From The International Communist League's Marxist Bulletin Series-War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International:The Birth of the Comintern (1919)

War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International:
The Birth of the Comintern (1919)

by George Foster New York, 14 June 1998

This class series will attempt to take to heart comrade Lenin's injunction in "Left-Wing" Communism: rather than simply hailing soviet power and the October Revolution, the real point is to study the experience of the Bolshevik Party in order to assimilate the lessons and international significance of October. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed that our capacity to understand the world— and he was referring to class society in particular—is in direct proportion to our ability to intervene in it. And as comrade Robertson recently observed, the lessons of the October Revolution and the Communist International have for us Marxists a very deep validity. They mark the high point of the workers movement, to be contrasted with the current valley in which we today find ourselves situated. This class will consider the First Congress of the Third International which took place in March 1919, in the midst of a civil war in which the October Revolution was fighting for its very life.

The story of the First Congress is mainly the story of the struggle to forge a new revolutionary international following the ignominious collapse of the socialist Second International on 4 August of 1914. It is above all the story of the struggle by Lenin's Bolsheviks to turn the battle against the first imperialist war into a civil war to abolish the capitalist system.

Younger comrades in particular have real difficulty grasping the enormous and traumatic impact of World War I on the bourgeois societies of the time and on the proletariat. From the end of the Franco-Prussian war [1870-1871] until the onset of the first imperialist war, a period of some 43 years elapsed in Europe without a major war. Most of the imperialist combatants who embarked on the First World War assumed it would be very short. The British bourgeoisie in particular was hoping that its rivals on the continent would mutually exhaust each other in a bout of bloodletting and, indeed, looked forward to the war. But it didn't turn out to be a short war.

The war dragged on for over four years. Millions upon millions of proletarians were slaughtered in a war to re-divide the world amongst the various contending imperialists, a war to see who would get how much loot and how much booty. To quote General Sherman: "war is hell." But, if war is
hell, World War I stood out in its grotesque brutality. WWI was fought mainly as a war of attrition, of trench warfare, of bankrupt strategies reflecting the complete bankruptcy of bourgeois society. It was a war in which the proletariat and even the scions of the bourgeoisie were cut down and slaughtered in enormous numbers. For example, the Prussian Junker class was, at the end of the war, a shadow of its former self. Likewise the war decimated the sons of the British ruling class.

To give you an example of the brutality of the situation, in 1916 there was a small salient of the German line projecting into the Entente lines in Belgium at a village called Ypres. The British general in the sector, Sir Douglas Haig, decided to straighten out this little pocket disturbing the geometrical regularity of his front. Over the space of three or four days he lost something like 600,000 men in this endeavor, which did not in any way alter the sanguinary stalemate.

At the beginning of the war there was only one significant republic in continental Europe and that was France. By the end of this war, the face of Europe had changed. Three empires—tsarist Russia, the Hapsburgs of Austria-Hungary and the Hohenzollern empire of Germany—disappeared from the political map to be replaced by various republics. So it was a very big change. I highly recommend to comrades two books. One is Carl Schorske's book, German Social Democracy, 1905-1917, and the other is a book by Richard Watt, a British chemist who wrote history in his spare time, called The Kings Depart.

The ignominious capitulation of the Second International to the imperialist bourgeoisie during the first imperialist war marks the point at which the struggle for the Third International began and it was a struggle from the onset taken up by the Bolsheviks. To understand the Third International and Bolshevism, which went through its final forging in its revolutionary struggle against the first imperial¬ist war, some remarks are in order about the Third International's predecessor, the Second International, about its origins and history and its collapse.

Going back over that history one is struck by an observation made by Jim Cannon about the early, pre-communist socialist movement in the U.S. In The First Ten Years of American Communism, Cannon observed that it took the Bolsheviks and the Communist International to clarify and settle a whole series of political and organizational questions that had bedeviled the movement—questions ranging from the counterposition between direct trade-union action versus parliamentarism to, in the case of the U.S., the black question. In a very real sense, Cannon's observation concerning the American socialists is more generally applicable to the Second International as a whole. That is, if you go back and you examine the history of the Second International, one gets a sense of participants who, in some sense, were sleepwalking.

It took the experience of the Bolsheviks, who had to deal with a wide spectrum of issues and conditions of work (such as the national question, trade-union struggle, legality versus illegality, work in parliament, Soviets, the 1905 mass strikes culminating in the Moscow insurrection), to really forge a new type of party that in its experiences had learned lessons that were valid for the entire workers movement in the imperialist epoch. And Bolshevism, it should be understood, was not born all at once but started as another party in the Second International and, indeed, a party which modeled itself after the preeminent party of the Second International, that is to say the German SPD.

Lenin makes the point that the Second International and the parties which constituted it were very much products of the pre-imperialist epoch, a period of protracted, organic capitalist growth and, as indicated, of peace among the major European powers. If the First International laid the foundation for an international organization of workers, for the preparation of the revolutionary attack on capital, the Second International was an organization, as Lenin remarked, whose growth proceeded in breadth at the cost of a temporary drop in revolutionary consciousness and a strengthening of opportunism in the party.

The SPD and Parliamentarism

The German Social Democracy itself underwent considerable change over these years. In February of 1881, in the period when the Social Democrats in Germany were outlawed by the Anti-Socialist Laws, Karl Kautsky wrote:
"The Social Democratic workers' party has always emphasized that it is a revolutionary party in a sense that it recognizes that it is impossible to resolve the social questions within the existing society.... Even today, we would prefer, if it were possible, to realize the social revolution through the peaceful road.... But if we still harbour this hope today, we have nonetheless ceased to emphasize it, for every one of us knows that it is a Utopia. The most perceptive of our comrades have never believed in the possibility of a peaceful revolution; they have teamed from history that violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.... Today we all know that the popular socialist state can be erected only through a violent overthrow and that it is our duty to uphold consciousness of this among ever broader layers of the people." —quoted in Massimo Salvador!, Karl Kautsky and
the Socialist Revolution 1880-1938, p. 20 (Verso,
1979)

This was the young Karl Kautsky, at the beginning of his career as a Marxist. And by the way, both Kautsky and Bernstein, who were in a real sense the legates of Marx and Engels, were won to Marxism through Engels' work Anti-Duhring. It was the work which actually won key cadre of the Social Democracy to Marxism. Kautsky was to go on to become the editor of Die Neue Zeit, which was the theoretical paper of Social Democracy (and parenthetically, I would point out, he edited it longer than Norden edited WV) and became the preeminent German propagandist for Marxism for the whole period. In fact, he was known as the pope of Marxism and for a long time he was looked up to by Lenin and others as the embodiment of orthodox Marxism. Yet running through the orthodox Marxism of Kautsky was a strong parliamentarist thread which grew organically out of the conditions that the German party experienced.

As a consequence of the German Anti-Socialist Laws the SPD was outlawed from 1874 to 1886. Despite its illegality during this period, the Social Democracy managed to get about 9.1 percent of the votes in parliament. With the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws and the legalization of the party, the party began to grow. Notwithstanding some fits and starts the party began to experience a steady accretion of electoral support, both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers. This led the SPDers to think that German Social Democracy would simply grow organically. Some older comrades may remember that many years ago a comrade plotted three or four years of our growth and from that graph projected that by now we would probably have a billion members. Empirical reality rapidly shattered her illusion, but in the case of the SPD in that period, experience tended to confirm a steady pattern of growth.

A few scant years after the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws, Kautsky was putting forward a very different line from that of 1881. Very much influenced by Darwin and German biologists such as Haeckel, he postulated that socialism would be the natural evolutionary outcome of capitalism—that the working class would grow to be a larger and larger proportion of the populace, that through the votes of these workers, SPD representation would ineluctably grow in parliament and that inevitably Social Democracy would triumph. Kautsky, along with Bernstein, penned the Erfurt Program, a program that all comrades should take the time to read. It is the classic example of the minimum-maximum program of Social Democracy.

The Erfurt Program is also noteworthy for what it does not contain—it consciously avoided the whole issue of the state. Kautsky wrote the theoretical part of Erfurt and Bernstein the practical. By the way, in 1899, Lenin described the Erfurt Program as a Marxist document. But later, reconsidering it in The State and Revolution, and based on his experiences in the intervening period, he came to view it very differently.
Kautsky wrote a commentary on the Erfurt Program and in it he developed his central themes. One of them was the indispensability of parliament as an instrument of government in great states—for all classes—and, therefore, for the proletariat as well as the bourgeoisie and, secondly, for the need to win a majority of parliament, treating elections as the fundamental, strategic avenue to power for the labor movement.

Kautsky posed an indissoluble link between the conquest of state power and the conquest of a majority in parliament, between the defense of the technical importance of parliament and the impossibility of a Paris Commune-type state. He thought that the Social Democracy, its political and social struggles and use of parliamentary legislation for socialist purposes, constituted the very content of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As early as 1892 Kautsky writes:

"In a great modern state, [the proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, can] acquire influence in the administration of the state only through the vehicle of an elected parliament. Direct legislation, at least in a great modern state, cannot render parliament superfluous, [but can only represent a ramification of the administration. Hence the general thesis:] it is absolutely impossible to entrust the entire legislation of the state to it [direct legislation], and it is equally impossible to control or direct the state administration through it. So long as the great modern state exists..."

And notice there is no class character to this state:

"...the central point of political activity will always remain in its parliament. [Now:] the most consistent expression of parliament is the parliamentary republic."
—quoted in Massimo Salvador], ibid, pp. 35-36

And, therefore, the conquest of parliament was indispensable for Social Democracy. This was to be a signpost of German Social Democracy thenceforth, through the whole period up to the first imperialist war.
Now Wilhelm Liebknecht aptly termed the Kaiserine parliament a "fig leaf for absolutism." Germany at this time presented a strange combination of parliamentarism, with rather nominal powers, fronting for absolutist despotism ruling on behalf of German capital. This was reflected in the laws regarding suffrage. On a national level there was direct male suffrage. On the provincial level suffrage rights varied a lot, ranging from places like Prussia, which had a notorious three-class franchise system based on how much direct tax you paid, to some of the southern German states, which eventually had more or less direct suffrage, but were very short on proletarians and had large peasant populations.

It was clear that the German Social Democracy would have to contend on a parliamentary level if it were to be a political party in Germany, and it did so. During the years of the Anti-Socialist Laws, because the parliamentary fraction was granted immunity, it was relatively untouchable, and played a key role in leading the party. This early experience later played its part in reinforcing a tendency to fetishize parliament despite the fact that the Reichstag was impotent and could not compel the imperial government to answer to it. And on the provincial level it was downright bizarre to have parliamentary illusions, for example, if you look at the restricted suffrage in Prussia.

In the Prussian elections in 1913, the SPD got over 775,000 votes, some 28.3 percent of the total. But it only won ten seats in the Prussian parliament. In contrast the Deutsche Volkspartei, which received 6.7 percent of the votes, won 38 seats. The Free Conservative Party, with 2 percent, won 54 seats. The National Liberal Party, with 13 percent, won 73 seats. The Catholic Center Party, with 16 percent, won 103 seats and the German Conservative Party, with 14 percent, won 147 seats. How is this possible? The people who paid the top third in income tax got a third of the seats, etc. That was about 2 or 3 percent of the population. So, there is a certain level at which one's credulity is strained at the evident latching on very early to parliamentary cretinism.

The SPD and the State

Secondly, the SPD was clearly awed by the power of the German state and army. One gets the impression that the experience of the Anti-Socialist Laws resulted in an attitude of "Never again!" The party lived in real fear that it could be outlawed by a stroke of the Kaiser's pen. As the party accrued influence and organizational mass there was a corresponding reluctance to risk this organic growth by displeasing the powers that be. This sentiment went hand-in-hand with the conception of the SPD as the party of the whole class.

When, in 1875, the Marxian wing fused with the Lassalleans, the fusion was codified in the Gotha Program (basically a Lassallean program). When Marx penned his Critique of the Gotha Programmed, that critique was suppressed in Germany. It was suppressed by Rebel, Kautsky and Bernstein, because they were afraid it would provoke a split with the Lassalleans.
Likewise, when the Erfurt Program was penned, Engels wrote a very sharp criticism of it; you can read about it in The State and Revolution. Engels thought it was a very fine program, but the failure of the program to address the key issue of state power fundamentally compromised it. Engels opined that while it might be difficult to raise the demand for a democratic republic, that failure opened the door to politically disarming the party when it had to confront big revolutionary events. Engels' criticisms were suppressed to maintain unity with the opportunists and out of fear that their publication might expose the party to reprisals from the Kaiser's government.

During the life of the Second International, which was founded in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, 14 July 1889, the German Social Democrats were very hesitant to call any sort of May Day actions because they feared a strike in Germany on May Day would bring the government down on them. So, there was a very peculiar development of a sense of German exceptionalism, a feeling that things were going along swimmingly, the SPD was gaining in parliament, the organization was burgeoning. The mindset was that the party must at all costs avoid a premature confrontation with the bourgeoisie that could spell disaster. Tactical prudence was beginning to evolve into reformist adaptation.
Kautsky and others of the German Social Democrats were always concerned about a general strike because they thought it would be a one-shot proposition in the Kaiser's Germany. It would immediately lead to total confrontation with the bourgeoisie and either the proletariat would triumph or it would be smashed. And, since inevitably the SPD was gaining influence in parliament and expanding its press, trade-union organizations, and sporting groups and hundreds of other associations were growing, why wreck the inevitable march of progress toward socialism?

I have spent some time on the SPD's reformist adaptations because I would like to contrast it with the experience of the Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik experience was needless to say very different.

