electrician’s ticket in the early 1930s, but like tens of thousands of others in Montreal during the Great Depression he couldn’t find any work. By the mid-thirties, only 23 years old, he had a wife and six children and was collecting about $15 a week in social assistance. He paid rent in kind by doing electrical work for his landlord. He had a lot of time on his hands, and with a bunch of other unemployed workers put together a softball club in Lafontaine Park. The club soon turned into a small league, where Gagnon was a key organizer.

Henri Gagnon had heard of socialism, including from an eccentric freight train jumper when he was an apprentice. Some left-wing activists would come to the ball game and try to recruit some of the guys. They weren’t very successful, but eventually Gagnon got curious and started attending workers and unemployed meetings animated by the CPC.

At one of these meetings, just before the 1936 provincial elections, Gagnon argued for supporting the Union Nationale (UN) of Maurice Duplessis because of its “anti-trust” positions. Napoléon Brizard, a streetcar driver and trade unionist—and, Gagnon would later find out, a local leader of the Communist Party—countered him by explaining that Duplessis’ UN was in fact a representative of big capital. Later, Gagnon attended meetings of the CPC-affiliated “Front Populaire,” an unemployed workers support group, where he heard very convincing arguments in defense of the working class and against capitalism. This was where Henri Gagnon bought his first issues of the CPC’s Clarté, and he soon began to avidly read the works of Karl Marx.

He had to fight his way into becoming a Communist Party member, as the party was under severe repression and had to function clandestinely. But Gagnon was a stubborn fellow, and eventually he was accepted. His first CPC cell meeting in 1936 was made up of employed and unemployed francophone workers, including two members of a printers union. He soon got to meet comrades from other cells and sections, including longshoremen and streetcar operators, workers from McDonald Tobacco, from CP Rail’s Angus Shops, from Dominion Glass, from fur and leather factories, construction, the food industry and the City of Montreal (CUPE’s still often militant Montreal blue-collar Local 301 was founded by Communists).

All the francophone branches included many women involved in trade-union and party work, as well as the CPC-led La Voix des Femmes du Québec (Voice of Quebec Women). In 1938, the CPC launched French-speaking branches of the Young Communist League (YCL), which were soon teeming with dozens of young working-class men and women who organized meetings and other political activities, as well as popular monthly dances.

Gagnon also got to know some of the anglophone and Jewish members of the YCL in Montreal, whom he described as unfailingly supportive and helpful to the francophone group. Many of the English speakers were themselves leaders of working-class struggle, especially in the textile industry. In 1946, party supporters Kent Rowley and his companion Madeleine Parent led the bitterly fought Dominion Textile strike in St-Henri and Valleyfield, which ended in the victorious unionization of its 6,000 workers. A year later, Duplessis had both of them charged with “seditious conspiracy” because of their union activities.

In his 1985 memoir, looking back to the CPC’s trade-union work of his youth, Henri Gagnon observed:

“The socialist activists of Quebec played a vanguard role in building the union movement. During the Great Depression, nascent trade unionism depended on the voluntary work and sacrifice of the most dedicated workers. This was the heroic period when trade unionism was not the institution that it has become in our times. It was also a time when unionized workers constituted a small minority of a Québécois working class in formation. It was a time of hard battles for union recognition, which was always opposed by the bosses. In the union movement of those days, one was more likely to get a bad licking than a medal.”

Les Militants Socialistes du Québec, d’une Epoque à l’Autre (1985) (our translation)

From Bogus “Anti-Imperialism” to “Total War”

As I mentioned earlier, the repression against the CPC was severe. During this entire period in the 1930s and beyond, even before Duplessis passed his Padlock Law in 1937, between federal and provincial legislation the Communist Party in Quebec was actually somewhat legal for only about one year. But Gagnon also notes in his memoirs that the CPC was virtually the only well-organized left group in Quebec. The CCF (Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, forerunner of the NDP) had nothing going there, and the rest of the Montreal left was mostly made up of anarchists and anti-clericalist talkers who didn’t do much. Repression made it practically impossible for the CPC to do work outside the Montreal area, but otherwise they had a politically open field.

Repression was definitely a deterrent to membership. Gagnon spoke of how scared he was when he went to his first cell meeting and on his first assignment, passing leaflets door-to-door, thinking he would be picked up by the cops at any minute. But—somewhat unsurprisingly—the biggest obstacle reported by many young recruits at the time was breaking with their Catholic beliefs. For many, it took months or even years after they joined before they could fully abandon their faith and become atheists. I’m sure quite a few never made it that far.

For most of the 1930s, the national question had not been a big factor against recruitment. During this period Quebec nationalism meant almost exclusively Duplessis, the Catholic church and fascist bands. This helps to explain why, in spite of their blindness on the national question, the CPC made gains in Quebec. Certainly their position on the Quebec national question was bad throughout these years. As an example, in 1938 the party’s brief to the Rowell-Sirois Commission in Ottawa was a crawling statement of support for federalism, arguing above all for “national unification.” It took some time before such positions finally came to bite the party in the ass. But when they did, this destroyed almost everything that the CPC had in francophone Montreal.

The national question became more of an issue in Quebec society at large as World War II approached. When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed in 1939, the CPs around the world suddenly veered from “anti-fascist” popular frontists to a posture of opposing Anglo-American imperialism. While this was entirely cynical on Moscow’s part, it did spur further success for the CPC in Quebec.

As in the first interimperialist world war, popular opposition to again going to war for Britain was huge in Quebec. This reflected both widespread hatred for yet another war on behalf of the English oppressors and support by sections of the Catholic nationalist elite for fascism and clerical nationalism, notably the pro-Hitler Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain in France (see “Imperialist War and National Oppression: Quebec and the Conscription Crises,” SC No. 119, Winter 1998/99). Gagnon reports that from May to July 1940, the Montreal YCL managed to get out over 250,000 pieces of propaganda, mostly leaflets at various demonstrations, denouncing British imperialism and opposing Canada’s participation in the war.

In line with this shift, the CPC started schmoozing with pretty unappetizing Quebec nationalists. In late 1940, the party launched something called the “Congrès des Canadiens Français” (Congress of French Canadians) on a deeply class-collaborationist platform with groups like the Young Patriots, the Société St-Jean-Baptiste, the Third Battalion of the Papal Zouaves and the Société du Bon Parler Français (Society for the Proper Speaking of French)! The first issue of the new group’s newspaper, co-edited by Gagnon, carried a giant front-page picture of Conservative Montreal mayor Camillien Houde, hailing him as a hero and martyr after his incarceration at an internment camp in Petawawa for opposing conscription.

Of course, this all came to a dramatic collapse after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. “Anti-imperialism” went out the window and it was back to supporting Britain and other imperialist powers, including Canada, in a supposed “great war against fascism.” CPC militants now turned to supporting the “total war effort” (Henri Gagnon himself enlisted and fought in Europe), arguing for a no-strike pledge in the unions. The CPC went on to support the “yes” side in the conscription referendum of 1941, but allowed a sop to its Quebec leadership, which continued to object to conscription in Quebec. So the CPC’s line became: vote “yes” in English Canada and vote “no” in Quebec!

Against the CPC’s hard swing over to Anglo chauvinism in the service of imperialist war, the Canadian Trotskyists opposed the imperialist war while calling for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union which, despite Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration, remained a workers state. Driven underground, their paper banned, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers League nevertheless sought to intersect the powerful anti-conscription movement in Quebec.

In 1943, the CPC re-branded itself the Labor Progressive Party (LPP) around a program centred on demands for “National Unity” and “Democratic Progress.” Tim Buck started to push for a “Lib-Lab” coalition between labour and the ruling bourgeois Liberals under Mackenzie King.

The LPP continued to achieve gains in Quebec, however, as exemplified by Fred Rose’s surprise 1943 by-election victory in the mixed Jewish-francophone riding of Montreal-Cartier, at the western end of Plateau Mont-Royal. It’s notable that among his defeated opponents was a certain David Lewis for the CCF. Rose won the riding again in the 1945 general election, this time by 1,500 votes. And of course, party members were playing key roles in the unprecedented wave of strikes following the end of the war, particularly during the tumultuous year of 1946.

The Cold War: Anti-Communist Reaction

By the end of the war, Tim Buck and the party had totally embraced the promise of “universal peace” coming out of the various Allied conferences that brought the U.S., British and other imperialist leaders together with Joseph Stalin. But instead of the Stalinist delusion of peace on all fronts, what came after World War II was the fiercest wave of anti-Communist repression yet seen. As in the U.S., the Cold War would strike a body blow to the party and more broadly to the workers movement. In Canada, one of the first and most famous victims of the witchhunt was Fred Rose.

Rose was born Fred Rosenberg in Poland in 1907. His family followed tens of thousands of other Jewish immigrants to the shores of North America, in their case to Montreal, where they arrived in 1916. Rose joined the Montreal YCL and in 1925 became its national secretary. As a fluent speaker of both English and French, he was well placed to play a leading role internally and externally, which he did. He was evidently a talented speaker and a personable guy, and his election victories reflected his personal popularity in the neighbourhood.

