Click on the headline to link to Occupy Oakland website for the latest from the Bay Area vanguard battleground in the struggle for social justice.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Friday, December 23, 2011
Thursday, December 22, 2011
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pages Of The "Socialist Alternative" Press- Part One- Russia -How the (Soviet)Bureaucracy Seized Power -Introduction and The Russian Working Class Takes Power (1917)
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Introduction
A young South Aftican activist, 20-year-old Comrade Bongani of the underground movement in Tumahole township, reflects the attitude of serious fighters the world over towards the need for socialist theory. Asked by a journalist what "people's education" meant, he is reported with answering:
"I mean the type of education whereby all the people are satisfied with it because they are involved in the decision-making for the benefit of all.
"For instance, when dealing with the Russian Revolution of 1917, because Russia is a Communist country, Bantu education [discriminatory system of schooling imposed on blacks by the South African state] will tell you this and that about communism and how bad it is.
"They won't tell you the true facts about what happened in Russia during that time..."
"Would you like to see socialism in this country?"
"Yes, because it's going to do away with capitalism."
"What do you understand by capitalism?"
"It is a system of private ownership by certain individuals who own the means of production. My parents, from Monday to Friday, can make a production of R1,000, but he or she is going to get, say, R50. So our parents are being exploited so that certain individuals can get rich.
"That's why I prefer socialism, because the working class will control production." (Financial Mail, Johannesburg, October 31, 1986)
It is not accidental that this comrade should use the example of the Russian revolution to illustrate this point. The first (and so far the only) conscious socialist revolution in the world, it proved irrefutably the possibility of overthrowing the rule of the reactionary classes and establishing the rule of the working class.
Despite systematic distortion by the capitalist media and education system, workers, youth and peasants (especially in the underdeveloped world) are aware of Russia's amazing transformation, following the October revolution, from a backward peasant country into a superpower.
For these reasons the Russian revolution has continued to inspire millions of oppressed people with confidence in their own victory. For the same reasons, no other event contains more fundamental lessons for the working-class movement today.
What are the "true facts about what happened in Russia during that time?" On what program did the Russian working class conquer power? Are the fundamental aims of that program still applicable in our struggle today?
Comrade Bongani refers to Russia as a "Communist" country. To what extent has the program of the 1917 revolution been carried into practice? To what extent has Russia advanced towards communism?
Politically conscious workers are aware that serious problems exist in the Soviet Union. In 1956, Soviet leader Krushchev denounced the monstrous corruption and repression that had characterized the rule of his predecessor, Stalin, from the 1920s until his death in 1953. Thirty years later, Mikhail Gorbachev is denouncing the continuing bureaucratic abuse.
Comrade Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party, today expresses his "anger and disgust" at having been a defender of Stalin's regime. (Interview with The Observer, London, March 1 1987)
But denunciations, anger and disgust do not answer the real question: what happened in the Soviet Union after 1917 to give rise to a regime of mass repression? Seventy years later, what remains of the system of workers' democracy established under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky?
For socialists it is essential to answer these questions fully and openly. Our critical examination of the Russian revolution and its subsequent degeneration has nothing in common with the capitalists' class hatred towards the USSR. We need to know "the true facts" in order to learn the lessons, and to respond correctly to the policies of the present-day Soviet leadership.
Comrades should organize discussions where these events, and the ideas that explain them, can be analyzed, where queries can be raised and ideas debated. This pamphlet is intended as a contribution to the discussion, and an introduction to further reading.
Each of its four parts, for example, could form the basis for a group discussion. Individual comrades could prepare contributions on the topics (sections) into which every part is divided. The books and pamphlets listed at the end should be studied by comrades who want to understand the issues in more detail.
Carrying out this study, and taking on board the lessons, is the best way to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian revolution.
George Collins, October 1987
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Part One: The Russian Working Class Takes Power
1. The October Revolution
Petrograd, capital of Russia, on the night of October 25, 1917. With the First World War raging on the battlefields of Europe, the Russian revolution has reached its deciding moment. Armed detachments of workers and soldiers, organized by the Bolshevik Party, have taken control in the city. The pro-capitalist Provisional Government, discredited and isolated, has ceased to exist.
In the Smolny Institute, formerly a girls' school, the Congress of Soviets [elected councils] of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies is in session.
Some delegates are professional politicians, left-wing intellectuals or radicalized army officers. But the vast majority are representatives of the ordinary working people: "great masses of shabby soldiers, grimy workmen, peasants - poor men, bent and scarred in the brute struggle for existence" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World) - but filled with a revolutionary vision of the future, and a passionate determination to end their oppression once and for all.
Middle-class reformists denounce the Bolsheviks and demand that the congress break up! But delegate after delegate of the workers, peasants and soldiers drown them in the will and inspiration of the masses rising to their feet.
A soldier captures the mood: "I tell you, the Lettish soldiers have many times said: 'No more resolutions! No more talk! We want deeds - the power must be in our hands!'"
The hall, reports John Reed, "rocked with cheering..." (pages 102-103)
Amidst tumultuous applause, the Bolsheviks announce the transfer of state power to the soviets of the working people. A "Proclamation to workers, soldiers and peasants", put forward by the Bolsheviks, is overwhelmingly adopted. It sums up the immediate tasks:
"The Soviet authority will at once propose an immediate democratic peace to all nations, and an immediate truce on all fronts. It will assure the free transfer of landlord, crown and monastery lands to the Land Committees [elected by the peasants as instruments for seizing the landlords' estates], defend the soldiers' rights, enforcing a complete democratization of the Army, establish workers' control over production, ... take means to supply bread to the cities and articles of first necessity to the villages, and secure to all nationalities living in Russia a real right to independent existence.
"The Congress resolves: that all local power shall be transferred to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, which must enforce revolutionary order." (Quoted by John Reed, pages 115-116)
Under a government of the revolutionary workers' party, supported by the mass of the poor peasants, the Russian people were freeing themselves from centuries of enslavement. In doing so they were demolishing the conditions for the existence of the capitalist system.
Lenin addressed the Congress of the following evening. When eventually he could make himself heard above the thunderous applause, his first words were to confirm the task which the democratic revolution had placed on the agenda:
"We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order."
Throughout the long, hard years of struggle leading up to this night, Marxists had explained in theory what this task would involve. Now the Bolshevik leaders needed to explain it in practical terms.
Leon Trotsky, next to Lenin the most authoritative leader of the Russian revolution, spoke later that same night:
"We rest all our hope on the possibility that our revolution will unleash the European revolution. If the insurrectionary peoples of Europe do not crush imperialism, then we will be crushed... Either the Russian revolution will raise the whirlwind of struggle in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will crush our revolution." (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, volume 3, page 315)
The delegates, wrote an observer, greeted these words "with an immense crusading acclaim". Clearly, Lenin and Trotsky had expressed the thoughts and feelings of the vast majority of revolutionary fighters present in the Smolny that night.
Thus, in its very first hours, the new proletarian regime reasserted two fundamental propositions of Marxism - no longer as theoretical concepts but as the basis for state policy:
(a) democracy and a solution to the land question, in an underdeveloped country like Russia, is possible only under working-class rule, bringing with it the overthrow of capitalism and the transition to socialism.
(b) Socialist revolution cannot be confined within the borders of one country; it can only advance through the struggle to overthrow capitalism on a world scale.
The rest of this pamphlet will deal with the fate of the Russian revolution over the following ten to twenty years, and the displacement of workers' democracy by a monstrous bureaucratic dictatorship. From studying these developments carefully, lessons can be learned that will be of vital importance to the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism today, and the construction of healthy regimes of workers' democracy in the next period.
2. The Counter-Revolution
Marx and Engels had thought it most likely that capitalism would be defeated first in the developed countries, where the working class was most powerful, and the industrial basis existed for the transition to socialism.
Instead, in October 1917, the chain of world capitalism broke at its weakest link.
The Bolshevik government inherited a backward society in a state of disintegration, exhausted by three years of war and a series of crushing defeats by Germany.
The imperialists could not tolerate the challenge to their authority, and the threat to their interests in Russia, which the Bolsheviks presented. As a pro-capitalist historian openly admits: "They [the imperialist leaders such as Churchill and Foch] warned that Bolshevism was a dangerous threat to world society and should be crushed while it was still weak". (J.N. Westwood, Russia 1917 to 1964, page 38)
Within Russia the privileged and reactionary classes, as well as reformists in the labor movement, fought the revolution with every means at their disposal - boycotts, economic sabotage, even the threat of a general strike.
Workers' control over production, through a system of factory, regional and national committees, was proclaimed to provide some check on the capitalists' activities. But there was no way of peacefully regulating the eruption of class struggle unleashed by the revolution.
On the one hand, the capitalists refused to submit to workers' control. On the other hand, where the workers asserted their power, they did not stop at "controlling" the capitalists. They took over factories lock, stock and barrel, even before their government was able to provide them with back-up and resources.
These struggles in industry clearly confirmed the perspective explained by Trotsky in his theory of "permanent revolution" (see Section 11): once the working class takes power, even in a backward country, it becomes impossible to confine their program to the limits of capitalism. The workers will inevitably be driven on to the expropriation of the capitalists and the program of socialist transformation.
A bourgeois historian describes the deepening paralysis of Russian society as the struggle between the classes intensified:
"In the spring of 1918 the Russian economy was approaching the point of complete collapse. Money lost all value, manufactured goods disappeared from the shops, the shops themselves closed down as the normal channels of trade ceased to function; speculation and corruption were rife." (Theodore H. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? page 154)
Hunger worsened in the cities as food supplies came almost to a standstill: when manufactured goods could not be obtained even by barter, why should the peasants raise food for the urban market?
Revolutionary counter-measures were taken. The banks, in the face of their persistent sabotage, were occupied and nationalized in December 1917. The workers spontaneously took over more and more factories until the decree of June 1918 bringing every important branch of industry into state ownership.
Committees of the poor peasants, and armed detachments of workers, were organized to seize the grain supplies hoarded by the rich peasants (kulaks).
The irreconcilable struggle between the classes escalated into a full-scale trial of strength. Armed counter-revolution began to emerge, based on an alliance of the imperialist powers with the kulaks, the capitalists, and the remnants of the forces of Tsarism. The Russian civil war raged, with peaks and intervals, from May 1918 until the spring of 1921.
Civil war, like revolution, forces everyone to take sides - for or against the government. Right-wing "socialists", ex-revolutionaries and reformists, their hatred of Marxism (as always) stronger than their fear of reaction, in large numbers joined the onslaught against the workers' state.
In March 1918, British forces occupied the northern port of Murmansk, and in August they seized Archangel, cutting off Russia's outlets to the sea. In April, Japanese troops landed at Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia.
"Emboldened by the prospect of allied intervention," writes the leading bourgeois historian, E.H. Carr, "the right SR's [right wing of the so-called Socialist Revolutionary Party, based on the richer peasants] at their party conference in Moscow in May 1918 openly advocated a policy designed 'to overthrow the Bolshevik dictatorship and to establish a government based on universal suffrage and willing to accept Allied assistance in the war against Germany'" - i.e. a pro-imperialist government! (The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, page 170)
The Mensheviks, split in all directions, were "uncompromising only on one point - their hostility to the [Bolshevik] regime". (Carr, page 170)
In Samara, the SR's set up an anti-Bolshevik "government" and started to raise an army. In August they captured Kazan. The Left SR's (based on the poor peasantry) were in coalition with the Bolsheviks until March 1918, when they left the government because they opposed the peace treaty signed with Germany, calling it a "betrayal".
Now they plotted against the government and tried to provoke a German attack which, they believed, would be met with "revolutionary war". Totally misreading the situation, they staged an insurrection in July, which rapidly collapsed.
The Western powers, as their war against Germany neared its end, concentrated their attention on Russia. More British, French and US troops were landed in Murmansk and Archangel. American, Japanese, British, French and Italian troops occupied Vladivostok and advanced westward as far as the Ural mountains. Sizeable French forces were deployed in the Black Sea.
At the same time, the imperialists financed and armed the counter-revolutionary ("White") armies organized out of the most backward peasantry by ex-Tsarist officers.
