Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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Reviews
Walter Daum, The Life and Death of Stalinism: A Resurrection of Marxist Theory, Socialist Voice, New York, 1990, pp.380, $15.00
The rapidity and extent of the political, social and economic changes now taking place in Eastern Europe, and the fact that they are clearly the outcome of a very long process, make it all the more urgent for revolutionaries to grasp the meaning of what is happening, a task that cannot even be started without an appreciation of the class character of these states and of their laws of motion and development. The reaction of the international Trotskyist movement to this most fundamental of ideological challenges has been most disappointing, and what has so far appeared can be placed in two clearly defined categories, those that are works of apologetic, of the ‘we-were-right-all-the-time’ kind of argument, where the organisation had failed to foresee a single thing, and those that continue to hedge their bets, of the ‘confused-situation-that-can-go-either-way’ variety, where the group which publishes them clearly does not have a clue. A disappointing feature of both types is the lack of any attempt to trace the development of Soviet and Eastern European society as a whole since 1917.
It is one of the many strengths of this book that its author has not only seen that this is the main problem, but has done his utmost to address it. It is a thoughtful, and indeed in many ways, an ideologically exciting book. Whether you accept its main thesis or not, and it will emerge from what is written below that this reviewer does not, it will still challenge your presuppositions and force you to rethink your ideas from top to bottom in the most rigorous way. And unlike most would-be Marxist texts these days, it is written in intelligible English, which is no small gain as well.
The most arresting part of it is that it reminds us of Lenin’s basic definition in State and Revolution, so long ignored or forgotten by those who regard themselves as revolutionaries, of what a workers’ state really is, a “bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.119). This workers’ state, he points out, “in effect creates a single capital” (p.132). There was thus no question of the immediate abolition of wage labour, that essential component of capitalism, in the Soviet Union: “... the workers’ state inherits a capitalist economy and must therefore live with it at the same time that it transforms it – it is indeed a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie” (p.125). “It would not be incorrect”, he concludes, “to call the post 1917 Soviet Union a ‘deformed workers’ state’ almost from the start, a workers’ state whose transition was disastrously hampered by its backwardness and isolation” (pp.142-3).
Here he comes close to the heart of the matter, that the very term ‘workers’ state’ is a dialectical contradiction. It remains bourgeois in the sense that, like any other state, it defends property, but with this proviso, that the property in question is public rather than private. But since the historic task of this state is its own abolition, its withering away, although the workers have created it by means of a revolution, and the state is thus ‘owned’ by them, it still remains a bourgeois instrument and rests upon the exploitation of wage labour, thereby having a high bourgeois content from the start. The author has thus stumbled on a truth that few Trotskyists have ever even noticed, that there is not, and never could be, any such thing as a ‘healthy’ workers’ state, “a grotesque label, if ever there was one, given the reality”, notes Daum carefully (p.143), even when applied to that of Lenin and Trotsky. Thus, if instead of withering away this state power strengthens itself – and in the conditions of the Soviet Union following 1917 there was no question of any other development – its bourgeois content must increase, and it ceases by slow and imperceptible degrees to represent much of the interests of the working class.
Another highly successful part of this exercise is Daum’s destruction, down to the last brick, of the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ created by the International Secretariat to explain the establishment of the ‘peoples’ democracies’ in Eastern Europe after 1945 (pp.310-5). If the nationalisation of the majority of the economy is really the touchstone of what a workers’ state is, he points out, the Soviet Union itself did not become one until the end of 1918; and the idea that a bourgeois state can become a workers’ state by ‘structural assimilation’ really amounts to saying that “Socialist transformation can be achieved without overthrowing the bourgeois state” (p.313). “Such a theory echoes the revisionist method of Bernstein”, he rightly points out (p.312), describing it as “the hallmark of reformism” (p.313). But whilst successfully highlighting Mandel’s dilemma, we shall see that Daum abandons his own methodology when it comes to the Soviet Union, which he believes was a workers’ state until 1936-39, when it was replaced by a bourgeois state, created not as a result of the smashing of the state by armed conquest or internal counterrevolution.
It is precisely in his attempt to apply his own real insights to Eastern Europe that he halts halfway. He correctly draws our attention to that elementary proposition of Marxism, so long and so often forgotten by its would-be practitioners, that the working class revolution is qualitatively different from the revolutions of all other classes by its conscious character; “the creation of a workers’ state”, he points out, “is not just a matter of economic forms; it is the result of a social revolution that places state power in the hands of the working class. Since it inaugurates the period of transition it is in fact the Socialist revolution. And it must be the conscious achievement of the masses.” (p.311) Since he believes that in seizing state power from the Nazis and their puppets, the Stalinists carried out political, not social, revolutions (p.315), he argues that “the proletarian label for the Stalinist states amounts to a cynical rejection of the Marxist conclusion that a workers’ state can be established only through the workers’ conscious activity” (p.13). He is thus obliged to argue that the only feasible theory, that of Haston and Vern/Ryan, is impossible per se: “if the date of the Eastern European revolution is put at 1944-45, then the Stalinist forces became the agent of proletarian revolution at the very moment when they were crushing the movement of workers’ revolt“ (pp.322-3). But in stressing the conscious factor to the exclusion of everything else, he forgets his previous insight, that the workers’ state, being a bourgeois state, also has features in common with all other states, one of which is that it consists of armed men standing in defence of property. Social overturns can take place by armed conquest from abroad, and the possibility of this arose within the lifetime of Lenin in Poland, and its realisation actually took place in the case of Georgia. In the light of the development of Eastern Europe we can surely now affirm that if the Soviet army had indeed conquered Poland in 1919, without the involvement of the Polish working class, and, indeed, in contradiction with their wishes, we would have had a ‘Stalinist’ state in Poland nearly a decade before we got one in the Soviet Union, which actually happened in the case of Georgia, a couple or so years later. For it was Marx himself who explained a long time ago, with reference to the imperialism of the nineteenth century, that the victor in a war involving states of a different socio-economic character imposes its property forms upon the vanquished, that in effect a war between states of a different class nature partakes of the character of an international civil war.
We might add, incidentally, that those who believe that it requires individual, separate revolutions to form new states have certainly got a lot of explaining to do, as the spread of the bourgeois revolution in Europe after 1789 in the first instance took place on the bayonet points of Napoleon’s troops rather than by separate insurrections of the bourgeois class in each country. Daum thus signally fails to grasp what was really at issue in Trotsky’s analysis of the changes in the property forms of Eastern Poland in 1939 as set forth in In Defence of Marxism. “Trotsky seems torn between crediting a revolutionary overturn to the masses and denying the revolutionary character of the Stalinists’ acts”, he concludes (p.318). Yet he himself has already supplied the answer to this conundrum. If a workers’ state really is “a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie”, and if the workers subject to wage labour within it are simultaneously a ruling and an oppressed class, then the operations of this counter-revolutionary workers’ state are bound to take on precisely this character. Daum contradicts his own theory by stating that “the Stalinist social overturn came only later” (p.313), when, in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, “the old bourgeoisies were overthrown” (p.310). He is evidently oblivious of the fact that it was Hitler, not Stalin, who destroyed the embryo capitalist classes in Eastern Europe, and that the complete annihilation of capitalist property forms in the region, by then dominated by German imperialism, came upon Hitler’s defeat. In fact, the truth is that Stalin tried to recreate a native capitalist class in these areas, an attempt he had to abandon when it was obvious that Marshall Aid could well succeed where he was failing, and recreate these classes as clients of American finance capital.
There is far more to this book, however, than can be restricted to these considerations. On the purely historical side Daum provides a devastating picture of the ideological degeneration of the Fourth International, that is, if you accept that there still was one, which this reviewer would not. He shows how the postwar theory of the Trotskyists did not even explain what was happening at the time, still less being able to predict anything, and certainly being utterly useless as a guide to any action of any sort. It began as a complete failure to understand the nature of the postwar world (pp.292ff), continued happily on its way in the ridiculous somersaulting over the nature of the Eastern European states in 1948 (p.311), and when it finally settled down – if it ever did – it left them with an outlook that would not allow them to identify which were workers’ states and which were not (p.313), when this crucial class transformation was supposed to have taken place (p.314), and even with the view that it was possible to have states that had no class characterisation at all (p.314). In terms of activity Daum rightly highlights the importance of the betrayal of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 (pp.325-6), whilst strangely neglecting the lack of reaction to the behaviour of the LSSP during the Great Hartal a year later (cf. Revolutionary History, Volume 2 no.1, Spring 1989, pp.38-43). But whilst it may be true that Bolivia 1952 was the ‘Fourth of August’ of the Fourth International, to use Trotsky's phrase of Germany in 1933, Daum’s analysis leads him to look for the roots of this Stalinist-type degeneration after the end of the war and in the confusion over Eastern Europe. He is thus obliged to accept the myth of ‘Pabloite revisionism’, that it is a creation of the European leadership of the mid- and later 1940s. This is contrary to the clear evidence that adaptation to Stalinism originates with the SWP during the war (as Natalia Trotsky and Grandizo Munis pointed out), and indeed with James P. Cannon himself, in his support for the activity of the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1944-45, and in the contention that it was still “Trotsky’s army” and not Stalin’s (cf. Max Shachtman, From the Bureaucratic Jungle, part 2, in The New International, Volume 11 no.2, March 1945, pp.48-9).
It is no coincidence that the SWP dropped transitional politics at exactly the same time, and Daum shows that, coming from the same American milieu with the lack of an autonomous working class political movement of any sort, he has no real grasp of them eithcr. “In Britain”, he notes solemnly, “instead of exposing a Labour Party that helped bury the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, the left dug itself ever more deeply into it” (p.22). He thus belongs to that school of idealist ‘Marxism’ that thinks that you can destroy the Labour Party by ‘exposing’ it, i.e. by mere name-calling from outside. Perhaps a bit more reading might come up with the information that it was Engels who urged the trade unions to set up such a party, and that it was Lenin and Trotsky who advised us to “dig more deeply” into it. The “leftward motion of the workers” (p.295), for example, that Daum seems to think is a necessary condition for it, was far from taking place in the British Labour Party when Trotsky advised entry in 1936, and indeed did not take place until 1944. In fact, he shows on more than one occasion that he does not understand the ‘workers’ government’ slogan of the Transitional Programme at all. According to him, when the Bolsheviks raised the slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’, “the purpose of Lenin’s tactic was to place the Mensheviks in office so that their subservience to capitalism would be made visible to all” (p.316). But that is the whole point; the slogan means exactly what it says – power, not ‘office’, for part of the time the Bolsheviks were using that slogan the Mensheviks were already in ‘office’, in Kerensky’s government! If it were possible for a reformist party to break with the bourgeoisie and take power, the result would be a workers’ revolution, not a government that “could only have a fleeting existence”, which could either lead “to the workers’ revolution, or it is defeated” (p.316). The whole point of this slogan as a practical, non-sectarian, united front method of demonstrating the class character of the reformists, of really ‘exposing’ them, is to show to their followers that they do not want power for their party at all, but office in a bourgeois state.
There are other indications that Daum’s grasp of Marxism is not as sure as it could be. At one point he argues against Lenin’s concept that revolutionary consciousness had to be brought to the working class from outside, from the declassed bourgeois intelligentsia, in other words (pp.105ff). Apart from the argument about conditions determining consciousness, he has clearly forgotten from which class Marx, Engels, Trotsky, etc., really originated. A very strained argument (pp.274-6) tries to prove that the Soviet Union can still be imperialist, even if it does not export capital in the Leninist sense, giving as its clinching argument that “Czardom had little capital to export” (p.275). Now this really is playing with words, for however penetrated Czarist Russia was becoming by capital, and however ‘feudal’ some of its institutions appeared to be, its ‘imperial’ character was that of an Asiatic Empire, a state form that long predates capitalist society, and indeed every other form of class society as well. He also indulges in over generalisations, categorically denying what Engels treats as a possibility in Anti-Dühring when he states that “no bourgeoisie has gone so far as to abolish private property completely by entrusting its ownership function to the state” (pp.80-1), an assumption that may well need modification if we look at short periods in the history of Israel just after its foundation and of Chiang’s China as it tottered to its doom in 1945-49.
But it is a measure of the power of the author’s reasoning that it supplies the main refutation to the thesis defended by his own book. A major part of his argument against the theory of ‘structural assimilation’ is that by molecular change a state that was once a bourgeois state cannot become a workers’ state without a smashing and recreation of the state apparatus. Such a theory, he argues, leaves us with no guidelines for deciding when a state ceases to be a bourgeois state and becomes one ruled by the workers. But these same arguments are equally valid when applied to the reverse process – counter-revolution. Despite the claim that “this book’s political standpoint is Trotskyist” (p.7), this is demonstrably not the case. It is, in fact, a ‘state capitalist’ analysis of Russia that places the period of the erection of a bourgeois state in 1936-39. Yet the state had the same structure, and even the same personal dictator, before and after this period. This argumentation (pp.170ff) is quite the least convincing part of the book. All sorts of elaborate rationalisations are indulged in to prove the point, as regards both domestic and foreign policy. A quite extraordinary juridical significance is ascribed to the Stalin Constitution of 1936, in spite of the fact that both its author and reviser were shot within two years. In going over the work methods, the exploitation, the labour code, the purges and the terror, he is unable to surmount the problem that the state that implemented them was the same state before and after, which had developed by uninterrupted stages from 1917 onwards. He even tries to pretend that the outright class collaboration of the Popular Front was qualitatively different from previous betrayals, such as Pilsudski’s accession to power in Poland, Chiang’s smashing of the Second Revolution in China in 1927-28, or Hitler’s rise in Germany.
In fact, the same disarray exists amongst state capitalist analyses of the Soviet Union as Daum identifies among the Trotskyists with regard to Stalinism after 1945. When did it become a bourgeois state? Along the way he supplies a pretty effective demolition job on the views of Tony Cliff, that the crucial counter-revolution in class terms came about in the period of 1928-29, but in so doing supplies the ammunition for destroying his own dating of this alleged change. State capitalism as a concept turns out to be quite as unscientific as the ‘Pabloism’ he so roundly castigates, since unless it becomes part of the totality of what a ‘workers’ state’ really is, it comes into head-on collision with the class theory of the state. The truth is that the only state capitalist theories that can lay claim to any scientific basis at all are those of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and of some of the Mensheviks, who would place Russia’s bourgeois revolution in the setting up of this very state form in 1917.
But the basic thesis of this very fine book, that what we have since 1917 is a continued degeneration of a workers’ revolution in the direction of pure capitalist forms, becoming ever more alienated in structures (Pol Pot’s Cambodia!) and in methods (military bureaucratic conquest and peasant insurrection) cannot be faulted. Comrade Daum is of the opinion – and he argues his case with vigour and imagination – that the crucial change from quantity into quality took place in the Soviet Union in 1936-39. I would argue that we are on the point of witnessing it now, but that it will still require a break at the level of state power, in spite of the ever more warped and degenerated forms through which workers’ power is still expressed.
Al Richardson
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-Lessons From The Utopian Socialists- Charles Fourier and The Phalanx Movement-The Phalanstery
Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
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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, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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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. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*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.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
The Phalanstery
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Source: The History Guide;
Translated: by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier. Published in the Manuscrits de Fourier (1851).