In late 1945, a Soviet defector by the name of Igor Gouzenko accused MP Fred Rose as well as party leader Sam Carr and Quebec scientist Raymond Boyer of spying for the USSR. Boyer himself admitted that he passed on information about weapons production to the Soviet Union, then a Western ally, in the interest of coordinating the “scientific war effort.” All of them were tried and jailed. Sentenced to six years, Rose was released in 1951, but could not find work anywhere as the RCMP made sure to tell any potential employer not to hire him. According to Gagnon, who I tend to believe, that charmer Tim Buck dropped Rose and Carr from membership as soon as possible during the witchhunt. This allowed Buck to avoid having to defend them in the context of his own appeals for unity with the Mackenzie King government, which was persecuting Rose, Boyer and Carr.

Fred Rose eventually had to move back to his native country, where he went on to work for the English-language journal Poland. His Canadian citizenship was revoked and all his appeals to come back and clear his name remained fruitless. He died peacefully in Warsaw in 1983.

Tim Buck Wrecks CPC’s Quebec Work

Soon after the Fred Rose trial came the climax of this story: the spectacular collapse of the Communists in French Canada. As the struggle against Quebec’s national oppression slowly started to shift from the reactionary Catholic nationalists of the past and into the labour movement, this was bound to happen sooner or later. In the event, it was precipitated by Tim Buck’s bureaucratic megalomania.

In 1946, after returning from the war, Henri Gagnon and the local LPP led a militant and ultimately successful struggle for housing for war vets and their families, which was deplorable to non-existent in Montreal at the time. Gagnon’s Squatters’ Movement drove the Duplessis government and the city’s bourgeois masters to fits of rage. Even the New York Times covered the story of Henri Gagnon, the “Number 1 Communist” taking over this supposedly “non-communist” movement, along with a heavily cropped picture of him and “that spy” Fred Rose side by side.

The Squatters’ Movement received very little coverage in the English-language press of the LPP and was clearly irritating to the party leadership with its “Lib-Lab” coalition crap. It is apparent that Tim Buck had decided that he had a dangerous potential rival on his hands. Regardless, the sudden and vicious political assault on Henri Gagnon appeared well-prepared and thought out. As Buck wasn’t going to “get” him on his irreproachable record as a party activist and leader, he manufactured the only accusation against Henri Gagnon that could possibly stick inside the party: that he and his supposed “clique” were Quebec nationalists and anti-Semites. The accusation of cliquism was obviously false, as Gagnon had no “group” of any kind—except, if you will, the overwhelming majority of the francophone rank-and-file members, who followed and respected him as an earnest and talented leader. And he definitely wasn’t an anti-Semite.

The evidence against Gagnon was flimsy at best. He had made an intervention at a 1946 National Committee meeting where he spoke of the “relations between the two nations of Canada,” and at a later meeting in 1947 he said that Duplessis was “not a nationalist leader,” likely a clumsy formulation used to make an analytical point. Later, in September 1947, Gagnon wrote a document in response to one by Tim Buck defending the party’s policy on “constitutional reforms.” In it, he entirely agreed with Buck’s federal social reform plans, but included the following sentence: “The struggle for a unified social legislation, for the national equality of French Canada, is an integral part of the battle for the right of national determination.” (Remember that Stanley Ryerson had already publicly argued for the right of self-determination for Quebec in early 1946, and nothing happened to him.)

This last piece set off a full-fledged campaign against Gagnon. It was kicked off by Quebec provincial leader Oscar Roy, who denounced the “shades of nationalism” in Gagnon’s document and in his earlier comments (of course the CP didn’t have a problem with Canadian nationalism when it suited them). Then came the “surprise motion,” cooked up overnight just before the October 1947 LPP Provincial Congress. This motion (reportedly drafted by Stanley Ryerson) denounced the existence of a “tendency” that “constitutes a nationalist, anti-Marxist deviation,” “adopts the point of view of nationalism on the question of federal-provincial relations” and “openly expresses a scornful attitude toward internationalism, is anti-Semitic, propagates organizational and political separatism within the party.” And the clincher: it “rejects in practice the principle of internationalist unity of the party in Quebec and Canada; takes an attitude of hostility toward the leadership of the party centre; attempts to organize a faction in opposition to the party leadership.” Other issues were thrown in related to trade-union work and what-not, but this “nationalist” and “anti-Semitic” stuff was the heart of it.

The Congress was followed by the resignation or withdrawal of up to 300 French-speaking members from the party. Gagnon and another 100 or so supporters tried to fight to stay in, but bureaucratic maneuvers got the better of them. After the Congress, some nefarious forces got the Montreal Herald, a bourgeois daily widely read in the Jewish community and with many LPP supporters on staff, to print as good coin the accusations of anti-Semitism against Gagnon. He obviously had to reply sharply to the slander, which he did, and the Herald shut up about it. But this itself became an excuse for suspending him from the party for talking to the bourgeois press. Tired and disgusted, he quit a few weeks later, taking with him most of what was left of the francophones within the party. About 100 French-speaking Tim Buck loyalists stayed in. But most of them would quit anyway amid the turmoil and bureaucratic infighting that followed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech exposing some of the crimes of Stalin, who had died in 1953.

This was pretty much the end of the line for the CPC in Quebec, despite the creation in 1965 of a semi-autonomous Parti Communiste du Québec (PCQ). By the early 1990s, as capitalist counterrevolution swept the former Soviet Union, the CPC and its Quebec wing crumbled, their worldview shattered by the terminal crisis of Stalinism.

In the aftermath, a small group in Quebec was patched together, only to split once again over the national question in 2006. Both wings call themselves the PCQ. One waves the Maple Leaf, calling to “struggle against U.S. domination and for genuine Canadian independence,” while railing vis-à-vis Quebec that “The separatist solution would bring severe additional economic hardship to the working people of both nations and would weaken their political unity against the common enemy” (Program of the Communist Party of Canada, adopted in 2001). The other, meanwhile, gives electoral support to the bourgeois-nationalist Bloc and Parti Québécois, while operating as a pressure grouplet inside the petty-bourgeois populist Québec Solidaire.

Gagnon and his group remained active after their expulsion, even briefly forming a “French Canadian Communist Party,” all the while trying to mend fences with Buck’s party. The Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party briefly sought to intersect them, but this didn’t go anywhere. Gagnon remained an unrepentant Stalinist, and in 1956 he and some of his supporters were allowed to rejoin the party. But they too were soon repulsed by the situation following the Khrushchev speech and quit again. After that, Gagnon remained active in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers until his retirement. In 1985, he published his memoirs, on which some of this presentation is based. He died in Montreal in 1989.

We’ll end our story here. The central lesson of the history of the Communist Party in Quebec is the absolute necessity of a correct line on the national question in this country. A would-be revolutionary party that fails to maintain a Leninist approach—the defense of the right of self-determination, i.e., to independence, for all nations while opposing any form of chauvinism and nationalism—will necessarily capitulate to its “own” capitalist ruling class. The Stalinist CPC ended up flatly endorsing the nationalism of the English Canadian oppressors. No less a dead end, other groups on the left have gone the other way, capitulating to Québécois nationalism.

We Trotskyists carry forward the Leninist program on the Quebec national question. Since 1995, we have advocated Quebec independence as the best means to undermine chauvinism and nationalism among a working class that is deeply divided. This will stand us in good stead to win the working-class militants of the future in the fight to forge a party that struggles for North American socialist revolution.
Spartacist Canada No. 175
Winter 2012/2013

The Popular Front: Policy of Class Betrayal

quote of the issue

From Spain in the late 1930s to South Africa today, “Communist” parties wielding the Stalinist program of class collaboration known as the popular (or peoples’) front have helped the capitalist rulers derail workers struggles and protected bourgeois governments from revolutionary challenges by the proletariat. In 1937, as the Spanish proletariat was locked in a life-and-death struggle for power, James Burnham, then a leading propagandist for the U.S. Trotskyists, highlighted urgent lessons from the “theory” and history of popular-front betrayals, and their kinship to earlier social-democratic methods of subordinating the workers to capitalist rule. He contrasts the popular front with the Bolshevik tactic of the united front, i.e., joint action of different currents in the workers movement in which the revolutionary party retains its complete political independence and the right to criticize its opponents.



The Peoples’ Front, on the other hand, is not merely, not even primarily, an agreement for joint action on specific issues. It first and foremost involves the acceptance by all members of the Peoples’ Front of a common program. This difference is the key to the gulf which separates the Peoples’ Front from the united front.

What program? We have already seen the answer. The program of the Peoples’ Front is a program for the defense of bourgeois democracy: that is, for the defense of one form of capitalism.

Whose program is this? It is obviously not the program of the proletariat. The program of the proletariat, accepted by revolutionists since the publication of the Communist Manifesto, can be summed up in two slogans: for workers’ power and for socialism. Naturally the immediate tactic of the proletariat is not on all occasions the struggle for state power: that is possible only in a revolutionary crisis. But at all times and on all occasions the fundamental program remains the same—for the overthrow of capitalism, for workers’ power and for socialism. This program expresses the basic class conflict in modern society; records the Marxist understanding that the problems of society can be solved only by socialism, and that socialism can be achieved only through the conquest of power by the proletariat. The duty of the revolutionary party, the conscious vanguard of the proletariat, is to keep this full and fundamental program always to the fore and always uncompromised. In its program, the revolutionary party thus sums up the independence of the proletariat as a class, and asserts its independent historical destiny.