Victor Serge, a Bolshevik at the time, vividly describes the desperate situation in October 1919:
"The Whites under Admiral Kolchak are masters of Siberia; they constitute the 'supreme government' of Ukraine under General Denikin who is preparing for a march on Moscow. In the North, thanks to the British battalions, they dominate a vaguely socialist government presided over by old Tchaikovsky, a veteran of the first struggles against Tsarism; and General Yudenich is preparing to take Petrograd, where the people are dying of hunger in the streets and dead horses are piled up in fromt of the Grand Opera." (From Lenin to Stalin, page 31)
Yet, a year later, Wrangel (Denikin's successor) had been crushed in the Crimea, and the military threat was effectively ended.
The Bolsheviks' victory over the combined forces of internal and external reaction, from a position of terrible weakness, most surely rank as one of the most brilliant military achievements of all time.
How was this victory won?
3. How the Bolsheviks Defeated the Counter-Revolution
The survival of the Russian workers' state was made possible, in the first place, by the support of the working class internationally in the enormous movements following the October revolution.
Brilliantly confirming the Bolsheviks' perspective, Europe was plunged into a period of revolution. The road to victory opened up before the working class in one country after another.
The imperialists, tied down by life-and-death struggles in their own countries, could not continue their attacks on Russia without provoking the workers even further, and driving their soldiers to mutiny.
A strike by Hungarian munitions workers in January 1918 spread like wildfire to Vienna, Berlin and throughout Germany, involving over two million workers. Their central demand, echoing the Russian workers' demand, was peace. In Finland an Independent Workers' Republic was proclaimed. After months of fighting it was crushed with the help of German troops.
Then, on 4 November 1918, mutiny broke out at the German naval base of Kiel, and ignited the German revolution. Within days every major city was in the hands of the workers' councils.
The effect on the Russian working class was electrifying. The Bolshevik Ilyin-Shenevsky, taking an evening off in a Petrograd theatre, gives a glimpse of its impact throughout the country:
"Before one of the acts was about to begin, a man in jacket and high boots came on to the stage and said: 'Comrades! We have just had news from Germany. There has been a revolution in Germany. Wilhelm [the emperor] has been overthrown. A Soviet of workers' deputies has been formed in Berlin and has sent us a telegram of greeting.'
"It is hard to convey what followed... The announcement was met with a kind of roar, and frenzied applause shook the theatre for several minutes..." (The Bolsheviks in Power, pages 127-128)
In Austria, mass strikes and army mutinies finally smashed the imperial Hasburg regime. The empire disintegrated, and in Hungary a revolutionary soviet government took power in March 1919.
France was swept by mass strikes and naval mutiny. British soldiers mutinied, and the Red Flag was hoisted over the Clyde in the Scottish industrial heartland. Ireland was in armed revolt against British rule. Strikes involving four million workers convulsed in the USA in 1919.
These events, hardly mentioned in official history books, demonstrated a law which every socialist needs to understand: a successful workers' revolution has an incalculable impact internationally, provoking capitalist reaction but, at the same time, inspiring the workers in other countries to come to its defense and follow its example.
The spirit of international solidarity was the Russian workers' most potent weapon. Not by moral appeals to "democracy" ir the "conscience" of the capitalist class, but by linking themselves to the working-class struggle for power internationally, the Bolsheviks won immeasurable support from every corner of the globe, and opened a "second front" in the imperialists' rear.
Addressed in a comradely way, British and American troops in Russia began to mutiny. On the Black Sea, French sailors hoisted the Red Flag. The imperialists were compelled to withdraw their forces and abandon the Whites to their fate.
The early congresses of the Communist International (see Section 4 below) called on the workers' movement internationally to take action against any kind of support for the Whites in Russia. In July 1920, following the invasion of Russia by reactionary Polish forces, the Second Congress appealed:
"Stop all work, atop all transport, if you see that despite your protests the capitalist cliques of your countries are preparing a new intervention against Russia. Do not allow a single train, a single ship through to Poland." (Quoted in J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943 - Documents, Volume 1, page 113)
In Britain, the London dockers rallied magnificently to their comrades in Russia when they refused to load the vessel Jolly George with arms for the Whites in Poland.
In July, with the Red Army driving back the invaders, the British government threatened to send troops to Poland. Council of action were set up by trade unionists throughout Britain, threatening a general strike if the intervention went ahead.
The British government - 48 hours after rejecting the Soviet reply to its ultimatum - backed down.
On the battlefields of Russia, as in the international arena, the workers' victory was only made possible by the Bolsheviks' uncompromising revolutionary policy.
A soldier, speaking at a mass meeting in Petrograd, makes clear the class program that the Red Army was built on:
"The soldier says: 'Show me what I am fighting for... Is it the democracy, or is it the capitalist plunderers? If you can prove to me that I am defending the Revolution, then I will go out and fight without capital punishment to force me'.
"When the land belongs to the peasants and the factories to the workers and the power to the Soviets, then we'll know we have something to fight for, and we'll fight for it!" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, pages 45-46)
A key factor in the struggle is leadership - in the first place, ideas and program; but following from this, the role of individuals in grasping those ideas, embodying the forward drive of their class, and showing others the way.
It would be impossible, for example, to deny the historic contribution of Marx and Engels in the development of the program of socialism, or of Lenin in preparing the way for the October revolution.
It would be equally impossible to underestimate Trotsky's role as Commissar for War from 1918 to 1925 in building the Red Army and leading it to victory.
Trotsky organized the Red Army as a revolutionary army, motivated by political understanding, not by blind obedience. His unshakeable confidence in the workers, youth and peasants who made up its ranks is best expressed in his own words:
"What was needed for [saving the revolution]? Very little. The front ranks of the masses had to realize the mortal danger in the situation. The first requisite for success was to hide nothing, our weaknesses least of all; not to trifle with the masses but to call everything by its right name." (My Life, page 43)
Dedicated young workers were attracted to the army, and became its vanguard. Trotsky continues:
"The Soviets, the party, the trades unions, all devoted themselves to raising new detachments, and sent thousands of communists to the [front]. Most of the youth of the party did not know how to handle arms, but they had the will to win, and that was the most important thing. They put backbone into the soft body of the army."
The "will to win" was "the most important thing". Howe to use arms can be learned in a short time. But the will to win can only be born out of a sense of purpose, a clear goal to fight for, and the understanding of how it can be achieved.
The Bolsheviks had the morale to win; and precisely this vital force was missing from the ranks of the Whites. Even the pro-capitalist Westwood is forced to admit:
"Until Wrangel took over the remnants of the White Army [i.e., nearly at the end of the war], its officers set an example of drunkenness, looting and violence which their soldiers willingly followed. Outrageous treatment of the local population, the outspoken intention to restore the landlords, and the greater social cleavage between the Whites and the peasantry made the latter finally prefer the Reds." (Russia 1917 to 1964)
Thus the initial onslaught of the counter-revolution was defeated. The Bolsheviks, however, understood that their victory could bring no more than a respite in the struggle. As Lenin commented in 1920:
"We have now passed from war to peace. But we have not forgotten that war will come again. So long as both capitalism and socialism remain, we cannot live in peace. Either the one or the other in the long run will conquer." (Quoted by Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 3, page 365)
Questions for Discussion
1. Why did the revolution occur in backward Russia, and not in Britain or Germany where the working class was stronger?
2. What would have happened if Lenin and Trotsky hadn't been in Russia in 1917?
3. The revolution took place in Russia because of the unique conditions of war weariness, starvation and landless peasants. Surely it won't happen like that here?
4. Didn't the development of a three-year civil war show that the Bolsheviks only had the support of a tiny minority?
5. How did the Bolsheviks with the civil war against militarily superior forces?
Further Reading: Introductory
Articles in Militant in 1987, (834 overview of 1917; 835 February 1917; 842 April 1917; 859 Kornilov's revolt; 869 The October Revolution; also November 1987 on rise of Stalinism.)
Russian Revolution study guide, especially articles on February 1917 and the Russian Revolution
Ideals of October by LPYS (pp. 1-6)
Further Study
In Defense of October by Trotsky
Bureaucratism or Workers Power? by Silverman and Grant (pp. 26-40)
Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For by Woods and Grant (pp. 22-39)
Lessons of October By Trotsky
History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky
A marvelous book outlining the process and development of the revolution up to the end of 1917
Ten Days That Shook the World by Reed
A vivid eyewitness account of the events of 1917
The Bolsheviks in Power by Ilyin-Shenevsky
From Lenin to Stalin by Serge
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Introduction
A young South Aftican activist, 20-year-old Comrade Bongani of the underground movement in Tumahole township, reflects the attitude of serious fighters the world over towards the need for socialist theory. Asked by a journalist what "people's education" meant, he is reported with answering:
"I mean the type of education whereby all the people are satisfied with it because they are involved in the decision-making for the benefit of all.
"For instance, when dealing with the Russian Revolution of 1917, because Russia is a Communist country, Bantu education [discriminatory system of schooling imposed on blacks by the South African state] will tell you this and that about communism and how bad it is.
"They won't tell you the true facts about what happened in Russia during that time..."
"Would you like to see socialism in this country?"
"Yes, because it's going to do away with capitalism."
"What do you understand by capitalism?"
"It is a system of private ownership by certain individuals who own the means of production. My parents, from Monday to Friday, can make a production of R1,000, but he or she is going to get, say, R50. So our parents are being exploited so that certain individuals can get rich.
"That's why I prefer socialism, because the working class will control production." (Financial Mail, Johannesburg, October 31, 1986)
It is not accidental that this comrade should use the example of the Russian revolution to illustrate this point. The first (and so far the only) conscious socialist revolution in the world, it proved irrefutably the possibility of overthrowing the rule of the reactionary classes and establishing the rule of the working class.
Despite systematic distortion by the capitalist media and education system, workers, youth and peasants (especially in the underdeveloped world) are aware of Russia's amazing transformation, following the October revolution, from a backward peasant country into a superpower.
For these reasons the Russian revolution has continued to inspire millions of oppressed people with confidence in their own victory. For the same reasons, no other event contains more fundamental lessons for the working-class movement today.
What are the "true facts about what happened in Russia during that time?" On what program did the Russian working class conquer power? Are the fundamental aims of that program still applicable in our struggle today?
Comrade Bongani refers to Russia as a "Communist" country. To what extent has the program of the 1917 revolution been carried into practice? To what extent has Russia advanced towards communism?
Politically conscious workers are aware that serious problems exist in the Soviet Union. In 1956, Soviet leader Krushchev denounced the monstrous corruption and repression that had characterized the rule of his predecessor, Stalin, from the 1920s until his death in 1953. Thirty years later, Mikhail Gorbachev is denouncing the continuing bureaucratic abuse.
Comrade Joe Slovo, leader of the South African Communist Party, today expresses his "anger and disgust" at having been a defender of Stalin's regime. (Interview with The Observer, London, March 1 1987)
But denunciations, anger and disgust do not answer the real question: what happened in the Soviet Union after 1917 to give rise to a regime of mass repression? Seventy years later, what remains of the system of workers' democracy established under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky?
For socialists it is essential to answer these questions fully and openly. Our critical examination of the Russian revolution and its subsequent degeneration has nothing in common with the capitalists' class hatred towards the USSR. We need to know "the true facts" in order to learn the lessons, and to respond correctly to the policies of the present-day Soviet leadership.
Comrades should organize discussions where these events, and the ideas that explain them, can be analyzed, where queries can be raised and ideas debated. This pamphlet is intended as a contribution to the discussion, and an introduction to further reading.
Each of its four parts, for example, could form the basis for a group discussion. Individual comrades could prepare contributions on the topics (sections) into which every part is divided. The books and pamphlets listed at the end should be studied by comrades who want to understand the issues in more detail.
Carrying out this study, and taking on board the lessons, is the best way to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian revolution.
George Collins, October 1987
*********
Part One: The Russian Working Class Takes Power
1. The October Revolution
Petrograd, capital of Russia, on the night of October 25, 1917. With the First World War raging on the battlefields of Europe, the Russian revolution has reached its deciding moment. Armed detachments of workers and soldiers, organized by the Bolshevik Party, have taken control in the city. The pro-capitalist Provisional Government, discredited and isolated, has ceased to exist.
In the Smolny Institute, formerly a girls' school, the Congress of Soviets [elected councils] of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies is in session.
Some delegates are professional politicians, left-wing intellectuals or radicalized army officers. But the vast majority are representatives of the ordinary working people: "great masses of shabby soldiers, grimy workmen, peasants - poor men, bent and scarred in the brute struggle for existence" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World) - but filled with a revolutionary vision of the future, and a passionate determination to end their oppression once and for all.
Middle-class reformists denounce the Bolsheviks and demand that the congress break up! But delegate after delegate of the workers, peasants and soldiers drown them in the will and inspiration of the masses rising to their feet.