It's an old saw that "you learn something new every day." But sometimes what you learn is important. Gary Steenson in his book "Not One Man! Not One Penny!" German Social Democracy, 1863-1914 [University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981] reveals a little-known fact:

"One very unusual aspect of the socialist congresses in Germany was the presence at most of them of police officials. These men had the right to interrupt speakers who ventured into forbidden territory, and they could even cancel a session altogether if the discussion got too extreme. But the congressional participants themselves usually knew the allowable limits, and after the end of the antisocialist law, the police officials did not often intervene. Their presence was, nonetheless, a source of embarrassment for the SPD and should have been for the authorities also."
-p. 125

This submission to cop censorship is absolutely breathtaking, and accommodation to it reveals the deep reformist rot that infected the SPD. It should be contrasted with the comportment of the Bolsheviks who took their responsibility to revolutionary Marxism seriously. Commenting on what can be said and what must be said, in 1917 Lenin wrote:

"At times some try to defend Kautsky and Turati by arguing that, legally, they could no more than 'hint' at their opposition to the government, and that the pacifists of this stripe do make such 'hints'. The answer to that is, first, that the impossibility of legally speaking the truth is an argument not in favour of concealing the truth, but in favour of setting up an illegal organisation and press that would be free of police surveillance and censorship. Second, that moments occur in history when a socialist is called upon to break with all legality. Third, that even in the days of serfdom in Russia, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky managed to speak the truth, for example, by their silence on the Manifesto of February 19, 1861, and their ridicule and castigation of the liberals, who made exactly the same kind of speeches as Turati and Kautsky." -Lenin, Collected Works [hereafter CW\ Vol. 23, p. 186

Clearly the SPD's many-years-long accommodation to police censorship played a significant role in its slide into social chauvinism when confronted by the revolutionary tasks imposed by the imperialist war.
The SPD's accommodation to bourgeois legality is all the more surprising given the very real repression the party experienced, particularly in its formative years. Liebknecht and Bebel, for example, opposed the Franco-Prussian war. For their efforts, they were thrown into prison for a couple of years. The party did face a situation of near illegality, even following the lifting of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Many, many people were arrested for crimes of lese majeste. SPDers were elected to parliament and when they got to Berlin found out their landlady had been told by the government not to rent them a place. Socialists were exiled, under old laws going back to 1850, to tiny provincial towns.

Kautsky summed up in 1888 what we have come to know as the social-democratic worldview when he wrote in A Social Democratic Catechism: "The Social Democracy is a revolutionary party, but it is not a party that makes revolutions...." The SPD's policy was one of revolutionary passivity, of waiting. Kautsky maintained that Social Democrats are not pacifists. The SPD would eventually prevail in parliament and if the bourgeoisie offers resist¬ance the Social Democratic workers would suppress them. But the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was for Kautsky really a question for future generations

The rise of imperialism and the rise of opportunism go hand in hand. Early on, in the heavily peasant areas of south Germany, where the Social Democracy was weaker and where there were fewer proletarians, SPD representatives began to openly adapt to alien class pressures. These pressures reflected themselves nationally when, in 1895, Bebel and Liebknecht, over the vociferous objections of Kautsky, revised the Erfurt Program to "include a demand for democratization of all public institutions, to improve the situation in industry, agriculture and transport within the framework of the present social and state order."
Bernstein, who had lived for 20 years in exile in Britain, while there began to develop fundamental doubts on the possibility or necessity of proletarian revolution, doubts which he later systematized into a general revisionist assault on Marxism. Kautsky, since Bernstein was his good friend, temporized on launching a struggle against this revisionism.

However, eventually the battle was joined, with Kautsky, Luxemburg and Plekhanov weighing in very heavily against Bernstein (who was not handled in the party with kid gloves). Nonetheless, Bernstein and Kautsky both feared a split in the party. Kautsky hoped to ideologically defeat revisionism without a split, arguing that revisionism could be isolated and would cease to be dangerous. This generally was the approach of the Second International in the whole period leading up to the war.
I should mention, by the way, that Kautsky's deep but latent reformist streak found expression in the Second Congress of the Second International in Paris in 1890 when the issue of Millerandism came up. The French socialist politician Millerand had recently accepted a cabinet post in a bourgeois government. Kautsky led the charge against Millerand stating that it was absolutely impermissible to be a minister in a bourgeois government...except under "special circumstances." And the special circumstances were, for example, in the event of a war, where, say, the tsar invaded Germany. Only then, according to Kautsky, would a Social Democrat be compelled to join a government of the enemy class; only unity in defense of the nation made permissible that which in times of peace was impermissible!

Impact of the 1905 Russian Revolution

The 1905 Russian Revolution had an enormous impact on Germany, the class struggle in Germany, on the Social Democracy and on the trade unions. On the left of the party, Rosa Luxemburg saw 1905 through the lens of her experiences in Warsaw, where she went to participate in the revolution. For Luxemburg, the main lesson of the revolution was the efficacy of the mass strike as the road to revolution. She saw the mass strike as the chief instrument for realizing the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Through intervention in these struggles the socialists would win authority and lead the workers to victory. The assault on the capitalist power would not be through parliament, but through a series of convulsive strikes that would clean the party of revisionism and lead to the fall of capital. But while Luxemburg invested the mass strike and spontaneous action by the proletariat with great revolutionary import, she failed to grasp the significance of the Soviets and as well of the real rehearsal for October, the culmination of 1905, which was the Moscow insurrection.

Germany in 1905 experienced massive turmoil. There were thousands and thousands of strikes. There were numerous lockouts by employers. There were militant workers' demonstrations and street fighting between the workers and the police.

Under the impact of both Luxemburg and the events in 1905 in Germany and Russia, Kautsky was driven to the left. He certainly was among the most perceptive of the commentators on what was going on in 1905 in Russia from the outside. Both Lenin and Trotsky claimed Kautsky's analysis supported their views. Kautsky did, indeed, refer to what was going on in Russia as permanent revolution and stated that the unfolding of the revolutionary struggles in Russia turned out to be very different from what he had previously thought. Thus he wrote:

"The [Russian] liberals, can scream all they want about the need for a strong government and regard the growing chaos in Russia with anguished concern; but the revolutionary proletariat has every reason to greet it with the most fervent hopes. This 'chaos' is nothing other than permanent revolution. In the present circumstances it is under revolutionary conditions that the proletariat completes its own maturation most rapidly, develops its intellectual, moral, and economic strength most completely, imprints its own stamp on state and society most profoundly, and obtains the greatest concessions from them. Even though this dominance of the proletariat can only be transitory in a country as economically backward as Russia, it leaves effects that cannot be reversed, and the greater the dominance, the longer they will last.... Permanent revolution is thus exactly what the proletariat in Russia needs."
—quoted in Massimo Salvadori, op. cit., p. 102

Here he is speaking of permanent revolution in the sense of Marx's "Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League."
In January of 1906, Kautsky, basing himself on the experience of the Moscow insurrection, declared that it was now necessary to re-examine Engels' famous preface to Marx's Class Struggle in France, the text of which the German Social Democracy had so often used to justify its own legalism. The reformists had fixated on an observation by Engels that the epoch of barricades and street fighting was definitely over. But Kautsky said that the battle of Moscow, where a small group of insurgents managed to hold out for two weeks against superior forces, indicated that victorious armed struggle by the insurgents was possible because of the mass strike wave, of which he said too little was known in Engels' time. It was precisely the strike wave and struggles around it that had undermined the discipline of the army and those lessons were applicable, not only in Russia, but possibly throughout Europe.

Thus Kautsky swung quite far to the left. But he was still very nervous about a mass strike in Germany, which he thought could only be a one-shot affair—all or nothing. For its part, the German ruling class was also drawing its own class lessons from the events in Russia. The Kaiser thought that it might well be necessary to send an expeditionary force into Russia to rescue his fellow monarch, the tsar, and, as a corollary to that, the Kaiser certainly was planning to suppress the German Social Democracy.

The turmoil surrounding 1905 frightened many of Germany's SPD trade-union leaders. In the main they had a very clear position: "No mass strikes! Nothing out of the ordinary!" These bureaucrats feared that the street demonstrations and turmoil were pulling in unorganized workers who had low consciousness and would threaten the organized and above all orderly German trade-union movement. In May of 1905 in Cologne, the trade unions came out on record against the mass strike.

The stage was thus set for an open division between the party and its affiliated trade unions. At the Jena Congress, the party, under the impact of what was going on in Russia, adopted the mass strike as a political weapon in defense of suffrage rights and the right of association in particular. The mass strike was presented as a means of extending suffrage in places like Prussia and of defending the right of a Social Democratic party to exist and organize in the trade unions. This mass strike resolution carried overwhelmingly, by 287 to 14 votes.

One of those voting against the resolution was a man named Carl Legien who just happened to be the leader of the SPD's trade-union federation. He importuned the party leadership and on 16 February 1906, at a secret meeting of the party and trade unions, the party capitulated to the trade unions.

Basically, the trade unions said to the party: if there are to be mass strikes and the party can't prevent them, it is the party and not the trade unions who should lead them. The trade unions promised to sup¬
port the party to the extent they could, but the party was to bear the brunt not only of the responsibility for leading mass strikes, but also of paying for them.

The very next year in September of 1906, Bebel at the Mannheim Congress declared that without the support of the unions, mass strikes are unthinkable and Legien said "Ja! They are unthinkable!"

At Mannheim the party endorsed the deal cooked up at the earlier secret conference. Bebel, who wielded immense authority in the German movement, pushed the proposal through by a vote of 386 to 5. Among those voting for it were Kitschy, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

Following the events of 1905 there was a rise in German imperial ambitions. The German bourgeoisie reacted to 1905 with a great wave of chauvinist propaganda and in the 1907 elections the German Social Democracy got a really cold, wet rag smacked in its face. These were the so-called Hottentots elections and they were the first elections in which imperialist patriotism played a big role. In 1907, many of the petty bourgeois who had previously voted for the Social Democrats, didn't.

The percentage of the SPD votes didn't drop-very much in absolute numbers. It went from 31.7 to 29, but the number of SPD representatives in the Reichstag dropped from 81 to 43. At the time there were numerous political parties in Germany and thus provisions for runoffs if no party obtained a majority of the vote. The Social Democracy willy-nilly had been counting on a large number of petty-bourgeois votes.

In contesting for election in Germany, routinely the SPD had made blocs with the liberals. Where a Social Democrat didn't get in the runoff, SPDers were told to vote for the bourgeois progressive, and an appeal was made to the progressive voters to vote SPD if a socialist was in a runoff. Of course, Social Democrats, being disciplined, got many progressives elected. But following 1905, the progressives' bourgeois base would have nothing to do with these anti-patriotic reds and this bloc didn't work out so well from that standpoint.

The Social Democracy and Imperialist War

Turmoil growing out of events in Russia and the swell in imperialist and patriotic propaganda really drove the party leadership into frenzy. Thus the stage was set for erosion of the historic position of the SPD encapsulated in the slogan of Wilhelm Liebknecht of "not one man, not one penny."

Bebel started talking about being for national defense if Russia invaded Germany and, believe me, the Russian question was as big a bugaboo in Germany in this period as it was in America in the Cold War period. Bebel made a speech in the Reichstag explaining when he would be a defensist, at the same time sugar-coating it with a denunciation of Prussian discipline, mistreatment of soldiers and financial burdens. He was followed by a SPDer by the name of Noske, who contested the accusation that Social Democracy was anti-national or anti-patriotic. Noske said that there is no accusation more unjustified than the claim that the SPD wanted to undermine the discipline of the army. Where in Germany except in the army is there greater discipline than in the Social Democratic Party and the modern trade unions?

"'As a Social Democrat I agree with the honorable Minister of War when he declares that German soldiers must have the best arms.' Finally, he [Kautsky] proclaimed that the Social Democrats would repel any aggression against their country 'with greater determination' than any bourgeois party, that the SPD wanted Germany to be 'armed as well as possible,' and that 'the entire German people' had an 'interest in the military institutions necessary for the defence' of the 'fatherland'."
The quote is from Massimo Salvadori's Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938, p. 119 (1938). Salvadori comments: "There could have been no more public funeral for the anti-militarist propaganda preached by [Karl] Liebknecht."

The party had begun to polarize into an incipient center, a left wing and a very insidious right wing. Karl Liebknecht had become the bete noire not only of the right wing but also of some of the center of the party with the publication of his book Militarism and Anti-Militarism, and for his efforts to organize an anti-militarist youth organization. In fact, Liebknecht's book earned him almost two years in prison—apropos the point about the reality of life in the Kaiser's Germany.

By the way, one must say that aside from Die Neue Zeit, which received a lot of criticism because it contained articles having nothing to do with Germany, German Social Democracy was very provincial in its views. It tended to concern itself mainly with domestic issues.

By 1910, the German Social Democracy panicked before the bourgeoisie's patriotic propaganda offensive. Some SPDers began to entertain the proposition that since they had always been for an income tax, the SPD should therefore support the direct tax, even though the purpose of the direct tax was to raise money for the war budget. The party pulled back from that position, but by 1912, when the party was really in a panic about regaining what it had lost in the elections, operationally it had moved very, very far to the right.

When the issue of the direct tax came up again in 1913 the Kautsky center gave critical support to the social-chauvinists on this issue. Rosa Luxemburg said that if Kautsky urged his followers to vote the direct tax, in a year they would be voting war credits. She was absolutely prophetic in that. When war came on 4 August 1914, the German party, which was the biggest party of the international, capitulated and voted war credits, betraying socialism. Nearly all parties of the Second International from the various belligerent countries followed suit with the honorable exceptions of the Russians, the Italians, the Serbs and, ultimately, a few Germans.

The Second International, to which the SPD was affiliated, was not an international in the Leninist sense. The war revealed it to be an international in little but name, more akin to a bunch of socialist pen pals.

That political rot which precipitated out on 4 August 1914 did not fall from the sky but grew, organically if you will, within the SPD. And there were premonitions of the problems which manifested themselves at earlier Second International congresses.

Thus, the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 actually debated whether there could be a socialist colonial policy. There was a commission in which the majority called for exactly that. That proposal by that commission was only narrowly defeated, by a vote of 128 against 108, with 10 abstentions. It was a near thing. Commenting on it, Lenin said that vote had tremendous significance. First, socialist opportunism, which capitulated before bourgeois charm, had unmasked itself plainly, and, secondly, there became manifest a negative feature of the European labor movement, which is capable of causing great harm to the proletariat.

Half of the SPD delegation at Stuttgart was made up of trade unionists and maintained the position of trade-union independence. And, then, of course, the war question also came up. If you read the Stuttgart resolution on the war, and the subsequent ones culminating in the Basel Manifesto, they all speak about how, to combat war amongst the capitalist powers, the proletariat should use whatever means are at its disposal when necessary.

