Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm
From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!
Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.
Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.
In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!
Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.
Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Monday, March 14, 2011
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Third World Congress (1921)- From The Marxist Studies Series- "Elaboration Of Communist Tactics And Organization"
Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
The Third Congress (1921):
Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization
by Reuben Samuels New York, 5 September 1998
The Second Congress of the Communist International [17 July-7 August 1920] that Steve dealt with took place at what in hindsight turned out to be the peak of a revolutionary wave that followed World War I and was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolu¬tion. As you will recall, a great map was hung at the Congress charting the progress of the Red Army and its march on Warsaw. But the Red Army was unable to take Warsaw.
The massive scope of the postwar class war reached the point of revolutionary crisis in countries like Hungary, Germany and Italy. It contributed decisively to the Red Army victory over the White Guard forces and their imperialist allies. The imperialists were unable to crush the Soviet workers state, but despite heroic battles, without a tempered and authoritative revolutionary party, the combative working classes of Hungary, Germany and Italy were unable to overthrow their own bourgeoisies.
As Lenin stated at the Third Congress in the summer of 1921:
"The result is a state of equilibrium which, although highly unstable and precarious enables the Socialist republic to exist—not for long—of course, within the capitalist encirclement."
—"Theses for a Report on Tactics of the R.C.P.", Collected Works (CW), Vol. 32, p. 454, First Eng¬lish Edition (Progress Publishers, 1965)
The defeats of this period demonstrated both the immaturity of the newly formed communist parties and the ability of the Social Democracy—despite its role in WWI mobilizing the proletariat for the imperialist slaughter, and despite its vanguard role in the imperialist expeditions against the Soviet Union—to maintain its base among the organized working class in the advanced industrial countries. So we had in the period leading up to the Third Congress a mighty coal miners strike in Britain that was betrayed by the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy. A very similar development took place in the fall of 1920 in Italy, which was the mightiest upsurge of the working people in all of Europe in that period, which was also betrayed by Social Democracy. Then there was the defeat of the German proletariat in Saxony, March 1921, crushed by social-democratic governments. In each case, the defeat was a confirmation of what Trotsky wrote in the Lessons of October (1924): "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, with a substitute for the party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer" (The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-25, p. 252).
At the Third Congress, Trotsky, in concluding the opening report that he gave on the economic situation and the prospects for proletarian revolution, stated:
"Now for the first time we see and feel that we are not so immediately near to the goal, to the conquest of power, to the world revolution. At that time, in 1919, we said to ourselves: 'It is a question of months.' Now we say: 'It is perhaps a question of years'."
—quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Vol. 3, p. 385 (Macmillan, 1953)
The Third Congress was devoted to using this period of precarious equilibrium to prepare the communist parties that were often communist parties only in name and stated goals, but not in their activity and organization.
In summing up the work of the Third Congress, Trotsky made what I think is an important point about historical materialism, about the crises of the bourgeoisies such as developed directly out of WWI. This point was important to counteract crisis-mongers like the Healyites in the '60s—or for that matter the Stalinists in the Third Period—who claimed that there were crises so severe that their own dynamic alone would bring down the bour¬geoisie. The bourgeoisie would create a form of social suicide. And Trotsky responded to this in light of his report to the Third Congress where he had emphasized the temporary stability of capitalism: "History has provided the basic premise for the success of this [proletarian] revolution—in the sense that society cannot any longer develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not at all assume upon itself— in place of the working class, in place of the politicians of the working class, in place of the Communists—the solutions of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian van¬guard...History says to the working class, 'You must know that unless you cast down the bour¬geoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civ¬ilization. Try, solve this task!'"
—"School of Revolutionary Strategy," The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2, p. 6 (Monad Press, 1972)
So it was clear to the Bolsheviks—at least it was clear to Lenin and Trotsky going into the Third Congress—that it was no longer sufficient to lay out the broad outlines in principles of the Bolshevik Revolution. Equally important was transmitting the strategy of revolutionary struggle for the conquest of power. The two decades of experience of building the Bolshevik Party, the instrument for the proletarian revolution, had to be made available to these fledgling communist parties that had gathered around the Comintern. This experience had to be made accessible to them and had to be applied by them to the specific circumstances in their own countries.
The debates that took place at this Congress, the debates over tactics, party building, the relationship to the trade unions, communist work among women and youth, could not have taken place without the programmatic ground-breaking work of the First and Second Congresses: the "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World," the "Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the "21 Conditions for Admission to the CI." These documents sought to draw the hard programmatic line against the centrists and opportunists who sought to destroy the new revolutionary international from within with their own brand of anti-revolutionary entrism. This was the framework in which this discussion could take place. It was not going to be a discussion with the centrists who would not split with the reformists.
Now this doesn't mean there was a cleavage between these Congresses. Lenin and Trotsky realized from the very beginning the necessity to impart their organizational and tactical experience to these revolutionaries who had been won to the October Revolution, but not yet won to Bolshevism. Lenin wrote the manual on tactics, "Left-Wing" Communism-An Infantile Disorder, so that it was in the hands of all the delegates to the Second Congress of the CI. But it was still necessary at this Congress to devote significant time to the struggle against the centrists and opportunists who were seeking to "get on the bandwagon" of the then extremely authoritative and popular October Revolution and its new International, offering a clean banner on which they could wipe their blood-besmirched hands.
To give you an example of the problems that the Comintern and the Bolsheviks faced, take the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Like the German party, in Czechoslovakia, the Comintern won a substantial section of the old Social Democracy and a party with hundreds of thousands of members. Now, the tradition of this party, very much like the French and German, was very reformist, very much in the tradition of Noske and the French Social Democ¬racy. As late as 1919, a social-democratic coalition government sent Czech troops in to crush the Hun¬garian Soviet. However, this actually had a radicalizing influence on the base of the Social Democracy.
A substantial left wing took over the party headquarters and newspapers. The social-democratic leadership responded by calling in the troops. This resulted in a political general strike of one million workers in December 1920, just before the Third Congress of the Comintern. The most militant sec¬tions of this working class, however, were organized into separate national parties. Czechoslovakia was put together from the remnants of the Habsburg Empire, and the Slovaks and Sudeten Germans each had their own parties with substantial minori¬ties of Jews, Gypsies, Hungarians—you name it, they had it. The parties were divided along national lines. And the strongest, the Bohemian-Moravian party, was also the most reformist and the last to declare its agreement with the Comintern and the 21 Conditions.
This was an anomalous situation: a country with two parties that said: 'We're ready, take us in!' And hanging back was a third party that says: 'We're almost ready! We agree with the 21 Condi¬tions. We agree with getting together and having a united party.' Finally they held what many thought would be their unification congress in the middle of May, just one month before the Third Comintern Congress. But instead of unifying, the congress set up a "Committee of Action" for this purpose. It was really a delaying tactic to prevent the consolidation of a united communist party in Czechoslovakia. Going into the Comintern Congress, maybe there was a party, maybe there were three parties, but, then again, maybe no party. So, when you read reports and exchanges at the Congress, very angry about the leadership of the Czech Communist Party, you can understand why.
And this was not atypical. So much of the discredited Social Democracy was drawn in the wake of the authority and enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution that the sorting-out process was not easy.
NEP: A Necessary Retreat
Now, within the Soviet Union itself, the Soviet workers had successfully defended themselves from domestic counterrevolution backed by the intervention of 17 imperialist armies. The dictatorship of the proletariat was triumphant, but the prole¬tariat was shattered as a class. It was at the expense of the physical existence of the working class that this victory was won.
In 1921, famine swept Russia. Even cannibalism reappeared. The proletariat, already a small minority of three million at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, was reduced by half. And very often this proletariat was subsidized, supported by the state simply to maintain intact remnants of the class, the basis for the dictatorship. This is graphically described in Deutscher's, The Prophet Unarmed:
"...[B]y the end of the civil war, Russia's national income amounted to only one-third of her income in 1913...industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods produced before the war...the coal-mines turned out less than one-tenth and the iron foundries only one-fortieth of their normal output...the railways were destroyed." —p. 4
All the stocks, reserves and the exchange of goods and services on which the economy depended for its work were utterly destroyed. Russian cities and towns became so depopulated after 1921 that Moscow had only one-half and Petrograd one-third of their former inhabitants. And the people of the two capitals had for many months lived on a food ration of two ounces of bread and a few frozen potatoes.
What was the situation in the military? There were five million soldiers in 1920. There was a policy of demobilization, but how? What to do with five million armed men and women? There were no trains to transport the demobilized troops home. There was no fuel for them in the barracks. Many of these troops demobilized themselves and became bandit partisans. They would simply roam the countryside and the cities and try to forage food and a little bit of clothing to stay alive. This became such a significant problem that the Cheka, which is often mis-translated as secret police but was actually the Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation, formed a special section to combat banditism.
Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, worked in what was called the Department of Enlightenment and a lot of her "enlightenment" had to do with teenage bands that had no other way to survive than to act like gangs. They went out and foraged and stole what they could, by any means they could, to stay alive! At the time of the 1921 June-July Third Congress of the Comintern, bandit partisan warfare is still going on throughout the Soviet Union. I just mention one district, Temblov. In Temblov the old Socialist Revolutionaries had gotten together an armed band of 21,000, and this was just in one district. This was happening while the Third Congress was going on. If you read The Trotsky Papers (1917-1922), volume 2, put out by the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam you'll see more paper is devoted to Temblov than is devoted to the Third Congress.
This problem was increasingly taking the form of a civil war of the countryside against the cities. How to deal with it? As Lenin said: 'the easy part was expropriating the bourgeoisie. Difficult was defeating the imperialist-backed counterrevolution. But we did that too. Now we've hit the real bedrock of capitalism: the petty proprietors, the peasants. Without their food the cities cannot be rebuilt. There cannot be any kind of reconstruction under this devastation of civil war.'
It was necessary to make what was openly called a retreat: introducing a tax in kind for the peas¬antry. This is what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The tax in kind meant instead of having all their grain and foodstuffs taken by the state, they had to pay a certain amount in the form of taxes. Then they could market the rest. That is the restoration—within the context of state owner¬ship of land—of market trade. Likewise, there was encouragement—not with a lot of success—of foreign concessions and foreign investment in Soviet industry.
Now, this policy was attacked by various oppo¬sitions within the Bolshevik Party. And Lenin's speeches and the reports to the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party deal with these positions in trying to hammer out a policy to deal with the catastrophic economic and social collapse. Under these conditions, the Kronstadt sailors revolt. This was a different generation from the Kronstadt sailors who formed the Red Guard and a cornerstone of the Red Army. Another generation had gone into the military, very closely tied to the countryside, which represented the peasant unrest there.
It was fundamentally a counterrevolutionary uprising. The main demand was: "Soviets without Bolsheviks!" This was also one of the main demands of the Workers Opposition. In a situation where the proletariat itself was shattered as a class, its only cohesive identity as an instrument of pro¬letarian class-consciousness was the party, which itself, of course, was devastated. In the middle of this Congress it was necessary to take every delegate with military training and send them to Kron¬stadt to put down the uprising. That's what you call a working congress.
The reaction of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) right wing, Dittmann and Crispien, was to say, 'You see, we're for the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in dark, backward Slavic Russia, to take power, to take responsibility for rebuilding from the devastation of the imperialist war, that is the source of all these problems. So, you see, yes we're for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but not where it exists, not where it is struggling to survive.'
These policies were also attacked by the ultra-lefts in Germany and Holland. They were also attacked by the Italian Socialist leader Serrati— remember him from the Second Congress? He's the guy that kept interrupting John Reed's report on the black question. 'Let's get on to the real proletariat.' I guess he didn't know what was happening to America.
So, NEP and economic reconstruction was one of the important, fighting issues of the Third Congress of the Comintern. This was a retreat and it was necessary to lay this out before the Tenth Party Congress, but also before the highest tribunal of the Communist movement, the CI, at the Third Congress. Lenin treated the Comintern as an international soviet that would render the final judgment on the policies not only for Germany, not only for Italy, but also for the Soviet Union. He of course fought so that the policies he thought should win would win.
Lenin was orchestrating just about everything that happened at the Congress insofar as it was possible, as he was a sick man by this time. But his principal report was on the tactics of the Russian Communist Party. He tied these questions together with the policies that were necessary in Western Europe, especially in the advanced industrial coun¬tries, but not only there.
If you read Carr and Deutscher—especially Carr is very strong on this point—they basically see the Third Congress as a whole chapter called the "Congress of Retreat." Carr's point is that with the defeat of the march on Warsaw, with the defeats in Hungary and Italy, the Soviet Union was forced to be "reasonable" and "statesmanlike," forced to adopt Realpolitih, the politics of national interest, to which the policies of the Comintern would be sub¬ordinate. If you want trade and investment from the capitalists of other countries you have to tone down overthrowing them, don't you? Which is exactly what Serrati charged about the NEP.
But the reality was that the Bolshevik Revolution was made for the world revolution, and its survival depended on world revolution. With its delay the Bolsheviks were compelled on the one hand to take certain measures to buy time within the Soviet Union, and at the same time to struggle for the preparation of these new parties of the Comintern so that they could fulfill their task.
Split at Halle Wins Mass Base for KPD
So what's happening in Germany? The USPD, which had considerable authority—it claimed at least on paper 700,000 to 800,000 members-had a congress in Halle in October 1920 to decide on affiliation to the Comintern on the basis of the 21 Conditions that had been adopted at the Second Congress. The USPD split, a majority going with the KPD and Comintern, a minority retaining the "Independent" label for another year while fading back into the SPD. The Communist Party brought 40,000 members to this unification, the USPD left wing brought about 300,000 to 400,000. So the number of Communists after the fusion increased tenfold.
It was not accidental that this congress was held in Halle. Halle was a left-wing stronghold of the workers movement in Germany. It was the center of a region, the province of Saxony, which contained a strong component of radical miners. Like American miners, they lived in relatively backward, isolated communities. Nevertheless, radicalized by their experiences in the blood-soaked trenches of WWI, they very often came back left-wing Social Democrats, members of the USPD.
Also, the war had accelerated the development of a petrochemical industry in Halle-Merseberg. In 1895 there were a thousand workers. By the end of WWI there were 35,000 workers, 23,000 of whom worked in the Leuna Werke [plant] near Halle. It was the biggest industrial plant then in Germany. It was a real stronghold of the USPD that claimed a membership in this one district of 80,000. Not only did the Communist Party and the USPD have a sub¬stantial base there, but so did the ultraleft syndicalists of the KAPD.
This was reflected in the class struggle in this region as well. Now, you might have read in your history books that in the Weimar Republic, with that wonderful, democratic constitution, workers got the eight-hour day. But it was a six-day or 48-hour workweek, so don't get so excited. And it was not implemented anywhere but in some sections of the civil service and in this region. Everywhere else people were working 54 hours a week. That was the norm. Wages were higher in this region. People got a third more vacation. And if I told you how little vacation you got you'd think you must be in America! Nev¬ertheless they got a third more in this region and this represented some sharp class struggle.
I'll just give you one example. In January the mine bosses decided, 'We're gonna bring in a special police to be guards in the mines.' And workers just walked out and said, 'We're gonna hire our own guards, they're gonna be war veterans and workers who've been injured working in the mines, and they're gonna be beholden to us and not the mine chiefs.' And they won.
This was a militant section of the working class with a huge industrial base that had, just like in Rus¬sia, grown up in a period of less than 15 or 20 years. It had won substantial gains and was strongly Communist.
On 20 February 1921, there were elections to the Prussian parliament (called the Landtag). In these elections to the Prussian state parliament the SPD got 70,000 votes. What was left of the USPD got 75,000 and the Communist Party got 197,000 votes. That is one-third more than the combined votes of the SPD and USPD.
This didn't go unnoticed to the rest of the ruling class in Germany and is the background to the 1921 March Action, that took place mainly in this region.
This was a red sore in the eyes of the German bourgeoisie at a time when they had to pay substantial reparations to the victors of WWI, especially France and Britain. In fact one of the demands raised by the Communists was, "Make the bourgeoisie pay for Versailles!" Lenin's attitude was, 'We don't care about Versailles, we've got other things on the agenda. If we took power in Germany, we might also be compelled to pay reparations. But the main thing is to get the power.' He drew a very hard line in this regard against the kind of nationalist propaganda that came out in this period, including from the Communist Party. This problem worsens and will be dealt with in greater detail in the next class.
Back to 1921: What's going on in the KPD? After the fusion they had two chairmen: one from the old USPD left wing, Ernst Daumig, and the other who was the chairman of the Communist Party after Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches were murdered, Paul Levi. Paul Levi was an attorney who had defended Luxemburg and Liebknecht before the Kaiser's court. He joined the Spartacists and the left wing of the Zimmerwald Movement during WWI. He was known to Lenin, so he had some authority, but he also had some other less sterling qualities which we'll get to in a moment.
Radek was the Comintern rep in Germany, or seemed to be. They have a phrase in German—"the man for all things." So he was the all-purpose representative for this and that. Imprisoned by the Social Democrats, he met in jail with one of Ger¬many's foremost industrialists, Walter Rathenau, to discuss trade relations with Russia. Rathenau organized Germany's industrial supply line for WWI. He also happened to be Jewish. (Rathenau paid with his life for his trade and military negotiations with the Soviet Union, gunned down the following year by two fascist army officers.)
"Open Letter": Precursor to the United Front
One of the more intelligent things Levi and Radek came up with was the "Open Letter," which was drafted and printed in the beginning of January 1921, right after the fusion of the KPD and the USPD left wing. It was short, punchy and to the point. It consisted of a bunch of what we would call economic and transitional demands: for example, higher wages; the unemployed should be paid at the standard wage rate of the industry from which they have been laid off; pensions for the old people; distribution of cheap food; workers control, etc. Germany went through all these wars and the castles still stand, right? Throw out the princes, bring in the homeless.
The "Open Letter" was an appeal to all the workers' organizations—from the SPD and the big trade-union federation to the KAPD (a left split from the KPD) and its little union organization called the "one big union." This document was published in the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne [Red Flag] in January 1921. It anticipated the "Theses on Tactics" that would be discussed at the Third CI Congress and the united-front tactic that was elaborated at the Fourth. And it anticipated the Transitional Program upon which the Fourth International was founded.
I've always believed this document had no impact except with people like Lenin and Trotsky. Wrong. The Social Democrats did not go rushing to endorse this document and to sign up to throw the princes out of the palaces and to seize the shutdown factories. But a big congress of metalworkers held in Berlin at the end of January unanimously adopted the demands of this document. No social-democratic representative from the union movement could vote against it, at most they could abstain, because the document was too powerful. There were meetings of what was called the trade-union Kartell or federation for Greater Berlin. The same thing happened, it was unanimously adopted. It was extremely popular.
It turns out the place where it had no impact was in the KPD, because the tactic was never fought out. Levi had a bright idea. He got together with Radek, they wrote it up—after all he's the Chairman, right—so it appears in their newspaper Rote Fahne, bang, that's it! Are we going to implement it? How are we going to implement it? Were there any dis¬cussions to that effect? No.
Livorno: "Unity" That Strangled Italian Revolution
Now the next thing that shapes the history of the German party doesn't happen in Germany, it happens in Italy. And we get back to our old friend, Serrati. The Italian Socialist Party called a congress in Livorno in January 1921. This is after this party, through its reformist right wing and the trade-union bureaucrats, had sabotaged this great indus¬trial and agrarian workers uprising. Because it didn't lead to workers revolution, they had in effect opened the road to the fascists. So now they're going to have a congress and decide what they're going to do about the Comintern and those 21 Conditions.
And everybody's there from Turati and Serrati to Bordiga—they're all there. What the Comintern wanted was for Serrati to break with the reformists. He refused. The Comintern sent two representatives—the Hungarian, Rakosi, and a Bulgarian, Kabakchiev. It was very hard to get people into Italy at this point. They traveled there under extreme difficulties. Comintern agents did not get the red carpet treatment from border guards.
Zinoviev, who opens the Third Congress with one of his usual pithy four-hour reports on the work of the ECCI, describes what happens to these guys when they get to Livorno. They walk into the Congress and are greeted with delegates yelling, "Long live the Pope!" This is in Italy! You thought the Pope lived in Rome? No, the Vatican is in Moscow. If you didn't know, you found out at this congress. Zinoviev even claims somebody released a bird at this point, a dove, into the congress. The Comintern reps come this great distance at great peril to be heckled and mistreated. This is internationalism?
Paul Levi got better treatment. He went down there in part at the initiative of Clara Zetkin. He pursued an entirely different policy, a policy counterposed to the Comintern. He argued, 'Well, if you've got a party that is outside the Comintern like the USPD, then it's okay to split it. But if you have a party that's already in the Comintern, like the Italian Socialist Party (the whole party had formally joined the Comintern), then how can you splinter them? It's like cutting off a part of the body, say the arm, to have such a split.'
And we're talking about 1921, that is several months after these same people that are sitting in the same hall had sabotaged the general strikes, the plant occupations, the occupation of land by agrarian workers, so magnificent and so betrayed. The bourgeoisie got scared enough that they then backed the fascists: 'We can't just rely on Serrati and Turati to keep this working class under control. Time to go for the surgical operation and apply the knife.'