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The announcement does, I acknowledge, sound very improbable, of a method for combining three hundred families unequal in fortune, and rewarding each person – man. woman, child – according to the three properties, capital, labor, talent. More than one reader will credit himself with humor when he remarks: “Let the author try to associate but three families, to reconcile three households in the same dwelling to social union, to arrangements of purchases and expenses, to perfect harmony in passions, character, and authority; when he shall have succeeded in reconciling three mistresses of associated households, we shall believe that he can succeed with thirty and with three hundred.”
I have already replied to an argument which it is well to reproduce (for repetition will frequently be necessary here); I have observed that as economy can spring only from large combinations, God had to create a social theory applicable to large masses and not to three or four families.
An objection seemingly more reasonable, and which needs to be refuted more than once, is that of social discords. How conciliate the passions, the conflicting interests, the incompatible characters, in short, the innumerable disparities which engender so much discord?
It may easily have been surmised that I shall make use of a lever entirely unknown, and whose properties cannot be judged until I shall have explained them. The passional contrasted Series draws its nourishment solely from those disparities which bewilder civilized policy; it acts like the husbandman who from a mass of filth draws the germs of abundance; the refuse, the dirt, and impure matter which would serve only to defile and infect our dwellings, are for him the sources of wealth.
If social experiments have miscarried, it is because some fatality has impelled all speculators to work with bodies of poor people whom they subjected to a monastic-industrial discipline, chief obstacle to the working of the series. Here, as in everything else, it is ever SIMPLISM (simplisme) which misleads the civilized, obstinately sticking to experiments with combinations of the poor; they cannot elevate themselves to the conception of a trial with combinations of the rich. They are veritable Lemming rats (migrating rats of Lapland), preferring drowning in a pond to deviating from the route which they have decided upon.
It is necessary for a company of 1,500 to 1,600 persons to have a stretch of land comprising a good square league, say a surface of six million square toises (do not let us forget that a third of that would suffice for the simple mode).
The land should be provided with a fine stream of water; it should be intersected by hills, and adapted to varied cultivation; it should be contiguous to a forest, and not far removed from a large city, but sufficiently so to escape intruders.
The experimental Phalanx standing alone, and without the support of neighboring phalanxes, will, in consequence of this isolation, have so many gaps in attraction, and so many passional calms to dread in its workings, that it will be necessary to provide it with the aid of a good location fitted for a variety of functions. A flat country such as Antwerp, Leipzig, Orleans, would be totally unsuitable, and would cause many Series to fail, owing to the uniformity of the land surface. It will, therefore, be necessary to select a diversified region, like the surroundings of Lausanne, or, at the very least, a fine valley provided with a stream of water and a forest, like the valley of Brussels or of Halle. A fine location near Paris would be the stretch of country lying between Poissy and Confleurs, Poissy and Meulan.
A company will be collected consisting of from 1,500 to 1,600 persons of graduated degrees of fortune, age, character, of theoretical and practical knowledge; care will be taken to secure the greatest amount of variety possible, for the greater the number of variations either in the passions or the faculties of the members, the easier will it be to make them harmonize in a short space of time.
In this district devoted to experiment, there ought to be combined every species of practicable cultivation, including that in conservatories and hot-houses; in addition, there ought to be at least three accessory factories, to be used in winter and on rainy days; furthermore, various practical branches of science and the arts, independent of the schools.
Above all, it will be necessary to fix the valuation of the capital invested in shares; lands, materials, flocks, implements, etc. This point ought, it seems, to be among the first to receive attention; I think it best to dismiss it here. I shall limit myself to remarking that all these investments in transferable shares and stock-coupons will be represented.
A great difficulty to be overcome in the experimental Phalanx will be the formation of the ties of high mechanism or collective bonds of the Series, before the close of the first season. It will be necessary to accomplish the passional union of the mass of the members; to lead them to collective and individual devotion to the maintenance of the Phalanx, and, especially, to perfect harmony regarding the division of the profits, according to the three factors, Capital, Labor, Talent.
This difficulty will be greater in northern than in southern countries, owing to the difference between devoting eight months and five months to agricultural labor.
An experimental Phalanx, being obliged to start out with agricultural labor, will not be in full operation until the month of May (in a climate of 50 degrees, say in the region around London or Paris); and, since it will be necessary to form the bonds of general union, the harmonious ties of the Series, be fore the suspension of field labor, before the month of October, there will be barely five months of full practice in a region of 50 degrees: the work will have to be accomplished in that short space.
The trial would, therefore, be much more conveniently made in a temperate legion, like Florence, Naples, Valencia, Lisbon, where they would have eight to nine months of full cultivation and a far better opportunity to consolidate the bonds of union, since there would be but two or three months of passional calm remaining to tide over till the advent of the second spring, a time when the Phalanx, resuming agricultural labor, would form its ties and cabals anew with much greater zeal, imbuing them with a degree of intensity far above that of the first year; it would thenceforth be in a state of complete consolidation, and strong enough to weather the passional calm of the second winter.
We shall see in the chapter on hiatuses of attraction, that the first Phalanx will, in consequence of its social isolation and other impediments inherent to the experimental canton, have twelve special obstacles to overcome, obstacles which the Phalanxes subsequently founded would not have to contend with. That is why it is so important that the experimental canton should have the assistance coming from field-work prolonged eight or nine months, like that in Naples and Lisbon.
Let us proceed with the details of composition.
At least seven-eighths of the members ought to be cultivators and manufacturers; the remainder will consist of capitalists, scholars, and artists.
The Phalanx would be badly graded and difficult to balance, if among its capitalists there were several having 100,000 francs, several 50,000 francs, without intermediate fortunes. In such a case it would be necessary to seek to procure intermediate fortunes of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 francs. The Phalanx best graduated in every respect raises social harmony and profits to the highest degree.
One is tempted to believe that our sybarites would not wish to be associated with Grosjean and Margot: they are so even now (as I believe I have already pointed out). Is not the rich man obliged to discuss his affairs with twenty peasants who occupy his farms, and who are all agreed in taking illegal advantage of him? He is, therefore, the peasant’s associate, obliged to make inquiries about the good and the bad farmers, their character, morals, solvency, and industry; he does associate in a very direct and a very tiresome way with Grosjean and Margot. In Harmony, he will be their indirect associate, being relieved of accounts regarding the management, which will be regulated by the regents, proctors, and special officers, without its being necessary for the capitalist to intervene or to run any risk of fraud. He will, therefore, be freed from the disagreeable features of his present association with the peasantry; he will form a new one, where he will not furnish them anything, and where they will only be his obliging and devoted friends, in accordance with the details given regarding the management of the Series and of reunions. If he takes the lead at festivals, it is because he has agreed to accept the rank of captain. If he gives them a feast, it is because he takes pleasure in acknowledging their continual kind attentions.
Thus the argument urged about the repugnance to association between Mondor and Grosjean, already associated in fact, is only, like all the others, a quibble devoid of sense.
The edifice occupied by a Phalanx does not in any way resemble our constructions, whether of the city or country; and none of our buildings could be used to establish a large Harmony of 1,600 persons – not even a seat palace like Versailles, nor a great monastery like the Escurial. If, for the purposes of experiment, only an inconsiderable Harmony of 200 or 300 members, or a hongrée of 400 members is organized, a monastery or a palace (Meudon) could be used for it.
The lodgings, plantations, and stables of a Society conducted on the plan of Series of groups, must differ vastly from our villages and country towns, which are intended for families having no social connection, and which act in a perverse manner; in place of that class of little houses which rival each other in filth and ungainliness in our little towns, a Phalanx constructs an edifice for itself which is as regular as the ground permits: here is a sketch of distribution for a location favorable to development.
The central part of the Palace or Phalanstery ought to be appropriated to peaceful uses, and contain the dining-halls, halls for finance, libraries, study, etc. In this central portion are located the place of worship, the tour d’ordre, the telegraph, the post-office boxes, the chimes for ceremonials, the observatory, the winter court adorned with resinous plants, and situated in the rear of the parade-court.
One of the wings ought to combine all the noisy workshops, such as the carpenter-shop, the forge, all hammer-work; it ought to contain also all the industrial gatherings of children, who are generally very noisy in industry and even in music. This combination will obviate a great annoyance of our civilized cities, where we find some man working with a hammer in every street, some dealer in iron or tyro on the clarionet, who shatter the tympanum of fifty families in the vicinity.
The other wing ought to contain the caravansary with its ballrooms and its halls appropriated to intercourse with outsiders, so that these may not encumber the central portion of the palace and embarrass the domestic relations of the Phalanx.
****
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, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
*******
Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
**********
In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
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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. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough on organizing the unorganized and other labor-specific causes (example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio).
*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.
Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!
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Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
The Phalanstery
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Source: The History Guide;
Translated: by Julia Franklin, and published as Selections from the Works of Fourier. Published in the Manuscrits de Fourier (1851).
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The announcement does, I acknowledge, sound very improbable, of a method for combining three hundred families unequal in fortune, and rewarding each person – man. woman, child – according to the three properties, capital, labor, talent. More than one reader will credit himself with humor when he remarks: “Let the author try to associate but three families, to reconcile three households in the same dwelling to social union, to arrangements of purchases and expenses, to perfect harmony in passions, character, and authority; when he shall have succeeded in reconciling three mistresses of associated households, we shall believe that he can succeed with thirty and with three hundred.”
I have already replied to an argument which it is well to reproduce (for repetition will frequently be necessary here); I have observed that as economy can spring only from large combinations, God had to create a social theory applicable to large masses and not to three or four families.
An objection seemingly more reasonable, and which needs to be refuted more than once, is that of social discords. How conciliate the passions, the conflicting interests, the incompatible characters, in short, the innumerable disparities which engender so much discord?
It may easily have been surmised that I shall make use of a lever entirely unknown, and whose properties cannot be judged until I shall have explained them. The passional contrasted Series draws its nourishment solely from those disparities which bewilder civilized policy; it acts like the husbandman who from a mass of filth draws the germs of abundance; the refuse, the dirt, and impure matter which would serve only to defile and infect our dwellings, are for him the sources of wealth.
If social experiments have miscarried, it is because some fatality has impelled all speculators to work with bodies of poor people whom they subjected to a monastic-industrial discipline, chief obstacle to the working of the series. Here, as in everything else, it is ever SIMPLISM (simplisme) which misleads the civilized, obstinately sticking to experiments with combinations of the poor; they cannot elevate themselves to the conception of a trial with combinations of the rich. They are veritable Lemming rats (migrating rats of Lapland), preferring drowning in a pond to deviating from the route which they have decided upon.
It is necessary for a company of 1,500 to 1,600 persons to have a stretch of land comprising a good square league, say a surface of six million square toises (do not let us forget that a third of that would suffice for the simple mode).
The land should be provided with a fine stream of water; it should be intersected by hills, and adapted to varied cultivation; it should be contiguous to a forest, and not far removed from a large city, but sufficiently so to escape intruders.
The experimental Phalanx standing alone, and without the support of neighboring phalanxes, will, in consequence of this isolation, have so many gaps in attraction, and so many passional calms to dread in its workings, that it will be necessary to provide it with the aid of a good location fitted for a variety of functions. A flat country such as Antwerp, Leipzig, Orleans, would be totally unsuitable, and would cause many Series to fail, owing to the uniformity of the land surface. It will, therefore, be necessary to select a diversified region, like the surroundings of Lausanne, or, at the very least, a fine valley provided with a stream of water and a forest, like the valley of Brussels or of Halle. A fine location near Paris would be the stretch of country lying between Poissy and Confleurs, Poissy and Meulan.
A company will be collected consisting of from 1,500 to 1,600 persons of graduated degrees of fortune, age, character, of theoretical and practical knowledge; care will be taken to secure the greatest amount of variety possible, for the greater the number of variations either in the passions or the faculties of the members, the easier will it be to make them harmonize in a short space of time.
In this district devoted to experiment, there ought to be combined every species of practicable cultivation, including that in conservatories and hot-houses; in addition, there ought to be at least three accessory factories, to be used in winter and on rainy days; furthermore, various practical branches of science and the arts, independent of the schools.
Above all, it will be necessary to fix the valuation of the capital invested in shares; lands, materials, flocks, implements, etc. This point ought, it seems, to be among the first to receive attention; I think it best to dismiss it here. I shall limit myself to remarking that all these investments in transferable shares and stock-coupons will be represented.
A great difficulty to be overcome in the experimental Phalanx will be the formation of the ties of high mechanism or collective bonds of the Series, before the close of the first season. It will be necessary to accomplish the passional union of the mass of the members; to lead them to collective and individual devotion to the maintenance of the Phalanx, and, especially, to perfect harmony regarding the division of the profits, according to the three factors, Capital, Labor, Talent.
This difficulty will be greater in northern than in southern countries, owing to the difference between devoting eight months and five months to agricultural labor.
An experimental Phalanx, being obliged to start out with agricultural labor, will not be in full operation until the month of May (in a climate of 50 degrees, say in the region around London or Paris); and, since it will be necessary to form the bonds of general union, the harmonious ties of the Series, be fore the suspension of field labor, before the month of October, there will be barely five months of full practice in a region of 50 degrees: the work will have to be accomplished in that short space.
The trial would, therefore, be much more conveniently made in a temperate legion, like Florence, Naples, Valencia, Lisbon, where they would have eight to nine months of full cultivation and a far better opportunity to consolidate the bonds of union, since there would be but two or three months of passional calm remaining to tide over till the advent of the second spring, a time when the Phalanx, resuming agricultural labor, would form its ties and cabals anew with much greater zeal, imbuing them with a degree of intensity far above that of the first year; it would thenceforth be in a state of complete consolidation, and strong enough to weather the passional calm of the second winter.
We shall see in the chapter on hiatuses of attraction, that the first Phalanx will, in consequence of its social isolation and other impediments inherent to the experimental canton, have twelve special obstacles to overcome, obstacles which the Phalanxes subsequently founded would not have to contend with. That is why it is so important that the experimental canton should have the assistance coming from field-work prolonged eight or nine months, like that in Naples and Lisbon.
Let us proceed with the details of composition.
At least seven-eighths of the members ought to be cultivators and manufacturers; the remainder will consist of capitalists, scholars, and artists.
The Phalanx would be badly graded and difficult to balance, if among its capitalists there were several having 100,000 francs, several 50,000 francs, without intermediate fortunes. In such a case it would be necessary to seek to procure intermediate fortunes of 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, 90,000 francs. The Phalanx best graduated in every respect raises social harmony and profits to the highest degree.
One is tempted to believe that our sybarites would not wish to be associated with Grosjean and Margot: they are so even now (as I believe I have already pointed out). Is not the rich man obliged to discuss his affairs with twenty peasants who occupy his farms, and who are all agreed in taking illegal advantage of him? He is, therefore, the peasant’s associate, obliged to make inquiries about the good and the bad farmers, their character, morals, solvency, and industry; he does associate in a very direct and a very tiresome way with Grosjean and Margot. In Harmony, he will be their indirect associate, being relieved of accounts regarding the management, which will be regulated by the regents, proctors, and special officers, without its being necessary for the capitalist to intervene or to run any risk of fraud. He will, therefore, be freed from the disagreeable features of his present association with the peasantry; he will form a new one, where he will not furnish them anything, and where they will only be his obliging and devoted friends, in accordance with the details given regarding the management of the Series and of reunions. If he takes the lead at festivals, it is because he has agreed to accept the rank of captain. If he gives them a feast, it is because he takes pleasure in acknowledging their continual kind attentions.