A soldier captures the mood: "I tell you, the Lettish soldiers have many times said: 'No more resolutions! No more talk! We want deeds - the power must be in our hands!'"
The hall, reports John Reed, "rocked with cheering..." (pages 102-103)
Amidst tumultuous applause, the Bolsheviks announce the transfer of state power to the soviets of the working people. A "Proclamation to workers, soldiers and peasants", put forward by the Bolsheviks, is overwhelmingly adopted. It sums up the immediate tasks:
"The Soviet authority will at once propose an immediate democratic peace to all nations, and an immediate truce on all fronts. It will assure the free transfer of landlord, crown and monastery lands to the Land Committees [elected by the peasants as instruments for seizing the landlords' estates], defend the soldiers' rights, enforcing a complete democratization of the Army, establish workers' control over production, ... take means to supply bread to the cities and articles of first necessity to the villages, and secure to all nationalities living in Russia a real right to independent existence.
"The Congress resolves: that all local power shall be transferred to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, which must enforce revolutionary order." (Quoted by John Reed, pages 115-116)
Under a government of the revolutionary workers' party, supported by the mass of the poor peasants, the Russian people were freeing themselves from centuries of enslavement. In doing so they were demolishing the conditions for the existence of the capitalist system.
Lenin addressed the Congress of the following evening. When eventually he could make himself heard above the thunderous applause, his first words were to confirm the task which the democratic revolution had placed on the agenda:
"We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order."
Throughout the long, hard years of struggle leading up to this night, Marxists had explained in theory what this task would involve. Now the Bolshevik leaders needed to explain it in practical terms.
Leon Trotsky, next to Lenin the most authoritative leader of the Russian revolution, spoke later that same night:
"We rest all our hope on the possibility that our revolution will unleash the European revolution. If the insurrectionary peoples of Europe do not crush imperialism, then we will be crushed... Either the Russian revolution will raise the whirlwind of struggle in the west, or the capitalists of all countries will crush our revolution." (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, volume 3, page 315)
The delegates, wrote an observer, greeted these words "with an immense crusading acclaim". Clearly, Lenin and Trotsky had expressed the thoughts and feelings of the vast majority of revolutionary fighters present in the Smolny that night.
Thus, in its very first hours, the new proletarian regime reasserted two fundamental propositions of Marxism - no longer as theoretical concepts but as the basis for state policy:
(a) democracy and a solution to the land question, in an underdeveloped country like Russia, is possible only under working-class rule, bringing with it the overthrow of capitalism and the transition to socialism.
(b) Socialist revolution cannot be confined within the borders of one country; it can only advance through the struggle to overthrow capitalism on a world scale.
The rest of this pamphlet will deal with the fate of the Russian revolution over the following ten to twenty years, and the displacement of workers' democracy by a monstrous bureaucratic dictatorship. From studying these developments carefully, lessons can be learned that will be of vital importance to the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism today, and the construction of healthy regimes of workers' democracy in the next period.
2. The Counter-Revolution
Marx and Engels had thought it most likely that capitalism would be defeated first in the developed countries, where the working class was most powerful, and the industrial basis existed for the transition to socialism.
Instead, in October 1917, the chain of world capitalism broke at its weakest link.
The Bolshevik government inherited a backward society in a state of disintegration, exhausted by three years of war and a series of crushing defeats by Germany.
The imperialists could not tolerate the challenge to their authority, and the threat to their interests in Russia, which the Bolsheviks presented. As a pro-capitalist historian openly admits: "They [the imperialist leaders such as Churchill and Foch] warned that Bolshevism was a dangerous threat to world society and should be crushed while it was still weak". (J.N. Westwood, Russia 1917 to 1964, page 38)
Within Russia the privileged and reactionary classes, as well as reformists in the labor movement, fought the revolution with every means at their disposal - boycotts, economic sabotage, even the threat of a general strike.
Workers' control over production, through a system of factory, regional and national committees, was proclaimed to provide some check on the capitalists' activities. But there was no way of peacefully regulating the eruption of class struggle unleashed by the revolution.
On the one hand, the capitalists refused to submit to workers' control. On the other hand, where the workers asserted their power, they did not stop at "controlling" the capitalists. They took over factories lock, stock and barrel, even before their government was able to provide them with back-up and resources.
These struggles in industry clearly confirmed the perspective explained by Trotsky in his theory of "permanent revolution" (see Section 11): once the working class takes power, even in a backward country, it becomes impossible to confine their program to the limits of capitalism. The workers will inevitably be driven on to the expropriation of the capitalists and the program of socialist transformation.
A bourgeois historian describes the deepening paralysis of Russian society as the struggle between the classes intensified:
"In the spring of 1918 the Russian economy was approaching the point of complete collapse. Money lost all value, manufactured goods disappeared from the shops, the shops themselves closed down as the normal channels of trade ceased to function; speculation and corruption were rife." (Theodore H. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? page 154)
Hunger worsened in the cities as food supplies came almost to a standstill: when manufactured goods could not be obtained even by barter, why should the peasants raise food for the urban market?
Revolutionary counter-measures were taken. The banks, in the face of their persistent sabotage, were occupied and nationalized in December 1917. The workers spontaneously took over more and more factories until the decree of June 1918 bringing every important branch of industry into state ownership.
Committees of the poor peasants, and armed detachments of workers, were organized to seize the grain supplies hoarded by the rich peasants (kulaks).
The irreconcilable struggle between the classes escalated into a full-scale trial of strength. Armed counter-revolution began to emerge, based on an alliance of the imperialist powers with the kulaks, the capitalists, and the remnants of the forces of Tsarism. The Russian civil war raged, with peaks and intervals, from May 1918 until the spring of 1921.
Civil war, like revolution, forces everyone to take sides - for or against the government. Right-wing "socialists", ex-revolutionaries and reformists, their hatred of Marxism (as always) stronger than their fear of reaction, in large numbers joined the onslaught against the workers' state.
In March 1918, British forces occupied the northern port of Murmansk, and in August they seized Archangel, cutting off Russia's outlets to the sea. In April, Japanese troops landed at Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia.
"Emboldened by the prospect of allied intervention," writes the leading bourgeois historian, E.H. Carr, "the right SR's [right wing of the so-called Socialist Revolutionary Party, based on the richer peasants] at their party conference in Moscow in May 1918 openly advocated a policy designed 'to overthrow the Bolshevik dictatorship and to establish a government based on universal suffrage and willing to accept Allied assistance in the war against Germany'" - i.e. a pro-imperialist government! (The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, page 170)
The Mensheviks, split in all directions, were "uncompromising only on one point - their hostility to the [Bolshevik] regime". (Carr, page 170)
In Samara, the SR's set up an anti-Bolshevik "government" and started to raise an army. In August they captured Kazan. The Left SR's (based on the poor peasantry) were in coalition with the Bolsheviks until March 1918, when they left the government because they opposed the peace treaty signed with Germany, calling it a "betrayal".
Now they plotted against the government and tried to provoke a German attack which, they believed, would be met with "revolutionary war". Totally misreading the situation, they staged an insurrection in July, which rapidly collapsed.
The Western powers, as their war against Germany neared its end, concentrated their attention on Russia. More British, French and US troops were landed in Murmansk and Archangel. American, Japanese, British, French and Italian troops occupied Vladivostok and advanced westward as far as the Ural mountains. Sizeable French forces were deployed in the Black Sea.
At the same time, the imperialists financed and armed the counter-revolutionary ("White") armies organized out of the most backward peasantry by ex-Tsarist officers.
Victor Serge, a Bolshevik at the time, vividly describes the desperate situation in October 1919:
"The Whites under Admiral Kolchak are masters of Siberia; they constitute the 'supreme government' of Ukraine under General Denikin who is preparing for a march on Moscow. In the North, thanks to the British battalions, they dominate a vaguely socialist government presided over by old Tchaikovsky, a veteran of the first struggles against Tsarism; and General Yudenich is preparing to take Petrograd, where the people are dying of hunger in the streets and dead horses are piled up in fromt of the Grand Opera." (From Lenin to Stalin, page 31)
Yet, a year later, Wrangel (Denikin's successor) had been crushed in the Crimea, and the military threat was effectively ended.
The Bolsheviks' victory over the combined forces of internal and external reaction, from a position of terrible weakness, most surely rank as one of the most brilliant military achievements of all time.
How was this victory won?
3. How the Bolsheviks Defeated the Counter-Revolution
The survival of the Russian workers' state was made possible, in the first place, by the support of the working class internationally in the enormous movements following the October revolution.
Brilliantly confirming the Bolsheviks' perspective, Europe was plunged into a period of revolution. The road to victory opened up before the working class in one country after another.
The imperialists, tied down by life-and-death struggles in their own countries, could not continue their attacks on Russia without provoking the workers even further, and driving their soldiers to mutiny.
A strike by Hungarian munitions workers in January 1918 spread like wildfire to Vienna, Berlin and throughout Germany, involving over two million workers. Their central demand, echoing the Russian workers' demand, was peace. In Finland an Independent Workers' Republic was proclaimed. After months of fighting it was crushed with the help of German troops.
Then, on 4 November 1918, mutiny broke out at the German naval base of Kiel, and ignited the German revolution. Within days every major city was in the hands of the workers' councils.
The effect on the Russian working class was electrifying. The Bolshevik Ilyin-Shenevsky, taking an evening off in a Petrograd theatre, gives a glimpse of its impact throughout the country:
"Before one of the acts was about to begin, a man in jacket and high boots came on to the stage and said: 'Comrades! We have just had news from Germany. There has been a revolution in Germany. Wilhelm [the emperor] has been overthrown. A Soviet of workers' deputies has been formed in Berlin and has sent us a telegram of greeting.'
"It is hard to convey what followed... The announcement was met with a kind of roar, and frenzied applause shook the theatre for several minutes..." (The Bolsheviks in Power, pages 127-128)
In Austria, mass strikes and army mutinies finally smashed the imperial Hasburg regime. The empire disintegrated, and in Hungary a revolutionary soviet government took power in March 1919.
France was swept by mass strikes and naval mutiny. British soldiers mutinied, and the Red Flag was hoisted over the Clyde in the Scottish industrial heartland. Ireland was in armed revolt against British rule. Strikes involving four million workers convulsed in the USA in 1919.
These events, hardly mentioned in official history books, demonstrated a law which every socialist needs to understand: a successful workers' revolution has an incalculable impact internationally, provoking capitalist reaction but, at the same time, inspiring the workers in other countries to come to its defense and follow its example.
The spirit of international solidarity was the Russian workers' most potent weapon. Not by moral appeals to "democracy" ir the "conscience" of the capitalist class, but by linking themselves to the working-class struggle for power internationally, the Bolsheviks won immeasurable support from every corner of the globe, and opened a "second front" in the imperialists' rear.
Addressed in a comradely way, British and American troops in Russia began to mutiny. On the Black Sea, French sailors hoisted the Red Flag. The imperialists were compelled to withdraw their forces and abandon the Whites to their fate.
The early congresses of the Communist International (see Section 4 below) called on the workers' movement internationally to take action against any kind of support for the Whites in Russia. In July 1920, following the invasion of Russia by reactionary Polish forces, the Second Congress appealed:
"Stop all work, atop all transport, if you see that despite your protests the capitalist cliques of your countries are preparing a new intervention against Russia. Do not allow a single train, a single ship through to Poland." (Quoted in J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943 - Documents, Volume 1, page 113)
In Britain, the London dockers rallied magnificently to their comrades in Russia when they refused to load the vessel Jolly George with arms for the Whites in Poland.
In July, with the Red Army driving back the invaders, the British government threatened to send troops to Poland. Council of action were set up by trade unionists throughout Britain, threatening a general strike if the intervention went ahead.
The British government - 48 hours after rejecting the Soviet reply to its ultimatum - backed down.
On the battlefields of Russia, as in the international arena, the workers' victory was only made possible by the Bolsheviks' uncompromising revolutionary policy.
A soldier, speaking at a mass meeting in Petrograd, makes clear the class program that the Red Army was built on:
"The soldier says: 'Show me what I am fighting for... Is it the democracy, or is it the capitalist plunderers? If you can prove to me that I am defending the Revolution, then I will go out and fight without capital punishment to force me'.