Lenin objected to the slogan of a mass strike against war. How the proletariat is to conduct the struggle against war depends upon the particular conditions it confronts. Answering a war, he says, depends on the character of the crisis which a war provokes—the choice of means of struggle is made on the basis of these conditions. But the Germans really wanted any reference to any strike action against war deleted, because they opposed anything that would commit them, even on paper, to such a course.

Lenin in contrast stressed that the key thing about the resolution on war and peace was that the struggle must consist in substituting not merely peace for war, but socialism for capitalism. "It is not a matter of preventing the outbreak of war, but a matter of utilizing the crisis resulting from the war to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie." And he, Rosa Luxemburg and, I believe, Martov blocked to amend a resolution by Bebel (which was a very orthodox resolution) because it was possible to read the orthodox postulates of Bebel through opportunist glasses. So Lenin and Luxemburg amended the resolution to say that militarism was the chief weapon of class suppression, to say that agitation among the youth was necessary and indicated, and, third, that the task of the Social Democrats was not only struggle against the outbreak of war, or for an early termination of war which had already broken out, but also to utilize the crisis caused by the war to hasten the downfall of the bourgeoisie.
When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, it found Lenin in Galicia. He couldn't believe the SPD had voted for war credits, thinking it must be police propaganda.

After he managed to make his way back to Switzerland, Lenin's course was set. He and his comrades embarked on an implacable struggle for a new revolutionary international to replace the Second International, now fatally compromised by social chauvinism. The central issue was that the world war was an imperialist war, and that the answer to this war was not "peace," or "no annexations," or "the right of self determination of all nations," but, in fact, to turn this imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against the bourgeoisie, for socialism.
The war disrupted the Second International for a while, but shortly various national parties, each aligned with its own bourgeoisie, held "antiwar" congresses. First the Entente "socialists," then the central powers "socialists" met. This was followed by the Copenhagen Congress of neutral "socialists." The Bolsheviks at first were not inclined to participate in the Copenhagen Congress because of its demands: peace, no annexations, courts of arbitration and disarmament. But on reconsideration, the Bolsheviks attended Copenhagen to raise five points: socialists out of bourgeois cabinets, no vote for war credits, fraternization of troops, for civil war against the imperialist war, and for illegal organizations that organize for revolutionary propaganda and actions among the proletariat in the struggle for the Third International.

Forging the Third International

It was in the struggle against the social chauvinists and centrists that the Bolsheviks finally hammered out the key points of their international and political and organizational program. To do so it was necessary to swim against a raging stream of social chauvinism. Zinoviev says:
"It was in a manifesto on the arrested Bolshevik Duma fraction that we first advanced the slogan of turning the imperialist war into civil war. At that time, in the camp of the Second International, we were regarded literally as lepers. When we stated that this war had to be turned into a civil war, a war against the bourgeoisie, they seriously began to suggest that we were not quite right in the head."

The first international conference that pulled together socialists from various belligerent countries was, in fact, an international women's conference organized in Switzerland by Clara Zetkin. The Bolsheviks intervened and were voted down. That conference was followed by an international youth conference which also voted down the Bolshevik proposals.

It was only at the Zimmerwald Conference that the Bolsheviks were able to come forward as a weak minority—but a minority which was to become the nucleus of a new Communist Third International. At that conference Ledebour (who was one of the German center) confronted Lenin: "Civil war to end the imperialist war? Well, Lenin, go to Russia and try it there. It's pretty easy to say this in Switzerland." In the Second International all these centrists and chauvinist wiseacres proclaimed that all the Russian workers supported the war and that no one supported the Bolsheviks. During the period of 1915-1916 the Bolsheviks remained an insignificant minority. It was only in 1916 that they began to reestablish real and significant links in Russia.

Lenin was absolutely implacable in hammering on the issue of the imperialist nature of the war and the revolutionary task it demanded. His key point was that the greatest danger to the proletariat and to the chance of revolution were the centrists, with their flowery conceits and illusions.

Take Kautsky, for example. Kautsky had not been a member of the German parliamentary fraction, but he was such a doyen of the party that he was invited to the meeting where they voted war credits. Kautsky had planned to suggest abstention, but when it became clear there was going to be no abstention, he said, fine, let's vote for the war credits and state that our condition is no annexations, blah, blah, blah. Well, the German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg said, that's a good resolution. Let's just take this part out about no annexations. And that was what happened.
Liebknecht originally went along, as a disciplined member of the party, with the vote, but broke immediately thereafter. Once the war began in earnest Kautsky argued it was a war of defense for Germany. In an incredible exercise in muddle-headed obfuscation he argued it was, as well, a war of defense for the French, the Belgians and the British. After all, Social Democrats are not anti-national and can't present themselves to the nation as anti-national. His conclusion—the International is really a peacetime organization! After the war, everyone would get back together! So, to justify his support to voting for war credits, he supported the votes of all Social Democrats for "self-defense."

As the war progressed it became more hideous. And the fighting lasted far longer than anyone had imagined. Social tensions began to rise and the bourgeoisie and the centrists began to get nervous. By 1917 a turn occurred. The war had run its course. Germany had grabbed a fair chunk of territory. None of the combatants had the capacity to squeeze much more blood or sweat out of the proletariat. The Germans were beginning to think they had a chance to split Russia off from Britain and France and do a separate deal.

Kautsky began to worry about the news from the front—that everybody in the trenches supports Liebknecht. Liebknecht had made a famous speech against the war. For his troubles he had been drafted into the army out of parliament and then imprisoned. Luxemburg was arrested soon after Liebknecht. The centrists began to calculate that they were losing their influence. Thus, Kautsky and company began to redouble their offensive for "peace" and broke off from the official Social Democracy to form an independent party.

Lenin's struggle against the war meant not simply struggle against the centrists outside the party, but inside as well. Some Bolsheviks, exemplified by Bukharin's Bogy group, were seduced by the siren peace songs of the centrists. Bukharin and his co-thinkers also had a position against the right of self-determination for nations during the war, because, according to them, the imperialist war had rendered all such questions irrelevant. Lenin characterized this position as a caricature of imperialist economism.

It is very interesting to consider Trotsky's role in the struggle against the social chauvinists. He of course had a solidly internationalist position of opposition to the war. But until quite late in the war Trotsky rather quixotically conciliated various centrists. At times he sought out political blocs with the Mensheviks and for a brief period even hoped to obtain Kautsky's collaboration in the struggle against the war. For these reasons Lenin subjected him to some very harsh criticisms.

Forging the Bolshevik Party

The programmatic intransigence of Lenin laid the foundation for the struggle for October. In this regard let's examine the period of the Bolshevik Party from 1912 to 1914, and contrast it to the evolution of the German Social Democracy. There are three key periods of struggle in the development of Bolshevism: 1895 to 1903 against economism, from 1903 to 1908 against the Mensheviks, and from 1908 to 1914 against the liquidators. The liquidators were the Mensheviks of various stripes and origins who wanted a legal labor party in Russia. Given the conditions in Russia, Lenin made the point that such a party could not be a Marxist revolutionary party.

Certainly Lenin's experience with the German Social Democracy in the Second International in this period was not exactly positive. The SPD-dominated International tried a number of times to foist unity on the Russian Marxists and it was fairly clear from the get-go that Kautsky in particular, like most of the SPD leadership, viewed Lenin as an incurable sectarian enrage.

The Germans were really pro-Martov; they wanted to enforce unity. The last effort at unity was in 1913-14, when the International demanded that all the Russian Marxists get into one room in front of a commission of the International and take steps to unite into one big party. And, by the way, the German Social Democracy also had its fingers on the purse strings of a lot of the money that the Russian Bolsheviks and Mensheviks had.
I really enjoyed reading about this conference. Lenin chose Inessa Armand as the Bolshevik representative. Armand was a very elegant and cosmopolitan woman, who spoke several languages, was intelligent, politically hard, and diplomatic. Following Lenin's instructions she told the conference that the Bolsheviks were in favor of unity, however, that unity had conditions attached to it.

"1. All-party resolutions of December 1908 and January 1910 on liquidationism are confirmed in a very resolute and unreserved manner precisely in their application to liquidationism. It is recognized that anyone who writes (especially in the legal press) against 'commending the illegal press' deserves condemnation and cannot be tolerated in the ranks of the illegal party. Only one who sincerely and with all his strength helps the development of the illegal press, of illegal proclamations and so forth, can become a member of the illegal party."
It goes on:

"3. It is recognized that the entry of any group of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party into a bloc or union with another party is absolutely not permissible and incompatible with party membership." —Ganken and Fisher, The Bolsheviks and the World
War, pp. 120-121 (Stanford University Press,
1940)

Bundism is to be condemned; it is incompatible with membership; national and cultural autonomy, this again, contradicts the party program; and the failure to recognize the resolutions of the party on that is incompatible with party membership. When Inessa Armand presented these conditions, her presentation was considered the worst of manners from the standpoint of all these Second International Social Democrats. How could the Bolsheviks act like this?

In fact, the reality on the ground in Russia was that there was one Russian Social Democratic Workers Party that mattered, and it was the illegal party of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. By the time that the international was trying to engineer unity among the Russian factions the Bolsheviks had about 80 percent of the active proletariat, in terms of their support, and correspondingly in press circulation.
The influence of the Bolsheviks amongst the Russian proletariat was initially undercut by the outbreak of the war, and indeed the war sharply undercut a rising tide of worker militancy in a number of countries, including Germany and Britain. One of the subsidiary reasons why the various bourgeoisies were not averse to embarking on imperialist war was that they thought it would quench class struggle at home.

The road of development of Bolshevism spans nearly a decade and a half. The fundamental point of this talk is that the October Revolution would not have been possible without the program and the tactics elaborated by the Bolsheviks in the struggle for the Third International and against imperialist war. For it was on the rock of the war that Menshevism, tying itself to the bourgeoisie, broke its neck. Because of the war, once the revolution broke out in Russia there was no room for a formulation akin to the "democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry." In fact, the task that had been set in motion by the outbreak of World War I was that of civil war of the proletariat for socialist revolution.

Lenin's key three works of this period, Imperialism, The State and Revolution, and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, were polemics against the center, internationally, in Social Democracy. In the heat of battle, in Russia and across Europe, when the founding of the Third International took place, it was not easy to get delegates to Moscow, and most of those who turned up were people who either were lucky and made it through or happened to already be there. The delegates to the First Congress were thus necessarily a somewhat eclectic collection of parties and individuals. But it was an historic affirmation of the years of previous struggle and above all of the actual creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat embodied in Soviets. The key resolution at that Congress was, indeed, an upholding of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Kautsky spent the last 20 years of his life as an embittered, anti-Soviet Social Democrat, an apostle of bourgeois democracy, blaming all ills, including German fascism, on Bolshevism. Lenin, for his part, recognized the real issue which the Third International had to turn its attention to and that was the spreading of the October Revolution to other places. I wanted to quote something that he wrote in October of 1918, which I think kind of gives a measure of him as a revolutionist. If you look in the volume that has The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, there is, earlier on, a very short piece by the same name and in it Lenin notes:

"Europe's greatest misfortune and danger is that it has no revolutionary party. It has parties of traitors like -the Scheidemanns, Renaudels, Henderson’s, Webbs and Co., and of servile souls like Kautsky. But it has no revolutionary party.

"Of course* a mighty, popular revolutionary movement may rectify this deficiency, but it is nevertheless a serious misfortune and a grave danger.
"That is why we must do our utmost to expose renegades like Kautsky, thereby supporting the revolutionary groups of genuine internationalist workers, who are to be found in all countries." -CW, Vol. 28, p. 113
It was that task that the founding of the Third International took up.
The German delegation of the newly fledged Communist Party arrived in Moscow with a mandate (adopted before the Spartacus uprising) to oppose the launching of a Third International, because the German Communists could not yet break themselves from the conception of the party of the whole class. They still were mesmerized by the possibility of some sort of unity with various centrists and thought the formation of a new international premature. The German delegation was actually talked out of this position while in Moscow.

That was crucial. It had been a long and difficult struggle, but the banner of international proletarian revolution, besmirched by Social Democracy in 1914, was planted at this founding conference. Its key programmatic element, the dictatorship of the proletariat based on soviet power, was asserted. The struggle to forge new revolutionary parties was launched.

The new parties which adhered to the banner of October reflected a generational split. It was the young workers who had gone through the war who were to become the base of the new International. It was the older workers who tended to stay behind with the Social Democracy. Certainly our tasks today have obvious parallels. The sine qua non is to build parties of a Bolshevik type, to forge an international, and to contest for proletarian power and that really is the only road to new October Revolutions, which is what this class is all about.

Summary following discussion

Markin comment- I have not republished the summary here as there is no context for the statements made during the course of the discussion.
******
Reading List for Educationals on the Comintern

I. War, Revolution and the Split in the Second International: The Birth of the Comintern

Lenin, "The Tasks of Revolutionary Social-Democracy in the European War," 6 September 1914,
Collected Works (CW), Vol. 21, pp. 15-19

Lenin, "The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International," 1 November 1914, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 3541 Lenin, "What Next?", 9 January 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 107-114

Lenin, "Letter from the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P. to the Editors oiNashe Slovo" 23 March 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 165-168

Lenin, "The Draft Resolution Proposed by the Left Wing at Zimmerwald," prior to 2 September 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 345-348

Lenin, "The First Step," 11 October 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 383-388

Lenin, "Opportunism, and the Collapse of the Second International" end of 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 438-453 Lenin, "The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (Theses)," January-February 1916, CW, Vol. 22, pp. 143-156

Lenin, "Thejunius Pamphlet," July 1916, CW, Vol. 22, pp. 305-319

Lenin, "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism," October 1916, CW, Vol. 23, pp. 105-120

Lenin, "Report on Peace, October 26," 8 November 1917, CW, Vol. 26, pp. 249-253

Lenin, "Speech on the International Situation, November 8," 8 November 1918, CW, Vol. 28, pp. 151-164

Lenin, "Letter to the Workers of Europe and America," 21 January 1919, CW, Vol. 28, pp. 429-436

Lenin, "The Third International and Its Place in History," 15 April 1919, CW, Vol. 29, pp. 305-313

Trotsky, "Open Letter to the Editorial Board of 'Kommunist'," 4 June 1915, Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 235-238 (Monad Press, 1984) Trotsky, "The Work of the Zimmerwald Conference," ibid., pp. 329-331

Trotsky, "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World," 6 March 1919,
The First Five Years of the Communist International (hereafter FFYCI), Vol. 1, pp. 19-30 Trotsky, "To Comrades of the Spartacus League," 9 March 1919, FFYCI, pp. 3943

Additional Readings:

Lenin, "The Collapse of the Second International," May-June 1915, CW, Vol. 21, pp. 207-259

Lenin, "Political Report of the Central Committee, March 7," 7 March 1918, CW, Vol. 27, pp. 87-109

Lenin, "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," November 1918, CW, Vol. 28, pp. 229-325

Pearce, B., "Lenin and Trotsky on Pacifism and Defeatism," What Is Revolutionary Leadership?, pp. 24-35 (published by Spartacist)

"Toward the Communist International," Lenin and the Vanguard Party, pp. 47-55 (SL/U.S. pamphlet, 1997 edition)

Luxemburg, "The Reconstruction of the International," Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 183-193

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-"Egypt and the Near East-Permanent Revolution vs. Arab Nationalism"

Workers Vanguard No. 980
13 May 2011

Egypt and the Near East

Permanent Revolution vs. Arab Nationalism

(Young Spartacus pages)

We print below an edited and slightly excerpted New York Spartacus Youth Club forum given on March 9 at the City College of New York (CCNY).