Levi goes back to Berlin really proud of himself and makes a report to the Central Committee or Zentralausschuss—hls report is counterposed to the
policy of the Comintern. Everybody knows that. His report is put up for a vote. He loses, narrowly. At this point, Levi, who is the chairman of the Party, Clara Zetkin, Daumig, who is co-chairman, and two other members of the Zentmlausschuss resign, like it's a parliamentary vote of no confidence: 'You didn't vote for me, so I'm not going to be on your Zentralausschuss anymore. I'm taking a powder.' So they leave. However, they don't resign their actual seats in parliament. These they keep.
Now you had a party that was very much divided between the so-called left wing and a right wing of which Levi, and Zetkin, to a certain extent, were representative. They wanted to do things like the "Open Letter." They also wanted to do things like support Serrati at Livorno. But these issues were never fought out.
Lenin writes a personal letter to Levi and Zetkin in April 1921, after the March Action. And he says, 'On the Italian Question I think you're wrong. But I'm mad at you because you walked out of the central committee simply because you lost a vote. How are we ever going to build a collective leadership if we can't even have political struggle within the leadership? So, by doing this 1) you undermined the "Open Letter," which was never fought for anyway in the party, and 2) you opened the road to the so-called leftists in the party.' The leftists now felt they had a free hand.
Indeed they had. A funny thing, how often today's ultraleftists are tomorrow's rightists. Levi was replaced as chairman by Heinrich Brandler, who would go from being a leader of the so-called lefts to a leader of the Right Opposition associated with Bukharin in Soviet Russia. He was a construction worker, a union official from the age of 16, and an early supporter of the Spartacists. He would be chairman of the party again in the crucial months of 1923 when the KPD blew a final decisive revolutionary opportunity.
In Berlin the so-called leftists were represented by the Fischer-Maslow-Reuter group. You may have already heard of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. Ernst Reuter would go on to a short tenure as General Secretary of the KPD before following the road blazed by Levi back into the SPD.
Comrades who have visited Berlin may recall that in the center of the West part there is a traffic circle bordered by the Technical University called Ernst Reuter Platz. This was not named after Reuter for his service or disservice to German communis'm. At the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 when Berlin was under four-power occupation, Reuter was elected "Lord Mayor" of Berlin. Notorious for his anti-communist views, Reuter was vetoed by the Soviets. The Lord Mayor returned the compliment, calling the country which freed Europe from fascism "a nation of slaves."
The German bourgeoisie has a long history of dealing with revolution—in Germany, in France, in Hungary and elsewhere. It has a lot of experience and it augmented its experience by recruiting a number of ex-leftists through the instrumentality of the Social Democracy.
The March Action
Back to Germany, early 1921. Who shows up in Germany but Bela Kun and Kim's sidekick, Jozsef Pogany, a.k.a. John Pepper, who in the United States steered the CP into the Farmer-Labor Party mess. These people messed up the 1919 Hungarian Revolution—they fused with the Social Democrats and refused to give land to the peasants. They made every mistake you could make, for which the working class, as always, paid. Based on this authority they were sent as Comintern agents to Germany. How this happened is not well documented and remains a mystery.
Bela Kun was big on the "Revolutionary Offensive." What is offensive about it we'll find out shortly. Backed by Kun and Pepper, suddenly Rote Fahne started raising a lot of abstract propaganda: "Overthrow the bourgeoisie! Down with the regime!"
Lenin's letters to the KPD after the Third Congress and Trotsky's remarks in "School of Revolutionary Strategy" underlined the German bour¬geoisie's method of operation. The rulers set up the German proletariat where they are most left-wing and provoke a premature, isolated uprising and chop off its head. Then they send the armed forces and Nazi gangs city to city, chop, chop, decapitating the party, its work facilitated by the KPD's federated structure. That's what we saw in 1919, first in Janu¬ary and later in March. That's what we saw in March of 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and what we see again in March of 1921. The architects of the bour¬geoisie's "March Action" were the very experienced social-democratic Prussian minister of police Carl Severing and Saxon President Otto Horsing.
In war-devastated Germany, working conditions were terrible. Miners, in order to survive, got to take a couple of bags of scrap coal home. That was stopped. No more free coal; buy it on the market like everybody else. Then the bosses claimed that the workers were stealing. That's always a big, explo¬sive issue. The workers are the thieves, not the capitalists?
After WWI, most workers kept their guns. They thought they might come in handy for another kind of war. During the Kapp Putsch in the previous
year, armed workers militias sprouted up through¬out Germariy. Although their arms were pathetic compared to the state arsenal, they could deter fas¬cist gangs and some paramilitary forces. Now the capitalist rulers declared they were going to disarm the workers and put an end to "unrest"—the code¬word for class struggle.
For this purpose they created a new paramilitary police force, the Schutzpolizei (Schupos) and organized it into groups of a hundred, or Hun-dertschaften. They were going to occupy the mines around Halle and search the homes of workers to suppress "stealing" and disarm the workers.
The Communist Party was also thinking of having a March offensive. Now, in Germany, everything revolves around holidays, like Easter. The country totally shuts down for the four-day Easter weekend. They wanted to have their general strike after Easter.
The bourgeoisie wouldn't cooperate. They started their offensive before Easter. Around the 16-17 of March they started moving Schupos into Halle. The workers were outraged and looked to the Communist Party for leadership. The Communist Party was not prepared, even though they'd been calling for a "general strike" and to "overthrow the bour¬geoisie" for two months. The secret police raided the CP headquarters in February and reported: 'we can't find the evidence that they're preparing anything!' They hadn't prepared a damn thing.
Still the CP calls for a general strike. And it does get a response. In many of these small mining communities the workers took over, formed armed guards and set up committees that were embryonic Soviets. You had dual power in this one little region. In the Leuna Werke solidarity demonstrations increased in size to some 18,000 before all hell broke loose.
The government purposely didn't send enough troops to do the job. As the Schupos approached the Leuna Werke, the workers responded by occu¬pying the plant and forming a workers militia and a commissary. So Red Leuna is born; followed by Red Merseburg, then Red Ammendorf.
Communists were subjected to savage persecution in all capitalist countries and had to take cer¬tain elementary measures of self-defense. Recall the Palmer Raids-mass deportation of foreign-born leftists and mass imprisonment of many more here. That edifice to bourgeois democracy, the Weimar Republic, was built over the broken and bullet-riddled bodies of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches and thousands of the finest fighters. The KPD also took to heart the attack of many Communists throughout the world that they had not adequately protected Karl and Rosa. The Comintern, in its statutes and the 21 Conditions for Membership, insisted that Communist Parties must conduct such defensive measures and must work even when they have been declared "illegal" by reactionary, witch-hunting laws or when work must be conducted "underground" due to persecution by the state or fascist bands.
For this work the KPD had set up military and counter-espionage organizations, the Militarrat and Nachrichtendienst. However, in the KPD this, like all work, was highly federated. Much was left to local initiative which sometimes got completely out of control. In the midst of all this, you've got the anarcho-syndicalist KAPD and a substantial current in the KPD that believes the philistine German working class isn't going to respond unless we give them a kick in the ass.
And the KAPD had some assistance from Max Hoelz, the Robin Hood of the German proletariat. Hoelz was a very interesting guy. He was a very high-grade technician in the repair and servicing of railroads. He formed a workers militia in the November Revolution. The revolution was sup¬pressed but his militia lived on. He would do bank jobs and distribute funds to the poor, in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's question: is it a greater crime to rob a bank or own one? Usually he'd pick targets that were often justly hated by the prole¬tariat, like courthouses. He is reputed to have derailed just plain personnel trains that had nothing to do with the movement of military goods. If so, we would have opposed this. All of this was based on the "Theory of the Offensive," that the working class cannot be motivated by consciousness of its own political interests and historical destiny; we need to ignite the working class with deeds of great daring. There was nothing new about this theory, it was not invented by Radek and Bela Kun. The Marxist movement had combated some anarcho-syndicalist tendencies since its birth in the 1840s.
The KPD with its own theory of the "Revolutionary Offensive" was not in too good a position to combat this—on the contrary. So the KPD sent Hugo Eberlein down to Halle to help out. He was the KPD representative at the founding Congress of the Comintern. A fine comrade, but he was a bit loony, and known among his comrades and fellow workers as "Hugo the Fuse," as he was behind some of the military activity of the KPD. His advice was, 'to really get workers moving here what we ought to do is take the two regional party sec¬retaries, who seemed like pretty good guys, kidnap them and say the police did it. If that doesn't work, then we'll blow up a couple of party headquarters and blame that on the police!'
I think those two regional party secretaries spiked Eberlein's inventive proposals. But the main problem was that the action in the March Action was restricted to Saxony and Halle. The KPD did try to extend the strike into other sections of Ger¬many. In Berlin they had almost no support and their appeal for a general strike resulted in fist-fights with workers in front of AEG and other big industrial plants. The KPD did write an appeal to social-democratic workers. It was called, "Either you're for us or against us." Paul Levi said this was a declaration of war on four-fifths of the working class. He was not wrong. It also had another charming quality. It called on them to hang their leaders from the lampposts. You might call this an early version of the united front from below. As comrade Robertson said, their hearts were in the right place. But as you can imagine, this didn't make much of an impact in extending the strike to the social-democratic workers.
Hamburg was even more tragic. On the docks you had a division among longshoremen very much like the United States. You had steady guys who were social-democratic and then you had the casuals who were Communists. The steady guys had the jobs—there was high unemployment at that point in Hamburg. So the CP organized the unemployed to seize the docks. There were big physical fights, but the CP mobilized enough forces so they were able to occupy the docks. There was no attempt to win over the SPD workers except by the threat: "join us or else."
The Hamburg KPD liked showy demonstrations so they marched off the docks and down to the nearby Fish Market while the police and the Social Democrats took back the docks. This was burned into the memory of the social-democratic work force. (In October 1923 when Thalmann tried to bring about the uprising not knowing it had been canceled—it had been voted down in Chem¬nitz again—many of the social-democratic workers joined the police as volunteers to suppress the KPD-led uprising.)
In other cities, where the CP had a base, there were short, one-day general strikes, such as Essen. But workers in the Ruhr and elsewhere were not aware of what was happening in Saxony. So there was no preparation and no apparatus to pull them into a struggle.
The KPD "Revolutionary Offensive" played right into the hands of the bourgeoisie, so that the general strike could be suppressed militarily. To take the Leuna Werke 1,200 Schupos backed up by the Reichswehr and artillery were used. They shot into the plant that made ammonia knowing that it could set off an explosion. They captured several hundred workers, locked them up in a silo and kept them there for two weeks. Two dozen Communist youth who sought to liberate these workers—very courageous individuals—were all murdered, massa¬cred. The number of dead is hard to estimate-there was a cover-up. The number of arrested is public record—6,000. Special courts were set up to deal with this. The Rote Hilfe, or Red Aid [the first Communist-affiliated defense league and an inspiration for the International Labor Defense], got its start providing legal defense and material support to the prisoners and their families, in many cases widows and families who had lost the breadwinner to this action. That was the March Action, which ended with the end of March.
Comrades asked me in Chicago, "What would have been a correct policy for Communists?" In fact in the "School of Revolutionary Strategy" Trotsky answers:
"The offensive was in reality launched by the Social-Democratic policeman Hoersing. This should have been utilized in order to unite all the workers for defense, for self-protection, even if, to begin with, a very modest resistance. Had the soil proved favorable, had the agitation met with a favorable response, it would then have been possible to pass over to the general strike. If the events continue to unfold further, if the masses rise, if the ties among the workers grow stronger, if their temper lifts, while indecision and demoralization seize the camp of the foe—then comes the time for issuing the slogan to pass over to the offensive."
-p. 21
As this essay shows, there was a discussion in the Comintern of what should have been done and how the Party should be prepared to avoid a similar situation. That was a crucial fight.
Levi, as you'll recall, had resigned as chairman of the party. And knowing that the March Action was about to happen—because Clara Zetkin made Bela go talk to him about it—he did the responsible thing...and went on vacation. He was in Vienna on his way to Italy where he seemed to enjoy spending time. Then the March Action started and he did come back. In the beginning of April he issued a brochure entitled "Our Way." It contained many just criticisms of the March Action. But it also claimed that the March Action was the greatest putsch in history, that the CP had acted like General Ludendorff in WWI, sending endless waves of youth into a bloodbath on the front lines. It was a critique that lacked any solidarity whatso¬ever with the party but offered much material to the prosecutors. It was used, as he must have known it would be, by those special courts that had been set upvto sit in judgment on the Communists and their supporters. For this he was expelled from the Communist Party and the expulsion was confirmed at the Comintern Congress.
It's clear in his 16 April letter to Clara Zetkin and Levi that Lenin didn't know even at that late date what had happened in Germany. But he quickly figures it out. He calls Bela Kun back from Germany. Lenin calls him in for a talk, which, according to Bela Kun's Hungarian biographer, resulted in Bela Kun, upon leaving Lenin's office, having a heart attack.
But the problem was not just Bela Kun. The KPD claimed the March Action was nothing less than a great victory. It was hailed by the "ultralefts" listed in "Left-Wing" Communism, by the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern, by the Vienna Bureau, and by the Young Communist League. Everyone was on the March Action bandwagon, including Zinoviev, who was head of the Com¬intern, Radek, who was—insofar as he was official anything—official Comintern representative in Germany, and Bukharin. Lenin and Trotsky realized that they were about to lose the Comintern, that they were a minority, at least among the leading elements, probably in the IEC and several Euro¬pean parties.
Part of this was an understandable reaction against Social Democracy. But part of it was what Lenin described as infantile leftism: playing with phrases as a surrogate for the more arduous but essential task of forging a communist vanguard that wins the allegiance of a majority of the working class. Many "leftists" who attacked the necessary conces¬sions to the peasantry for the survival of the Soviet workers state were the loudest champions of the "Revolutionary Offensive" and the March Action.
This fight had to take place simultaneously in the Russian delegation which had six members and was split evenly on the question of the March Action—between Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev on one side and Radek, Bukharin and Zinoviev on the other. That is the background to the Third Congress that is best described in the Prometheus Research Series bulletin on the Organizational Resolution passed at the Third Congress (Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work [New York, 1988]).
Third Congress: School of Revolutionary Stategy
The Congress is approaching: what is to be done? I encouraged comrades to read Lenin's "Letter to Zinoviev" on the "Thesis on Tactics" (CW, Vol. 42, pp. 319-323) because it shows how the fight would be waged before, during and after the Congress. Lenin decided that the cause of proletarian justice as well as Marxist clarity would best be served by having one of the principal malefactors, Radek, incorporate the lessons of the March Action defeat into his report "On Tactics" which would inform and guide all of the sections of the CI. Radek did a draft. As the delegates arrived Radek showed the draft to his buddies from Germany: Thalheimer, Brandler and Maslow. They suggested changes: 'You see, where it says "conquest of the majority of the working class," why don't you take that out and put in "important sections of the working class," or "decisive sections of the working class."' Just tone down the main thing that was supposed to be emphasized at this Congress! And if that wasn't enough, they got together with a recovered Bela Kun to draw up their own amendments.
On 1 June they ship this all to Lenin in an envelope. He opens it, reads the contents and furiously makes notes on the envelope, which are in the Russian edition, but alas, not the English. These notes are then developed in the letter to Zinoviev which opens: "The crux of the matter is that Levi in very many respects is right politically. Unfortunately, he is guilty of a number of breaches of discipline for which the Party has expelled him" ("Letter to Zinoviev," p. 319). Lenin is categorical that the "Open Letter" tactic was correct and important:
"...[W]averings in regard to The 'Open Letter' are extremely harmful, shameful, and extremely widespread. We may as well admit this. All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress."
-ibid., p. 321
To show how carefully crafted this congress was, it begins with an appeal to the German proletariat on behalf of Max Hoelz, who had just been captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. While fully incorporating the Marxist critique of individual terror, the resolution passed by the Con¬gress declares: "But his actions emanated from his love of the proletariat and his hatred of the bourgeoisie," and "instructs the German proletariat to defend him." It was as if you say, 'OK young hot¬heads and ultralefts, we will pound you politically, but we applaud your elan and seek only to give it Marxist direction and purpose.'
For the "rightists" you might say, there was also a celebration of Clara Zetkin's 65th birthday. Naturally a KPD "leftist," Fritz Heckert, gave a wonderful valedictory speech for Clara. The guy that did the presentation on the organizational resolution was another KPD left-winger, Koenen.
If some of this seems mildly perverse, Lenin was trying to make a point here. He was struggling for genuine homogeneity, not by hiding the issues but by fighting them out among comrades. He felt that 'we have gotten rid of the people—or they have gotten rid of themselves—that we don't want in this Communist International. Now we've got to fight to forge cadre.' The lesson you get, how this Congress was orchestrated, is a lesson in party building.
If the "Theses on Tactics" read a little vacuous in parts, it's not accidental. At the last minute Lenin couldn't get Radek to do all that many changes. There are passages that read like: 'When there's a defeat, it's necessary to retreat.' Except, that was bold language for some in this Congress. But, there is one section that runs from page 285 to 286 (Theses, Res¬olutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International [Ink Links, London, 1980]) which is a description of the role of transitional demands that motivates Trotsky's Transitional Pro¬gram. It is a very powerful statement.
Trotsky's "School of Revolutionary Strategy" is his summary and analysis of the key debates of the Third Congress. They are relevant to fights that we've had in our own party around the general strike in Italy and Germany. When I was in the SpAD we were advocating an adventurist policy on paper. We didn't do much except put out propa¬ganda filled with phrases about "general strikes" and "mass strikes" in precisely the region where the March Action took place—the mining, industrial region that includes Bischofferode, Wolfen (which had also developed a big chemical industry), the Halle Leuna Werke.
The problem is that by 1990-91, when we started to make this general strike agitation, these plants were finished. The bourgeoisie had decided to close them down. In the case of Bischofferode the workers were only fighting over who would get the last paycheck to turn off the lights. The empty propaganda we put out at that time was counter-posed to explaining to the workers what was hap¬pening and what had happened to them because of capitalist counterrevolution.
In "School of Revolutionary Strategy," Trotsky has a devastating indictment of the Italian SP. He said: 'Yes, you called for the revolution. You called for mass strikes. You called for all these good things and you prepared nothing. You set these people up and led to a disaster.' In his criticism of the Comintern's draft program for the Sixth Congress Trotsky writes:
"The slogan of the Third Congress did not simply read 'To the masses]' but: 'To power through a previous conquest of the massesl' After the fac¬tion fight led by Lenin (which he characterized demonstratively as the 'Right' wing)...Lenin arranged a private conference toward the end of the Congress in which he warned prophetically: 'Remember, it is only a question of getting a good running start for the revolutionary leap. The struggle for the masses is the struggle for power.'"
—The Third International After Lenin, pp. 90-91
These documents for us are living documents. When you read the Third Congress "Resolution on Communist Work among Women" you should know that there was a fight in the SL about this question when we had the opportunity to recruit from radical, feminist collectives in the early '70s. These documents became for us a living reference point and are reprinted in the early issues of Women and Revolution. The same thing with the document on the youth question. The communist youth theses lay out very clearly the motivating principles that became fighting issues in the very birth, first of the Revolutionary Tendency and then, after another kind of faction fight over our orientation to SDS, the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus.
Because we claim the tradition of the October Revolution as ours, it is our obligation to examine critically our work and perspectives by the standards set at the first four congresses of the Comintern. I really appreciate the way Trotsky concluded Lessons of October. That is: revolutionary tradition is not a museum display, it's not an internet search engine. He writes:
"The party should and must know the whole of the past, so as to be able to estimate it correctly and assign each event to its proper place. The tradition of a revolutionary party is not built on evasions, but on critical clarity."
Summary following discussion
I have not included the summmary portion because it relates to questions asked in the discussion period and is thus rather helter-skelter. Markin
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
The Third Congress (1921):
Elaboration of Communist Tactics and Organization
by Reuben Samuels New York, 5 September 1998
The Second Congress of the Communist International [17 July-7 August 1920] that Steve dealt with took place at what in hindsight turned out to be the peak of a revolutionary wave that followed World War I and was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolu¬tion. As you will recall, a great map was hung at the Congress charting the progress of the Red Army and its march on Warsaw. But the Red Army was unable to take Warsaw.
The massive scope of the postwar class war reached the point of revolutionary crisis in countries like Hungary, Germany and Italy. It contributed decisively to the Red Army victory over the White Guard forces and their imperialist allies. The imperialists were unable to crush the Soviet workers state, but despite heroic battles, without a tempered and authoritative revolutionary party, the combative working classes of Hungary, Germany and Italy were unable to overthrow their own bourgeoisies.
As Lenin stated at the Third Congress in the summer of 1921:
"The result is a state of equilibrium which, although highly unstable and precarious enables the Socialist republic to exist—not for long—of course, within the capitalist encirclement."