"When the land belongs to the peasants and the factories to the workers and the power to the Soviets, then we'll know we have something to fight for, and we'll fight for it!" (John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, pages 45-46)
A key factor in the struggle is leadership - in the first place, ideas and program; but following from this, the role of individuals in grasping those ideas, embodying the forward drive of their class, and showing others the way.
It would be impossible, for example, to deny the historic contribution of Marx and Engels in the development of the program of socialism, or of Lenin in preparing the way for the October revolution.
It would be equally impossible to underestimate Trotsky's role as Commissar for War from 1918 to 1925 in building the Red Army and leading it to victory.
Trotsky organized the Red Army as a revolutionary army, motivated by political understanding, not by blind obedience. His unshakeable confidence in the workers, youth and peasants who made up its ranks is best expressed in his own words:
"What was needed for [saving the revolution]? Very little. The front ranks of the masses had to realize the mortal danger in the situation. The first requisite for success was to hide nothing, our weaknesses least of all; not to trifle with the masses but to call everything by its right name." (My Life, page 43)
Dedicated young workers were attracted to the army, and became its vanguard. Trotsky continues:
"The Soviets, the party, the trades unions, all devoted themselves to raising new detachments, and sent thousands of communists to the [front]. Most of the youth of the party did not know how to handle arms, but they had the will to win, and that was the most important thing. They put backbone into the soft body of the army."
The "will to win" was "the most important thing". Howe to use arms can be learned in a short time. But the will to win can only be born out of a sense of purpose, a clear goal to fight for, and the understanding of how it can be achieved.
The Bolsheviks had the morale to win; and precisely this vital force was missing from the ranks of the Whites. Even the pro-capitalist Westwood is forced to admit:
"Until Wrangel took over the remnants of the White Army [i.e., nearly at the end of the war], its officers set an example of drunkenness, looting and violence which their soldiers willingly followed. Outrageous treatment of the local population, the outspoken intention to restore the landlords, and the greater social cleavage between the Whites and the peasantry made the latter finally prefer the Reds." (Russia 1917 to 1964)
Thus the initial onslaught of the counter-revolution was defeated. The Bolsheviks, however, understood that their victory could bring no more than a respite in the struggle. As Lenin commented in 1920:
"We have now passed from war to peace. But we have not forgotten that war will come again. So long as both capitalism and socialism remain, we cannot live in peace. Either the one or the other in the long run will conquer." (Quoted by Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Volume 3, page 365)
Questions for Discussion
1. Why did the revolution occur in backward Russia, and not in Britain or Germany where the working class was stronger?
2. What would have happened if Lenin and Trotsky hadn't been in Russia in 1917?
3. The revolution took place in Russia because of the unique conditions of war weariness, starvation and landless peasants. Surely it won't happen like that here?
4. Didn't the development of a three-year civil war show that the Bolsheviks only had the support of a tiny minority?
5. How did the Bolsheviks with the civil war against militarily superior forces?
Further Reading: Introductory
Articles in Militant in 1987, (834 overview of 1917; 835 February 1917; 842 April 1917; 859 Kornilov's revolt; 869 The October Revolution; also November 1987 on rise of Stalinism.)
Russian Revolution study guide, especially articles on February 1917 and the Russian Revolution
Ideals of October by LPYS (pp. 1-6)
Further Study
In Defense of October by Trotsky
Bureaucratism or Workers Power? by Silverman and Grant (pp. 26-40)
Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For by Woods and Grant (pp. 22-39)
Lessons of October By Trotsky
History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky
A marvelous book outlining the process and development of the revolution up to the end of 1917
Ten Days That Shook the World by Reed
A vivid eyewitness account of the events of 1917
The Bolsheviks in Power by Ilyin-Shenevsky
From Lenin to Stalin by Serge
***Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Night-When “Stewball” Stu Ruled The Highways
Click on to the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Danny and The Juniors performing Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay to set the mood for this sketch.
The Golden Age Of American Rock ‘n’ Roll; The Follow-Up Hits, various artists, Ace Records, 1991
Scene: Brought to mind by the be-bop cover photograph of a “boss” two-toned 1950s Oldsmobile sitting in front of a car dealership just waiting to be driven off in the “golden age of the automobile” night.
“Stewball” Stu loved cars, loved 1950s classic “boss” cars, period. And on the very top of that heap was his cherry red ’57 Chevy. The flamed-out king hell dragon of the Mainiac highways, especially those back roads around his, our, hometown, Olde Saco, close by the sea. Not for him the new stuff, the new “boss” Mustang, Mustang Sally ride I am crazy for, or would be crazy for if, (1) I was older than my current no-driver, no legal driver fifteen, and (2) I had any kind of dough except the few bucks I grab doing this and that, mainly that.
And how do I know about Stewball’s preferences, prejudices if you want to put it that way? Well I, Joshua Lawrence Breslin, have been riding “shot-gun” to Stewball’s driver for the past several months, ever since I proved my metal, my Stu-worthy metal, when I “scrammed” a while back when Stu moved in on me and a hot date I had with a local Lolita and three was a crowd.
Ya, Stu and me are tight, tight as a nineteen year guy who is the king of the roads around here can be with a fifteen year old guy with no dough, no drivers’ license, no sister for him to drool over, and zero, maybe minus zero, mechanical skills to back him up. So you see me flaking out on that Lolita thing meant a lot to Stewball, although he is not a guy that you can figure something on, not easy figuring anyhow. [Hey, by the way, by the very big way, that Stewball moniker is strictly between you and me. Some of the guys that hung around his garage (really his bent out of shape trailer home rigged up with all kinds of automobile-fixing stuff all over the place) started to call him Stewball among ourselves after we observed, observed for the sixty-fifth time, Stu loaded before noon on some rotgut Southern Comfort that he swore kept him sober, unlike whiskey. Like I say don’t spread that around because Stu in one tough hombre. I once saw him chain-whip a guy just for kind of eyeing a Lolita (not the one I butted out on) that was sitting next to him in that cherry red Chevy at Jimmy Joe’s Diner, the one down on Route One, not the one over on Atlantic Avenue. Enough said, okay.]
Let me tell you about one time a few months back when Stu proved, for the umpteenth time (although my first time, first really seeing him in action glory time), why no one can come close to him as king of these roads around herr, and maybe any. It was a Friday night, an October Friday night, just starting to get to be defroster or car heater time so it had to be then. Stu, who lives over on Tobacco Road (I won’t tell you his real address because, like he says, what people don’t know is just fine with him and the girls all know where he is anyway. Ya, that’s a real Stu-ism) picked me up at my house on Albamarle Street (got that girls, Albamarle) like he always does, sometime between seven and eight, also as usual.
We then make the loop. First down Atlantic passed the Colonial Donut Shoppe (they serve other stuff there too) to see if there was a stray clover (A Stu-ism for a girl, origin unknown) or two looking to erase the gloomy, lonely night coming on. (I hoped two, two girls that is, because while I am glad, glad as hell, that I did right by Stu with that "hot" Lolita (and she was hot, maybe too hot for me then, not now) I don’t want to make a habit of it, being Stu’s “shot-gun,” or not. No dice. So off to Lanny’s Bowl-World over on Sea Street. Guess it is kind of early because no dice there either. Well, it’s off to “headquarters,” Jimmy Joe’s Diner on Main Street (really Route One but everybody local calls it Main).
Now Jimmy Joe’s has been Stu’s headquarters for so long that he has a “reserved” spot there. Yes, right in front just to the left on the entrance so that he can “scope” (Stu-ism) the scene (read: girls, Josh-ism). Jimmy Joe, the owner, felt that Stu was so good for business, Friday night hot teenage girls crowding the place looking for fast-driving guys and fast, or slow, driving guys, ready to, well you know I don’t have to draw you a diagram, business so he had no problem with the arrangement. Except this Friday night, this October Friday night, Stu’s reserved spot is occupied, occupied by a two-toned, low-riding 1956 Oldsmobile that even I can see had been worked on, worked hard on to create maximum horse-power in the minimum time. And inside that Oldsmobile sat one Duke McKay, a guy some of us had heard of, from down in Kittery near the New Hampshire border. So maybe Duke, not knowing the local rules, parked in that spot by accident. Ya that seems like the right answer.
No way though. Why? Because sitting right next old Duke, actually almost on top of him is that Lolita that I made way for to help Stu. Said Lolita (not her real name because she was, and is, as I write, uh, not “of age” so Lolita is a good enough moniker) looking very fine, very fine indeed, as Stu goes over to the Oldsmobile to give Duke the what for. I can almost hear the chains coming out.
But Stu must have had some kind of jinx on him, or Lolita put one on him, because all he did was make Duke a proposition. Beat Stu in a “chicken run” and the parking spot, Lolita, and the unofficial king of the road title were his. Lose, and he was gone (without chain-whipping I hoped) from Olde Saco, permanently, minus Lolita. Now I can see where this Lolita is worth getting a little steamed up about. But take it from me Stu, until just this minute, was strictly a love them or leave them guy (leave them to me, please). Duke, with eight million pounds of bravado, answered quickly like any true road-warrior does when challenged and just uttered, “On.” And we are off, although not before Lolita gives Stu some madness femme fatale look. A look, a pout really, which you couldn’t tell if she was in Stu’s corner or wanted to see him in hell. Girls, damn.
A chicken race, for the squares, is nothing but a race between two cars (usually two), two fast teenager-driven cars, done late at night or early in the morning out on some desolate road, sometimes straight, sometimes not. The idea is to get a fast start and keep the accelerator on the floor as long as possible before some flame-out. For Olde Saco runs they use the beach down at the Squaw Rock end since it is long, flat, and wide even at high tide, and the loser either winds up in the dunes or the ocean, usually the latter, ruining a perfectly good car but that is the way it is. Most importantly it is out of sight of the cops until too late.
So about two in the morning one could see a ’57 cherry red Chevy lining up, with me as a “second,” against a ’56 Oldsmobile, with Lolita as Duke’s “second.” Jimmy Joe’s son, Billy, acted as starter as usual. And they are off. Duke got an extremely fast start and was maybe thirty yards ahead of us and it looked like we done for when Stu opened up from somewhere and flat out “smoked” the side of Duke Olds sending his vehicle off into the ocean, soon to sputter in the roaring waves, and oblivion. Stu stopped the Chevy, backed up the several hundred yards to the vicinity of the distressed Oldsmobile, opened up the passenger side door and escorted Lolita, as nice as you please, to his king hell Chevy. And she was smiling, smiling very, well let’s put it this way, Stu’s got a big treat coming. And Josh? Well, Stu yells over “Hey, Josh, hope you find a ride home tonight.” But do you see what I mean about Stewball Stu being the king of the roads around here. What a guy.
The Golden Age Of American Rock ‘n’ Roll; The Follow-Up Hits, various artists, Ace Records, 1991
Scene: Brought to mind by the be-bop cover photograph of a “boss” two-toned 1950s Oldsmobile sitting in front of a car dealership just waiting to be driven off in the “golden age of the automobile” night.
“Stewball” Stu loved cars, loved 1950s classic “boss” cars, period. And on the very top of that heap was his cherry red ’57 Chevy. The flamed-out king hell dragon of the Mainiac highways, especially those back roads around his, our, hometown, Olde Saco, close by the sea. Not for him the new stuff, the new “boss” Mustang, Mustang Sally ride I am crazy for, or would be crazy for if, (1) I was older than my current no-driver, no legal driver fifteen, and (2) I had any kind of dough except the few bucks I grab doing this and that, mainly that.
And how do I know about Stewball’s preferences, prejudices if you want to put it that way? Well I, Joshua Lawrence Breslin, have been riding “shot-gun” to Stewball’s driver for the past several months, ever since I proved my metal, my Stu-worthy metal, when I “scrammed” a while back when Stu moved in on me and a hot date I had with a local Lolita and three was a crowd.
Ya, Stu and me are tight, tight as a nineteen year guy who is the king of the roads around here can be with a fifteen year old guy with no dough, no drivers’ license, no sister for him to drool over, and zero, maybe minus zero, mechanical skills to back him up. So you see me flaking out on that Lolita thing meant a lot to Stewball, although he is not a guy that you can figure something on, not easy figuring anyhow. [Hey, by the way, by the very big way, that Stewball moniker is strictly between you and me. Some of the guys that hung around his garage (really his bent out of shape trailer home rigged up with all kinds of automobile-fixing stuff all over the place) started to call him Stewball among ourselves after we observed, observed for the sixty-fifth time, Stu loaded before noon on some rotgut Southern Comfort that he swore kept him sober, unlike whiskey. Like I say don’t spread that around because Stu in one tough hombre. I once saw him chain-whip a guy just for kind of eyeing a Lolita (not the one I butted out on) that was sitting next to him in that cherry red Chevy at Jimmy Joe’s Diner, the one down on Route One, not the one over on Atlantic Avenue. Enough said, okay.]
