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Workers Vanguard No. 1002
11 May 2012
Down With the Bosses’ European Union—For a Workers Europe!-Banks Starve Greek Working People-For a Leninist-Trotskyist Party!
MAY 7—The results of yesterday’s parliamentary elections in Greece reflected mass discontent with the European Union (EU) and the starvation policies mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The two bourgeois parties that had enforced the austerity measures, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement and the right-wing New Democracy, received less than a third of the vote between them. Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) came in second behind New Democracy with 16.5 percent of the vote. Syriza, which stands in favor of the EU and the euro while offering to renegotiate the terms of austerity, is calling for a “left government.” According to the Greek Communist Party (KKE) newspaper, Rizospastis (7 May), the KKE, which opposes the EU and the euro, won 8.4 percent of the vote. Ominously, the fascist Golden Dawn received nearly 7 percent.
We print below a 5 May article, adapted for WV, written by our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain and appearing in Workers Hammer No. 218 (Spring 2012).
* * *
The 6 May parliamentary elections in Greece are taking place amid fears of economic meltdown. The Greek capitalists have triggered popular outrage by imposing brutal austerity, including cuts to jobs, pensions and public services. Behind the Greek bourgeoisie stand the imperialist European Union and the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund with whom the Greek government negotiated a 130 billion euro [$170 billion] bailout in February to stave off a default on the country’s loan obligations. This was the second “rescue package” in the space of two years and, like the first, was in fact a bailout of the country’s creditors—mainly French and German banks—as well as Greek ones. The EU bloodsuckers are intent on ensuring that when Greece goes bankrupt, it does not take the whole euro zone down with it.
For the Greek working class, the crisis has become a catastrophe. Wages have been slashed; unemployment is running at over 20 per cent, reaching 51 per cent for youth. Homelessness has increased by 25 per cent over the past year while one in three Greeks lives below the official poverty line. The suicide rate has rocketed. In a case which has come to symbolise the anger and desperation of the population, in early April 77-year-old retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas shot himself with a handgun outside the parliament in Athens’ Syntagma Square. His suicide note said that he could not face the prospect “of scavenging through garbage bins for food and becoming a burden to my child” (New York Times online, 5 April).
The Greek capitalist rulers are more than willing accomplices of Wall Street, the German banks, the City of London and the French Bourse. The leaders of the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF—the so-called “troika”—continually ride roughshod over Greece’s national sovereignty. When then prime minister George Papandreou proposed a referendum on the EU-dictated austerity package last November, EU leaders orchestrated his removal and replacement by Lucas Papademos, former vice president of the European Central Bank. The deposed Papandreou was hardly an opponent of EU austerity: he was leader of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), a bourgeois populist party, which governed since 2009, imposing the most savage cuts the country has seen since World War II. Now led by Evangelos Venizelos, PASOK continues to govern in coalition with the right-wing conservatives of New Democracy, led by Antonis Samaras. EU leaders have demanded that Greece enshrine a commitment to repay the bankers into its constitution. This would be legally binding on whatever government emerges from the election.
As proletarian internationalists, we have consistently opposed the imperialist EU on principle. It was originally established as an adjunct of NATO, the imperialist military alliance against the Soviet Union. From its beginnings it has been a mechanism by which the combined capitalist powers impose austerity on their own working classes. The dominant powers, led by Germany, subordinate the weaker ones such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and the East European member states. Under the banner of the “flexible labour market,” the EU has rolled back trade-union rights and imposed low wages and precarious work contracts.
The misery being inflicted on the Greek working people is a template for attacks on workers across Europe. Heavily indebted Spain, with the highest official unemployment rate in Europe (24 per cent), was engulfed by a one-day general strike on 29 March against the government’s budget cuts. A week earlier, a 24-hour general strike against austerity in neighbouring Portugal brought most of that country’s transport system to a standstill. It is not only in the poorer nations of southern Europe that the working class is under attack. German imperialism has driven down wages and drastically reduced welfare spending at home. The German proletariat, the most powerful working class in Europe, is potentially the Achilles’ heel of the imperialist EU, but it is led by the Social Democratic Party. In government from 1998 to 2005, the Social Democrats carried out draconian attacks on the working class which helped sharpen German imperialism’s competitive edge in the world market.
In the face of a wave of chauvinism against Greeks, our comrades in the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany wrote: “The workers movement in Germany must mobilize in solidarity with Greek workers and all the other victims of the EU imperialists—after all, they’ll be confronted with similar attacks in the immediate future” (reprinted in Workers Hammer No. 211, Summer 2010 [reprinted in WV No. 960, 4 June 2010]). Last year our comrades stated that there is “no way out for debtor countries like Greece under the set-up dictated by the German bourgeoisie.” Noting that Greece might be much better off if it defaulted and left the euro zone, they warned that, “while this might provide relief from the downward spiral, leaving the euro zone will not insulate the Greek proletariat from the world economic downturn and capitalist devastation” (reprinted in Workers Hammer No. 217, Winter 2011-2012 [see WV No. 992, 9 December 2011]).
The single currency has helped the German bourgeoisie make huge profits. The Greek capitalist rulers too have benefited from the EU and seem determined to retain the euro, despite the fact that it prevents Greece from devaluing its currency to lessen its debts or to increase the competitiveness of its exports. The International Communist League opposed the introduction of the euro and pointed out that a single currency spanning several different capitalist countries is not sustainable. In 1997 we wrote: “Control over the quantity of money within its boundaries is a basic economic prerogative of a bourgeois state,” and “since capitalism is organised on the basis of particular national states, itself the cause of repeated imperialist wars to redivide the world, it is impossible to cohere a stable pan-European bourgeois state” (Workers Vanguard No. 670, 13 June 1997). If Greece were to be propelled out of the euro—and the EU—under the impact of mass opposition to EU-dictated starvation policies, it would be a defeat for the imperialists and a step forward for the working class, in Greece and the rest of Europe. Meanwhile working-class militants in Germany and other imperialist countries should oppose the extortionate demands that Greece pay its debt.
Opposition to the EU is a necessary starting point for the working classes of all European countries, but it is not a solution in itself. The crisis being played out in Greece—and threatening to engulf Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy—stems from the world system of capitalism. Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin in his 1916 work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, noted that: “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established,” and “in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” A small club of wealthy imperialist powers subordinate and oppress the vast majority of the world’s population. Dependent countries (such as Greece, or Argentina today) “politically, are formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence.”
Under imperialism, each country becomes more closely connected to the world market, while industry becomes increasingly concentrated, laying the basis for the socialist organisation of society. However, capitalism is based on individual nation-states which inevitably come into conflict with each other in the drive for profits and new areas of exploitation. The capitalist nation-state is thus a fetter to the further development of the productive forces. For the working class and oppressed, the only way out is through socialist revolutions which will expropriate the bourgeoisie and establish an internationally planned economy under workers rule.
Over the past two years Greek workers have staged many one- or two-day general strikes, trying to beat back the joint offensive of the European imperialists and the Greek bourgeoisie. In the run-up to the parliamentary vote on the latest austerity package, workers staged a 48-hour general strike. On the day the cuts were approved a massive demonstration converged on parliament and fought pitched battles with rampaging cops. But the government’s relentless attacks on jobs and living standards have continued.
The Greek working class has a long history of militancy and self-sacrifice. But again and again its struggles have been dissipated—or crushed—as a result of its reformist leadership which salvaged the rule of the Greek bourgeoisie at crucial moments. The critical need is for an inter-nationalist revolutionary workers party, based on the programme of Lenin and Trotsky. The Trotskyist Group of Greece is dedicated to building such a party to fight for workers revolution throughout the region. Our programme is for a socialist united states of Europe.
The KKE’s Class Collaboration
The two main union federations—the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE) and the Confederation of Public Servants (ADEDY)—are run by supporters of PASOK and New Democracy, the parties primarily responsible for pushing through the austerity measures. These trade-union leaders make no pretence of opposition to the EU. Likewise, throughout Europe the reformist leaderships of the working class either explicitly or tacitly accept the EU, promoting illusions in a “social Europe.”
An exception to this rule is the KKE, the Greek Communist Party, which opposed the EU and the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that authorised the introduction of the euro. With the KKE gaining ground in the polls, the social-democratic left in Greece like Xekinima (Start—the Greek section of the Committee for a Workers’ International) and the International Marxist Tendency’s affiliate Marxist Voice, are openly touting a “left” coalition of the KKE and Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left, dominated by Synaspismos, formed out of the old “Eurocommunist” wing of the Communist Party). But the KKE rejects such a coalition, correctly criticising Syriza for “being consistently pro-E.U.” and for the fact that “it has voted for the Maastricht treaty after all” (Wikinews.org, 13 May 2010).
The KKE has the allegiance of the most militant sections of the Greek working class. Its trade-union organisation, PAME, purports to offer a “class-oriented” opposition to the sell-out bureaucrats in GSEE and ADEDY, whom it correctly denounces for class collaboration with the bosses and their government. However the KKE cannot offer a way forward for the working class beyond the cycle of one-day general strikes, which amount to a militant form of lobbying parliament. The KKE does not have a programme for the working-class seizure of power. It is wedded to nationalism which is the main obstacle to building a revolutionary workers party in Greece. A strategic task in building a revolutionary party is to win the working-class base of the KKE to the internationalist programme of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks.
The KKE has adopted, on paper at least, a leftist posture against the Greek capitalists and their anti-working-class austerity. In the theses of party conferences, and in particular on its Internet postings, the KKE spouts Marxist-sounding rhetoric. It even says in its 18th Congress Resolution on Socialism that “In the place of the bourgeois army and repressive organs, which will be completely dissolved, new institutions will be created, based on the armed revolutionary struggle for the destruction of the resistance of the exploiters and for the defence of the Revolution” (February 2009).
This verbal leftism is so much hot air, as shown in the KKE’s actual practice. On the question of the capitalist state, i.e., “the bourgeois army and repressive organs,” the KKE’s real programme is common-or-garden variety reformism. In an article in Rizospastis (25 May 2011), the KKE reports on a meeting of the Panhellenic Confederation of Police Officers, which its members attended. The KKE’s representative, one Spiros Halvadji, lectured the cops that “the role of the police must not be repression against the popular movement, but must have as its primary role the prosecution of crime.” The cops, together with the courts, prisons and military, make up the core of the bourgeois state, which Lenin described as “the ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of millions of working people by handfuls of the rich” (The State and Revolution, 1917). Today in Greece, the reactionary crusade against “crime” is the pretext for rounding up hundreds of immigrants and throwing them into concentration camps.
A Leninist party would combat national chauvinism, which is whipped up by the capitalist rulers, particularly against Turkey, Greece’s historic enemy, as well as towards neighbouring Balkan countries. In the context of heightened Greek nationalism caused by the EU’s trampling on the country’s national sovereignty, the government has launched a racist campaign against immigrants, opening up new detention centres and arresting hundreds. Attacks on immigrants have increased, as fascist organisations such as Golden Dawn have been emboldened.
Defence of the rights of oppressed nationalities and immigrants is essential to working-class unity in the struggle for socialist revolution. Nationalism sets workers of different nationalities against each other, poisoning class consciousness and aiding the capitalists to drive down the wages of all workers. Workers from Albania, South Asia, Africa and elsewhere must be drawn into common struggle alongside their Greek class brothers and sisters. A class-struggle leadership in the trade unions would fight for jobs for all and for full citizenship rights for immigrants.
The KKE has the social power to mobilise powerful contingents of workers to defend immigrants and to sweep the fascist vermin off the streets, but their nationalism is a barrier to such a perspective. In the early 1990s, an intense wave of Greek chauvinism over Macedonia contributed to the growth of Golden Dawn. When the former Yugoslav republic included the word “Macedonia” in its name, posters across Greece declared, “Macedonia Is Greek!” At the time we wrote that “the response of the KKE to the tidal wave of chauvinism is a sustained capitulation to Greek nationalism,” expressed in KKE statements such as: “we don’t let any foreign nationalist lay claim to even a centimeter of Greek soil” (Workers Vanguard No. 565, 11 December 1992). Our article demanded: “For the right of self-determination for Macedonia, including Greek Macedonians! For full democratic rights for minorities in Greece! For a Balkan Socialist Federation, including Greece!”
In contrast to the proletarian socialism of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, the KKE espouses nationalist populism. This is apparent in incessant, anti-Marxist demands for “people’s power,” sometimes expressed in the absurd coupling “working-class people’s power.” For example, they argue “the basic direction of the people’s movement must be the overthrow of capitalism. The only way out is the working-class popular power with disengagement from the EU and unilateral cancellation of the debt. There is no other solution for the people” (“The List of the Measures Included in the New Memorandum,” 16 February).