—"Theses for a Report on Tactics of the R.C.P.", Collected Works (CW), Vol. 32, p. 454, First Eng¬lish Edition (Progress Publishers, 1965)
The defeats of this period demonstrated both the immaturity of the newly formed communist parties and the ability of the Social Democracy—despite its role in WWI mobilizing the proletariat for the imperialist slaughter, and despite its vanguard role in the imperialist expeditions against the Soviet Union—to maintain its base among the organized working class in the advanced industrial countries. So we had in the period leading up to the Third Congress a mighty coal miners strike in Britain that was betrayed by the Labour Party and the trade-union bureaucracy. A very similar development took place in the fall of 1920 in Italy, which was the mightiest upsurge of the working people in all of Europe in that period, which was also betrayed by Social Democracy. Then there was the defeat of the German proletariat in Saxony, March 1921, crushed by social-democratic governments. In each case, the defeat was a confirmation of what Trotsky wrote in the Lessons of October (1924): "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, with a substitute for the party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer" (The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1923-25, p. 252).
At the Third Congress, Trotsky, in concluding the opening report that he gave on the economic situation and the prospects for proletarian revolution, stated:
"Now for the first time we see and feel that we are not so immediately near to the goal, to the conquest of power, to the world revolution. At that time, in 1919, we said to ourselves: 'It is a question of months.' Now we say: 'It is perhaps a question of years'."
—quoted in E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, Vol. 3, p. 385 (Macmillan, 1953)
The Third Congress was devoted to using this period of precarious equilibrium to prepare the communist parties that were often communist parties only in name and stated goals, but not in their activity and organization.
In summing up the work of the Third Congress, Trotsky made what I think is an important point about historical materialism, about the crises of the bourgeoisies such as developed directly out of WWI. This point was important to counteract crisis-mongers like the Healyites in the '60s—or for that matter the Stalinists in the Third Period—who claimed that there were crises so severe that their own dynamic alone would bring down the bour¬geoisie. The bourgeoisie would create a form of social suicide. And Trotsky responded to this in light of his report to the Third Congress where he had emphasized the temporary stability of capitalism: "History has provided the basic premise for the success of this [proletarian] revolution—in the sense that society cannot any longer develop its productive forces on bourgeois foundations. But history does not at all assume upon itself— in place of the working class, in place of the politicians of the working class, in place of the Communists—the solutions of this entire task. No, History seems to say to the proletarian van¬guard...History says to the working class, 'You must know that unless you cast down the bour¬geoisie, you will perish beneath the ruins of civ¬ilization. Try, solve this task!'"
—"School of Revolutionary Strategy," The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2, p. 6 (Monad Press, 1972)
So it was clear to the Bolsheviks—at least it was clear to Lenin and Trotsky going into the Third Congress—that it was no longer sufficient to lay out the broad outlines in principles of the Bolshevik Revolution. Equally important was transmitting the strategy of revolutionary struggle for the conquest of power. The two decades of experience of building the Bolshevik Party, the instrument for the proletarian revolution, had to be made available to these fledgling communist parties that had gathered around the Comintern. This experience had to be made accessible to them and had to be applied by them to the specific circumstances in their own countries.
The debates that took place at this Congress, the debates over tactics, party building, the relationship to the trade unions, communist work among women and youth, could not have taken place without the programmatic ground-breaking work of the First and Second Congresses: the "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World," the "Theses on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the "21 Conditions for Admission to the CI." These documents sought to draw the hard programmatic line against the centrists and opportunists who sought to destroy the new revolutionary international from within with their own brand of anti-revolutionary entrism. This was the framework in which this discussion could take place. It was not going to be a discussion with the centrists who would not split with the reformists.
Now this doesn't mean there was a cleavage between these Congresses. Lenin and Trotsky realized from the very beginning the necessity to impart their organizational and tactical experience to these revolutionaries who had been won to the October Revolution, but not yet won to Bolshevism. Lenin wrote the manual on tactics, "Left-Wing" Communism-An Infantile Disorder, so that it was in the hands of all the delegates to the Second Congress of the CI. But it was still necessary at this Congress to devote significant time to the struggle against the centrists and opportunists who were seeking to "get on the bandwagon" of the then extremely authoritative and popular October Revolution and its new International, offering a clean banner on which they could wipe their blood-besmirched hands.
To give you an example of the problems that the Comintern and the Bolsheviks faced, take the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Like the German party, in Czechoslovakia, the Comintern won a substantial section of the old Social Democracy and a party with hundreds of thousands of members. Now, the tradition of this party, very much like the French and German, was very reformist, very much in the tradition of Noske and the French Social Democ¬racy. As late as 1919, a social-democratic coalition government sent Czech troops in to crush the Hun¬garian Soviet. However, this actually had a radicalizing influence on the base of the Social Democracy.
A substantial left wing took over the party headquarters and newspapers. The social-democratic leadership responded by calling in the troops. This resulted in a political general strike of one million workers in December 1920, just before the Third Congress of the Comintern. The most militant sec¬tions of this working class, however, were organized into separate national parties. Czechoslovakia was put together from the remnants of the Habsburg Empire, and the Slovaks and Sudeten Germans each had their own parties with substantial minori¬ties of Jews, Gypsies, Hungarians—you name it, they had it. The parties were divided along national lines. And the strongest, the Bohemian-Moravian party, was also the most reformist and the last to declare its agreement with the Comintern and the 21 Conditions.
This was an anomalous situation: a country with two parties that said: 'We're ready, take us in!' And hanging back was a third party that says: 'We're almost ready! We agree with the 21 Condi¬tions. We agree with getting together and having a united party.' Finally they held what many thought would be their unification congress in the middle of May, just one month before the Third Comintern Congress. But instead of unifying, the congress set up a "Committee of Action" for this purpose. It was really a delaying tactic to prevent the consolidation of a united communist party in Czechoslovakia. Going into the Comintern Congress, maybe there was a party, maybe there were three parties, but, then again, maybe no party. So, when you read reports and exchanges at the Congress, very angry about the leadership of the Czech Communist Party, you can understand why.
And this was not atypical. So much of the discredited Social Democracy was drawn in the wake of the authority and enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution that the sorting-out process was not easy.
NEP: A Necessary Retreat
Now, within the Soviet Union itself, the Soviet workers had successfully defended themselves from domestic counterrevolution backed by the intervention of 17 imperialist armies. The dictatorship of the proletariat was triumphant, but the prole¬tariat was shattered as a class. It was at the expense of the physical existence of the working class that this victory was won.
In 1921, famine swept Russia. Even cannibalism reappeared. The proletariat, already a small minority of three million at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, was reduced by half. And very often this proletariat was subsidized, supported by the state simply to maintain intact remnants of the class, the basis for the dictatorship. This is graphically described in Deutscher's, The Prophet Unarmed:
"...[B]y the end of the civil war, Russia's national income amounted to only one-third of her income in 1913...industry produced less than one-fifth of the goods produced before the war...the coal-mines turned out less than one-tenth and the iron foundries only one-fortieth of their normal output...the railways were destroyed." —p. 4
All the stocks, reserves and the exchange of goods and services on which the economy depended for its work were utterly destroyed. Russian cities and towns became so depopulated after 1921 that Moscow had only one-half and Petrograd one-third of their former inhabitants. And the people of the two capitals had for many months lived on a food ration of two ounces of bread and a few frozen potatoes.
What was the situation in the military? There were five million soldiers in 1920. There was a policy of demobilization, but how? What to do with five million armed men and women? There were no trains to transport the demobilized troops home. There was no fuel for them in the barracks. Many of these troops demobilized themselves and became bandit partisans. They would simply roam the countryside and the cities and try to forage food and a little bit of clothing to stay alive. This became such a significant problem that the Cheka, which is often mis-translated as secret police but was actually the Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution, Sabotage and Speculation, formed a special section to combat banditism.
Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, worked in what was called the Department of Enlightenment and a lot of her "enlightenment" had to do with teenage bands that had no other way to survive than to act like gangs. They went out and foraged and stole what they could, by any means they could, to stay alive! At the time of the 1921 June-July Third Congress of the Comintern, bandit partisan warfare is still going on throughout the Soviet Union. I just mention one district, Temblov. In Temblov the old Socialist Revolutionaries had gotten together an armed band of 21,000, and this was just in one district. This was happening while the Third Congress was going on. If you read The Trotsky Papers (1917-1922), volume 2, put out by the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam you'll see more paper is devoted to Temblov than is devoted to the Third Congress.
This problem was increasingly taking the form of a civil war of the countryside against the cities. How to deal with it? As Lenin said: 'the easy part was expropriating the bourgeoisie. Difficult was defeating the imperialist-backed counterrevolution. But we did that too. Now we've hit the real bedrock of capitalism: the petty proprietors, the peasants. Without their food the cities cannot be rebuilt. There cannot be any kind of reconstruction under this devastation of civil war.'
It was necessary to make what was openly called a retreat: introducing a tax in kind for the peas¬antry. This is what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). The tax in kind meant instead of having all their grain and foodstuffs taken by the state, they had to pay a certain amount in the form of taxes. Then they could market the rest. That is the restoration—within the context of state owner¬ship of land—of market trade. Likewise, there was encouragement—not with a lot of success—of foreign concessions and foreign investment in Soviet industry.
Now, this policy was attacked by various oppo¬sitions within the Bolshevik Party. And Lenin's speeches and the reports to the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party deal with these positions in trying to hammer out a policy to deal with the catastrophic economic and social collapse. Under these conditions, the Kronstadt sailors revolt. This was a different generation from the Kronstadt sailors who formed the Red Guard and a cornerstone of the Red Army. Another generation had gone into the military, very closely tied to the countryside, which represented the peasant unrest there.
It was fundamentally a counterrevolutionary uprising. The main demand was: "Soviets without Bolsheviks!" This was also one of the main demands of the Workers Opposition. In a situation where the proletariat itself was shattered as a class, its only cohesive identity as an instrument of pro¬letarian class-consciousness was the party, which itself, of course, was devastated. In the middle of this Congress it was necessary to take every delegate with military training and send them to Kron¬stadt to put down the uprising. That's what you call a working congress.
The reaction of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) right wing, Dittmann and Crispien, was to say, 'You see, we're for the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in dark, backward Slavic Russia, to take power, to take responsibility for rebuilding from the devastation of the imperialist war, that is the source of all these problems. So, you see, yes we're for the dictatorship of the proletariat, but not where it exists, not where it is struggling to survive.'
These policies were also attacked by the ultra-lefts in Germany and Holland. They were also attacked by the Italian Socialist leader Serrati— remember him from the Second Congress? He's the guy that kept interrupting John Reed's report on the black question. 'Let's get on to the real proletariat.' I guess he didn't know what was happening to America.
So, NEP and economic reconstruction was one of the important, fighting issues of the Third Congress of the Comintern. This was a retreat and it was necessary to lay this out before the Tenth Party Congress, but also before the highest tribunal of the Communist movement, the CI, at the Third Congress. Lenin treated the Comintern as an international soviet that would render the final judgment on the policies not only for Germany, not only for Italy, but also for the Soviet Union. He of course fought so that the policies he thought should win would win.
Lenin was orchestrating just about everything that happened at the Congress insofar as it was possible, as he was a sick man by this time. But his principal report was on the tactics of the Russian Communist Party. He tied these questions together with the policies that were necessary in Western Europe, especially in the advanced industrial coun¬tries, but not only there.
If you read Carr and Deutscher—especially Carr is very strong on this point—they basically see the Third Congress as a whole chapter called the "Congress of Retreat." Carr's point is that with the defeat of the march on Warsaw, with the defeats in Hungary and Italy, the Soviet Union was forced to be "reasonable" and "statesmanlike," forced to adopt Realpolitih, the politics of national interest, to which the policies of the Comintern would be sub¬ordinate. If you want trade and investment from the capitalists of other countries you have to tone down overthrowing them, don't you? Which is exactly what Serrati charged about the NEP.
But the reality was that the Bolshevik Revolution was made for the world revolution, and its survival depended on world revolution. With its delay the Bolsheviks were compelled on the one hand to take certain measures to buy time within the Soviet Union, and at the same time to struggle for the preparation of these new parties of the Comintern so that they could fulfill their task.
Split at Halle Wins Mass Base for KPD
So what's happening in Germany? The USPD, which had considerable authority—it claimed at least on paper 700,000 to 800,000 members-had a congress in Halle in October 1920 to decide on affiliation to the Comintern on the basis of the 21 Conditions that had been adopted at the Second Congress. The USPD split, a majority going with the KPD and Comintern, a minority retaining the "Independent" label for another year while fading back into the SPD. The Communist Party brought 40,000 members to this unification, the USPD left wing brought about 300,000 to 400,000. So the number of Communists after the fusion increased tenfold.
It was not accidental that this congress was held in Halle. Halle was a left-wing stronghold of the workers movement in Germany. It was the center of a region, the province of Saxony, which contained a strong component of radical miners. Like American miners, they lived in relatively backward, isolated communities. Nevertheless, radicalized by their experiences in the blood-soaked trenches of WWI, they very often came back left-wing Social Democrats, members of the USPD.
Also, the war had accelerated the development of a petrochemical industry in Halle-Merseberg. In 1895 there were a thousand workers. By the end of WWI there were 35,000 workers, 23,000 of whom worked in the Leuna Werke [plant] near Halle. It was the biggest industrial plant then in Germany. It was a real stronghold of the USPD that claimed a membership in this one district of 80,000. Not only did the Communist Party and the USPD have a sub¬stantial base there, but so did the ultraleft syndicalists of the KAPD.
This was reflected in the class struggle in this region as well. Now, you might have read in your history books that in the Weimar Republic, with that wonderful, democratic constitution, workers got the eight-hour day. But it was a six-day or 48-hour workweek, so don't get so excited. And it was not implemented anywhere but in some sections of the civil service and in this region. Everywhere else people were working 54 hours a week. That was the norm. Wages were higher in this region. People got a third more vacation. And if I told you how little vacation you got you'd think you must be in America! Nev¬ertheless they got a third more in this region and this represented some sharp class struggle.
I'll just give you one example. In January the mine bosses decided, 'We're gonna bring in a special police to be guards in the mines.' And workers just walked out and said, 'We're gonna hire our own guards, they're gonna be war veterans and workers who've been injured working in the mines, and they're gonna be beholden to us and not the mine chiefs.' And they won.
This was a militant section of the working class with a huge industrial base that had, just like in Rus¬sia, grown up in a period of less than 15 or 20 years. It had won substantial gains and was strongly Communist.
On 20 February 1921, there were elections to the Prussian parliament (called the Landtag). In these elections to the Prussian state parliament the SPD got 70,000 votes. What was left of the USPD got 75,000 and the Communist Party got 197,000 votes. That is one-third more than the combined votes of the SPD and USPD.
This didn't go unnoticed to the rest of the ruling class in Germany and is the background to the 1921 March Action, that took place mainly in this region.
This was a red sore in the eyes of the German bourgeoisie at a time when they had to pay substantial reparations to the victors of WWI, especially France and Britain. In fact one of the demands raised by the Communists was, "Make the bourgeoisie pay for Versailles!" Lenin's attitude was, 'We don't care about Versailles, we've got other things on the agenda. If we took power in Germany, we might also be compelled to pay reparations. But the main thing is to get the power.' He drew a very hard line in this regard against the kind of nationalist propaganda that came out in this period, including from the Communist Party. This problem worsens and will be dealt with in greater detail in the next class.
Back to 1921: What's going on in the KPD? After the fusion they had two chairmen: one from the old USPD left wing, Ernst Daumig, and the other who was the chairman of the Communist Party after Luxemburg, Liebknecht and Jogiches were murdered, Paul Levi. Paul Levi was an attorney who had defended Luxemburg and Liebknecht before the Kaiser's court. He joined the Spartacists and the left wing of the Zimmerwald Movement during WWI. He was known to Lenin, so he had some authority, but he also had some other less sterling qualities which we'll get to in a moment.
Radek was the Comintern rep in Germany, or seemed to be. They have a phrase in German—"the man for all things." So he was the all-purpose representative for this and that. Imprisoned by the Social Democrats, he met in jail with one of Ger¬many's foremost industrialists, Walter Rathenau, to discuss trade relations with Russia. Rathenau organized Germany's industrial supply line for WWI. He also happened to be Jewish. (Rathenau paid with his life for his trade and military negotiations with the Soviet Union, gunned down the following year by two fascist army officers.)
"Open Letter": Precursor to the United Front
One of the more intelligent things Levi and Radek came up with was the "Open Letter," which was drafted and printed in the beginning of January 1921, right after the fusion of the KPD and the USPD left wing. It was short, punchy and to the point. It consisted of a bunch of what we would call economic and transitional demands: for example, higher wages; the unemployed should be paid at the standard wage rate of the industry from which they have been laid off; pensions for the old people; distribution of cheap food; workers control, etc. Germany went through all these wars and the castles still stand, right? Throw out the princes, bring in the homeless.
The "Open Letter" was an appeal to all the workers' organizations—from the SPD and the big trade-union federation to the KAPD (a left split from the KPD) and its little union organization called the "one big union." This document was published in the KPD newspaper Rote Fahne [Red Flag] in January 1921. It anticipated the "Theses on Tactics" that would be discussed at the Third CI Congress and the united-front tactic that was elaborated at the Fourth. And it anticipated the Transitional Program upon which the Fourth International was founded.
I've always believed this document had no impact except with people like Lenin and Trotsky. Wrong. The Social Democrats did not go rushing to endorse this document and to sign up to throw the princes out of the palaces and to seize the shutdown factories. But a big congress of metalworkers held in Berlin at the end of January unanimously adopted the demands of this document. No social-democratic representative from the union movement could vote against it, at most they could abstain, because the document was too powerful. There were meetings of what was called the trade-union Kartell or federation for Greater Berlin. The same thing happened, it was unanimously adopted. It was extremely popular.
It turns out the place where it had no impact was in the KPD, because the tactic was never fought out. Levi had a bright idea. He got together with Radek, they wrote it up—after all he's the Chairman, right—so it appears in their newspaper Rote Fahne, bang, that's it! Are we going to implement it? How are we going to implement it? Were there any dis¬cussions to that effect? No.
Livorno: "Unity" That Strangled Italian Revolution
Now the next thing that shapes the history of the German party doesn't happen in Germany, it happens in Italy. And we get back to our old friend, Serrati. The Italian Socialist Party called a congress in Livorno in January 1921. This is after this party, through its reformist right wing and the trade-union bureaucrats, had sabotaged this great indus¬trial and agrarian workers uprising. Because it didn't lead to workers revolution, they had in effect opened the road to the fascists. So now they're going to have a congress and decide what they're going to do about the Comintern and those 21 Conditions.
And everybody's there from Turati and Serrati to Bordiga—they're all there. What the Comintern wanted was for Serrati to break with the reformists. He refused. The Comintern sent two representatives—the Hungarian, Rakosi, and a Bulgarian, Kabakchiev. It was very hard to get people into Italy at this point. They traveled there under extreme difficulties. Comintern agents did not get the red carpet treatment from border guards.
Zinoviev, who opens the Third Congress with one of his usual pithy four-hour reports on the work of the ECCI, describes what happens to these guys when they get to Livorno. They walk into the Congress and are greeted with delegates yelling, "Long live the Pope!" This is in Italy! You thought the Pope lived in Rome? No, the Vatican is in Moscow. If you didn't know, you found out at this congress. Zinoviev even claims somebody released a bird at this point, a dove, into the congress. The Comintern reps come this great distance at great peril to be heckled and mistreated. This is internationalism?
Paul Levi got better treatment. He went down there in part at the initiative of Clara Zetkin. He pursued an entirely different policy, a policy counterposed to the Comintern. He argued, 'Well, if you've got a party that is outside the Comintern like the USPD, then it's okay to split it. But if you have a party that's already in the Comintern, like the Italian Socialist Party (the whole party had formally joined the Comintern), then how can you splinter them? It's like cutting off a part of the body, say the arm, to have such a split.'
And we're talking about 1921, that is several months after these same people that are sitting in the same hall had sabotaged the general strikes, the plant occupations, the occupation of land by agrarian workers, so magnificent and so betrayed. The bourgeoisie got scared enough that they then backed the fascists: 'We can't just rely on Serrati and Turati to keep this working class under control. Time to go for the surgical operation and apply the knife.'
Levi goes back to Berlin really proud of himself and makes a report to the Central Committee or Zentralausschuss—hls report is counterposed to the
policy of the Comintern. Everybody knows that. His report is put up for a vote. He loses, narrowly. At this point, Levi, who is the chairman of the Party, Clara Zetkin, Daumig, who is co-chairman, and two other members of the Zentmlausschuss resign, like it's a parliamentary vote of no confidence: 'You didn't vote for me, so I'm not going to be on your Zentralausschuss anymore. I'm taking a powder.' So they leave. However, they don't resign their actual seats in parliament. These they keep.
Now you had a party that was very much divided between the so-called left wing and a right wing of which Levi, and Zetkin, to a certain extent, were representative. They wanted to do things like the "Open Letter." They also wanted to do things like support Serrati at Livorno. But these issues were never fought out.