For the proletariat, through its parties, to give up its own independent program means to give up its independent functioning as a class. And this is precisely the meaning of the Peoples’ Front. In the Peoples’ Front the proletariat renounces its class independence, gives up its class aims—the only aims, as Marxism teaches, which can serve its interests. By accepting the program of the Peoples’ Front, it thereby accepts the aims of another section of society; it accepts the aim of the defense of capitalism when all history demonstrates that the interests of the proletariat can be served only by the overthrow of capitalism. It subordinates itself to a middle-class version of how best and most comfortably to preserve the capitalist order. The Peoples’ Front is thus thoroughly and irrevocably non-proletarian, anti-proletarian.

By its very nature, the Peoples’ Front must be so. The establishment of the Peoples’ Front, by definition, requires agreement on a common program between the working-class parties and non-working-class parties. But the non-proletarian parties cannot agree to the proletarian program—the program of revolutionary socialism—without ceasing to be what they are, without becoming themselves revolutionary workers’ parties. But if that should happen, then there would be no basis left for a Peoples’ Front: there would be only revolutionary proletarian unity. Consequently, the Peoples’ Front must always be an abandonment of the proletarian program, a subordination of the proletariat to non-proletarian social interests. In the Peoples’ Front, it is the proletariat and the proletariat alone that loses.

—James Burnham, The Peoples’ Front: The New Betrayal (1937)

From the Archives of Spartacist-Revolution and the Right to Bear Arms-The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Workers Vanguard No. 1015
11 January 2013

From the Archives of Spartacist-Revolution and the Right to Bear Arms-The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Spartacist No. 43-44, Summer 1989 (Excerpts)

It’s really not news that guns were invented to kill people. And in this class-divided society, it has more than occasionally been necessary for “law-abiding” citizens to defend themselves with violence, even against the so-called legally constituted authorities. Are memories really so short? Recall the bloody Ludlow, Colorado massacre of 1914 in which 21 men, women and children, families of striking miners, were killed by the machine gun fire of the state militia, who were really Rockefeller’s hired guns. But the workers were armed by the United Mine Workers, and to the bosses’ horror for ten days some 1,000 strikers fought back bullet for bullet.

Recall as well the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in South Chicago. On May 30 of that year, in the midst of a national strike against the “little” steel companies (i.e., all the companies except the giant United States Steel Corporation), 1,500 protesters, mostly strikers and their families, marched in a holiday mood toward the Republic Mill. They were met by a solid line of 200 cops and a sudden volley of tear gas shells. As the marchers broke and ran, the cops charged with blazing guns and swinging clubs. Ten workers were shot dead, and another 40 were wounded—all of them shot in the back. An additional 101 protesters, including an eight-year-old child, were injured by clubs. In this case the strikers had been politically disarmed by their union misleaders with the line that the cops, sent to keep order by the Democratic “friends” of labor, should be “welcomed.”

We also remember the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which five leftist civil rights workers and labor organizers were gunned down in cold blood by a Klan/Nazi group. An FBI informer led the fascists to the murder site, and an agent of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms showed them how to use and transport the semiautomatic weapons. Or in the Philadelphia of black mayor Wilson Goode, where the cops in 1985 raked the MOVE commune with 10,000 rounds in 90 minutes, using fully automatic M-16s and M-60 machine guns, and incinerated eleven black people, including five children, in a fire ignited by C-4 plastic explosive provided by the FBI. But of course none of the “concerned” anti-gun lobbyists are advocating taking away guns from the cops.

White middle-class liberals preach total pacifism from the relative safety of their condos and suburban ranch houses—they don’t expect the cops to come bursting into their homes. But the ruling class does not believe in pacifism and has carefully armed its state to the teeth. The whole issue of gun control revolves around the question: do you trust this state to have a monopoly of arms? And the answer is refracted through the deepening class and racial polarization of this society. The core of the state, after all, is “special bodies of armed men,” as Lenin explained in his 1917 pamphlet The State and Revolution, commenting on the writings of Marx and Engels. And this is not our state, but the capitalists’; they assert the state’s monopoly of armed force in order to maintain their class rule.

To Disarm the People

The whole history of gun control is the story of the ruling class trying to disarm the population, particularly in periods of social struggle. The ban on automatic weapons is usually linked to gangsters like Al Capone, but it never stopped them from getting their hands on Thompson submachine guns, just as the mob today has its Uzis. More to the point, the 1934 ban on automatic weapons came in the Great Depression when the spectre of working-class revolution haunted Washington (in fact, that year saw three citywide general strikes led by ostensible communists). The federal gun control act of 1968 came at the peak of black ghetto upheavals. And the perennial push to ban the cheap handguns known as “Saturday Night Specials” is just an attempt to make guns more expensive and hence less accessible to the poorer classes.

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In Europe and America it was the struggle against absolutist, reactionary tyrannies which produced the revolutionary principle of the “right to keep and bear arms.” One of the first acts of the French Revolution was to seize weapons and ammunition from the arsenals. And every subsequent revolutionary upsurge has been accompanied by similar actions. The right to bear arms was codified by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. What’s going on today is a calculated counterrevolutionary attack by a decaying ruling class on these constitutional guarantees.

The Second Amendment’s Revolutionary History

The clear intent of the Second Amendment (ratified in 1791), as expressed in its language, was not sport or hobby but a people’s militia:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The constitutional right is not about hunting or target practice; the American colonial revolutionaries wanted the whole people armed, centering on military arms—in today’s terms something like the AK-47—in order to be able to kill British soldiers, and to forestall the threat of any standing army, which they rightly regarded as the bane of liberty and the basis of tyranny. Indeed, what triggered the American Revolution were attempts by the British army, in particular General Thomas Gage, to force colonialists to surrender their arms. As noted in a recent article by Stephen P. Halbrook:

“The Revolutionary War was sparked when militiamen exercising at Lexington refused to give up their arms. The widely published American account of April 19, 1775, began with the order shouted by a British officer:

“‘Disperse you Rebels—Damn you, throw down your Arms and disperse’.”

American Rifleman, March 1989

There is a continuum between the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the American Civil War. The question of the standing army and the king’s attempts to raise taxes to finance it against the opposition of Parliament and the emergent bourgeoisie was central to the outbreak of the English bourgeois revolution. Oliver Cromwell beheaded the king in 1649 and the revolution gave birth to democratic principles, codified decades later in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 when the revolution was already ebbing and after a renewed drive to absolutist reaction under James II. As a guarantee against the Catholic/royalist threat, the English Bill of Rights listed “true, ancient and indubitable rights,” including:

“6. That the raising or keeping a standing Army within the Kingdom in Time of Peace, unless it be with Consent of Parliament, is against Law.

“7. That the Subjects which are Protestants, may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Condition, and as are allowed by Law.”

— quoted in Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed (1984)

This principle was reiterated in the 18th-century Blackstone’s Commentaries, still regarded as a definitive bourgeois statement on the English Common Law. The 1689 Scottish Claim of Right reiterated an identical point about the right to bear arms. In Scotland this assertion was underpinned by a widely accepted custom of bearing arms. This reflected among other things the recognition that the ability to mobilize forces of equipped and experienced fighters at short notice had often been the margin between independence and English invasion and conquest. In addition the Scottish Reformation had faced the challenge of attempts to impose French-backed Catholic absolutism.

Carrying forward the English tradition, the American revolutionaries expanded on this right, in light of their own experience in struggle against the British king, when they drew up the Constitution in 1787. In the state conventions which ratified it, a “militia” was understood to mean the armed people, not a “select” militia like the present-day National Guard (which can be federalized and keeps its arms stored in armories controlled by the government). The right to “keep and bear arms” was universally recognized as an individual right. As Patrick Henry summed it up, “The great object is, that every man be armed.”

As in any class society, there were some big, categorical exceptions to these “universal” rights. The Second Amendment assumed it was English-speaking white Protestants that had the guns, to be used against Indians, black slaves, Spanish, Dutch and French invaders and, needless to say, the British former colonial masters who continued to threaten the young republic. Thus in South Africa today the white population is individually heavily armed as one of the means to maintain their status over the black majority. Similarly in the English Revolution the right to bear arms was directed against Catholics as perceived and frequently real representatives of reaction. Applied in Ireland this was an instrument of exploitation and terrible oppression. In Ireland after 1688, among other anti-Catholic measures, no Catholic could serve in the army or possess arms. In the later 18th century armed militias were raised in Ireland and Britain. In Ireland these mainly Protestant “Volunteers” took up the struggle for reforms. Then an “Arms and Gunpowder Bill” was passed requiring the Volunteers to turn in their arms. The radical wing, inspired by the American and French Revolutions, and led by Wolfe Tone, took up the call for universal suffrage and the removal of all laws against the Catholics. The United Irishmen uprising of 1798 was Ireland’s failed bourgeois revolution.

Despite these limitations on the concept of “universal rights,” the American War of Independence released a world-shaking democratic spirit, reflected in the military sphere by the arming of masses of civilians who could be trusted, out of ideological conviction, to fight for their government in loosely controlled guerrilla-type units. As was noted by Friedrich Engels, who was no mean soldier himself (being a heroic and able officer on the revolutionary side in 1848):

“While the soldiers of European armies, held together by compulsion and severe treatment, could not be trusted to fight in extended order, in America they had to contend with a population which, untrained to the regular drill of line soldiers, were good shots and well acquainted with the rifle. The nature of the ground favored them; instead of attempting manoeuvres of which at first they were incapable, they unconsciously fell into skirmishing. Thus, the engagement of Lexington and Concord marks an epoch in the history of infantry.”