By preaching the common interests of “the people,” the KKE dissolves the proletariat into the whole of the population and obscures the class divisions of bourgeois society. With its hands on the levers of production, the working class is the only force with the potential power and objective interest to overthrow capitalism. The interests of the Greek capitalists, who make their profits from the exploitation of workers, and of the working class cannot be reconciled. The capitalists are inextricably tied to the imperialist powers and turn to them for aid in repressing the working class. The petty bourgeoisie comprises a heterogeneous layer between the capitalists and the workers, everything from teachers to small farmers to students. It includes the substantial proportion of the Greek population employed in family-run businesses. The strong influence of nationalist populism in Greek society is rooted in the fact that the industrial proletariat is very small and the urban petty bourgeoisie correspondingly large.
The KKE’s vision of “socialism” is a reactionary programme of national autarky based on the exploitation of the supposed wealth of natural resources, including energy resources within Greece alone. What the KKE envisions is a variety of “socialism in one country,” the dogma adopted by Stalin in late 1924 when the bureaucracy usurped power in a political counterrevolution that led to the degeneration of the Soviet workers state. “Socialism in one country” expressed the nationalist opportunism of the Soviet bureaucracy and ran counter to the Bolshevik Party’s historic revolutionary, internationalist programme. It provided the Stalinist bureaucracy with an ideological justification for transforming the foreign Communist parties into bargaining chips in an illusory search for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Lenin had explained at a Bolshevik Party congress in 1919: “We are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states, and it is inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to exist alongside of the imperialist states for any length of time. One or the other must triumph in the end” (“Report of the Central Committee,” 18 March 1919).
Despite its degeneration under Stalinism, we Trotskyists defended the Soviet Union, and fought for workers political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy, whose policies of appeasement of imperialism undermined the existence of the workers state. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union in 1991-92, after decades of military and economic pressure from world imperialism, definitively demonstrated the bankruptcy of Stalinism. If “socialism in one country” was impossible in the Soviet Union, covering one-sixth of the earth’s surface and rich in mineral wealth, in the context of Greece it is simply absurd.
The KKE’s History of Betrayals
In February, as the Greek parliament debated the second bailout and workers outside battled with police, government spokesmen evoked the spectre of civil war. KKE leader Aleka Papariga responded by referring to the Greek bourgeoisie’s repression against Communists in the 1940s. The 1946-49 Civil War continues to haunt all sides in Greece today. To the Greek bourgeoisie the KKE, the oldest party in Greece, embodies the hatred of the working class and peasantry for its rule. In reality, it is a travesty that the KKE retains a reputation as a militant fighter against capitalism based on the Resistance against the Nazi occupation and the subsequent Greek Civil War.
The KKE’s long history of betrayal of the Greek proletariat begins with the Stalinisation of the party in the late 1920s. The KKE faithfully followed every twist and turn of policy emanating from the Stalinist leadership in the Soviet Union. During the economic crisis of the 1930s, Greece was convulsed by massive workers strikes, notably the May 1936 general strike in Salonika. The KKE dominated the whole working-class movement and enjoyed strong support in the countryside. But the KKE subordinated the fight for working-class power to pursuing an alliance with the bourgeois Liberal Party, paving the way for the military dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. As our Trotskyist forebears explained:
“Instead of organizing the workers for decisive revolutionary action and working to draw the peasants in the countryside into the struggle, throughout the fateful months between April and August 1936, when the working class was in deep revolutionary ferment, the Stalinists busied themselves with a campaign to force the Liberal Party to organize with them a People’s Front. The Liberal Party, however, had heard its master’s voice and turned down the Stalinist offer. They were busy easing the way for Metaxas.”
— “Civil War in Greece,” Fourth International, February 1945
Far from forming an alliance with the KKE against the right wing of the bourgeoisie, the Liberals united with the right to crush the workers.
During the brutal Nazi occupation of Greece in World War II, the KKE established itself as the leadership of the Resistance. The Greek workers and peasants flocked to the military wing of the Resistance—ELAS—and fought heroically against both the Nazi occupiers and the Greek bourgeoisie’s anti-Communist quislings like General Zervas, a tool of the British imperialists who also collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. By the time the German forces withdrew from Greece, the entire country was in the hands of the ELAS fighters and the hated Greek bourgeoisie was at their mercy.
The workers and peasants, however, were cheated of their victory by the betrayal of the KKE leadership. The Stalinists joined the capitalist government and, in February 1945, signed the Treaty of Varkiza, disarming the KKE-led resistance fighters and handing power back to the miserable Greek bourgeoisie. In this, the KKE embraced the anti-revolutionary perspective of Stalin, who, at the Tehran Conference with Churchill and Roosevelt in 1943, had agreed that Greece would remain capitalist and under the thumb of British imperialism. Thousands of Communists were killed in the subsequent civil war. After the final defeat of the KKE’s Democratic Army in 1949, thousands were forced into exile. Those who could not get away were rounded up and put in concentration camps on prison islands. There they were subject to torture unless they renounced the party. The KKE was banned for decades and its members blacklisted.
What the comrades of the Fourth International wrote at the end of World War II holds true for the role of the Stalinists throughout the Civil War:
“The Greek masses were burning with revolutionary determination and wished to prepare the overthrow of all their oppressors—Nazi and Greek. Instead of providing the mass movement with a revolutionary program, similar to the Bolshevik program of 1917, and preparing the masses for the seizure of power, the Stalinists steered the movement into the blind alley of People’s Frontism. The Stalinists, who enjoyed virtual hegemony of the mass movement, joined with a lot of petty bourgeois politicians, lawyers, professors, who had neither mass following nor influence, and artificially worked to limit the struggle to the fight for capitalist democracy.”
Today the KKE continues the Stalinist tradition of popular-frontism and class collaboration that historically has politically disarmed the working class and bound it to the Greek bourgeoisie.
Imperialism and Greek Capitalism
The dependent character of the modern Greek state did not begin with its accession to the EU, but was stamped on it from birth. At the treaty which carved an independent Greek state out of the decaying Ottoman Empire in May of 1832, no Greeks were present—only representatives of the “protecting” powers: Britain, France and Russia. An absolutist monarch—Otto of Bavaria—was imposed on the new country. Throughout the 19th century Greece was a pawn of British diplomacy, particularly vis-à-vis tsarist Russia. Despite early attempts to modernise the country Greece remained overwhelmingly agrarian, dependent on the export of currants. While there was very little investment in industry, a very wealthy commercial bourgeoisie developed, based on merchant shipping and, later, banking.
In the early 1830s, to pay for the war against the Ottoman Turks, the Greek government contracted loans in the City of London on ruinous terms. By the 1880s Greek debts to Britain exceeded 630 million drachmas, the service of which consumed a third of the state’s revenues. When the currant market collapsed, Greece went bankrupt. This established a pattern that has persisted to the present. British imperialist policy towards Greece was geared to using loans in order to subjugate the country and to bring about its complete financial and diplomatic dependency. Following WWII, in the latter phase of the Greek Civil War, the U.S. supplanted decaying British imperialism in Greece, and similarly employed aid and loans as a weapon to subordinate the country.
The Greek bourgeoisie has always depended upon one or another imperialist power to guarantee its position, jointly exploiting the Greek proletariat. Such relationships of dependency are inevitable as long as imperialism exists. The only way out is the road taken by the Russian workers and peasants in the 1917 October Revolution. Led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks, they seized state power, expropriated the capitalist class and the landowners and swept away the tsarist autocracy and the state church. Lenin established the Third (Communist) International as the world party of proletarian revolution, conscious that, to survive, the workers revolution in backward Russia had to be extended to the advanced capitalist countries—especially Germany.
Proletarian internationalism is a life-and-death question for the working classes throughout Europe, who must struggle against the attacks of the national bourgeoisie and against the EU robber barons. Workers in the imperialist countries, in struggling against their “own” bourgeoisies, have the potential to strike a blow in the interests of all those, throughout Europe and worldwide, who are ground under the heel of imperialism. In countries such as Britain and Germany, immigrant workers from Greece, Turkey and elsewhere bring with them traditions of militant struggle and form an organic tie to struggles in their countries of origin.
The global economic crisis starkly poses the need to do away with the boom-bust cycle of capitalism. This can only be done through workers revolutions that expropriate the super-rich exploiters and reorganise production to meet human need. To transform the working class into a class fighting for power at the head of all the oppressed requires the leadership of a revolutionary party.
Monday, May 21, 2012
On The 100th Anniversary Of The 1912 Presidential Election- From The Pen Of Early American Socialist Leader Eugene V. Debs- Susan B. Anthony: A Reminiscence (1909)
Click on the headline to link to the Eugene V. Debs Marxist Internet Archive website article listed in the headline..
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
*********
Eugene V. Debs
Susan B. Anthony: A Reminiscence
(1909)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Labor & Freedom, St. Louis 1916, pp.19-33.
Originally published in Socialist Woman, January 1909.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twice only did I personally meet Susan B. Anthony, although I knew her well. The first time was at Terre Haute, Indiana, my home, in 1880, and the last time shortly before her death at her home at Rochester, New York. I can never forget the first time I met her. She impressed me as being a wonderfully strong character, self-reliant, thoroughly in earnest, and utterly indifferent to criticism.
There was never a time in my life when I was opposed to the equal suffrage of the sexes. I could never understand why woman was denied any right or opportunity that man enjoyed. Quite early, therefore, I was attracted to the woman suffrage movement. I had of course read of Susan B. Anthony and from the ridicule and contempt with which she was treated I concluded that she must be a strong advocate of, and doing effective work for, the rights of her sex. It was then that I determined, with the aid of Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, the brilliant writer, who afterward became her biographer, to arrange a series of meetings for Miss Anthony at Terre Haute.
In due course of time I received a telegram from Miss Anthony from Lafayette announcing the time of her arrival at Terre Haute and asking me to meet her at the station. I recognized the distinguished lady or, to be more exact, the notorious woman, the instant she stepped from the train. She was accompanied by Lily Devereaux Blake and other woman suffrage agitators and I proceeded to escort them to the hotel where I had arranged for their reception.
I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly expressed for this magnificent woman. Even my friends were disgusted with me for piloting such an “undesirable citizen” into the community. It is hard to understand, after all these years, how bitter and implacable the people were, especially the women, toward the leaders of this movement.
As we walked along the street I was painfully aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and later I had often to defend my position, which, of course, I was ever ready to do.
The meetings of Miss Anthony and her co-workers were but poorly attended and all but barren of results. Such was the loathing of the community for a woman who dared to talk in public about “woman’s rights” that people would not go to see her even to satisfy their curiosity. She was simply not to be tolerated and it would not have required any great amount of egging-on to have excited the people to drive her from the community.
To all of this Miss Anthony, to all appearance, was entirely oblivious. She could not have helped noticing it for there were those who thrust their insults upon her but she gave no sign and bore no resentment.
I can see her still as she walked along, neatly but carelessly attired, her bonnet somewhat awry, mere trifles which were scarcely noticed, if at all, in the presence of her splendid womanhood. She seemed absorbed completely in her mission. She could scarcely speak of anything else. The rights and wrongs of her sex seemed to completely possess her and to dominate all her thoughts and acts.
On the platform she spoke with characteristic earnestness and at times with such intensity as to awe her audience, if not compel conviction. She had an inexhaustible fund of information in regard to current affairs, and dates and data for all things. She spoke with great rapidity and forcefullness; her command of language was remarkable and her periods were all well-rounded and eloquently delivered. No thoughtful person could hear her without being convinced of her honesty and the purity of her motive. Her face fairly glowed with the spirit of her message and her soul was in her speech.
But the superb quality, the crowning virtue she possessed, was her moral heroism.
Susan B. Anthony had this quality in an eminent degree. She fearlessly faced the ignorant multitude or walked unafraid among those who scorned her. She had the dignity of perfect selfreliance without a shadow of conceit to mar it. She was a stern character, an uncompromising personality, but she had the heart of a woman and none more tender ever throbbed for the weak and the oppressed of earth.
No leader of any crusade was ever more fearless, loyal or uncompromising than Susan B. Anthony and not one ever wrought more unselfishly or under greater difficulties for the good of her kind and for the progress of the race.
I did not see Miss Anthony again until I shook hands with her at the close of my address in Rochester, but a short time before she passed to other realms. She was the same magnificent woman, but her locks had whitened and her kindly features bore the traces of age and infirmity.
Her life-work was done and her sun was setting!
How beautiful she seemed in the quiet serenity of her sunset!
Twenty-five years before she drank to its dregs the bitter cup of persecution, but now she stood upon the heights, a sad smile lighting her sweet face, amidst the acclaims of her neighbors and the plaudits of the world.
Susan B. Anthony freely consecrated herself to the service of humanity; she was a heroine in the highest sense and her name deserves a place among the highest on the scroll of the immortals.