Thus the argument urged about the repugnance to association between Mondor and Grosjean, already associated in fact, is only, like all the others, a quibble devoid of sense.
The edifice occupied by a Phalanx does not in any way resemble our constructions, whether of the city or country; and none of our buildings could be used to establish a large Harmony of 1,600 persons – not even a seat palace like Versailles, nor a great monastery like the Escurial. If, for the purposes of experiment, only an inconsiderable Harmony of 200 or 300 members, or a hongrée of 400 members is organized, a monastery or a palace (Meudon) could be used for it.
The lodgings, plantations, and stables of a Society conducted on the plan of Series of groups, must differ vastly from our villages and country towns, which are intended for families having no social connection, and which act in a perverse manner; in place of that class of little houses which rival each other in filth and ungainliness in our little towns, a Phalanx constructs an edifice for itself which is as regular as the ground permits: here is a sketch of distribution for a location favorable to development.
The central part of the Palace or Phalanstery ought to be appropriated to peaceful uses, and contain the dining-halls, halls for finance, libraries, study, etc. In this central portion are located the place of worship, the tour d’ordre, the telegraph, the post-office boxes, the chimes for ceremonials, the observatory, the winter court adorned with resinous plants, and situated in the rear of the parade-court.
One of the wings ought to combine all the noisy workshops, such as the carpenter-shop, the forge, all hammer-work; it ought to contain also all the industrial gatherings of children, who are generally very noisy in industry and even in music. This combination will obviate a great annoyance of our civilized cities, where we find some man working with a hammer in every street, some dealer in iron or tyro on the clarionet, who shatter the tympanum of fifty families in the vicinity.
The other wing ought to contain the caravansary with its ballrooms and its halls appropriated to intercourse with outsiders, so that these may not encumber the central portion of the palace and embarrass the domestic relations of the Phalanx.
Monday, April 09, 2012
All Out May Day 2012: A Day Without the 99% -General Strike Occupy Boston Working Group
In late December 2011 the General Assembly (GA) of Occupy Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the stirring and mostly successful November 2nd Oakland General Strike and December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, issued a call for a national and international general strike centered on immigrant rights, environmental sustainability, a moratorium on foreclosures, an end to the wars, and jobs for all. These and other issues such as political transparency and horizontal democracy that have become associated with the Occupy movement are to be featured in the actions set for May Day 2012.
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a time for the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America to join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy.
Some political activists here in Boston, mainly connected with Occupy Boston (OB), decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan its own May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 8, 2012.
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and some did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its lack of a recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. GSOB also came to a realization that successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 would not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Our focus will be actions and activities that respond and reflect the Boston political situation as we attempt to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration actions in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national actions this year. One of the first steps GSOB took as a working group was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. After making such efforts GSOB has joined forces with BMDC in order to coordinate the over-all May Day actions.
Taking its cue from the developing Occupy May Day movement, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of Occupy Wall Street, GSOB has centered its slogans on the theme of “Occupy May First - A Day Without the 99%.” GSOB wishes to highlight the fact that in capitalist America labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Also to highlight the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the increasing political voicelessness of the 99%, and the social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions faced under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated by Occupy Boston last fall.
On May Day GSOB is calling on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. We encourage working people to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets.
For students at all levels GSOB is calling for a walk-out of classes. Further we call on college students to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and GSOB suggests at some point in the day that all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
In the early hours on May 1st members of the 99% are urged to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza jointly sponsored by BMDC and GSOB. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The GSOB is urging the following slogans for May 1st. - No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without the 99% really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. GSOB says -All Out For May Day 2012!
GSOB meets every Thursday at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston (Chinatown) from 5:15-6:45 PM. April 26th will be an all-inclusive final planning meeting sponsored by BMDC-GSOB. Check us out on Facebook and the Facebook event page- http://www.facebook.com/#!/Occupy.May1.Boston
May Day is the historic international working class holiday that has been celebrated each year in many parts of the world since the time of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago in 1886 and the struggle for the eight-hour work day. More recently it has been a time for the hard-pressed immigrant communities here in America to join together in the fight against deportations and other discriminatory aspects of governmental immigration policy.
Some political activists here in Boston, mainly connected with Occupy Boston (OB), decided just after the new year to support that general strike call and formed the General Strike Occupy Boston working group (GSOB). GSOB has met, more or less weekly, since then to plan its own May Day actions. The first step in that process was to bring a resolution incorporating the Occupy Los Angeles issues before the GA of Occupy Boston for approval. That resolution was approved by GA OB on January 8, 2012.
Early discussions within the working group centered on drawing the lessons of the West Coast actions last fall. Above all what is and what isn’t a general strike. Traditionally a general strike, as witness the recent actions in Greece and other countries, is called by workers’ organizations and/or parties for a specified period of time in order to shut down substantial parts of the capitalist economy over some set of immediate demands. A close analysis of the West Coast actions showed a slightly different model: one based on community pickets of specified industrial targets, downtown mass street actions, and scattered individual and collective acts of solidarity like student support strikes and sick-outs. Additionally, small businesses and other allies were asked to close and some did close down in solidarity.
That latter model seemed more appropriate to the tasks at hand in Boston given its lack of a recent militant labor history and that it is a regional financial, technological and educational hub rather than an industrial center. GSOB also came to a realization that successful actions in Boston on May Day 2012 would not necessarily exactly follow the long established radical and labor traditions of the West Coast. Our focus will be actions and activities that respond and reflect the Boston political situation as we attempt to create, re-create really, an on-going May Day tradition beyond the observance of the day by labor radicals and the immigrant communities.
Over the past several years, starting with the nation-wide actions in 2006, the Latin and other immigrant communities in and around Boston have been celebrating May Day as a day of action on the very pressing problem of immigration status as well as the traditional working class solidarity holiday. It was no accident that Los Angeles, scene of massive immigration actions in the past and currently one of the areas facing the brunt of the deportation drives by the Obama administration, would be in the lead to call for national actions this year. One of the first steps GSOB took as a working group was to try to reach out to the already existing Boston May Day Coalition (BMDC), which has spearheaded the annual marches and rallies in the immigrant communities, in order to learn of their experiences and to coordinate actions. After making such efforts GSOB has joined forces with BMDC in order to coordinate the over-all May Day actions.
Taking its cue from the developing Occupy May Day movement, especially the broader and more inclusive messages coming out of Occupy Wall Street, GSOB has centered its slogans on the theme of “Occupy May First - A Day Without the 99%.” GSOB wishes to highlight the fact that in capitalist America labor, of one kind or another, has created all the wealth but has not shared in the accumulated profits. Also to highlight the increasing economic gap between rich and poor, the increasing political voicelessness of the 99%, and the social issues related to race, class, sexual inequality, gender and the myriad other oppressions faced under capitalism is in keeping with the efforts initiated by Occupy Boston last fall.
On May Day GSOB is calling on the 99% to strike, skip work, walk out of school, and refrain from shopping, banking and business in order to implement that general slogan. We encourage working people to request the day off, or to call in sick. Small businesses are encouraged to close for the day and join the rest of the 99% in the streets.
For students at all levels GSOB is calling for a walk-out of classes. Further we call on college students to occupy the universities. With a huge student population of over 250,000 in the Boston area no-one-size-fits- all strategy seems appropriate. Each kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, graduate school and wayward left-wing think tank should plan its own strike actions and GSOB suggests at some point in the day that all meet at a central location in downtown Boston.
In the early hours on May 1st members of the 99% are urged to converge on the Boston Financial District for a day of direct action to demand an end to corporate rule and a shift of power to the people. The Financial District Block Party will start at 7:00 AM on the corner of Federal Street & Franklin Street in downtown Boston. Banks and corporations are strongly encouraged to close down for the day.
At noon there will be a city permit-approved May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza jointly sponsored by BMDC and GSOB. Following the rally participants are encouraged to head to East Boston for solidarity marches centered on the immigrant communities that will start at approximately 2:00 PM and move from East Boston, Chelsea, and Revere to Everett for a rally at 4:00 PM. Other activities that afternoon for those who chose not to go to East Boston will be scheduled in and around the downtown area.
That evening, for those who cannot for whatever reasons participate in the daytime actions, there will be a “Funeral March” for the banks forming at 7:00 PM at Copley Square that steps off at 8:00 PM and will march throughout the downtown area.
The GSOB is urging the following slogans for May 1st. - No work. No school. No chores. No shopping. No banking. Let’s show the 1% that we have the power. Let’s show the world what a day without the 99% really means. And let’s return to the old traditions of May Day as a day of international solidarity with our working and oppressed sisters and brothers around the world. GSOB says -All Out For May Day 2012!
GSOB meets every Thursday at Encuentro 5, 33 Harrison Avenue, Boston (Chinatown) from 5:15-6:45 PM. April 26th will be an all-inclusive final planning meeting sponsored by BMDC-GSOB. Check us out on Facebook and the Facebook event page- http://www.facebook.com/#!/Occupy.May1.Boston
From The United National Anti-War Coalition-All Out On May Day!
Click on the headline to link to The United National Anti-War Coalition-All Out On May Day!
Markin comment:
This message is from 2011 but applies this year as well-maybe more so.
Markin comment:
This message is from 2011 but applies this year as well-maybe more so.
Out In The Be-Bop Night- The Baby-Boomer Birth Of The Search For The Blue-Pink American Western Night- “American Graffiti”-Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of a segment of American Graffiti, featuring the lead-up to the hot rod duel.
DVD Review
American Graffiti, starring Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Paul LeMat, directed by George Lucas, 1973
Recently in this space I have been deep in remembrances of the influences, great and small, of the 1950s “beats” on my own sorry teen-aged alienation and teen-aged angst (sometimes they were separate anguishes, sometimes tied together like inseparable twins, mostly the latter) and the struggle to find my place in the sun, to write in bright lights my own beat plainsong. Of course, that influence was blown over me second-hand as I was just a little too young, or too wide-world unconscious, to be there at the creation, on those first roads west, those first fitfully car-driven, gas-fuelled, thumb hanging-out, sore-footed, free exploration west, in body and mind. That first great rush of the adrenal in trying to discover, eternally discover as it has turned out, the search for the meaning of the great blue-pink American West night. Ah, pioneer-boys, thanks.
I just got a whiff, a passing whiff of that electric-charged air, the sweet “be-bop”, bop-bop, real gone daddy, cooled-out, pipe-filled with whatever, jazz-sexed, high white note blown, howling in the wind plainsong afterglow. Moreover, somewhat tarnished, a little sullen and withdrawn, and media-used up by my time. More than one faux black chino-wearing, black beret’d, stringy-bearded, nightshade sun-glassed, pseudo-poetic-pounding, television-derived fakir crossed my path in Harvard Square in those high stakes early 1960s high school days. And a few real ones, as well. (A couple, whom I still pass occasionally, giving a quick nod to, have never given up the ghost and still haunt the old square looking for the long-gone, storied Hayes-Bickford, a place where the serious and the fakirs gathered in the late night before dawn hour to pour out their souls, via mouth or on paper). More to the point, I came too late to be able to settle comfortably into that anti-political world that the “beats” thrived in. Great political and social events were unfolding and I wanted in, feverishly wanted in, with both hands.
You know some of the beat leaders, the real ones, don’t you? Remembered, seemingly profusely remembered now, by every passing acquaintance with some specimen to present. Now merely photo-plastered, book wrote, college english department deconstruction’d , academic journal-debated, but then in full glory plaid shirt, white shirt, tee shirt, dungarees, chinos, sturdy foot-sore cosmic traveler shoes, visuals of heaven’s own angel bums, if there was a heaven and if there were angels and if that locale needed bums.
Jack, million hungry word man-child sanctified, Lowell mills-etched and trapped and mother-fed, Jack Kerouac. Allen, om-om-om, bop, bop, mantra-man, mad Paterson-trapped, modern plainsong-poet-in-chief, Allen Ginsberg. William, sweet opium dream (or, maybe, not so sweet when the supply ran out), needle-driven, sardonic, ironic, chronic, Tangiers-trapped, Harvard man (finally, a useful one, oops, sorry), Williams S. Burroughs. Neal, wild word, wild gesture, out of ashcan all-America dream man, tire-kicking, oil-checking, gas-filling, zen master wheelman gluing the enterprise together, Neal Cassady. And a whirling crowd of others, including mad, street-wise, saint-gunsel, Gregory Corso. I am a little fuzzy these days on the genesis of my relationship to this crowd (although a reading of Ginsberg’s Howl was probably first in those frantic, high school, Harvard Square, poetry-pounding, guitar-strummed, existential word space, coffee, no sugar, I’ll have a refill, please, fugitive dream’d, coffeehouse-anchored days). This I know. I qualified, in triplicate, teen angst, teen alienation, teen luddite as a card-carrying member in those days.
That brings us to the film under review, American Graffiti, and its relationship to the birth of the search for the blue-pink great American West night promised to be discussed in the headline. Well, let me run through the plot line for those who are not familiar with idea behind the film, or are too young to have a clue as to such goings-on but might want to know what the old fogies, their parents or (ouch) grandparents were up to (or thought they were up to) back in the days, or are the peers of those 1960s baby-boomers enshrined in the film, but have forgotten a thing or two since they watched the thing in 1973 (another ouch).
The opening scene sets the whole film up. A very spiffy, well-dressed, well-scrubbed, well-mannered (mostly), middle class crew of 1962-era Southern California suburban valley kids with plenty of disposable income at hand, are gathering for one last tribal meeting before they go their separate ways in the great adult grind-it-out, eyes-straight-forward, shoulder-to-the-wheel, little boxes world at their main club house, Mel’s fast food drive-in (already I have lost the younger set on that last point, on the non-mall food court, drive-in thing, right?). How did they get to said gathering spot, you might ask? Come on now, this is wide open-spaced California suburban valley how else would they get there other that in their own personal “teen mobiles.” Jesus, do I have to tell you everything.
They come in one and twos, mainly, in some of the best-looking “boss” cars (excuse my reversion to an old-time term for excellence, automobile division) that you will see these days outside of an automobile museum. And besides that, many of them, the cars that is, are “souped-up” (look that one up yourself), especially valley hot-rod-king of the hill, John (played by Paul LeMat), and his yellow (mustard yellow, wow, can you believe that?) little deuce coupe (ditto on the look up). Here is the point though, the main point even in this pre-1960s rebellion period, none of the cars look anything like any parent would drive, or could drive (except the few dweeby cars borrowed for the evening from some plaint, or beaten-down, beaten down by teen argument, parent). Yes indeed, this is a gathering of the California branch of “youth nation” in all their tribal finery.
As is to be expected of a teen-centered (amazingly teen-centered, adults get merely cameo appearances in this one, and that seems about right) drama the plot line thins out considerably after the flash at Mel’s. Mainly, it is about a single night’s search for the 1962 version of the California blue-pink night (more on this below). And what drives that search? Cruising, natch. Why spend the time and expense involved in a “boss” car (you know that word now, right?) if you don’t create a stir up and down the main drag boulevard looking for…. , you can easily fill in that blank yourself. The rest of the plot centers on such eternal questions as the young leaving home and hearth to face the great wide world (here to be or not to be a college freshman by stars Ron Howard, as Steve, and Richard Dreyfus, as Curt), the usual boy looking for girl thing (including by oldster hot-rod king, Johnny) that I have endlessly reported on elsewhere in this space and that is not worthy of further comment in a teen film. That IS a teen film. What else could such a film be about? Teen break-ups (Howard and Cindy Williams, as Laurie), cruising, stopping at Mel’s for some car-hopped fast food, cruising, a little hot- rod duel ( between Johnny and, ah, one Harrison Ford) on those open California highways (what else are they for?), and then daylight and the rude old work-a-day world intrudes, even on sanctified teen life.