— “Infantry,” an article for The New American Cyclopaedia (1859)

Abolition of Slavery by Arming the Slaves

But the Americans’ so-called democracy accepted slavery, written into the Constitution itself. It was generally recognized that if the slaves got guns it would mean the end of slavery, so they were denied this legal right through the device, juridically approved by the Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott case in 1857, of claiming that “the people” meant only “citizens,” and “citizens” did not include black slaves. Chief Justice Taney noted with horror that if blacks were citizens they would be entitled to a long list of rights, including the right to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

John Brown was among a small vanguard in the 1850s who saw that only force of arms would put an end to slavery, and he became a prophetic martyr for leading the famous raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Meanwhile, ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a close friend of Brown, openly defended a man’s “right of self-defense” when fugitive slaves were being hunted by agents of the slaveholders, even if this meant “shooting down his pursuers,” as occasionally happened. “Slavery is a system of brute force,” he said. “It must be met with its own weapons.”

Thus when the Civil War came, and the Northern bourgeoisie became so militarily desperate in 1862-63 to crush the slaveholders’ rebellion against the Union that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and agreed to the forming of black regiments, Douglass seized on this historic opportunity. “Men of Color, To Arms!” was his slogan as he campaigned for black volunteers for such famous regiments as the 54th Massachusetts. And it wasn’t only in the army that blacks fought—during the racist anti-draft riots in New York in 1863, according to one black newspaper of the time:

“The colored men who had manhood in them armed themselves, and threw out their pickets every day and night, determined to die defending their homes.... Most of the colored men in Brooklyn who remained in the city were armed daily for self-defense.”

— quoted in James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War (1965)

In the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, the central struggle in the South was between the newly emancipated blacks seeking to exercise political power and the remnants of the slaveholders’ government seeking to put the former slaves back “in their place.” This struggle pivoted on black people’s possession of arms. Hence the reactionary “black codes” passed in various Southern states tried to outlaw possession of firearms by blacks. An 1865 Florida statute, for instance, made it unlawful for “any Negro” to possess “firearms or ammunition of any kind,” the penalty for violation being the pillory and the whip. In response, the federal government’s Freedmen’s Bureau widely distributed circulars which read in part, “All men, without distinction of color, have the right to keep and bear arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.” But the question would be decided by military power: the racist white state militias, aided by the private Ku Klux Klan, were already disarming blacks, whose only defense was their own arms and/or the occupying Union Army. What was going on in the South was graphically described in one letter cited in Congressional hearings in 1871:

“Then the Ku Klux fired on them through the window one of the bullets striking a colored woman...and wounding her through the knee badly. The colored men then fired on the Ku Klux, and killed their leader or captain right there on the steps of the colored men’s house....”

In this case, as in many others, the Klan leader turned out to be “a constable and deputy sheriff.”

While Congress adopted all sorts of paper measures protecting blacks, including the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees “equal protection of the laws,” it betrayed the promise of black liberation in the Compromise of 1877, when Union troops were withdrawn from the South. Because they could not defend their rights by force of arms, black people were denied all their rights. It took a long and often bloody struggle for the civil rights movement 80 years later to restore some of the blacks’ rights won in the “Second American Revolution” which was the Civil War.

Disarming the Population

In the 19th century Karl Marx had expressed the hope that America would be one of the few countries where working people could take power more or less peacefully because the ruling class had virtually no standing army but relied on militias. Yet by the turn of the century the U.S. had entered the imperialist club and quickly developed a standing army. And over the years Second Amendment rights, supposedly inviolate, have been increasingly constricted by layer upon layer of laws which made gun-owning and armed self-defense more and more of a class privilege.

The most notorious example is New York State’s Sullivan Law, which makes it illegal to carry a pistol for self-defense, unless you’re one of a handful of well-connected people who can get a license to “carry” from the police department, people like real estate mogul Donald Trump and New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger (“Businessmen Opt to Pack a Gun,” New York City Business, 11 March 1985). The law was passed back in 1911 after a man who felt he had been unjustly fired from his city job as night watchman shot the mayor with a revolver. Hizzoner survived, but the incident was seized upon by “prominent” citizens such as John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (the same one responsible for the Ludlow massacre) to launch a campaign for gun control. And the New York Times led the pack.

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The Turning Point: 1848

As the call for a people’s militia was adopted by the rising proletarian movement, the bourgeoisie abandoned its own slogan that “every man be armed.” As noted by Friedrich Engels, the workers’ demands for social equality contained “a threat to the existing order of society”:

“...the workers who put it forward were still armed; therefore, the disarming of the workers was the first commandment for the bourgeois, who were at the helm of the state. Hence, after every revolution won by the workers, a new struggle, ending with the defeat of the workers.

“This happened for the first time in 1848.”

— Engels’ 1891 introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France

With the appearance of the proletariat as an independent actor on the scene, “the armed people” became archaic as the population was polarized along class lines. 1848 marked the beginning of the modern world in which we still live, and the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat remains historically unresolved to this day.

The defeat of the 1848 revolutions in Europe was followed by a bloodbath revealing the “insane cruelties” of which the bourgeoisie is capable, wrote Engels. “And yet 1848 was only child’s play compared with the frenzy of the bourgeoisie in 1871,” when the workers of Paris rose up and formed the Commune. One of the Commune’s key decisions came on 30 March 1871, when it “abolished conscription and the standing army, and declared the sole armed force to be the National Guard, in which all citizens capable of bearing arms were to be enrolled.” When the Commune fell in May 1871 before the troops of the French government, behind whom stood the more substantial forces of the Prussian army, the disarming of the working class was followed by a massacre of defenseless men, women and children in which some 30,000 died.

Legislation against the possession of arms and for gun control precisely correlates with the social situation. Besides the seminal events of 1848 and 1871, the whole history of France since 1789 demonstrates the way in which the ruling class has resorted to firearms control in accord with the felt threats to its position. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1816, Louis XVIII sought to disarm the population by ordering all arms turned in. Louis Philippe in 1834 and Napoleon III in 1858 passed laws to restrict access to arms. A 1939 emergency decree of the Daladier government remains the basis for all subsequent French gun control laws, and new restrictions were imposed in 1958, 1960 and 1961, during the crisis surrounding the Algerian war for independence. However, the memory of the armed insurrection of the Communards remains alive in the French working class. And the Resistance during WW II, despite the Communist Party’s nationalist, class-collaborationist role, did not exactly leave a pacifist anti-gun legacy.

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The Bolshevik Revolution

It was an armed working class which made the Bolshevik Revolution, in accordance with Lenin’s call:

“Following the path indicated by the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian Revolution of 1905, the proletariat must organise and arm all the poor, exploited sections of the population in order that they themselves should take the organs of state power directly into their own hands, in order that they themselves should constitute these organs of state power.”

— “Letters from Afar, Third Letter Concerning a Proletarian Militia” (March 1917)

The Soviet Red Guard workers militias fought the first battles of the ensuing civil war. Like all militias, the Red Guards were not much good at first, but in war one’s strength is always relative to the enemy’s, and the Whites suffered from low morale. Militiamen can become professional fighters if they survive long enough to gain experience. As the founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, commented in December 1921, “In the initial stages we learnt manoeuvring from them [the Whites].” And the Soviets eventually triumphed over the combined strength of 14 imperialist/Allied expeditionary forces and the tsarist White Guards.

Though the Bolsheviks advocated a socialist militia “in connection with the abolition of classes,” they were forced by the fight against counterrevolution to build a standing army. Trotsky explained in the foreword to the fifth volume of his military writings (How the Revolution Armed, 1921-23 [1981]) that the problem was rooted in the poverty and backwardness of Russia, wherein “the Red barracks constitutes an incomparably higher cultural setting than that to which the Red Army man is used at home.” But when Stalin usurped political power at the head of a conservative bureaucracy, he made the standing army into a fetish, going so far as to mimic the Western capitalist armies’ ranks and privileges. Trotsky denounced this:

“No army...can be more democratic than the regime which nourishes it. The source of bureaucratism with its routine and swank is not the special needs of military affairs, but the political needs of the ruling stratum.”

The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

Having restored the officer caste 18 years after its revolutionary abolition, Stalin then beheaded the Red Army on the eve of Hitler’s invasion.

In the shadow of the oncoming world war, Trotsky’s Fourth International insisted in its 1938 Transitional Program: “The only disarmament which can avert or end war is the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by the workers. But to disarm the bourgeoisie the workers must arm themselves.” Its program for revolutionary struggle against imperialism and war included the call for: “Substitution for the standing army of a people’s militia, indissolubly linked up with factories, mines, farms, etc.” Its demands for military training and arming of workers and peasants under the control of workers’ and peasants’ committees were coupled with the demand for “complete independence of workers’ organizations from military-police control.”...

Having guns is no magic talisman, but an unarmed population faces merciless slaughter at the hands of this vicious ruling class whose state is armed to the teeth. For as Karl Marx summed it up in Capital (1867), “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new.” 

“Emancipation Proclaimed”-By Frederick Douglass, October 1862

Workers Vanguard No. 1015
11 January 2013

“Emancipation Proclaimed”-By Frederick Douglass, October 1862

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the 1 January 1863 issuance of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, we reprint below an October 1862 article by Frederick Douglass from Douglass’ Monthly, published in Rochester, New York. The article hails Lincoln’s preliminary announcement of the proclamation on September 22.

Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, was an electrifying agitator and outstanding political leader. Breaking with the “moral suasion” line of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, by the early 1850s Douglass argued that slavery could not be ended short of armed struggle. With the onset of the Civil War, he along with other militant abolitionists and Radical Republicans, such as Wendell Phillips and Thaddeus Stevens, sought to convince Republican moderates to agree to an emancipation proclamation and the arming of black soldiers to smash the Confederate slavocracy. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass actively recruited black troops to the Union Army. He continued to fight for black equality after the war and the formal abolition of slavery in 1865.

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Common sense, the necessities of the war, to say nothing of the dictation of justice and humanity have at last prevailed. We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree. Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, in his own peculiar, cautious, forbearing and hesitating way, slow, but we hope sure, has, while the loyal heart was near breaking with despair, proclaimed and declared: “That on the First of January, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand, Eight Hundred and Sixty-three, All Persons Held as Slaves Within Any State or Any Designated Part of a State, The People Whereof Shall Then be in Rebellion Against the United States, Shall be Thenceforward and Forever Free.” “Free forever” oh! long enslaved millions, whose cries have so vexed the air and sky, suffer on a few more days in sorrow, the hour of your deliverance draws nigh! Oh! Ye millions of free and loyal men who have earnestly sought to free your bleeding country from the dreadful ravages of revolution and anarchy, lift up now your voices with joy and thanksgiving for with freedom to the slave will come peace and safety to your country. President Lincoln has embraced in this proclamation the law of Congress passed more than six months ago, prohibiting the employment of any part of the army and naval forces of the United States, to return fugitive slaves to their masters, commanded all officers of the army and navy to respect and obey its provisions. He has still further declared his intention to urge upon the Legislature of all the slave States not in rebellion the immediate or gradual abolishment of slavery. But read the proclamation for it is the most important of any to which the President of the United States has ever signed his name.

Opinions will widely differ as to the practical effect of this measure upon the war. All that class at the North who have not lost their affection for slavery will regard the measure as the very worst that could be devised, and as likely to lead to endless mischief. All their plans for the future have been projected with a view to a reconstruction of the American Government upon the basis of compromise between slaveholding and non-slaveholding States. The thought of a country unified in sentiments, objects and ideas, has not entered into their political calculations, and hence this newly declared policy of the Government, which contemplates one glorious homogeneous people, doing away at a blow with the whole class of compromisers and corrupters, will meet their stern opposition. Will that opposition prevail? Will it lead the President to reconsider and retract? Not a word of it. Abraham Lincoln may be slow, Abraham Lincoln may desire peace even at the price of leaving our terrible national sore untouched, to fester on for generations, but Abraham Lincoln is not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature.

The careful, and we think, the slothful deliberation which he has observed in reaching this obvious policy, is a guarantee against retraction. But even if the temper and spirit of the President himself were other than what they are, events greater than the President, events which have slowly wrung this proclamation from him may be relied on to carry him forward in the same direction. To look back now would only load him with heavier evils, while diminishing his ability, for overcoming those with which he now has to contend. To recall his proclamation would only increase rebel pride, rebel sense of power and would be hailed as a direct admission of weakness on the part of the Federal Government, while it would cause heaviness of heart and depression of national enthusiasm all over the loyal North and West. No, Abraham Lincoln will take no step backward. His word has gone out over the country and the world, giving joy and gladness to the friends of freedom and progress wherever those words are read, and he will stand by them, and carry them out to the letter. If he has taught us to confide in nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word. The want of Constitutional power, the want of military power, the tendency of the measure to intensify Southern hate, and to exasperate the rebels, the tendency to drive from him all that class of Democrats at the North, whose loyalty has been conditioned on his restoring the union as it was, slavery and all, have all been considered, and he has taken his ground notwithstanding. The President doubtless saw, as we see, that it is not more absurd to talk about restoring the union, without hurting slavery, than restoring the union without hurting the rebels. As to exasperating the South, there can be no more in the cup than the cup will hold, and that was full already. The whole situation having been carefully scanned, before Mr. Lincoln could be made to budge an inch, he will now stand his ground. Border State influence, and the influence of half-loyal men, have been exerted and have done their worst. The end of these two influences is implied in this proclamation. Hereafter, the inspiration as well as the men and the money for carrying on the war will come from the North, and not from half-loyal border States.

The effect of this paper upon the disposition of Europe will be great and increasing. It changes the character of the war in European eyes and gives it an important principle as an object, instead of national pride and interest. It recognizes and declares the real nature of the contest, and places the North on the side of justice and civilization, and the rebels on the side of robbery and barbarism. It will disarm all purpose on the part of European Government to intervene in favor of the rebels and thus cast off at a blow one source of rebel power. All through the war thus far, the rebel ambassadors in foreign countries have been able to silence all expression of sympathy with the North as to slavery. With much more than a show of truth, they said that the Federal Government, no more than the Confederate Government, contemplated the abolition of slavery.

But will not this measure be frowned upon by our officers and men in the field? We have heard of many thousands who have resolved that they will throw up their commissions and lay down their arms, just so soon as they are required to carry on a war against slavery. Making all allowances for exaggeration there are doubtless far too many of this sort in the loyal army. Putting this kind of loyalty and patriotism to the test, will be one of the best collateral effects of the measure. Any man who leaves the field on such a ground will be an argument in favor of the proclamation, and will prove that his heart has been more with slavery than with his country. Let the army be cleansed from all such pro-slavery vermin, and its health and strength will be greatly improved. But there can be no reason to fear the loss of many officers or men by resignation or desertion. We have no doubt that the measure was brought to the attention of most of our leading Generals, and blind as some of them have seemed to be in the earlier part of the war, most of them have seen enough to convince them that there can be no end to this war that does not end slavery. At any rate, we may hope that for every pro-slavery man that shall start from the ranks of our loyal army, there will be two anti-slavery men to fill up the vacancy, and in this war one truly devoted to the cause of Emancipation is worth two of the opposite sort.

Whether slavery will be abolished in the manner now proposed by President Lincoln, depends of course upon two conditions, the first specified and the second implied. The first is that the slave States shall be in rebellion on and after the first day of January 1863 and the second is we must have the ability to put down that rebellion. About the first there can be very little doubt. The South is thoroughly in earnest and confident. It has staked everything upon the rebellion. Its experience thus far in the field has rather increased its hopes of final success than diminished them. Its armies now hold us at bay at all points, and the war is confined to the border States slave and free. If Richmond were in our hands and Virginia at our mercy, the vast regions beyond would still remain to be subdued. But the rebels confront us on the Potomac, the Ohio, and the Mississippi. Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia are in debate on the battlefields and their people are divided by the line which separates treason from loyalty. In short we are yet, after eighteen months of war, confined to the outer margin of the rebellion. We have scarcely more than touched the surface of the terrible evil. It has been raising large quantities of food during the past summer. While the masters have been fighting abroad, the slaves have been busy working at home to supply them with the means of continuing the struggle. They will not down at the bidding of this Proclamation, but may be safely relied upon till January and long after January. A month or two will put an end to general fighting for the winter. When the leaves fall we shall hear again of bad roads, winter quarters and spring campaigns. The South which has thus far withstood our arms will not fall at once before our pens. All fears for the abolition of slavery arising from this apprehension may be dismissed. Whoever, therefore, lives to see the first day of next January, should Abraham Lincoln be then alive and President of the United States, may confidently look in the morning papers for the final proclamation, granting freedom, and freedom forever, to all slaves within the rebel States. On the next point nothing need be said. We have full power to put down the rebellion. Unless one man is more than a match for four, unless the South breeds braver and better men than the North, unless slavery is more precious than liberty, unless a just cause kindles a feebler enthusiasm than a wicked and villainous one, the men of the loyal States will put down this rebellion and slavery, and all the sooner will they put down that rebellion by coupling slavery with that object. Tenderness towards slavery has been the loyal weakness during the war. Fighting the slaveholders with one hand and holding the slaves with the other, has been fairly tried and has failed. We have now inaugurated a wiser and better policy, a policy which is better for the loyal cause than an hundred thousand armed men. The Star Spangled Banner is now the harbinger of Liberty and the millions in bondage, inured to hardships, accustomed to toil, ready to suffer, ready to fight, to dare and to die, will rally under that banner wherever they see it gloriously unfolded to the breeze. Now let the Government go forward in its mission of Liberty as the only condition of peace and union, by weeding out the army and navy of all such officers as the late Col. Miles, whose sympathies are now known to have been with the rebels. Let only the men who assent heartily to the wisdom and the justice of the anti-slavery policy of the Government be lifted into command; let the black man have an arm as well as a heart in this war, and the tide of battle which has thus far only waved backward and forward, will steadily set in our favor. The rebellion suppressed, slavery abolished, and America will, higher than ever, sit as a queen among the nations of the earth.

Now for the work. During the interval between now and next January, let every friend of the long enslaved bondman do his utmost in swelling the tide of anti-slavery sentiment, by writing, speaking, money and example. Let our aim be to make the North a unit in favor of the President’s policy, and see to it that our voices and votes, shall forever extinguish that latent and malignant sentiment at the North, which has from the first cheered on the rebels in their atrocious crimes against the union, and has systematically sought to paralyze the national arm in striking down the slaveholding rebellion. We are ready for this service or any other, in this, we trust the last struggle with the monster slavery. 