Markin comment on this From The Pen Of Eugene V. Debs series:
The Political Evolution of Eugene V. Debs
For many reasons, the most important of which for our purposes here are the question of the nature of the revolutionary party and of revolutionary leadership, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in the international labor movement. In its aftermath, there was a definitive and I would argue, necessary split, between those leftists (and here I use that term generically to mean socialists, communists, anarchists, syndicalists and the like) who sought to reform the capitalist state from within and those who saw that it needed to be destroyed “root and branch” and new institutions established to create a more just society. This division today continues, in truncated form to be sure, to define the contours of the question. The heroic American pre- World War II socialist labor leader and icon, Eugene V. Debs, contained within his personal political trajectory all the contradictions of that split. As will be described below in more detail we honor Debs for his generosity of socialist spirit while at the same time underscoring that his profile is, in the final analysis, not that of something who could have led a proletarian revolution in the earlier part of the 20th century.
Debs was above all others except, perhaps, “Big Bill” Haywood in the pre-World War I movement. For details of why that was so and a strong biographic sketch it is still necessary to go Ray Ginger’s “The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs”. I will review that effort in this space at a later time. For now though let me give the highlights I found that every serious labor militant or every serious student of socialism needs to think through.
If history has told us anything over the past one hundred and fifty years plus of the organized labor movement it is that mere trade union consciousness under conditions of capitalist domination, while commendable and necessary, is merely the beginning of wisdom. By now several generations of labor militants have passed through the school of trade unionism with varying results; although precious few have gone beyond that to the class consciousness necessary to “turn the world upside down” to use an old expression from the 17th century English Revolution. In the late 19th when American capitalism was consolidating itself and moving onto its industrial phases the landscape was filled with pitched class battles between labor and capital.
One of those key battles in the 1890’s was led by one Eugene V. Debs and his American Railway Union against the mammoth rail giant, The Pullman Company. At that time the rails were the key mode of transportation in the bustling new industrial capitalist commerce. At that time, by his own reckoning, Debs saw the struggle from a merely trade unionist point of view, that is a specific localized economic struggle for better wages and conditions rather than taking on the capitalist system and its state. That strike was defeated and as a result Debs and others became “guests” of that state in a local jail in Illinois for six months or so. The key conclusion drawn from this ‘lesson’, for our purposes, was that Debs personally finally realized that the close connection between the capitalists and THEIR state (troops, media, jails, courts) was organic and needed to be addressed.
Development of working class political class consciousness comes in many ways; I know that from my own personal experiences running up against the capitalist state. For Debs this “up close and personal” confrontation with the capitalist drove him, reluctantly at first and with some reservations, to see the need for socialist solutions to the plight of the workingman (and women). In Debs’ case this involved an early infatuation with the ideas of cooperative commonwealths then popular among radicals as a way to basically provide a parallel alternative society away from capitalism. Well again, having gone thorough that same kind of process of conversion myself (in my case 'autonomous' urban communes, you know, the “hippie” experience of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s); Debs fairly quickly came to realize that an organized political response was necessary and he linked up his efforts with the emerging American Socialist Party.
Before World War I the major political model for politically organizing the working class was provided by the Marxist-dominated German Social Democratic Party. At that time, and in this period of pre-imperialist capitalist development, this was unquestionably the model to be followed. By way of explanation the key organizing principle of that organization, besides providing party discipline for united action, was to create a “big tent” party for the social transformation of society. Under that rubric the notion was to organize anyone and everyone, from socialist-feminists, socialist vegetarians, pacifists, municipal reformers, incipient trade union bureaucrats, hard core reformists, evolutionary socialists and- revolutionaries like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg who we honor to this day. The American Social Party that Debs joined exhibited all those tendencies (and some even more outlandish) of the German model. And as long as no great events acted to disrupt the “unity” of this amorphous formation the various tensions within the organization concerning reform or revolution were subdued for a time. Not forever though.
Various revolutionary tendencies within the workers’ movement have historically had opposing positions concerning parliamentary politics: what to do politically while waiting for the opportune moment to take political power. The controversy centered (and today centers around) whether to run for elective executive and/or legislative offices. Since World War I a very strong argument has developed that revolutionaries should not run for executive offices of the capitalist state on the principle that we do not want to be responsible for the running of the capitalist state. On the other hand running for legislative office under the principle of acting as “tribunes of the people” continues to have validity. The case of the German revolutionary social democrat Karl Liebknecht using his legislative office to denounce the German war effort DURING the war is a very high-level expression of that position. This question, arguably, was a little less clears in the pre-war period.
If Eugene V. Debs is remembered politically today it is probably for his five famous runs for the American presidency (one, in 1920, run from jail) from 1900 to 1920 (except 1916). Of those the most famous is the 1912 four- way fight (Teddy Roosevelt and his “Bull Moose” Party providing the fourth) in which he got almost a million votes and something like 5 percent of the vote- this is the high water mark of socialist electoral politics then and now. I would only mention that a strong argument could be made here for support of the idea of a revolutionary (and, at least until the early 1920’s Debs considered himself, subjectively, a revolutionary) running for executive office- the presidency- without violating political principle (of course, with the always present proviso that if elected he would refuse to serve). Certainly the issues to be fought around- the emerging American imperial presence in the world, the fierce wage struggles, the capitalist trustification and cartelization of industry, the complicity of the courts, the struggle for women’s right to vote, the struggle against the emerging anti- black Jim Crow regime in the South would make such a platform a useful propaganda tool. Especially since Debs was one of the premier socialist orators of the day, if perhaps too flowery and long-winded for today’s eye or ear.
As the American Socialist Party developed in the early 20th century, and grew by leaps and bounds in this period, a somewhat parallel development was occurring somewhat outside this basically parliamentary movement. In 1905, led by the revolutionary militant “Big Bill” Haywood and with an enthusiastic (then) Debs present probably the most famous mass militant labor organization in American history was formed, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies). As it name denotes this organization stood as, in effect, the nucleus of the industrial unionism that would win the day among the unorganized in the 1930’s with the efforts of the CIO. But it also was, as James P. Cannon an early IWW organizer noted in one of his books, the nucleus of a revolutionary political party. One of the reasons, among others, for its demise was that it never was able to resolve that contradiction between party and union. But that is an analysis for another day.
What is important to note here is that organization form fit in, very nicely indeed, with Debs’ notions of organizing the unorganized, the need for industrial unionization (as opposed to the prevailing narrow craft orientation of the Samuel Gompers-led AFL). Nevertheless Debs, to his credit, was no “dual unionist”, that is, committed to ignoring or going around the AFL and establishing “revolutionary” unions. This question of “boring from within” organized labor or “dual unions” continues to this day, and historically has been a very thorny question among militants faced with the bureaucratic inertia of the trade union bureaucracy. Debs came down on the side of the angels on this one (even if he later took unfavorable positions on IWW actions).
Although Debs is probably best known for his presidential runs (including that one from Atlanta prison in 1920 that I always enjoy seeing pictures of the one where he converses with his campaign staff in his cell) he really should be, if he is remembered for only one thing, remembered for his principled opposition to American war preparedness and eventual entry into World War I in 1917. Although it is unclear in my mind how much of Debs’ position stemmed from personal pacifism, how much from Hoosier isolationism (after all he was the quintessential Midwestern labor politician, having been raised in and lived all his life in Indiana) and how much was an anti-imperialist statement he nevertheless, of all major socialist spokesmen to speak nothing of major politicians in general , was virtually alone in his opposition when Woodrow Wilson pulled the hammer down and entered American forces into the European conflict.
That, my friends, should command respect from almost everyone, political friend or foe alike. Needless to say for his opposition he was eventually tried and convicted of, of all things, the catch-all charge of sedition and conspiracy. Some things never change. Moreover, that prison term is why Debs had to run from prison in 1920.
I started out this exposition of Debs’ political trajectory under the sign of the Russian Revolution and here I come full circle. I have, I believe, highlighted the points that we honor Debs for and now to balance the wheel we need to discuss his shortcomings (which are also a reflection of the shortcomings of the internationalist socialist movement then, and now). The almost universal betrayal of its anti- war positions of the pre-war international social democracy, as organized in the Second International and led by the German Party, by its subordination to the war aims of its respective individual capitalist governments exposed a deep crevice in the theory and practice of the movement.
As the experiences of the Russian revolution pointed out it was no longer possible for reformists and revolutionaries to coexist in the same party. Literally, on more than one occasion, these formally connected tendencies were on opposite sides of the barricades when the social tensions of society exploded. It was not a pretty sight and called for a splitting and realignment of the revolutionary forces internationally. The organizational expression of this was the formation, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, of the Communist International in 1919. Part of that process, in America, included a left-wing split (or purge depending on the source read) and the creation, at first, of two communist organizations. As the most authoritative left-wing socialist of the day one would have thought that Debs would have inclined to the communists. That was not to be the case as he stayed with the remnant of the American Socialist Party until his death in the late 1920’s.
No one would argue that the early communist movement in America was not filled with more than its share of political mistakes, wild boys and just plain weirdness but that is where the revolutionaries were in the 1920’s. And this brings us really to Debs’ ultimate problem as a socialist leader and why I made that statement above that he could not lead a proletarian revolution in America, assuming that he was his desire. Debs had a life-long aversion to political faction and in-fighting. I would agree, as any rational radical politician would, that faction and in-fighting are not virtuous in and of themselves and are a net drain on the tasks of propaganda, recruitment and united front actions that should drive left-wing political work. However, as critical turning points in the international socialist movement have shown, sometimes the tensions between the political appetites of supposed like-minded individuals cannot be contained in one organization. This question is most dramatically posed, of course, in a revolutionary period when the tensions are whittled down to choices for or against the revolution. One side of the barricade or the other.
That said, Debs’ personality, demeanor and ultimately his political program of trying to keep “big tent” socialist together tarnished his image as a socialist leader. Debs’ positions on convicts, women, and blacks, education, religion and government. Debs was no theorist, socialist or otherwise, and many of his positions would not pass muster among radicals today. I note his economic determinist argument that the black question is subsumed in the class question. I have discussed this question elsewhere and will not address it here. I would only note, for a socialist, his position is just flat out wrong. I also note that, outside his support for women’s suffrage and working women’s rights to equal pay his attitude toward women was strictly Victorian. As was his wishy-washy attitude toward religion. Eugene V. Debs, warts and all, nevertheless deserves a fair nod from history as the premier American socialist of the pre-World War I period.
*********
Eugene V. Debs
Susan B. Anthony: A Reminiscence
(1909)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From Labor & Freedom, St. Louis 1916, pp.19-33.
Originally published in Socialist Woman, January 1909.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twice only did I personally meet Susan B. Anthony, although I knew her well. The first time was at Terre Haute, Indiana, my home, in 1880, and the last time shortly before her death at her home at Rochester, New York. I can never forget the first time I met her. She impressed me as being a wonderfully strong character, self-reliant, thoroughly in earnest, and utterly indifferent to criticism.
There was never a time in my life when I was opposed to the equal suffrage of the sexes. I could never understand why woman was denied any right or opportunity that man enjoyed. Quite early, therefore, I was attracted to the woman suffrage movement. I had of course read of Susan B. Anthony and from the ridicule and contempt with which she was treated I concluded that she must be a strong advocate of, and doing effective work for, the rights of her sex. It was then that I determined, with the aid of Mrs. Ida Husted Harper, the brilliant writer, who afterward became her biographer, to arrange a series of meetings for Miss Anthony at Terre Haute.
In due course of time I received a telegram from Miss Anthony from Lafayette announcing the time of her arrival at Terre Haute and asking me to meet her at the station. I recognized the distinguished lady or, to be more exact, the notorious woman, the instant she stepped from the train. She was accompanied by Lily Devereaux Blake and other woman suffrage agitators and I proceeded to escort them to the hotel where I had arranged for their reception.
I can still see the aversion so unfeelingly expressed for this magnificent woman. Even my friends were disgusted with me for piloting such an “undesirable citizen” into the community. It is hard to understand, after all these years, how bitter and implacable the people were, especially the women, toward the leaders of this movement.
As we walked along the street I was painfully aware that Miss Anthony was an object of derision and contempt, and in my heart I resented it and later I had often to defend my position, which, of course, I was ever ready to do.
The meetings of Miss Anthony and her co-workers were but poorly attended and all but barren of results. Such was the loathing of the community for a woman who dared to talk in public about “woman’s rights” that people would not go to see her even to satisfy their curiosity. She was simply not to be tolerated and it would not have required any great amount of egging-on to have excited the people to drive her from the community.
To all of this Miss Anthony, to all appearance, was entirely oblivious. She could not have helped noticing it for there were those who thrust their insults upon her but she gave no sign and bore no resentment.
I can see her still as she walked along, neatly but carelessly attired, her bonnet somewhat awry, mere trifles which were scarcely noticed, if at all, in the presence of her splendid womanhood. She seemed absorbed completely in her mission. She could scarcely speak of anything else. The rights and wrongs of her sex seemed to completely possess her and to dominate all her thoughts and acts.
