Click on the headline to link to updates from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. I will post important updates as they appear on that site.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupation Movement And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!
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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Peter Paul Markin comment (re-post December, 2011):
Recently my long time friend, Josh Breslin (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those old enough to recognize that name from half the alterative presses in this country, large and small, over the past forty years or so) sent me an e-mail the contents of which I have commented on in this space under the entry “General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale.” (See post below.)The substance of the piece was that Josh felt that the Occupy idea was ripe for the picking by those bourgeois political forces that were hovering around the movement lately looking like wolves ready to feast on an easy meal. Without going into detail here he also argued that there were some very Potemkin Village-like aspects of the Occupy Boston movement since the police raid on December 10th scattered the tribe. The most remarkable statement though, or at least the one which stuck in my mind after reading his e-mail, was his characterization of Occupy as “generals without an army.’’ That little twist has haunted me not a little since after some thought and some further investigation I find that statement to have some truth in it.
Now some readers of this post will dismiss the whole notion of generals, or at least the free-wheeling use of any military terms when speaking of the movement, out of hand. That would be unfortunate because that expression was merely a short-hand way for Josh to say what many people I have spoke to already sense. This “leaderless” movement has leaders, there is nothing wrong with leaders emerging if based on doing hard political work and winning authority, and that in a very important sense those fairly small numbers whose lives are now entwined with the Occupy movement are de facto leaders and that is just hard political realty. Period
And an equally hard fact is that through the thick and thin of committee meetings, working groups, “rump” General Assemblies (Josh’s word but there is also truth in that characterization as well) and other forms of actions (mainly small, very small) over the past month or so (and thus a mood that pre-dates the demise of Dewey Square) is that the Occupy movement has lost much steam. Some of this was, and should have been, expected. And perhaps with a better political focus here in Boston that may be turned around come spring. But the hard-headed reality is that a lot of possibly very good cadres are spinning their wheels with no forces (or not many) behind them. Others are just doing what comes naturally content to attend endless meetings, discuss endlessly, and let other hostile forces come in and pick those very good cadres clean. Ya, sometime Josh Breslin is clueless on stuff but on this on he is preaching to the converted.
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General Assembly Blues- A Cautionary Tale
Peter Paul Markin comment:
I had never seen my old friend Josh Breslin so irate (Joshua Lawrence Breslin for those who know him under that moniker through his various commentary columns in all kind alternative press operations over the past forty years or so). Or rather more correctly I had never read anything of his that practically steamed off the page, the computer screen page that early Monday morning (December 19, 2011, let’s see the time stamp, oh yes, 5:14 AM, Ya early, definitely early for Josh) when I was casually perusing my daily e-mail delete slaughter-house. It seems that he had attended an Occupy Boston General Assembly (GA) meeting the night before over at the hallowed Community Church on Boylston Street (hallowed in leftist circles, I had first gone there long ago to attend a commemoration program for Sacco and Vanzetti). Since the police raid on the Occupy camp at Dewey Square in the early morning hours of December 11th the GAs have been assembling helter-skelter at various locations from the Parkman Bandstand on the Common to various sympathetic indoor as winter sets in locations, mainly churches, in order to keep some continuity during these unsettled times.
At that meeting the main order of business was a simple proposal submitted by the OB Socialist Caucus, a loose group of organizationally-affiliated and unaffiliated people who identify themselves with the socialist cause. The gist of the proposal was to make a forthright statement that Occupy Boston was to be clearly identified, more clearly identified than in any previous document, as independent of the main bourgeois parties, the Democrats in particular, and by implication was not to be a front or voting cattle bloc for any particular organized political operation ready to move in like hungry wolves looking for an easy meal. This proposal never reached a vote, a yea or nay vote, that night because it was “blocked” well before such a vote could be taken by, as Josh called it in his e-mail, the “Rump” assembly (see said e-mail posted below, well the gist of it anyway). The Rump being a minority of those eighty or so brethren in attendance that evening whose maneuver in the consensus-addled GA world stopped the proposal in its tracks. This series of events triggered in Josh some kind of previously well-hidden verbal explosion about the trends that he had witnessed developing in the movement, and that had disturbed him previously. Naturally he had to send his old compadre Peter Paul his bilious e-mail as the first step in his “campaign” to get things off his chest.
A little explanation is in order to gauge the seriousness of Josh’s maddened impulse and, as well, for why I have taken the time to write this little commentary up and pushed it forward. Josh and I go back a long way, back to the summer of love in San Francisco in 1967 when I was on Captain Crunch’s merry prankster magical mystery tour freedom bus and I met Josh, then going under the moniker “Prince Of Love,” on Russian Hill in that town. Ya, I know, we were just a little too self-important on changing the name changed the person thing but that was the way it was. I was, for a while, known as Be-Bop Benny, among other names. He had, after just graduating from high school up in Olde Saco, Maine hitch-hiked across the country to see “what was happening.” We hit it off right away, probably because my being from North Adamsville here in Massachusetts we were the only New Englanders “on the bus,” even though I was a few years older. In any case our friendship survived through thick and thin, even despite his “stealing” my girl, Butterfly Swirl (okay, okay I will stop with the a. k. a’s), from right under my nose during the first few days we knew each other. Part of that thick and thin has been involvement in a long series of left-wing political struggles where we have not always seen eye to eye but have generally been “on the right of the angels.”
And that, roughly, brings us to the present. Along the way, for a number of reason that shall not detain us here, I increasingly came to socialist conclusions abut the nature of American society and the ways to change it. Josh, while always on the cutting edge of those same conclusions, never crossed over and has maintained a studied non-socialist radical position very similar to many that I have run into as the Occupy movement has gathered steam. Although, as a paid political commentator for various publications, he has always kept a certain skeptical distance from going overboard every time there is the slightest left breeze coming in over Boston Harbor. Until now.