Major events are rocking the Near East and North Africa. What we have to offer is a revolutionary internationalist program, captured in the placard here that says, “Down With the Oil Sheiks, Emirs, Kings, Colonels and Zionist Rulers—Workers to Power! For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!” This talk is going to motivate that perspective, which is a Marxist perspective. It is going to primarily focus on Egypt, the history of the Palestine/Israel question and the long and brutal role that imperialism has played in this region.

Recently Obama, the current U.S. imperialist Commander-in-Chief, has been praising the fight for “democracy.” But during the upheaval in Egypt, Obama expressed support for Hosni Mubarak’s regime, especially the “reforms” promised by Vice President Omar Suleiman, who has long played a key role in Washington’s “war on terror” torture program. The U.S. has poured $1.3 billion a year into arming the Egyptian military, as it does to prop up bloody dictators worldwide. After Mubarak resigned, Obama said that the U.S. stands for “a credible transition to a democracy.”

What U.S. imperialism means by “democracy” are the corpses of more than one million Iraqis who died as a result of the 2003 invasion and occupation, as well as the imperialist barbarism inflicted by U.S./NATO forces upon the peoples of Afghanistan. Last week, NATO aircraft shot down nine young boys collecting firewood in Afghanistan. The sheiks, despots and strongmen that litter the Near East, along with the Israeli rulers, act as U.S. imperialism’s agents. Take a recent back-page ad in the New York Times for Our Last Best Chance by King Abdullah of Jordan. The ad quoted Bill Clinton, who as president bombed and starved Iraq for eight long years, praising the Jordanian monarch—the same monarch who today suppresses protests against his rule. So don’t be fooled by these imperialist war criminals, whether in Democratic or Republican clothing. Now they are threatening Libya and have already implemented sanctions; we say imperialists hands off! [See “Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!” WV No. 977, 1 April.]

It’s against these imperialists’ agents that the masses in Tunisia and Egypt have been revolting, fed up with unemployment, rising food prices and the widespread corruption of the Arab capitalist rulers and their families and cronies. Inspired by the protests in Tunisia, protesters in Egypt courageously faced down a massive crackdown that left hundreds dead. After nearly 30 years of governing Egypt with an iron fist, Mubarak stepped down following 18 days of unprecedented upheaval throughout the country, with demonstrators unleashing their fury at the regime by targeting police and security buildings as well as those belonging to the ruling National Democratic Party. These protests were significantly topped off by a wave of labor strikes.

I’m sure that everyone saw the mass celebrations of millions of people that erupted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and in cities throughout the country over what seemed like the end of a brutal dictatorship that ruled under emergency law, imprisoning and disappearing its opponents in Egypt’s vast torture chambers. But while Mubarak is no longer in power, the central core of Egypt’s bonapartist capitalist state apparatus, the military, is now directly in power. A doctor in Cairo was quoted as saying, “They cut off the head, but the body is still moving.”

The military announced the dissolution of Mubarak’s sham parliament and the formation of a panel to “amend” the equally sham constitution. They have denounced the continuing strikes as leading to “negative results” and ordered workers to return to their jobs. Two weeks ago it was reported that soldiers beat protesters and burned down a reconstituted tent camp in Tahrir Square. In capitalist society, which is divided into antagonistic social classes whose interests are irreconcilably opposed, the question of the state is a crucial one. Together with the police, courts and prisons, the army is at the core of the capitalist state, which is an apparatus for the violent suppression of the working class and the oppressed. Above all, the drive to “restore stability” in Egypt is aimed at the working class.

The strikes launched by tens of thousands of workers amid the anti-Mubarak protests continued after Mubarak’s fall. These included some 6,000 workers on the Suez Canal, through which 8 percent of world trade travels, although Canal pilots continued to work, which meant ships kept moving. Thousands of textile and steel workers also went on strike in Suez, which saw some of the most militant protests. In the wake of Mubarak’s fall, strikes spread to steel workers outside the capital, postal workers, textile workers and thousands of oil and gas workers.

What is necessary in this situation is for the working class to emerge as an independent force and lead the struggles of the region’s unemployed youth, urban poor, peasants, women and other oppressed sectors fighting for freedom. Why the working class? Because this is the one class with the social power and historic interest to overthrow capitalism. In fighting for economic demands, such as against poverty-level wages, the working class is demonstrating the unique position it holds in making the wheels of the capitalist economy turn. This social power, to stop and take over those wheels, gives the working class the potential to lead all the impoverished masses in struggle against their unbearable oppression.

The Trap of Egyptian Nationalism

There is a lot of empty, classless talk about how “we are all Egyptian” (I guess minus Mubarak) and the “people’s revolution.” Other than the upper echelons of the Tunisian and Egyptian bourgeoisies, these upheavals have been characterized by an outpouring of all social classes. In demonstrations, Egyptian flags have been everywhere. What this reflects is a nationalist consciousness that is also expressed in widespread illusions that the army is a “friend of the people.” These illusions are a deadly danger to the working people and the oppressed.

From the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Free Officers’ coup in 1952, which toppled the monarchy and ended the British occupation of the country, the army has been viewed as the guarantor of Egyptian national sovereignty. In fact, the military has been the backbone of one dictatorship after another since that time. In 1952 it was mobilized by Nasser to shoot down textile strikers in Kafr Al-Dawwar near Alexandria. In 1977 it was mobilized by Anwar el-Sadat to “restore order” after a two-day countrywide upheaval over the price of bread. Today, despite claiming that it did not oppose the anti-Mubarak demonstrators, the military arrested hundreds and tortured many. We say: Down with the emergency law! Free all victims of state repression!

There has also been a lot of talk about the Facebook and Twitter “revolution,” which I guess the military is now a part of since they post communiqués on their Facebook page. But, as a young comrade said at a recent event, “The working class needs a vanguard party, not a Facebook profile!” One of the technologically savvy youth leaders, Google exec Wael Ghonim, was arrested for using Facebook to organize the early protests. He epitomizes the logic of a bourgeois-nationalist program: Upon his release, he kissed his captors, praised the “sincerity” of the military and told striking workers that now is not the time to fight for $100 a month if you only make $70. He is speaking for the capitalist class and fighting for its interests.

Nationalism arose in connection with the development of capitalism, which strove to establish unified national markets. While nationalism in Egypt is fueled by a history of imperialist subjugation, it has long served the bourgeois rulers by obscuring the class divide between the tiny layer of filthy rich at the top and the brutally exploited and impoverished workers and peasants at the bottom. Nationalism is a key obstacle to revolutionary proletarian consciousness. We oppose those fake socialists who promote bourgeois nationalism.

The Egyptian youth who initiated the “January 25 Revolution” have been hailed by one and all, including bourgeois oppositionists and the state-run media that had, until the fall of Mubarak, denounced them as foreign agents. Among these mainly petty-bourgeois youth, a good number have been animated not only by their own grievances but particularly by the struggles of the Egyptian proletariat. I mentioned the recent strikes, but what rarely gets reported is that, over the last ten years, the Egyptian workers have engaged in over 3,000 strikes, sit-ins and other actions, involving over two million workers. These strikes were carried out in defiance of the corrupt leadership of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation, which was established by Nasser in 1957 as an arm of the state.

The petty bourgeoisie is an intermediate class comprising many layers with disparate interests, from students to peasants. It is incapable of advancing a coherent, independent perspective and will necessarily fall under the sway of one of the two main classes of capitalist society: the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Among the militant youth who showed incredible courage in taking on the Mubarak regime, those committed to fighting on behalf of the oppressed must be won to the revolutionary internationalist program of Trotskyism. Such elements will be crucial to forging a revolutionary party, which, like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, will be founded through a fusion of the most advanced workers with declassed intellectuals won to the side of the working class.

In Egypt, this party must fight for the program of permanent revolution. What do we mean by permanent revolution? This theory embodies the experience of the 1917 Russian Revolution. What we are talking about is the seizure of power by the working class in countries of uneven and combined development, which is the only way to break the chains of political despotism and economic and social backwardness. The victorious working class would fight to extend its revolutionary victory to the centers of world imperialism, laying the basis for an international planned economy that would end scarcity. Elementary democratic tasks such as legal equality for women, complete separation of religion and state, agrarian revolution to give land to the peasants—as well as ending joblessness and grinding poverty—cannot be achieved without the overthrow of the capitalist order. The indispensable instrument for the working class is a proletarian revolutionary party, which can be built only through relentless struggle against all bourgeois forces: the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the bourgeois liberals like ElBaradei, who all falsely claim to support the struggles of the masses.

Despite limited land reform carried out in the ’50s and early ’60s by nationalist regimes in Egypt, Syria and Iraq, the pattern of land ownership in the region still resembles what it was a century ago. Wealthy landowners possess large tracts of the best land while millions of desperate peasants, unable to scratch out a living on tiny plots of arid land, have settled in the vast shantytowns that ring Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad. Cairo professionals have cell phones and computers and large numbers of Egyptian workers are concentrated in modern, foreign-owned auto plants. Meanwhile, you have barefoot villagers in the Nile valley tilling their fields with tools that have scarcely changed since the age of the pharaohs. With nearly half the population living on $2 a day or less, popular hatred for Mubarak was definitely driven by the estimated $70 billion fortune amassed by his family. Inhuman poverty and squalor compete with grotesque displays of wealth.

While Egypt is a regional power in its own right, it is nonetheless a neocolony whose brutal and murderous bourgeoisie is tied by a million strings to world imperialism, which benefits from the exploitation, oppression and degradation of the neocolonial masses. Beginning with Sadat’s rule in 1970, Egypt has also been a strategic ally of Zionist Israel and, in recent years, has aided in the starvation blockade of the Palestinians in Gaza, including by sealing the border in Sinai.

Conditions like those in Egypt are what Leon Trotsky, co-leader with Lenin of the 1917 Russian Revolution, described as uneven and combined development, in which modern industry has been superimposed on largely peasant-based societies. This was also true of Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution. Though itself an imperialist power, Russia at the time, unlike the more advanced capitalist countries of West Europe, had not had a bourgeois-democratic revolution and remained mired in social and economic backwardness. Emerging late in the capitalist era, the weak and corrupt Russian bourgeoisie was dependent on Western capital and feared the proletariat far too much to mobilize them for an onslaught against the tsarist autocracy. The autocracy ruled over a vast “prison house of peoples” and a mass of impoverished peasants. At the same time, foreign capitalist investment had given rise to a small but combative industrial working class that was concentrated in modern large-scale industry.

The Russian Revolution was a confirmation of permanent revolution: the working class overthrew bourgeois rule, freed the country from the imperialist yoke, gave land to the peasants and freed the many oppressed nations and peoples of the former tsarist empire. The achievement of democratic tasks was combined with socialist tasks, such as the expropriation of the means of production by the workers state, which laid the basis for the development of a collectivized planned economy. The destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 was a world-historic defeat for working people and the oppressed and enormously strengthened the forces of capitalist reaction on a global scale.

What you learn when you study the Russian Revolution is that the victory of the revolution was possible only because of the Bolsheviks’ irreconcilable struggle against all variants of bourgeois nationalism, populism and liberalism. They struggled against the Menshevik opportunists, who tailed the liberal bourgeoisie, and also against the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party, which was hostile to proletarian class rule. As Lenin put it, “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism” [“Unity,” April 1914]. Later I will get to the opponents and distorters of Marxism today who tail the liberal and not-so-liberal bourgeois forces of our day.

So in summary, achieving genuine national and social liberation requires mobilizing the proletariat in revolutionary struggle against both the imperialists and the domestic bourgeoisie. A proletarian revolution in Egypt resulting in a workers and peasants government would have an electrifying impact on workers and the oppressed throughout North Africa, the Near East and beyond. Over one-quarter of all Arabic speakers live in Egypt, a country of over 80 million that has the largest working class in the region.

The Near East: Yesterday and Today

Now you can’t understand the Near East today without understanding that the region was literally carved up following World War I [1914-18] by the British and other colonial powers that drew the borders of Iraq and other countries of the Near East. Winston Churchill, that imperialist pig and major player in this chapter of history, said during WWI, “I think a curse should rest on me because I am so happy. I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment—and yet—I cannot help it—I enjoy every second I live.” Following the mass slaughter of the war, the imperialists divvied up the loot. There was a sense of unity between the Arabs of Palestine, including what is today Jordan, and the Arabs of what is now Syria and Lebanon. They were divided into separate countries. In what is now Iraq, Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims and Kurds and Turkmens wanted to live separately. They were forced to live together. The point was to carve up the region in such a way that ethnic and religious strife would perpetually plague it. This new Near East was duly approved by the League of Nations, which Lenin called a “den of thieves.” It served, as the United Nations does today, as a fig leaf for imperialist interests.