This is one time though that I do not do justice to a film with a summary because this thing is well-directed, well-produced, and well-acted by a crew of then very young unknowns (mostly) that would go on to all kinds of other cinematic successes (including hot-rod runner-up, ah, Ford). The sense of déjà vu for this Eastern U.S.-born baby-boomer, including a great high school dance segment and a soundtrack that reads out of every classic Oldies But Goodies compilation that I have ever reviewed, was palpable, without being maudlin. Kudos
So what connection can be drawn, one might rightly ask in a review of American Graffiti, a film that depicts a snapshot of a then respectable early 1960s coming-of-age teen-driven culture and the search for now respectably beatified “beat” culture great blue-pink American West night? One with, by then, a respectable post-birth of rock and roll (cleaned up of the “bad boys” like Jerry Lee Lewis) soundtrack. That also pays homage to a then very respectable post-Great Depression Okie-Akie invasion middle class-driven suburban valley life-style, and its respectable (mostly) California teen “boss” car culture. And highlights a then respectable superficial teen angst (“Do you like my finger nails painted in crimson red or rose red?”, “Do you want Pepsi or Coke with your hamburger, hold the onions?”, or something along those lines) A film which, moreover, has not the slightest reference to, nor can in any way be taken to have been produced under the under the sign of, the “beats.” Hell, not even a Maynard G. Krebs (from the old time media image of beatniks television show, Dobey Gillis) beatnik caricature in the lot. Nada.
The closest that any character comes is my boy John, “greaser”, deuce coupe, hot rod-king-of- the-hill, and working class poet (limited lyric car poet, okay)/ existential philosopher. And he doesn’t count because he has been around since Hector was a pup, is seen as an eternal “townie” by his middle class brethren, and is a throwback to James Dean and Marlon Brando 1950s California cool. And those guys (I mean the characters they played in Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One not them as personalities, they were cool, no question) weren’t beat, no way. Beside John’s angst, important but kind of universal as it is, for some dewy-eyed female teeny-bopper to sit next to him in that old jalopy as he cruises those great California valley night highways is not the stuff of tragedy. Not in my book anyway, and I also had more than my share of that kind of teen angst.
No, what this film connects to, and connects to visually in the first instance, is that great big old search for that pink-blue American Western night that the “beats”, at least what I think the beats were searching for when they were doing their breakout from the post- World War II American crank-out death machine night. The shift from the Eastern American dark night westward (mainly, although some of beats were already vanguard- hovering around San Francisco waiting for the boys to come off the roads from the east and establish what was what) serves as a metaphor for much of what they were up to, if only to breakout, a little, from the nine-to-five, waiting for the bomb (atomic bomb) to drop world. That visual sense is most dramatically highlighted in the very first opening shots of this film where the pink-blue sky forms the backdrop to the activity starting up at California teen-hang-out (and elsewhere as well, even stuffy old Boston), fast food drive-in, Mel’s drive-in (A&W, Adventure Car-Hop, Dairy Queen, fill in your own named spot), central committee headquarters for valley California teen night. .
Wait, let me detail this a little more so there is no mistake. The film opens with the first few anxious California “boss” cars (you remember what that word means, right?), almost tear-provoking in this reviewer, because I rode in teen cars just like those, rolling into neon-sign lighted Mel’s(lights just turned on against the kitchen-backdrop dark night) just as the sun is going down. There is a big old sun-devouring red devil of a cloud flaming up in the background. That is NOT the part of the pink-blue night I am talking about. Below, just below, nearer the horizon is the one I am talking about, the symbol of the search, and the stuff of dreams, the great American blue-pink dream escape.
I can hear great yawns and see rolled eyes piercing through cyberspace as you say so what is the big deal about some foolish ephemeral passing cloud, blue-pink, pink-blue, or hell, blue-blue. Philistines! Go back now to Mel’s, or wherever the blue-pink sky announces the nights doings, the night’s promises or disappointments. Those promises or those disappointments, great or small, went to make up the birth of the search for the great American Western night, the night of our own circumscribed teen, kiddish break-outs, great or small.
Make no mistake it was not the morning, the morning of school or toil, paid or unpaid. It was not the lazy afternoon, the time of study or of the self-same toil, paid or unpaid (the unpaid kind thanked for or not, or to quote the universal parent god of the time done because “we keep a roof over your head”). It was the night, no the approach, the blue-pink approach of night that drove our maddened dreams, hopefully signaling good omens for the night’s work. The day was mere preclude to that tiny feverishly sought breakout (now a small thing seen, but not then). The telephoned arrangements, the groomed preparations, the gathering of the odd dollar here or there, in order to first cruise that teen empty highway and then on second pass the filling teen night.
Now do you see how the “beats”, those unnamed, unnamable, sub-consciously-embedded beats drove our bust-out dreams for travel, for adventure, for wine (later, dope), for women (or men) and for song, for shaking off the dust of the old town, great or small, as long as it moving elsewhere, and on a thumb pulled-out, hard-driven, shoe leather-beaten shod foot if need be.
American Graffiti is a snapshot of just exactly that minute, just that historic minute before the great shake-out of the 1960s for the baby-boomer generation, after that minute some of us went left politically and became social activists. We made just about every political, social, and cultural mistake along the way and lost, no, were defeated, no again, were mauled, in the end in our dreams of “seeking that newer world.” (And have spent the past forty or so years having to fight a rear-guard against the straightjacket, death machine-loving yahoos and their consorts). Ya, but hear me out. The search for the blue-pink Great American Western night was not one of those mistakes.
DVD Review
American Graffiti, starring Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, Paul LeMat, directed by George Lucas, 1973
Recently in this space I have been deep in remembrances of the influences, great and small, of the 1950s “beats” on my own sorry teen-aged alienation and teen-aged angst (sometimes they were separate anguishes, sometimes tied together like inseparable twins, mostly the latter) and the struggle to find my place in the sun, to write in bright lights my own beat plainsong. Of course, that influence was blown over me second-hand as I was just a little too young, or too wide-world unconscious, to be there at the creation, on those first roads west, those first fitfully car-driven, gas-fuelled, thumb hanging-out, sore-footed, free exploration west, in body and mind. That first great rush of the adrenal in trying to discover, eternally discover as it has turned out, the search for the meaning of the great blue-pink American West night. Ah, pioneer-boys, thanks.
I just got a whiff, a passing whiff of that electric-charged air, the sweet “be-bop”, bop-bop, real gone daddy, cooled-out, pipe-filled with whatever, jazz-sexed, high white note blown, howling in the wind plainsong afterglow. Moreover, somewhat tarnished, a little sullen and withdrawn, and media-used up by my time. More than one faux black chino-wearing, black beret’d, stringy-bearded, nightshade sun-glassed, pseudo-poetic-pounding, television-derived fakir crossed my path in Harvard Square in those high stakes early 1960s high school days. And a few real ones, as well. (A couple, whom I still pass occasionally, giving a quick nod to, have never given up the ghost and still haunt the old square looking for the long-gone, storied Hayes-Bickford, a place where the serious and the fakirs gathered in the late night before dawn hour to pour out their souls, via mouth or on paper). More to the point, I came too late to be able to settle comfortably into that anti-political world that the “beats” thrived in. Great political and social events were unfolding and I wanted in, feverishly wanted in, with both hands.
You know some of the beat leaders, the real ones, don’t you? Remembered, seemingly profusely remembered now, by every passing acquaintance with some specimen to present. Now merely photo-plastered, book wrote, college english department deconstruction’d , academic journal-debated, but then in full glory plaid shirt, white shirt, tee shirt, dungarees, chinos, sturdy foot-sore cosmic traveler shoes, visuals of heaven’s own angel bums, if there was a heaven and if there were angels and if that locale needed bums.
Jack, million hungry word man-child sanctified, Lowell mills-etched and trapped and mother-fed, Jack Kerouac. Allen, om-om-om, bop, bop, mantra-man, mad Paterson-trapped, modern plainsong-poet-in-chief, Allen Ginsberg. William, sweet opium dream (or, maybe, not so sweet when the supply ran out), needle-driven, sardonic, ironic, chronic, Tangiers-trapped, Harvard man (finally, a useful one, oops, sorry), Williams S. Burroughs. Neal, wild word, wild gesture, out of ashcan all-America dream man, tire-kicking, oil-checking, gas-filling, zen master wheelman gluing the enterprise together, Neal Cassady. And a whirling crowd of others, including mad, street-wise, saint-gunsel, Gregory Corso. I am a little fuzzy these days on the genesis of my relationship to this crowd (although a reading of Ginsberg’s Howl was probably first in those frantic, high school, Harvard Square, poetry-pounding, guitar-strummed, existential word space, coffee, no sugar, I’ll have a refill, please, fugitive dream’d, coffeehouse-anchored days). This I know. I qualified, in triplicate, teen angst, teen alienation, teen luddite as a card-carrying member in those days.
That brings us to the film under review, American Graffiti, and its relationship to the birth of the search for the blue-pink great American West night promised to be discussed in the headline. Well, let me run through the plot line for those who are not familiar with idea behind the film, or are too young to have a clue as to such goings-on but might want to know what the old fogies, their parents or (ouch) grandparents were up to (or thought they were up to) back in the days, or are the peers of those 1960s baby-boomers enshrined in the film, but have forgotten a thing or two since they watched the thing in 1973 (another ouch).
The opening scene sets the whole film up. A very spiffy, well-dressed, well-scrubbed, well-mannered (mostly), middle class crew of 1962-era Southern California suburban valley kids with plenty of disposable income at hand, are gathering for one last tribal meeting before they go their separate ways in the great adult grind-it-out, eyes-straight-forward, shoulder-to-the-wheel, little boxes world at their main club house, Mel’s fast food drive-in (already I have lost the younger set on that last point, on the non-mall food court, drive-in thing, right?). How did they get to said gathering spot, you might ask? Come on now, this is wide open-spaced California suburban valley how else would they get there other that in their own personal “teen mobiles.” Jesus, do I have to tell you everything.
They come in one and twos, mainly, in some of the best-looking “boss” cars (excuse my reversion to an old-time term for excellence, automobile division) that you will see these days outside of an automobile museum. And besides that, many of them, the cars that is, are “souped-up” (look that one up yourself), especially valley hot-rod-king of the hill, John (played by Paul LeMat), and his yellow (mustard yellow, wow, can you believe that?) little deuce coupe (ditto on the look up). Here is the point though, the main point even in this pre-1960s rebellion period, none of the cars look anything like any parent would drive, or could drive (except the few dweeby cars borrowed for the evening from some plaint, or beaten-down, beaten down by teen argument, parent). Yes indeed, this is a gathering of the California branch of “youth nation” in all their tribal finery.
As is to be expected of a teen-centered (amazingly teen-centered, adults get merely cameo appearances in this one, and that seems about right) drama the plot line thins out considerably after the flash at Mel’s. Mainly, it is about a single night’s search for the 1962 version of the California blue-pink night (more on this below). And what drives that search? Cruising, natch. Why spend the time and expense involved in a “boss” car (you know that word now, right?) if you don’t create a stir up and down the main drag boulevard looking for…. , you can easily fill in that blank yourself. The rest of the plot centers on such eternal questions as the young leaving home and hearth to face the great wide world (here to be or not to be a college freshman by stars Ron Howard, as Steve, and Richard Dreyfus, as Curt), the usual boy looking for girl thing (including by oldster hot-rod king, Johnny) that I have endlessly reported on elsewhere in this space and that is not worthy of further comment in a teen film. That IS a teen film. What else could such a film be about? Teen break-ups (Howard and Cindy Williams, as Laurie), cruising, stopping at Mel’s for some car-hopped fast food, cruising, a little hot- rod duel ( between Johnny and, ah, one Harrison Ford) on those open California highways (what else are they for?), and then daylight and the rude old work-a-day world intrudes, even on sanctified teen life.
This is one time though that I do not do justice to a film with a summary because this thing is well-directed, well-produced, and well-acted by a crew of then very young unknowns (mostly) that would go on to all kinds of other cinematic successes (including hot-rod runner-up, ah, Ford). The sense of déjà vu for this Eastern U.S.-born baby-boomer, including a great high school dance segment and a soundtrack that reads out of every classic Oldies But Goodies compilation that I have ever reviewed, was palpable, without being maudlin. Kudos
So what connection can be drawn, one might rightly ask in a review of American Graffiti, a film that depicts a snapshot of a then respectable early 1960s coming-of-age teen-driven culture and the search for now respectably beatified “beat” culture great blue-pink American West night? One with, by then, a respectable post-birth of rock and roll (cleaned up of the “bad boys” like Jerry Lee Lewis) soundtrack. That also pays homage to a then very respectable post-Great Depression Okie-Akie invasion middle class-driven suburban valley life-style, and its respectable (mostly) California teen “boss” car culture. And highlights a then respectable superficial teen angst (“Do you like my finger nails painted in crimson red or rose red?”, “Do you want Pepsi or Coke with your hamburger, hold the onions?”, or something along those lines) A film which, moreover, has not the slightest reference to, nor can in any way be taken to have been produced under the under the sign of, the “beats.” Hell, not even a Maynard G. Krebs (from the old time media image of beatniks television show, Dobey Gillis) beatnik caricature in the lot. Nada.
The closest that any character comes is my boy John, “greaser”, deuce coupe, hot rod-king-of- the-hill, and working class poet (limited lyric car poet, okay)/ existential philosopher. And he doesn’t count because he has been around since Hector was a pup, is seen as an eternal “townie” by his middle class brethren, and is a throwback to James Dean and Marlon Brando 1950s California cool. And those guys (I mean the characters they played in Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One not them as personalities, they were cool, no question) weren’t beat, no way. Beside John’s angst, important but kind of universal as it is, for some dewy-eyed female teeny-bopper to sit next to him in that old jalopy as he cruises those great California valley night highways is not the stuff of tragedy. Not in my book anyway, and I also had more than my share of that kind of teen angst.
No, what this film connects to, and connects to visually in the first instance, is that great big old search for that pink-blue American Western night that the “beats”, at least what I think the beats were searching for when they were doing their breakout from the post- World War II American crank-out death machine night. The shift from the Eastern American dark night westward (mainly, although some of beats were already vanguard- hovering around San Francisco waiting for the boys to come off the roads from the east and establish what was what) serves as a metaphor for much of what they were up to, if only to breakout, a little, from the nine-to-five, waiting for the bomb (atomic bomb) to drop world. That visual sense is most dramatically highlighted in the very first opening shots of this film where the pink-blue sky forms the backdrop to the activity starting up at California teen-hang-out (and elsewhere as well, even stuffy old Boston), fast food drive-in, Mel’s drive-in (A&W, Adventure Car-Hop, Dairy Queen, fill in your own named spot), central committee headquarters for valley California teen night. .
Wait, let me detail this a little more so there is no mistake. The film opens with the first few anxious California “boss” cars (you remember what that word means, right?), almost tear-provoking in this reviewer, because I rode in teen cars just like those, rolling into neon-sign lighted Mel’s(lights just turned on against the kitchen-backdrop dark night) just as the sun is going down. There is a big old sun-devouring red devil of a cloud flaming up in the background. That is NOT the part of the pink-blue night I am talking about. Below, just below, nearer the horizon is the one I am talking about, the symbol of the search, and the stuff of dreams, the great American blue-pink dream escape.