As I have written elsewhere Josh, now retired, still likes to keep his hand in the mix and so has been working on a project that may turn into a book about the Occupy Boston experience. When he first he crossed the river from the wilds of Cambridge he held himself pretty aloof from the doings but soon became totally enmeshed in what was going on. I was, and still am, a lot more skeptical about where the winds are heading. Josh though spent some nights at Dewey Square and got involved in the camp life. He marched up and down the streets of Boston in every possible cause. Brought food and other goods to the site when he came over. Donated money and other resources to the efforts. He even told me that he washed dishes (once) to help out in the kitchen one day. And believe me in the old prankster days the Prince of Love was, well, too “important” to bow down and get his hands wet doing anything as lowly as dishes. So this new experiment (or rather a chance to make up for those youthful mistakes) really energized him.
So when Joshua Lawrence Breslin, on a darkened Monday morning, signals that something is wrong, something is politically wrong with the direction of the movement I listen up. And, perhaps, you should too.
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Below I have placed the substance of the e-mail that Josh Breslin sent to me that fateful Monday December 19th morning. This is my summarization of the document which was written by him in our usual “code” and with his usual excessive use of expletives to normal ears so that it would be not understandable to “outsiders.” In short I have edited it as best I could while retaining the political direction. If Josh doesn’t like it then he can, well, sue me. Ha ha. Or better, write his own damn translation. Peter Paul Markin.
December 19, 2011, 5:14 AM to PeterPaulMarkin@yahoo.com:
Pee Pee, [The reader is hereby warned no to make anything out of this old-time nickname, old time going back to childhood North Adamsville working-class neighborhood days, or else.] You won’t believe what those arrogant airheads did last night at the so-called GA. I call it, and you can quote me on this, the “Rump” like back in Oliver Cromwell’s time when a bunch of cronies controlled everything, or else. They “blocked” the proposal to have a clear statement of independence from the damn Democrats (and Republicans too) but we know who really wants in on this movement.
What they did was get together enough people to block the thing even though with a simple majority it could have gotten through. So much for democracy. For once you are right on this blocking and consensus b.s. Now when Miss Betty [Elizabeth Warren] comes a-courting she will have a field day. You and I have disagreed on many things but keeping the bourgeois parties the hell away from our movement (except maybe to do “Jimmy Higgins” work putting up chairs or licking envelopes, stuff like that) has always been something that has united us ever since Chicago in 1968.
You should have heard the reasons given. Naturally the old chestnut- “we don’t want to alienate anyone” (anyone to the left of Genghis Khan, I guess). “It’s too negative.” Like the bourgeoisie gives a damn about negativity as long as they keep their moola and their power. “The statement we have already posted about transparency and independence is good enough” Like that flimsy one-size-fits-all statement has any political meaning at all. And it degenerated from there. I was so mad I had to walk out and get some fresh air.
I am far from giving up on this Occupy movement but in a lot of ways it really is like that guy, that homeless camper guy, I interviewed over at Dewey Square in early November when the weather got a little cold said. He said the place was a Potemkin Village. I thought he meant about people not staying there overnight. But now I think he meant the whole experiment. They, we, are generals without any army right now and nothing that is being done lately is calculated to break out from that situation. Were we this ruthlessly obtuse back in the days? I hope not- Josh
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- "America, Where Are You Now...."-Stepphenwolf's "Monster" –For The Quebec Student Movement Struggle
Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Steppenwolf performing their classic anti-war song (and plaintive plea)Monster.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
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Markin comment on the lyrics here:
Steppenwolf was one of the most political of the rock groups brought forth by the new musical sensibility of the counter-cultural movement in the mid to late 1960s. The narrative here in Monster reads like a capsule history of the American experience up until the 1960s. And a powerful call, a call that should resonate today, for the older generation (now us) to come and help the young fight against the monster of American (and today Canadian) imperialistic capitalism that is driving us all to the bottom. A theme song for all the struggle movements springing up around this good, green earth.
In this series, presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By, I will post some songs that I think will help us get through the “dog days” of the struggle for our communist future. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this would not be acceptable for our political prospects, it will suffice for our purposes here.
********
Markin comment on the lyrics here:
Steppenwolf was one of the most political of the rock groups brought forth by the new musical sensibility of the counter-cultural movement in the mid to late 1960s. The narrative here in Monster reads like a capsule history of the American experience up until the 1960s. And a powerful call, a call that should resonate today, for the older generation (now us) to come and help the young fight against the monster of American (and today Canadian) imperialistic capitalism that is driving us all to the bottom. A theme song for all the struggle movements springing up around this good, green earth.
If The Frame Fits- Susan Hayward’s “I Want To Live!”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Susan Hayward’s “I Want To Live!"
DVD Review
I Want To Live!, starring Susan Hayward, directed by Robert Wise, 1959
Normally one would not expect an actress like Susan Hayward, whose roles were mostly romantic , demure leading ladies in some mixed- up love affair to shine in the film under review, I Want To Live!, but it is just enough against type to have been Oscar-worthy. Here Ms. Hayward plays Barbara Graham, a party girl (nice, right) who gets mixed up, mixed up big time, in a heist that went wrong, badly wrong, leading to the murder of an elderly woman.