On the platform she spoke with characteristic earnestness and at times with such intensity as to awe her audience, if not compel conviction. She had an inexhaustible fund of information in regard to current affairs, and dates and data for all things. She spoke with great rapidity and forcefullness; her command of language was remarkable and her periods were all well-rounded and eloquently delivered. No thoughtful person could hear her without being convinced of her honesty and the purity of her motive. Her face fairly glowed with the spirit of her message and her soul was in her speech.
But the superb quality, the crowning virtue she possessed, was her moral heroism.
Susan B. Anthony had this quality in an eminent degree. She fearlessly faced the ignorant multitude or walked unafraid among those who scorned her. She had the dignity of perfect selfreliance without a shadow of conceit to mar it. She was a stern character, an uncompromising personality, but she had the heart of a woman and none more tender ever throbbed for the weak and the oppressed of earth.
No leader of any crusade was ever more fearless, loyal or uncompromising than Susan B. Anthony and not one ever wrought more unselfishly or under greater difficulties for the good of her kind and for the progress of the race.
I did not see Miss Anthony again until I shook hands with her at the close of my address in Rochester, but a short time before she passed to other realms. She was the same magnificent woman, but her locks had whitened and her kindly features bore the traces of age and infirmity.
Her life-work was done and her sun was setting!
How beautiful she seemed in the quiet serenity of her sunset!
Twenty-five years before she drank to its dregs the bitter cup of persecution, but now she stood upon the heights, a sad smile lighting her sweet face, amidst the acclaims of her neighbors and the plaudits of the world.
Susan B. Anthony freely consecrated herself to the service of humanity; she was a heroine in the highest sense and her name deserves a place among the highest on the scroll of the immortals.
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-“Accusation of the Uncertain Sciences”
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.
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
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.
********
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 of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues 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!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“Accusation of the Uncertain Sciences”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
First Published: in 1822, Théorie de l'unité universelle.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Celebrated philosophers have long recognised the existence of a great unfathomed mystery.’ they have understood that man had failed in the study of nature and missed the paths which would have led to individual and collective happiness. In ages less vain than ours savants have deplored this failure and looked forward to a time when the human race would arrive at a happier destiny than that of civilisation. We find such prognostications in the writings of the most renowned authors from Socrates, who prophesied that “some day the light would. descend,” to Voltaire who, impatient to see it descend, exclaimed: “How dark a night still veils all nature’s face."[24]
Plato and the Greek sophists expressed the same misgivings in other terms. Their utopias were an indirect accusation of the social thought of their age which could not conceive of anything beyond the systems of civilisation and barbarism. These writers are regarded as oracles of wisdom, and yet from Socrates to Montaigne we find the most eminent of them deploring the insufficiency of their ideas and asking: “What do I know?” Today people talk in a different tone, and Voltaire was right to complain that the cry of the modern sophists is: “What don’t I know!”
All the honourable philosophers, those who have not engaged in idle controversy, have recognised the falseness of our social theories. Montesquieu thinks that “the social world is suffering from a chronic sickness, an inner vice, a secret and hidden venom.” J.-J. Rousseau, in speaking of the people of civilisation, says: “These are not men; there is a disorder in things, the cause of which we have not yet fathomed.”
There are nonetheless people who vaunt the progress of our political sciences and the perfection of reason. This is an in decent boast and it has been cruelly refuted by the general misfortune, by the disastrous consequences of the so-called enlightened theories which gave birth to the storms of revolution. Was there ever a time like the present to stigmatise the regenerating sciences en masse! They have already been condemned by their own authors. Before the Revolution the compiler Barthélemy said (in his Voyage d'Anacharsis): “These libraries, the so-called treasure-houses of sublime knowledge, are no more than a humiliating repository of contradictions and errors; their abundance of ideas is in fact a penury.” What would he have said a few years later if he had seen the philosophical dogmas put to the test? No doubt like Raynal he would have made a public confession of ignorance and said with Bacon: “We must revise our whole understanding of things, and forget all that we have learned.”
A scholar could gather pages of such citations in which modern philosophy denounces its own wisdom. I am merely citing a few imposing authorities who have preceded me in drawing attention to the spurious quality of our present enlightenment. I wish only to make it clear that the greatest geniuses have prophesied and called for the discovery of a social theory other than the Philosophy which they blame for having misled human reason.
What is the error committed by the philosophers? What branch of learning have they failed to investigate? There are several, and notably the branch with which they claim to have been particularly concerned: I mean the study of Man. Although they claim to have exhausted the subject, they know absolutely nothing about it. They have concerned themselves with superficial problems, like that of Ideology,[25] which are meaningless so long as we remain ignorant of the fundamental science which deals with man’s basic impulses. It is impossible to understand the nature of these impulses and their goal without a knowledge of the analytic and synthetic calculus of passionate attraction... .
So long as the human mind has not discovered the calculus of the social destinies, interpreted by the synthesis of attraction, we must remain in a state of political cretinism. Our progress in a few of the natural sciences — in mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. — is useless, for it has not provided us with a remedy for any of man’s ills. The accomplishments of these sciences only serve to emphasise the confusion of social thought which has done nothing to promote human happiness and which, after thirty centuries of correctives and reforms, has left all social evils as deeply rooted as ever... .
What have we learned about man and his social destinies? There are four sciences which claim to solve the riddle. One of them, called Ideology, is only concerned with the surface of the question. It has lost itself in quibbles and subtleties concerning the analysis of ideas and failed to study the real question, which is that of the functions and uses of the passions and ‘the laws of passionate attraction... .
Three other sciences — politics, moral philosophy and political economy — also claim to explain the problem of our destinies. Let us analyse these sciences.
Politics and political economy advocate theories which run counter to human destiny. They encourage us to submit passively to civilisation, with its system of incoherent and loathsome work, when we should be trying to attain our true destiny which is societary work.
A fourth philosophical science, moral philosophy, which also boasts of making man its study, does just the opposite. The only art that the moralists know is that of perverting human nature and repressing the soul’s impulses or passionate attractions on the grounds that they are not suited to the civilised and barbarian order. The real problem on the contrary is to discover the means of escaping the civilised and barbarian order. This order is in conflict with man’s passions and inclinations, all of which tend to unity, to domestic and agricultural association.
These four uncertain sciences vaunt the system of incoherent and piece-meal work in order to dispense themselves of the task of inventing the societary system. Having failed to perform their appointed task and having misled us for three thousand years, they will come to the same end as all the anarchists who delude men with their promises of happiness and finally destroy one another.
Such is the status of the philosophical sciences today: like the revolutionary parties, they are destroying one another before our very eyes. One of the most reputable of these sciences, Moral Philosophy, has recently been overwhelmed by a party of new savants called the Economists. The Economists have won favor by encouraging the love of wealth whereas morality advised men to throw their wealth “into the womb of the avid seas.” By hoisting the banner of wealth and luxury, and thus yielding to the first dictate of attraction, the Economists were sure of crushing the moralists. For the moralists wish us to scorn wealth only because they lack the means to obtain it for us; like the fox in the fable they call the grapes too green because they are unable to reach them.
What has civilisation gained by changing its banner, by forsaking the moralists in order to follow the Economists? It is true that the economists permit us to love wealth, but they don’t make us wealthy. On the contrary, the influence of their dogmas has only served to double the weight of taxes and the size of armies, to promote poverty, deceit and all the scourges. Its material consequence has been the devastation of forests. in the political sphere its fruit has been monopoly, both naval and corporate. Is there any vice which has not been aggravated by the intrusion of these dangerous doctors? ...
If we consider that the present state of generalised deprivation is the fruit of a hundred thousand social systems, can we believe in the good faith of those who have amassed this clutter of dogmas? Should we not divide the authors of these systems into two categories, one composed of charlatans and the other of dupes? For we must consider as dupes those who have believed that civilisation was man’s destiny and have sought to perfect it instead of looking for a way out of it.
Let us then distinguish those who, in agreement with the Montesquieus, the Rousseaus and the Voltaires, have been suspicious of philosophy and civilisation. We will give the name of Expectant Sophists to all those writers who, since Socrates, have sought the enlightenment which they admitted was not to be found in their own learning; and under the term Obscurantist Sophists we will designate all those quacks who vaunt their nostrums of perfectibility, although well aware of their worthlessness.
We can recognise a category of very pardonable Obscurantists. This would include the men who take fright before a new discovery is tested, fearing that it might become a dangerous weapon in the hands of agitators. Such doubts are praiseworthy prior to verification. But under the term Philosophical Obscurantists I mean to include only those haughty men whose motto is nil sub sole novum,[26] and who pretend that there is nothing more to be discovered, that their science “has perfectibilised all perfectible perfectibilities.”
This distinction of the philosophers into Expectants and Obscurantists allows everyone the chance to justify himself. A philosopher is exonerated in placing himself in the category of the Expectants who are waiting for enlightenment, and in condemning the four sciences that are indulgently described as uncertain when they might better be called deceiving. What other name can be given:
To modern Metaphysics which has spawned the sects of Materialism and Atheism and cast the intellect into a scientific dead-end by bogging it down in the useless controversy over ideology. Had the metaphysicians devoted themselves to their assigned task, the study of attraction, this would have led in a few years to the discovery of the laws of passional harmony.
To Politics which vaunts the rights of man but fails to guarantee the first right and the only useful one, which is the right to work. The acknowledgment of this right would have sufficed to cast suspicion on civilisation which can neither recognise it nor grant it.
To Economism which promises wealth to nations but only teaches the art of enriching financiers and leeches, the art of doubling taxes, of devouring the future through fiscal loans, and of neglecting all research on domestic association, the basis of the economy.
To Moralism which, after two thousand years of advocating the scorn of wealth and the love of truth, has just recently begun to extol the civilised commercial system with its bankruptcy, usury, speculation and freedom of deception.
Such are the four sciences which direct the social world, or rather which have been misdirecting it for twenty-five centuries. These sciences are already suspect in the eyes of the revolutionaries whom they have begotten. Bonaparte eliminated them all from the Institute, and this was perhaps the most sensible act of his reign.[27]
****
An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
********
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
********
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.
********
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 of public and private sector workers to unionize.
* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dues 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!
*******
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“Accusation of the Uncertain Sciences”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier. Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction. Translated, Edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Published by Jonathan Cape, 1972;
First Published: in 1822, Théorie de l'unité universelle.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Celebrated philosophers have long recognised the existence of a great unfathomed mystery.’ they have understood that man had failed in the study of nature and missed the paths which would have led to individual and collective happiness. In ages less vain than ours savants have deplored this failure and looked forward to a time when the human race would arrive at a happier destiny than that of civilisation. We find such prognostications in the writings of the most renowned authors from Socrates, who prophesied that “some day the light would. descend,” to Voltaire who, impatient to see it descend, exclaimed: “How dark a night still veils all nature’s face."[24]
Plato and the Greek sophists expressed the same misgivings in other terms. Their utopias were an indirect accusation of the social thought of their age which could not conceive of anything beyond the systems of civilisation and barbarism. These writers are regarded as oracles of wisdom, and yet from Socrates to Montaigne we find the most eminent of them deploring the insufficiency of their ideas and asking: “What do I know?” Today people talk in a different tone, and Voltaire was right to complain that the cry of the modern sophists is: “What don’t I know!”
All the honourable philosophers, those who have not engaged in idle controversy, have recognised the falseness of our social theories. Montesquieu thinks that “the social world is suffering from a chronic sickness, an inner vice, a secret and hidden venom.” J.-J. Rousseau, in speaking of the people of civilisation, says: “These are not men; there is a disorder in things, the cause of which we have not yet fathomed.”
There are nonetheless people who vaunt the progress of our political sciences and the perfection of reason. This is an in decent boast and it has been cruelly refuted by the general misfortune, by the disastrous consequences of the so-called enlightened theories which gave birth to the storms of revolution. Was there ever a time like the present to stigmatise the regenerating sciences en masse! They have already been condemned by their own authors. Before the Revolution the compiler Barthélemy said (in his Voyage d'Anacharsis): “These libraries, the so-called treasure-houses of sublime knowledge, are no more than a humiliating repository of contradictions and errors; their abundance of ideas is in fact a penury.” What would he have said a few years later if he had seen the philosophical dogmas put to the test? No doubt like Raynal he would have made a public confession of ignorance and said with Bacon: “We must revise our whole understanding of things, and forget all that we have learned.”
A scholar could gather pages of such citations in which modern philosophy denounces its own wisdom. I am merely citing a few imposing authorities who have preceded me in drawing attention to the spurious quality of our present enlightenment. I wish only to make it clear that the greatest geniuses have prophesied and called for the discovery of a social theory other than the Philosophy which they blame for having misled human reason.