Lenin writes a personal letter to Levi and Zetkin in April 1921, after the March Action. And he says, 'On the Italian Question I think you're wrong. But I'm mad at you because you walked out of the central committee simply because you lost a vote. How are we ever going to build a collective leadership if we can't even have political struggle within the leadership? So, by doing this 1) you undermined the "Open Letter," which was never fought for anyway in the party, and 2) you opened the road to the so-called leftists in the party.' The leftists now felt they had a free hand.
Indeed they had. A funny thing, how often today's ultraleftists are tomorrow's rightists. Levi was replaced as chairman by Heinrich Brandler, who would go from being a leader of the so-called lefts to a leader of the Right Opposition associated with Bukharin in Soviet Russia. He was a construction worker, a union official from the age of 16, and an early supporter of the Spartacists. He would be chairman of the party again in the crucial months of 1923 when the KPD blew a final decisive revolutionary opportunity.
In Berlin the so-called leftists were represented by the Fischer-Maslow-Reuter group. You may have already heard of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. Ernst Reuter would go on to a short tenure as General Secretary of the KPD before following the road blazed by Levi back into the SPD.
Comrades who have visited Berlin may recall that in the center of the West part there is a traffic circle bordered by the Technical University called Ernst Reuter Platz. This was not named after Reuter for his service or disservice to German communis'm. At the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 when Berlin was under four-power occupation, Reuter was elected "Lord Mayor" of Berlin. Notorious for his anti-communist views, Reuter was vetoed by the Soviets. The Lord Mayor returned the compliment, calling the country which freed Europe from fascism "a nation of slaves."
The German bourgeoisie has a long history of dealing with revolution—in Germany, in France, in Hungary and elsewhere. It has a lot of experience and it augmented its experience by recruiting a number of ex-leftists through the instrumentality of the Social Democracy.
The March Action
Back to Germany, early 1921. Who shows up in Germany but Bela Kun and Kim's sidekick, Jozsef Pogany, a.k.a. John Pepper, who in the United States steered the CP into the Farmer-Labor Party mess. These people messed up the 1919 Hungarian Revolution—they fused with the Social Democrats and refused to give land to the peasants. They made every mistake you could make, for which the working class, as always, paid. Based on this authority they were sent as Comintern agents to Germany. How this happened is not well documented and remains a mystery.
Bela Kun was big on the "Revolutionary Offensive." What is offensive about it we'll find out shortly. Backed by Kun and Pepper, suddenly Rote Fahne started raising a lot of abstract propaganda: "Overthrow the bourgeoisie! Down with the regime!"
Lenin's letters to the KPD after the Third Congress and Trotsky's remarks in "School of Revolutionary Strategy" underlined the German bour¬geoisie's method of operation. The rulers set up the German proletariat where they are most left-wing and provoke a premature, isolated uprising and chop off its head. Then they send the armed forces and Nazi gangs city to city, chop, chop, decapitating the party, its work facilitated by the KPD's federated structure. That's what we saw in 1919, first in Janu¬ary and later in March. That's what we saw in March of 1920 following the Kapp Putsch and what we see again in March of 1921. The architects of the bour¬geoisie's "March Action" were the very experienced social-democratic Prussian minister of police Carl Severing and Saxon President Otto Horsing.
In war-devastated Germany, working conditions were terrible. Miners, in order to survive, got to take a couple of bags of scrap coal home. That was stopped. No more free coal; buy it on the market like everybody else. Then the bosses claimed that the workers were stealing. That's always a big, explo¬sive issue. The workers are the thieves, not the capitalists?
After WWI, most workers kept their guns. They thought they might come in handy for another kind of war. During the Kapp Putsch in the previous
year, armed workers militias sprouted up through¬out Germariy. Although their arms were pathetic compared to the state arsenal, they could deter fas¬cist gangs and some paramilitary forces. Now the capitalist rulers declared they were going to disarm the workers and put an end to "unrest"—the code¬word for class struggle.
For this purpose they created a new paramilitary police force, the Schutzpolizei (Schupos) and organized it into groups of a hundred, or Hun-dertschaften. They were going to occupy the mines around Halle and search the homes of workers to suppress "stealing" and disarm the workers.
The Communist Party was also thinking of having a March offensive. Now, in Germany, everything revolves around holidays, like Easter. The country totally shuts down for the four-day Easter weekend. They wanted to have their general strike after Easter.
The bourgeoisie wouldn't cooperate. They started their offensive before Easter. Around the 16-17 of March they started moving Schupos into Halle. The workers were outraged and looked to the Communist Party for leadership. The Communist Party was not prepared, even though they'd been calling for a "general strike" and to "overthrow the bour¬geoisie" for two months. The secret police raided the CP headquarters in February and reported: 'we can't find the evidence that they're preparing anything!' They hadn't prepared a damn thing.
Still the CP calls for a general strike. And it does get a response. In many of these small mining communities the workers took over, formed armed guards and set up committees that were embryonic Soviets. You had dual power in this one little region. In the Leuna Werke solidarity demonstrations increased in size to some 18,000 before all hell broke loose.
The government purposely didn't send enough troops to do the job. As the Schupos approached the Leuna Werke, the workers responded by occu¬pying the plant and forming a workers militia and a commissary. So Red Leuna is born; followed by Red Merseburg, then Red Ammendorf.
Communists were subjected to savage persecution in all capitalist countries and had to take cer¬tain elementary measures of self-defense. Recall the Palmer Raids-mass deportation of foreign-born leftists and mass imprisonment of many more here. That edifice to bourgeois democracy, the Weimar Republic, was built over the broken and bullet-riddled bodies of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches and thousands of the finest fighters. The KPD also took to heart the attack of many Communists throughout the world that they had not adequately protected Karl and Rosa. The Comintern, in its statutes and the 21 Conditions for Membership, insisted that Communist Parties must conduct such defensive measures and must work even when they have been declared "illegal" by reactionary, witch-hunting laws or when work must be conducted "underground" due to persecution by the state or fascist bands.
For this work the KPD had set up military and counter-espionage organizations, the Militarrat and Nachrichtendienst. However, in the KPD this, like all work, was highly federated. Much was left to local initiative which sometimes got completely out of control. In the midst of all this, you've got the anarcho-syndicalist KAPD and a substantial current in the KPD that believes the philistine German working class isn't going to respond unless we give them a kick in the ass.
And the KAPD had some assistance from Max Hoelz, the Robin Hood of the German proletariat. Hoelz was a very interesting guy. He was a very high-grade technician in the repair and servicing of railroads. He formed a workers militia in the November Revolution. The revolution was sup¬pressed but his militia lived on. He would do bank jobs and distribute funds to the poor, in the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's question: is it a greater crime to rob a bank or own one? Usually he'd pick targets that were often justly hated by the prole¬tariat, like courthouses. He is reputed to have derailed just plain personnel trains that had nothing to do with the movement of military goods. If so, we would have opposed this. All of this was based on the "Theory of the Offensive," that the working class cannot be motivated by consciousness of its own political interests and historical destiny; we need to ignite the working class with deeds of great daring. There was nothing new about this theory, it was not invented by Radek and Bela Kun. The Marxist movement had combated some anarcho-syndicalist tendencies since its birth in the 1840s.
The KPD with its own theory of the "Revolutionary Offensive" was not in too good a position to combat this—on the contrary. So the KPD sent Hugo Eberlein down to Halle to help out. He was the KPD representative at the founding Congress of the Comintern. A fine comrade, but he was a bit loony, and known among his comrades and fellow workers as "Hugo the Fuse," as he was behind some of the military activity of the KPD. His advice was, 'to really get workers moving here what we ought to do is take the two regional party sec¬retaries, who seemed like pretty good guys, kidnap them and say the police did it. If that doesn't work, then we'll blow up a couple of party headquarters and blame that on the police!'
I think those two regional party secretaries spiked Eberlein's inventive proposals. But the main problem was that the action in the March Action was restricted to Saxony and Halle. The KPD did try to extend the strike into other sections of Ger¬many. In Berlin they had almost no support and their appeal for a general strike resulted in fist-fights with workers in front of AEG and other big industrial plants. The KPD did write an appeal to social-democratic workers. It was called, "Either you're for us or against us." Paul Levi said this was a declaration of war on four-fifths of the working class. He was not wrong. It also had another charming quality. It called on them to hang their leaders from the lampposts. You might call this an early version of the united front from below. As comrade Robertson said, their hearts were in the right place. But as you can imagine, this didn't make much of an impact in extending the strike to the social-democratic workers.
Hamburg was even more tragic. On the docks you had a division among longshoremen very much like the United States. You had steady guys who were social-democratic and then you had the casuals who were Communists. The steady guys had the jobs—there was high unemployment at that point in Hamburg. So the CP organized the unemployed to seize the docks. There were big physical fights, but the CP mobilized enough forces so they were able to occupy the docks. There was no attempt to win over the SPD workers except by the threat: "join us or else."
The Hamburg KPD liked showy demonstrations so they marched off the docks and down to the nearby Fish Market while the police and the Social Democrats took back the docks. This was burned into the memory of the social-democratic work force. (In October 1923 when Thalmann tried to bring about the uprising not knowing it had been canceled—it had been voted down in Chem¬nitz again—many of the social-democratic workers joined the police as volunteers to suppress the KPD-led uprising.)
In other cities, where the CP had a base, there were short, one-day general strikes, such as Essen. But workers in the Ruhr and elsewhere were not aware of what was happening in Saxony. So there was no preparation and no apparatus to pull them into a struggle.
The KPD "Revolutionary Offensive" played right into the hands of the bourgeoisie, so that the general strike could be suppressed militarily. To take the Leuna Werke 1,200 Schupos backed up by the Reichswehr and artillery were used. They shot into the plant that made ammonia knowing that it could set off an explosion. They captured several hundred workers, locked them up in a silo and kept them there for two weeks. Two dozen Communist youth who sought to liberate these workers—very courageous individuals—were all murdered, massa¬cred. The number of dead is hard to estimate-there was a cover-up. The number of arrested is public record—6,000. Special courts were set up to deal with this. The Rote Hilfe, or Red Aid [the first Communist-affiliated defense league and an inspiration for the International Labor Defense], got its start providing legal defense and material support to the prisoners and their families, in many cases widows and families who had lost the breadwinner to this action. That was the March Action, which ended with the end of March.
Comrades asked me in Chicago, "What would have been a correct policy for Communists?" In fact in the "School of Revolutionary Strategy" Trotsky answers:
"The offensive was in reality launched by the Social-Democratic policeman Hoersing. This should have been utilized in order to unite all the workers for defense, for self-protection, even if, to begin with, a very modest resistance. Had the soil proved favorable, had the agitation met with a favorable response, it would then have been possible to pass over to the general strike. If the events continue to unfold further, if the masses rise, if the ties among the workers grow stronger, if their temper lifts, while indecision and demoralization seize the camp of the foe—then comes the time for issuing the slogan to pass over to the offensive."
-p. 21
As this essay shows, there was a discussion in the Comintern of what should have been done and how the Party should be prepared to avoid a similar situation. That was a crucial fight.
Levi, as you'll recall, had resigned as chairman of the party. And knowing that the March Action was about to happen—because Clara Zetkin made Bela go talk to him about it—he did the responsible thing...and went on vacation. He was in Vienna on his way to Italy where he seemed to enjoy spending time. Then the March Action started and he did come back. In the beginning of April he issued a brochure entitled "Our Way." It contained many just criticisms of the March Action. But it also claimed that the March Action was the greatest putsch in history, that the CP had acted like General Ludendorff in WWI, sending endless waves of youth into a bloodbath on the front lines. It was a critique that lacked any solidarity whatso¬ever with the party but offered much material to the prosecutors. It was used, as he must have known it would be, by those special courts that had been set upvto sit in judgment on the Communists and their supporters. For this he was expelled from the Communist Party and the expulsion was confirmed at the Comintern Congress.
It's clear in his 16 April letter to Clara Zetkin and Levi that Lenin didn't know even at that late date what had happened in Germany. But he quickly figures it out. He calls Bela Kun back from Germany. Lenin calls him in for a talk, which, according to Bela Kun's Hungarian biographer, resulted in Bela Kun, upon leaving Lenin's office, having a heart attack.
But the problem was not just Bela Kun. The KPD claimed the March Action was nothing less than a great victory. It was hailed by the "ultralefts" listed in "Left-Wing" Communism, by the Amsterdam Bureau of the Comintern, by the Vienna Bureau, and by the Young Communist League. Everyone was on the March Action bandwagon, including Zinoviev, who was head of the Com¬intern, Radek, who was—insofar as he was official anything—official Comintern representative in Germany, and Bukharin. Lenin and Trotsky realized that they were about to lose the Comintern, that they were a minority, at least among the leading elements, probably in the IEC and several Euro¬pean parties.
Part of this was an understandable reaction against Social Democracy. But part of it was what Lenin described as infantile leftism: playing with phrases as a surrogate for the more arduous but essential task of forging a communist vanguard that wins the allegiance of a majority of the working class. Many "leftists" who attacked the necessary conces¬sions to the peasantry for the survival of the Soviet workers state were the loudest champions of the "Revolutionary Offensive" and the March Action.
This fight had to take place simultaneously in the Russian delegation which had six members and was split evenly on the question of the March Action—between Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev on one side and Radek, Bukharin and Zinoviev on the other. That is the background to the Third Congress that is best described in the Prometheus Research Series bulletin on the Organizational Resolution passed at the Third Congress (Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of Their Work [New York, 1988]).
Third Congress: School of Revolutionary Stategy
The Congress is approaching: what is to be done? I encouraged comrades to read Lenin's "Letter to Zinoviev" on the "Thesis on Tactics" (CW, Vol. 42, pp. 319-323) because it shows how the fight would be waged before, during and after the Congress. Lenin decided that the cause of proletarian justice as well as Marxist clarity would best be served by having one of the principal malefactors, Radek, incorporate the lessons of the March Action defeat into his report "On Tactics" which would inform and guide all of the sections of the CI. Radek did a draft. As the delegates arrived Radek showed the draft to his buddies from Germany: Thalheimer, Brandler and Maslow. They suggested changes: 'You see, where it says "conquest of the majority of the working class," why don't you take that out and put in "important sections of the working class," or "decisive sections of the working class."' Just tone down the main thing that was supposed to be emphasized at this Congress! And if that wasn't enough, they got together with a recovered Bela Kun to draw up their own amendments.
On 1 June they ship this all to Lenin in an envelope. He opens it, reads the contents and furiously makes notes on the envelope, which are in the Russian edition, but alas, not the English. These notes are then developed in the letter to Zinoviev which opens: "The crux of the matter is that Levi in very many respects is right politically. Unfortunately, he is guilty of a number of breaches of discipline for which the Party has expelled him" ("Letter to Zinoviev," p. 319). Lenin is categorical that the "Open Letter" tactic was correct and important:
"...[W]averings in regard to The 'Open Letter' are extremely harmful, shameful, and extremely widespread. We may as well admit this. All those who have failed to grasp the necessity of the Open Letter tactic should be expelled from the Communist International within a month after its Third Congress."
-ibid., p. 321
To show how carefully crafted this congress was, it begins with an appeal to the German proletariat on behalf of Max Hoelz, who had just been captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. While fully incorporating the Marxist critique of individual terror, the resolution passed by the Con¬gress declares: "But his actions emanated from his love of the proletariat and his hatred of the bourgeoisie," and "instructs the German proletariat to defend him." It was as if you say, 'OK young hot¬heads and ultralefts, we will pound you politically, but we applaud your elan and seek only to give it Marxist direction and purpose.'
For the "rightists" you might say, there was also a celebration of Clara Zetkin's 65th birthday. Naturally a KPD "leftist," Fritz Heckert, gave a wonderful valedictory speech for Clara. The guy that did the presentation on the organizational resolution was another KPD left-winger, Koenen.
If some of this seems mildly perverse, Lenin was trying to make a point here. He was struggling for genuine homogeneity, not by hiding the issues but by fighting them out among comrades. He felt that 'we have gotten rid of the people—or they have gotten rid of themselves—that we don't want in this Communist International. Now we've got to fight to forge cadre.' The lesson you get, how this Congress was orchestrated, is a lesson in party building.
If the "Theses on Tactics" read a little vacuous in parts, it's not accidental. At the last minute Lenin couldn't get Radek to do all that many changes. There are passages that read like: 'When there's a defeat, it's necessary to retreat.' Except, that was bold language for some in this Congress. But, there is one section that runs from page 285 to 286 (Theses, Res¬olutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International [Ink Links, London, 1980]) which is a description of the role of transitional demands that motivates Trotsky's Transitional Pro¬gram. It is a very powerful statement.
Trotsky's "School of Revolutionary Strategy" is his summary and analysis of the key debates of the Third Congress. They are relevant to fights that we've had in our own party around the general strike in Italy and Germany. When I was in the SpAD we were advocating an adventurist policy on paper. We didn't do much except put out propa¬ganda filled with phrases about "general strikes" and "mass strikes" in precisely the region where the March Action took place—the mining, industrial region that includes Bischofferode, Wolfen (which had also developed a big chemical industry), the Halle Leuna Werke.
The problem is that by 1990-91, when we started to make this general strike agitation, these plants were finished. The bourgeoisie had decided to close them down. In the case of Bischofferode the workers were only fighting over who would get the last paycheck to turn off the lights. The empty propaganda we put out at that time was counter-posed to explaining to the workers what was hap¬pening and what had happened to them because of capitalist counterrevolution.
In "School of Revolutionary Strategy," Trotsky has a devastating indictment of the Italian SP. He said: 'Yes, you called for the revolution. You called for mass strikes. You called for all these good things and you prepared nothing. You set these people up and led to a disaster.' In his criticism of the Comintern's draft program for the Sixth Congress Trotsky writes:
"The slogan of the Third Congress did not simply read 'To the masses]' but: 'To power through a previous conquest of the massesl' After the fac¬tion fight led by Lenin (which he characterized demonstratively as the 'Right' wing)...Lenin arranged a private conference toward the end of the Congress in which he warned prophetically: 'Remember, it is only a question of getting a good running start for the revolutionary leap. The struggle for the masses is the struggle for power.'"
—The Third International After Lenin, pp. 90-91
These documents for us are living documents. When you read the Third Congress "Resolution on Communist Work among Women" you should know that there was a fight in the SL about this question when we had the opportunity to recruit from radical, feminist collectives in the early '70s. These documents became for us a living reference point and are reprinted in the early issues of Women and Revolution. The same thing with the document on the youth question. The communist youth theses lay out very clearly the motivating principles that became fighting issues in the very birth, first of the Revolutionary Tendency and then, after another kind of faction fight over our orientation to SDS, the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus.
Because we claim the tradition of the October Revolution as ours, it is our obligation to examine critically our work and perspectives by the standards set at the first four congresses of the Comintern. I really appreciate the way Trotsky concluded Lessons of October. That is: revolutionary tradition is not a museum display, it's not an internet search engine. He writes:
"The party should and must know the whole of the past, so as to be able to estimate it correctly and assign each event to its proper place. The tradition of a revolutionary party is not built on evasions, but on critical clarity."
Summary following discussion
I have not included the summmary portion because it relates to questions asked in the discussion period and is thus rather helter-skelter. Markin
Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Rally to Support WGBH Workers In Boston- Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm
From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!
Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.
Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.
In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!
Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.
Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.
Rally to Support WGBH Workers
Submitted by ujpadmin1 on Fri, 03/11/2011 - 8:26am.
When: Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 4:00 pm
Where: 10 Guest St • Brighton
Start: 2011 Mar 15 - 4:00pm
From Wisconsin to Boston, show your support for workers' rights!
Please join us to show support for WGBH’s AEEF/CWA Local 1300 in their current struggle.
Workers at WGBH, our local public television station, are fighting for the basic right to have a union in their workplace. Workers are members of AEEF/CWA Local 1300, and have been organized for nearly 40 years.
In the past, WGBH has bargained in good faith with their workers. Management and the union have been in negotiations since August, and management has recently decided to end collective bargaining. The union now faces the implementation of an unfair contract, and needs your support today!
Keep the union-busting in Wisconsin out of Massachusetts.
Sponsored by AEEF/CWA Local 1300, Greater Boston Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
For more information contact Jennifer at jennifer@massjwj.net.
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
The Anti-War Protest Season Continues-New York City Anti-War Rally April 9
Markin comment:
During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.
March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!
When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm
Where: Union Square • New York, NY
Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City and San Francisco
(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)
Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
During this February and March I have called for and placed a number posts in this space in support of a March 19th Veterans For Peace-led march and action in Washington, D.C. I also gave my reasons for such support in commentary in those posts. Mainly from a sense of solidarity with my fellow veterans and because they were ramping up their opposition to Obama's wars beylond yet another march. This march in New York on April 9th, while necessary as an action to oppose Obama's wars, is a more traditional one and while we will attend it does not have the dramatic impact and bonds of solidarity attached to it of the Veterans' march.
March and Rally: Bring the Troops Home Now!
When: Saturday, April 9, 2011, 12:00 pm
Where: Union Square • New York, NY
Start: 2011 Apr 9 - 12:00pm
Endorse the call to action from the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
Bring the Troops Home Now!