Life had not dealt bout a square hand to Barbara so she wound up, like many another guy or gal from the wrong side of the tracks doing as she said “the best she could.” She got mixed up with some wrong gees and as mentioned above got mixed up with a murder. And as if, once again, to prove that there is no honor among thieves, they set out to place the frame on her.
And with her devil take the hinter post attitude she worms her way into the death penalty, the death penalty in a time when that act was carried out quite frequently including to women.
That is where the acting part of the film really takes off and Ms. Hayward earns her Oscar. From that wayward party girl she turns thoughtful and then terrified at the state-imposed death that stares her right in the face. There is some controversy over the details; the guilt or innocence of Barbara Graham, of the actual case that the film is based on but Ms. Hayward’s performance should make one think twice about the question of the death penalty as state policy.
DVD Review
I Want To Live!, starring Susan Hayward, directed by Robert Wise, 1959
Normally one would not expect an actress like Susan Hayward, whose roles were mostly romantic , demure leading ladies in some mixed- up love affair to shine in the film under review, I Want To Live!, but it is just enough against type to have been Oscar-worthy. Here Ms. Hayward plays Barbara Graham, a party girl (nice, right) who gets mixed up, mixed up big time, in a heist that went wrong, badly wrong, leading to the murder of an elderly woman.
Life had not dealt bout a square hand to Barbara so she wound up, like many another guy or gal from the wrong side of the tracks doing as she said “the best she could.” She got mixed up with some wrong gees and as mentioned above got mixed up with a murder. And as if, once again, to prove that there is no honor among thieves, they set out to place the frame on her.
And with her devil take the hinter post attitude she worms her way into the death penalty, the death penalty in a time when that act was carried out quite frequently including to women.
That is where the acting part of the film really takes off and Ms. Hayward earns her Oscar. From that wayward party girl she turns thoughtful and then terrified at the state-imposed death that stares her right in the face. There is some controversy over the details; the guilt or innocence of Barbara Graham, of the actual case that the film is based on but Ms. Hayward’s performance should make one think twice about the question of the death penalty as state policy.
Out In The 1950s Crime Noir Night-French-Style- Jean Gabin’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Jean Gabin’s Touches Pas au Grisbi
DVD Review
Touchez Pas au Grisbi, starring Jean Gabin, 1954
Hey, I have been touting crime noir films for the past couple of years so why not review, as here with Jean Gabin’s 1954 Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a French crime noir in honor of, well, the name of the genre. And a later generation of French directors who went crazy for Hollywood gangster epics in such films as “Breathless” and Don’t Shoot The Piano Player. Especially when said this crime noir stars Jean Gabin, last reviewed here in a very different film, Children Of Paradise.
Well, let’s cut to the chase (literally, as this plot unfolds). It seems that long- time crime boss Max (Gabin) has pulled a caper (heist, okay) to set himself and his confederate Riton up for a well-deserved retirement from the rackets. And everything was going along just fine until old buddy Riton got a loose tongue over some show girl (played by a very young Jean Moreau) and spilled his guts out to her about how he could keep her in clover. Problem is that young showgirls are as fickle and calculating as any other woman mixed up with bad actuarial table criminals and she has another crime boss on the hook, one Angelo. Naturally she mentions the loot to Angelo and sets off an explosion of maneuvers by him to get the kale, and by Max to keep it.
The cat and mouse of this pair drives the rest of the movie with old Max showing one and all why he was (and is) the king of the hill, even if he may have lost a step or two. Angelo’s big mistake (besides thinking that Max was over the hill and easy pickings) was kidnapping Riton, an act that set Max on a fight to the finish. See the film to get the details of that fight to the finish. What is important though is the use by the director here of the many tough guy moves made by Hollywood gangsters in the heyday 1930s including a few off-hand beatings of opponent gangsters to get information, a few off-hand slaps at show girls (by Gabin of all people but that is part of being a boss and no chump), and a car chase, natch complete with machine guns ta-ta-ta-ing. Ya, the French picked up the genre very nicely. Gabin might be a little too suave (except for those off-hand girl slaps) to be an American 1930s gangster but he fit the more demure 1950s just right.
DVD Review
Touchez Pas au Grisbi, starring Jean Gabin, 1954
Hey, I have been touting crime noir films for the past couple of years so why not review, as here with Jean Gabin’s 1954 Touchez Pas au Grisbi, a French crime noir in honor of, well, the name of the genre. And a later generation of French directors who went crazy for Hollywood gangster epics in such films as “Breathless” and Don’t Shoot The Piano Player. Especially when said this crime noir stars Jean Gabin, last reviewed here in a very different film, Children Of Paradise.
Well, let’s cut to the chase (literally, as this plot unfolds). It seems that long- time crime boss Max (Gabin) has pulled a caper (heist, okay) to set himself and his confederate Riton up for a well-deserved retirement from the rackets. And everything was going along just fine until old buddy Riton got a loose tongue over some show girl (played by a very young Jean Moreau) and spilled his guts out to her about how he could keep her in clover. Problem is that young showgirls are as fickle and calculating as any other woman mixed up with bad actuarial table criminals and she has another crime boss on the hook, one Angelo. Naturally she mentions the loot to Angelo and sets off an explosion of maneuvers by him to get the kale, and by Max to keep it.
The cat and mouse of this pair drives the rest of the movie with old Max showing one and all why he was (and is) the king of the hill, even if he may have lost a step or two. Angelo’s big mistake (besides thinking that Max was over the hill and easy pickings) was kidnapping Riton, an act that set Max on a fight to the finish. See the film to get the details of that fight to the finish. What is important though is the use by the director here of the many tough guy moves made by Hollywood gangsters in the heyday 1930s including a few off-hand beatings of opponent gangsters to get information, a few off-hand slaps at show girls (by Gabin of all people but that is part of being a boss and no chump), and a car chase, natch complete with machine guns ta-ta-ta-ing. Ya, the French picked up the genre very nicely. Gabin might be a little too suave (except for those off-hand girl slaps) to be an American 1930s gangster but he fit the more demure 1950s just right.