I can hear great yawns and see rolled eyes piercing through cyberspace as you say so what is the big deal about some foolish ephemeral passing cloud, blue-pink, pink-blue, or hell, blue-blue. Philistines! Go back now to Mel’s, or wherever the blue-pink sky announces the nights doings, the night’s promises or disappointments. Those promises or those disappointments, great or small, went to make up the birth of the search for the great American Western night, the night of our own circumscribed teen, kiddish break-outs, great or small.
Make no mistake it was not the morning, the morning of school or toil, paid or unpaid. It was not the lazy afternoon, the time of study or of the self-same toil, paid or unpaid (the unpaid kind thanked for or not, or to quote the universal parent god of the time done because “we keep a roof over your head”). It was the night, no the approach, the blue-pink approach of night that drove our maddened dreams, hopefully signaling good omens for the night’s work. The day was mere preclude to that tiny feverishly sought breakout (now a small thing seen, but not then). The telephoned arrangements, the groomed preparations, the gathering of the odd dollar here or there, in order to first cruise that teen empty highway and then on second pass the filling teen night.
Now do you see how the “beats”, those unnamed, unnamable, sub-consciously-embedded beats drove our bust-out dreams for travel, for adventure, for wine (later, dope), for women (or men) and for song, for shaking off the dust of the old town, great or small, as long as it moving elsewhere, and on a thumb pulled-out, hard-driven, shoe leather-beaten shod foot if need be.
American Graffiti is a snapshot of just exactly that minute, just that historic minute before the great shake-out of the 1960s for the baby-boomer generation, after that minute some of us went left politically and became social activists. We made just about every political, social, and cultural mistake along the way and lost, no, were defeated, no again, were mauled, in the end in our dreams of “seeking that newer world.” (And have spent the past forty or so years having to fight a rear-guard against the straightjacket, death machine-loving yahoos and their consorts). Ya, but hear me out. The search for the blue-pink Great American Western night was not one of those mistakes.
Ancient dreams, dreamed-Save The Last Dance For Me- Magical Realism 101
A tow-headed boy walks, endless forget waiting for erratic Eastern Mass. bus-stop non-stop walks, up named streets, Captain’s Walk (evoking New England Captain Ahab madnesses, a kindred spirit, and land-bound searches for the great blue-pink American west night drive the frenzy instead of holy death-seeking sea drifts, although that is unnamed just now), Snug Harbor Avenue (evoking, well, just evoking home, or the theory of home, or some happy black and white television version of home), and Sextant Circle (like such a useful nautical instrument could guide some lonely, lonesome boy out of the fetid bog-fed marshes and visions of pirates seeking booty, or death). On to Taffrail Road, ah, Taffrail Road evoking ship-wreaked damsels, young, waiting for swashbuckling sailor boys risen from local old tar graveyards to restore their honor, their freedom, or just to share their bed. That last is the rub and that is the heart of the matter along those endless non-stop streets where erratic buses serve as the only way out of those clinched fist streets. That tow-headed boy is enthralled, no better, enraged and engorged with his first stirring of interest in damsel time, thus the time of his time. Yes, clinch those fists very tightly and take the ride.
Unnamed streets abound too, up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year rutted pavement streets, deeply-gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles streets impassable in winter hard glare and summer sweated heat. A Street cutting off the flow to that old tar cemetery seeking exotic writ names deep-etched in granite slab washed now by birdsong, and dung, rather than damsel sweet smell perfumes. B Street the same, C Street the same, same like some alphabet conspiracy against the boyhood night, against the boyhood dream night when he dreams of manhood, or better feelings of manhood but is clueless, utterly clueless, about what those feelings portent, ominously portent. But what knows he of ominous, or portents for that matter. He confesses, and no church confession either but etched, gravestone old tar etched, no mortal, not even hangmen evil brothers or harassing cousins, boy or girl, should ever have to face the fifth-grade night rudderless, compass-less and with the mark of cain upon his neck.
After walking, endless walking through named and unnamed streets, he heads home, not the home of home but his dream home with her, her house home. After all who in hteri right mind could curse and rail against the fifth grade-night, and why, if not for budding portentous romance with some green tree-coded she. He dare not speak her name for fear of jinx, or unrequitedness. The year before, that innocent last fourth-grade year, they, the shes of his enflamed imagination, were all just sticks, hardly distinguishable from boys but except perhaps a little smaller, just sticks to be avoided, or ignored, but this year a few, and she among the few, suddenly got interesting and he was stuck, struck really, by that ironic fact, or would have been if he had known what ironic travails he would go through before the end.
But here, watch him from afar, as he crosses for the fifth, or fifteenth time, or fifteen hundredth time past trees are green, coded, coded fifty years coded, endless trees are green secret-coded waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now, for one look, one look, that would elude him, elude him forever such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. She some fair Rosamund and he a mere serf, and they knew it, or he knew it although it did not stop him from wanting, or waiting for that one glance, and that dancing blue-eyed smile.
The dance of all damn things, the upcoming one-size-fits-all school dance, parent-approved, headmaster-approved, hell, bishop-approved when you came right down to it, and, hell, blessed too from what he had heard, maybe jesus, blessed, is what has him in a mental whirl. Such tow-headed fifth-grade boy whirls made an existence, a walked streets existence, possible just as well as reds under every bed scare, russkie atomic-bomb-dropping, get out of the stinking projects and get a new shirt at all costs that disturbed his other nights. But, christ, a two bit dance, some later laughable Podunk gym fiesta, crepe-hanging, some surly drafted, imprisoned teacher to “spin platters” from some RCA music box, and her with the dancing blue-eyes and rounding shape. Yes, that thing drove him crazy, or the possibility of it in the fragrant perfume-soap, some girlish bath soap for all he knew or heard from girl cousins, american bandstand night,
And dreams of private dances in dark shadow corners while that silly hung crepe begins to droop above their spot and he first, and then she, laughs about how some fourth-grader must have hung it, their private laugh. And dance too, no Fred Astaire waltz old-time fox trot (except maybe that slow one at the end of the night although that was mere planned dream echo in walked streets), but full-blossomed be-bop wild hands and ass gyrating to some Elvis good night rocking or Chuck driving some car over the cliff for love, or something, something unspoken, or ask the older kids who know, know through their well-tuned grapevine, what “it” is. If they will tell you.
All a dream, a street-walked dream until, and when, really when he got up the nerve, the endless streets walking nerve, to ask her. But no dance floor numbness would slake that footsore walking thirst not then, and no high school confidential dance either (hell elementary school was tough enough, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out blaring off some truck-bed bandstand. Too improbable for words. So Rosamund fate, young damsel sighted off the sea-side taffrail slid by, and with time the footsoreness turned into dust, or some other psychic pain whirl. But here and now when it counted, at least, no all the rage potato sack stick-turning-into-shape dance with coded name, trees are green, brunette. That will come, that will come. But when?
Unnamed streets abound too, up crooked cheap, low-rent, fifty-year rutted pavement streets, deeply-gouged, one-lane snow-drift hassles streets impassable in winter hard glare and summer sweated heat. A Street cutting off the flow to that old tar cemetery seeking exotic writ names deep-etched in granite slab washed now by birdsong, and dung, rather than damsel sweet smell perfumes. B Street the same, C Street the same, same like some alphabet conspiracy against the boyhood night, against the boyhood dream night when he dreams of manhood, or better feelings of manhood but is clueless, utterly clueless, about what those feelings portent, ominously portent. But what knows he of ominous, or portents for that matter. He confesses, and no church confession either but etched, gravestone old tar etched, no mortal, not even hangmen evil brothers or harassing cousins, boy or girl, should ever have to face the fifth-grade night rudderless, compass-less and with the mark of cain upon his neck.
After walking, endless walking through named and unnamed streets, he heads home, not the home of home but his dream home with her, her house home. After all who in hteri right mind could curse and rail against the fifth grade-night, and why, if not for budding portentous romance with some green tree-coded she. He dare not speak her name for fear of jinx, or unrequitedness. The year before, that innocent last fourth-grade year, they, the shes of his enflamed imagination, were all just sticks, hardly distinguishable from boys but except perhaps a little smaller, just sticks to be avoided, or ignored, but this year a few, and she among the few, suddenly got interesting and he was stuck, struck really, by that ironic fact, or would have been if he had known what ironic travails he would go through before the end.
But here, watch him from afar, as he crosses for the fifth, or fifteenth time, or fifteen hundredth time past trees are green, coded, coded fifty years coded, endless trees are green secret-coded waiting, waiting against boyish infinite time, infinite first blush of innocent manhood, boyhood times, gone now, for one look, one look, that would elude him, elude him forever such is life in lowly spots, lowly, lowly spots. She some fair Rosamund and he a mere serf, and they knew it, or he knew it although it did not stop him from wanting, or waiting for that one glance, and that dancing blue-eyed smile.
The dance of all damn things, the upcoming one-size-fits-all school dance, parent-approved, headmaster-approved, hell, bishop-approved when you came right down to it, and, hell, blessed too from what he had heard, maybe jesus, blessed, is what has him in a mental whirl. Such tow-headed fifth-grade boy whirls made an existence, a walked streets existence, possible just as well as reds under every bed scare, russkie atomic-bomb-dropping, get out of the stinking projects and get a new shirt at all costs that disturbed his other nights. But, christ, a two bit dance, some later laughable Podunk gym fiesta, crepe-hanging, some surly drafted, imprisoned teacher to “spin platters” from some RCA music box, and her with the dancing blue-eyes and rounding shape. Yes, that thing drove him crazy, or the possibility of it in the fragrant perfume-soap, some girlish bath soap for all he knew or heard from girl cousins, american bandstand night,
And dreams of private dances in dark shadow corners while that silly hung crepe begins to droop above their spot and he first, and then she, laughs about how some fourth-grader must have hung it, their private laugh. And dance too, no Fred Astaire waltz old-time fox trot (except maybe that slow one at the end of the night although that was mere planned dream echo in walked streets), but full-blossomed be-bop wild hands and ass gyrating to some Elvis good night rocking or Chuck driving some car over the cliff for love, or something, something unspoken, or ask the older kids who know, know through their well-tuned grapevine, what “it” is. If they will tell you.
All a dream, a street-walked dream until, and when, really when he got up the nerve, the endless streets walking nerve, to ask her. But no dance floor numbness would slake that footsore walking thirst not then, and no high school confidential dance either (hell elementary school was tough enough, man), handy man, breathless, Jerry Lee freak-out blaring off some truck-bed bandstand. Too improbable for words. So Rosamund fate, young damsel sighted off the sea-side taffrail slid by, and with time the footsoreness turned into dust, or some other psychic pain whirl. But here and now when it counted, at least, no all the rage potato sack stick-turning-into-shape dance with coded name, trees are green, brunette. That will come, that will come. But when?
From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Francis King and George Matthews (eds.), About Turn: The British Communist Party and the Second World War
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*****************
Reviews
Francis King and George Matthews (eds.), About Turn: The British Communist Party and the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings of 25 September and 2-3 October 1939, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1990, pp.318, £34.95
In the last year or two of his life Trotsky had several metaphors for the Communist International of Stalin and Dimitrov. He called it a corpse; but the Kremlin was to require this corpse to display a few more twitches of life before finally ordering its dissolution in 1943. Trotsky also called it a cesspit – a dunghill, to use the most direct English rendering. With this cloacal image Trotsky conveyed his profound disgust at the terminal degeneration of the body he had helped to found in 1919, at its ‘doglike servility’, at its transformation into a docile instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, which in the autumn of 1939 sold it to Hitler “along with oil and manganese”. [1] This book shows in detail – word for word – what went on in the leadership of one section of that dunghill in belated response to the German-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the Second World War.
On 2 September 1939, the day before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain issued a manifesto urging a “struggle on two fronts”: for a “military victory over Fascism” and for the removal of the Chamberlain government. [2] General Secretary Harry Pollitt was set to work to write a pamphlet, How to Win the War, which came out on 14 September and was hailed by Rajani Palme Dutt, before he knew better and before the pamphlet was withdrawn, as “being one of the finest things that [Pollitt] had produced, so clearly and simply presented”. It was William Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, who revealed this statement of Dutt’s to the CC, no doubt to Dutt’s embarrassment; and it is not the least juicy plum in this 50-year-old pudding of a book.
But on 14 September something else happened: the Daily Worker received a press telegram from the Soviet Union saying it was a robber war on both sides. Pollitt suppressed this telegram because it was against the line of the 2 September manifesto. However, at the next day’s meeting of the party’s Political Bureau, Dutt, ever responsive to his master’s voice, said the line would have to be revised. Indeed, Stalin had already given orders to that effect, in a private chat with Dimitrov on 7 September; Dimitrov had handed the word down to the Comintern Secretariat, which had approved his theses on 9 September, instructing the Communist Parties of France, Britain, Belgium and the USA in particular that they must immediately correct their political line. Monty Johnstone points out in his Introduction to About Turn that neither the Executive Committee of the Comintern (which had not held a plenary meeting for four years) nor its Presidium (of which Pollitt was a full and Gallacher a candidate member) was in any way involved in this policy switch. Dimitrov had then briefed D.F. Springhall, the CPGB’s representative at Comintern headquarters. Springhall got back from Moscow on the evening of 24 September with the theses in his head; they were to follow him in a more tangible form soon afterwards.
Waiting for Springhall must have been a trying time for the leading British Stalinists. But the week that followed his brief report must have been agonising. The CC stood adjourned for a week, and in the meantime the Daily Worker’s line on the war was totally unclear. It published material so fence-sitting and so confused that much damage was done to the party’s credibility, even amongst its own members. This resulted from sharp differences between the three-man secretariat (Dutt, Springhall and William Rust) to whom Pollitt had voluntarily relinquished his responsibilities as General Secretary, and the rest of the Political Bureau (Pollitt, Gallacher, J.R. Campbell, Emile Burns and Ted Bramley).
When the CC resumed on 2 October, Dutt complained bitterly of this “complete incoherence worse either than the old line or the new”, told his comrades that “the duty of a Communist is not to disagree but to accept”, and, in a thinly veiled reference to Pollitt, warned that anyone who deserted now would be branded for his political life. Gallacher complained of the “rotten”, “dirty”, “unscrupulous”, and “opportunist” factional methods used by Dutt and his supporters, those “three ruthless revolutionaries”. They had shown “mean despicable disloyalty” and it was impossible for him to work with them. Campbell, ardent defender of the Moscow Trials and pitiless scourge of Trotskyism, said the CPGB would soon be indistinguishable from “the filthy rabble of Trotskyists”. The shipbuilding worker Finlay Hart objected to Dutt’s telling them to “accept or else”. Maurice Cornforth, philosopher-to-be, said he agreed with something he had once heard Pollitt say: the Soviet Union could do no wrong. “This is what we have to stick to”, he observed, adding that the new line didn’t mean cooperation with the Trotskyists, whose line, he was certain, would be “based on anti-Soviet slanders”. Rust said Gallacher saw himself as a kind of elder statesman who attended meetings when he felt like it, while Campbell was presenting British imperialism as a man-eating tiger turned vegetarian. Burns said Dutt’s opening statement had been “peculiarly low and dastardly”. Dutt and his supporters had used “the most vile factional methods”; they wanted as many as possible to vote against the theses so that the could be “represented as the real nucleus of the Comintern to carry the line forward in the British party”. They were attempting to clear themselves with Moscow by explaining how pure they were. Springhall said no comrade who had a conversation with Comrade Dimitrov could fail to learn something from him, and accused Campbell of thinking that the Soviet Union was only concerned to save its own skin.