Lincoln-A Review by Jacob Zorn

Workers Vanguard No. 1015
11 January 2013

Civil War, Not Compromise, Smashed Slavery

Lincoln-A Review by Jacob Zorn

Lincoln—Steven Spielberg’s new movie based on a screenplay by Tony Kushner—begins with a battle scene that highlights the bravery of black soldiers, some 200,000 of whom fought in the Civil War. Two of them are seen talking to President Lincoln and criticizing the Union Army’s racist policies, paying blacks less than whites and preventing them from advancing to officers. One of the soldiers wonders whether blacks will have the vote in a hundred years. This sequence hints at the crucial role played by black soldiers in the armed struggle that broke the slave power in the South, but the film then entirely switches gears.

The movie’s plot reduces the abolition of slavery to so many parliamentary maneuvers by the wise and clever Lincoln to get the House of Representatives in early 1865 to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery. In the process, it distorts the significance of the Amendment and the role of the abolitionists, who were the main force, then and for decades before, pushing for an end to slavery.

To its credit, Lincoln is forthright that the Civil War was about slavery and does depict Lincoln, with all his contradictions and strengths, as devoted to not just winning the war but smashing the Southern slavocracy. The movie is based in part on a chapter in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005). While other historians—particularly James McPherson, who wrote the classic Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), and Eric Foner—present a deeper understanding of the social and political forces at work in the Civil War, Goodwin’s book underscores Lincoln’s political genius and canny leadership in leading the North to victory.

The opening scene is done in a manner to wrongly suggest that racial oppression is a relic of the past long since overcome. The not-too-thinly-disguised goal of the movie is to laud President Obama and to underline how he, supposedly like Lincoln, should seek “bipartisan” compromises with adversaries. By extension, his left critics are expected to give the president a break. When interviewed on NPR, Kushner gushed about what a great president Barack Obama is and what a “blessing” it was to see “the Obama years through a Lincoln lens.” Kushner then rhapsodized about the virtues of compromise and horse trading. This message was not lost on most of the bourgeois commentary on the film—as shown in the L.A. Times (28 November 2012) headline: “Gov. Jerry Brown Could Learn a Lesson From ‘Lincoln’.”

Lincoln is not without entertainment value, with its excellent acting by Daniel Day-Lewis (as Lincoln) and Tommy Lee Jones (as Pennsylvania Republican Congressman and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens). If the only problem of the movie was simply the narrow focus of its plot, it could be partly alleviated by watching it in conjunction with the superb movie Glory. An inspiring portrayal of the black soldiers in the Massachusetts 54th regiment, Glory gives a sense of what was required for Union victory in a way that Lincoln does not.

But the main weakness of Lincoln is that in trying to show the Lincoln years through the Obama lens the movie distorts history. Barack Obama is Commander-in-Chief of a capitalist system long into its imperialist epoch of decay. The Civil War was the last great progressive act of the American bourgeoisie. To further the consolidation of industrial capitalism, when the exploitation of free labor represented an historical advance, the North was compelled to destroy the system of chattel slavery in the South. Today racist U.S. imperialism continues to carry out what has been more than a century of pillage and war across the globe, brutally exploiting labor at home and abroad while qualitatively arresting wider social and economic development. The American capitalist rulers are the main enemy of the world’s working people and oppressed.

It will serve some good if Lincoln piques interest in the Civil War among its viewers. But it must be understood that the movie obscures the fact that only a social revolution could have uprooted slavery, smashing everything that stood in its way. By the same token, it will take a socialist revolution by the proletariat and its allies to eradicate capitalist wage slavery.

The Thirteenth Amendment

The Thirteenth Amendment, which had its origins in a petition campaign by anti-slavery women suffragettes in early 1864, states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The Thirteenth Amendment codified the end of slavery. Lincoln’s insistence that his generals fight to crush the opposing Confederate armies, and not his search for “bipartisanship,” paved the way for the passage of the Amendment.

In July 1862, as slaves were fleeing Southern plantations and seeking freedom behind Union Army lines, Congress authorized the “confiscation”—i.e., emancipation—of Confederates’ slaves. In January 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had drafted the previous September. It declared that slaves in Confederate-controlled areas “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” With the Proclamation, the war openly became a social revolution to emancipate an oppressed class, the chattel slaves, and destroy an oppressor class, the slave masters. The Emancipation Proclamation also sanctioned the recruitment of black soldiers, such as those Lincoln visited in the first scene of the movie.

The revolutionary aspect of the war was resisted by many Northerners, especially those in the Democratic Party, which was the party that ran the slave South. These Northern Democrats—the so-called “Copperheads”—were antiwar and opposed abolition. In the movie, their main spokesman is Democratic Congressman Fernando Wood, a former mayor of New York City. The clash of the two parties came to a head in the election of 1864, when the Democrats ran General George B. McClellan—whom Lincoln had fired as the commanding general of the Union Army because he refused to fight to win the war. Meanwhile, with Ulysses S. Grant in charge, the tide of the war had begun to decisively turn, and the Union Army was on an offensive through the South.

In the election, the Democrats’ slogan was “The Constitution As It Is and the Union As It Was.” In other words, end the war and keep slavery. McClellan was decisively defeated, winning only New Jersey and the border states Delaware and Kentucky. Lincoln’s victory signaled support for continuing the war until the slavocracy was defeated, with the Republicans gaining enough seats in Congress to guarantee passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

From Lincoln’s perspective, the question was not whether slavery would be abolished, but whether the Amendment would be passed by the outgoing Congress in early 1865 or the incoming Congress later that spring. This consideration was not trivial. Rather than wait for the new Republican-dominated Congress to be convened, Lincoln wanted it to pass with some Democratic support. To do so would be a show of national support for abolition and would undercut the Copperheads, making it impossible to conclude peace on any basis except abolition.

The movie shows in detail how Lincoln—mainly acting through his secretary of state, William H. Seward—manipulated, cajoled, flattered and bribed various Democrats to support the Amendment. In the end, he obtained enough support from “lame duck” Democratic Congressmen to get it passed. Rather than the culmination of the Civil War, the drama in Congress represented a sideshow—albeit an important one—to the abolition of slavery. Eric Foner stressed in a letter to the New York Times (26 November 2012) about the movie: “Even as the House debated, [Union general] Sherman’s army was marching into South Carolina, and slaves were sacking plantation homes and seizing land. Slavery died on the ground, not just in the White House and the House of Representatives.”

The viewer would not know from the movie that to become law, amendments must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. When this happened in December 1865, it was because the North had militarily defeated the Confederacy. Among the states that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment were several in the South. James McPherson captured the real lesson of its adoption when he wrote: “Without the Civil War there would have been no confiscation act, no Emancipation Proclamation, no Thirteenth Amendment (not to mention the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth), certainly no self-emancipation, and almost certainly no end of slavery for several more decades at least” (Drawn with the Sword, 1997).

The Abolitionists and Radical Republicans

Radical abolitionism, the first interracial political movement in the United States, had pointed out decades before the Civil War that the slave system could not be reformed but had to be destroyed. At the time, mainstream politicians either essentially ignored slavery (the Whig Party) or supported it (the Democratic Party). For their bravery, the abolitionists were attacked, denounced and belittled.

The more farsighted elements of the capitalist class in the North eventually coalesced into the Republican Party. At the time of the 1860 presidential election, the Republican Party was not an abolitionist party, and Lincoln, its candidate, wanted only to limit slavery from expanding into the West. But both the slavocracy and Republicans understood that if slavery were prevented from expanding, it could not survive, in large part because its agricultural methods demanded ever more virgin soil. Lincoln’s victory prompted the Southern states to secede, provoking the Civil War. From its outset, the abolitionists understood that slavery was the central issue. Former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass insisted that it was futile to “separate the freedom of the slave from the victory of the government.” He declared: “War for the destruction of liberty must be met with war for the destruction of slavery.”

This was underlined by Karl Marx, who from London agitated among British workers in support of the North. In “The Civil War in the United States” (October 1861), Marx stressed: “The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.” Criticizing Lincoln’s early wavering on emancipation, Marx declared, “Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan—emancipation of the slaves.”

In the early stages of the war, Lincoln was fearful of the reaction of the four pro-Union slave border states as well as the Copperheads. The abolitionists and Radicals pushed Lincoln to grasp the need to smash slavery in order to win the war. Thaddeus Stevens declared: “It is plain that nothing approaching the present policy will subdue the rebels.”

In our article “Honor Abraham Lincoln!” (WV No. 938, 5 June 2009), which elaborates on the evolution of his views on race over the course of the Civil War, we stated:

“The American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln was both bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time—with all the contradictions this implies.... Borrowing from today’s terminology, one could argue that Lincoln began as a reformist, believing that the reactionary social system in the South could be pressured into change and that the institution of slavery would eventually wither on the vine. But he underwent a radical shift when bloody experience in the crucible of war—combined with the mass flight of the slaves to the Union lines—taught him that the nation could be preserved only by means of social revolution.”

It is hard to say to whom the movie does more injustice, Lincoln or the abolitionists. Lincoln is turned into some Obama-style centrist, and the abolitionists into well-meaning people who couldn’t get the job done. Kushner in his interview with NPR condemned “impatience on the part of very good, very progressive people” as one of the main obstacles Obama faces today. In other words, like Obama, Lincoln’s virtue was that he knew that the way to get what is important is to give as well as take.

One of the most egregious aspects of the film is the lack of even a mention of Frederick Douglass, a powerful advocate for abolition and black rights. It was Douglass who not only urged Lincoln to recruit black troops, but advocated that they be treated fairly and paid the same as whites. Douglass had met and argued with Lincoln on a number of occasions, including at the reception after his second inaugural address, as Goodwin relates in the chapter of her book on the Thirteenth Amendment.