March and Rally
April 9th, 2011
New York City and San Francisco
(Union Sq. at noon) (Time and place to be announced)
Bring U.S. Troops Now: Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza!
Trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for all, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
End FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads
Sunday, March 13, 2011
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Third World Congress (1921)-ECCI Appeal to the Proletariat of All Countries
Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
*********
*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future- Neither People's Peace Nor People's War: INDOCHINA MUST CO COMMUNIST! (1971)
Markin comment:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment on this article:
Aside from a bit of nostalgia in hearing about “people’s war”, a term not much heard from recently as its major, mostly Maoist, proponents have long given that notion up as China steams ahead on a path of more and more pro-imperialist accommodation (and increased internal capitalist forbearance) so I don’t have anything right now to say about that part of the article. Except to say people’s war, in any case, is not good for such business as the Chinese are embarked upon. Such documents are now locked, with seven seals, under the walls of the Forbidden Palace.
What is of interest is the notion of the “people’s peace treaty.” I admit that in 1971 I was interested in such a proposition for a while. But just for a while. Why? Well, as raw and new as I was to the Marxist movement that I was beginning to take seriously, very seriously at that point, I knew from many past encounters that this idea in the hands of the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party was a shill. That it was merely served up by them to give the liberals and others a chance to feel good without having to leave home. See, and I have mentioned this before, in those days (early 1970s) nobody who was seriously interested in Marxism, at least in the circles that I ran in, gave any thought to what the SWP or CP were, or were not, up to in those days. Except their programs had nothing to do with revolution.
That said, the notion of a people’s peace treaty or people’s referendum on war, and the like are not inherently tools only reformists can use. In the late 1930s the then revolutionary SWP projected just such a program, as a tactic in the struggle against the build-up to the on-coming imperialist war in America. (They also projected the just plain wrong Proletarian Military Program a little later but that is a separate issue.) In retrospect I would question whether in 1971, after several years of hard American military bombardment and destruction in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, that such a concept would have much tactical use even for revolutionaries. Hell, some of us were waving NLF banners in the America streets. Where was there serious room, even propagandistic room, for a pacifistic thing like a people’s peace treaty.
*********
From the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter, forebear of Young Spartacus, July 1971.
Neither People's Peace Nor People's War:
INDOCHINA MUST CO COMMUNIST!
Many radicals, disillusioned with the flag-waving patriotism of the clergy-liberal CP-SWP led antiwar movement, were drawn to the People's Peace Treaty as a positive way to show their solidarity with the Vietnamese Revolution. But the People's Peace Treaty embodies precisely those politics which have prevented the Vietnamese Revolution from reaching a victorious conclusion. Twice the Viet Minh, predecessor of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF), won complete military victory only to snatch political defeat from the jaws of military victory through a People's Peace Treaty-type settlement. The March 6 accords of 1946, signed by Ho Chi Minh, allowed French troops back into Indo-China. The 1954 Geneva accords, backed both by the Soviet Union and Communist China, gave back South Viet Nam, which the Viet Minh held, in exchange for elections which were of course never held.
People's Peace
The People's Peace Treaty asks that the Americans and Vietnamese recognize the "independence, peace and neutrality" of Laos and Cambodia, along the lines of the 1954 and 1962 Geneva Conventions. But the Geneva accords recognized, not the Cambodian and Laotian Communists and national liberation fighters, but their butchers, members of the royal families handpicked for their ruthlessness in dealing with real independence fighters and for their subservience to French imperialism.
The People's Peace Treaty calls for a "provisional coalition government to organize democratic elections. " Coalition governments by their very nature are unstable formations in which either the Communists throw everybody else out (DRV) or else are tossed out themselves, which is more likely. Those who would learn from history, instead of endlessly repeating mistakes, would do well to study the Laotian events from 1956 to 1958, which parallel almost exactly what the PPT projects for South Viet Nam after the withdrawal of U. S. troops. The Pathet Lao did quite well in the elections held after the Vientiane Agreements (1957), whereupon they were thrown out of government, and following various "democratic" maneuvers the U.S. resumed aid to the Royal Laotian army, which became the only foreign army in the world wholly supported by U. S. taxpayers. Coalition governments only serve to confuse, disarm and retard the class struggle, as recent examples, Allende in Chile and Bandaranaike in Ceylon, demonstrate.
People's War
People's War is merely the extension of the class-collaborationism and nationalism embodied in the People's Peace. Lin Piao describes People's War as: "To rely on the peasants, build rural base areas and use the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities. " Thus, People's War is a war waged without the participation of the working class. People's War is also a strategy for the "rural areas of the world" (the under-developed countries), not the "cities of the world"(the industrial countries). Further, the1 revolution in the "rural areas of the world" is divided by Lin Piao into two distinct stages: the national-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution. The two stages must be kept distinct since the national-democratic revolution "embraces in its ranks not only the workers, peasants , and the urban petty bourgeoisie, but also the national bourgeoisie and other patriot¬ic and anti-imperialist democrats. "Obviously if the national-democratic revolution began to perform socialist tasks such as the expropriation of the national bourgeoisie, then the national bourgeoisie would soon depart from its ranks. People's War is a military strategy for a war of the national-democratic revolution (including the national bourgeoisie in its ranks), fought without the workers, in the countryside of underdeveloped countries. Nowhere do Mao, Lin Piao or Giap claim that People's War is a strategy for workers, for revolutionary work in the cities or in the industrial countries or during a socialist revolution. In fact, none of these "revolutionaries" or their co-thinkers have any strategy for a proletarian socialist revolution.
According to Lin Piao "the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the national-democratic revolution. " But if the socialist revolution, which means the destruction of the national bourgeoisie as a class were truly an inevitable sequel to the national-democrat revolution, then the national bourgeoisie will not join a movement which promises, if successful, their destruction. No matter how oppressive the national bourgeoisie may find colonial or neo-colonial subjugation, it knows that its survival is contingent on the continuance of that subjugation. Therefore, for national independence to be consolidated after anything resembling People's War, the national bourgeoisie must be smashed !
Even where People's War has been militarily successful, the democratic tasks still remain on the agenda and the socialist revolution is anything but inevitable. The price paid for "using the countryside to first encircle, then capture the cities" has been economic mismanagement and stagnation even within tt context of a planned economy and socialized production, and the complete absence of wor ers democracy (for which Maothought and six hour Castroite tirades are no substitute) and the isolation of the revolution in one country
Who are the "People"?
The fundamental flaw of the People's Peace Treaty is that it ignores the class reality of the struggle in Indochina. It states that the "American and Vietnamese people are not enemies. " Then why did the war happen? Th "People" is not the enemy precisely because in modern society, torn by class conflict, ir dividuals and groups act and react as classes. The undifferentiated "People" can be neithei enemies nor allies because they have no social reality. "Power to the People" is as meaningless a formulation as "Amen". Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Program is a trenchant critic of such formulations as "People's Party, "People's State" and "international brotherhood of Peoples" which confuse and hide the reality of the class struggle, which is a struggle between different classes of "People".
The Socialist Workers Party has built a consciously anti-class peace movement. By basing the peace movement on "the masses" (another euphemism for "the People") the SWP attempts to cover over its welcoming of bourgeois politicians into the movement. The SWP is consciously class-collaborationist and must be politically destroyed as an obstacle in the road of proletarian revolution, along with the CPUSA and the People's Peace Treaty.
Class War
Instead of People's Peace or People's War, Trotskyists advocate class war. Trotskyists believe that the urban working class must lead the peasants. What is required is a proletarian vanguard party with a program for international working-class revolution, not a Stalinist party with a peasant-based and nationally-limited program. The proletariat in "rural areas" as well as in industrial centers, following in the footsteps of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, must raise once again the banners of the October Revolution and the Fourth International of Trotsky!
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment on this article:
Aside from a bit of nostalgia in hearing about “people’s war”, a term not much heard from recently as its major, mostly Maoist, proponents have long given that notion up as China steams ahead on a path of more and more pro-imperialist accommodation (and increased internal capitalist forbearance) so I don’t have anything right now to say about that part of the article. Except to say people’s war, in any case, is not good for such business as the Chinese are embarked upon. Such documents are now locked, with seven seals, under the walls of the Forbidden Palace.
What is of interest is the notion of the “people’s peace treaty.” I admit that in 1971 I was interested in such a proposition for a while. But just for a while. Why? Well, as raw and new as I was to the Marxist movement that I was beginning to take seriously, very seriously at that point, I knew from many past encounters that this idea in the hands of the Socialist Workers Party and the American Communist Party was a shill. That it was merely served up by them to give the liberals and others a chance to feel good without having to leave home. See, and I have mentioned this before, in those days (early 1970s) nobody who was seriously interested in Marxism, at least in the circles that I ran in, gave any thought to what the SWP or CP were, or were not, up to in those days. Except their programs had nothing to do with revolution.
That said, the notion of a people’s peace treaty or people’s referendum on war, and the like are not inherently tools only reformists can use. In the late 1930s the then revolutionary SWP projected just such a program, as a tactic in the struggle against the build-up to the on-coming imperialist war in America. (They also projected the just plain wrong Proletarian Military Program a little later but that is a separate issue.) In retrospect I would question whether in 1971, after several years of hard American military bombardment and destruction in Vietnam and the rest of Indochina, that such a concept would have much tactical use even for revolutionaries. Hell, some of us were waving NLF banners in the America streets. Where was there serious room, even propagandistic room, for a pacifistic thing like a people’s peace treaty.
*********
From the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus Newsletter, forebear of Young Spartacus, July 1971.
Neither People's Peace Nor People's War:
INDOCHINA MUST CO COMMUNIST!
Many radicals, disillusioned with the flag-waving patriotism of the clergy-liberal CP-SWP led antiwar movement, were drawn to the People's Peace Treaty as a positive way to show their solidarity with the Vietnamese Revolution. But the People's Peace Treaty embodies precisely those politics which have prevented the Vietnamese Revolution from reaching a victorious conclusion. Twice the Viet Minh, predecessor of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV) and the National Liberation Front (NLF), won complete military victory only to snatch political defeat from the jaws of military victory through a People's Peace Treaty-type settlement. The March 6 accords of 1946, signed by Ho Chi Minh, allowed French troops back into Indo-China. The 1954 Geneva accords, backed both by the Soviet Union and Communist China, gave back South Viet Nam, which the Viet Minh held, in exchange for elections which were of course never held.
People's Peace
The People's Peace Treaty asks that the Americans and Vietnamese recognize the "independence, peace and neutrality" of Laos and Cambodia, along the lines of the 1954 and 1962 Geneva Conventions. But the Geneva accords recognized, not the Cambodian and Laotian Communists and national liberation fighters, but their butchers, members of the royal families handpicked for their ruthlessness in dealing with real independence fighters and for their subservience to French imperialism.
The People's Peace Treaty calls for a "provisional coalition government to organize democratic elections. " Coalition governments by their very nature are unstable formations in which either the Communists throw everybody else out (DRV) or else are tossed out themselves, which is more likely. Those who would learn from history, instead of endlessly repeating mistakes, would do well to study the Laotian events from 1956 to 1958, which parallel almost exactly what the PPT projects for South Viet Nam after the withdrawal of U. S. troops. The Pathet Lao did quite well in the elections held after the Vientiane Agreements (1957), whereupon they were thrown out of government, and following various "democratic" maneuvers the U.S. resumed aid to the Royal Laotian army, which became the only foreign army in the world wholly supported by U. S. taxpayers. Coalition governments only serve to confuse, disarm and retard the class struggle, as recent examples, Allende in Chile and Bandaranaike in Ceylon, demonstrate.
People's War
People's War is merely the extension of the class-collaborationism and nationalism embodied in the People's Peace. Lin Piao describes People's War as: "To rely on the peasants, build rural base areas and use the countryside to encircle and finally capture the cities. " Thus, People's War is a war waged without the participation of the working class. People's War is also a strategy for the "rural areas of the world" (the under-developed countries), not the "cities of the world"(the industrial countries). Further, the1 revolution in the "rural areas of the world" is divided by Lin Piao into two distinct stages: the national-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution. The two stages must be kept distinct since the national-democratic revolution "embraces in its ranks not only the workers, peasants , and the urban petty bourgeoisie, but also the national bourgeoisie and other patriot¬ic and anti-imperialist democrats. "Obviously if the national-democratic revolution began to perform socialist tasks such as the expropriation of the national bourgeoisie, then the national bourgeoisie would soon depart from its ranks. People's War is a military strategy for a war of the national-democratic revolution (including the national bourgeoisie in its ranks), fought without the workers, in the countryside of underdeveloped countries. Nowhere do Mao, Lin Piao or Giap claim that People's War is a strategy for workers, for revolutionary work in the cities or in the industrial countries or during a socialist revolution. In fact, none of these "revolutionaries" or their co-thinkers have any strategy for a proletarian socialist revolution.
According to Lin Piao "the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the national-democratic revolution. " But if the socialist revolution, which means the destruction of the national bourgeoisie as a class were truly an inevitable sequel to the national-democrat revolution, then the national bourgeoisie will not join a movement which promises, if successful, their destruction. No matter how oppressive the national bourgeoisie may find colonial or neo-colonial subjugation, it knows that its survival is contingent on the continuance of that subjugation. Therefore, for national independence to be consolidated after anything resembling People's War, the national bourgeoisie must be smashed !
Even where People's War has been militarily successful, the democratic tasks still remain on the agenda and the socialist revolution is anything but inevitable. The price paid for "using the countryside to first encircle, then capture the cities" has been economic mismanagement and stagnation even within tt context of a planned economy and socialized production, and the complete absence of wor ers democracy (for which Maothought and six hour Castroite tirades are no substitute) and the isolation of the revolution in one country
Who are the "People"?
The fundamental flaw of the People's Peace Treaty is that it ignores the class reality of the struggle in Indochina. It states that the "American and Vietnamese people are not enemies. " Then why did the war happen? Th "People" is not the enemy precisely because in modern society, torn by class conflict, ir dividuals and groups act and react as classes. The undifferentiated "People" can be neithei enemies nor allies because they have no social reality. "Power to the People" is as meaningless a formulation as "Amen". Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Program is a trenchant critic of such formulations as "People's Party, "People's State" and "international brotherhood of Peoples" which confuse and hide the reality of the class struggle, which is a struggle between different classes of "People".
The Socialist Workers Party has built a consciously anti-class peace movement. By basing the peace movement on "the masses" (another euphemism for "the People") the SWP attempts to cover over its welcoming of bourgeois politicians into the movement. The SWP is consciously class-collaborationist and must be politically destroyed as an obstacle in the road of proletarian revolution, along with the CPUSA and the People's Peace Treaty.
Class War
Instead of People's Peace or People's War, Trotskyists advocate class war. Trotskyists believe that the urban working class must lead the peasants. What is required is a proletarian vanguard party with a program for international working-class revolution, not a Stalinist party with a peasant-based and nationally-limited program. The proletariat in "rural areas" as well as in industrial centers, following in the footsteps of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, must raise once again the banners of the October Revolution and the Fourth International of Trotsky!
From The Wisconsin War-Zone- The Lines Are Further Drawn- The Fight For A General Strike Of All Labor In Wisconsin Is Directly Posed-And Solidarity Actions By Those Outside The State- Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Get To It
Markin comment:
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
Over the past few week as the events concerning the fate of collective bargaining rights, the core of any union’s reason for existence, of Wisconsin’s public workers unions have unfolded I had joined the voices of those who have argued that passage of the ant-iunion legislation by the Republican Senate majority should trigger the call for a one day general strike of all Wisconsin as the start of a push back. Well that day has arrived and every pro-labor militant from Madison to Cairo (Illinois or Egypt, it matters not) should be joining their voices in that call, and agitating in their unions and other organization to carry it out. The lines could not be more clearly drawn, the survival of the Wisconsin public workers unions are at stake, the survival of all public workers unions are now at stake, and the survival of unionism in the United States as well. This is only the start of the right-wing onslaught. Let Wisconsin’s labor response make it the end. Fight for a one day general strike now!
******
Friday, March 04, 2011
On The Question Of General Strikes In Defense Of The Wisconsin Public Workers Unions- Don't Mourn, Organize- A Short Note
Click on the headline to link to a James P.Cannon Internet Archive online article about the lessons of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 mentioned in the post below.
Markin comment:
Recently, in the wake of the front-line struggle of the Wisconsin public workers unions (now heightened by the latest news that the Ohio Senate has also voted to curb collective bargaining rights in that state), I, along with others, have been agitating for a one day general strike by organized labor, unorganized, but desperately in need of being organized, workers, and other allies, in support of those efforts. I have also placed the propaganda of others, individuals and organizations, who are advocating this same general position in this space, and will continue to do so as I see it come up as I scan the leftist universe. Before I go on, just to make things clear on this issue, I would draw the reader’s attention to the distinction between propagandizing, the general task for communist organizers in this period pushing issues on behalf our communist future, and agitation which requires/requests some immediate action. The events in the public sector labor movement over the past several weeks, as they have rapidly unfolded, call for immediate action whether we can cause any motion on the issue or not.
That said, I would also note that I have framed my call to action in terms of posing the question of a general strike, the objective need for such action. That proposition is the axis of intervention for leftist and trade union militants today. And that is the rub. Of course, right this minute (and as the Ohio situation foretells maybe only this minute), any such one day general strike would, of necessity, have to be centered in Wisconsin, and the tactical choices would have to be made on the ground there ( how to make the strike effective, what unions to call in, what places to shut down, etc.). My original posting did not make a distinction on location(s)though, and I make none now, about whether such a strike would be localized or not. Certainly, given the centrally of the collective bargaining principle to the lifeblood of any union, and the drumbeat of other states like Ohio, it can hardly be precluded that it could not be a wider strike than just in Wisconsin.
And that is the rub, again. I am perfectly aware, after a lifetime of oppositional politics of one sort or another, that it is one thing to call for an action and another to have it heeded by some mass organization that can do something about it, or even have it taken for more than its propaganda value. And it is the somewhat fantastic quality of the proposition to many trade unionists that I have been running up against in my own efforts to present this demand. Now, as I have noted previously, in France this kind of strike is something of an art form, and other European working classes are catching on to the idea. Moreover, in the old days the anarchists, when they had some authority in the working class in places like Spain,thought nothing of calling such strikes. And some Marxists, like the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, saw the political general strike as the central strategic piece in the working class taking state power. However the low level of political consciousness here, or lack of it, or even of solid trade union consciousness, is what the substance of this note is about.
Although the Wisconsin public workers unions have galvanized segments of the American labor movement, particularly the organized sector (those who see what is coming down the road for them-or who have already been the subject of such victimizations in the roller coaster process of the de-industrialization of America) the hard fact is that it has been a very, very long time since this labor movement has seen a general strike. You have to go back to the 1930s and the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934, or to the San Francisco General Strike of that same year to even been able to provide an example to illustrate how it could take place in this country. That, my friends, is over seventy-five years ago, a long time in anybody’s political book and, more importantly, a couple of generations removed from the actual experience. Hell, it has been as far back as the period immediately after World War II since we have seen massive nation-wide industrial strikes. The closest situation that I can think of that would be widely remembered today, and that was also somewhat successful and well supported, was the UPS strike in the 1990s. All of this points to one conclusion, our class struggle skills are now rather rusty, and it shows.
How? Well, first look at the propaganda of various leftist and socialist groups. They, correctly, call for solidarity, for defense rallies and for more marches in support of the Wisconsin struggle. But I have seen relevantly little open advocacy for a one day general strike. That is damning. But here is the real kicker, the one that should give us all pause. The most recent Wisconsin support rally in Boston was attended by many trade union militants, many known (known to me from struggles over the years) leftist activists, and surprisingly, a significant segment of older, not currently active political ex-militants who either came out for old times sake, or understood that this is a do or die struggle and they wanted to help show their support. In short, a perfect audience before which a speaker could expect to get a favorable response on a call for a political general strike. And that call that day, was made not by me, and not by other socialists or communists, but by a militant from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a well-known union with plenty of militants in it. The response: a few claps in a crowd of over two thousand.
Time has been, is, and will be our enemy here as we struggle to win these pubic workers union fights. Why? Our sense of leftist legitimacy, our class struggle sense has so atrophied over the past several decades that people, political people, trade union political people and even leftist political people have lost their capacity to struggle to win. Still, the objective situation in Wisconsin, hell, in Boston and Columbus, requires that we continue to fight around a class struggle axis. And central to that fight- Fight for a one day general strike in support of the Wisconsin public workers unions!
*On The 8th Anniversary of The Iraq War (Really 20th) A March 19th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets
Click on the headline to link to the Stop These Wars Website.
Markin comment:
In the lead up to the December 16, 2010 Veterans For Peace led-civil disobedience action in Washington, D. C. where 131 people were arrested (many of whom later had the charges against them dropped) I motivated my support for that action as described below in a blog entry that I am re-posting today. That same general motivation applies (with a caveat noted just below) as another Veterans For Peace-led planned civil disobedience action is scheduled for March 19th 2011, the 8th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War II. (Although as noted in the headline to this entry it really is the 20th year as the theme of the Catholic Worker-led demonstrations in Washington on January 15, 2011 made clear, correctly clear.)