Harry Pollitt showed himself as reluctant as Campbell to depart from the Popular Front line of the Comintern’s 1935 Seventh Congress. In politics, he said, there was neither friendship nor loyalty. He told Dutt: “You won’t intimidate me ... I was in this movement practically before you were born.” He had never heard a report so bankrupt and devoid of explanation as Springhall’s. Springhall had had no responsibility for drafting the theses: he was just a messenger boy (“what Strang was for Chamberlain”). “I was never an office boy”, said Pollitt. “If there is one thing that is clear it is that the fight against Fascism has disappeared and Fascism has now, because of its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, taken on a progressive role.” Soviet policy had antagonised important sections of the working class movement. The new line was in essence a betrayal of the labour movement’s struggle against Fascism – a word, he added bitterly, it was becoming unfashionable to mention. He himself wanted to “smash the Fascist bastards once and for all”.
So much for the first day of the resumed meeting. Little that was new was added on the second, final, day. John Gollan, Ted Bramley, Idris Cox and Peter Kerrigan expressed support for the new line, though Bramley wanted to know why there had been so little consultation by the Comintern (a point later re-emphasised by Gallacher); and Kerrigan (“I have always justified the Soviet Union in every action that the Soviet Union has taken”) said he had been flabbergasted when the Red Army marched into Poland. “If ... Comrade Pollitt is not convinced of the correctness of the line we will have to consider arranging for him to have a talk in Moscow”, suggested Cox, in words that still have a rather sinister ring 51 years later. Jimmy Shields, long a party functionary, said that “when the Soviet Union makes a move we should support it, whether it [such support] is considered to be mechanical or not”. The railway worker William Cowe said the Comintern was his “guiding light”. When the vote was taken, only Pollitt, Campbell and Gallacher voted against the new line – though Pollitt later asked, successfully, that Gallacher’s vote be recorded as being in favour.
Here is our closest, most intimate picture of the Stalinist method as it was used in Britain by these fearless fighters for Socialism, these battle-hardened cadres, these veterans of the Lenin School, these tenth-rate bureaucrats whom we watch here jockeying for the privilege of being recognised as Stalin’s trusted lieutenants in Britain. The picture I was given, when I joined the Young Communist League in 1942, and for the next 14 years, was of a party that had always been truly monolithic, where deep friendship and mutual loyalty had always prevailed. Pollitt and Dutt, we were given to understand, went together like Sohrab and Rustam, or port and nuts. The picture that emerges from this book is totally different, and helps to explain why Pollitt would never enter the Daily Worker building so long as Rust was its editor. (Perhaps it also helps to explain why Dutt left his private papers not to the CPGB, as one would have expected, but to the British Library.)
What also emerges, to an extraordinary degree, is the degree of criticism of, and even hostility to, the Soviet Union and the Comintern expressed in unguarded moments by people who, in public and for their own good reasons, were prepared to swallow those doubts and even forget later that they had ever entertained them. Dutt reports and reprobates this, in a striking passage where he speaks of “anti-International tendencies, a contemptuous attitude to the International, the kind of thing that began already from the time of the [Moscow] trials, talk of collapse of the International, talk of the Soviet Union following its interests”. These were “a reflection of enemy outlooks”. Even Rust, according to Gallacher, had complained that the CPGB was becoming the “propaganda department of the Soviet foreign office”.
And here surely is the key to the whole debate. For the British propaganda department of Stalin’s Foreign Office is precisely what they had by now become, after 15 years’ Stalinisation of their party. As T.A. Jackson had so presciently warned in 1924: “Our job is only to carry out all instructions at the double, and to stand to attention until the next order comes.” [3] The depth of the CPGB leaders’ uneasiness about their rôle, here revealed so poignantly and at the same time so farcically, shows Trotsky’s wisdom in advising his supporters, in the following June, to devote more attention to the rank and file of the Communist parties: “On the day that Moscow makes a half turn towards the democracies as a half friend, there will be a new explosion in the ranks of the CP. We must be ready to gain from it. I consider the possibilities in the CP very good despite the transitory radicalness of the CP, which cannot be for long.” [4]
Trotsky, not for the first time, was here over-optimistic about the immediate possibilities; but about Stalinism’s inherent volatility and instability he was absolutely right in the long term. The era of ‘explosions– is of course long over; Stalinism and its organisations are now decomposing before our eyes. Those who seek to profit politically from this process urgently need to learn a lot more about Stalinism’s past. This book makes a useful starting-points. [5]
Peter Fryer
Notes
1. Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p.210.
2. The full text of this manifesto appears in 1939: The Communist Party of Great Britain and the War, ed. John Attfield and Stephen Williams, Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp.147-52.
3. Communist Review, Volume IV (1923-24), p.539.
4. Discussions with Trotsky: 12-15 June 1940, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, p.254. Trotsky was of course referring to the CPUSA, but his advice no doubt had more general application in the 1939-41 period.
5. Unfortunately the editing of this book is far from flawless. There are many fairly obvious mishearings or errors of transcription. The word ‘not’ should clearly come before the words ‘playing its part’ in line 19 on p.68; the word ‘decision’ in the bottom line of p.85 should, I imagine, be ‘discipline’; ‘work’ in line 8 of p.148 should undoubtedly be ‘war’; ‘Dutt’ in line 18 of p.150 seems to be an error for some other name; ‘loosen’ in line 34 of p.148 should perhaps be ‘lessen’; the word ‘Springhall’ should appear in bold type at the beginning of line 3 of p.188; ‘principal questions’ in line 27 of p.188 should probably be ‘principled questions’; ‘clearly’ in line 4 of p.202 should certainly be ‘clearer’; ‘Cox’ in line 6 of p.250 should plainly be ‘Kerrigan’; ‘don’t’ in line 19 of p.266 should surely have been deleted; lines 16-21 on p.292 seem to have strayed in from later in that section. There are similar errors elsewhere, not to mention a number of misprints. Nor are the Biographical Notes wholly reliable: eg Jim Roche ceased to be a CPGB full-timer in 1956, not 1957. To cap it all, the indexes are a disgrace: these lazily compiled and forbidding strings of page numbers virtually unrelieved by sub-headings are of little use to the serious student. For Lawrence and Wishart to charge £34.95 for such a shoddily edited book surpasses mere effrontery.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*****************
Reviews
Francis King and George Matthews (eds.), About Turn: The British Communist Party and the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings of 25 September and 2-3 October 1939, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1990, pp.318, £34.95
In the last year or two of his life Trotsky had several metaphors for the Communist International of Stalin and Dimitrov. He called it a corpse; but the Kremlin was to require this corpse to display a few more twitches of life before finally ordering its dissolution in 1943. Trotsky also called it a cesspit – a dunghill, to use the most direct English rendering. With this cloacal image Trotsky conveyed his profound disgust at the terminal degeneration of the body he had helped to found in 1919, at its ‘doglike servility’, at its transformation into a docile instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, which in the autumn of 1939 sold it to Hitler “along with oil and manganese”. [1] This book shows in detail – word for word – what went on in the leadership of one section of that dunghill in belated response to the German-Soviet pact and the outbreak of the Second World War.
On 2 September 1939, the day before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain issued a manifesto urging a “struggle on two fronts”: for a “military victory over Fascism” and for the removal of the Chamberlain government. [2] General Secretary Harry Pollitt was set to work to write a pamphlet, How to Win the War, which came out on 14 September and was hailed by Rajani Palme Dutt, before he knew better and before the pamphlet was withdrawn, as “being one of the finest things that [Pollitt] had produced, so clearly and simply presented”. It was William Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, who revealed this statement of Dutt’s to the CC, no doubt to Dutt’s embarrassment; and it is not the least juicy plum in this 50-year-old pudding of a book.
But on 14 September something else happened: the Daily Worker received a press telegram from the Soviet Union saying it was a robber war on both sides. Pollitt suppressed this telegram because it was against the line of the 2 September manifesto. However, at the next day’s meeting of the party’s Political Bureau, Dutt, ever responsive to his master’s voice, said the line would have to be revised. Indeed, Stalin had already given orders to that effect, in a private chat with Dimitrov on 7 September; Dimitrov had handed the word down to the Comintern Secretariat, which had approved his theses on 9 September, instructing the Communist Parties of France, Britain, Belgium and the USA in particular that they must immediately correct their political line. Monty Johnstone points out in his Introduction to About Turn that neither the Executive Committee of the Comintern (which had not held a plenary meeting for four years) nor its Presidium (of which Pollitt was a full and Gallacher a candidate member) was in any way involved in this policy switch. Dimitrov had then briefed D.F. Springhall, the CPGB’s representative at Comintern headquarters. Springhall got back from Moscow on the evening of 24 September with the theses in his head; they were to follow him in a more tangible form soon afterwards.
Waiting for Springhall must have been a trying time for the leading British Stalinists. But the week that followed his brief report must have been agonising. The CC stood adjourned for a week, and in the meantime the Daily Worker’s line on the war was totally unclear. It published material so fence-sitting and so confused that much damage was done to the party’s credibility, even amongst its own members. This resulted from sharp differences between the three-man secretariat (Dutt, Springhall and William Rust) to whom Pollitt had voluntarily relinquished his responsibilities as General Secretary, and the rest of the Political Bureau (Pollitt, Gallacher, J.R. Campbell, Emile Burns and Ted Bramley).
When the CC resumed on 2 October, Dutt complained bitterly of this “complete incoherence worse either than the old line or the new”, told his comrades that “the duty of a Communist is not to disagree but to accept”, and, in a thinly veiled reference to Pollitt, warned that anyone who deserted now would be branded for his political life. Gallacher complained of the “rotten”, “dirty”, “unscrupulous”, and “opportunist” factional methods used by Dutt and his supporters, those “three ruthless revolutionaries”. They had shown “mean despicable disloyalty” and it was impossible for him to work with them. Campbell, ardent defender of the Moscow Trials and pitiless scourge of Trotskyism, said the CPGB would soon be indistinguishable from “the filthy rabble of Trotskyists”. The shipbuilding worker Finlay Hart objected to Dutt’s telling them to “accept or else”. Maurice Cornforth, philosopher-to-be, said he agreed with something he had once heard Pollitt say: the Soviet Union could do no wrong. “This is what we have to stick to”, he observed, adding that the new line didn’t mean cooperation with the Trotskyists, whose line, he was certain, would be “based on anti-Soviet slanders”. Rust said Gallacher saw himself as a kind of elder statesman who attended meetings when he felt like it, while Campbell was presenting British imperialism as a man-eating tiger turned vegetarian. Burns said Dutt’s opening statement had been “peculiarly low and dastardly”. Dutt and his supporters had used “the most vile factional methods”; they wanted as many as possible to vote against the theses so that the could be “represented as the real nucleus of the Comintern to carry the line forward in the British party”. They were attempting to clear themselves with Moscow by explaining how pure they were. Springhall said no comrade who had a conversation with Comrade Dimitrov could fail to learn something from him, and accused Campbell of thinking that the Soviet Union was only concerned to save its own skin.
Harry Pollitt showed himself as reluctant as Campbell to depart from the Popular Front line of the Comintern’s 1935 Seventh Congress. In politics, he said, there was neither friendship nor loyalty. He told Dutt: “You won’t intimidate me ... I was in this movement practically before you were born.” He had never heard a report so bankrupt and devoid of explanation as Springhall’s. Springhall had had no responsibility for drafting the theses: he was just a messenger boy (“what Strang was for Chamberlain”). “I was never an office boy”, said Pollitt. “If there is one thing that is clear it is that the fight against Fascism has disappeared and Fascism has now, because of its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, taken on a progressive role.” Soviet policy had antagonised important sections of the working class movement. The new line was in essence a betrayal of the labour movement’s struggle against Fascism – a word, he added bitterly, it was becoming unfashionable to mention. He himself wanted to “smash the Fascist bastards once and for all”.
So much for the first day of the resumed meeting. Little that was new was added on the second, final, day. John Gollan, Ted Bramley, Idris Cox and Peter Kerrigan expressed support for the new line, though Bramley wanted to know why there had been so little consultation by the Comintern (a point later re-emphasised by Gallacher); and Kerrigan (“I have always justified the Soviet Union in every action that the Soviet Union has taken”) said he had been flabbergasted when the Red Army marched into Poland. “If ... Comrade Pollitt is not convinced of the correctness of the line we will have to consider arranging for him to have a talk in Moscow”, suggested Cox, in words that still have a rather sinister ring 51 years later. Jimmy Shields, long a party functionary, said that “when the Soviet Union makes a move we should support it, whether it [such support] is considered to be mechanical or not”. The railway worker William Cowe said the Comintern was his “guiding light”. When the vote was taken, only Pollitt, Campbell and Gallacher voted against the new line – though Pollitt later asked, successfully, that Gallacher’s vote be recorded as being in favour.
Here is our closest, most intimate picture of the Stalinist method as it was used in Britain by these fearless fighters for Socialism, these battle-hardened cadres, these veterans of the Lenin School, these tenth-rate bureaucrats whom we watch here jockeying for the privilege of being recognised as Stalin’s trusted lieutenants in Britain. The picture I was given, when I joined the Young Communist League in 1942, and for the next 14 years, was of a party that had always been truly monolithic, where deep friendship and mutual loyalty had always prevailed. Pollitt and Dutt, we were given to understand, went together like Sohrab and Rustam, or port and nuts. The picture that emerges from this book is totally different, and helps to explain why Pollitt would never enter the Daily Worker building so long as Rust was its editor. (Perhaps it also helps to explain why Dutt left his private papers not to the CPGB, as one would have expected, but to the British Library.)
What also emerges, to an extraordinary degree, is the degree of criticism of, and even hostility to, the Soviet Union and the Comintern expressed in unguarded moments by people who, in public and for their own good reasons, were prepared to swallow those doubts and even forget later that they had ever entertained them. Dutt reports and reprobates this, in a striking passage where he speaks of “anti-International tendencies, a contemptuous attitude to the International, the kind of thing that began already from the time of the [Moscow] trials, talk of collapse of the International, talk of the Soviet Union following its interests”. These were “a reflection of enemy outlooks”. Even Rust, according to Gallacher, had complained that the CPGB was becoming the “propaganda department of the Soviet foreign office”.
And here surely is the key to the whole debate. For the British propaganda department of Stalin’s Foreign Office is precisely what they had by now become, after 15 years’ Stalinisation of their party. As T.A. Jackson had so presciently warned in 1924: “Our job is only to carry out all instructions at the double, and to stand to attention until the next order comes.” [3] The depth of the CPGB leaders’ uneasiness about their rôle, here revealed so poignantly and at the same time so farcically, shows Trotsky’s wisdom in advising his supporters, in the following June, to devote more attention to the rank and file of the Communist parties: “On the day that Moscow makes a half turn towards the democracies as a half friend, there will be a new explosion in the ranks of the CP. We must be ready to gain from it. I consider the possibilities in the CP very good despite the transitory radicalness of the CP, which cannot be for long.” [4]
Trotsky, not for the first time, was here over-optimistic about the immediate possibilities; but about Stalinism’s inherent volatility and instability he was absolutely right in the long term. The era of ‘explosions– is of course long over; Stalinism and its organisations are now decomposing before our eyes. Those who seek to profit politically from this process urgently need to learn a lot more about Stalinism’s past. This book makes a useful starting-points. [5]
Peter Fryer
Notes
1. Manifesto of the Fourth International on the Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p.210.
2. The full text of this manifesto appears in 1939: The Communist Party of Great Britain and the War, ed. John Attfield and Stephen Williams, Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, pp.147-52.