Even before WWI was finished, the British and French imperialists divided up the spoils of their impending victory in the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916. The publication of that document by the Soviet workers state exposed the imperialists’ machinations and had an electrifying effect across the region. The Bolshevik Revolution, and its extension to largely Muslim Central Asia in the course of the bloody three-year Russian Civil War [1918-20] against the imperialist-backed counterrevolutionary White armies, triggered a series of national revolts and popular uprisings in the Near East, which was occupied by the British and French imperialists from Egypt through the Fertile Crescent to Iran. In Egypt, as strikes and demonstrations swept the country in 1919, one observer reported that “news of success or victory by the Bolsheviks” in the Russian Civil War “seems to produce a pang of joy and content among all classes of Egyptians.” Also in 1919, open rebellion broke out in the Punjab in India; hundreds were shot down by British troops. The same war criminal Winston Churchill wrote to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs at the time, “The ruin of Lenin and Trotsky and the system they embody is indispensable to the peace and revival of the world.” I hope you have gathered by now that imperialist “peace” is anything but peace.

In this climate of social upheaval coming off WWI, Communist Parties were formed in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Persia, which is Iran today. However, the working class in the Near East at that time was small and the Communist Parties were politically inexperienced. So as a result of both internal weaknesses and external repression, most of these parties had effectively disappeared by the late 1920s.

By the time Communist Parties re-emerged in those countries beginning in the mid 1930s, the now-Stalinized Communist International had long since ceased to be an instrument for world socialist revolution. The defeat of the German revolution in 1923, which was a decisive factor in the isolation of the Soviet Union, and the virtual exclusion of the Trotskyist Left Opposition at the rigged Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924, which coincided with Lenin’s death, marked the beginning of the Soviet Thermidor. This was the period in which political power was usurped from the proletarian vanguard by a conservative bureaucratic caste whose chief spokesman was Stalin.

The Stalinist bureaucracy repudiated the Bolshevik program of international socialist revolution in adopting the nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country.” This was a flat denial of the Marxist understanding that a socialist society could only be built on an international basis, through the destruction of capitalist imperialism as a world system and the establishment of a world socialist division of labor. Under Stalin’s rule, the Communist International was transformed from an instrument for world proletarian revolution into a border guard against imperialist attacks on the Soviet Union. The program and strategy that ensued was class collaborationism, which, following the triumph of Hitlerite fascism, was codified by 1935 as “the people’s front against fascism.” In the colonial world in the lead-up to World War II [1939-45], the Stalinist Communist Parties were transformed into open supporters of the “democratic” imperialists who oppressed the worker and peasant masses.

A series of Arab nationalist regimes came to power coming off the defeat in the 1948 War with Israel, which had thoroughly discredited the imperialist-backed Arab regimes. Arab nationalists used Israel as an external enemy to direct the masses’ anger and frustrations away from their own capitalist oppressors. We defend the Palestinians against the Zionist rulers and their U.S. backers and we also defend them against the Arab capitalist rulers who have played their own bloody part in subjugating and massacring the besieged Palestinian population spread throughout the region. We will not forget the Black September massacre of 10,000 Palestinians by the Jordanian monarchy in 1970. Over and over again history has shown that the Arab bourgeois states are no less an enemy of Palestinian liberation than the Zionist rulers.

Support to Arab nationalism by the Stalinist Communist Parties has led to the bloody defeat of workers movements throughout the Near East, not least in Egypt. Nasser, a bourgeois nationalist, came to power in 1952 with the support of the Egyptian Stalinists. He sought to appeal to the U.S. but was rebuffed, so he turned to the Soviet degenerated workers state for financial, military and political aid. Upon coming to power, Nasser sought to crush the combative Egyptian working class, which was heavily influenced by the Communist Party. But even as he was imprisoning, torturing and killing Communists, the Communist Party continued to support Nasser, liquidating into his Arab Socialist Union in 1965.

Behind this abject capitulation was the Stalinist schema of “two-stage revolution,” which meant postponing the socialist revolution to an indefinite future while in the first “democratic” stage the proletariat is subordinated to an allegedly anti-imperialist national bourgeoisie. But history shows that the “second stage” consists of killing communists and massacring workers. From the Chinese Revolution of 1925-27 and Spain in 1936-37 to Iran and Iraq in the 1950s and Indonesia in 1965-66, two-stage revolution has been a recipe for bloody defeats for the working class. [See the Spartacus Youth League pamphlet The Stalin School of Falsification Revisited, 1975.]

Millions of workers who looked to the Communist Parties for leadership in these countries were betrayed by their Stalinist misleaders. In Egypt, such betrayal was sold as support for Nasser’s “Arab Socialism.” But “Arab Socialism” was a myth. What it amounted to was capitalism with heavy state investment. The role Nasser saw for the workers was captured by his statement, “The workers don’t demand; we give.” To curb the combative proletariat, Nasser instituted several reforms, raising wages and reducing unemployment. Eventually, state investment dried up and there was no longer much to “give.” But these reforms created strong illusions in Nasser, which are still prevalent today.

Nasser’s hand-picked successor, Anwar el-Sadat, brought Egypt fully into the fold of American imperialism in the ’70s. After Sadat came to power, the Communist Party sought to reorganize. Sadat responded by unleashing the Muslim Brotherhood to effectively crush them. He expelled Soviet advisers and instituted the “open door” policy of economic liberalization, cutting food and other subsidies. Mubarak and his neoliberal program of mass privatizations took this further and deeper. Contrary to popular illusions, Mubarak did not represent a break from Nasserism, rather its legacy. Under Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, Egypt remained subjugated to the imperialist world market and its dictates. The real difference between Nasser and Mubarak is that while Nasser was a genuinely popular bonapartist ruler, Mubarak was widely despised.

Israel and Palestine

Now I want to talk some about the Israel/Palestine question, which is also key to understanding this region. Earlier I mentioned the 1948 War, which resulted in the consolidation of the state of Israel, a creation that arose out of the intersection of the Nazi Holocaust and the dissolution of the British Empire. The expulsion of nearly a million Arabs from Palestine—most of them to squalid refugee camps where they and their descendants live to this day—was also accompanied by a mass migration, which was driven by both the Arab regimes and the Zionists, of the so-called Oriental or Sephardic Jewish population from the Arab countries to Israel. We defend the national rights of the dispossessed Palestinian people against the Zionist butchers and demand the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all Israeli troops and fascistic settler auxiliaries from the Occupied Territories. But we do not thereby deny the right of the Hebrew-speaking nation to exist.

Under capitalism, when two peoples lay claim to the same land—and in this case a very small sliver of land—the right of self-determination can be exercised only by the stronger national grouping driving out, oppressing or destroying the weaker one. This is what Israel, backed by tons of aid from the U.S., does to the Palestinians. In such cases, the only way to assure the right of national self-determination for both peoples lies in overturning capitalist rule and instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the only class that has no interest in perpetuating national antagonisms. We fight to break the Hebrew-speaking workers from the poison of Zionist chauvinism and we fight to break Arab workers from the sway of petty-bourgeois nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism.

To have a future free of bloodshed, what is necessary is Hebrew and Arab workers revolution against the murderous Israeli capitalist rulers and all the Arab regimes. We do not pretend that this will be easy, but it is historically possible and necessary. While there are certainly not many cracks in the Zionist citadel today, it is nonetheless a class-divided society. Some 25 percent of its citizens, disproportionately Arabs, live in poverty, and income disparities are higher in Israel than in Egypt or Jordan. Sephardic Jews, though overwhelmingly under the ideological sway of right-wing and religious parties, suffer widespread discrimination and poverty.

Our Leninist program advocates the right of all nations to self-determination, that is, the right to form independent nation-states, which is a basic democratic right. We do not make a distinction on this point between oppressed nations, which get the right to exist, and oppressor nations, which, according to some, do not. There is a widely held position that all Jews in Israel today represent an “occupation.” There is a group called the League for the Revolutionary Party that is active at CCNY. They are crass apologists for Arab nationalism. They argue an idea that is widespread on the left that there are “good” people, that is, the oppressed—one could say the “occupied” people—and “bad” people who are the oppressors and do not even have the right to exist. To speak of an “occupation” as a whole implies that the programmatic consequence is “get rid of them,” which has its own genocidal logic. In contrast to petty-bourgeois moralism, we advance a revolutionary internationalist solution in which all peoples have a right to exist.

When I was growing up as an Israeli American kid, I was taught by my parents all about the Holocaust, the horrific experiences my grandparents had gone through, and that no matter where Jews went in the world the only safe place free from persecution was Israel. In essence, I was taught that I was part of the oppressed people, and I was viewed that way in school. Actually, in ninth grade I had this terrible science teacher who made us get into groups by race. I didn’t want to stand with the white kids because, of course, they were oppressor peoples, and I didn’t know what to do. Then a black student who I was friends with said, “She’s from Israel and that’s near Africa so she’s standing with us.” And that’s what I did. I stood with the black students. A year or so later, I became best friends with an Egyptian student who, along with her brother, shattered my world by informing me that Israel was oppressing the Palestinians. So, I had gone pretty quickly from the “oppressed” peoples to the “oppressor” peoples. Learning the truth about what was happening to the Palestinians—that the Zionist rulers’ mentality toward the Palestinians is like the Nazis’ mentality toward the Jews—changed my whole view of the world. But it was only the Marxist program that decisively enabled me to break from the poison of bourgeois nationalism, which is very deeply ingrained in the consciousness of this region.

In What Is To Be Done? Lenin argues that the revolutionary party must be a “tribune of the people,” the defender of all the oppressed, not just the working class. That means defending the rights of oppressed minorities such as the Coptic Christians in Egypt. It means fighting for free abortion on demand. It means defending the rights of homosexuals against backwardness and religious and moralistic bigotry. And it means fighting anti-Semitism, which is rampant in Arab countries. Often the word “Jew” is used instead of “Zionist,” and still prevalent are centuries-old anti-Semitic themes that the Jews are plotting world domination, the Jews are the embodiment of all evil, and so on.

Capitalist rule fuels these national, ethnic and religious divisions that drive the constant bloodshed that defines the Near East. Marxists seek to shift the axis of struggle from Israeli against Arab to class against class. We stand with Lenin, who wrote: “Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just,’ ‘purest,’ most refined and civilized brand. In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism” [“Critical Remarks on the National Question,” October-December 1913]. This really differentiates us from the slew of other groups that falsely call themselves socialists.

WWP, ISO Tail Arab Nationalism, Anti-Women Reaction

In contrast to our revolutionary program, which is based on and confirmed by the lessons of history, virtually the entire left internationally has offered nothing but empty cheerleading for the “Egyptian Revolution.” This is exemplified by the Workers World Party [WWP] in the U.S., which, as the military took control of the country on February 11, headlined: “WWP Rejoices with the Egyptian People.” In Egypt, the Revolutionary Socialists [RS] group, which is promoted by the International Socialist Organization [ISO, a group active at CCNY], issued a statement on February 1, in which the RS dissolved the power of the working class into the classless demand for “all power to the people” and the call for a “popular revolution.” Left out of the statement is even the mention of the word “socialism.” This same group also appeals to crass Egyptian nationalism, declaring, “Revolution must restore Egypt’s independence, dignity and leadership in the region.”

The RS also fosters suicidal illusions in the Muslim Brotherhood. They try to invest these clericalist forces with “anti-imperialist” credentials and have pursued alliances with them over several years. We know that, whether or not it is currently in a position to make a bid for power, the Muslim Brotherhood represents a deadly danger to the working class, the Coptic Christian minority, all secularists, gays and the brutally oppressed women of Egypt. This is the same Brotherhood that, following the 1948 War, incited mobs that pillaged Jewish businesses, burned synagogues and slaughtered dozens of Jews. Henri Curiel and other leaders of Egyptian Communism were targeted.

The growing influence of these same forces is rightly feared by women in the region, including in Tunisia, where, as a recent article in the New York Times [20 February] described: “Tensions mounted here last week when military helicopters and security forces were called in to carry out an unusual mission: protecting the city’s brothels from a mob of zealots.” Tunisian society is relatively secular in contrast to Egypt and other countries in North Africa and the Near East. For example, many women do not wear the veil and abortion laws are relatively liberal. While the imperialists have used the “war on terror” to prop up “secular” dictators like Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, in reality the imperialists have long fostered the growth of Islamic fundamentalism as a bulwark against Communism and even left-bourgeois nationalism. This is no less true of the Arab rulers, who brutally repress the fundamentalists with one hand while promoting them with the other. In a 1994 interview, Ben Ali himself stated, “To some extent fundamentalism was of our own making, and was at one time encouraged in order to combat the threat of communism. Such groups were fostered in the universities and elsewhere at that time in order to offset the communists and to strike a balance.”

Now I want to end this talk with the woman question, as yesterday was International Women’s Day. It is also around the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, which caused the deaths of 146 garment workers, many of them immigrant Jewish women, who could not escape the burning building because the bosses had locked the doors to the stairwells.

Today in Egypt, women are a crucial part of the working class, where they have played a leading role in the strikes over the last decade, especially in the textile industry. One of the most dramatic of these was the December 2006 textile strike in Mahalla al-Kobra where more than 20,000 workers went out. It was the women workers who led the strike, walking out as the men continued working. They started chanting outside the plant, “Where are the men? Here are the women!” This had the intended effect, as the men joined them, launching one of the biggest strikes Egypt had seen in years.

At the same time, women’s oppression really is at the heart of Egyptian society. Together with religion, it is rooted in the country’s backwardness, which is reinforced by imperialist subjugation. Forty percent of all women in Egypt are illiterate. Although illegal, female genital mutilation is rampant and equally so among Muslims and Christians. According to the United Nations, 96 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 49 have undergone genital mutilation. Women who protested in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt were more often than not wearing the headscarf. More than 80 percent of women in Egypt wear the headscarf—not by law but by force of a social norm—which is much to the consternation of many of their mothers who courageously fought decades earlier to take it off.

As we wrote in a recent WV article, “The Egyptian woman may be the slave of slaves, but she is also a vital part of the very class that will lay the material basis for her liberation by breaking the chains of social backwardness and religious obscurantism through socialist revolution” [“Egypt: Military Takeover Props Up Capitalist Rule,” WV No. 974, 18 February]. As Trotsky stressed in a 1924 speech, “Perspectives and Tasks in the East,” “There will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the revolution and for the ideas of communism than the awakened woman worker” [reprinted in Spartacist (English-language edition) No. 60, Autumn 2007].