I note here that while I support and will attend the March 19th actions (with as many of the local ad hoc anti-imperialist group that I belong to as can come that day) because they are very important symbolic actions on an important anti-war occasion I am worried, at least a little worried, that if we do not take more arrests (more than 131 that is) this action will be seen as a failure. Not by the media, of course, as they hardly paid attention on December 16th. Not the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama government, of course, they haven’t paid attention at all, ever. But militants, and potential militants, who will dismiss such actions out of hand and write off street actions as the work of cranky old men and women. In short, we do not want to get civil disobedience-itis any more than we wanted to keep doing those endless dwindling mass marches. So to do this right-All out in support of the Vets- All out to resist these wars- All out to end Obama’s Iraq and Afghan Wars.
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December 1, 2010
A December 16th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets
On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:
“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”
Now comes word (click on headline for similar March 19th action) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of "Peace On Earth." There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”
That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So I, and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. I will hold my nose in doing so, although not my tongue, trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.
Markin comment:
In the lead up to the December 16, 2010 Veterans For Peace led-civil disobedience action in Washington, D. C. where 131 people were arrested (many of whom later had the charges against them dropped) I motivated my support for that action as described below in a blog entry that I am re-posting today. That same general motivation applies (with a caveat noted just below) as another Veterans For Peace-led planned civil disobedience action is scheduled for March 19th 2011, the 8th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War II. (Although as noted in the headline to this entry it really is the 20th year as the theme of the Catholic Worker-led demonstrations in Washington on January 15, 2011 made clear, correctly clear.)
I note here that while I support and will attend the March 19th actions (with as many of the local ad hoc anti-imperialist group that I belong to as can come that day) because they are very important symbolic actions on an important anti-war occasion I am worried, at least a little worried, that if we do not take more arrests (more than 131 that is) this action will be seen as a failure. Not by the media, of course, as they hardly paid attention on December 16th. Not the Bush I-Clinton-Bush II-Obama government, of course, they haven’t paid attention at all, ever. But militants, and potential militants, who will dismiss such actions out of hand and write off street actions as the work of cranky old men and women. In short, we do not want to get civil disobedience-itis any more than we wanted to keep doing those endless dwindling mass marches. So to do this right-All out in support of the Vets- All out to resist these wars- All out to end Obama’s Iraq and Afghan Wars.
********
December 1, 2010
A December 16th Veterans-Led March In Washington To Stop The Wars In Afghanistan And Iraq-All Out In Support Of The Vets
On November 11, 2010, Veterans Day, I marched with a contingent of Veterans For Peace in the Boston Veterans Day parade and posted an entry in this space about my take on the event. (See, A Stroll In The Park On Veterans Day- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan!, dated November 11, 2010). As part of that commentary I noted the following:
“Listen, I have been to many marches and demonstrations for democratic, progressive, socialist and communist causes in my long political life. However, of all those events none, by far, has been more satisfying that to march alongside my fellow ex-soldiers who have “switched” over to the other side and are now part of the struggle against war, the hard, hard struggle against the permanent war machine that this imperial system has embarked upon. From as far back as in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) days I have always felt that ex-soldiers (hell, active soldiers too, if you can get them) have had just a little bit more “street cred” on the war issue than the professors, pacifists and little old ladies in tennis sneakers who have traditionally led the anti-war movements. Maybe those brothers (and in my generation it was mainly only brothers) and now sisters may not quite pose the questions of war and peace the way I do, or the way that I would like them to do, but they are kindred spirits.”
Now comes word (click on headline for similar March 19th action) that veterans are leading an action in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2010 in front of the White House under the rubric of "Peace On Earth." There is no question that I, the anti-imperialist committee that I am a member of in Boston, any self-respecting radical or, hell, any self-respecting little old lady in tennis sneakers for that matter, could endorse this thing. If for no other reason that it begs, literally begs, Warmonger-In-Chief Obama (of the double troop escalations in Afghanistan with nobody holding a gun to his head remember) to “do the right thing.”
That said, the sentiment expressed above in that Veterans Day commentary still holds true. So I, and all I can gather to go with me, will be in Washington on December 16th. I will hold my nose in doing so, although not my tongue, trying to get my fellow vets to change course. In my hand I will hold this slogan-Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S. Troops From Iraq and Afghanistan! And I won’t be begging him about it, no way.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
*From The Pages Of The Communist International-In Honor Of The 92nd Anniversary Of Its Founding (March 1919) And The 90th Anniversary Of The Third World Congress (1921)-Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women: Theses
Honor The 92nd Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The 90th Anniversary Of The Historic Third World Congress Of The CI (1921)
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women: Theses
Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
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8 July 1921
Basic Principles
1 The Third Congress of the Communist International, in conjunction with the Second International Conference of Communist women, confirms once again the decision of the First and Second Congresses that all the Communist Parties of the West and the East need to increase work amongst the female proletariat, educating the broad mass of working women in Communist ideas and drawing them into the struggle for Soviet power, for the construction of the Soviet workers’ republic.
Throughout the world the working class, and consequently working women as well, are confronting the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The capitalist economic system has entered a blind alley; there is no scope for the development of the productive forces within the framework of capitalism. The sharp decline in living standards of the working people, the inability of the bourgeoisie to restore production, the rise of speculation, the disintegration of production, unemployment, price fluctuations and the gap between prices and wages, lead everywhere to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle. This struggle decides who and which system is to lead, administer and organise production – either a small group of bourgeois or the working class basing itself on the principles of Communism.
The newly emergent proletarian class must, in accordance with the laws of economic development, take the apparatus of production into its own hands and create new economic forms. Only then will it be in a position to encourage the maximum development of the productive forces, which are held in cheek by the anarchy of capitalist production.
While power is in the hands of the bourgeois class, the proletariat is unable to organise production. While they keep this power there are no reforms or measures that the democratic or socialist governments of the bourgeois countries could adopt to save the situation or alleviate the terrible and unbearable sufferings of the working women and men which result from the collapse of the capitalist economic system. Only by seizing power can the class of producers take hold of the means of production, thus making it possible to direct economic development in the interests of the working people.
To accelerate the inevitable and final battle between the proletariat and the obsolete bourgeois world, the working class must adhere firmly and without hesitation to the tactics outlined by the III International. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the fundamental and immediate goal and this determines for the proletariat of both sexes the methods of work and the direction the struggle takes.
The struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is the most important question facing the proletariat in the capitalist countries. In those countries where dictatorship is already in the hands of the workers, the building of a Communist society is the vital question. The III Congress of the Communist International maintains that without the active participation of the broad masses of the female proletariat and the semi-proletarian women, the proletariat can neither seize power nor realise communism.
At the same time, the Congress once again draws the attention of all women to the fact that without Communist Party support for all the projects leading to the liberation of women, the recognition of women’s rights as equal human beings and their real emancipation cannot in practice be won.
2 In the present period particularly, it is in the interests of the working class that women are drawn into the organised ranks of the proletariat as it fights for Communism. As the economic dislocation increases on a world scale and the consequences press more heavily on all the urban and rural poor, the question of social revolution is more sharply posed for the working class of the bourgeois-capitalist countries, while the working people of Soviet Russia face the task of creating a national economy on new Communist lines. The active, conscious and determined participation of women will ensure that these goals are more easily realised.
Where the question of winning power is posed directly, the Communist Party has to take into account the enormous danger presented to the revolution by the masses of passive working women who are outside the movement – the housewives, office workers and peasant women who are still under the influence of the bourgeois world-view, the church and tradition, and have no links with the great liberation movement for communism. Women that stand outside this movement are inevitably a stronghold of bourgeois ideas and a target for counter-revolutionary propaganda, both in the West and in the East. The experience of the Hungarian revolution, where women’s lack of class consciousness played such a sad role, must serve as a warning for the proletariat elsewhere as it takes the road of social revolution.
On the other hand, events in the Soviet republic are a concrete example of how essential the participation of working and peasant women is in the civil war, the defence of the republic and all other areas of Soviet life. The important role that working and peasant women have already played in the Soviet republic has been clearly shown: in organising defence, strengthening the home front, combating desertion and all kinds of counter-revolutionary activity, sabotage, etc. Other countries must study and learn from the experience of the workers’ republic.
It follows that the Communist Parties must extend their influence over the widest layers of the female population by means of organising special apparatuses inside the Party and establishing special methods of approaching women, with the aim of liberating them from the influence of the bourgeois world-view or the influence of the compromising parties, and of educating them to be resolute fighters for Communism and consequently for the full development of women.
3 While making the improvement of Party work amongst the female proletariat an immediate task of both the Western and Eastern Communist Parties, the III Congress of the Communist International at the same time points out to the working women of the whole world that their liberation from centuries of enslavement, lack of rights and inequality is possible only through the victory of Communism, and that the bourgeois women’s movement is completely incapable of guaranteeing women that which Communism gives. So long as the power of capital and private property exists, the liberation of woman from dependence on a husband can go no further than the right to dispose of her own property and her own wage and decide on equal terms with her husband the future of her children.
The most radical feminist demand – the extension of the suffrage to women in the framework of bourgeois parliamentarianism – does not solve the question of real equality for women, especially those of the propertyless classes. The experience of working women in all those capitalist countries in which, over recent years, the bourgeoisie has introduced formal equality of the sexes makes this clear. The vote does not destroy the prime cause of women’s enslavement in the family and society. Some bourgeois states have substituted civil marriage for indissoluble marriage. But as long as the proletarian woman remains economically dependent upon the capitalist boss and her husband, the breadwinner, and in the absence of comprehensive measures to protect motherhood and childhood and provide socialised child-care and education, this cannot equalise the position of women in marriage or solve the problem of relationships between the sexes.
The real equality of women, as opposed to formal and superficial equality, will be achieved only under Communism, when women and all the other members of the labouring class will become co-owners of the means of production and distribution and will take part in administering them, and women will share on an equal footing with all the members of the labour society the duty to work; in other words, it will be achieved by overthrowing the capitalist system of production and exploitation which is based on the exploitation of human labour,and by organising a Communist economy.
Only Communism creates conditions whereby the conflict between the natural function of woman – maternity – and her social obligations, which hinder her creative work for the collective, will disappear and the harmonious and many-sided development of a healthy and balanced personality firmly and closely in tune with the life and goals of the labour-collective will be completed. All women who fight for the emancipation of woman and the recognition of her rights must have as their aim the creation of a Communist society.
But Communism is also the final aim of the proletariat as a whole and therefore, in the interests of both sides, the two struggles must be fought as ‘a single and indivisible’ struggle.
4 The Third Congress of the Communist International supports the basic position of revolutionary Marxism that there is no ‘special’ women’s question, nor should there be a special women’s movement, and that any alliance between working women and bourgeois feminism or support for the vacillating or clearly right-wing tactics of the social compromisers and opportunists will lead to the weakening of the forces of the proletariat, thereby delaying the great hour of the full emancipation of women.
A Communist society will be won not by the united efforts of women of different classes, but by the united struggle of all the exploited.
The masses of proletarian women must, in their own interests, support the revolutionary tactics of the Communist Party and take as active and direct a part as possible in mass action and in every type and form of civil war that emerges both on the national and international scale.
5 At its highest stage, the struggle of women against their dual oppression (by capitalism and by their own domestic family dependence) must take on an international character, developing into a struggle (fought under the banner of the III International) by the proletariat of both sexes for their dictatorship and for the Soviet system.
6 The III Congress of the Communist International warns working women against any kind of co-operation or agreement with bourgeois feminists. At the same time, it makes clear to proletarian women that any illusions that it is possible to support the II International or opportunist elements close to it without damaging the cause of women’s liberation will do serious harm to the liberation struggle of the proletariat. Women must never forget that the slavery of women is rooted in the bourgeois system and that to end this slavery a new Communist society has to be brought into being.
The support working women give to the groups and parties of the II and Two-and-a-Half Internationals is a brake on the social revolution, delaying the advent of the new order. If women turn from the II and Two-and-a-Half Internationals with resolution and without compromise, the victory of the social revolution will be more sure. Communist women must condemn all those who are afraid of the revolutionary tactics of the Communist International and stand firm for their exclusion from the closed ranks of the Communist International.
Women must remember that the II International has never even tried to set up any kind of organisation to further the struggle for the full liberation of women. The international unification of Socialist women was begun outside the framework of the II International at the initiative of working women themselves. The Socialist women who conducted special work amongst women had neither status nor representation nor full voting rights.
At its very first Congress, in 1919, the Third International clearly formulated its attitude to the question of drawing women into the struggle for proletarian dictatorship. The Congress called a conference of women Communists and in 1920 an International Secretariat for work amongst women was established with a permanent representative on the Executive Committee of the Communist International. All class-conscious working women should break unconditionally with the II and Two-and-a-Half Internationals and give their support to the revolutionary line of the Communist International.
7 Women who work in factories, offices and fields must show their support for the Communist International by joining the Communist Parties. In those countries and parties where the struggle between the II and III International has not yet come to a head, working women must do all they can to support the party or group which is standing for the Communist International and, whatever the accepted leaders say or do, must ruthlessly fight against all who are vacillating or have gone over openly to the other side. Class-conscious proletarian women who want emancipation must not stay in parties which stand outside the Communist International.
To be against the III International is to be an enemy of the liberation of women.
Class-conscious working women in both the West and East should support the Communist International as members of the Communist Parties of their countries. Any hesitation on their part, or fear of breaking with the familiar compromising parties and the recognised leaders disastrously affects the success of the great proletarian struggle which is developing into a ruthless and global civil war.
Methods and Forms of Work among Women
The III Congress of the Communist International holds, therefore, that work among the female proletariat must be conducted by all Communist Parties on the following basis:
1 Women must be included in all the militant class organisations – the Party, the trade unions, the co-operatives, Soviets of factory representatives etc., with equal rights and equal responsibilities.
2 The importance must be recognised of drawing women into all areas of the active struggle of the proletariat (including the military defence of the proletariat) and of constructing in all areas the foundations of a new society and organising production and everyday life on Communist lines.
3 The maternal function must be recognised as a social function and the appropriate measures to defend and protect women as child-bearers must be taken or fought for.
The III Congress of the Communist International is firmly opposed to any kind of separate women’s associations in the Parties and trade unions or special women’s organisations, but it accepts that special
methods of work among women are necessary and that every Communist Party should set up a special apparatus for this work. In adopting this position, the Congress takes into consideration the following:
a) the oppression women suffer in everyday life not only in the bourgeois-capitalist countries, but in countries with a Soviet structure, in transition from capitalism to communism;
b) the great passivity and political backwardness of the female masses, which is to be explained by the fact that for centuries women have been excluded from social life and enslaved in the family;
c) the special function – childbirth – which nature assigns to women, and the specificities connected with this function, call for the greater protection of their energies and health in the interests of the whole collective.
The III Congress of the Communist International therefore recognises that a special apparatus for conducting work among women is necessary. This apparatus must consist of departments or commissions for work among women, attached to every Party committee at all levels, from the CC of the Party right down to the urban, district or local Party committee. This decision is binding on all Parties in the Communist International.
The Third Congress of the Communist International indicates that the tasks of the Communist Parties to be carried out through these departments include the following:
1 to educate women in Communist ideas and draw them into the ranks of the Party;
2 to fight the prejudices against women held by the mass of the male proletariat, and increase the awareness of working men and women that they have common interests;
3 to strengthen the will of working women by drawing them into all forms and types of civil conflict, encouraging women in the bourgeois countries to participate in the struggle against capitalist exploitation, in mass action against the high cost of living, against the housing shortage, unemployment and around other social problems, and women in the Soviet republics to take part in the formation of the Communist personality and the Communist way of life;
4 to put on the Party’s agenda and to include in legislative proposals questions directly concerning the emancipation of women, confirming their liberation, defending their interests as child-bearers;
5 to conduct a well-planned struggle against the power of tradition, bourgeois customs and religious ideas, clearing the way for healthier and more harmonious relations between the sexes, guaranteeing the physical and moral vitality of working people.
The Party committees directly lead and are responsible for all the work of the women’s departments or commissions. The head of the department or commission must be a member of the Party committee. Wherever possible, the members of the departments or commissions should be Communists.
The commissions or departments of working women should not work independently. In the Soviet countries they should work through the appropriate economic or political organs (Soviet departments, commissions, trade unions); in capitalist countries they should have the support of the appropriate proletarian organisations: Party, unions, Soviets, etc.
Wherever Communist Parties exist illegally or semi-legally, they must still create an apparatus for work among women. This apparatus must be subordinate to the general Party apparatus and adapt to the situation of illegality. All local, regional and central illegal organisations should have, in the same way as legal organisations, one woman comrade responsible for organising propaganda among women. In the modern epoch the trade unions, production unions and co-operatives must serve as the basis for Party work among women both in countries where the struggle for the overthrow of capital is still in progress and in the Soviet workers’ republics.
Work amongst women must be informed by an understanding of the unity of the Party movement and organisation, but at the same time show independent initiative and, proceeding independently from other Party commissions or sections, work towards the rapid and full emancipation of women. The goal should be not to duplicate work but to enable working women to help the Party and its activities.
Party Work among Women in the Soviet Countries
In the Soviet workers’ republic the role of the departments is to educate the women in Communist ideas, to draw them into the Communist Party and develop their self-activity and independence, involving them in the construction of Communism and educating them to be firm defenders of the Communist International.
The departments must help women take part in all branches of Soviet construction, in matters ranging from defence to the many and complex economic plans of the republic.
In the Soviet republic the departments must make sure that the resolutions of the 8th Congress of Soviets on drawing working and peasant women into the construction and organisation of the national economy and on their participation in all bodies which guide, administer, control and organise production are being carried out. Through their representatives and through Party bodies, the departments must participate in drafting new laws and influence the redrafting of those which need altering in the interests of the liberation of women. The departments must show particular initiative in developing laws to protect the labour of women and young people.
The departments must draw the greatest possible number of working and peasant women into the Soviet election campaign and see that working and peasant women are elected to the Soviets and their executive committees.
The departments must work for the success of all political and economic campaigns conducted by the Party.
The departments must promote the acquisition of skills by female workers, by improving the technical education of women and making sure that working and peasant women have access to the appropriate educational institutions.
It is the job of the departments to see that working women are included in the enterprise commissions on the protection of labour and that the commissions of aid for the protection of maternity and childhood are more active.
The departments must contribute to the development of the entire network of social institutions: communal dining rooms, laundries, repair shops, institutions of social welfare, house-communes etc., which transform everyday life along new, Communist lines and relieve women of the difficulties of the transitional period. Such social institutions which help emancipate women’s everyday lives, turning the slave of the home and family into a free member of the working class – the class which is its own boss and the creator of new forms of living.
The departments must encourage the education of women trade-union members in Communist ideas, with the help of organisations for work among women set up by the Communist fraction in the trade unions.
The departments must ensure that working women attend general factory and general factory delegate meetings.
The departments must systematically appoint delegate-practitioners to Soviet, economic and union work.
[When delegates were freed from factory work for their term, while retaining a wage, they were called ‘practitioners’. The idea was for them to work in various Soviet institutions and thus gain experience of governing.]
The women’s departments of the Party must above all work to develop firm links with working women and closer contact with housewives, office workers, and poor peasant women.
The departments should call and organise working women’s delegate meetings in order to create firm ties between the Party and the masses, extend the influence of the Party to the non-Party masses and educate the mass of women in Communist ideas through independent activity and participation in practical work.
The delegate meetings are the most effective means of educating working and peasant women; through the delegates the influence of the Party can be extended to the non-Party masses and the backward masses of working and peasant women.
The delegate meetings are to be attended by representatives of the factories of the given region, town or rural area (where it is a question of electing rural delegates through meetings of peasant women) or of the neighbourhood, where it is a question of electing housewife delegates. In Soviet Russia the delegates are involved in every kind of political or economic campaign, sent to work on various enterprise commissions, drawn into control of Soviet institutions and, finally, given work as practitioners for a period of two months in the departments of the Soviets (law of 1921).
The delegates are to be elected at workshop meetings or at meetings of housewives or office workers according to the norm laid down by the Party. The departments must conduct propaganda and agitational work among the delegates, for which purpose meetings are held not less than twice a month. The delegates must report on their activity to their shops or to their residential area meetings. The delegates are elected for a period of three months. Broadly-based non-Party conferences of working and peasant women are the second form of agitation among the female masses. The representatives who attend these conferences are elected at the meetings of working women in the enterprises, and of peasant women in the villages.
The working women’s departments take the lead in caning and organising these conferences.
The departments or commissions conduct consistent and extensive propaganda, both verbal and printed, in order to build on the experience the working women gain from their practical work in the Party. The departments organise meetings and discussions; they organise working women in the factories and housewives in the neighbourhoods, lead delegates’ meetings and conduct house-to-house agitation.
Sections for work among women must be established to train special cadres and to expand work in the Soviet schools at the central and at the district level.