What is the error committed by the philosophers? What branch of learning have they failed to investigate? There are several, and notably the branch with which they claim to have been particularly concerned: I mean the study of Man. Although they claim to have exhausted the subject, they know absolutely nothing about it. They have concerned themselves with superficial problems, like that of Ideology,[25] which are meaningless so long as we remain ignorant of the fundamental science which deals with man’s basic impulses. It is impossible to understand the nature of these impulses and their goal without a knowledge of the analytic and synthetic calculus of passionate attraction... .
So long as the human mind has not discovered the calculus of the social destinies, interpreted by the synthesis of attraction, we must remain in a state of political cretinism. Our progress in a few of the natural sciences — in mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. — is useless, for it has not provided us with a remedy for any of man’s ills. The accomplishments of these sciences only serve to emphasise the confusion of social thought which has done nothing to promote human happiness and which, after thirty centuries of correctives and reforms, has left all social evils as deeply rooted as ever... .
What have we learned about man and his social destinies? There are four sciences which claim to solve the riddle. One of them, called Ideology, is only concerned with the surface of the question. It has lost itself in quibbles and subtleties concerning the analysis of ideas and failed to study the real question, which is that of the functions and uses of the passions and ‘the laws of passionate attraction... .
Three other sciences — politics, moral philosophy and political economy — also claim to explain the problem of our destinies. Let us analyse these sciences.
Politics and political economy advocate theories which run counter to human destiny. They encourage us to submit passively to civilisation, with its system of incoherent and loathsome work, when we should be trying to attain our true destiny which is societary work.
A fourth philosophical science, moral philosophy, which also boasts of making man its study, does just the opposite. The only art that the moralists know is that of perverting human nature and repressing the soul’s impulses or passionate attractions on the grounds that they are not suited to the civilised and barbarian order. The real problem on the contrary is to discover the means of escaping the civilised and barbarian order. This order is in conflict with man’s passions and inclinations, all of which tend to unity, to domestic and agricultural association.
These four uncertain sciences vaunt the system of incoherent and piece-meal work in order to dispense themselves of the task of inventing the societary system. Having failed to perform their appointed task and having misled us for three thousand years, they will come to the same end as all the anarchists who delude men with their promises of happiness and finally destroy one another.
Such is the status of the philosophical sciences today: like the revolutionary parties, they are destroying one another before our very eyes. One of the most reputable of these sciences, Moral Philosophy, has recently been overwhelmed by a party of new savants called the Economists. The Economists have won favor by encouraging the love of wealth whereas morality advised men to throw their wealth “into the womb of the avid seas.” By hoisting the banner of wealth and luxury, and thus yielding to the first dictate of attraction, the Economists were sure of crushing the moralists. For the moralists wish us to scorn wealth only because they lack the means to obtain it for us; like the fox in the fable they call the grapes too green because they are unable to reach them.
What has civilisation gained by changing its banner, by forsaking the moralists in order to follow the Economists? It is true that the economists permit us to love wealth, but they don’t make us wealthy. On the contrary, the influence of their dogmas has only served to double the weight of taxes and the size of armies, to promote poverty, deceit and all the scourges. Its material consequence has been the devastation of forests. in the political sphere its fruit has been monopoly, both naval and corporate. Is there any vice which has not been aggravated by the intrusion of these dangerous doctors? ...
If we consider that the present state of generalised deprivation is the fruit of a hundred thousand social systems, can we believe in the good faith of those who have amassed this clutter of dogmas? Should we not divide the authors of these systems into two categories, one composed of charlatans and the other of dupes? For we must consider as dupes those who have believed that civilisation was man’s destiny and have sought to perfect it instead of looking for a way out of it.
Let us then distinguish those who, in agreement with the Montesquieus, the Rousseaus and the Voltaires, have been suspicious of philosophy and civilisation. We will give the name of Expectant Sophists to all those writers who, since Socrates, have sought the enlightenment which they admitted was not to be found in their own learning; and under the term Obscurantist Sophists we will designate all those quacks who vaunt their nostrums of perfectibility, although well aware of their worthlessness.
We can recognise a category of very pardonable Obscurantists. This would include the men who take fright before a new discovery is tested, fearing that it might become a dangerous weapon in the hands of agitators. Such doubts are praiseworthy prior to verification. But under the term Philosophical Obscurantists I mean to include only those haughty men whose motto is nil sub sole novum,[26] and who pretend that there is nothing more to be discovered, that their science “has perfectibilised all perfectible perfectibilities.”
This distinction of the philosophers into Expectants and Obscurantists allows everyone the chance to justify himself. A philosopher is exonerated in placing himself in the category of the Expectants who are waiting for enlightenment, and in condemning the four sciences that are indulgently described as uncertain when they might better be called deceiving. What other name can be given:
To modern Metaphysics which has spawned the sects of Materialism and Atheism and cast the intellect into a scientific dead-end by bogging it down in the useless controversy over ideology. Had the metaphysicians devoted themselves to their assigned task, the study of attraction, this would have led in a few years to the discovery of the laws of passional harmony.
To Politics which vaunts the rights of man but fails to guarantee the first right and the only useful one, which is the right to work. The acknowledgment of this right would have sufficed to cast suspicion on civilisation which can neither recognise it nor grant it.
To Economism which promises wealth to nations but only teaches the art of enriching financiers and leeches, the art of doubling taxes, of devouring the future through fiscal loans, and of neglecting all research on domestic association, the basis of the economy.
To Moralism which, after two thousand years of advocating the scorn of wealth and the love of truth, has just recently begun to extol the civilised commercial system with its bankruptcy, usury, speculation and freedom of deception.
Such are the four sciences which direct the social world, or rather which have been misdirecting it for twenty-five centuries. These sciences are already suspect in the eyes of the revolutionaries whom they have begotten. Bonaparte eliminated them all from the Institute, and this was perhaps the most sensible act of his reign.[27]
A Remembrance Worthy Of The Day- A Memorial Day for Peace-Join The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace In Boston-May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Click on the headline to link to the Smedley Butler Brigade VFP Facebookpage.
To The Fallen-In Lieu Of A Letter
The mere mention of the name Veterans For Peace evokes images of hard-bitten ex-servicemen and women, many old, ramrod straight holding their beloved black and white peace dove-emblazoned banners flying proudly in all weathers. Of urgent and militant calls for withdrawal of American military personnel from conflicts somewhere in the bewildering number of places that this government has planted its forces. And of relentless exposure of the thousand and one ways that this government (and not just this government) tries to hide its atrocities against overwhelmed opponents and the innocent civilians who get caught up in the juggernaut. Those exercises of our democratic and moral obligations are what drive us most days but I want to put politics aside this day, or put them aside at least long enough to speak of another role that we have taken on over the past several years here in Boston on Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for our fallen.
Others can address, and eloquently, the origins and purposes of the day, a task that usually would come easily to this writer. Others will throw symbolic flowers into our beloved homeland the sea to give somber recognition to the fallen of current conflicts. Still others in other commemorations can, and will, speak of valor, honor, duty and unquestioned obedience to orders accompanied by the far-away tattoo of drums, the echo of the distant roar of cannon, cannon headed to some unmarked destination, and the whish and whirl as an unseen overhead airplane unloads it sacrilegious payload.
Today I choose though to speak of long ago but not forgotten personal remembrance, and to give name to that remembrance. To give name, James Earl Jenkins, old North Quincy rough-house Irish neighborhoods friend and fellow of many boyhood adventures not all fit for public mention, a name now blood-stone etched in black marble down in Washington, D.C. To give name, Kenneth Edward Johnson, my brother and James’ friend also, a name not etched in black stone but a causality of war nevertheless who, despite his fervent desire, “never made it back to the real world” and spent his shortened lonely life reliving the past.
James and Kenneth, what happened to each of them and why, take on special meaning today as I utter their names publicly from the misty past for the first time in a long time because those names link to those we remember today. Not just those, like James, who served under whatever conditions and for whatever personal reasons, those seem beside the point just now, or like my brother, those who do not show up in any official casuality report but all those nevertheless damaged by the close-hand experience of war.
But enough of this, as it only brings another saddened tear. But, as well, enough of war.
****************
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Christopher Columbus Park, Boston, Massachusetts
(near the Long Wharf Marriott on the waterfront - Aquarium stop on the MBTA Blue Line and a short walk from Haymarket on the Orange Line)
Please join us
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012
There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
Additional information will follow
as the program is finalized
To The Fallen-In Lieu Of A Letter
The mere mention of the name Veterans For Peace evokes images of hard-bitten ex-servicemen and women, many old, ramrod straight holding their beloved black and white peace dove-emblazoned banners flying proudly in all weathers. Of urgent and militant calls for withdrawal of American military personnel from conflicts somewhere in the bewildering number of places that this government has planted its forces. And of relentless exposure of the thousand and one ways that this government (and not just this government) tries to hide its atrocities against overwhelmed opponents and the innocent civilians who get caught up in the juggernaut. Those exercises of our democratic and moral obligations are what drive us most days but I want to put politics aside this day, or put them aside at least long enough to speak of another role that we have taken on over the past several years here in Boston on Memorial Day, a day of remembrance for our fallen.
Others can address, and eloquently, the origins and purposes of the day, a task that usually would come easily to this writer. Others will throw symbolic flowers into our beloved homeland the sea to give somber recognition to the fallen of current conflicts. Still others in other commemorations can, and will, speak of valor, honor, duty and unquestioned obedience to orders accompanied by the far-away tattoo of drums, the echo of the distant roar of cannon, cannon headed to some unmarked destination, and the whish and whirl as an unseen overhead airplane unloads it sacrilegious payload.
Today I choose though to speak of long ago but not forgotten personal remembrance, and to give name to that remembrance. To give name, James Earl Jenkins, old North Quincy rough-house Irish neighborhoods friend and fellow of many boyhood adventures not all fit for public mention, a name now blood-stone etched in black marble down in Washington, D.C. To give name, Kenneth Edward Johnson, my brother and James’ friend also, a name not etched in black stone but a causality of war nevertheless who, despite his fervent desire, “never made it back to the real world” and spent his shortened lonely life reliving the past.
James and Kenneth, what happened to each of them and why, take on special meaning today as I utter their names publicly from the misty past for the first time in a long time because those names link to those we remember today. Not just those, like James, who served under whatever conditions and for whatever personal reasons, those seem beside the point just now, or like my brother, those who do not show up in any official casuality report but all those nevertheless damaged by the close-hand experience of war.
But enough of this, as it only brings another saddened tear. But, as well, enough of war.
****************
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Christopher Columbus Park, Boston, Massachusetts
(near the Long Wharf Marriott on the waterfront - Aquarium stop on the MBTA Blue Line and a short walk from Haymarket on the Orange Line)
Please join us
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012
There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
Additional information will follow
as the program is finalized
Sunday, May 20, 2012
From The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace- In Boston- Memorial Day for Peace-May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Click on the headline to link to the Smedley Butler Brigade VFP Facebook page.
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Christopher Columbus Park
Boston, Massachusetts
Please join us
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012
There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
Additional information will follow
as the program is finalized
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012, 1:00 - 3:00 pm
Christopher Columbus Park
Boston, Massachusetts
Please join us
Please join Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and Samantha Smith, Chapter 45, Military Families Speak Out, Mass Peace Action, United for Justice with Peace as we commemorate Memorial Day on Monday May 28, 2012
There will be no parade, no marching band, no military equipment, no guns and drums, no Air Force fly-overs.
There will be veterans and supporters who have lost friends and loved ones. Veterans who know the horrors of war and the pain and anguish of loss. There will be friends and families of soldiers, remembering their loved ones. There will be Iraqi Refugees who have suffered terrible losses and will join with us as we remember and show respect for their loss.
There will be flowers dropped into the harbor for each fallen U.S. soldier from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Flowers will also be also be dropped into the harbor remembering the loss of Iraqi family and friends.
Additional information will follow
as the program is finalized
From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-Greece: New elections due as pro-austerity coalition talks fail
Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.
***From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight
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
Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight, Fortress, London 1988, pp.497, £6.95.
Although the main thrust of this book deals with the last half dozen years and hence lies outside the scope of this magazine, it does include a preliminary sketch on the history of the labour movement in Liverpool and one or two hints about the part played in it by the Trotskyists.
Appendices 4 and 5 contain matter supplied in interviews by Jimmy Deane and Tommy Birchall. Along with several interesting details we are told that Charles Martinson, who later stood as an RCP candidate in the council elections, left the Communist Party when he was in the International Brigade over the attacks made on the POUM, and joined the Trotskyists when he got back to Britain.