3. Communist Review, Volume IV (1923-24), p.539.
4. Discussions with Trotsky: 12-15 June 1940, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, p.254. Trotsky was of course referring to the CPUSA, but his advice no doubt had more general application in the 1939-41 period.
5. Unfortunately the editing of this book is far from flawless. There are many fairly obvious mishearings or errors of transcription. The word ‘not’ should clearly come before the words ‘playing its part’ in line 19 on p.68; the word ‘decision’ in the bottom line of p.85 should, I imagine, be ‘discipline’; ‘work’ in line 8 of p.148 should undoubtedly be ‘war’; ‘Dutt’ in line 18 of p.150 seems to be an error for some other name; ‘loosen’ in line 34 of p.148 should perhaps be ‘lessen’; the word ‘Springhall’ should appear in bold type at the beginning of line 3 of p.188; ‘principal questions’ in line 27 of p.188 should probably be ‘principled questions’; ‘clearly’ in line 4 of p.202 should certainly be ‘clearer’; ‘Cox’ in line 6 of p.250 should plainly be ‘Kerrigan’; ‘don’t’ in line 19 of p.266 should surely have been deleted; lines 16-21 on p.292 seem to have strayed in from later in that section. There are similar errors elsewhere, not to mention a number of misprints. Nor are the Biographical Notes wholly reliable: eg Jim Roche ceased to be a CPGB full-timer in 1956, not 1957. To cap it all, the indexes are a disgrace: these lazily compiled and forbidding strings of page numbers virtually unrelieved by sub-headings are of little use to the serious student. For Lawrence and Wishart to charge £34.95 for such a shoddily edited book surpasses mere effrontery.
Sunday, April 08, 2012
In The 1970s Steamy Noir Night- Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown”
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown
DVD Review
Chinatown, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, directed by Roman Polanski, Paramount Pictures, 1974
Without a doubt director Roman Polanski’s take on greed, crime and corruption in high and low places in 1930’s Los Angeles is a modern landmark in the detective genre. Evoking all the attributes of the classic film noir detectives Jack Nicholson as J.J. Gettes is that old favorite- a tough guy who doesn’t mind taking a beating for the good of the cause, is resourceful, loyal and resolute and also has a little spare time for the ladies (of course without strings, if possible). Fay Dunaway as the conniving, justly father-conflicted femme fatale carrying a big family secret is a good match up for Nicholson’s tough guy detective. Unlike some plot lines this one, written by Robert Townes, keeps a tight leash on the line and does not get tricky with subplots and twists. That makes it is the stronger for this one may be all about the water problems in up and coming Los Angeles but is also about overweening greed and ambition-that says it all.
DVD Review
Chinatown, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, directed by Roman Polanski, Paramount Pictures, 1974
Without a doubt director Roman Polanski’s take on greed, crime and corruption in high and low places in 1930’s Los Angeles is a modern landmark in the detective genre. Evoking all the attributes of the classic film noir detectives Jack Nicholson as J.J. Gettes is that old favorite- a tough guy who doesn’t mind taking a beating for the good of the cause, is resourceful, loyal and resolute and also has a little spare time for the ladies (of course without strings, if possible). Fay Dunaway as the conniving, justly father-conflicted femme fatale carrying a big family secret is a good match up for Nicholson’s tough guy detective. Unlike some plot lines this one, written by Robert Townes, keeps a tight leash on the line and does not get tricky with subplots and twists. That makes it is the stronger for this one may be all about the water problems in up and coming Los Angeles but is also about overweening greed and ambition-that says it all.
***Where The Communist Fellow-Traveler Meets The Existentialist Fellow-Traveler- The Early Career of French Novelist Andre Malraux- Some Essays
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for French novelist Andre Malraux
Book Review
Malraux: A Collection Of Critical Essays, edited by R.W.B Lewis, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1964
No question that the early novels of Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate and The Conquerors about the motivations, hopes and understanding developed by the second Chinese Revolution in the 1920s and Man’s Hope about the seemingly absurd nature of the hard-bitten struggle against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s caught my imagination in my early years as a communist. Written when Malraux was enthralled by the heroic days of the communist movement in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and of its leaders at first the huge heroic figure of Leon Trotsky and then the arch symbol of power Stalin he had the pulse of the struggle in hand. If not, in the end, of the plebeian aspects of the struggle then the travails of the lonely intellectual as he (or she but for Malraux almost exclusively he) tries to come to grips with the modern age and its challenges. Later Malraux just as easily changed hats and explored the lonely pursuits of the intellectual as bureaucrat as he took his place as official cultural mouthpiece for French imperialism under Charles DeGaulle.
Those two poles of attraction pretty well sum up the examination of Malraux life as various literary critics, including Leon Trotsky wearing his literary hat on this one, and others try to get some measure of the man. His influence on communist literary theory was minimal as one would expect of a fellow-traveler in an age of “proletarian culture” and “socialist realism” although his attempts to bring the heroic individual element into play as a factor in mass struggles is a subject well worth exploring for those interested in social struggle down at the bottom of society. There is always a sense though that Malraux stood outside the struggle and viewed himself as a mere spectator even then as Trotsky captures in his essay (book review) on The Conquerors.
Malraux fares better, if not literarily then philosophically, when he later breaks with communism or his idealized Stalin-influenced version of it under the impact of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (he was hardly the first or last to break over that one) and explores humankind’s futile modern sense of loneliness and estrangement as he flirts with existentialism. This was done in a series of lesser novels around World War II and essays on art and art history although the work and the essays on them here are the weakest parts of the collection. Probably the best overall essay is the last one by Gaetan Picon, Malraux on Malraux, where the essayist understands that whatever else Malraux has always been concerned about the role of the intellectual, his passions, his hurts and his “place in the sun” in modern society. That more than anything explains why Malraux was able to so adroitly move from one captain to another as his life drifted along. Read Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope, and The Conquerors and then read these critical essays about an important author from the first half of the 20th century.
Book Review
Malraux: A Collection Of Critical Essays, edited by R.W.B Lewis, Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1964
No question that the early novels of Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate and The Conquerors about the motivations, hopes and understanding developed by the second Chinese Revolution in the 1920s and Man’s Hope about the seemingly absurd nature of the hard-bitten struggle against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s caught my imagination in my early years as a communist. Written when Malraux was enthralled by the heroic days of the communist movement in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and of its leaders at first the huge heroic figure of Leon Trotsky and then the arch symbol of power Stalin he had the pulse of the struggle in hand. If not, in the end, of the plebeian aspects of the struggle then the travails of the lonely intellectual as he (or she but for Malraux almost exclusively he) tries to come to grips with the modern age and its challenges. Later Malraux just as easily changed hats and explored the lonely pursuits of the intellectual as bureaucrat as he took his place as official cultural mouthpiece for French imperialism under Charles DeGaulle.
Those two poles of attraction pretty well sum up the examination of Malraux life as various literary critics, including Leon Trotsky wearing his literary hat on this one, and others try to get some measure of the man. His influence on communist literary theory was minimal as one would expect of a fellow-traveler in an age of “proletarian culture” and “socialist realism” although his attempts to bring the heroic individual element into play as a factor in mass struggles is a subject well worth exploring for those interested in social struggle down at the bottom of society. There is always a sense though that Malraux stood outside the struggle and viewed himself as a mere spectator even then as Trotsky captures in his essay (book review) on The Conquerors.
Malraux fares better, if not literarily then philosophically, when he later breaks with communism or his idealized Stalin-influenced version of it under the impact of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (he was hardly the first or last to break over that one) and explores humankind’s futile modern sense of loneliness and estrangement as he flirts with existentialism. This was done in a series of lesser novels around World War II and essays on art and art history although the work and the essays on them here are the weakest parts of the collection. Probably the best overall essay is the last one by Gaetan Picon, Malraux on Malraux, where the essayist understands that whatever else Malraux has always been concerned about the role of the intellectual, his passions, his hurts and his “place in the sun” in modern society. That more than anything explains why Malraux was able to so adroitly move from one captain to another as his life drifted along. Read Man’s Fate, Man’s Hope, and The Conquerors and then read these critical essays about an important author from the first half of the 20th century.
Stand with Bradley Manning during his April 24-26 hearing
Stand with Bradley Manning during his April 24-26 hearing
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
Events in the Washington DC area and internationally in support of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning’s next appearance in court will take place April 24-26 at Ft. Meade, MD. At the previous hearing on March 15th, Bradley’s lawyer filed a motion to dismiss all charges based on the government’s failure to present evidence as requested. Additionally, a broad coalition of media groups filed a complaint because documents from the court proceedings have been mostly shielded from the public’s view.
We are calling for conscientious citizens everywhere to organize in support of Bradley Manning during his next hearing. Drop all charges against Bradley Manning–punish the war criminals, not the whistle-blowers! Join us in the Washington DC area if you can. Otherwise, host or attend a solidarity event in your community. Ideas for local events include: town square vigils, community forums, concerts, and house party fund-raisers.
Please register your event here. Also check out our online resources.
Planned events:
Tuesday, April 24 – 11am – 2pm -Occupy the Department of Justice (Washington DC)
Join the “Free Bradley Manning” contingent at Occupy the Justice Department The DoJ is a leading collaborating agency involved in the prosecution of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower US Army PFC Bradley Manning. 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC – at the Department of Justice
* “Free Bradley Manning and all political prisoners”
* “End solitary confinement and stop torture”
Wednesday, April 25 – 8am – Stand with Bradley inside and outside the courtroom (Fort Meade MD)
Join the all-day vigil for Bradley Manning at the Fort Mead Main Gate, 8am-5pm (Maryland 175& Reece Rd, Fort Meade, MD 21113). We’ll be holding signs and banners throughout the day. Supporters are also encouraged to attend the courtroom proceedings for all or part of the day. We are currently investigating chartering a bus that would leave from Washington D.C.
Supporters are encouraged to attend Bradley Manning’s court martial motion hearing at Fort Meade on Tuesday, April 24. This hearing is scheduled for April 24-26, beginning at 9am daily. To attend, go to the Fort Meade Visitor Control Center at the Fort Meade Main Gate (Maryland 175 & Reece Rd, Fort Meade, MD 21113). We suggest arriving when the visitor center opens at 7:30am (if you arrive late, you should still be able to get into the courtroom later in the morning).
Supporters are also encouraged to attend the courtroom proceedings for all or part of the day on Thursday, April 26.
For more information about organizing an event in your community April 24-26, please contact emma@bradleymanning.org for ideas and resources.
http://www.bradleymanning.org/
Events in the Washington DC area and internationally in support of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning’s next appearance in court will take place April 24-26 at Ft. Meade, MD. At the previous hearing on March 15th, Bradley’s lawyer filed a motion to dismiss all charges based on the government’s failure to present evidence as requested. Additionally, a broad coalition of media groups filed a complaint because documents from the court proceedings have been mostly shielded from the public’s view.
We are calling for conscientious citizens everywhere to organize in support of Bradley Manning during his next hearing. Drop all charges against Bradley Manning–punish the war criminals, not the whistle-blowers! Join us in the Washington DC area if you can. Otherwise, host or attend a solidarity event in your community. Ideas for local events include: town square vigils, community forums, concerts, and house party fund-raisers.
Please register your event here. Also check out our online resources.
Planned events:
Tuesday, April 24 – 11am – 2pm -Occupy the Department of Justice (Washington DC)
Join the “Free Bradley Manning” contingent at Occupy the Justice Department The DoJ is a leading collaborating agency involved in the prosecution of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower US Army PFC Bradley Manning. 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC – at the Department of Justice
* “Free Bradley Manning and all political prisoners”
* “End solitary confinement and stop torture”
Wednesday, April 25 – 8am – Stand with Bradley inside and outside the courtroom (Fort Meade MD)
Join the all-day vigil for Bradley Manning at the Fort Mead Main Gate, 8am-5pm (Maryland 175& Reece Rd, Fort Meade, MD 21113). We’ll be holding signs and banners throughout the day. Supporters are also encouraged to attend the courtroom proceedings for all or part of the day. We are currently investigating chartering a bus that would leave from Washington D.C.
Supporters are encouraged to attend Bradley Manning’s court martial motion hearing at Fort Meade on Tuesday, April 24. This hearing is scheduled for April 24-26, beginning at 9am daily. To attend, go to the Fort Meade Visitor Control Center at the Fort Meade Main Gate (Maryland 175 & Reece Rd, Fort Meade, MD 21113). We suggest arriving when the visitor center opens at 7:30am (if you arrive late, you should still be able to get into the courtroom later in the morning).
Supporters are also encouraged to attend the courtroom proceedings for all or part of the day on Thursday, April 26.
For more information about organizing an event in your community April 24-26, please contact emma@bradleymanning.org for ideas and resources.
From Veterans For Peace- The VFP President Calls Things By Their Right Name-End The Endless Wars
Click on the headline to link to a Veterans For Peace presentation against the endless wars confronting those who are knee deep in sponsoring them.
Markin comment:
The video speaks for itself-End the endless wars!
Markin comment:
The video speaks for itself-End the endless wars!
Catherine Merridale, Moscow From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Politics and the Rise of Stalin: the Communist Party in the Capital 1925-32
Click on the headline to link to the Revolutionary History Journal index.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*****************
Reviews
Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: the Communist Party in the Capital 1925-32, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990, pp328, £47.50
Catherine Merridale has produced a book that is both useful and interesting. It is extremely valuable as a study of the processes at work in the Soviet Union’s largest party organisation at the time of Stalin’s rise to power and this, in itself, fills an important gap in our understanding. The book is also particularly informative in its attempt to focus, not simply on the ‘high politics’ of leadership struggles, but on the workings of the party at the grassroots and the role of local activists there. This has been aided by Merridale’s access to Soviet archives including factory records of major plants, and of the Metal Workers Union.
Existing under the very nose of the apparatus Moscow was always heavily, directly and more consistently influenced by the centre than were other local parties. However, up until 1924 the Trotskyist opposition did have significant support amongst youth in Moscow’s higher educational institutes, although less among workers than in some other areas. Merridale provides some useful documentation on this point. However, many readers of this journal will not agree with Merridale’s characterisations of the politics of the various left oppositions. For example she attacks the Trotsky-Zinoviev group for using the “same extreme language as the Stalin-Bukharin majority, not seeking common ground with their opponents, but seeing them as betrayers of Leninism” (p.23). She falsely claims that “no Bolshevik opposition after 1921 included soviet democracy in its programme” (p.24),while the Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927 clearly raised just such a call (see Chapter 5). However she does provide us with useful evidence of the continuing support for the left, right up to its outright suppression in 1927.
As an example, the Democratic Centralists, part of the Joint Opposition, had the loyalty of the Klara Zetkin plant, right up to 1927. The Opposition had a considerable base in Sokol’niki, an area that Merridale explains as containing a great concentration of government and state institutions, whilst at one stage it could count on 62 cells in the Krasnaya Presnaya district.