In Bourgeois-Capitalist Countries
The current tasks of the commissions for work among women are dictated by the objective situation. On the one hand, the collapse of the world economy, the horrific growth of unemployment which has the effect of reducing the demand for women workers and increasing prostitution, the high cost of living, the desperate housing shortage and the threats of new imperialist wars; and, on the other hand, the succession of economic strikes by workers everywhere and the repeated attempts to begin the civil war on a world scale – all this is the prologue to world social revolution.
The commissions of working women must concern themselves with the important tasks of the proletariat, fight for the Party’s slogans in their entirety, and involve women in the revolutionary action the Party takes against the bourgeoisie and the social compromisers.
The commissions must make sure not only that women join the Party, the trade unions and other class organisations and have equal rights and equal obligations (they must counter any attempts to isolate or separate off working women), but that women are brought into the leading bodies of the Parties, unions and co-operatives on equal terms with men.
The commissions must encourage the broad layers of the female proletariat and the peasant women to use their electoral rights in the interests of the Communist Parties during elections to parliament and to all social institutions, explaining at the same time that these rights are limited and can do little to weaken capitalist exploitation or further the emancipation of women and that the Soviet system is superior to the parliamentary one.
The commissions must also see that the working women, office workers and peasant women take an active part in the election of revolutionary economic and political Soviets of workers’ deputies – they must bring housewives into political activity and explain the idea of Soviets to the peasant women. The commissions must work in particular to realise the principle of equal pay for equal work. They must also draw working women and men into a campaign for free and universal vocational education which would help women workers increase their skills.
The commissions must see that Communist women take part in the municipal and other legislative organs wherever suffrage laws give this opportunity, introducing them to the revolutionary tactics of their Party. Participating in the legislative, municipal and other organs of the bourgeois states, Communist women must defend the basic principles and tactics of their Party; they must concentrate less on the practical realisation of reforms in the framework of the bourgeois system and more on using the questions and demands that arise out of the urgent needs and everyday experience of working women as revolutionary slogans to draw women into a fight to win these demands through the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The commissions must be in close contact with the parliamentary and local government fractions and discuss with them any questions which relate to women.
The commissions must explain to women that the system of individual domestic economies is backward and uneconomical and that the bourgeois method of bringing up children is far from perfect. They must concentrate the attention of working women on the proposals for improving the everyday life of the working class being put forward or supported by the Party.
The commissions must help draw women trade-union members into the Communist Parties. Special organisers should be appointed to undertake this work under the leadership of the Party or its local sections.
The women’s agitational commissions must do propaganda work to persuade working women in the co-operatives to fight for Communist ideas and assume a leading role in these organisations which will have a very important role to play during and after the revolution as centres of distribution.
The entire work of the commissions must be aimed at developing the revolutionary activity of the masses, and thus hastening the social revolution.
In the Economically Backward Countries (The East)
In countries where industry is underdeveloped the Communist Parties and the departments of working women must make sure that the Party, the unions and the other organisations of the labouring class recognise that women have equal rights and equal responsibilities.
The departments or commissions and the Party must fight all prejudices and all religious and secular customs that oppress women; they must carry out this agitation among men as well.
The Communist Parties and their departments or commissions must take the principles of women’s equality into the spheres of child education, family relations and public life.
The departments must seek support above all from the broad layer of women exploited by capital, i.e., who work in the cottage industries and on the rice and cotton plantations. In the Soviet countries the departments must encourage the setting up of craft workshops. In countries where the bourgeois system still exists, work must be concentrated on organising women who work on the plantations and on drawing them into unions alongside the men.
In the Soviet countries of the East the raising of the general cultural level of the population is the best method of overcoming backwardness and religious prejudices. The departments must encourage the development of schools for adults that are open to women. In the bourgeois countries the commissions must wage a direct struggle against the bourgeois influence in the schools.
Wherever possible, the departments or commissions must do house-to-house agitation. The departments must organise clubs for working women and encourage the most backward of them to join. The clubs must be cultural centres and experimental model institutions that show how women can work towards their emancipation through self-activity (the organisation of creches, nurseries, literacy schools attached to clubs, etc.).
Mobile clubs should be organised to work among nomadic peoples.
In Soviet countries the departments must help the appropriate Soviet organs to make the transition from pre-capitalist forms of economy to social forms of production, convincing working women by practical example that the domestic economy and the previous family form block their emancipation, while social labour liberates them.
In Soviet Russia the departments must see that the legislation which recognises the equal rights of women with men and defends the interests of women is observed among the Eastern peoples. The departments must encourage women to work as judges and juries in national courts of law.
The departments must also involve women in the Soviet elections, checking the social composition of the working and peasant women in the Soviets and executive committees. Work among the female proletariat of the East must be carried out on a class basis. The departments have to show that the feminists are incapable of finding a solution to the question of female emancipation. In the Soviet countries of the East, women of the intelligentsia (teachers, for example) who sympathise with Communism should be drawn into educational campaigns. Avoiding tactless and crude attacks on religious beliefs or national traditions, the departments or commissions working among the women of the East must still struggle against nationalism and the power of religion over people’s minds.
In the East, as in the West, the organisation of working women must be geared not to the defence of national interests but to the unity of the international proletariat of both sexes around the common goals of the class.
[Because work among women of the East is so important and at the same time so new, special instructions are appended to the theses which explain how the basic methods of Communist Party work among women are to be applied in the specific conditions of everyday life in the East.]
Methods of Agitation and Propaganda
The Communist Parties of the West and East must grasp the basic principle of work among women – ‘agitation and propaganda through action’. Then they will be capable of carrying out their most important task, which is the Communist education of the women of the proletariat and the training of fighters for Communism.
Agitation by action means above all encouraging working women to self-activity, dispelling the doubts they have about their own abilities and drawing them into practical work in the sphere of construction or struggle. It means teaching them through experience to know that every gain made by the Communist Party, every action directed against the exploitation of capital, is a step towards improving the position of women. Firstly, practice and action, that lead to an understanding of Communist ideals and theoretical principles; and secondly, theory, that leads to practice and action – these are the methods of work the Communist Parties and their working women’s departments must employ in approaching the mass of women.
The departments must be in close contact with the Communist cells in the enterprises and workshops, making sure that each cell has an organiser to carry out work among women in the factory in question. In this way the departments will be centres of action and not of verbal propaganda alone.
The departments and the trade unions must keep in contact through their representatives or organisers, who are appointed by the trade-union fractions but conduct their work under the leadership of the departments.
In the Soviet countries the spreading of Communist ideas through action means bringing working women, peasant women, housewives and women office workers into all branches of Soviet construction, ranging from the army and the police through to those which directly emancipate women by their organisation of communal eating, a network of institutions of social education, the protection of motherhood, etc. It is particularly important at the present moment to draw working women into work connected with the restoration of the national economy.
In the capitalist countries propaganda by deed means above all encouraging working women to participate in strikes, demonstrations and any type of struggle which strengthens and deepens their revolutionary will and consciousness. It also means drawing them into all types of Party work, including illegal work (especially liaison work) and the organisation of Party subbotniks or Sundays at which the wives of workers and women office workers who sympathise with Communism work voluntarily for the Party and organise sessions to sew and repair children’s clothes, etc.
The principle of drawing women into all the Parties’ political, economic and educational campaigns is one aspect of propaganda by action.
In the capitalist countries the departments must extend their activity and their influence to the most backward and oppressed female proletariat. In the Soviet countries they must conduct their work among the proletarian and semi-proletarian female masses, enslaved by the conditions and prejudices of everyday life.
The commissions must carry out work among the working women, housewives and peasant women, and the women engaged in mental labour (the intelligentsia).
For the purposes of propaganda and agitation, the commissions must organise public meetings, meetings at individual enterprises and meetings of working women and women office-workers (either by trade or by district). They must also organise general women’s meetings, meetings of housewives, etc.
In capitalist countries the commissions make sure that the fractions of the Communist Parties in the trade unions, co-operatives and factory councils appoint women’s organisers; that, in other words, they have representatives in all organisations which help develop the revolutionary activity of the proletariat towards seizure of power. In Soviet countries they encourage the appointment of working and peasant women to all Soviet organisations which lead, administer and control social life and which serve to support the proletarian dictatorship and contribute to the realisation of Communism.
The commissions must assign proletarian women Communists to work in factories or offices where there are a large number of women; they must send Communist working women into large proletarian neighbourhoods and industrial centres, as has been tried with success in Soviet Russia.
Commissions for work amongst women must make use of the highly successful experience of the women’s department of the RCP in order to organise delegates’ meetings and non-Party conferences of working and peasant women. Meetings of working women and women office-workers from various sectors, and of peasant women and housewives, must be organised, at which concrete demands and needs are discussed and commissions elected. These commissions must keep in close touch with those who elect them and with the commissions for work among women. The commissions must send their agitators to take part in debates at the meetings of parties hostile to Communism. Propaganda and agitation through meetings and debates must be complemented by well-organised house-to-house agitation. The Communist women doing this work must each be responsible for no more than ten households; they must make visits at least once a week to do agitation among housewives, and call more frequently when the Communist Party is conducting a campaign or is preparing any kind of action.
The commissions are instructed to use the written word in the course of their agitational, organisational and educational work:
1 to help publish a central paper on work among women in every country;
2 to guarantee the publication of ‘Working women’s pages’ or special supplements in the Party press, and also the inclusion of articles on questions of work amongst women in the general Party and trade-union press; the commissions are responsible for the appointment of editors to the above-mentioned publications and training working women, both Party members and non-Party members, to work for the press.
The commissions must see to the issuing of popular agitational and educational literature in the forms of leaflets and pamphlets and they must help in their distribution.
The commissions must enable Communist women to make the most effective use of all political and educational institutions of the Party.
The commissions must work to strengthen the class consciousness and militancy of the young Communist women, involving them in general Party courses and discussion evenings. Special evenings of reading and discussion or a series of talks especially for working women should be organised only where they are really necessary and expedient.
In order to strengthen comradeship between working women and working men, it is desirable not to organise special courses and schools for Communist women, but all general Party schools must without fail include a course on the methods of work among women. The departments must have the right to delegate a certain number of their representatives to the general Party courses.
The Structure of the Departments
Departments and commissions of work among women are attached to every Party committee, at local and regional Party level and at CC level. The size is determined by the Party and depends on the needs of the particular country. The number of paid workers on these commissions is also determined by the Party in accordance with its financial resources.
The director of the women’s agitational department or the person chairing the commission should be a member of the local Party committee. Where this is not the case the director of the department should be present at all the sessions of the committee with full voting rights on all questions concerning the women’s department and a consultative vote on all other questions.
As well as the above-mentioned general work, the district or county department or commission has the following additional functions: encouraging contact between the departments of the given district and the central department; collecting information about the activity of the departments or commissions of the district/region in question; ensuring that the local departments have the opportunity to exchange material; supplying the district/county with literature; sending agitators to the districts; mobilising Party members for work amongst women; calling district/county conferences not less than twice a year, at which each department is represented by one or two Communist women; and holding non-Party conferences of working and peasant women and housewives of the given district/county.
The members of the collegium are nominated by the head of the department or commission and approved by the county or district committee. The director is elected in the same way as other members of the district and county committees – at the district or county Party conference.
The members of the district/county and local departments or commissions are elected at town, district or county conferences or are appointed by the appropriate departments in contact with the Party committees.
If the director of the women’s department is not a member of the district Party committee/country Party committee, she has the right to be present at all the sessions of the Party committee with full voting rights on questions concerning the departments and a consultative vote on all other questions.
The central Party department, in addition to the functions listed for the district/county departments, also instructs the women’s agitational department over questions of Party work, supervises the work of the departments, directs, in contact with the appropriate Party bodies, the allocation of personnel engaged in work amongst women, checks the conditions and progress of female labour, bearing in mind the changes in the legal and economic situation of women, participates through its representatives or authorised persons in special commissions working on the question of improving or changing the everyday life of the working class, the protection of labour and childhood, etc., publishes a ‘central women’s page’, edits a regular journal for working women, calls a meeting, not less than once a year, for the representatives of all the district/county departments, organises national speaking tours for instructors on work among women, ensures that working women and all departments take part in all the Party’s political and economic campaigns and actions, delegates a representative to the International Secretariat of Communist women and organises an annual International Working Women’s Day.
If the director of the women’s department is not a member of the CC, she has the right to be present at all sessions of the CC with full voting rights on questions concerning the departments, and with a consultative vote on all other questions. The director of the women’s department or the chairperson of the commission is appointed by the CC of the Party or is elected at an all – Party Congress. Decisions and resolutions passed by all departments or commissions have to be finally approved by the appropriate Party committee. The size of the central department and the number of members to have full voting rights are decided by the CC of the Party.
On International Work
The International women’s Secretariat of the Communist International leads the women’s work of the Communist Parties at the international level, unites working women to struggle for the goals put forward by the Communist International, and draws women of all countries and all peoples into the revolutionary struggle for the power of the Soviets and the dictatorship of the working class.
Markin comment:
Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.
No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.
The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.
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Methods and Forms of Work among Communist Party Women: Theses
Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
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8 July 1921
Basic Principles
1 The Third Congress of the Communist International, in conjunction with the Second International Conference of Communist women, confirms once again the decision of the First and Second Congresses that all the Communist Parties of the West and the East need to increase work amongst the female proletariat, educating the broad mass of working women in Communist ideas and drawing them into the struggle for Soviet power, for the construction of the Soviet workers’ republic.
Throughout the world the working class, and consequently working women as well, are confronting the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The capitalist economic system has entered a blind alley; there is no scope for the development of the productive forces within the framework of capitalism. The sharp decline in living standards of the working people, the inability of the bourgeoisie to restore production, the rise of speculation, the disintegration of production, unemployment, price fluctuations and the gap between prices and wages, lead everywhere to the inevitable sharpening of the class struggle. This struggle decides who and which system is to lead, administer and organise production – either a small group of bourgeois or the working class basing itself on the principles of Communism.
The newly emergent proletarian class must, in accordance with the laws of economic development, take the apparatus of production into its own hands and create new economic forms. Only then will it be in a position to encourage the maximum development of the productive forces, which are held in cheek by the anarchy of capitalist production.
While power is in the hands of the bourgeois class, the proletariat is unable to organise production. While they keep this power there are no reforms or measures that the democratic or socialist governments of the bourgeois countries could adopt to save the situation or alleviate the terrible and unbearable sufferings of the working women and men which result from the collapse of the capitalist economic system. Only by seizing power can the class of producers take hold of the means of production, thus making it possible to direct economic development in the interests of the working people.
To accelerate the inevitable and final battle between the proletariat and the obsolete bourgeois world, the working class must adhere firmly and without hesitation to the tactics outlined by the III International. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the fundamental and immediate goal and this determines for the proletariat of both sexes the methods of work and the direction the struggle takes.
The struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is the most important question facing the proletariat in the capitalist countries. In those countries where dictatorship is already in the hands of the workers, the building of a Communist society is the vital question. The III Congress of the Communist International maintains that without the active participation of the broad masses of the female proletariat and the semi-proletarian women, the proletariat can neither seize power nor realise communism.
At the same time, the Congress once again draws the attention of all women to the fact that without Communist Party support for all the projects leading to the liberation of women, the recognition of women’s rights as equal human beings and their real emancipation cannot in practice be won.
2 In the present period particularly, it is in the interests of the working class that women are drawn into the organised ranks of the proletariat as it fights for Communism. As the economic dislocation increases on a world scale and the consequences press more heavily on all the urban and rural poor, the question of social revolution is more sharply posed for the working class of the bourgeois-capitalist countries, while the working people of Soviet Russia face the task of creating a national economy on new Communist lines. The active, conscious and determined participation of women will ensure that these goals are more easily realised.
Where the question of winning power is posed directly, the Communist Party has to take into account the enormous danger presented to the revolution by the masses of passive working women who are outside the movement – the housewives, office workers and peasant women who are still under the influence of the bourgeois world-view, the church and tradition, and have no links with the great liberation movement for communism. Women that stand outside this movement are inevitably a stronghold of bourgeois ideas and a target for counter-revolutionary propaganda, both in the West and in the East. The experience of the Hungarian revolution, where women’s lack of class consciousness played such a sad role, must serve as a warning for the proletariat elsewhere as it takes the road of social revolution.
On the other hand, events in the Soviet republic are a concrete example of how essential the participation of working and peasant women is in the civil war, the defence of the republic and all other areas of Soviet life. The important role that working and peasant women have already played in the Soviet republic has been clearly shown: in organising defence, strengthening the home front, combating desertion and all kinds of counter-revolutionary activity, sabotage, etc. Other countries must study and learn from the experience of the workers’ republic.
It follows that the Communist Parties must extend their influence over the widest layers of the female population by means of organising special apparatuses inside the Party and establishing special methods of approaching women, with the aim of liberating them from the influence of the bourgeois world-view or the influence of the compromising parties, and of educating them to be resolute fighters for Communism and consequently for the full development of women.
3 While making the improvement of Party work amongst the female proletariat an immediate task of both the Western and Eastern Communist Parties, the III Congress of the Communist International at the same time points out to the working women of the whole world that their liberation from centuries of enslavement, lack of rights and inequality is possible only through the victory of Communism, and that the bourgeois women’s movement is completely incapable of guaranteeing women that which Communism gives. So long as the power of capital and private property exists, the liberation of woman from dependence on a husband can go no further than the right to dispose of her own property and her own wage and decide on equal terms with her husband the future of her children.
The most radical feminist demand – the extension of the suffrage to women in the framework of bourgeois parliamentarianism – does not solve the question of real equality for women, especially those of the propertyless classes. The experience of working women in all those capitalist countries in which, over recent years, the bourgeoisie has introduced formal equality of the sexes makes this clear. The vote does not destroy the prime cause of women’s enslavement in the family and society. Some bourgeois states have substituted civil marriage for indissoluble marriage. But as long as the proletarian woman remains economically dependent upon the capitalist boss and her husband, the breadwinner, and in the absence of comprehensive measures to protect motherhood and childhood and provide socialised child-care and education, this cannot equalise the position of women in marriage or solve the problem of relationships between the sexes.
The real equality of women, as opposed to formal and superficial equality, will be achieved only under Communism, when women and all the other members of the labouring class will become co-owners of the means of production and distribution and will take part in administering them, and women will share on an equal footing with all the members of the labour society the duty to work; in other words, it will be achieved by overthrowing the capitalist system of production and exploitation which is based on the exploitation of human labour,and by organising a Communist economy.
Only Communism creates conditions whereby the conflict between the natural function of woman – maternity – and her social obligations, which hinder her creative work for the collective, will disappear and the harmonious and many-sided development of a healthy and balanced personality firmly and closely in tune with the life and goals of the labour-collective will be completed. All women who fight for the emancipation of woman and the recognition of her rights must have as their aim the creation of a Communist society.
But Communism is also the final aim of the proletariat as a whole and therefore, in the interests of both sides, the two struggles must be fought as ‘a single and indivisible’ struggle.
4 The Third Congress of the Communist International supports the basic position of revolutionary Marxism that there is no ‘special’ women’s question, nor should there be a special women’s movement, and that any alliance between working women and bourgeois feminism or support for the vacillating or clearly right-wing tactics of the social compromisers and opportunists will lead to the weakening of the forces of the proletariat, thereby delaying the great hour of the full emancipation of women.
A Communist society will be won not by the united efforts of women of different classes, but by the united struggle of all the exploited.
The masses of proletarian women must, in their own interests, support the revolutionary tactics of the Communist Party and take as active and direct a part as possible in mass action and in every type and form of civil war that emerges both on the national and international scale.
5 At its highest stage, the struggle of women against their dual oppression (by capitalism and by their own domestic family dependence) must take on an international character, developing into a struggle (fought under the banner of the III International) by the proletariat of both sexes for their dictatorship and for the Soviet system.
6 The III Congress of the Communist International warns working women against any kind of co-operation or agreement with bourgeois feminists. At the same time, it makes clear to proletarian women that any illusions that it is possible to support the II International or opportunist elements close to it without damaging the cause of women’s liberation will do serious harm to the liberation struggle of the proletariat. Women must never forget that the slavery of women is rooted in the bourgeois system and that to end this slavery a new Communist society has to be brought into being.
The support working women give to the groups and parties of the II and Two-and-a-Half Internationals is a brake on the social revolution, delaying the advent of the new order. If women turn from the II and Two-and-a-Half Internationals with resolution and without compromise, the victory of the social revolution will be more sure. Communist women must condemn all those who are afraid of the revolutionary tactics of the Communist International and stand firm for their exclusion from the closed ranks of the Communist International.
Women must remember that the II International has never even tried to set up any kind of organisation to further the struggle for the full liberation of women. The international unification of Socialist women was begun outside the framework of the II International at the initiative of working women themselves. The Socialist women who conducted special work amongst women had neither status nor representation nor full voting rights.
At its very first Congress, in 1919, the Third International clearly formulated its attitude to the question of drawing women into the struggle for proletarian dictatorship. The Congress called a conference of women Communists and in 1920 an International Secretariat for work amongst women was established with a permanent representative on the Executive Committee of the Communist International. All class-conscious working women should break unconditionally with the II and Two-and-a-Half Internationals and give their support to the revolutionary line of the Communist International.