Let me tell you about one time a few months back when Stu proved, for the umpteenth time (although my first time, first really seeing him in action glory time), why no one can come close to him as king of these roads around herr, and maybe any. It was a Friday night, an October Friday night, just starting to get to be defroster or car heater time so it had to be then. Stu, who lives over on Tobacco Road (I won’t tell you his real address because, like he says, what people don’t know is just fine with him and the girls all know where he is anyway. Ya, that’s a real Stu-ism) picked me up at my house on Albamarle Street (got that girls, Albamarle) like he always does, sometime between seven and eight, also as usual.
We then make the loop. First down Atlantic passed the Colonial Donut Shoppe (they serve other stuff there too) to see if there was a stray clover (A Stu-ism for a girl, origin unknown) or two looking to erase the gloomy, lonely night coming on. (I hoped two, two girls that is, because while I am glad, glad as hell, that I did right by Stu with that "hot" Lolita (and she was hot, maybe too hot for me then, not now) I don’t want to make a habit of it, being Stu’s “shot-gun,” or not. No dice. So off to Lanny’s Bowl-World over on Sea Street. Guess it is kind of early because no dice there either. Well, it’s off to “headquarters,” Jimmy Joe’s Diner on Main Street (really Route One but everybody local calls it Main).
Now Jimmy Joe’s has been Stu’s headquarters for so long that he has a “reserved” spot there. Yes, right in front just to the left on the entrance so that he can “scope” (Stu-ism) the scene (read: girls, Josh-ism). Jimmy Joe, the owner, felt that Stu was so good for business, Friday night hot teenage girls crowding the place looking for fast-driving guys and fast, or slow, driving guys, ready to, well you know I don’t have to draw you a diagram, business so he had no problem with the arrangement. Except this Friday night, this October Friday night, Stu’s reserved spot is occupied, occupied by a two-toned, low-riding 1956 Oldsmobile that even I can see had been worked on, worked hard on to create maximum horse-power in the minimum time. And inside that Oldsmobile sat one Duke McKay, a guy some of us had heard of, from down in Kittery near the New Hampshire border. So maybe Duke, not knowing the local rules, parked in that spot by accident. Ya that seems like the right answer.
No way though. Why? Because sitting right next old Duke, actually almost on top of him is that Lolita that I made way for to help Stu. Said Lolita (not her real name because she was, and is, as I write, uh, not “of age” so Lolita is a good enough moniker) looking very fine, very fine indeed, as Stu goes over to the Oldsmobile to give Duke the what for. I can almost hear the chains coming out.
But Stu must have had some kind of jinx on him, or Lolita put one on him, because all he did was make Duke a proposition. Beat Stu in a “chicken run” and the parking spot, Lolita, and the unofficial king of the road title were his. Lose, and he was gone (without chain-whipping I hoped) from Olde Saco, permanently, minus Lolita. Now I can see where this Lolita is worth getting a little steamed up about. But take it from me Stu, until just this minute, was strictly a love them or leave them guy (leave them to me, please). Duke, with eight million pounds of bravado, answered quickly like any true road-warrior does when challenged and just uttered, “On.” And we are off, although not before Lolita gives Stu some madness femme fatale look. A look, a pout really, which you couldn’t tell if she was in Stu’s corner or wanted to see him in hell. Girls, damn.
A chicken race, for the squares, is nothing but a race between two cars (usually two), two fast teenager-driven cars, done late at night or early in the morning out on some desolate road, sometimes straight, sometimes not. The idea is to get a fast start and keep the accelerator on the floor as long as possible before some flame-out. For Olde Saco runs they use the beach down at the Squaw Rock end since it is long, flat, and wide even at high tide, and the loser either winds up in the dunes or the ocean, usually the latter, ruining a perfectly good car but that is the way it is. Most importantly it is out of sight of the cops until too late.
So about two in the morning one could see a ’57 cherry red Chevy lining up, with me as a “second,” against a ’56 Oldsmobile, with Lolita as Duke’s “second.” Jimmy Joe’s son, Billy, acted as starter as usual. And they are off. Duke got an extremely fast start and was maybe thirty yards ahead of us and it looked like we done for when Stu opened up from somewhere and flat out “smoked” the side of Duke Olds sending his vehicle off into the ocean, soon to sputter in the roaring waves, and oblivion. Stu stopped the Chevy, backed up the several hundred yards to the vicinity of the distressed Oldsmobile, opened up the passenger side door and escorted Lolita, as nice as you please, to his king hell Chevy. And she was smiling, smiling very, well let’s put it this way, Stu’s got a big treat coming. And Josh? Well, Stu yells over “Hey, Josh, hope you find a ride home tonight.” But do you see what I mean about Stewball Stu being the king of the roads around here. What a guy.
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-No Academic Posts For War Criminals!: Bloody Bundy Must Go! ("Young Spartacus," October 1979)
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment:
The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.
This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
*******
From the pages of Young Spartacus, October, 1979:
No Academic Posts For War Criminals!: Bloody Bundy Must Go! ("Young Spartacus," October 1979)
NEW YORK—"No academic posts for mass murderers! McGeorge Bundy, chief strategic advisor on Vietnam for Kennedy and Johnson, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese. Demonstrate, today, 12 noon, Bobst Library. Drive war criminal Bundy off campus!" On the morning of October 2 the Spartacus Youth League's sound-truck drove through the New York University campus to build for a militant protest against the appointment of McGeorge Bundy to a post in the history department. NYU students and several campus workers swelled the ranks of the SYL's contingent in a 50-strong picket line demonstration.
The demonstrators chanted "Bloody Bundy -you can't hide, we charge you with -genocide!" and "Bundy, Eichmann, Pinochet, the working class will not forget!" And nationally-known NYU professor Bertell Oilman and supporters of the Spartacist League/ SYL spoke at a spirited rally. The demonstration drew a large crowd of observers which included 15 Moonies, anti-communist fanatics who repeatedly sought to provoke a physical fight. But the disciplined protesters easily prevented any disruption.
The anti-Bundy protest created a great deal of controversy on the NYU campus, including front-page coverage in the NYU student paper. A professor commented that "having a demonstration at NYU was itself a revolution," on a campus which has not seen much political activity in the last five years. Unaccustomed to militant protests, some students fully expected the SYL to drag Bundy out of his offices and string him up from Washington Square Arch. But such justice for Bundy and others of his ilk rightfully belongs to the families of his victims. Ship Bundy to Hanoi for trial!
McGeorge Bundy once told a New York Times reporter, "I'm not sure I engage in a great deal of introspection" (22 May). And no wonder! As an SYL leaflet stated,
"Bundy was the No. 1 author of U.S. imperialism's strategy of air and naval' against the North—carpet bombing, napalming villages, the mining of harbors and the bombing of dikes...Vietnam was the U.S.' dirtiest war and Bundy's hands are blood red from the slaughter of Vietnamese men, women and children."
After the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic Bundy demanded that the Communists "be incarcerated in concentration camps" (Sidney Lens, The Nation, 2 May 1966)! Following a stint as president of the Ford Foundation, Bundy is today again serving U.S. imperialism as an advisor to Carter on the "Soviet/Cuban military threat." This is the imperialist mastermind the NYU administration wants to clothe in academic respectability. The SYL says: drive this war criminal off campus!
Speaking in solidarity with the SYL's action, Bertell Oilman agreed that Bundy was certainly a war criminal, and noted that by NYU's criteria the shah of Iran would be a good candidate for a teaching post. Ollman, who was denied an academic post at the University of Maryland because of his left-wing political views, focused much of his case against Bundy's appointment on this grounds that this former Harvard deal lacked "scholarly" credentials. The SYL, however, couldn't care less about the number of degrees Bundy has or what his academic standing is. For us the question is his responsibility for the crimes of U.S. imperialism. As Michael Weinstein, president of the SYL's NYU chapter, put it: "Bundy is not an academic apologist, he is a shameless executor of mass murder— Bundy must be driven away— not for his views but for his deeds."
This point went right over the head of the editors of the NYU student paper the Washington Square News. They went into a tizzy, charging that the SYL is against academic freedom. "Bundy is a man who will bring both prestige and valuable knowledge to the university, they wrote. The editors may think it's fine for the Bundys of the world to bid their time at the universities until the are called on again to plan the next imperialist slaughter, but their past and future victims have a rather differert view. As one student wrote:
"It ought to delight the masterminds of the German War Machine, who can finally leave South America and bring valuable knowledge of history to Universities all over the nation... wonder if Bundy and his crowd would be as forgiving and forgetting of draft dodgers and AWOLs, whose crime was NOT wanting to kill people."
Kissinger, Friedman... Now Bundy
Bundy is not the only imperialist mass murderer who has sought to carve out "respectable" academic niche. The SYL sprang into action in 1977 when Nixon' right-hand man Henry Kissinger was offered a post at Columbia University John Alcorn, SYLer at Columbia recalled that effort in his speech to the NYU demonstrators: "We had the same situation Kissinger, another architect—just like Bundy—of mass murder
in Indochina, was offered an honorary professorship. The Spartacus Youth
League initiated a united-front campaign to prevent this scum from getting
an academic post. The SYL led a campaign, successfully, to keep Kissinger off campus at Columbia. It can be done!"
University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman is another "respectable academic" who has been the focus of SYL protests. Friedman thought he could hush-hush his active collaboration with the savage, U.S.-backed military regime of Pinochet in Chile as he continued to teach economics. As an advisor to the junta Friedman engineered a "shock treatment" for the Chilean economy which brought starvation and massive hardships to thousands of workers and peasants. The SYL broke the diplomatic silence over Friedman's murderous role with a 1975 campaign which received nationwide publicity.
In the past few years the SYL has also demonstrated against the likes of Nguyen Cao Ky, former vice president of South Vietnam and an open admirer of Hitler, in Cleveland in 1975; against Vietnam war criminal Sam "Mad Dog" Huntington at Harvard in 1978 and most recently against Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in Boston. The SYL has also been active in struggles to oust the CIA and ROTC from the campuses, and in 1977 the SYL led a successful mobilization to drive a bunch of Nazis off the San Francisco State campus and then beat back an administration witchhunt.
Loony Moonies: The South Korea Connection
Coming on the heels of Carter': nationally televised speech on Soviet troops in Cuba, the SYL demonstration included signs demanding "Carter/ Bundy: Hands Off Cuba!" and "Sink SALT! Defend Cuba and the USSR!" One of the most popular chants was "Hey, hey, what do you say, U.S. out of Guantanamo Bay!" As a speaker explained at the rally: "The Spartacist League is a Trotskyist organization. The Stalinists who rule in Russia and Vietnam are our bitter enemies. We stand for political revolution in those countries to overthrow the ruling bureaucracies. But we defend those countries 100 percent against U.S. imperialism!"
The 15 provocateurs from Sun Myung Moon's anti-communist Unification Church went nuts at the SYL's defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states. But their howls of "SYL-KGB" and "Communists off campus" were drowned out by the demonstrators who chanted "Crazy Moonies, they may pray, but they're running dogs for the CIA!" and "Down with the Moonies! For a united socialist Korea!" Having come originally to seek to provoke a "rumble," the Moonies decided that discretion was the better part of valor when they were confronted by a number of trade
Numerous investigations have documented the Moonies' sinister connections to the South Korean CIA; lately, a detailed expose by Francine du Plessix Grey appeared in the New York Review of Books. The purpose of Moonie outfits is to foment anti-communism in the U.S. and to build public support for an ever more aggressive anti-communist U.S. foreign policy. To this end. Moon and his cohorts have established a "Freedom Leadership Foundation," which conducts right-wing propaganda activities in Washington; a "Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation," which serves as a public-relations outlet for the brutally repressive dictatorship of South Korea's Pak Chung Hi; an "International Federation for Victory Over Communism," which coordinates the Moonies' pro-imperialist activities on a world scale and last but not least the "Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles," which serves as the campus home for people like those who tried to mix it up at the Bundy demonstration.
Moon himself is a multimillionaire industrialist with interests in heavy machinery plants, titanium, marble, shotguns and ginseng tea. Wild-eyed Moonies can be seen on the streets of New York City and at local airports pushing their slick daily newspaper.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment:
The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.