At the time of the fight with the left in the mid and late 1920s the Moscow party apparatus was in the hands of the Bukharinite Uglanov. Merridale’s account of his regime is very illuminating indeed. It comes at a time when certain Soviet and western historians have suggested that the Bukharinites would have been a democratic alternative to the ‘command administrative’ system of both Trotsky and Stalin. She points out that Uglanov was a rigid bureaucratic centraliser who used the apparatus to exclude the New Opposition from political life in the capital, whose chief representative was Kamenev – the author seems to have a softer spot for him than for other opposition leaders. Unlike in Leningrad the New Opposition made no attempt to mobilise rank and file support for their platform. Yet Uglanov attempted to maintain an iron grip on the party organisation on behalf of Bukharin and Stalin.
However, Merridale points out that, once the Stalin-Bukharin bloc started to split, Uglanov saw his own power base shift from under him very rapidly. He was replaced as Moscow Party Secretary by Molotov, and cast into the ranks of the Right Opposition. In her discussion of the activities of the Right Opposition, Merridale makes it abundantly clear that they were simply a conservative part of the apparatus. They made no attempt to organise at the grassroots, but, appearing as the supporters of the existing order, they could command considerable support from the top levels of the government bureaucracy, trade unions and factory directors.
Merridale here highlights the depth of the fissures that existed within the party and governmental apparatus at this time, and she does it very well. Those fissures were to widen. Molotov was replaced by Bauman, who displayed those traits of voluntarism that were at the heart of the development of the Stalinist system. He lost no time in trying to move too rapidly in the campaign of collectivisation, and he was eventually replaced by Kaganovich, one of the most loyal of Stalin’s men. By 1930 the emerging Stalin clique had their hands firmly on the capital city’s party organisation. Yet even they were to have to do battle to oust the Secretary of the most prestigious Krasnaya Presnaya district, Ryutin, who lost his post only in 1932.
But, as we have already said, Merridale’s book is not simply about leadership battles along the road to Stalinism. Her intention is to explore the interrelationship between the emerging Stalinist system and the rank and file. Here, her thesis is summed up in the following way:
What is beyond question, however, is that the rank and file contributed to the implementation of Stalin’s policies after 1928. There is no doubt that their enthusiasm, however brutal its consequences in many instances, was indispensable to the Stalinist ‘great turn’. (p.67)
Here, broadly speaking, she puts herself alongside the school of revisionist historians of the Soviet Union in the West. They have broken with the old totalitarian school that saw the bureaucratic apparatus as monolithic and all-embracing, while the masses were but passive puppets. Before Merridale, others, such as Lynne Viola in Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987), have stressed the degree of popular motivation and enthusiasm that accompanied the ‘Great Turn’. Coming at a time when many Soviet historians are turning to totalitarian theories, this school offers many refreshing insights compared with the dull old Stalinist and Western orthodoxies. It points to the very real enthusiasm shown by a layer of workers for the ‘turn’ in its earliest years, and argues that, at least at this time, party activists were not simply passive dupes.
But the problem that they all have, including Merridale, is in proving that this groundswell actually helped to create the Stalinist system. She points to the highly contradictory nature of the party in the mid and late 1920s. She disagrees with Trotskyists that the Lenin Levy and subsequent mass recruitment drives simply filled the party with passive political illiterates:
To suggest that the new generation were all passive dupes of the General Secretary is to underestimate the interest the average worker had in the progress of the revolution, both in general and in terms of his or her prospects in the new society. Those who did not have this interest tended to stay away altogether. (p.139)
The attempt to create a mass party was indeed fraught with contradictions for the emerging bureaucracy. On the one hand, it was formed on the basis of shop and shift cells. On the other hand, the increase in its proletarian composition was also accompanied by the development of an ever greater network of supervisory committees to oversee the rank and file. However, Merridale documents a degree of grassroots vitality in the late 1920s within a party supervised by the emergent bureaucracy, but organised in the plants and workshops.
Party meetings at the Krasnyi Proletarii factory lasted until 3 or 4am despite proposals from higher up that such meetings be limited to three hours only. Merridale provides examples of lower party organs organising strikes in the late 1920s and in 1930. And there was often conflict in the plants between the party and a management with supposedly supreme powers under edinochalie (one man management).
Yet there is a real danger of drawing too many conclusions from this picture of rank and file activity, however good a corrective it may be to previous accounts. By 1932 most of the accoutrements of a mass party had been dissolved in order to guarantee a more smoothly running machine for the apparatus. Shop and shift cells were abolished. Political education remained a low priority as the agenda of party bodies was normally dominated by questions of production and productivity. Merridale’s discussion of the contradictions between their educational tasks and fulfilment of the plan presented to party officials is fascinating. As the magazine Propagandist described it in September 1930:
Propagandists with other party responsibilities left the preparation of classes until the last moment, reading teaching materials on the tram on the way in. (p.l50)
This is not surprising in an organisation that had ordained subordination to the claims of industrial management:
The party cells must actively promote the fulfilment of the principle of edinochalie in the whole system of industrial management. (quoted p.168)
Such a situation created very real tensions, as Merridale demonstrates. Most high ranking technical personnel were not party members, but were in many cases inherited from Tsarism or the non-party technical intelligentsia. In the giant Serp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) factory in 1925, only two members of the factory administration and not one foreman were party members. Hence the contradiction between a worker based party and a management whose dictates the workers were not allowed to challenge by the apparatus of that same party. And hence the need for the Stalinist clique finally to transform the party into an apparatus party.
While the book claims to prove that a movement of an enthusiastic rank and file shaped and, more importantly, supported the ‘Great Turn’, it often provides contrary evidence. For instance, in 1929 party election meetings at AMO and Serp i Molot failed even to muster a quorum. Whilst there was support amongst a large section of worker activists for a ‘second revolution’, which involved a ‘workers promotion’ system under apparatus patronage, this was definitely on the wane after 1930. Factory cells again started to give voice to workers’ grievances, and accordingly faced a clampdown on their residual independent rights. Even if the rank and file had been used against the right wing in the bureaucratic apparatus, they now constituted a potential challenge, not simply a support mechanism, for the emerging Stalinist regime. They could be used against the Moscow right because Nepmen, kulaks and their Moscow patron, Uglanov, were deeply unpopular amongst the Moscow workers. NEP meant 25 per cent unemployment amongst the capital’s industrial workers. But when they started to demand some of the fruits of the ‘second revolution’, the bureaucratic apparatus clamped down on them ever more firmly.
The book is a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the rise to power of the Stalin clique. Unfortunately, perhaps because she does not choose to deal with ‘high politics’, Merridale does not really look at the development and make-up of the group around Stalin. We need more such studies. Merridale has shown the range of materials that can be used. She has also shown some of the key themes that need to be. explored. Whilst having a few reservations about some of the book’s conclusions, this study is thoroughly recommended. It is just a great pity that it is so expensive.
Dave Hughes
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forebears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
*****************
Reviews
Catherine Merridale, Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin: the Communist Party in the Capital 1925-32, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990, pp328, £47.50
Catherine Merridale has produced a book that is both useful and interesting. It is extremely valuable as a study of the processes at work in the Soviet Union’s largest party organisation at the time of Stalin’s rise to power and this, in itself, fills an important gap in our understanding. The book is also particularly informative in its attempt to focus, not simply on the ‘high politics’ of leadership struggles, but on the workings of the party at the grassroots and the role of local activists there. This has been aided by Merridale’s access to Soviet archives including factory records of major plants, and of the Metal Workers Union.
Existing under the very nose of the apparatus Moscow was always heavily, directly and more consistently influenced by the centre than were other local parties. However, up until 1924 the Trotskyist opposition did have significant support amongst youth in Moscow’s higher educational institutes, although less among workers than in some other areas. Merridale provides some useful documentation on this point. However, many readers of this journal will not agree with Merridale’s characterisations of the politics of the various left oppositions. For example she attacks the Trotsky-Zinoviev group for using the “same extreme language as the Stalin-Bukharin majority, not seeking common ground with their opponents, but seeing them as betrayers of Leninism” (p.23). She falsely claims that “no Bolshevik opposition after 1921 included soviet democracy in its programme” (p.24),while the Platform of the Joint Opposition of 1927 clearly raised just such a call (see Chapter 5). However she does provide us with useful evidence of the continuing support for the left, right up to its outright suppression in 1927.
As an example, the Democratic Centralists, part of the Joint Opposition, had the loyalty of the Klara Zetkin plant, right up to 1927. The Opposition had a considerable base in Sokol’niki, an area that Merridale explains as containing a great concentration of government and state institutions, whilst at one stage it could count on 62 cells in the Krasnaya Presnaya district.
At the time of the fight with the left in the mid and late 1920s the Moscow party apparatus was in the hands of the Bukharinite Uglanov. Merridale’s account of his regime is very illuminating indeed. It comes at a time when certain Soviet and western historians have suggested that the Bukharinites would have been a democratic alternative to the ‘command administrative’ system of both Trotsky and Stalin. She points out that Uglanov was a rigid bureaucratic centraliser who used the apparatus to exclude the New Opposition from political life in the capital, whose chief representative was Kamenev – the author seems to have a softer spot for him than for other opposition leaders. Unlike in Leningrad the New Opposition made no attempt to mobilise rank and file support for their platform. Yet Uglanov attempted to maintain an iron grip on the party organisation on behalf of Bukharin and Stalin.
However, Merridale points out that, once the Stalin-Bukharin bloc started to split, Uglanov saw his own power base shift from under him very rapidly. He was replaced as Moscow Party Secretary by Molotov, and cast into the ranks of the Right Opposition. In her discussion of the activities of the Right Opposition, Merridale makes it abundantly clear that they were simply a conservative part of the apparatus. They made no attempt to organise at the grassroots, but, appearing as the supporters of the existing order, they could command considerable support from the top levels of the government bureaucracy, trade unions and factory directors.
Merridale here highlights the depth of the fissures that existed within the party and governmental apparatus at this time, and she does it very well. Those fissures were to widen. Molotov was replaced by Bauman, who displayed those traits of voluntarism that were at the heart of the development of the Stalinist system. He lost no time in trying to move too rapidly in the campaign of collectivisation, and he was eventually replaced by Kaganovich, one of the most loyal of Stalin’s men. By 1930 the emerging Stalin clique had their hands firmly on the capital city’s party organisation. Yet even they were to have to do battle to oust the Secretary of the most prestigious Krasnaya Presnaya district, Ryutin, who lost his post only in 1932.
But, as we have already said, Merridale’s book is not simply about leadership battles along the road to Stalinism. Her intention is to explore the interrelationship between the emerging Stalinist system and the rank and file. Here, her thesis is summed up in the following way:
What is beyond question, however, is that the rank and file contributed to the implementation of Stalin’s policies after 1928. There is no doubt that their enthusiasm, however brutal its consequences in many instances, was indispensable to the Stalinist ‘great turn’. (p.67)
Here, broadly speaking, she puts herself alongside the school of revisionist historians of the Soviet Union in the West. They have broken with the old totalitarian school that saw the bureaucratic apparatus as monolithic and all-embracing, while the masses were but passive puppets. Before Merridale, others, such as Lynne Viola in Best Sons of the Fatherland (1987), have stressed the degree of popular motivation and enthusiasm that accompanied the ‘Great Turn’. Coming at a time when many Soviet historians are turning to totalitarian theories, this school offers many refreshing insights compared with the dull old Stalinist and Western orthodoxies. It points to the very real enthusiasm shown by a layer of workers for the ‘turn’ in its earliest years, and argues that, at least at this time, party activists were not simply passive dupes.
But the problem that they all have, including Merridale, is in proving that this groundswell actually helped to create the Stalinist system. She points to the highly contradictory nature of the party in the mid and late 1920s. She disagrees with Trotskyists that the Lenin Levy and subsequent mass recruitment drives simply filled the party with passive political illiterates:
To suggest that the new generation were all passive dupes of the General Secretary is to underestimate the interest the average worker had in the progress of the revolution, both in general and in terms of his or her prospects in the new society. Those who did not have this interest tended to stay away altogether. (p.139)
The attempt to create a mass party was indeed fraught with contradictions for the emerging bureaucracy. On the one hand, it was formed on the basis of shop and shift cells. On the other hand, the increase in its proletarian composition was also accompanied by the development of an ever greater network of supervisory committees to oversee the rank and file. However, Merridale documents a degree of grassroots vitality in the late 1920s within a party supervised by the emergent bureaucracy, but organised in the plants and workshops.
Party meetings at the Krasnyi Proletarii factory lasted until 3 or 4am despite proposals from higher up that such meetings be limited to three hours only. Merridale provides examples of lower party organs organising strikes in the late 1920s and in 1930. And there was often conflict in the plants between the party and a management with supposedly supreme powers under edinochalie (one man management).
Yet there is a real danger of drawing too many conclusions from this picture of rank and file activity, however good a corrective it may be to previous accounts. By 1932 most of the accoutrements of a mass party had been dissolved in order to guarantee a more smoothly running machine for the apparatus. Shop and shift cells were abolished. Political education remained a low priority as the agenda of party bodies was normally dominated by questions of production and productivity. Merridale’s discussion of the contradictions between their educational tasks and fulfilment of the plan presented to party officials is fascinating. As the magazine Propagandist described it in September 1930:
Propagandists with other party responsibilities left the preparation of classes until the last moment, reading teaching materials on the tram on the way in. (p.l50)
This is not surprising in an organisation that had ordained subordination to the claims of industrial management:
The party cells must actively promote the fulfilment of the principle of edinochalie in the whole system of industrial management. (quoted p.168)
Such a situation created very real tensions, as Merridale demonstrates. Most high ranking technical personnel were not party members, but were in many cases inherited from Tsarism or the non-party technical intelligentsia. In the giant Serp i Molot (Hammer and Sickle) factory in 1925, only two members of the factory administration and not one foreman were party members. Hence the contradiction between a worker based party and a management whose dictates the workers were not allowed to challenge by the apparatus of that same party. And hence the need for the Stalinist clique finally to transform the party into an apparatus party.
While the book claims to prove that a movement of an enthusiastic rank and file shaped and, more importantly, supported the ‘Great Turn’, it often provides contrary evidence. For instance, in 1929 party election meetings at AMO and Serp i Molot failed even to muster a quorum. Whilst there was support amongst a large section of worker activists for a ‘second revolution’, which involved a ‘workers promotion’ system under apparatus patronage, this was definitely on the wane after 1930. Factory cells again started to give voice to workers’ grievances, and accordingly faced a clampdown on their residual independent rights. Even if the rank and file had been used against the right wing in the bureaucratic apparatus, they now constituted a potential challenge, not simply a support mechanism, for the emerging Stalinist regime. They could be used against the Moscow right because Nepmen, kulaks and their Moscow patron, Uglanov, were deeply unpopular amongst the Moscow workers. NEP meant 25 per cent unemployment amongst the capital’s industrial workers. But when they started to demand some of the fruits of the ‘second revolution’, the bureaucratic apparatus clamped down on them ever more firmly.
The book is a most valuable contribution to our understanding of the rise to power of the Stalin clique. Unfortunately, perhaps because she does not choose to deal with ‘high politics’, Merridale does not really look at the development and make-up of the group around Stalin. We need more such studies. Merridale has shown the range of materials that can be used. She has also shown some of the key themes that need to be. explored. Whilst having a few reservations about some of the book’s conclusions, this study is thoroughly recommended. It is just a great pity that it is so expensive.
Dave Hughes
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