7 Women who work in factories, offices and fields must show their support for the Communist International by joining the Communist Parties. In those countries and parties where the struggle between the II and III International has not yet come to a head, working women must do all they can to support the party or group which is standing for the Communist International and, whatever the accepted leaders say or do, must ruthlessly fight against all who are vacillating or have gone over openly to the other side. Class-conscious proletarian women who want emancipation must not stay in parties which stand outside the Communist International.
To be against the III International is to be an enemy of the liberation of women.
Class-conscious working women in both the West and East should support the Communist International as members of the Communist Parties of their countries. Any hesitation on their part, or fear of breaking with the familiar compromising parties and the recognised leaders disastrously affects the success of the great proletarian struggle which is developing into a ruthless and global civil war.
Methods and Forms of Work among Women
The III Congress of the Communist International holds, therefore, that work among the female proletariat must be conducted by all Communist Parties on the following basis:
1 Women must be included in all the militant class organisations – the Party, the trade unions, the co-operatives, Soviets of factory representatives etc., with equal rights and equal responsibilities.
2 The importance must be recognised of drawing women into all areas of the active struggle of the proletariat (including the military defence of the proletariat) and of constructing in all areas the foundations of a new society and organising production and everyday life on Communist lines.
3 The maternal function must be recognised as a social function and the appropriate measures to defend and protect women as child-bearers must be taken or fought for.
The III Congress of the Communist International is firmly opposed to any kind of separate women’s associations in the Parties and trade unions or special women’s organisations, but it accepts that special
methods of work among women are necessary and that every Communist Party should set up a special apparatus for this work. In adopting this position, the Congress takes into consideration the following:
a) the oppression women suffer in everyday life not only in the bourgeois-capitalist countries, but in countries with a Soviet structure, in transition from capitalism to communism;
b) the great passivity and political backwardness of the female masses, which is to be explained by the fact that for centuries women have been excluded from social life and enslaved in the family;
c) the special function – childbirth – which nature assigns to women, and the specificities connected with this function, call for the greater protection of their energies and health in the interests of the whole collective.
The III Congress of the Communist International therefore recognises that a special apparatus for conducting work among women is necessary. This apparatus must consist of departments or commissions for work among women, attached to every Party committee at all levels, from the CC of the Party right down to the urban, district or local Party committee. This decision is binding on all Parties in the Communist International.
The Third Congress of the Communist International indicates that the tasks of the Communist Parties to be carried out through these departments include the following:
1 to educate women in Communist ideas and draw them into the ranks of the Party;
2 to fight the prejudices against women held by the mass of the male proletariat, and increase the awareness of working men and women that they have common interests;
3 to strengthen the will of working women by drawing them into all forms and types of civil conflict, encouraging women in the bourgeois countries to participate in the struggle against capitalist exploitation, in mass action against the high cost of living, against the housing shortage, unemployment and around other social problems, and women in the Soviet republics to take part in the formation of the Communist personality and the Communist way of life;
4 to put on the Party’s agenda and to include in legislative proposals questions directly concerning the emancipation of women, confirming their liberation, defending their interests as child-bearers;
5 to conduct a well-planned struggle against the power of tradition, bourgeois customs and religious ideas, clearing the way for healthier and more harmonious relations between the sexes, guaranteeing the physical and moral vitality of working people.
The Party committees directly lead and are responsible for all the work of the women’s departments or commissions. The head of the department or commission must be a member of the Party committee. Wherever possible, the members of the departments or commissions should be Communists.
The commissions or departments of working women should not work independently. In the Soviet countries they should work through the appropriate economic or political organs (Soviet departments, commissions, trade unions); in capitalist countries they should have the support of the appropriate proletarian organisations: Party, unions, Soviets, etc.
Wherever Communist Parties exist illegally or semi-legally, they must still create an apparatus for work among women. This apparatus must be subordinate to the general Party apparatus and adapt to the situation of illegality. All local, regional and central illegal organisations should have, in the same way as legal organisations, one woman comrade responsible for organising propaganda among women. In the modern epoch the trade unions, production unions and co-operatives must serve as the basis for Party work among women both in countries where the struggle for the overthrow of capital is still in progress and in the Soviet workers’ republics.
Work amongst women must be informed by an understanding of the unity of the Party movement and organisation, but at the same time show independent initiative and, proceeding independently from other Party commissions or sections, work towards the rapid and full emancipation of women. The goal should be not to duplicate work but to enable working women to help the Party and its activities.
Party Work among Women in the Soviet Countries
In the Soviet workers’ republic the role of the departments is to educate the women in Communist ideas, to draw them into the Communist Party and develop their self-activity and independence, involving them in the construction of Communism and educating them to be firm defenders of the Communist International.
The departments must help women take part in all branches of Soviet construction, in matters ranging from defence to the many and complex economic plans of the republic.
In the Soviet republic the departments must make sure that the resolutions of the 8th Congress of Soviets on drawing working and peasant women into the construction and organisation of the national economy and on their participation in all bodies which guide, administer, control and organise production are being carried out. Through their representatives and through Party bodies, the departments must participate in drafting new laws and influence the redrafting of those which need altering in the interests of the liberation of women. The departments must show particular initiative in developing laws to protect the labour of women and young people.
The departments must draw the greatest possible number of working and peasant women into the Soviet election campaign and see that working and peasant women are elected to the Soviets and their executive committees.
The departments must work for the success of all political and economic campaigns conducted by the Party.
The departments must promote the acquisition of skills by female workers, by improving the technical education of women and making sure that working and peasant women have access to the appropriate educational institutions.
It is the job of the departments to see that working women are included in the enterprise commissions on the protection of labour and that the commissions of aid for the protection of maternity and childhood are more active.
The departments must contribute to the development of the entire network of social institutions: communal dining rooms, laundries, repair shops, institutions of social welfare, house-communes etc., which transform everyday life along new, Communist lines and relieve women of the difficulties of the transitional period. Such social institutions which help emancipate women’s everyday lives, turning the slave of the home and family into a free member of the working class – the class which is its own boss and the creator of new forms of living.
The departments must encourage the education of women trade-union members in Communist ideas, with the help of organisations for work among women set up by the Communist fraction in the trade unions.
The departments must ensure that working women attend general factory and general factory delegate meetings.
The departments must systematically appoint delegate-practitioners to Soviet, economic and union work.
[When delegates were freed from factory work for their term, while retaining a wage, they were called ‘practitioners’. The idea was for them to work in various Soviet institutions and thus gain experience of governing.]
The women’s departments of the Party must above all work to develop firm links with working women and closer contact with housewives, office workers, and poor peasant women.
The departments should call and organise working women’s delegate meetings in order to create firm ties between the Party and the masses, extend the influence of the Party to the non-Party masses and educate the mass of women in Communist ideas through independent activity and participation in practical work.
The delegate meetings are the most effective means of educating working and peasant women; through the delegates the influence of the Party can be extended to the non-Party masses and the backward masses of working and peasant women.
The delegate meetings are to be attended by representatives of the factories of the given region, town or rural area (where it is a question of electing rural delegates through meetings of peasant women) or of the neighbourhood, where it is a question of electing housewife delegates. In Soviet Russia the delegates are involved in every kind of political or economic campaign, sent to work on various enterprise commissions, drawn into control of Soviet institutions and, finally, given work as practitioners for a period of two months in the departments of the Soviets (law of 1921).
The delegates are to be elected at workshop meetings or at meetings of housewives or office workers according to the norm laid down by the Party. The departments must conduct propaganda and agitational work among the delegates, for which purpose meetings are held not less than twice a month. The delegates must report on their activity to their shops or to their residential area meetings. The delegates are elected for a period of three months. Broadly-based non-Party conferences of working and peasant women are the second form of agitation among the female masses. The representatives who attend these conferences are elected at the meetings of working women in the enterprises, and of peasant women in the villages.
The working women’s departments take the lead in caning and organising these conferences.
The departments or commissions conduct consistent and extensive propaganda, both verbal and printed, in order to build on the experience the working women gain from their practical work in the Party. The departments organise meetings and discussions; they organise working women in the factories and housewives in the neighbourhoods, lead delegates’ meetings and conduct house-to-house agitation.
Sections for work among women must be established to train special cadres and to expand work in the Soviet schools at the central and at the district level.
In Bourgeois-Capitalist Countries
The current tasks of the commissions for work among women are dictated by the objective situation. On the one hand, the collapse of the world economy, the horrific growth of unemployment which has the effect of reducing the demand for women workers and increasing prostitution, the high cost of living, the desperate housing shortage and the threats of new imperialist wars; and, on the other hand, the succession of economic strikes by workers everywhere and the repeated attempts to begin the civil war on a world scale – all this is the prologue to world social revolution.
The commissions of working women must concern themselves with the important tasks of the proletariat, fight for the Party’s slogans in their entirety, and involve women in the revolutionary action the Party takes against the bourgeoisie and the social compromisers.
The commissions must make sure not only that women join the Party, the trade unions and other class organisations and have equal rights and equal obligations (they must counter any attempts to isolate or separate off working women), but that women are brought into the leading bodies of the Parties, unions and co-operatives on equal terms with men.
The commissions must encourage the broad layers of the female proletariat and the peasant women to use their electoral rights in the interests of the Communist Parties during elections to parliament and to all social institutions, explaining at the same time that these rights are limited and can do little to weaken capitalist exploitation or further the emancipation of women and that the Soviet system is superior to the parliamentary one.
The commissions must also see that the working women, office workers and peasant women take an active part in the election of revolutionary economic and political Soviets of workers’ deputies – they must bring housewives into political activity and explain the idea of Soviets to the peasant women. The commissions must work in particular to realise the principle of equal pay for equal work. They must also draw working women and men into a campaign for free and universal vocational education which would help women workers increase their skills.
The commissions must see that Communist women take part in the municipal and other legislative organs wherever suffrage laws give this opportunity, introducing them to the revolutionary tactics of their Party. Participating in the legislative, municipal and other organs of the bourgeois states, Communist women must defend the basic principles and tactics of their Party; they must concentrate less on the practical realisation of reforms in the framework of the bourgeois system and more on using the questions and demands that arise out of the urgent needs and everyday experience of working women as revolutionary slogans to draw women into a fight to win these demands through the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The commissions must be in close contact with the parliamentary and local government fractions and discuss with them any questions which relate to women.
The commissions must explain to women that the system of individual domestic economies is backward and uneconomical and that the bourgeois method of bringing up children is far from perfect. They must concentrate the attention of working women on the proposals for improving the everyday life of the working class being put forward or supported by the Party.
The commissions must help draw women trade-union members into the Communist Parties. Special organisers should be appointed to undertake this work under the leadership of the Party or its local sections.
The women’s agitational commissions must do propaganda work to persuade working women in the co-operatives to fight for Communist ideas and assume a leading role in these organisations which will have a very important role to play during and after the revolution as centres of distribution.
The entire work of the commissions must be aimed at developing the revolutionary activity of the masses, and thus hastening the social revolution.
In the Economically Backward Countries (The East)
In countries where industry is underdeveloped the Communist Parties and the departments of working women must make sure that the Party, the unions and the other organisations of the labouring class recognise that women have equal rights and equal responsibilities.
The departments or commissions and the Party must fight all prejudices and all religious and secular customs that oppress women; they must carry out this agitation among men as well.
The Communist Parties and their departments or commissions must take the principles of women’s equality into the spheres of child education, family relations and public life.
The departments must seek support above all from the broad layer of women exploited by capital, i.e., who work in the cottage industries and on the rice and cotton plantations. In the Soviet countries the departments must encourage the setting up of craft workshops. In countries where the bourgeois system still exists, work must be concentrated on organising women who work on the plantations and on drawing them into unions alongside the men.
In the Soviet countries of the East the raising of the general cultural level of the population is the best method of overcoming backwardness and religious prejudices. The departments must encourage the development of schools for adults that are open to women. In the bourgeois countries the commissions must wage a direct struggle against the bourgeois influence in the schools.
Wherever possible, the departments or commissions must do house-to-house agitation. The departments must organise clubs for working women and encourage the most backward of them to join. The clubs must be cultural centres and experimental model institutions that show how women can work towards their emancipation through self-activity (the organisation of creches, nurseries, literacy schools attached to clubs, etc.).
Mobile clubs should be organised to work among nomadic peoples.
In Soviet countries the departments must help the appropriate Soviet organs to make the transition from pre-capitalist forms of economy to social forms of production, convincing working women by practical example that the domestic economy and the previous family form block their emancipation, while social labour liberates them.
In Soviet Russia the departments must see that the legislation which recognises the equal rights of women with men and defends the interests of women is observed among the Eastern peoples. The departments must encourage women to work as judges and juries in national courts of law.
The departments must also involve women in the Soviet elections, checking the social composition of the working and peasant women in the Soviets and executive committees. Work among the female proletariat of the East must be carried out on a class basis. The departments have to show that the feminists are incapable of finding a solution to the question of female emancipation. In the Soviet countries of the East, women of the intelligentsia (teachers, for example) who sympathise with Communism should be drawn into educational campaigns. Avoiding tactless and crude attacks on religious beliefs or national traditions, the departments or commissions working among the women of the East must still struggle against nationalism and the power of religion over people’s minds.
In the East, as in the West, the organisation of working women must be geared not to the defence of national interests but to the unity of the international proletariat of both sexes around the common goals of the class.
[Because work among women of the East is so important and at the same time so new, special instructions are appended to the theses which explain how the basic methods of Communist Party work among women are to be applied in the specific conditions of everyday life in the East.]
Methods of Agitation and Propaganda
The Communist Parties of the West and East must grasp the basic principle of work among women – ‘agitation and propaganda through action’. Then they will be capable of carrying out their most important task, which is the Communist education of the women of the proletariat and the training of fighters for Communism.
Agitation by action means above all encouraging working women to self-activity, dispelling the doubts they have about their own abilities and drawing them into practical work in the sphere of construction or struggle. It means teaching them through experience to know that every gain made by the Communist Party, every action directed against the exploitation of capital, is a step towards improving the position of women. Firstly, practice and action, that lead to an understanding of Communist ideals and theoretical principles; and secondly, theory, that leads to practice and action – these are the methods of work the Communist Parties and their working women’s departments must employ in approaching the mass of women.
The departments must be in close contact with the Communist cells in the enterprises and workshops, making sure that each cell has an organiser to carry out work among women in the factory in question. In this way the departments will be centres of action and not of verbal propaganda alone.
The departments and the trade unions must keep in contact through their representatives or organisers, who are appointed by the trade-union fractions but conduct their work under the leadership of the departments.
In the Soviet countries the spreading of Communist ideas through action means bringing working women, peasant women, housewives and women office workers into all branches of Soviet construction, ranging from the army and the police through to those which directly emancipate women by their organisation of communal eating, a network of institutions of social education, the protection of motherhood, etc. It is particularly important at the present moment to draw working women into work connected with the restoration of the national economy.
In the capitalist countries propaganda by deed means above all encouraging working women to participate in strikes, demonstrations and any type of struggle which strengthens and deepens their revolutionary will and consciousness. It also means drawing them into all types of Party work, including illegal work (especially liaison work) and the organisation of Party subbotniks or Sundays at which the wives of workers and women office workers who sympathise with Communism work voluntarily for the Party and organise sessions to sew and repair children’s clothes, etc.
The principle of drawing women into all the Parties’ political, economic and educational campaigns is one aspect of propaganda by action.
In the capitalist countries the departments must extend their activity and their influence to the most backward and oppressed female proletariat. In the Soviet countries they must conduct their work among the proletarian and semi-proletarian female masses, enslaved by the conditions and prejudices of everyday life.
The commissions must carry out work among the working women, housewives and peasant women, and the women engaged in mental labour (the intelligentsia).
For the purposes of propaganda and agitation, the commissions must organise public meetings, meetings at individual enterprises and meetings of working women and women office-workers (either by trade or by district). They must also organise general women’s meetings, meetings of housewives, etc.
In capitalist countries the commissions make sure that the fractions of the Communist Parties in the trade unions, co-operatives and factory councils appoint women’s organisers; that, in other words, they have representatives in all organisations which help develop the revolutionary activity of the proletariat towards seizure of power. In Soviet countries they encourage the appointment of working and peasant women to all Soviet organisations which lead, administer and control social life and which serve to support the proletarian dictatorship and contribute to the realisation of Communism.
The commissions must assign proletarian women Communists to work in factories or offices where there are a large number of women; they must send Communist working women into large proletarian neighbourhoods and industrial centres, as has been tried with success in Soviet Russia.
Commissions for work amongst women must make use of the highly successful experience of the women’s department of the RCP in order to organise delegates’ meetings and non-Party conferences of working and peasant women. Meetings of working women and women office-workers from various sectors, and of peasant women and housewives, must be organised, at which concrete demands and needs are discussed and commissions elected. These commissions must keep in close touch with those who elect them and with the commissions for work among women. The commissions must send their agitators to take part in debates at the meetings of parties hostile to Communism. Propaganda and agitation through meetings and debates must be complemented by well-organised house-to-house agitation. The Communist women doing this work must each be responsible for no more than ten households; they must make visits at least once a week to do agitation among housewives, and call more frequently when the Communist Party is conducting a campaign or is preparing any kind of action.
The commissions are instructed to use the written word in the course of their agitational, organisational and educational work:
1 to help publish a central paper on work among women in every country;
2 to guarantee the publication of ‘Working women’s pages’ or special supplements in the Party press, and also the inclusion of articles on questions of work amongst women in the general Party and trade-union press; the commissions are responsible for the appointment of editors to the above-mentioned publications and training working women, both Party members and non-Party members, to work for the press.
The commissions must see to the issuing of popular agitational and educational literature in the forms of leaflets and pamphlets and they must help in their distribution.
The commissions must enable Communist women to make the most effective use of all political and educational institutions of the Party.
The commissions must work to strengthen the class consciousness and militancy of the young Communist women, involving them in general Party courses and discussion evenings. Special evenings of reading and discussion or a series of talks especially for working women should be organised only where they are really necessary and expedient.
In order to strengthen comradeship between working women and working men, it is desirable not to organise special courses and schools for Communist women, but all general Party schools must without fail include a course on the methods of work among women. The departments must have the right to delegate a certain number of their representatives to the general Party courses.
The Structure of the Departments
Departments and commissions of work among women are attached to every Party committee, at local and regional Party level and at CC level. The size is determined by the Party and depends on the needs of the particular country. The number of paid workers on these commissions is also determined by the Party in accordance with its financial resources.
The director of the women’s agitational department or the person chairing the commission should be a member of the local Party committee. Where this is not the case the director of the department should be present at all the sessions of the committee with full voting rights on all questions concerning the women’s department and a consultative vote on all other questions.
As well as the above-mentioned general work, the district or county department or commission has the following additional functions: encouraging contact between the departments of the given district and the central department; collecting information about the activity of the departments or commissions of the district/region in question; ensuring that the local departments have the opportunity to exchange material; supplying the district/county with literature; sending agitators to the districts; mobilising Party members for work amongst women; calling district/county conferences not less than twice a year, at which each department is represented by one or two Communist women; and holding non-Party conferences of working and peasant women and housewives of the given district/county.
The members of the collegium are nominated by the head of the department or commission and approved by the county or district committee. The director is elected in the same way as other members of the district and county committees – at the district or county Party conference.
The members of the district/county and local departments or commissions are elected at town, district or county conferences or are appointed by the appropriate departments in contact with the Party committees.
If the director of the women’s department is not a member of the district Party committee/country Party committee, she has the right to be present at all the sessions of the Party committee with full voting rights on questions concerning the departments and a consultative vote on all other questions.
The central Party department, in addition to the functions listed for the district/county departments, also instructs the women’s agitational department over questions of Party work, supervises the work of the departments, directs, in contact with the appropriate Party bodies, the allocation of personnel engaged in work amongst women, checks the conditions and progress of female labour, bearing in mind the changes in the legal and economic situation of women, participates through its representatives or authorised persons in special commissions working on the question of improving or changing the everyday life of the working class, the protection of labour and childhood, etc., publishes a ‘central women’s page’, edits a regular journal for working women, calls a meeting, not less than once a year, for the representatives of all the district/county departments, organises national speaking tours for instructors on work among women, ensures that working women and all departments take part in all the Party’s political and economic campaigns and actions, delegates a representative to the International Secretariat of Communist women and organises an annual International Working Women’s Day.
If the director of the women’s department is not a member of the CC, she has the right to be present at all sessions of the CC with full voting rights on questions concerning the departments, and with a consultative vote on all other questions. The director of the women’s department or the chairperson of the commission is appointed by the CC of the Party or is elected at an all – Party Congress. Decisions and resolutions passed by all departments or commissions have to be finally approved by the appropriate Party committee. The size of the central department and the number of members to have full voting rights are decided by the CC of the Party.
On International Work
The International women’s Secretariat of the Communist International leads the women’s work of the Communist Parties at the international level, unites working women to struggle for the goals put forward by the Communist International, and draws women of all countries and all peoples into the revolutionary struggle for the power of the Soviets and the dictatorship of the working class.
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