Monday, May 28, 2012
A Remembrance Worthy Of The Day- A Memorial Day for Peace-Join The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace In Boston-Today 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
Monday, May 28, 2012.
1:00pm until 3:00pm.
Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, Boston
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, 1-3 p.m.
Location: Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., 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 Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and 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.
PROGRAM
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
Program
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Merrimack Valley People for Peace
Rev. Lara Hoke, Opening
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover
Secretary VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Pat Scanlon, Welcome
Coordinator, VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Lee VanderLann, In memory of our friend Capt. Paul Brailsford
Executive Committee VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
VFP Samantha Smith Chapter
Bradford Adams, A short rememberance of my friend Zalmai
VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Afghanistan Veteran (2002-2003)
Kevin Lucey, Return to Hell
Parent of Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey USMC
Si Kahn, Song – Hunter –(Music from CD)
Bob Funke, What Memorial Day Means to Me
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Bonnie Gorman, Suicide: The hidden wounds of war
Military Families Speak Out,
Gold Star Families Vietnam
VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Nancy Wrenn, Are we finished with war yet?
Mass Peace Action
Webb Nichols, Poet
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Ahmad & Leyla AlZubaydi
Babylon Restaurant, Lowell
Iraqi Refugees
Farouq Ali
Arab Spring and Hypocrisy of the West
Iraqi Refugee
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Flower Ceremony
Rev. Ralph Galen, Closing
Community Church of Lawrence
Jesse Perrier, Taps
Executive Committee Smedley D. Butler Brigade
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
Monday, May 28, 2012.
1:00pm until 3:00pm.
Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park, Boston
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, 1-3 p.m.
Location: Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., 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 Veterans For Peace, Smedley Butler Brigade, Chapter 9 and 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.
PROGRAM
Memorial Day for Peace
May 28, 2012 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Christopher Columbus Park, 105 Atlantic Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
Program
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Merrimack Valley People for Peace
Rev. Lara Hoke, Opening
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Andover
Secretary VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Pat Scanlon, Welcome
Coordinator, VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Lee VanderLann, In memory of our friend Capt. Paul Brailsford
Executive Committee VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
VFP Samantha Smith Chapter
Bradford Adams, A short rememberance of my friend Zalmai
VFP, Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Afghanistan Veteran (2002-2003)
Kevin Lucey, Return to Hell
Parent of Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey USMC
Si Kahn, Song – Hunter –(Music from CD)
Bob Funke, What Memorial Day Means to Me
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Bonnie Gorman, Suicide: The hidden wounds of war
Military Families Speak Out,
Gold Star Families Vietnam
VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Nancy Wrenn, Are we finished with war yet?
Mass Peace Action
Webb Nichols, Poet
Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Ahmad & Leyla AlZubaydi
Babylon Restaurant, Lowell
Iraqi Refugees
Farouq Ali
Arab Spring and Hypocrisy of the West
Iraqi Refugee
Brian Quirk, Scottish Bag Pipes
Flower Ceremony
Rev. Ralph Galen, Closing
Community Church of Lawrence
Jesse Perrier, Taps
Executive Committee Smedley D. Butler Brigade
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Trotskyism and Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War -In Honor Of The Spanish-Bolshevik-Leninist
Trotskyism and Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 828, 11 June 2004 and 829, 9 July 2004
The following is a slightly edited presentation by Spartacist speaker Adrian Ortega at a Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth Club public educational in New York City on April 3.
Part One
Anarchism today has become fashionable among youth and left-liberal intellectual circles. Refracted in a myriad of ways, from "Green radicalism" to "Platformism," these youth seek to oppose a social reality dictated by an economic system based on the production of profits for the handful of capitalists. The emergence of anarchism as a prevalent ideology among radicalized youth today is a reflection of what we Marxists understand as a global retrogression in political consciousness following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet degenerated workers state and the deformed workers states of East Europe.
As the title of this forum indicates, this presentation will center on the counterposition between two political worldviews, Marxism and its contemporary continuation, Trotskyism, and anarchism, which played a decisive role in the events of the Spanish Civil War.
The Civil War (which lasted from approximately 1936 to 1939) represented the last opportunity for the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and open the road to socialism in Spain before the rise of the Francoist military dictatorship that would last more than 30 years and kill hundreds of thousands. In the key industrial center of Spain, Catalonia, armed workers organized militias and factory committees that shook the foundations of the capitalist order, private property and the state. But the most radical mass leaders of this movement (the anarchist FAI and the National Confederation of Labor [CNT] it controlled, and the centrist Workers Party of Marxist Unification [POUM]) along with the rest of the left (the Socialist Workers Party [PSOE] and the Stalinist Communist Party [PCE]) showed their political incapacity to lead the working class toward emancipation. It was only small groups (like the Friends of Durruti anarchists and the Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninists) who sought during the barricades fighting in May 1937 to bring revolutionary leadership to the proletariat. But these groups were not able to overcome their own limitations—centrally the Trotskyists' lack of authority among the proletariat and the Friends of Durruti's incapacity to break with an anarchist worldview—and lead the workers to power. Had there been a successful revolution in Spain, this would have drastically changed the shape of the world in which we live now.