This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
*******
From the pages of Young Spartacus, October, 1979:
No Academic Posts For War Criminals!: Bloody Bundy Must Go! ("Young Spartacus," October 1979)
NEW YORK—"No academic posts for mass murderers! McGeorge Bundy, chief strategic advisor on Vietnam for Kennedy and Johnson, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese. Demonstrate, today, 12 noon, Bobst Library. Drive war criminal Bundy off campus!" On the morning of October 2 the Spartacus Youth League's sound-truck drove through the New York University campus to build for a militant protest against the appointment of McGeorge Bundy to a post in the history department. NYU students and several campus workers swelled the ranks of the SYL's contingent in a 50-strong picket line demonstration.
The demonstrators chanted "Bloody Bundy -you can't hide, we charge you with -genocide!" and "Bundy, Eichmann, Pinochet, the working class will not forget!" And nationally-known NYU professor Bertell Oilman and supporters of the Spartacist League/ SYL spoke at a spirited rally. The demonstration drew a large crowd of observers which included 15 Moonies, anti-communist fanatics who repeatedly sought to provoke a physical fight. But the disciplined protesters easily prevented any disruption.
The anti-Bundy protest created a great deal of controversy on the NYU campus, including front-page coverage in the NYU student paper. A professor commented that "having a demonstration at NYU was itself a revolution," on a campus which has not seen much political activity in the last five years. Unaccustomed to militant protests, some students fully expected the SYL to drag Bundy out of his offices and string him up from Washington Square Arch. But such justice for Bundy and others of his ilk rightfully belongs to the families of his victims. Ship Bundy to Hanoi for trial!
McGeorge Bundy once told a New York Times reporter, "I'm not sure I engage in a great deal of introspection" (22 May). And no wonder! As an SYL leaflet stated,
"Bundy was the No. 1 author of U.S. imperialism's strategy of air and naval' against the North—carpet bombing, napalming villages, the mining of harbors and the bombing of dikes...Vietnam was the U.S.' dirtiest war and Bundy's hands are blood red from the slaughter of Vietnamese men, women and children."
After the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic Bundy demanded that the Communists "be incarcerated in concentration camps" (Sidney Lens, The Nation, 2 May 1966)! Following a stint as president of the Ford Foundation, Bundy is today again serving U.S. imperialism as an advisor to Carter on the "Soviet/Cuban military threat." This is the imperialist mastermind the NYU administration wants to clothe in academic respectability. The SYL says: drive this war criminal off campus!
Speaking in solidarity with the SYL's action, Bertell Oilman agreed that Bundy was certainly a war criminal, and noted that by NYU's criteria the shah of Iran would be a good candidate for a teaching post. Ollman, who was denied an academic post at the University of Maryland because of his left-wing political views, focused much of his case against Bundy's appointment on this grounds that this former Harvard deal lacked "scholarly" credentials. The SYL, however, couldn't care less about the number of degrees Bundy has or what his academic standing is. For us the question is his responsibility for the crimes of U.S. imperialism. As Michael Weinstein, president of the SYL's NYU chapter, put it: "Bundy is not an academic apologist, he is a shameless executor of mass murder— Bundy must be driven away— not for his views but for his deeds."
This point went right over the head of the editors of the NYU student paper the Washington Square News. They went into a tizzy, charging that the SYL is against academic freedom. "Bundy is a man who will bring both prestige and valuable knowledge to the university, they wrote. The editors may think it's fine for the Bundys of the world to bid their time at the universities until the are called on again to plan the next imperialist slaughter, but their past and future victims have a rather differert view. As one student wrote:
"It ought to delight the masterminds of the German War Machine, who can finally leave South America and bring valuable knowledge of history to Universities all over the nation... wonder if Bundy and his crowd would be as forgiving and forgetting of draft dodgers and AWOLs, whose crime was NOT wanting to kill people."
Kissinger, Friedman... Now Bundy
Bundy is not the only imperialist mass murderer who has sought to carve out "respectable" academic niche. The SYL sprang into action in 1977 when Nixon' right-hand man Henry Kissinger was offered a post at Columbia University John Alcorn, SYLer at Columbia recalled that effort in his speech to the NYU demonstrators: "We had the same situation Kissinger, another architect—just like Bundy—of mass murder
in Indochina, was offered an honorary professorship. The Spartacus Youth
League initiated a united-front campaign to prevent this scum from getting
an academic post. The SYL led a campaign, successfully, to keep Kissinger off campus at Columbia. It can be done!"
University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman is another "respectable academic" who has been the focus of SYL protests. Friedman thought he could hush-hush his active collaboration with the savage, U.S.-backed military regime of Pinochet in Chile as he continued to teach economics. As an advisor to the junta Friedman engineered a "shock treatment" for the Chilean economy which brought starvation and massive hardships to thousands of workers and peasants. The SYL broke the diplomatic silence over Friedman's murderous role with a 1975 campaign which received nationwide publicity.
In the past few years the SYL has also demonstrated against the likes of Nguyen Cao Ky, former vice president of South Vietnam and an open admirer of Hitler, in Cleveland in 1975; against Vietnam war criminal Sam "Mad Dog" Huntington at Harvard in 1978 and most recently against Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in Boston. The SYL has also been active in struggles to oust the CIA and ROTC from the campuses, and in 1977 the SYL led a successful mobilization to drive a bunch of Nazis off the San Francisco State campus and then beat back an administration witchhunt.
Loony Moonies: The South Korea Connection
Coming on the heels of Carter': nationally televised speech on Soviet troops in Cuba, the SYL demonstration included signs demanding "Carter/ Bundy: Hands Off Cuba!" and "Sink SALT! Defend Cuba and the USSR!" One of the most popular chants was "Hey, hey, what do you say, U.S. out of Guantanamo Bay!" As a speaker explained at the rally: "The Spartacist League is a Trotskyist organization. The Stalinists who rule in Russia and Vietnam are our bitter enemies. We stand for political revolution in those countries to overthrow the ruling bureaucracies. But we defend those countries 100 percent against U.S. imperialism!"
The 15 provocateurs from Sun Myung Moon's anti-communist Unification Church went nuts at the SYL's defense of the deformed and degenerated workers states. But their howls of "SYL-KGB" and "Communists off campus" were drowned out by the demonstrators who chanted "Crazy Moonies, they may pray, but they're running dogs for the CIA!" and "Down with the Moonies! For a united socialist Korea!" Having come originally to seek to provoke a "rumble," the Moonies decided that discretion was the better part of valor when they were confronted by a number of trade
Numerous investigations have documented the Moonies' sinister connections to the South Korean CIA; lately, a detailed expose by Francine du Plessix Grey appeared in the New York Review of Books. The purpose of Moonie outfits is to foment anti-communism in the U.S. and to build public support for an ever more aggressive anti-communist U.S. foreign policy. To this end. Moon and his cohorts have established a "Freedom Leadership Foundation," which conducts right-wing propaganda activities in Washington; a "Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation," which serves as a public-relations outlet for the brutally repressive dictatorship of South Korea's Pak Chung Hi; an "International Federation for Victory Over Communism," which coordinates the Moonies' pro-imperialist activities on a world scale and last but not least the "Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles," which serves as the campus home for people like those who tried to mix it up at the Bundy demonstration.
Moon himself is a multimillionaire industrialist with interests in heavy machinery plants, titanium, marble, shotguns and ginseng tea. Wild-eyed Moonies can be seen on the streets of New York City and at local airports pushing their slick daily newspaper.
The Latest From The "Leonard Peltier Defense Committee" Website-Free Leonard Peltier Now!-Free All Our Class-War Prisoners!-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!
Click on the headline to link to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee website for the latest news on our class-war political prisoner brother, Leonard Peltier.
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Leonard, Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
From #Occupied Boston (#Tomemonos Boston)-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Defend The Occupy Movement!-Defend Our Unions! - Defend The Boston Commune! Take The Offensive!
Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
***********
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war just this minute well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
Markin comment:
We know that we are only at the very start of an upsurge in the labor movement as witness the stellar exemplary actions by the West Coast activists on December 12, 2011. As I have pointed out in remarks previously made elsewhere as part of the Boston solidarity rally with the West Coast Port Shutdown this is the way forward as we struggle against the ruling class for a very different, more equitable society. Not everything went as well, or as well-attended, as expected including at our rally in solidarity in Boston but we are still exhibiting growing pains in the post-Occupy encampment era which will get sorted out in the future.
***********
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-Mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- As the so-called draw-down of American and Allied troops in Iraq reaches it final stages, the draw down of non-mercenary forces anyway, we must recognize that we anti-warriors failed, and failed rather spectacularly, to affect that withdrawal after a promising start to our opposition in late 2002 and early 2003 (and a little in 2006). As the endless American-led wars (even if behind the scenes, as in Libya) continue we had better straighten out our anti-war, anti-imperialist front quickly if we are to have any effect on the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan!
U.S. Hands Off Iran!- American (and world) imperialists are ratcheting up their propaganda war (right now) and increased economic sanctions that are a prelude to war just this minute well before the dust has settled on the now unsettled situation in Iraq and well before they have even sniffed at an Afghan withdrawal of any import. We will hold our noses, as we did with the Saddam leadership in Iraq and on other occasions, and call for the defense of Iran against the monster. A victory for the Americans (and their junior partner, Israel) in Iran is not in the interests of the international working class. Especially here in the “belly of the beast” we are duty-bound to call not just for non-intervention but for defense of Iran. We will, believe me we will, deal with the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Islamic fundamentalist in our own way in our own time.
U.S. Hands Off The World!- With the number of “hot spots” that the American imperialists, or one or another of their junior allies, have their hands on in this wicked old world this generic slogan would seem to fill the bill.
Down With The War Budget! Not One Penny, Not One Person For The Wars! Honor World War I German Social-Democratic Party MP, Karl Liebknecht, who did just that. The litmus test for every political candidate must be first opposition to the war budgets (let’s see, right now winding up Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran preparations, China preparations, etc. you get my drift). Then that big leap. The whole damn imperialist military budget. Again, no one said it would be simple. Revolution may be easier that depriving the imperialists of their military money. Well….okay.
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Free Quality Healthcare For All! This would be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The health and welfare of any society’s citizenry is the simple glue that holds that society together. It is no accident that one of the prime concerns of workers states like Cuba, whatever their other political problems, has been to place health care and education front and center and to provide to the best of their capacity for free, quality healthcare and education for all. Even the hide-bound social-democratic-run capitalist governments of Europe have, until recently anyway, placed the “welfare state” protections central to their programs.
Free, quality higher education for all! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! One Hundred, Two Hundred, Many Harvards!
This would again be a no-brainer in any rationally based society. The struggle to increase the educational level of a society’s citizenry is another part of the simple glue that holds that society together. Today higher education is being placed out of reach for many working class and minority families. Hell, it is getting tough for the middle class as well.
Moreover the whole higher educational system is increasing skewed toward those who have better formal preparation and family lives leaving many deserving students in the wilderness. Take the resources of the private institutions and spread them around, throw in hundreds of billions from the government (take from the military budget and the bank bail-out money), get rid of the top heavy and useless college administration apparatuses, mix it up, and let students, teachers, and campus workers run the thing through councils on a democratic basis.
Forgive student debt! The latest reports indicate that college student debt is something like a trillion dollars, give or take a few billion but who is counting. The price of tuition and expenses has gone up dramatically while services have not kept pace. What has happened is that the future highly educated workforce that a modern society, and certainly a socialist society, desperately needs is going to be cast in some form of indentured servitude to the banks or other lending agencies for much of their young working lives. Let the banks take a “hit” for a change!
Stop housing foreclosures now! Hey, everybody, everywhere in the world not just in America should have a safe, clean roof over their heads. Hell, even a single family home that is part of the “American dream,” if that is what they want. We didn’t make the housing crisis in America (or elsewhere, like in Ireland, where the bubble has also burst). The banks did. Their predatory lending practices and slip-shot application processes were out of control. Let them take the “hit” here as well.
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
The Latest From The “Occupy Oakland” Website-This Is Class War-We Say No More- Take The Offensive- Defend Our Unions!-Defend The Oakland Commune!