When International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 8, 1917, in Russia, women textile workers led a strike of more than 90,000 workers. This signaled the end of tsarist rule and the beginning of the Russian Revolution, which culminated months later in the seizure of power by the working class led by the Bolshevik Party. Today we stand in the communist tradition of the Bolshevik Party and for workers rule from Egypt to the U.S. Join us!

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard" -“War on Terror”: Marauding Abroad, Repression at Home

Workers Vanguard No. 980
13 May 2011

U.S. Murders Its Frankenstein’s Monster Bin Laden

“War on Terror”: Marauding Abroad, Repression at Home

Imperialists Out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya!

The May 1 assassination of Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was an act of imperialist arrogance typical of the U.S. “cops of the world.” The day before, the NATO imperialists had bombed the house of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son, missing Qaddafi, their intended target, but killing his son and three grandchildren. A few days later, a U.S. drone attack in Yemen killed two people in an unsuccessful attempt to take out Anwar al-Awlaki, one of at least four American citizens officially targeted for assassination by Washington.

The Obama administration did not even inform its Pakistani “allies” in advance of the incursion into their country by a military death squad. The raid was carried out by Navy SEAL commandos, a gang of specially selected and trained hitmen who shot and wounded bin Laden’s youngest wife and killed his son and three others. In murdering the Al Qaeda leader and dumping his body in the Arabian Sea, Washington destroyed its own Frankenstein’s monster. The U.S. had sponsored bin Laden and other Islamic reactionaries against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s as part of the decades-long imperialist drive to strangle the Soviet Union and foment capitalist counterrevolution.

Barack Obama, who came into office with broad support from the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy and the reformist left, is simply carrying out his duties as Commander-in-Chief. In escalating the bloody occupation of Afghanistan, he is doing what he promised to do if elected. Obama was more than willing to ignore other campaign promises in the interests of continuing the imperialist “war on terror.” His decision to maintain the U.S. concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as the system of kangaroo-court military commissions for accused terrorists, underlines the continuity of Obama’s policies with those of his Republican predecessor. Politicians and the bourgeois media are now engaged in a sick debate over how “effective” torture was in extracting information that helped track down bin Laden. Our position on those who have been tortured and brutalized—from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo—is simple: Free the detainees!

Seizing on the bin Laden kill, Obama appealed to “the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11,” waving yet again the bloody shirt of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Obama got a quick spike in the polls. But the “spontaneous” rallies of jubilation outside the White House and World Trade Center site, replete with bloodthirsty chauvinism, quickly dissipated and got little traction among working people. It is not so easy this time to whip up a spirit of shared “national interest” among workers, who have been thrown out of their jobs and homes by the millions and have seen their hard-won medical and pension benefits slashed by the capitalist class represented by the Democrats and Republicans. A common response even among workers who bought into the mission to “get” bin Laden was: OK, you got him, now when can we get out of Afghanistan? Obama made clear on May 1 that he had no intention of changing course in Afghanistan or relaxing the “anti-terror” crackdown on the home front.

The September 11 attack on the World Trade Center was a heinous crime, with nearly 3,000 people from all walks of life wantonly killed. Unlike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon was and is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military and, being a military installation, the possibility of getting hit comes with the territory. That fact did not make the attack an “anti-imperialist” act. In any case, terrorism almost always gets innocent people, including the passengers and crews on the hijacked airliners and the maintenance staff and secretaries at the Pentagon.

A Spartacist League/U.S. Political Bureau statement on the World Trade Center attack issued the day after (printed in WV No. 764, 14 September 2001) declared that those who perpetrated this act “embrace the same mentality as the racist rulers of America—identifying the working masses with their capitalist exploiters and oppressors!” The statement went on to warn:

“It’s an opportunity for the exploiters to peddle ‘one nation indivisible’ patriotism to try to direct the burgeoning anger at the bottom of this society away from themselves and toward an indefinable foreign ‘enemy,’ as well as immigrants in the U.S., and to reinforce their arsenal of domestic state repression against all the working people.”

This is precisely what happened. Beginning with rounding up immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries for imprisonment and deportation, the U.S. government has shredded civil liberties and vastly expanded police powers, a particular danger to black people and to the labor movement as well. In December 2001, striking teachers in Middletown, New Jersey, were compared to the Taliban by the school board after they defied a back-to-work order. The following year, as West Coast longshoremen organized by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) were engaged in tough contract talks, the head of Homeland Security warned that strike action could be treated as a threat to “national security.” The government later imposed the Transportation Workers Identification Credential, making longshoremen, rail workers and truckers undergo immigration review and criminal background checks—an invitation to purge blacks and other minorities as well as union militants. The FBI has also extended the “anti-terror” dragnet to include antiwar activists and reformist leftists, many of whom had supported Obama’s election.

When U.S. imperialism launched its wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003, we, as revolutionary Marxists, stood for the military defense of those neocolonial countries without giving an iota of political support to the reactionary Taliban or to Saddam Hussein’s blood-soaked capitalist regime. We stressed that every victory for the imperialists encourages more predatory wars, while every setback serves to assist the struggles of working people and oppressed the world over.

We called for class struggle against the imperialist rulers at home, in counterposition to the labor bureaucracy, which treacherously signed on to the “war on terror” while sometimes complaining about how it was applied. It is the historic task of the proletariat, led by a revolutionary party, to sweep away the system of capitalist imperialism. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained in a May 1917 speech titled “War and Revolution,” this will lay the basis for the “socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.”

Bin Laden: Product of Anti-Soviet Cold War

The post-September 11 “global war on terror” is but one of the many facets of capitalist reaction that followed the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Proclaiming themselves the “world’s only superpower,” the U.S. rulers have launched one bloody military action after another. Even as it remains embroiled in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. is stepping up murderous drone attacks in Pakistan while NATO escalates its bombing campaign on behalf of the pro-imperialist opposition in Libya.

Pakistani military leaders are fuming over the brazen disregard for their country’s national sovereignty manifested in the raid against bin Laden. U.S. officials, in turn, are demanding to know how bin Laden could have resided for years in a garrison town dominated by military installations without the protection of powerful figures in the Pakistani military or security forces.

The fact is that bin Laden and his ilk were promoted not only by the Pakistani authorities but, in the first instance, by the U.S. For decades, the U.S. fostered the growth of Islamic fundamentalism as a bulwark against “godless Communism” and even secular nationalism. In 1950, John Foster Dulles, who would become Secretary of State in the Eisenhower presidency, wrote: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it.”

The origins of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda stem from the U.S.-backed war against the Soviet Union’s 1979 intervention in Afghanistan. In the biggest CIA covert operation in history, money and arms were funneled to the mujahedin (holy warriors) based in western Pakistan. The main conduit was Pakistan’s top intelligence agency, the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate), led by fervent Islamist Hameed Gul. By the CIA’s own estimate, as many as 70,000 Islamic fundamentalists recruited from more than 50 countries by the CIA and ISI were trained at Islamist schools, which still flourish in Pakistan.

Washington started funneling arms to the mujahedin soon after the Soviet-allied People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power in April 1978. As modernizing left nationalists, the PDPA attempted to implement a program for redistributing land, lowering the bride price, educating women and freeing them from the prison of the head-to-toe covering called the burqa. As the Islamic hierarchy launched a fierce insurgency, the Soviet Union intervened at the PDPA’s request to prevent the collapse of its client regime. Beginning with Democrat Jimmy Carter and continuing under Republican Ronald Reagan, the U.S. seized on the Red Army intervention to launch a renewed anti-Soviet offensive across the globe, in particular waging a proxy war aimed at killing Soviet soldiers and officers in Afghanistan.

For Marxists, there was no question which side working people and the oppressed the world over had in this conflict. The threat of a CIA-backed Islamic takeover on the USSR’s southern flank posed pointblank the need for unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union, a bureaucratically degenerated workers state. Moreover, the Soviet intervention and the possibility of a prolonged integration of Afghanistan into the Soviet system opened the perspective of social liberation for the Afghan masses, particularly women. This was, as we wrote at the time, the first war in modern history in which a central issue was the rights of women. While most professed leftists around the world echoed the imperialists in condemning the Soviet intervention, the international Spartacist tendency (now the International Communist League) uniquely raised the slogans: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Extend social gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!”

Among those who flocked to enlist in the jihad against Communism was Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, the son of a construction magnate who had been a close friend of the former Saudi king, Faisal. In Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000), bin Laden recounts that his “volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.”

The New York Times took note of this history in its obituary of bin Laden. But what really caught our eye was the following editorial gem from the International Socialist Organization (ISO):

“One inconvenient truth you won’t hear much about in the media’s celebration of bin Laden’s death is the fact that the U.S. government helped him form al-Qaeda.

“When the former USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. saw an opportunity to turn the country into a battlefield in the Cold War….

“The U.S. ignored progressive and secular forces in Afghanistan, instead funneling support to fundamentalist groups that were not only anticommunist, but notorious for their brutality…. These were the rebels who Ronald Reagan praised as ‘freedom fighters’.”

—Socialist Worker online, 3 May

An inconvenient truth that you are definitely unlikely to hear from the ISO is that these anti-communist social democrats were themselves firmly in the camp of Washington’s “freedom fighters,” howling along with the imperialists that the Soviets should get out of Afghanistan. When the Kremlin bureaucracy announced in 1988 that it was pulling out the Soviet troops, the ISO wrote that “we welcome the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. It will give heart to all those inside the USSR and in Eastern Europe who want to break the rule of Stalin’s heirs” (Socialist Worker, May 1988). For Trotskyists, the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan was a historic betrayal that paved the way to the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union itself, which the ISO, true to form, hailed as well.

As for bin Laden, after having joined hands with the U.S. in the “holy war” against Communism, he became incensed by the deployment of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia during the 1991 “Operation Desert Storm” against Iraq. Al Qaeda went on to launch a series of attacks on U.S. facilities overseas, setting the stage for 11 September 2001.

Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through Socialist Revolution!

In a starry-eyed response to the killing of bin Laden, Phyllis Bennis of the liberal Institute for Policy Studies wrote in a May 2 article titled “Justice or Vengeance?”:

“The president’s speech last night could have aimed to put an end to the triumphalism of the ‘global war on terror’ that George W. Bush began and Barack Obama claimed as his own. It could have announced a new U.S. foreign policy based on justice, equality, and respect for other nations. But it did not….

“It’s ineffably sad that President Obama, in his claim that bin Laden’s death means justice, didn’t use the opportunity to announce the end of the deadly U.S. wars that answered the attacks of 9/11. This could have been a moment to replace vengeance with cooperation, replace war with justice.”

It is not surprising that the ISO reproduced this piece on its Web site without comment. For years, the ISO, the Workers World Party (WWP), the Party for Socialism and Liberation and others tried to build an “antiwar movement” whose basic premise was “Anybody but Bush” in the White House. The plain fact is that the Obama White House has, as promised, carried on and escalated the “war on terror” initiated under George W. Bush, causing some consternation among the ISO, WWP and other opportunist groups that had celebrated Obama’s election.

Writing in the New York Times (8 May), conservative columnist Ross Douthat observed that the killing of bin Laden “operationalized Bush’s famous ‘dead or alive’ dictum” and highlighted the continuity in foreign policy under both Republicans and Democrats. Citing the war in Libya, the escalating drone strikes in Pakistan and the “policy of targeted assassination” of U.S. citizens, Douthat wrote:

“Imagine, for a moment, that these were George W. Bush’s policies at work…. Imagine the outrage, the protests, the furious op-eds about right-wing tyranny and neoconservative overreach. Imagine all that, and then look at the reality. For most Democrats, what was considered creeping fascism under Bush is just good old-fashioned common sense when the president has a ‘D’ beside his name.”

In truth, Democratic politicians barely worked up a whimper in protest against the foreign adventures of the Bush gang, while the reformists’ “antiwar” movement dissipated more and more the closer it got to the 2008 elections. Sowing the illusion that the Democrats in office could be pressured to carry out a humanitarian foreign policy and to meet the needs of working people at home, the reformists serve, to the extent their forces allow, to reinforce the ties binding workers, minorities and youth to the other party of U.S. imperialism.

For the working class to take the offensive against the depredations of its rulers—at home and abroad—will require a new leadership, a workers party of the Bolshevik type that fights for a workers government. Our task is to build such a party in the “belly of the beast” of U.S. imperialism, to fight for the only answer to exploitation, repression and imperialist war: international socialist revolution.

Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night- Ain’t Got No Time For Corner Boys Down In The Street Making All That Noise- Doc’s Drugstore

It wasn’t all be-bop night, rock ‘n’ roll sock hop, midnight drifter, midnight sifter, low-rider, hard-boiled corner boy 1950s life in old down and out working class dregs North Adamsville. Not at all. But a lot of it was, a lot that bespoke of the early phases of American deindustrialization, although we would not have called that then, if we had been aware of it even, with the demise of the local mainstay ship building ad its associated industries, great world war warship shipbuilding and then later gigantic oil tankers and then, then nothing, maybe a sailboat, or a row boat for all I know, I just don’t know more, or why.

All I know, or at least all that I know from what I heard my father, and other fathers say, was that that industry was the life’s blood of getting ahead, ahead in the 1950s life in that beat down, beat up, beat thirteen ways to Sunday town (ya, I know it is only six but it sure did seem like thirteen on some hard father unemployed days). And so low-rider, hard-boiled corner boy, the easy life of pinball wizardry, dime store lurid magazines, slow-drinking Cokes (or Pepsis, but make mine local Robb’s Root Beer), draped around mascara-eyed, heavy form-filled girls, and the occasional armed robbery to break up the day, and bring in some much needed dough held a higher place that it might have, and almost certainly would in some new town West.

But what was a guy to do if to get out of the house, get away from ma’s nagging (and it was almost always ma, every ma house in those days), siblings heckling, and just breathe in some fresh air, some fresh be-bop rock corner boy air, if at all possible.