This talk aims to explain why the strategic "mistakes" made by the anarchist leadership in the Spanish Civil War were not only "mistakes" but the logical conclusion of a program that inherently rests on class collaboration—i.e., a political alliance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which constrains and subordinates the workers and their struggles to the framework of capitalism. I would like to give a few initial considerations regarding the political foundations of both currents.
Anarchists claim to fight for a classless society, and some of them understand the centrality of the proletariat in such a task, just as we Marxists do. However, they reject any form of "authority" and consequently oppose the existence of any state (meaning the use of organized violence to protect the interests of the class in power). They also renounce concepts like leadership and centralization and counterpose to them "autonomy" or "spontaneity." On the contrary, Marxists explain that "Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society" (Friedrich Engels, "On Authority" [1872]). In other words, we don't blindly condemn authority as an abstract concept divorced from a certain social and economic reality. Most of the world today is based on the authority of a property-owning class, the bourgeoisie, exercised over the working masses through the instrumentality of a state, the capitalist state. We oppose and work to destroy that authority and the state that helps preserve it. But we welcome the authority of mass organizations of workers and other oppressed sectors in society, like workers councils (soviets), which would coordinate and centralize the proletariat's efforts to create a society based on workers democracy and prevent the destruction of the gains resulting from a social revolution—a workers state. Through eliminating the irrationality of capitalist production, economic planning under a workers state would allow the free development of productive forces and eliminate the material basis for social inequality. This would have to be a joint enterprise of the world proletariat and is the only way to eliminate the state and create a society based on "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
The anarchist abstract condemnation of "authority" has concrete ramifications on the organizational level. Anarchist organizations are decentralized entities that claim to exercise no authority over their members. This in itself is a complete fallacy, which the events in the Civil War completely prove. Marxists, on the contrary, explain the necessity of a centralized, democratic organization of the working class that groups together the proletariat's most conscious elements, works to raise the consciousness of the working class as a whole and exercises leadership, including leading the decisive struggles for workers power; a vanguard party that embraces the highest levels of democracy in its internal life and intervenes in struggle as a unified, conscious political force.
The Spanish Revolution
On 17 July 1936, General Francisco Franco assumed command of the Moors and Legionnaires of Morocco under the banner of the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic church. With the support of the most reactionary forces in Spain, Franco launched a military coup to overthrow the Republican government of president Manuel Azaña, which was a liberal bourgeois government, to replace it with a military dictatorship. This was to enforce through blood the interests of the propertied classes over the workers and peasants, and to put an end to decades of highly militant labor struggles in Spain. Azaña hid the advancement of Franco's army from the working class and made frantic and unsuccessful attempts to contact the military leaders and to come to an agreement with them. The Spanish proletariat, which had just gone through two years of harsh state repression under a right-wing government, distrusted the Azaña government and took matters into their own hands. They independently mobilized to gather weapons and build barricades to fight the bourgeois pro-monarchist reaction.
Some of the most epic battles between the Francoist forces and the armed proletariat started almost concurrently in major cities like Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. I would like to read excerpts from Abel Paz's book, Durruti: The People Armed (1976), in his chapter "Barcelona in Flames":
"On July 19, 1936, at 5 A.M. a new page in the revolution was beginning to the sound of gunfire, the crackling of machine guns which were mixed with the deafening sound of factory sirens, informing the people that the decisive hour had arrived. The seventh artillery regiment had left San Andres Park, divided, and was trying to reach the center of the capital by two different routes. But at the crossing of the ‘Diagonal' the first detachment ran into a group of workers armed with grenades and pistols, which blocked its advance....
"One part of the Montesa regiment followed by important military units of engineers, managed to slip into Marques del Duero Avenue (Paralelo) but was checked by a strong barricade put up by the workers of the Woodworkers' Union....
"At the same time, near the Plaza de Palacio, the dockworkers of the Barceloneta district had routed the Montana artillery regiment....
"Towards noon after four hours of fighting the uprising appeared to be defeated. One by one, all the areas of resistance fell into the hands of the people....
"From then on the morale of the workers who were fighting, increased. In addition an important collection of weapons (guns and machine guns) fell into their hands. Barcelona began to have a new look."
This period is known as the "July events" in the Spanish Civil War. Heroic actions sprang from the workers' barricades to become class-struggle history. Within a few days, all Catalonia was in the hands of the proletariat. Madrid had seen the Francoist forces defeated by workers armed with scant stores of arms—with cobblestones and kitchen knives in Valencia—in the face of the embargo on arms by the government. Most of these workers were members of the CNT or the POUM.
Asturian miners outfitted a column of 5,000 dynamiters for a march on Madrid, which arrived one day later to guard the streets. Armed workers committees displaced the customs officers at the borders, and a joint committee of the General Workers Union (UGT—affiliated to the PSOE) and the CNT took charge of all transportation in Spain. A union book or membership card from a leftist party was the only requirement to enter the country. The police, the Civil and Assault Guards, which had sided against the workers in the battles, had been replaced by workers militias that patrolled the cities. But how did workers get to this point? Let me back up a few years and make some clarifications.
Anarchism was the predominant ideology among the Spanish proletariat in the 20th century, in great part thanks to the country's slow economic development during the previous three centuries. In the northern and eastern regions of Spain, like Catalonia and Aragon, the principal anarchist trade-union federation, the CNT, organized the most politically advanced workers in those provinces. The leaders of the CNT represented a trend inside anarchism called syndicalism. The syndicalists correctly recognized the industrial proletariat as the central agency for overthrowing capitalism. They believed, though, that trade unions would be the only instrument necessary to bring about a socialist revolution, and opposed, as all anarchists do, the idea of a vanguard party of the working class.