Click on the headline to link to Occupy Oakland website for the latest from the Bay Area vanguard battleground in the struggle for social justice.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
A Five-Point Program As Talking Points
*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement going back to the 1930s Great Depression the last time that unemployment, under-employment, and those who have just plain quit looking for work was this high in the American labor force. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay is a formula to spread the available work around. This is no mere propaganda point but shows the way forward toward a more equitable distribution of available work. Work that would be divided through local representative workers’ councils which would act, in one of its capacities, as a giant hiring hall where the jobs would be parceled out. This would be a simpler task now than when it was when first proposed in the 1930s with the vast increase in modern technology that could fairly accurately, via computers, target jobs that need filling and equitably divide up current work. Without the key capitalist necessity of keeping up the rate of profit the social surplus created by that work could be used to redistribute the available work at the same agreed upon rate rather than go into the capitalists’ pockets. The only catch, a big catch one must admit, is that no capitalist, and no capitalist system, is going to do any such thing so that it will, in the end, be necessary to fight for and win a workers government to implement this demand.
Organize the unorganized is a demand that cries out for solution today now that the organized sectors of the labor movement, both public and private, in America are at historic lows, just over ten percent of the workforce. Part of the task is to reorganize some of the old industries like the automobile industry, now mainly unorganized as new plants come on line and others are abandoned, which used to provide a massive amount of decent jobs with decent benefits but which now have fallen to globalization and the “race to the bottom” bad times. The other part is to ratchet up the efforts to organize the service industries, hospitals, hotels, hi-tech, restaurants and the like, that have become a dominant aspect of the American economy.
Organize the South-this low wage area, this consciously low-wage area, where many industries land before heading off-shore to even lower wage places cries out for organizing, especially among black and Hispanic workers who form the bulk of this industrial workforce. A corollary to organizing the South is obviously to organize internationally to keep the “race to the bottom” from continually occurring short of being resolved in favor of an international commonwealth of workers’ governments. Nobody said it was going to be easy.
Organize Wal-mart- millions of workers, thousands of trucks, hundreds of distribution centers. A victory here would be the springboard to a revitalized organized labor movement just as auto and steel lead the industrial union movements of the 1930s. To give an idea of how hard this task might be though someone once argued that it would be easier to organize a workers’ revolution that organize this giant. Well, that’s a thought.
Defend the right of public and private workers to unionize. Simple-No more Wisconsins, no more attacks on collective bargaining the hallmark of a union contract. No reliance on labor boards, arbitration, or bourgeois recall elections either. Unions must keep their independent from government interference. Period.
* Defend the independence of the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. In 2008 labor, organized labor, spent around 450 million dollars trying to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats (mainly). The results speak for themselves. For those bogus efforts the labor skates should have been sent packing long ago. The idea then was (and is, as we come up to another presidential election cycle) that the Democrats (mainly) were “friends of labor.” The past period of cuts-backs, cut-in-the back give backs should put paid to that notion. Although anyone who is politically savvy at all knows that is not true, not true for the labor skates at the top of the movement.
The hard reality is that the labor skates, not used to any form of class struggle or any kind of struggle, know no other way than class-collaboration, arbitration, courts, and every other way to avoid the appearance of strife, strife in defense of the bosses’ profits. The most egregious recent example- the return of the Verizon workers to work after two weeks last summer when they had the company on the run and the subsequent announcement by the company of record profits. That sellout strategy may have worked for the bureaucrats, or rather their “fathers” for a time back in the 1950s “golden age” of labor but now we are in a very hard and open class war. The rank and file must demand an end to using their precious dues payments period for bourgeois candidates all of whom have turned out to be sworn enemies of labor from Obama on down.
This does not mean not using union dues for political purposes though. On the contrary we need to use them now more than ever in the class battles ahead. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized, organizing the South, organizing Wal-Mart, and other pro-labor causes. Think, for example, of the dough spent on the successful November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio. That type of activity is where labor’s money and other resources should go.
*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! Hands Off The World!
*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!
*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed. Labor and the oppressed must rule!
From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Protests Hit Sam Huntington: Vietnam War Criminal Returns To Harvard (Octoer 1978)
Markin comment on this series:
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Markin comment:
The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.
This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
*******
From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Protests Hit Sam Huntington: Vietnam War Criminal Returns To Harvard (October 1978)
BOSTON, September 27—Samuel P. Huntington, one of the principal strategists and apologists for the vicious air war which devastated the countryside of Vietnam, is returning to Harvard this semester. After two years of service with Jimmy Carter's "human rights" crusade, Huntington is returning to wrap himself in the robes of respectable academia. to lecture twice a week on governmental theory. But this facade must not obscure the ugly reality. Samuel Huntington is complicit in mass murder he is a war criminal.
The U.S. air war, against Indochina ranks as one of this century’s most horrible atrocities. Millions of tons of explosives were rained upon the villages in Vietnam in- order to terrorize into submission a people who had been fighting imperialism and colonialism for decades. With calculated savagery, the U.S. unleashed weapons designed solely for their ability to maim, as carcinogenic, fetus-deforming chemical defoliants blanketed half of Vietnam's arable land. Prominent among the academic lackies who braintrusted these genocidal policies was Sam Huntington.
Unfortunately for this war criminal, his Harvard homecoming was not as uneventful as he might have liked. On September 26, a demonstration was staged outside Huntington's class by an ad hoc committee initiated by the Spartacus Youth League to protest his return to academia. While the demonstration was small, having been boycotted by the Harvard divestment "left," the campaign against Huntington certainly had its impact. The Harvard Crimson ran an editorial by two supporters of the SYL documenting Huntington's crimes. And the serenity of the morning air in Harvard Yard was certainly shattered by the loud chants of the demonstrators charging Huntington with complicity in mass murder.
Huntington's "Credentials"
In the late I960's, Huntington headed the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the South East Asia Development Advisory Group, a committee which played an important role in the develop-ment of State Department policy. While much of the work of this committee was cloaked in secrecy, there is strong evidence of its ominous nature. At the May 1969 meeting, for example, Huntington presented a paper entitled "Getting Ready for Political Competition in Vietnam." In this document he advocated electoral manipulation, control of the media and "inducements and coercions."
Huntington's preferred strategy for "political competition" was much more direct. In the July 1968 issue of Foreign Affairs he wrote:
"If the 'direct application of mechanical und conventional power' takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary warfare no longer operate... "In an absent-minded way the United States may well have stumbled upon the answer to 'wars of national liberation.' The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly bring the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power."
The mere authorship of these sentences indicts Huntington as a cold-blooded vulture. For what Huntington advocated with such antiseptic pedantry was nothing less than the elimination of the rural base of the National Liberation Front by reducing the Vietnamese countryside to corpses, embers and rubble. What Huntington calls "urbanization and modernization" had, in reality, the effect of driving terrified millions into the cities, swelling Saigon's population tenfold and creating a class of homeless and urban poor by pounding the villages with napalm and fragmentation bombs. "Urbanization and modernization" meant the destruction of the fabric of Vietnamese life— begging, prostitution, starvation and disease became the norms of existence.
The sickening apologies in bourgeois journals were only the starting point of Huntington's role in this effort. He did not merely comment on U.S. policy; he helped formulate it. Not only did he serve as chairman of the Council on Vietnam of the South' East Asia Development Advisory Group, but he acted as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Air Force and the Institute for Defense Analysis. Huntington is clearly not just another right-wing academic who supported the war. He is an important member of the imperialist brain trust and a war criminal. The SYL opposes Huntington’s appointment not primarily because of his ideas, but for the unspeakable atrocities for which he bears responsibility.
The "Mad Dog" of "Human Rights"
For the past two years, Huntington has been director of national security planning in the Carter administration, essentially functioning as Zbigniew Brzezinski's chief assistant. The key role of this assistant in the White House dramatically exposes the lie contained in Carter's "human rights" campaign. For two years, the Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League have maintained that the Carter crusade is but an attempt to refurbish the moral authority of U.S. imperialism in order to build popular support for a renewed aggressive foreign policy. Both in an immediate and ultimate sense the central targets of this effort are those countries in which capitalism has been overthrown, most importantly the Soviet Union. This campaign represents an ominous threat to the world's working masses. For U.S. imperialism, the major prop of virtually every reactionary tyrant on the face of the earth, will bring "human rights" to the world the way LB.I and Nixon brought "democracy" to Vietnam.
Huntingdon's role in the Carter administration is testimony to the sinister motives at the base of the "human rights" campaign. For in Huntington we see the genocidal maniac turned "human rights" advocate. Hunt-ingot is so strident in his anti-communism that within the administration he was reportedly known as "Mad Dog." It was Huntington who drafted the main Carter strategic assessment last year. Presidential Review Memoran¬dum-10, which heralded the passing of "detente" and mandated a new generation of weapons of destruction.
Huntington's return to the Harvard faculty exposes the hypocrisy behind the
ruckus raised by university president Derek Bok concerning covert CIA recruitment on campus last spring. The administration's insistence that all CIA recruiters on campus reveal themselves to university officials is but a feeble attempt to cover Harvard's obscene complicity with the intelligence agencies with a veil of virginal innocence. Harvard's hypocrisy is so monumental as to be laughable: this is the university that provides the brains that plan CIA "dirty tricks" from alumnus John F. Kennedy to alumnus and professor Henry Kissinger. Harvard graduates, officials and faculty members have masterminded U.S. imperialism's military engagements from the Bay of Pigs to the terror bombings in Vietnam. Bok's only apparent request is that imperialism's hit men inform him of their activities on campus.
Protest Huntington!
A protest directed against the return of a faculty member is almost certain to raise the issue of academic freedom. But .academic freedom is not the point. We do not single out Huntington for his thoughts, but rather for his deeds. While it is certainly true that such universities as Harvard have no shortage of intellectual mercenaries, the Huntingtons and Kissingers are special cases. Hunting-ton's central role in the murder and oppression of millions should provoke outrage and protest at Harvard.
It is significant that the sizable divestment movement on campus refused to participate in the SYL-initiated campaign. More concerned with salving their consciences than actively opposing the representatives and activities of imperialism, these divestment radicals prefer to spend their energies pleading with the Harvard Corporation to develop a more moral investment policy. Those in the divestment movement who tail the "human rights" crusade may have trouble discerning whether this "Mad Dog" cold-warrior is friend or foe.
Many of today's students were quite young during the ravaging of Vietnam and may not even recall the horrible destruction and the nightly body counts that passed across the television screen on the evening news. For them, the liberal assumptions inherent in the demands of the divestment movement are not so naturally repugnant as they might have been to the late 1960's antiwar activist. Campaigns like that initiated by the SYL against Huntington will help to bring about a renewed awareness of imperialism's crimes and the complicity of the bourgeois universities to a new generation of students. It is the task of a communist youth organization to bring the understanding to the campuses that the main reactionary power in the world is the American bourgeoisie. And one way of doing that is to expose the professors turned executors of imperialist reaction and to demand that they not be allowed to peacefully don the robes of academic respectability.
One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.
There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.
The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.
Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:
"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."
This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
*******
Markin comment:
The question of academic (or other non-governmental) positions for those who have been direct actors in implementing American imperialist policies is a serious one. We Marxists draw a sharpe distinction between those who are "merely" reactionary academics and those whose actions would actually qualify them to stand in front of some international criminal tribunal. No, not the bourgeois ones as constituted now but tribunals of their victims in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else their hubris takes them.
This point was recently brought home when a number of us demontrated against ex-Bush Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld when he came to Boston on a "book tour" touting his memoirs. If people want to pay hard cash to buy the book at some book stalland read his gibberish that is one thing. It is another that he be allowed to move freely around to do so when by all that is rational he should be standing front and center in Iraq right now in a place like Baghdad facing some serious criminal human rights violations. Of course, his president Bush (either)and others should be crowding the docket with him.
*******
From The Pages Of Young Spartacus-Protests Hit Sam Huntington: Vietnam War Criminal Returns To Harvard (October 1978)
BOSTON, September 27—Samuel P. Huntington, one of the principal strategists and apologists for the vicious air war which devastated the countryside of Vietnam, is returning to Harvard this semester. After two years of service with Jimmy Carter's "human rights" crusade, Huntington is returning to wrap himself in the robes of respectable academia. to lecture twice a week on governmental theory. But this facade must not obscure the ugly reality. Samuel Huntington is complicit in mass murder he is a war criminal.
The U.S. air war, against Indochina ranks as one of this century’s most horrible atrocities. Millions of tons of explosives were rained upon the villages in Vietnam in- order to terrorize into submission a people who had been fighting imperialism and colonialism for decades. With calculated savagery, the U.S. unleashed weapons designed solely for their ability to maim, as carcinogenic, fetus-deforming chemical defoliants blanketed half of Vietnam's arable land. Prominent among the academic lackies who braintrusted these genocidal policies was Sam Huntington.