The one abolitionist who factors prominently in the movie is Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens has long been vilified, like many Radicals, as a vindictive fanatic who was likely mad. By portraying Stevens sympathetically, the movie hopefully will spur people to learn more about him and the other radical abolitionists.

Yet the film deals with Stevens one-sidedly. At one point in the movie, during a private conversation, Lincoln lectured Stevens that if matters had been left to the Radicals, emancipation would have failed: “But if I’d listened to you, I’d’ve declared every slave free the minute the first shell struck Fort Sumter; then the border states would’ve gone over to the Confederacy, the war would’ve been lost and the Union along with it, and instead of abolishing slavery, as we hope to do, in two weeks, we’d be watching helpless as infants as it spread from the American South into South America.”

There is a grain of truth to this since Lincoln the politician was mindful of public opinion and tried not to put himself too far ahead of it. But it leaves out how instrumental abolitionists like Stevens were in the fight against slavery. As Stevens’ biographer put it, “Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate led the struggle against widespread apathy and fear, pushing through Congress the limited emancipation measures that prepared the nation for general emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment” (Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, 1959).

A telling example of how the movie tries to fit the abolition of slavery into the mold of compromise and bipartisanship is the dramatic tension over what Stevens would say in the House debate over the Thirteenth Amendment. Stevens was known for his saber-sharp sarcasm. In the movie, Ohio Congressman James Ashley—who sponsored the Amendment—begs Stevens to “compromise” in his advocacy of racial equality, “or you risk it all.” The movie then shows Stevens arguing with Fernando Wood on January 27, i.e., shortly before the final vote. In response to Wood’s badgering, Stevens states that he did not believe everybody was equal, but only should be treated equally before the law.

The drama of the scene is false, concocted in order to bolster the movie’s message of political conciliation. In fact, it was over three weeks before the voting when Stevens said that he advocated only “equality before the laws,” and he did so in response to Ohio Representative Samuel Cox, a Democrat who ended up voting for the Amendment. In any case, Stevens’ supposed “compromise”—civil rights for black people—was not only far ahead of most other politicians but also ahead of the actual Thirteenth Amendment.

Reconstruction

Several times in the movie, Lincoln declares that he was focused only on the task at hand—winning the war and abolishing slavery. He tells Stevens that he refuses to discuss Reconstruction after the war: “We shall oppose one another in the course of time. Now we’re working together.” Fair enough: one cannot fault a movie about Lincoln for not delving into what happened after the president’s assassination. But the movie’s refusal to even touch on what happened after the war serves a purpose. To do so would expose the folly of moderation and compromise with the pro-slavery forces.

After Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat from the mountains of Tennessee, assumed the presidency following Lincoln’s death, remnants of the defeated Confederacy made it clear that, while their military defeat had forced them to accept the end of slavery, they had no intention of accepting black people as genuinely free. Southern states sent former Confederates to Congress and passed “black codes” that all but re-enslaved blacks. Meanwhile, Johnson carried out a policy of conciliating the South and was openly disdainful of black people.

Combating Johnson’s equivocal Reconstruction policy, Stevens and other Radical Republicans carried out what became known as Radical Reconstruction. Refusing to allow the Southern representatives to sit in Congress, they passed laws—overriding Johnson’s repeated vetoes—that protected the rights of former slaves, extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and politically disenfranchised the former slaveowners. The Union Army was stationed in the South to enforce these laws. Meanwhile, black people were asserting their basic rights by voting, standing for office and building schools. Radical Reconstruction was the most democratic period in American history, bringing advances for poor whites, such as public education, as well.

Among the Radicals in Congress, Stevens pushed to extend Reconstruction the furthest. He advocated black suffrage, disenfranchising former Confederates and, most radical of all, seizing the former slaveholders’ plantations and redistributing them to the freedmen. In the movie, Stevens articulates this vision, telling Lincoln: “We’ll build up a land down there of free men and free women and free children and freedom.” Since Johnson tried to subvert Reconstruction at every step, Stevens helped spearhead the drive to impeach him, which failed by one vote in Spring 1868.

One of Stevens’ last acts was to campaign for the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. That Amendment extended the rights of citizenship to everybody born in the United States, regardless of race. While Lincoln implies that it was with the Thirteenth Amendment that Stevens compromised, it was in fact over the Fourteenth. He had pushed to give black men the right to vote, but the Amendment instead reduced the number of representatives for states that denied blacks the right to vote. Stevens told Congress that he was going to vote for it “because I live among men and not among angels.” Only in 1870, with the Fifteenth Amendment, did black men gain the right to vote.

As we wrote in our 1966 document “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (reprinted in Marxist Bulletin No. 9, “Basic Documents of the Spartacist League”): “Capitalist and slave alike stood to gain from the suppression of the planter aristocracy but beyond that had no further common interests.” In other words, even though a section of the bourgeoisie pushed to deepen Reconstruction, as a whole the ruling class had no such interest.

For Reconstruction to have succeeded would have required what Stevens advocated: breaking up the large landed estates and actually giving blacks “40 acres and a mule.” But the promise of black freedom was betrayed when the Northern capitalists formed an alliance with the remnants of the slavocracy in order to exploit Southern resources and the freedmen. Particularly following the Paris Commune of 1871, when the proletariat seized power for two months in the city, the American bourgeoisie saw expropriation and redistribution of private property in the land as a potential threat to themselves.

After the election of 1876, the last federal troops were recalled from the South as part of a compromise between the Republicans and the Democrats. Black freedmen and poor white sharecroppers didn’t have the social weight to defend their gains. With the racist Democrats returned to power in the South, they steadily stripped away the rights that black people had won. By the end of the century, the Southern states had disenfranchised black people and instituted formal Jim Crow segregation. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would be dead letters until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

The defeat of Reconstruction was a betrayal of the promise of black equality. To this day, the Civil War remains unfinished business, with black people making up an oppressed race-color caste. They form an integral part of American society but at the same time are overwhelmingly segregated at its bottom. Although the Democrats are no longer the pro-slavery party they once were, they are no less foes of black liberation today, administering along with the Republicans the capitalist system in its death agony. The tasks of the Civil War can be finished only by smashing American capitalism through socialist revolution. 

On Marx, Maximilian and Mexico

Workers Vanguard No. 1015
11 January 2013

On Marx, Maximilian and Mexico

(Letter)

The following letter was addressed to Jacob Zorn regarding an article based on his forum presentation, “Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War” (WV Nos. 933 and 934, 27 March and 10 April 2009), which is reprinted in the most recent issue of Black History and the Class Struggle (July 2012).

10 August 2012

I followed closely your Mexican-American War article in “Black History and the Class Struggle, No. 22.” I did so because I am a Texan and a former newspaper correspondent in Mexico. I was anxious to know what SL had to say: the group does impressive historical research.

For years I have argued that the Texas revolution was a pro-slavery uprising, and also that U.S. imperialism dates to the Mexican war. Your article convinced me that maybe the U.S. wasn’t ready for imperialism at the time.

However, I have long believed that Marx sided with Maximilian’s invasion of Mexico, writing words to the effect that it would “drag Mexico into the modern world.” I read that many years ago in a Mexican publication. But you didn’t mention that.

I thought it important since Maximilian’s invasion postdates 1854, the date you cite as that of Marx’s last defense of the Mexican War. So I looked in my “Collected Works” set—and found nothing of the kind.

Either I was misled about Marx’s view of Maximilian or you overlooked something. Can you tell me which it was? If I’m in error, I don’t want to continue.

If you are familiar with any sources on Marx/Maximilian/Juarez, I’d also like to know.

Yours, D.R.

WV replies:

Everything we have read by Karl Marx and/or Friedrich Engels opposes the French incursion into Mexico, which set up the rule of Habsburg “Emperor” Maximilian from 1864 until 1867. Indeed, in a November 1861 Daily Tribune article, Marx denounced the impending invasion of French as well as British and Spanish troops as “one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history” (“The Intervention in Mexico,” Collected Works, Vol. 19).

From 1858-61, Liberals and Conservatives fought a bloody civil war in Mexico, the “War of the Reform.” It was touched off when Conservatives resisted efforts by the government to limit the power of the reactionary Catholic church, including by decreeing the separation of church and state and seizing church property. When the forces of radical Liberal president Benito Juárez emerged victorious yet bankrupt, his government declared a two-year moratorium on paying the country’s foreign debt. This enraged the British, French and Spanish governments (led by Queen Victoria, Emperor Napoleon III and Queen Isabella II, respectively), who reacted by signing the Convention of London in October 1861. With this pact, they pledged to occupy the customs house at the port of Veracruz in order to collect their debts.

In his Daily Tribune article, Marx predicted that “the joint intervention, with no other avowed end save the rescue of Mexico from anarchy, will produce just the opposite effect, weaken the Constitutional Government, strengthen the priestly party by a supply of French and Spanish bayonets, rekindle the embers of civil war, and, instead of extinguishing, restore anarchy to its full bloom.” By January 1862, thousands of British, French and Spanish troops had landed in Veracruz. While the British and Spanish soon withdrew, the French continued their invasion, forcing the retreat of Juárez’s government to the north of the country. Attempting to establish a monarchy in Mexico, the French—with the backing of propertied anti-Juárez Mexican forces—crowned the Austrian Habsburg Maximilian I in 1864.