Given their relationship with the working class, anarcho-syndicalists sometimes had very good political impulses. During the First World War, when Spain's neutrality meant that its production increased, a staunch opposition to the war within the Spanish left was found among the anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT, who, in some cases, according to Gerald H. Meaker in his book The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923, "went beyond mere pacifism and instinctively favored ending the war by a popular revolution." The revolutionary Marxist V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in Russia had forthrightly opposed the war from the first day and fought for the defeat of their own bourgeoisie through the seizure of power by the working class.
With the support of important sectors of the Russian proletariat and the oppressed, Lenin had called for a workers revolution in Russia to end the war, collectivize industry, nationalize the land and expropriate the bourgeoisie and the banks. In October 1917 (under the old Russian calendar), the Bolsheviks leading the soviets, organs of proletarian power, led a proletarian insurrection that established the first workers state in history. Workers democracy found its concrete expression in congresses of soviets and councils of workers, peasants and soldiers, which had begun to run the economy of the biggest country in the world.
I.P. Goldenberg, a member of the Mensheviks (a reformist party in Russia) had denounced Lenin as "a candidate for one European throne that has been vacant for thirty years—the throne of Bakunin!" for fighting for workers revolution. However, the truth is that anarcho-syndicalists in Russia and elsewhere, including Spain, like Joaquin MaurÃn and Andrés Nin (future leaders of the POUM), realized from the experience of the Russian workers the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Gerald Meaker speaks of one anarchist militant who wrote in the anarchist paper Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom):
"The Russian revolution, according to this militant, was not yet an Anarchist society, but it offered the ‘direct means' by which to achieve one. All the Anarchists of the world would have to do as the Russian ‘maximalists' had done: they would have to ‘destroy authoritatively...the present edifice based upon privilege and injustice in order to begin constructing the great city of happiness, Anarchy'." [emphasis added]
The best of this generation of anarchists and syndicalists—like Victor Serge, the Marxist historian and Trotsky biographer; Alfred Rosmer, a leading anarcho-syndicalist in France who later became Trotsky's close collaborator; and James P. Cannon, an anarcho-syndicalist in the American Industrial Workers of the World who became the founder of Trotskyism in the U.S.—were won to revolutionary Marxism by the living example of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Revolution. Anarchism can't lead to a successful socialist revolution, as the events in Spain show.
The Betrayal of the Popular Front
The 1933 Nazi victory in Germany propelled mass unrest throughout Spain, including a general strike led by the CNT and UGT in October 1934. That same month, miners and other sectors of the proletariat in the northern region of Asturias rose up in arms against the recently formed government of Alejandro Lerroux. The anarchists abstained in the elections won by Lerroux; but not on the basis of any principles (as we will see later). Their main reason was their "apoliticism," an absurd rejection of participation in elections or parliament. But if you are serious about fighting for socialist revolution, would you waste any opportunity to let significant numbers of people know what you stand for? Imagine the effect that a speech in Congress by a Trotskyist denouncing the colonial occupation in Iraq would have on both the American working class and the soldiers in Iraq. To Marxists, the question of whether or not to participate in elections is a tactical question based on concrete circumstances. At the same time, Marxists renounce in principle the taking of any executive ministerial post in any capitalist government because it could not mean anything other than the direct administration of the capitalist state.
Lerroux governed in coalition with the CEDA (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rightists) of José Maria Gil Robles, and, given the victory of Hitlerite fascism in Germany, Lerroux's regime was feared as representing the rise of reactionary, right-wing forces in Spain. The bloody defeat of the Asturian uprising at the hands of Franco-led forces (5,000 people killed and 30,000 arrested) paved the way for two years of increased repression against the labor movement.
In January 1936 (six months before Franco's attempted coup) the popular-front coalition led by the Republican Left, the party of the liberal bourgeoisie, had come up with a program for the February elections which basically allowed a nominal restoration of regional autonomy for the Catalan region and offered to free political prisoners imprisoned during the prior two years. The program called also to guarantee respect for private property rights in the countryside and the cities, rejected any nationalization of the land and called to maintain capitalist control over industry and the banks.
The Republicans led an electoral bloc with Manuel Azaña at its head. The coalition included the UGT, the PSOE, the PCE and the POUM. And it was supported by the anarchists. This was a popular-front coalition, where the interests of the proletariat were subordinated to those of the capitalist class.
What was the POUM? The POUM was what we call a centrist party, i.e., a party that is revolutionary in words but reformist in deeds. It had emerged from the fusion between the Trotskyist Spanish Communist Left of Andrés Nin, and the BOC (Workers and Peasants Bloc) of Joaquin MaurÃn, which was a more right-wing centrist party that adapted to Catalan nationalism. Trotsky strenuously denounced the signing of the electoral pact by the POUM as a "betrayal of the proletariat for the sake of an alliance with the bourgeoisie" and broke political relations with them.
Azaña took office as president in May 1936 in the midst of a great wave of strikes. From June 10 to the first days of July, the number of workers striking against the deepening economic crisis had grown from half a million to over a million. Bourgeois democracy was starting to crumble.
Around the same time as Franco's attempted coup and the workers uprising during the "July events" in 1936, big chunks of the bourgeoisie in Catalonia (the region that comprised 70 percent of the industry in Spain) had fled the country, leaving their factories, lands and properties behind. Once the reaction had been defeated, CNT workers began to seize the abandoned factories and create workers committees that organized production on a local level. A similar phenomenon occurred in the countryside. These workers committees, and the workers militias formed to fight against Franco's army, became the basis for what we call a dual power situation, i.e., a temporary state of affairs in which both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie directly contest for power. It is necessary to study these workers cooperatives and militias, since they represent the embodiment of the anarchist economic and military program.