Such items as these supplied by these veterans stand in marked contrast to what appears in Taffe and Mulhearn’s text whenever it touches on that time. Thus we are told (p.34) that already in 1938 Ted Grant was the “theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain” There is no mention at all of D.D. Harber’s Militant group that Deane and Birchall joined to begin with and to which Grant belonged himself, that it was Gerry Healy who brought the Liverpool youth into the WIL, or that Ralph Lee, who had converted Grant to Trotskyism whilst still in South Africa, was far more prominent as a theoretician in the WIL to begin with than was Grant. And Haston and Tearse do not merit a mention at all.
A quick recourse to Trotsky’s Stalin School of Falsification should convince the writers how little credit they gain from this attitude to history.
Al Richardson
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
Peter Taffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City That Dared to Fight, Fortress, London 1988, pp.497, £6.95.
Although the main thrust of this book deals with the last half dozen years and hence lies outside the scope of this magazine, it does include a preliminary sketch on the history of the labour movement in Liverpool and one or two hints about the part played in it by the Trotskyists.
Appendices 4 and 5 contain matter supplied in interviews by Jimmy Deane and Tommy Birchall. Along with several interesting details we are told that Charles Martinson, who later stood as an RCP candidate in the council elections, left the Communist Party when he was in the International Brigade over the attacks made on the POUM, and joined the Trotskyists when he got back to Britain.
Such items as these supplied by these veterans stand in marked contrast to what appears in Taffe and Mulhearn’s text whenever it touches on that time. Thus we are told (p.34) that already in 1938 Ted Grant was the “theoretician and principal leader of Trotskyism in Britain” There is no mention at all of D.D. Harber’s Militant group that Deane and Birchall joined to begin with and to which Grant belonged himself, that it was Gerry Healy who brought the Liverpool youth into the WIL, or that Ralph Lee, who had converted Grant to Trotskyism whilst still in South Africa, was far more prominent as a theoretician in the WIL to begin with than was Grant. And Haston and Tearse do not merit a mention at all.
A quick recourse to Trotsky’s Stalin School of Falsification should convince the writers how little credit they gain from this attitude to history.
Al Richardson
Victory To The Greek Workers!-Take The State Power Now And Build A Socialist Future
Markin capsule comment:
Victory To The Greek Workers!-Build Workers Councils In Every City And Town –Arm The Workers Against State And Golden Dawn Attacks-Take The State Power Now And Build Socialism! Later It May Be Too Late- Start Reading Lenin And Trotsky Like Crazy They Knew How To Make A Revolution!
Victory To The Greek Workers!-Build Workers Councils In Every City And Town –Arm The Workers Against State And Golden Dawn Attacks-Take The State Power Now And Build Socialism! Later It May Be Too Late- Start Reading Lenin And Trotsky Like Crazy They Knew How To Make A Revolution!
From The Archives Of The "Spartacist “ Journal-The Founding of the Trotskyist Group of Greece
Click on the headline to link to the article described above
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and poltical questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
Spartacist English edition No. 59
Spring 2006
The Founding of the Trotskyist Group of Greece
For A Leninist Party in Greece! For a Socialist Federation of the Balkans!
The following was published in Greek in November 2004 and first printed in English in Workers Vanguard No. 838, 10 December 2004.
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is pleased to announce the founding of the Trotskyist Group of Greece as a sympathizing section. The Greek comrades were won to the program of the ICL over a period of time through debate over programmatic differences and testing our agreement in common work.
The first contact with the ICL was made in 1995 by Spiros, a leader of the Socialist Workingmen’s Organization (SOE), which split in 1994 from the Stalinophobic fake-Trotskyist Morenoite tendency. In 1996 the majority of the SOE founded the Revolutionary Workers Communist Organization (KOEE). In January 1999, Spiros resigned from the KOEE and began to correspond with the ICL, which had been sending literature to the KOEE since 1998. In May-June 1999, the KOEE leadership purged elements perceived as sympathetic to the ICL when our principled opposition to imperialist war against Serbia found a hearing among some members. Some of those thus expelled undertook to study the ICL program and in March 2000 formed an informal discussion group. In January 2001 the members of this study circle wrote to a group of ex-members of the Communist League-Workers Power (KSEE), a 1995 split-off from the SOE, and in March 2001 constituted a discussion group with these ex-KSEE members.
The Trotskyist Group of Greece was founded by comrades who fought on the question of women’s oppression in Greece and split from Spiros primarily over the need to champion the rights of Greece’s oppressed minorities, a crucial question for a Leninist-Trotskyist organization in a Balkan country.
The ICL’s record of fighting against counterrevolution in the DDR [East Germany] was central to the recruitment of the TGG comrades. In the “Agreement for Common Work” printed below, we make clear that we stand counterposed to organizations like the Socialist Workers Party (SEK—affiliated to the British SWP), International Workers Left (DEA—ISO) and the Taaffeite Xekinima, which backed Yeltsin’s counterrevolution in the Soviet Union in 1991-1992 and, in the latter case, even had supporters present on Yeltsin’s barricades. While preparing for a class on capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, one of the Greek comrades wrote in June 2000:
“I studied anew Trotsky’s books The Class Nature of the Soviet Union, The Revolution Betrayed and the ‘Declaration of Principles’ of the ICL. Thereafter, together with our own discussions I consider that the positions of the ICL on the question of Afghanistan are consistent with our ideology and I agree with them on the basis of the defense of a bureaucratically degenerated workers state against the threat of the bourgeois counterrevolution.
“In regard to the question of China, what I consider applies is what Trotsky maintained in 1933, when he fought against the conception that the bureaucracy had already destroyed the Soviet workers state: Trotskyists judge that situation as dangerous but not desperate and they consider it an act of cowardice to announce that the revolutionary fight has been lost before the fight and without a fight.”
In November 2000, another comrade left the KSEE after fighting in that organization for the position of defending China as a deformed workers state.
On the National Question
The Balkan peninsula is a region with myriad interpenetrated peoples and oppressed minorities. An equitable resolution of the national question in the Balkans requires a socialist federation. The ICL recognizes that the question of Macedonia is a test of the authenticity of any group claiming to be internationalist in Greece. The TGG defends the national rights of the Macedonian minority in Greece, including their right to set up their own state or unite with the existing state of Macedonia. For full democratic rights for national minorities in Greece! For a Balkan socialist federation!
On this basis we were won to the ICL’s program, strongly opposing Greek national chauvinism, following in Trotsky’s footsteps in his discussion with the Archio-Marxists on the Macedonian question:
“It’s not our task to organize nationalist uprisings. We merely say that if the Macedonians want it, we will then side with them, that they should be allowed to decide, and we will also support their decision. What disturbs me is not so much the question of the Macedonian peasants, but rather whether there isn’t a touch of chauvinist poison in Greek workers. That is very dangerous. For us, who are for a Balkan federation of soviet states, it is all the same if Macedonia belongs to this federation as an autonomous whole or part of another state. However, if the Macedonians are oppressed by the bourgeois government, or feel that they are oppressed, we must give them support.”
— Leon Trotsky, “A Discussion on Greece,”
Spring 1932, in Writings of Leon Trotsky Supplement (1929-33) (Pathfinder, 1979)
The split inside the group in Greece came to a head over Spiros’ refusal to recognize and fight against the national oppression of the Arvanites—an Orthodox Christian minority of Albanian descent who migrated to what is now Greece during the Middle Ages. The Arvanites have been forcibly Hellenized and face hideous discrimination and punishments even for speaking their own language in public.
To simply mention that national minorities exist in Greece is not merely taboo, it carries the risk of prosecution. In 2001, Vlach activist Sotiris Bletsas was dragged through the courts for distributing a leaflet that stated there are five linguistic minorities in Greece. Bletsas’ acquittal after an appeal is regarded as a landmark legal decision because it tacitly accepts that Arvanitika, Vlach, Macedonian, Turkish and Pomak are spoken on Greek soil. We defended Bletsas against the Greek bourgeois state in our intervention during the Polytechnic demonstrations in 2001.
Under capitalist rule, anti-Roma [Gypsy] racism has been rife throughout the Balkans. In Greece, 137 Roma were forced to move from their houses which were located in the vicinity of the Olympic Stadium construction site. Roma, along with Albanian immigrants, have increasingly been the victims of brutal police violence. One Albanian was murdered and around 100 injured after a football match between Greece and Albania in early September, and racist mobs attacked Albanians in several cities, including Athens and Thessaloniki. Albanian immigrants in Greece number around one million people. Immigrants are not merely victims of racist terror but an integral part of the proletariat, which confirms the importance of our call for the workers movement to defend immigrants and to fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. The defense of the rights of oppressed nationalities and immigrants is the only means by which the proletariat, consisting of workers of different ethnicities, can be united in the struggle for socialist revolution.
Another key question for revolutionaries in Greece is combatting anti-Turkish Greek chauvinism in regard to Cyprus, as we state in the “Agreement for Common Work.” Any proletarian, internationalist perspective for Cyprus needs to begin with the call for the immediate withdrawal of all the Greek troops from Cyprus, as well as the Turkish army, the British troops and bases and the UN contingent!
The Greek Orthodox church is a central pillar of the Greek capitalist order and fuels national chauvinism, directed particularly against Turkish people and against all Muslims, enforcing the ties between the Greek working class and its exploiters. An example of the sinister, chauvinist role of the Church was seen in 2000, when proposals by the then-PASOK government that would have removed the documenting of a person’s religion on national identity cards were met with reactionary mobilizations led by the Orthodox clergy. We are for the separation of church and state!
For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The main institution for the oppression of women is the family. For the ruling class, the family serves as the vehicle for transmitting private property from one generation to the next while serving in general as a mechanism for regimenting the population through the inculcation of conservative social values. Thus, the liberation of women cannot be achieved without the abolition of the system of private property. The expropriation of the bourgeoisie through proletarian revolution and the extension of that revolution to the more advanced industrial countries, establishing the material foundations for a socialist society of material abundance, will lay the basis for the replacement of the family.
In Greece, women did not have the right to vote until 1956, while the dowry was only formally abolished in 1986 and in reality still exists. Although abortion was legalized (with severe restrictions) in 1986, it is difficult to obtain, particularly for teenagers and poor women. We are for free abortion on demand!
Following the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, women workers in Greece, as elsewhere, have been those most affected by the capitalists’ attacks on the working masses. Working mothers have faced the closure of public nurseries and kindergartens. We fight for free, quality health care and for free, 24-hour childcare.
Greek society is extremely homophobic, as was demonstrated recently by the case of the Mega Channel TV broadcaster, which was fined €100,000 for showing a gay kiss in its Close Your Eyes series. In counterposition to the homophobic Greek left, we seek to act as a Leninist tribune of the oppressed and defend the democratic rights of homosexuals, including their right to marriage and to have children. All consensual forms of sexuality should be private, and the state or church must not intervene. We call for “state and church out of the bedroom.”
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
The Greek Communist Party (KKE) is a mass reformist party with major influence and roots in the working class. Unlike the Stalinophobic Greek fake Trotskyists, we do not ignore the KKE, but seek to win its working-class base to the genuine communism of Lenin and Trotsky. As we wrote in Workers Vanguard No. 565 (11 December 1992):
“The KKE is the historic mass party of the Greek working class. Its partisan struggle against the Nazi wartime occupation and in the civil war that broke out in 1944 gave it great authority. That authority was duly abused to block the seizure of power by the working class at the end of the war, when the Communist Party, as in France and Italy, made peace with the bourgeoisie, disarmed the working class and entered into a popular-front capitalist government to rebuild the Greek capitalist state machine. This 1945 betrayal did not prevent the bourgeoisie, aided and abetted by British and U.S. imperialism, from turning on the Communists, renewing the civil war and slaughtering thousands in a campaign designed to break the potential for working-class revolution.
“The defeat of the KKE-led forces in 1949, conforming to Stalin’s postwar settlement with Churchill that gave Greece to imperialism, paved the way for a series of rightist regimes culminating in the infamous colonels’ dictatorship of 1967-74. Despite this history, the goal of the KKE has remained to find its way back into the corridors of capitalist power.”
While the KKE is a mass reformist workers party, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) is a bourgeois-populist formation and has been so from its foundation. In contrast to elements on the Greek left, such as the Cliffites, we reject on principle any political support to this party of the class enemy.
The Greek comrades worked together with comrades from the ICL long before the section was founded. In this collaboration we produced a number of leaflets, translating key articles—e.g., “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program,” “The Bankruptcy of ‘New Class’ Theories,” “Women’s Liberation and the Struggle Against Imperialist Subjugation” and others. We wrote a statement in defense of the arrested anarchists and other protesters in Thessaloniki in 2003 against state repression. We defend and call for the immediate release of all those jailed in the roundup of the ELA and “17 November” groups [two groups that grew out of opposition to the rule of the military junta in Greece from 1967-74; they generally targeted representatives of the bourgeois state and imperialism]. When the oppressed act against the bourgeoisie and its state, we defend them against capitalist repression; however, we oppose the desperate petty-bourgeois strategy of individual terrorism, which is antithetical to the task of rendering the proletariat conscious that it is the only class with the historic interest and social force to smash capitalist exploitation.
The comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece, section of the ICL, are committed to building a party that represents the interests of the multiethnic working class and champions the rights of all the oppressed—women, homosexuals, youth, immigrants and ethnic minorities. It is necessary to fight for the political independence of the proletariat in order to overthrow the capitalist order by successful proletarian revolution.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Agreement for Common Work Between Greek Comrades and the ICL (FI)
1. The current group in Greece originated from a split within a group that had been having discussions with the ICL since 1999. The reason for the split was a months-long fight over the national question—the defense of the rights of national minorities in Greece and opposition to Greek national chauvinism. There were previously fights with others in the original group about the Russian question, the centrality of the woman question in Greece, the general strike question and the party question. As an excuse for breaking with the ICL over these questions, a minority of the group cynically accused the ICL of “centrism” and “chauvinism” when the bombing against Afghanistan began in October 2001 (International Internal Bulletin No. 54).
2. Comrades of the Greek group came to the politics of the ICL through fights and subsequent splits centered on the Russian question. Two members had split from the [ex-Morenoite] Communist League/Workers Power group over the defense of the Chinese deformed workers state, while another comrade of the original group wrote a document supporting the intervention of the ICL into the DDR in 1989-90. Another comrade of the current group came from the Greek Communist Party. Given the influence that the CP has in the Greek working class, it is the main obstacle, so it is very important for the future of the group that an ex-member of the CP is one of the Greek comrades. The group stands for the unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states—China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba—and for proletarian political revolution against the bureaucracy. We came to agree with the ICL’s analysis of the collapse of Stalinism in East Europe through studying the “Documents and Discussion on the Collapse of Stalinism” by Seymour and St. John in Spartacist No. 45-46 (Winter 1990-91), on which a comrade of the ICL gave a presentation. The Greek group agrees with the position of the ICL on Afghanistan, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan.” There is initial agreement with the ICL’s position on Poland, although it has not been discussed in the current group. We reject the Stalinophobia of the anti-communist Greek pseudo-Trotskyists who refuse to intervene into the Greek Communist Party—a mass pro-Soviet Stalinist party that has the support of the most advanced sections of the Greek working class and youth.
3. Greece is a Balkan country, and it is the only Balkan country to which the October Revolution did not extend. And the Greek capitalist state is the only one in the Balkans that does not recognize any national minority. A Trotskyist group in Greece must fight against Greek chauvinism and defend the rights of national minorities—which are forcibly Hellenized—the Macedonians, Vlachs, Pomaks, Turks, Cham (Muslim) Albanians and the Arvanites, etc., including the right of self-determination, especially for the Macedonian and Albanian minorities. It is also important to defend the rights of the persecuted Roma people. The comrades fight against Greek chauvinist poison inside the working class. The resolution of the myriad national questions in the Balkans requires a socialist federation of the Balkans.
4. A Trotskyist group must be a Leninist “tribune of the people.” And for Greece, where the ultra-reactionary Orthodox church has enormous influence, the oppression of women is extreme. The Greek “holy trinity” of “homeland-religion-family” which the capitalist state promotes is strongly connected with the national and the woman questions. A central issue for Trotskyists must be the fight for the liberation of women through socialist revolution and opposition to women’s oppression. We fight for full democratic rights for homosexuals, in opposition to the male-chauvinist, homophobic Greek society and the Greek left. We are for the separation of church and state.
5. The Greek comrades stand for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. They have already carried out many interventions, both in common work with comrades of the ICL and by themselves, into immigrant demonstrations. Immigrants—Albanian, Kurd, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Russian, Iraqi, Palestinian, etc.—have become a key component of the proletariat in Greece and the Greek group has to fight for the unity of the proletariat against any kind of racism.
6. The group agrees with the position of the ICL on the recent war on Iraq and the Afghanistan war in 2001. The Greek group fought under the slogans: Defend Iraq against the imperialist attack of the U.S. and its allies! Down with the colonial occupation of Iraq! All American and allied troops out of the Near East now! We called for class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home in counterposition to the Greek left, which had a very parochial position: “No Greek participation in the Iraq war” and also against the pacifism of the antiwar movement “Stop the War.” We supported the blockade of the American Souda base and we intervened in the workers strikes against the war. We called for Greek troops out of Cyprus.
7. A key question confronting Trotskyists in Greece is the question of Cyprus and our internationalist, class-struggle opposition to the anti-Turkish chauvinism of the Greek bourgeoisie. We call for the immediate withdrawal of all Greek troops from the island. We also demand the withdrawal of the Turkish army, the UN contingent and the British troops and bases. Our fight is for a proletarian solution to the national question, which of necessity requires the revolutionary overthrow of the nationalist bourgeoisies in Nicosia/Lefkosa, Athens and Ankara.
8. The group agrees on the ICL’s analysis and thesis on Pabloism. We want to fight to forge a Greek section of the ICL. We have been contributing our monthly payment since May 2002. We accept the discipline of a democratic-centralist international. The International, according to Lenin and Trotsky, is the necessary tool for the fight against capitalism, for new October Revolutions and for the protection of national sections from alien class pressures. We fight against the pretenders to Trotskyism—the SWP, Taaffeites, etc.—who are an obstacle to the reforging of a Trotskyist party. We seek to build the party through splits and fusions, including from among the CP youth and the anarchist milieu.
9. Unlike the Stalinist Communist Party, which is a reformist party based on the industrial proletariat, PASOK is a bourgeois-populist political formation. While it has influence in the main trade-union federations in Greece (which are generally craft unions), PASOK’s existence is not dependent on the labor movement. PASOK’s origins are in the bourgeois Centre Party of George Papandreou—the father of PASOK founder Andreas—whose social base the party inherited. PASOK’s ideological underpinnings are illustrated by the party’s seminal 3 September [1974] founding Declaration, which combined hawkish Greek nationalism over the Cyprus issue with characteristic populist claims to represent all “dispossessed” Greek people, defined to include peasants, small businessmen, managers, etc. The 3 September Declaration is moreover one of the more leftist expressions of PASOK’s politics, as it is liberally spiced with some quasi-Marxist verbiage. This “left” face was, however, jettisoned within a few years of the party’s founding and any would-be “leftists” were soon expelled from the party. In contrast to elements of the Greek left, such as the Cliffites, we reject on principle any political support—including electoral support—to this party of the class enemy.
10. An important task is the reading of Workers Vanguard and other ICL propaganda and continuing the reading of Marxist classics for cadre development. We should study and learn from the long and complex history of the Greek Trotskyist movement (e.g., the Greek Archio-Marxists and the Communist League of America’s Greek newspaper) and make it available to the rest of the ICL. As Trotskyists in Greece, we have to study about the Greek Civil War/national question/Cyprus, as well as the Trotskyist movement and its split during World War II on the Nazi occupation. The comrades need to study the ICL’s statement on the imperialist bombing of Serbia and the Balkan slaughter and, with the help of the ICL, the national minorities in Greece as a part of the Balkans.
11. In order to accommodate this common work it is necessary to study the English language. It’s also necessary for comrades of the ICL to study Greek.
12. As a task we have to project some modest public work in interventions through regular sales to the student milieu. In opponent meetings and in demonstrations we have already participated in common work with the ICL in Greece and in London.
13. Until it is realistic for a comrade to be able to transfer to Greece, it would be helpful for the Greek group to get more frequent visits, of longer duration. As soon as possible we need a comrade to transfer to help in the building of the section and the organizing of our political work.
14. We look forward to producing propaganda related to the class struggle in Greek society in order to intervene to give flesh to the ICL program.
— approved at a joint meeting of the TGG and representatives of the International Executive Committee of the ICL, 23 September 2004
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of the Spartacist journal that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social and poltical questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Spartacist periodically throughout the year.
Spartacist English edition No. 59
Spring 2006
The Founding of the Trotskyist Group of Greece
For A Leninist Party in Greece! For a Socialist Federation of the Balkans!
The following was published in Greek in November 2004 and first printed in English in Workers Vanguard No. 838, 10 December 2004.
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is pleased to announce the founding of the Trotskyist Group of Greece as a sympathizing section. The Greek comrades were won to the program of the ICL over a period of time through debate over programmatic differences and testing our agreement in common work.
The first contact with the ICL was made in 1995 by Spiros, a leader of the Socialist Workingmen’s Organization (SOE), which split in 1994 from the Stalinophobic fake-Trotskyist Morenoite tendency. In 1996 the majority of the SOE founded the Revolutionary Workers Communist Organization (KOEE). In January 1999, Spiros resigned from the KOEE and began to correspond with the ICL, which had been sending literature to the KOEE since 1998. In May-June 1999, the KOEE leadership purged elements perceived as sympathetic to the ICL when our principled opposition to imperialist war against Serbia found a hearing among some members. Some of those thus expelled undertook to study the ICL program and in March 2000 formed an informal discussion group. In January 2001 the members of this study circle wrote to a group of ex-members of the Communist League-Workers Power (KSEE), a 1995 split-off from the SOE, and in March 2001 constituted a discussion group with these ex-KSEE members.
The Trotskyist Group of Greece was founded by comrades who fought on the question of women’s oppression in Greece and split from Spiros primarily over the need to champion the rights of Greece’s oppressed minorities, a crucial question for a Leninist-Trotskyist organization in a Balkan country.
The ICL’s record of fighting against counterrevolution in the DDR [East Germany] was central to the recruitment of the TGG comrades. In the “Agreement for Common Work” printed below, we make clear that we stand counterposed to organizations like the Socialist Workers Party (SEK—affiliated to the British SWP), International Workers Left (DEA—ISO) and the Taaffeite Xekinima, which backed Yeltsin’s counterrevolution in the Soviet Union in 1991-1992 and, in the latter case, even had supporters present on Yeltsin’s barricades. While preparing for a class on capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, one of the Greek comrades wrote in June 2000:
“I studied anew Trotsky’s books The Class Nature of the Soviet Union, The Revolution Betrayed and the ‘Declaration of Principles’ of the ICL. Thereafter, together with our own discussions I consider that the positions of the ICL on the question of Afghanistan are consistent with our ideology and I agree with them on the basis of the defense of a bureaucratically degenerated workers state against the threat of the bourgeois counterrevolution.
“In regard to the question of China, what I consider applies is what Trotsky maintained in 1933, when he fought against the conception that the bureaucracy had already destroyed the Soviet workers state: Trotskyists judge that situation as dangerous but not desperate and they consider it an act of cowardice to announce that the revolutionary fight has been lost before the fight and without a fight.”
In November 2000, another comrade left the KSEE after fighting in that organization for the position of defending China as a deformed workers state.
On the National Question
The Balkan peninsula is a region with myriad interpenetrated peoples and oppressed minorities. An equitable resolution of the national question in the Balkans requires a socialist federation. The ICL recognizes that the question of Macedonia is a test of the authenticity of any group claiming to be internationalist in Greece. The TGG defends the national rights of the Macedonian minority in Greece, including their right to set up their own state or unite with the existing state of Macedonia. For full democratic rights for national minorities in Greece! For a Balkan socialist federation!
On this basis we were won to the ICL’s program, strongly opposing Greek national chauvinism, following in Trotsky’s footsteps in his discussion with the Archio-Marxists on the Macedonian question:
“It’s not our task to organize nationalist uprisings. We merely say that if the Macedonians want it, we will then side with them, that they should be allowed to decide, and we will also support their decision. What disturbs me is not so much the question of the Macedonian peasants, but rather whether there isn’t a touch of chauvinist poison in Greek workers. That is very dangerous. For us, who are for a Balkan federation of soviet states, it is all the same if Macedonia belongs to this federation as an autonomous whole or part of another state. However, if the Macedonians are oppressed by the bourgeois government, or feel that they are oppressed, we must give them support.”
— Leon Trotsky, “A Discussion on Greece,”
Spring 1932, in Writings of Leon Trotsky Supplement (1929-33) (Pathfinder, 1979)
The split inside the group in Greece came to a head over Spiros’ refusal to recognize and fight against the national oppression of the Arvanites—an Orthodox Christian minority of Albanian descent who migrated to what is now Greece during the Middle Ages. The Arvanites have been forcibly Hellenized and face hideous discrimination and punishments even for speaking their own language in public.
To simply mention that national minorities exist in Greece is not merely taboo, it carries the risk of prosecution. In 2001, Vlach activist Sotiris Bletsas was dragged through the courts for distributing a leaflet that stated there are five linguistic minorities in Greece. Bletsas’ acquittal after an appeal is regarded as a landmark legal decision because it tacitly accepts that Arvanitika, Vlach, Macedonian, Turkish and Pomak are spoken on Greek soil. We defended Bletsas against the Greek bourgeois state in our intervention during the Polytechnic demonstrations in 2001.