See, this is way before mall rat-dom came into fashion since the nearest mall was way too far away to drag yourself to, and it also meant traveling through other corner boy, other maybe not friendly corner boy lands. So if you didn’t want to tie yourself down to some heavy felony on some soft misty, foggy better, night by hanging around tough corner boy, Red Hickey-ruled Harry’s Variety, or your tastes did not run to trying to cadge some pinball games from those same toughs, or you were too young, too innocent, too poor, too car-less or too ragamuffiny for those form-filled, Capri-panted girls with their haunting black mascara eyes then you had to hang somewhere else, and Doc’s, ya, Doc’s Drugstore is where you hung out in the more innocent section of that be-bop 1950s night.

Wait a minute I just realized that I had better explain, and do it fast before you get the wrong idea, that I am not talking about some CVS, Rite-Aid, or Osco chain-linked, no soliciting, no trespassing, no loitering, police take notice, run in and run out with your fistful of drugs, legal drugs, places. Or run in for some notions or sundries, whatever they are. No way, no way in hell would you want to hang out where old-timers like your mothers and fathers and grandparents went to help them get well.

No this was Doc’s, Doc-owned (ya, Doc, Doc Adams, I think, or I think somebody told me once that he was part of some branch of that Adams crowd, the presidential Adams crowd that used to be big wheels in the town), Doc-operated, and Doc-ruled. And Doc let, unless it got too crazy, kids, ordinary kids, not hard-boiled white tee-shirted corner boys but plaid-shirted, chino pant-wearing (no I am not going to go on and on about the cuffs, no cuffs controversy, okay, so keep reading), maybe loafers (no, inserted pennies, please, and no, no, no, Thom McAn’s), a windbreaker against some ocean-blown windy night on such nights, put their mark on the side walls, the side brick walls of his establishment. And let the denizens of the Doc night (not too late night either) put as will every self-respecting corner boy, tee-shirted or plaid, make his mark by standing, one loafer-shod foot on the ground, and the other knee-bent against the brick wall holding Doc’s place together. True-corner boydom. Classic pose, classic memory pose.

And see, Doc, kindly, maybe slightly mad Doc, and now that I think about it slightly girl-crazy himself maybe, let girls, girls even hang against the wall. Old Harry’s Variety Red Hickey would have shot one of his girls in the foot if they ever tried that stunt. Girls were to be draped, preferably draped around Red not around Harry’s wall, brick or not. Now, after what I just described you know that you’re into a new age night because no way Harry, and definitely not Red (Daniel, don’t ever call him that though) Hickey, king hell king of the low-rider night that I told you about before, just a couple minutes ago would let some blond, real or imagined, Capri-panted, cashmere swearing wearing (tight, very tight cashmere sweater-wearing, if you didn’t know), boffed, bimbo (ouch, but that is what we called them, so be it) stand around his corner even. Dames (better, right) were for hot-rod Chevy, hard-driving, low-riding sitting on the seat next to, and other stuff. But plaid-shirted guys (loafer-shod) liked, do you hear me Red and Harry, liked having girls hanging with them to while away the be-bop hard night corner boy lands.

And before you even ask, Doc’s had not pinball machine and no pinball wizards (as far as I remember, although a couple of guys and a girl were crackerjack bowlers). But see, Doc’s had the things that mattered, mattered for plaid-shirted guys with a little dough (their allowances, no snickering please for any hard-boiled readers, or poor ones) in their pockets, and lust chaste lust maybe, in their hearts. Doc’s had a soda fountain, one,
and, two, a juke box. Where the heck do you think we heard a zillion times all those songs from back then that I keep telling you about? Come on now, smarten up.

And, of course if you have corner boys, even nice corner boys, you have to have a king hell king corner boy. Red, Red Hickey understood that instinctively, and acted on it, whip chain in hand. Other boys in other corners acted on it in that same spirit, although not that crudely. And corner boy king, Doc’s Drugstore corner boy king, Brian Pennington, plaid-shirted king of the soft-core corner boy night acted on that same Red premise. How Brian (“Bri” to most of us) came to be king corner boy is a good story, a good story about how a nowhere guy (a my characterization nowhere guy) used a little influence to get ahead in this wicked old world. Red did it by knocking heads around and was the last man standing, accepting his “crown” from his defeated cronies. Brian took a very different route.

Now I don’t know every detail of his conquest because I only touched the edges of his realm, and of his crowd, as I was moving out of the neighborhood thralldom on to other things, Frankie, Francis Xavier Riley, scribe things. Apparently Doc had a granddaughter, a nice but just then wild granddaughter whom Doc was very fond of as grandfathers will be. And of course he was concerned about the wildness, especially as she was coming of age, and nothing but catnip (and bait) for Red and his corner boys if Doc didn’t step in and bring Brian into the mix. Now, no question, Brian was a sharp dresser of the faux-collegiate type that was just starting to come into its own in that 1960s first minute. This time of the plaid shirts was a wave that spread, and spread quickly, among those kids from working class families that were still pushing forward on the American dream, and maybe encouraging their kids to take college courses at North Adamsville High, and maybe wind up in that burgeoning college scene that everybody kept talking about as the way out.

Brian was no scholar, christ he was no scholar, although he wasn’t a dunce either. At least he had enough sense to see which way things were going, for public consumption anyway and put on this serious schoolboy look. That sold Doc, who had been having conversations with Brian when he came into the drugstore with books in one arm, and a girl on the other. I’ll give you the real low-down sometime about how book-worthy, book-worshipping Brian really was. Let me just relate to you this tidbit for now. One day, one school vacation day, Brian purposefully knocked the books out of my hands that I had borrowed when I was coming out of the Thomas Crane Public Library branch over on Atlantic Avenue (before it moved to Norfolk Downs) and yelled at me, “bookworm.” Like I didn’t know that already. But enough about that because this is about Brian's rise, not mine. Somehow Brian and Lucy, Doc’s granddaughter came together, and without going into all the details that like I said I don’t really know anyway, they hit it off. And see, this is where Brian’s luck really held out, from that point on not only did Brian get to hang his loafer-ed shoe on Doc’s brick wall but he was officially, no questions asked, the king of that corner boy night. That’s how I heard the story and that seems about right because nobody ever challenged him on it, not that I heard.

Now like I mentioned before, Doc’s was a magnet for his juke box-filled soda fountain and that drew a big crowd at times, especially after school when any red-blooded kid, boy or girl, needed to unwind from the pressure-cooker of high school, especially we freshmen who not only had to put up with the carping teachers, but any upper classman who decided, he or she, to prank a frosh. That’s my big connection with Doc’s, that after school minute freshman year, but, and here I am getting my recollections second-hand, Doc’s was also a coming-of-age place for more than music, soft ice cream, and milk shakes. This is also the place where a whole generation of neighborhood boys, and through them, the girls as well had their first taste of alcohol.

How you say? Well, Brian, remember Brian, now no longer with Lucy (she went off to a private finishing school and drifted from the scene) but was still Doc’s boy, Doc’s savior boy, and somehow conned old Doc into giving him his first bottle of booze. Not straight up, after all Brian was underage but Bri said it was, wink, wink, for his grandmother. Now let me explain, in those days in the old neighborhood, and maybe all over, a druggist could, as medicine, sell small bottles of hard liquor out of his shop legally. The standard for getting the prescription wasn’t too high apparently, and it was a neighborhood drugstore and so you could (and this I know from personal experience) tell Doc it was for dear old grandma, and there you have it. Known grandma tee-totalers and their grand kids would be out of the loop on this one but every self-respecting grandma had a “script” with Doc. Now Doc knew, had to know, about this con, no question, because he always had a chuckle on him when this came up. And he had his own Doc standards- no one under sixteen (and he was sharp on that) and no girls. So many a night the corner boys around Doc’s were probably more liquored up that Red and his boys ever were. Nice, right?

And Yet Again, When Doo-Wop Be-Bopped The 1950s Night- “The Coed Records Story”- A CD Review

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of the Crests performing Sixteen Candles.
CD Review

The Coed Records Story, various artists, Ace Records, 2000

Sometimes looking back at the genesis of the 1950s rock explosion that produced some of the classic music that defined my generation, the generation of “68, it was individual performers like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, who drove the music, other times it was the lyrics, the Tin Pan Alley-etched lyrics, and, as here, sometimes it was the sound, the sound associated with a particular label. One thinks of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records with the early rockabilly and blues explosion. Or Verve, Or Decca, or later the Motown sound. One place where the doo-wop, or doo-wop oriented sub-genre got a full workout was with Coed Records who story is told here in informative booklet form, and more importantly, by something like a greatest hits CD of the best work from that label’s heyday.

Now, like every musical genre, some of this material is strictly of the moment, that doo-wop moment, and some of it was performed by one-hit Johnnies and Janies, but a few, and that is all that one can expect, are classics. Here those classics include 16 Candles and Step By Step (songs you prayed, prayed out loud that they would play, and play at the end of the school dance night), The Crests; You Belong To Me (ditto), The Duprees; and, The Last Dance (ditto again) , The Harptones.

From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs-"New Ball Game" (Nixon's Escalation Into Cambodia, 1970)

Click on the headline to link to the GI Voice archival website for an outline copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*******
G.I. Voice was published by the Spartacist League for about one year starting in 1969 and ending in 1970. They published 7 issues total and represented the SL’s attempt to intervene with their politics inside the U.S. Army then occupying and fighting brutal war in Vietnam. There was a growing G.I. anti-war movement and this was in part the SL’s attempt to win over militant G.I.s to the views of the SL.

—Riazanov Library******
Markin comment on this series:

In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”

Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.

During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:

Individual action vs., collective action? Most of the time, while I respect individual heroic efforts (or just great individual achievement), collective action turns the tides of history, and for lots of people not just a few. As far as my own military service time, which included heavy, heavy for the military, anti-war work one of my great regrets is that I did not spend more time arguing against those politicized and radicalized soldiers that I ran into by the handfuls on the issue of staying in and fighting the brass. No re-ups, christ no, but just finishing their tours of duty. More importantly, to stay in and raise anti-war hell (oops!), I mean “serve” in Vietnam if the fates played out that way. A few more radicals over there and who knows what could have been done especially in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s when the American Army even by important elements of its own brass was declared “unreliable.” That “unreliable” mass needed us to help figure things out. And to act on that figuring out.

Alas I was not Bolshevik then, although I was working my way, blindly, fitfully, and haphazardly to that understanding of the struggle. Moreover, I had not access to those who were arguing for a Bolshevik position on anti-war GI work, although I did have a few vicarious links to the U.S. Socialist Workers Party that organization was not strongly committed to keeping anti-war soldiers in to fight the brass but rather was more interested in having such GIs stand at the head of their eternal, infernal, paternal “mass marches.” My thinking, and those around me civilian and military, in any case, was dictated more by the “hell no, we won’t go” strategy of the anti-draft movement extended intact to the military theater than any well thought out notion of “turning the guns the other way.”

Killing Rachel Corrie Twice - by Stephen Lendman

Killing Rachel Corrie Twice
by Stephen Lendman

Email: lendmanstephen (nospam) sbcglobal.net (verified) 17 May 2011
Gaza siege

Killing Rachel Corrie Twice - by Stephen Lendman

On May 16, at 6:54AM Gaza time (3:54AM GMT), in international waters, an Israeli naval vessel attacked the Malaysian owned Spirit of Rachel Corrie ship (officially the MV Finch), carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. More details below.

Lawless Monday followed Nakba Day's bloody Sunday, Israeli security forces assaulting unprecedented numbers of nonviolent demonstrators in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and along the Lebanese/Syrian borders.

Egypt was complicit, blocking activists from reaching Rafah. So was Jordan, forcefully preventing Palestinian supporters from approaching the King Hussein Jordan River Crossing Point.

Nonetheless, the day was potentially historic. Activists hope it will inspire greater global support for Palestinian liberation and justice, what only hindsight will show.

Up to two dozen were killed, scores injured, and many arrested, soldiers and police firing high-velocity tear gas canisters at point blank range, rubber bullets, live ammunition, and tank shell warning shots, a shocking display of violence given scant coverage in America's media.

Now this, Israelis attacking Rachel Corrie's spirit after an Israeli bulldozer operator killed her in Gaza on March 16, 2003. Trying to stop a Rafah refugee camp home's demolition, witnesses said she climbed atop the giant Caterpillar tractor, spoke to the driver, climbed down, knelt 10 - 20 meters in front in clear view, blocking its path with her body. With activists screaming for it to stop, the soldier-operator crushed her to death deliberately, running her over twice to be sure.

On May 14, 2010, the MV Rachael Corrie sailed from Europe to Gaza. Other vessels, nine in all, tried to break the siege to deliver vitally needed aid, including over 10,000 tons of food, medicines, educational and construction materials.

They never made it. Israeli commandos intercepted them, killing at least nine unarmed activists on board the Mavi Marmara mother ship, injuring dozens, and arresting survivors. After stealing their property and harassing them for several days in confinement to deter future missions, they were released and sent home.

Israel miscalculated. They're coming. Besides US and other initiatives, the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG) plans new missions to deliver essentially needed aid.

It's an "umbrella body of 34 European human rights and humanitarian organizations," supporting the right of Palestinians "to live in peace and dignity," to be free from occupation, and to have "their own independent and sovereign state." It also "encourages all peoples of conscience and human rights advocates to intensify their efforts to highlight this life-threatening issue and end the catastrophe."

Its web site provides current information of its mission, including planned events and actions, accessed through the following link:

http://www.savegaza.eu/eng/

Saying they won't be intimidated, they're "putting Israel on notice," adding:

"We are Coming

We are Unarmed

We are Civilian

You have no right to threaten us

We Expect to Reach Gaza without any Interference."

In fact, Israel will confront them belligerently, including a planned FREEDOM FLOTILLA - STAY HUMAN voyage honoring slain journalist/activist Vittorio Arrigoni, a heroic freedom fighter like Rachel. Martyred for a just cause, their spirit inspires others to go on. Indeed, their right over wrong commitment won't ever be deterred, a lesson Israel insists on learning the hard way.

"There is nothing Israel - or our own governments - can do to frighten us into abandoning the 1.6 million 'prisoners' of Gaza," said ECESG spokesperson Rami Abdo. "We stand on the right side of history. If they continue their campaign of tyranny, however, we will only become more determined."