On July 20, with workers celebrating the defeat of Franco, Luis Companys, who was the president of the bourgeois Generalitat government in Catalonia, met with the leadership of the CNT-FAI—with GarcÃa Oliver as the main anarchist spokesman. Companys was an astute bourgeois politician who had been at some point a lawyer for the CNT. Here is what he proposed to GarcÃa Oliver and the rest of those in attendance:
"You have won and the power is in your hands. If you don't need me and if you don't want me as President of Catalonia, tell me now and I will be only one more soldier in the struggle against fascism. But if on the contrary you believe that in this job, where I would have been killed if there had been a fascist victory, I and my men, my name and my prestige can be useful in the struggle which has ended in Barcelona today, but whose outcome is still unknown in the rest of Spain, you can count on me. You can count on my loyalty as a man and a party leader who believes that a shameful past came to an end today, and I sincerely hope that Catalonia will be in the vanguard of the countries who are the most progressive in social matters."
—quoted in Abel Paz, Durruti: The People Armed
And the anarchists went for it. GarcÃa Oliver reports the results of the discussions in the CNT and the FAI as follows: "On July 21, 1936, a Regional Plenum of the Local Federations...took place in Barcelona. The situation was analyzed and it was decided not to speak about Libertarian Communism as long as part of Spain was in the hands of the fascists. The Plenum decided for collaboration opposed by only one delegation from ‘Bajo Llobregat'.... Any extreme position inspired by adventurism or inflexibility could have been a disaster because the revolution would have been exhausted..." [emphasis added]. With this, the anarchist workers were subordinated through their leadership to the will of the Generalitat government. Nine months later, Companys was on the phone calling for an air strike against the CNT-FAI headquarters.
The essence of this pathetic episode and the anarchist betrayal is perfectly described by Felix Morrow in the following quotation from his book, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain (1938):
"Class collaboration, indeed, lies concealed in the heart of anarchist philosophy. It is hidden, during periods of reaction, by anarchist hatred of capitalist oppression. But, in a revolutionary period of dual power, it must come to the surface. For then the capitalist smilingly offers to share in building the new world. And the anarchist, being opposed to ‘all dictatorships,' including dictatorship of the proletariat, will require of the capitalist merely that he throw off the capitalist outlook, to which he agrees, naturally, the better to prepare the crushing of the workers."
Even one of the most radical anarchists, Buenaventura Durruti, a prominent military leader, expressed his desire "to accept the agreements only provisionally, that is to say until the freeing of Saragossa." When the plenum ended, the anarchists proposed that Companys create a Central Committee of Militias, which included representatives from the CNT and UGT trade-union federations, the PSOE and the POUM. However, it also included representatives from bourgeois parties like the Catalan Esquerra (Companys' party) and the Republican Union.
The Committee became, then, a tool for class collaboration and ultimate control by the Catalan government over the militias. A Marxist revolutionary party would have fought to expel the bourgeois representatives from the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias and for the centralization of the militias under the command of workers and soldiers committees. Durruti and his anarchist collective "Nosotros," inside the CNT-FAI, were aware of the dangers of class collaboration inside the Anti-Fascist Committee. However, they decided to follow its orders and, as promptly as July 24, a militia column, with Durruti at the head of it, was dispatched to the city of Saragossa to fight against the right-wing forces headed by Franco. In that way, Companys and the CNT bureaucracy got rid of the anarchist elements that could have caused problems for their alliance in Catalonia.
But what about the workers collectives? In Barcelona, workers collectives were created in thousands of enterprises, from key industries like shipping, mines, electric power, transportation, gas and water to others like perfumeries, breweries and small workshops. These workers collectives achieved outstanding economic goals, particularly in the industries that supplied munitions for the militias. But how did these cooperatives work? Gaston Leval, a prominent CNT militant and French anarchist, notes in Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (1975):
"Too often in Barcelona and Valencia workers in each undertaking took over the factory, the works, or the workshop, the machines, raw materials, and taking advantage of the continuation of the money system and normal capitalist commercial relations, organized production on their own account, selling for their own benefit the produce of their labour....
"There was not, therefore, true socialisation, but a workers' neo-capitalism, a self-managment straddling capitalism and socialism, which we maintain would not have occurred had the Revolution been able to extend itself fully under the direction of our Syndicates."
—quoted in "Leninism and Workers Control," WV No. 162, 17 June 1977
In other words, these autonomous committees functioned under the premise of competition for markets and suppliers. Those factories that had inherited advanced technology and abundant raw materials had better opportunities to compete in the market than did others which didn't have those conveniences. Such economic relations ultimately tended to recreate the conditions of a primitive form of market capitalism.
These collectives were also centralized organs on a local level. In each workplace, an assembly of workers elected a committee, which would elect a manager to oversee the day-to-day running of the workplace. Within each industry there was an Industrial Council which had representatives of the two main unions (CNT and UGT) and representatives from the local committees, where the CNT and UGT were also prominent. However, bourgeois representatives from parties like the Esquerra and the Republican Left were part of these councils also. It is important to understand that in the absence of a planned, socialized economy, run by mass workers organizations (i.e., soviets), where left political parties could have full representation, what the CNT and UGT were doing was at best administering the workers collectives on behalf of the bourgeois popular front. Meanwhile, the government got ready to take the factories away from the anarchists and social democrats at the next opportunity.