By 1867, Juárez’s forces had defeated Maximilian, in part with the aid of the United States. The U.S. had recently emerged from victory over the slavocracy in the Civil War—the last great, progressive act of the American bourgeoisie (and the prelude to the emergence of the U.S. over the next few decades as an imperialist power). In a footnote in Volume I of Capital, Marx noted that in Mexico, as in several other countries, “slavery is hidden under the form of peonage.... Juarez abolished peonage. The so-called Emperor Maximilian re-established it by a decree, which, in the House of Representatives at Washington, was aptly denounced as a decree for the re-introduction of slavery into Mexico.”

D.R. seems to be confusing the attitude Marx and Engels adopted toward this incursion with their earlier support to the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-48). Marx and Engels at that time believed—wrongly—that the U.S. invasion would further the development of a modern capitalist Mexico. Thus Engels wrote in 1848 that they “rejoiced” at the U.S. conquest of Mexico, perceiving “an advance when a country which has hitherto been exclusively wrapped up in its own affairs, perpetually rent with civil wars, and completely hindered in its development, a country whose best prospect had been to become industrially subject to Britain—when such a country is forcibly drawn into the historical process” (“The Movements of 1847,” Collected Works, Vol. 6).

Far from promoting capitalist development and social progress, the U.S. invasion of Mexico in the 1840s was in the main driven by the Southern slaveholders’ need to extend the territory over which they held sway. The stage was set for the war when Texas declared independence in 1836, which D.R. aptly describes as a pro-slavery uprising. As Ulysses S. Grant wrote about the U.S. Civil War in his Memoirs: “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”

Comrade Zorn noted in his forum that industrial capitalism, which was in the process of development, was “then a progressive force, and Marx and Engels believed that one of its most progressive features was creating a nation with a unified working class.” While they condemned the monumental crimes committed by Western powers against the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas, they initially supported colonial penetration of such backward regions as a vehicle for promoting economic and social modernization. History would subsequently show that even though the advanced countries introduced certain elements of modern industrial technology into their colonies and semicolonies, e.g., railroads, the overall effect was to arrest the social and economic development of those areas.

Marx and Engels would soon develop a very different attitude toward colonialism, expressed, for example, in their defense of the Sepoy rebellion in British-occupied India in 1857-58. Particularly important in prompting the change in their views on the oppression of weak, backward states by stronger, more advanced ones was the major role that Britain’s hold on Ireland played in retarding the political consciousness of the English proletariat.

Having first championed the assimilation of the Irish into British society, in the late 1860s Marx and Engels came out for Ireland’s independence. In an April 1870 letter that Marx wrote to two American followers, S. Meyer and A. Vogt, he noted that “the ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland.” Marx continued: “This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.” He concluded that “the sole means” of hastening the social revolution in England was “to make Ireland independent.” Revolutionary Marxists carry forward this perspective by championing the national liberation of peoples subjugated by the advanced capitalist (imperialist) powers.

Certainly there was no mistaking as social progress the French intervention installing Maximilian, whose family tree included Emperor Charles V, in whose name Hernán Cortés had conquered Mexico for the Habsburgs in the 16th century. 

San Francisco Cop Vendetta Against Protesters-Defend the ACAC 19! Drop All Charges Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1015
11 January 2013

San Francisco Cop Vendetta Against Protesters-Defend the ACAC 19! Drop All Charges Now!

OAKLAND—One of the defense cases highlighted at last month’s benefit for the annual Partisan Defense Committee Holiday Appeal for class-war prisoners was that of the ACAC 19. These 19 protesters were arrested on October 6 when San Francisco cops brutally attacked a march of nearly 200, part of a series of “Anti-Colonial, Anti-Capitalist” (ACAC) events. The march was called to protest the racist treatment of native peoples, the military’s Fleet Week and the war in Afghanistan. Videos show dozens of cops suddenly charging the march before it got more than a few blocks, beating demonstrators to the pavement and inflicting injuries that included a broken nose, deep facial cuts requiring stitches and multiple bruises. Initially hit with felony charges, the ACAC 19 now face vindictive prosecution for a range of trumped-up misdemeanor charges. Drop all the charges now!

One of the organizers of the October 6 demonstration singled out for special attention by the cops is Robbie Donohoe, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 6 in San Francisco. Speaking at the Oakland Holiday Appeal, brother Donohoe graphically described the police assault:

“I turned and looked and I saw a baton hit my wife across the back, and I saw her back arch. And I was compelled—instead of trying to get to safety, I ran over and sort of flanked her with my body, and on the way there faced a line of batons coming down on me. And they eventually knocked us both over and continued to beat us both with batons as I lay on top of her. They kicked me off of her. Three officers were on my back. One of them pulled my head to the side so that I could see her lying next to me as another officer was punching her in the back of the head.”

On November 13, the SF district attorney subpoenaed Twitter account information of two protesters, ominously claiming “a conspiracy or agreement to stage a riot.” In a December 22 protest letter to the D.A., the PDC declared: “Occurring in the context of a nationwide increase in government surveillance and repression of leftist and labor activists, the District Attorney’s demand that Twitter turn over protesters’ account records is a direct threat to the right to political dissent, including the elementary rights of free speech and assembly.” Stop SFPD surveillance and harassment of the ACAC 19!

The Obama administration has systematically escalated the attacks on democratic rights unleashed by his Republican predecessor under the so-called “war on terror.” As the Spartacist League and PDC have always warned, although its initial targets were Arabs and Muslims, the “war on terror” has put in place an arsenal of repressive measures that would also be used against leftists, trade unionists and working people. Such attacks have become increasingly frequent and widespread.

In the Midwest, 23 leftists and trade unionists subpoenaed by a witchhunting federal grand jury in Chicago following 2010 FBI raids on their homes are still under investigation for supposed “material support to terrorism.” The “NATO 5,” arrested last year on trumped-up “terror plot” charges around the protests against NATO war criminals in Chicago, remain in jail and face up to 40 years if convicted. Four Occupy Cleveland supporters were sentenced in November to prison terms ranging from six to eleven and a half years for a “plot” concocted by an FBI informant. Three Portland activists are locked away in prison, possibly until 2014, for courageously refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in Seattle investigating a May Day demonstration last year.

Documents obtained last month by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal that the FBI, in coordination with the New York Stock Exchange, began tracking activists involved with planning Occupy Wall Street a month before the occupation of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. In cities across the country, the Feds along with local and state police monitored the Occupy movement as a potential terrorist threat.

Immediately after the arrests of the ACAC 19, the police and capitalist media launched a smear campaign, painting the demonstrators as “members of a criminal street gang, Black Blok.” An SFPD spokesman circulated the baseless claim that the ACAC demonstrators were the same “anarchist group” that had “vandalized” the Mission District police station in a protest against the shooting of a young Latino man by plainclothes gang squad cops weeks earlier. Gang squad cops were among those who attacked the ACAC march, and arrestees were stripped and inspected for “gang tattoos.” This gang squad is the same unit that uses the “gang affiliation” label as carte blanche to terrorize black and Latino youth in San Francisco, including gunning them down in the streets.

Clearly intending to provoke further retaliation against the ACAC 19, the police released pictures and names of the arrestees. Indeed, scurrilous flyers with mug shots of Donohoe and his wife together with their address were dumped from cars and postered around their neighborhood, denouncing them as “extremely dangerous people,” “members of the criminal street gang: Occupy Oakland” and “sworn anarchist revolutionaries.”

At the Holiday Appeal, UC Davis professor Joshua Clover—one of those facing prosecution for a March 29 campus sit-in (see “Defend the UC Davis ‘Banker’s Dozen’!” WV No. 1007, 31 August 2012)—spoke of a growing “black scare.” The bosses’ media and politicians have repeatedly howled about supposed Black Bloc anarchists to set the stage for cop repression against leftist protesters.

Behind the attacks on the ACAC protests and Occupy around the country is the understanding by the capitalist ruling class that the smoldering discontent at the base of this racist, class-divided society sows the seeds for sharp class and other social struggles. The ultimate target of political repression aimed at criminalizing dissent is the multiracial proletariat, which, as the collective producers of wealth, represents the one force capable of successfully challenging the capitalist order. For struggle against capitalist rule to be successful, that social power must be mobilized under the leadership of a revolutionary party.

That Marxist perspective is rejected by “direct action” activists, who have sought to distinguish themselves from other forces in and around the Occupy movement by burning American flags and otherwise expressing their rage against the atrocities of the U.S. imperialist rulers at home and abroad. Such actions offer only an ineffectual sideshow, bringing activists into isolated conflict with the bloody fist of the bosses’ state. This state apparatus, centrally the cops, courts, prisons and armed forces, is at bottom an instrument of force that defends the class rule of the bourgeoisie.

All wings of the Occupy movement share the populist conception of the “99 percent,” which obscures the class division of society and has been easily subsumed into the liberal wing of the capitalist Democratic Party. It will take a socialist revolution carried out by a class-conscious proletariat to put an end to the capitalist order and open the road to an egalitarian communist future.

*   *   *

The Support the ACAC 19 committee has called for letters, e-mails and phone calls demanding the immediate dropping of all charges to be directed to San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, Hall of Justice, 850 Bryant Street, Room 322, San Francisco, CA 94103; e-mail District Attorney@sfgov.org; phone (415) 553-1751. Donations can be made at the committee’s Web site: supporttheacac19.wordpress.com.