In fact, organizers of last May's "Freedom Flotilla" plan a mid-June "Freedom Flotilla Two. (FF 2)." Activists from 22 European, North American and Asian Free Gaza Movement-connected humanitarian organizations will attempt to break Israel's siege and deliver vitally needed aid.

Around 15 ships and over 1,000 activists are involved, sailing from various ports. Israel said preparations are underway to stop them, perhaps as violently as against last May's mission.

On April 9 and 10, its Steering Committee met in Athens, continuing mission preparations. Aware of Israel's plans, they're:

"calling on all our governments, the international community and the United Nations not to succumb to Israel's intimidation. Governments need to fulfill their 'responsibility to protect' their own citizens."

An ECESG initiative, FF 2 partners include participants from over 50 countries, including European Jews for a Just Peace.

Spirit of Rachel Corrie Attacked

Sponsored by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF), headed by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, a May 16 press release explained what happened, accessed from the following link:

http://www.perdana4peace.net/?p=2654

Mohamed said:

"The Palestinian struggle is nothing more than a struggle for justice, to which they, as much as everyone else, have a right."

He knows and supports it. Israel, Washington, and most other Western nations spurn it, denying Palestinians their international law guaranteed rights, including to life.

On May 16, Global Research editor Michel Chossudovsky featured the incident on Global Research.ca, a link accessing his account below:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24783

He said an Israeli and Egyptian ship intercepted MV Finch in international waters, an act of piracy, adding that new details will be posted when learned.

On May 11, the ship departed Port of Piraeus, Greece, carrying vitally needed plastic sewage pipes to restore the system Israel destroyed in its 2007 - 08 Cast Lead attack. Under siege, restoration can't happen without help.

As a result, up to 95% of Gaza's aquifer water is unsafe to drink because Israeli forces destroyed 20 km of water pipes, 7.5 km of sewage pipes, and 5,700 mobile water tanks. In 2009, Amnesty International (AI) addressed the problem in its report titled, "Troubled Waters - Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water."

Moreover, Military Orders applying only to Palestinians give Israel control over water, including:

-- No. 92 controlling all West Bank and Gaza water;

-- No. 158 stipulating that Palestinians can't construct water installations without (nearly impossible to get) permits; moreover, those built without them will be confiscated; and

-- No. 291 annulling all land and water-related arrangements prior to the occupation.

Destroyed and under siege, Gaza's Coastal Aquifer is polluted by raw sewage from waste collection pond cesspits and seawater, itself contaminated by about 80 million liters of untreated or partially treated daily discharges into the Mediterranean Sea.

As a result, waterborne diseases are common, UNWRA reporting in February 2009 that:

"Water diarrhea as well as acute bloody diarrhea remain the major causes of morbidity among reportable infectious diseases in (Gaza's) refugee population...."

In September 2009, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP):

"The pollution of groundwater is contributing to two main types of water contamination in the Gaza Strip. First and most importantly, it is causing the nitrate levels in the groundwater to increase. In most parts of (Gaza), especially around areas of intensive sewage infiltration, the nitrate level in groundwater is far above (accepted) guidelines....Second, because the water abstracted now is high in salt, the sewage is also very saline. (It's well known that higher drinking water nitrate levels) can induce methemoglobinaemia (a blood disorder) in young children."

Moreover, Gaza's shoreline is polluted, posing serious health hazards because raw sewage is dumped daily into the Mediterranean Sea through 16 discharge sites along the coast.

Gaza TV News.com quoted PGPF member Shamsul Azhar saying:

After Israeli forces fired warning shots, it forced MV Finch "to anchor in Egyptian waters, 30 nautical miles from Gaza."

Malaysian journalist on board, Alang Mendahara, said:

"The Israeli naval vessel fired a warning shot at us upon approaching and asked us to leave the waters, but the ship's captain refused and the Israelis fired again, circling the MV Finch before firing twice more."

Bendahara said ship participants included seven Malaysians, two Irish, two Indians and a Canadian. No one was hurt. Events like this are fluid. A follow-up article will explain more if relevant information permits.

For now, Israeli remains a global menace and no fit state to live in, including for Jews.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs-"For An Anti-War Worker-Student General Strike (1970)

Click on the headline to link to the GI Voice archival website for an outline copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
*******
G.I. Voice was published by the Spartacist League for about one year starting in 1969 and ending in 1970. They published 7 issues total and represented the SL’s attempt to intervene with their politics inside the U.S. Army then occupying and fighting brutal war in Vietnam. There was a growing G.I. anti-war movement and this was in part the SL’s attempt to win over militant G.I.s to the views of the SL.

—Riazanov Library******

Markin comment on this series:

In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”

Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.

During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
*******
Markin comment on this issue:

No question that by 1969 everyone involved in the anti-war movement in America, including this writer, should have known that the twin strategies of getting a “peace” president elected (variously Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, hell, even Lyndon Johnson compared to one Richard Milhous Nixon) and the ever-growing but ever futile strategy of same old, same old “mass marches” were played out, were bankrupt whatever value they had held in previous years. This writer, at least, got the message loud and clear that 1969 was a watershed year for a new strategy. Although I had always been (and remain now pretty much true to that concept) a “to the streets”-oriented politico at some point what you are doing in those streets and who you are bringing into them becomes problematic.

Endless student-(and other assorted, mainly, young people although not yet many working class kids) driven marches were not working. Adding in dissident Democrats and others of “good will” was not going to shift the balance. That SWP-CP-left liberal- driven "popular front" strategy was strictly counter-posed to what was needed by 1969. And that is where this issue of the GI Voice is valuable. The notion of posing a workers-student anti-war general strike that would shift the axis from reliance on those so-called “good will” people to the people who could shut things down, the workers, was strictly speaking the beginning of wisdom. A late recognition of the power of the working class as decisive in the struggle, to be sure, late even by this son of the working class, but also as a bridge to get to their sons and brothers, and it was mainly their sons and brothers (and my brothers and me) who were fighting the war in Vietnam by 1969.

Students, workers, and then, at some point, worker-soldiers added to the mix. Ya, that’s the ticket. It pains me even today to realize that if we had acted on that class axis maybe we could have “won.” And aided the heroic fighters of the DNV and South Vietnamese National Liberation Front is a serious way, as well. If you want to castigate the U.S. Socialist Workers Party for their role in the 1960s defeat of our side by the American imperial state the struggle against the Vietnam War this is the heart of the matter. The military defeat that the Vietnamese ultimately inflicted on the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies owed relatively little to our efforts whatever public relations kudos the Vietnamese may have issued post hoc. But the cost was high, too high, and we could have helped cut it. The CP Stalinists I will not even mention. They were just doing what they had done since the late 1930s but the SWP, as I found out later, “knew” better. You should burn with rage over that knowledge even today.

Once Again, When Bop-Bop Bopped In The Doo Wop Night- “The Best Of Doo Wop Uptempo”- A CD Review

Once Again, When Bop-Bop Bopped In The Doo Wop Night- “The Best Of Doo Wop Uptempo”- A CD Review

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q96ylFiQK_I

Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers performing Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

CD Review

The Best Of Doo Wop Uptempo, various artists, Rhino Records, 1989

Recently I got caught up, and caught up bad, in the girl group doo wop (or that is what I prefer to call it anyway) night and mentioned that I had a hard time, a really hard time, relating to girl groups. No, not that they could not doo wop with the guys, Christ, half, more than half the time, they were better than the guys. Think of those great Shirelles numbers that came exploding off the charts. No, my problem, my mostly girl-less teenage alienation, teen angst, teen guy couldn’t figure out girls problem, was the lyrics of most of the songs. Songs filled with lines about longing for long gone Eddie, songs about parents forcing young love out the door when it involved the leader of the pack, or wistfulness about whether true love would survive the night, or tomorrow night. Or even such lowly concerns as the fact that one’s boyfriend was back, or that one had reclaimed an old boy friend and made some other teenage girl miserable, miserable waiting at the midnight phone, still waiting maybe. You know, girlish concerns, girlish giggle concerns not fit for serious teenage boy angst ears.

Not so though with the doo wop guys, slow, or as here up-tempo. Here the reverse is true, well, somewhat true. Although many times girl-less I could relate to such lyrical problems as two-timing mamas, fickle girls trying to decide between Johnny and Jimmy, girls, conspiring, yes, conspiring, and I will provide notarized proof upon request, to break up Susie and Bobby so Laura can have a shot at the lad. Such were the treacheries of the teen life, the 1950s teen life American-style (although I suspect, without notarized proof here, that this stuff rings a bell for today’s teen whatever nation, via Facebook convenience, they hail from.

That said all that is left is to figure out the stick-outs, and there are many here, some verily classics of the genre of the up-tempo doo wop night: Get A Job (first, ma says it at about twelve or thirteen, then girlfriend says it at about sixteen or seventeen so you have some dough to spend on her, then wife says it at about twenty-five or six, okay we get it, yes, get a job): The Silhouettes; Gee (great harmonics, although the lyrics are, ah, a little light), The Crows; Blue Moon (an old time Tin Pan Alley tune that cries out for this treatment, and a big old full moon to croon under), The Marcels; Little Star (wistful, guy version), The Elegants; Step By Step (sensible approach to a relationship, if you can do it, most teens just forget it), The Crests; and, Come Go With Me (yes, please do), The Del-Vikings.

Note: I have to make a special pitch for Why Do Fools Fall In Love? by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the max daddy of the bop-doo wop night and the voice that basically made it all possible for all those groups, all those big city corner boy (and girl) groups, to partake of the rock scene and some fame. When my best elementary school friend, Billie, William James Bradley, king of the neighborhood rock night and a pretty good budding rock singer, first heard this song I thought he was going to go crazy. He had us doo-wopping that thing all one summer when we were hanging out in back of the school. And guess what? That song (and a couple of others) had the girls, a couple at first, then a few more, then a bevy (nice word, right?) all coming around and getting all moony and swoony. And kept this reviewer from being girl-less, for a while anyway. Thanks, Frankie.

From The Archives Of The Vietnam G.I. Anti-War Movement-"GI Voice"-The Spartacist League's Anti-War Work Among GIs-"GIs And Black Power"

Click on the headline to link to the GI Voice archival website for an outline copy of the issue mentioned in the headline. I am not familiar with the Riazanov Library as a source, although the choice of the name of a famous Russian Bolshevik intellectual, archivist, and early head of the Marx-Engels Institute there, as well as being a friend and , at various points a political confederate of the great Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, sits well with me.
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G.I. Voice was published by the Spartacist League for about one year starting in 1969 and ending in 1970. They published 7 issues total and represented the SL’s attempt to intervene with their politics inside the U.S. Army then occupying and fighting brutal war in Vietnam. There was a growing G.I. anti-war movement and this was in part the SL’s attempt to win over militant G.I.s to the views of the SL.

—Riazanov Library
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Markin comment on this series:

In a funny way this American Left History blog probably never have come into existence if it was not for the Vietnam War, the primary radicalizing agent of my generation, the generation of ’68, and of my personal radicalization by military service during that period. I was, like many working class youth, especially from the urban Irish neighborhoods, drawn to politics as a career, bourgeois politics that is, liberal or not so liberal. Radicalism, or parts of it, was attractive but the “main chance” for political advancement in this country was found elsewhere. I, also like many working class youth then, was drafted into the military, although I, unlike most, balked, and balked hard at such service one I had been inducted. That event is the key experience that has left me still, some forty years later, with an overarching hatred of war, of American imperialist wars in particular, and with an overweening desire to spend my time fighting, fighting to the end against the “monster.”

Needless to say, in the late 1960s, although there was plenty of turmoil over the war on American (and world-wide) campuses and other student-influenced hang-outs and enclaves and that turmoil was starting to be picked among American soldiers, especially drafted soldiers, once they knew the score there was an incredible dearth of information flowing back and forth between those two movements. I, personally, had connections with the civilian ant-war movement, but most anti-war GIs were groping in the dark, groping in the dark on isolated military bases (not accidentally placed in such areas) or worst, in the heat of the battle zone in Vietnam. We could have used a ton more anti-war propaganda geared to our needs, legal, political, and social. That said, after my “retirement” from military service I worked, for a while, with the anti-war GI movement through the coffeehouse network based around various military bases.

During that time (very late 1960s and first few years of the 1970s) we put out, as did other more organized radical and revolutionary organizations, much literature about the war, imperialism, capitalism, etc., some good, some, in retrospect, bad or ill-put for the audience we were trying to target. What we didn’t do, or I didn’t do, either through carelessness or some later vagabond existence forgetfulness was save this material for future reference. Thus, when I happened upon this Riazanov Library material I jumped at the opportunity of posting it. That it happens to be Spartacist League/International Communist League material is not accidental, as I find myself in sympathy with their political positions, especially on war issues, more often than not. I, however, plan to scour the Internet for other material, most notably from the U. S. Socialist Workers Party and Progressive Labor Party, both of whom did some anti-war GI work at that time. There are others, I am sure. If the reader has any such anti-war GI material, from any war, just pass it along.
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Markin comment on this issue:

This issue addresses head-on the question of racism in the military, a major stumbling block to class unity during the Vietnam War era, and a question still at issue today in the military even though a black man, Barack Obama, as President of the United States leads the American imperial state in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other more episodic military adventures. The other issue, around the May Day events in France, would actually have to be re-written today in light of our current better understand that, soldier or civilian, we as revolutionaries do not want to take political responsibility for running the bourgeois state and therefore will not run for the executive offices of that state (although we would run for certain legislature positions as, in Lenin’s phrase, “tribunes of the people” and are not precluded from supporting working-class candidates from other leftist organizations, depending on their programs).

Note: Those of us who have been involved in the communist movement for years have gotten used to reading political literature that contains a fairly high level of polemical and analytical material that is somewhat abstract, or at least would be abstract to novice radical (or wannabe radical) politicos or military personnel. A GI-oriented paper, without ducking the hard issues of imperialism, class struggle, and the various oppressions present under the current capitalist system and without “dumbing down” (the average military person has had enough, more than enough, of that from the cradle to boot camp) should be written in language that most GIs can understand, and maybe get a chuckle out of. This issue did a fairly good job of that, including the chuckle part (the model letters to the editor).