Under capitalist rule, anti-Roma [Gypsy] racism has been rife throughout the Balkans. In Greece, 137 Roma were forced to move from their houses which were located in the vicinity of the Olympic Stadium construction site. Roma, along with Albanian immigrants, have increasingly been the victims of brutal police violence. One Albanian was murdered and around 100 injured after a football match between Greece and Albania in early September, and racist mobs attacked Albanians in several cities, including Athens and Thessaloniki. Albanian immigrants in Greece number around one million people. Immigrants are not merely victims of racist terror but an integral part of the proletariat, which confirms the importance of our call for the workers movement to defend immigrants and to fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. The defense of the rights of oppressed nationalities and immigrants is the only means by which the proletariat, consisting of workers of different ethnicities, can be united in the struggle for socialist revolution.
Another key question for revolutionaries in Greece is combatting anti-Turkish Greek chauvinism in regard to Cyprus, as we state in the “Agreement for Common Work.” Any proletarian, internationalist perspective for Cyprus needs to begin with the call for the immediate withdrawal of all the Greek troops from Cyprus, as well as the Turkish army, the British troops and bases and the UN contingent!
The Greek Orthodox church is a central pillar of the Greek capitalist order and fuels national chauvinism, directed particularly against Turkish people and against all Muslims, enforcing the ties between the Greek working class and its exploiters. An example of the sinister, chauvinist role of the Church was seen in 2000, when proposals by the then-PASOK government that would have removed the documenting of a person’s religion on national identity cards were met with reactionary mobilizations led by the Orthodox clergy. We are for the separation of church and state!
For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
The main institution for the oppression of women is the family. For the ruling class, the family serves as the vehicle for transmitting private property from one generation to the next while serving in general as a mechanism for regimenting the population through the inculcation of conservative social values. Thus, the liberation of women cannot be achieved without the abolition of the system of private property. The expropriation of the bourgeoisie through proletarian revolution and the extension of that revolution to the more advanced industrial countries, establishing the material foundations for a socialist society of material abundance, will lay the basis for the replacement of the family.
In Greece, women did not have the right to vote until 1956, while the dowry was only formally abolished in 1986 and in reality still exists. Although abortion was legalized (with severe restrictions) in 1986, it is difficult to obtain, particularly for teenagers and poor women. We are for free abortion on demand!
Following the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe, women workers in Greece, as elsewhere, have been those most affected by the capitalists’ attacks on the working masses. Working mothers have faced the closure of public nurseries and kindergartens. We fight for free, quality health care and for free, 24-hour childcare.
Greek society is extremely homophobic, as was demonstrated recently by the case of the Mega Channel TV broadcaster, which was fined €100,000 for showing a gay kiss in its Close Your Eyes series. In counterposition to the homophobic Greek left, we seek to act as a Leninist tribune of the oppressed and defend the democratic rights of homosexuals, including their right to marriage and to have children. All consensual forms of sexuality should be private, and the state or church must not intervene. We call for “state and church out of the bedroom.”
For a Revolutionary Workers Party!
The Greek Communist Party (KKE) is a mass reformist party with major influence and roots in the working class. Unlike the Stalinophobic Greek fake Trotskyists, we do not ignore the KKE, but seek to win its working-class base to the genuine communism of Lenin and Trotsky. As we wrote in Workers Vanguard No. 565 (11 December 1992):
“The KKE is the historic mass party of the Greek working class. Its partisan struggle against the Nazi wartime occupation and in the civil war that broke out in 1944 gave it great authority. That authority was duly abused to block the seizure of power by the working class at the end of the war, when the Communist Party, as in France and Italy, made peace with the bourgeoisie, disarmed the working class and entered into a popular-front capitalist government to rebuild the Greek capitalist state machine. This 1945 betrayal did not prevent the bourgeoisie, aided and abetted by British and U.S. imperialism, from turning on the Communists, renewing the civil war and slaughtering thousands in a campaign designed to break the potential for working-class revolution.
“The defeat of the KKE-led forces in 1949, conforming to Stalin’s postwar settlement with Churchill that gave Greece to imperialism, paved the way for a series of rightist regimes culminating in the infamous colonels’ dictatorship of 1967-74. Despite this history, the goal of the KKE has remained to find its way back into the corridors of capitalist power.”
While the KKE is a mass reformist workers party, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) is a bourgeois-populist formation and has been so from its foundation. In contrast to elements on the Greek left, such as the Cliffites, we reject on principle any political support to this party of the class enemy.
The Greek comrades worked together with comrades from the ICL long before the section was founded. In this collaboration we produced a number of leaflets, translating key articles—e.g., “Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program,” “The Bankruptcy of ‘New Class’ Theories,” “Women’s Liberation and the Struggle Against Imperialist Subjugation” and others. We wrote a statement in defense of the arrested anarchists and other protesters in Thessaloniki in 2003 against state repression. We defend and call for the immediate release of all those jailed in the roundup of the ELA and “17 November” groups [two groups that grew out of opposition to the rule of the military junta in Greece from 1967-74; they generally targeted representatives of the bourgeois state and imperialism]. When the oppressed act against the bourgeoisie and its state, we defend them against capitalist repression; however, we oppose the desperate petty-bourgeois strategy of individual terrorism, which is antithetical to the task of rendering the proletariat conscious that it is the only class with the historic interest and social force to smash capitalist exploitation.
The comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece, section of the ICL, are committed to building a party that represents the interests of the multiethnic working class and champions the rights of all the oppressed—women, homosexuals, youth, immigrants and ethnic minorities. It is necessary to fight for the political independence of the proletariat in order to overthrow the capitalist order by successful proletarian revolution.
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Agreement for Common Work Between Greek Comrades and the ICL (FI)
1. The current group in Greece originated from a split within a group that had been having discussions with the ICL since 1999. The reason for the split was a months-long fight over the national question—the defense of the rights of national minorities in Greece and opposition to Greek national chauvinism. There were previously fights with others in the original group about the Russian question, the centrality of the woman question in Greece, the general strike question and the party question. As an excuse for breaking with the ICL over these questions, a minority of the group cynically accused the ICL of “centrism” and “chauvinism” when the bombing against Afghanistan began in October 2001 (International Internal Bulletin No. 54).
2. Comrades of the Greek group came to the politics of the ICL through fights and subsequent splits centered on the Russian question. Two members had split from the [ex-Morenoite] Communist League/Workers Power group over the defense of the Chinese deformed workers state, while another comrade of the original group wrote a document supporting the intervention of the ICL into the DDR in 1989-90. Another comrade of the current group came from the Greek Communist Party. Given the influence that the CP has in the Greek working class, it is the main obstacle, so it is very important for the future of the group that an ex-member of the CP is one of the Greek comrades. The group stands for the unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states—China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba—and for proletarian political revolution against the bureaucracy. We came to agree with the ICL’s analysis of the collapse of Stalinism in East Europe through studying the “Documents and Discussion on the Collapse of Stalinism” by Seymour and St. John in Spartacist No. 45-46 (Winter 1990-91), on which a comrade of the ICL gave a presentation. The Greek group agrees with the position of the ICL on Afghanistan, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan.” There is initial agreement with the ICL’s position on Poland, although it has not been discussed in the current group. We reject the Stalinophobia of the anti-communist Greek pseudo-Trotskyists who refuse to intervene into the Greek Communist Party—a mass pro-Soviet Stalinist party that has the support of the most advanced sections of the Greek working class and youth.
3. Greece is a Balkan country, and it is the only Balkan country to which the October Revolution did not extend. And the Greek capitalist state is the only one in the Balkans that does not recognize any national minority. A Trotskyist group in Greece must fight against Greek chauvinism and defend the rights of national minorities—which are forcibly Hellenized—the Macedonians, Vlachs, Pomaks, Turks, Cham (Muslim) Albanians and the Arvanites, etc., including the right of self-determination, especially for the Macedonian and Albanian minorities. It is also important to defend the rights of the persecuted Roma people. The comrades fight against Greek chauvinist poison inside the working class. The resolution of the myriad national questions in the Balkans requires a socialist federation of the Balkans.
4. A Trotskyist group must be a Leninist “tribune of the people.” And for Greece, where the ultra-reactionary Orthodox church has enormous influence, the oppression of women is extreme. The Greek “holy trinity” of “homeland-religion-family” which the capitalist state promotes is strongly connected with the national and the woman questions. A central issue for Trotskyists must be the fight for the liberation of women through socialist revolution and opposition to women’s oppression. We fight for full democratic rights for homosexuals, in opposition to the male-chauvinist, homophobic Greek society and the Greek left. We are for the separation of church and state.
5. The Greek comrades stand for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. They have already carried out many interventions, both in common work with comrades of the ICL and by themselves, into immigrant demonstrations. Immigrants—Albanian, Kurd, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Russian, Iraqi, Palestinian, etc.—have become a key component of the proletariat in Greece and the Greek group has to fight for the unity of the proletariat against any kind of racism.
6. The group agrees with the position of the ICL on the recent war on Iraq and the Afghanistan war in 2001. The Greek group fought under the slogans: Defend Iraq against the imperialist attack of the U.S. and its allies! Down with the colonial occupation of Iraq! All American and allied troops out of the Near East now! We called for class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home in counterposition to the Greek left, which had a very parochial position: “No Greek participation in the Iraq war” and also against the pacifism of the antiwar movement “Stop the War.” We supported the blockade of the American Souda base and we intervened in the workers strikes against the war. We called for Greek troops out of Cyprus.
7. A key question confronting Trotskyists in Greece is the question of Cyprus and our internationalist, class-struggle opposition to the anti-Turkish chauvinism of the Greek bourgeoisie. We call for the immediate withdrawal of all Greek troops from the island. We also demand the withdrawal of the Turkish army, the UN contingent and the British troops and bases. Our fight is for a proletarian solution to the national question, which of necessity requires the revolutionary overthrow of the nationalist bourgeoisies in Nicosia/Lefkosa, Athens and Ankara.
8. The group agrees on the ICL’s analysis and thesis on Pabloism. We want to fight to forge a Greek section of the ICL. We have been contributing our monthly payment since May 2002. We accept the discipline of a democratic-centralist international. The International, according to Lenin and Trotsky, is the necessary tool for the fight against capitalism, for new October Revolutions and for the protection of national sections from alien class pressures. We fight against the pretenders to Trotskyism—the SWP, Taaffeites, etc.—who are an obstacle to the reforging of a Trotskyist party. We seek to build the party through splits and fusions, including from among the CP youth and the anarchist milieu.
9. Unlike the Stalinist Communist Party, which is a reformist party based on the industrial proletariat, PASOK is a bourgeois-populist political formation. While it has influence in the main trade-union federations in Greece (which are generally craft unions), PASOK’s existence is not dependent on the labor movement. PASOK’s origins are in the bourgeois Centre Party of George Papandreou—the father of PASOK founder Andreas—whose social base the party inherited. PASOK’s ideological underpinnings are illustrated by the party’s seminal 3 September [1974] founding Declaration, which combined hawkish Greek nationalism over the Cyprus issue with characteristic populist claims to represent all “dispossessed” Greek people, defined to include peasants, small businessmen, managers, etc. The 3 September Declaration is moreover one of the more leftist expressions of PASOK’s politics, as it is liberally spiced with some quasi-Marxist verbiage. This “left” face was, however, jettisoned within a few years of the party’s founding and any would-be “leftists” were soon expelled from the party. In contrast to elements of the Greek left, such as the Cliffites, we reject on principle any political support—including electoral support—to this party of the class enemy.
10. An important task is the reading of Workers Vanguard and other ICL propaganda and continuing the reading of Marxist classics for cadre development. We should study and learn from the long and complex history of the Greek Trotskyist movement (e.g., the Greek Archio-Marxists and the Communist League of America’s Greek newspaper) and make it available to the rest of the ICL. As Trotskyists in Greece, we have to study about the Greek Civil War/national question/Cyprus, as well as the Trotskyist movement and its split during World War II on the Nazi occupation. The comrades need to study the ICL’s statement on the imperialist bombing of Serbia and the Balkan slaughter and, with the help of the ICL, the national minorities in Greece as a part of the Balkans.
11. In order to accommodate this common work it is necessary to study the English language. It’s also necessary for comrades of the ICL to study Greek.
12. As a task we have to project some modest public work in interventions through regular sales to the student milieu. In opponent meetings and in demonstrations we have already participated in common work with the ICL in Greece and in London.
13. Until it is realistic for a comrade to be able to transfer to Greece, it would be helpful for the Greek group to get more frequent visits, of longer duration. As soon as possible we need a comrade to transfer to help in the building of the section and the organizing of our political work.
14. We look forward to producing propaganda related to the class struggle in Greek society in order to intervene to give flesh to the ICL program.
— approved at a joint meeting of the TGG and representatives of the International Executive Committee of the ICL, 23 September 2004
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