Unfortunately for this war criminal, his Harvard homecoming was not as uneventful as he might have liked. On September 26, a demonstration was staged outside Huntington's class by an ad hoc committee initiated by the Spartacus Youth League to protest his return to academia. While the demonstration was small, having been boycotted by the Harvard divestment "left," the campaign against Huntington certainly had its impact. The Harvard Crimson ran an editorial by two supporters of the SYL documenting Huntington's crimes. And the serenity of the morning air in Harvard Yard was certainly shattered by the loud chants of the demonstrators charging Huntington with complicity in mass murder.
Huntington's "Credentials"
In the late I960's, Huntington headed the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the South East Asia Development Advisory Group, a committee which played an important role in the develop-ment of State Department policy. While much of the work of this committee was cloaked in secrecy, there is strong evidence of its ominous nature. At the May 1969 meeting, for example, Huntington presented a paper entitled "Getting Ready for Political Competition in Vietnam." In this document he advocated electoral manipulation, control of the media and "inducements and coercions."
Huntington's preferred strategy for "political competition" was much more direct. In the July 1968 issue of Foreign Affairs he wrote:
"If the 'direct application of mechanical und conventional power' takes place on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city, the basic assumptions underlying the Maoist doctrine of revolutionary warfare no longer operate... "In an absent-minded way the United States may well have stumbled upon the answer to 'wars of national liberation.' The effective response lies neither in the quest for conventional military victory nor in the esoteric doctrines of counter-insurgency warfare. It is instead forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly bring the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power."
The mere authorship of these sentences indicts Huntington as a cold-blooded vulture. For what Huntington advocated with such antiseptic pedantry was nothing less than the elimination of the rural base of the National Liberation Front by reducing the Vietnamese countryside to corpses, embers and rubble. What Huntington calls "urbanization and modernization" had, in reality, the effect of driving terrified millions into the cities, swelling Saigon's population tenfold and creating a class of homeless and urban poor by pounding the villages with napalm and fragmentation bombs. "Urbanization and modernization" meant the destruction of the fabric of Vietnamese life— begging, prostitution, starvation and disease became the norms of existence.
The sickening apologies in bourgeois journals were only the starting point of Huntington's role in this effort. He did not merely comment on U.S. policy; he helped formulate it. Not only did he serve as chairman of the Council on Vietnam of the South' East Asia Development Advisory Group, but he acted as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Air Force and the Institute for Defense Analysis. Huntington is clearly not just another right-wing academic who supported the war. He is an important member of the imperialist brain trust and a war criminal. The SYL opposes Huntington’s appointment not primarily because of his ideas, but for the unspeakable atrocities for which he bears responsibility.
The "Mad Dog" of "Human Rights"
For the past two years, Huntington has been director of national security planning in the Carter administration, essentially functioning as Zbigniew Brzezinski's chief assistant. The key role of this assistant in the White House dramatically exposes the lie contained in Carter's "human rights" campaign. For two years, the Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League have maintained that the Carter crusade is but an attempt to refurbish the moral authority of U.S. imperialism in order to build popular support for a renewed aggressive foreign policy. Both in an immediate and ultimate sense the central targets of this effort are those countries in which capitalism has been overthrown, most importantly the Soviet Union. This campaign represents an ominous threat to the world's working masses. For U.S. imperialism, the major prop of virtually every reactionary tyrant on the face of the earth, will bring "human rights" to the world the way LB.I and Nixon brought "democracy" to Vietnam.
Huntingdon's role in the Carter administration is testimony to the sinister motives at the base of the "human rights" campaign. For in Huntington we see the genocidal maniac turned "human rights" advocate. Hunt-ingot is so strident in his anti-communism that within the administration he was reportedly known as "Mad Dog." It was Huntington who drafted the main Carter strategic assessment last year. Presidential Review Memoran¬dum-10, which heralded the passing of "detente" and mandated a new generation of weapons of destruction.
Huntington's return to the Harvard faculty exposes the hypocrisy behind the
ruckus raised by university president Derek Bok concerning covert CIA recruitment on campus last spring. The administration's insistence that all CIA recruiters on campus reveal themselves to university officials is but a feeble attempt to cover Harvard's obscene complicity with the intelligence agencies with a veil of virginal innocence. Harvard's hypocrisy is so monumental as to be laughable: this is the university that provides the brains that plan CIA "dirty tricks" from alumnus John F. Kennedy to alumnus and professor Henry Kissinger. Harvard graduates, officials and faculty members have masterminded U.S. imperialism's military engagements from the Bay of Pigs to the terror bombings in Vietnam. Bok's only apparent request is that imperialism's hit men inform him of their activities on campus.
Protest Huntington!
A protest directed against the return of a faculty member is almost certain to raise the issue of academic freedom. But .academic freedom is not the point. We do not single out Huntington for his thoughts, but rather for his deeds. While it is certainly true that such universities as Harvard have no shortage of intellectual mercenaries, the Huntingtons and Kissingers are special cases. Hunting-ton's central role in the murder and oppression of millions should provoke outrage and protest at Harvard.
It is significant that the sizable divestment movement on campus refused to participate in the SYL-initiated campaign. More concerned with salving their consciences than actively opposing the representatives and activities of imperialism, these divestment radicals prefer to spend their energies pleading with the Harvard Corporation to develop a more moral investment policy. Those in the divestment movement who tail the "human rights" crusade may have trouble discerning whether this "Mad Dog" cold-warrior is friend or foe.
Many of today's students were quite young during the ravaging of Vietnam and may not even recall the horrible destruction and the nightly body counts that passed across the television screen on the evening news. For them, the liberal assumptions inherent in the demands of the divestment movement are not so naturally repugnant as they might have been to the late 1960's antiwar activist. Campaigns like that initiated by the SYL against Huntington will help to bring about a renewed awareness of imperialism's crimes and the complicity of the bourgeois universities to a new generation of students. It is the task of a communist youth organization to bring the understanding to the campuses that the main reactionary power in the world is the American bourgeoisie. And one way of doing that is to expose the professors turned executors of imperialist reaction and to demand that they not be allowed to peacefully don the robes of academic respectability.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Out In The Be-Bop 1940s Crime Noir Night- Ya, Crime Doesn’t Pay-So What- James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice”- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the early film adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.
DVD Review
The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, MGM, 1946
Ya, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he goes to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Yes, our boy, our never let your feet stand still for a minute on the road boy Frank (played by John Garfield) in the 1940s film adaptation of James M. Cain’s classic masterpiece crime noir, The Postman Always Rings Twice, had it bad, bad as a man could have it. Bad a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora (played by a very, very blonde Lana Turner) walked through the Twin Oaks café door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she is nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled at the screen for Frank to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy Frank. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.
See not only is Ms. Cora a Ms. but a real live 1940s Mrs. married to Nick, the owner of Twin Oaks. And Nick is nothing but an old guy, an old penny-pinching guy with small dreams getting smaller, whom Cora married on the rebound from, well, from something, something bad from the look of Nick. Yes, Nick is definitely nothing but a third party “has been” once the chemistry starts between Frank and Cora, starts to really get going as will often happen once you take those midnight swims in the white-flecked, our homeland the sea, pacific, Pacific Ocean just above slumming Los Angeles before the criss-cross roads took away many of the scenes. If Nick was smart he would watch his back very carefully because I smell murder in the air, hellish highway murder, once our sweet go-getter Cora coos to Frank that it is, and I quote, “the only way.” The only way to that white picket fence heaven old Nick is too cheap to buy her.
Needless to say, if you have read any of James M. Cain’s crime novels or short stories, there have to be a few twists and turns in the plot before the inevitable, and I mean inevitable in its fullest sense, road to perdition narrows and there is no escape from the grim fate that those who play with fate usually have to suffer. Here the inflamed lovers botch the first attempted murder of Nick but arouse so much suspicion from a very conveniently located neighboring District Attorney that they will not just get to go about their merry ways.
Moreover, have you been paying attention? Cora’s got her hooks in Frank so bad that you know there will be another attempt. And there was, and it was “successful.” And they got away with it after some nifty legal maneuvering that would do any modern defense attorney proud. Except you know as well as I do, and if you have ever read any previous crime noir review of mine, you damn well know that it can’t just be left like that. Crime, brothers and sisters, does not pay even for the mere legally not guilty. And that is where Frank’s smile, or half-smile, comes in. Because in the end he faces the chair not for Nick’s death, but for her’s. And all he cared about by then was whether she would in death forgive him. Ya, our boy Frank had it bad, real bad and that is what makes this a classic crime noir, no question. But Frank don’t feel bad there are about three billion guys who have gone through those same hoops for a dame, including this writer, although I personally tend to sultry brunettes not blondes.
DVD Review
The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, MGM, 1946
Ya, sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes, a frail, a frill, a twist, a dame, oh hell, let’s cut out the goofy stuff and just call her a woman and be done with it, will tie a guy’s insides up in knots so bad he doesn’t know what is what. Tie up a guy so bad he goes to the chair kind of smiling, okay maybe just half-smiling. Yes, our boy, our never let your feet stand still for a minute on the road boy Frank (played by John Garfield) in the 1940s film adaptation of James M. Cain’s classic masterpiece crime noir, The Postman Always Rings Twice, had it bad, bad as a man could have it. Bad a man could have from the minute Ms. Cora (played by a very, very blonde Lana Turner) walked through the Twin Oaks café door in her white summer blouse, shorts, and then de rigueur bandana holding back her hair. She may have been just another blonde, very blonde frail serving them off the arm in some seaside hash joint but from second one she is nothing but, well nothing but, a femme fatale. I swear, I swear on seven sealed bibles that I yelled at the screen for Frank to get the hell out of there at that moment. But do you think he would listen, no not our boy Frank. He had to play with fire, and play with it to the end.
See not only is Ms. Cora a Ms. but a real live 1940s Mrs. married to Nick, the owner of Twin Oaks. And Nick is nothing but an old guy, an old penny-pinching guy with small dreams getting smaller, whom Cora married on the rebound from, well, from something, something bad from the look of Nick. Yes, Nick is definitely nothing but a third party “has been” once the chemistry starts between Frank and Cora, starts to really get going as will often happen once you take those midnight swims in the white-flecked, our homeland the sea, pacific, Pacific Ocean just above slumming Los Angeles before the criss-cross roads took away many of the scenes. If Nick was smart he would watch his back very carefully because I smell murder in the air, hellish highway murder, once our sweet go-getter Cora coos to Frank that it is, and I quote, “the only way.” The only way to that white picket fence heaven old Nick is too cheap to buy her.
Needless to say, if you have read any of James M. Cain’s crime novels or short stories, there have to be a few twists and turns in the plot before the inevitable, and I mean inevitable in its fullest sense, road to perdition narrows and there is no escape from the grim fate that those who play with fate usually have to suffer. Here the inflamed lovers botch the first attempted murder of Nick but arouse so much suspicion from a very conveniently located neighboring District Attorney that they will not just get to go about their merry ways.
Moreover, have you been paying attention? Cora’s got her hooks in Frank so bad that you know there will be another attempt. And there was, and it was “successful.” And they got away with it after some nifty legal maneuvering that would do any modern defense attorney proud. Except you know as well as I do, and if you have ever read any previous crime noir review of mine, you damn well know that it can’t just be left like that. Crime, brothers and sisters, does not pay even for the mere legally not guilty. And that is where Frank’s smile, or half-smile, comes in. Because in the end he faces the chair not for Nick’s death, but for her’s. And all he cared about by then was whether she would in death forgive him. Ya, our boy Frank had it bad, real bad and that is what makes this a classic crime noir, no question. But Frank don’t feel bad there are about three billion guys who have gone through those same hoops for a dame, including this writer, although I personally tend to sultry brunettes not blondes.
The Latest From The "Partisan Defense Committee" Website- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners-An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!
Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
Markin comment:
Long live the tradition of the James P. Cannon-founded International Labor Defense (via the American Communist Party and the Communist International's Red Aid). Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners!
The Latest From The "National Jericho Movement"- Free All Our Class-War Prisoners
Click on the headline to link to the National Jericho Movement website for the latest news on our brother and sister class-war political prisoners.
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
Markin comment:
Free Mumia, Free Lynne, Free Bradley, Free Hugo, Free Ruchell-Free all our class-war prisoners
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