Moreover, some of these committees depended heavily upon credits from banks and government subsidies. Nonetheless, the anarchists didn't have any plan to take control of the banks and they didn't do it, which meant condemning those collectives dependent on bank credits to their ultimate disappearance. At the beginning of 1937, the government and the banks practically strangled these collectives, resorting to economic sabotage. The supply of raw materials was denied which ultimately stopped production in these factories.
As I said before, the CNT and FAI didn't see the phenomenon of workers management in the factories as a temporary condition, but as the realization of the anarchist economic ideal, autonomous productive units. In contrast, true revolutionaries would have resolutely defended workers management as a kernel of dual power. But they would have also called to oust the bourgeois representatives from the management of the collectives, while explaining that true socialization was only possible through a centralized, planned economy. A small group of Trotskyists called the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain, affiliated to Trotsky's Movement for the Fourth International, issued a leaflet in January 1937 titled "Hail the Workers, Peasants and Combatants' Committees!" in the midst of the economic boycott against the committees. The leaflet read:
"The bourgeois offensive against the committees must be responded to by strengthening them, forming them where they don't exist, extending their influence and coordinating between them in assemblies or congresses that study and resolve, independent of the bourgeois political power, those problems...posed by the necessities of the war and revolution.
"It is fundamentally necessary that the committees resolve the problems of nationalization and centralization of the private banks, unified command and military discipline....
"The committees…will take over leadership of the country, annulling the organs of the capitalist state...and establishing in their place the proletarian state based on the committees and on socialized property; establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie."
—AgustÃn Guillamón, Documentación histórica del trosquismo español (1936-1948) (Ediciones de La Torre, 1996)
The Bolshevik-Leninists propagandized for a perspective to transform the workers committees into mass organs of workers power at a national level, as incipient organs of workers rule—i.e., soviets—where political debate would be open to all left tendencies. The situation of dual power couldn't last indefinitely; it had to be solved on the side of the workers or against them. The Bolshevik-Leninists had the program to solve it on the side of the proletariat. However, in January 1937 they were brand new and by May had only 30 people, without enough authority among the working class as a political tendency, although most of their leaders had fought in the POUM militias.
Part Two
With the armed proletariat in the militias and the workers committees growing at a great rate, the capitalists were afraid of a new workers radicalization like that of July. In September 1936, in order to appease the workers, Azaña appointed a new cabinet in his government with the PSOE [Socialist Workers Party] and UGT [General Workers Union—affiliated to the Socialists], the PCE [the Stalinist Communist Party] and the bourgeoisie. In Catalonia, the anarchists for the first time joined the government; and two months later, they entered the national government. In Catalonia, the popular-front government also included the POUM [the centrist Workers Party of Marxist Reunification] for four months. That is, the Spanish left groups with significant influence in the working class sealed their alliance with the bourgeoisie.
What was the internal functioning of the CNT [the anarchist National Confederation of Labor] and the FAI [the political arm of the CNT] at the time? Miguel Amorós explains in his book La revolución traicionada: La verdadera historia de Balius y Los Amigos de Durruti:
"The plenums didn't take into account the assemblies of the unions and ignored the opinion of the militias. Against every norm of the confederation, it was the committees who called on them and elaborated the agenda, which was not always communicated to the delegates. The delegates attended without a mandate and without knowing what they were going to discuss or the relevance of decisions to be adopted."
The CNT and FAI bureaucracies, sharing power with the bourgeoisie, started going after those anarchists who criticized the corrupt methods of the leadership. Such anarchists included the writer Jaime Balius, a future leader of the Friends of Durruti group who was ousted from Solidaridad Obrera (Workers Solidarity—the CNT's main paper) in December of 1936 along with other members of the editorial staff. How about that for "anti-authoritarian organizations"?
Now I'll read another quote:
"As soon as they were faced with a serious revolutionary situation, the Bakuninists had to throw the whole of their old programme overboard. First they sacrificed their doctrine of absolute abstention from political, and especially electoral, activities. Then anarchy, the abolition of the State, shared the same fate.... They then dropped the principle that the workers must not take part in any revolution that did not have as its aim the immediate and complete emancipation of the proletariat, and they themselves took part in a movement that was notoriously bourgeois. Finally they...sat quite comfortably in the juntas of the various towns, and moreover almost everywhere as an impotent minority outvoted and politically exploited by the bourgeoisie."
Is this Leon Trotsky on 1936? No, it is Friedrich Engels polemicizing against the Spanish anarchists in 1873! Anarchism was, is and will always be class collaborationist at its core.
But not all the anarchists in Spain in 1936-37 shared the class collaborationism of the CNT-FAI bureaucracy. The Friends of Durruti group organized in opposition to that treachery. The CNT-FAI, in an attempt to better consolidate the forces against Franco's right-wing reactionaries, began to acquiesce to, and carry out, the "militarization" of the proletarian militias in September of 1937. This meant putting the militias under the orders of a centralized bourgeois army. The Republicans ordered the militarization of the militias, and the Socialist and anarchist ministers in the popular front voted for it. The majority of the members of the Friends of Durruti came from the thousands of anarchist militants who refused to submit to the militarization. Pablo Ruiz, who had fought with Buenaventura Durruti himself on the front, represented one wing of the group, and the prominent writer Jaime Balius represented another.
The four thousand members of the Friends of Durruti stood against the class collaborationism of the CNT-FAI and counterposed to it the call for revolution. They defended this by pointing out that "all revolutions are totalitarian." They raised the call for a "Revolutionary Junta!" According to Amorós, this was a variant of the concept advocated by the CNT of a "National Committee of Defense" in the face of the failure exhibited by the decentralization of the militias against Franco. The Friends of Durruti were CNT workers and militiamen who faced the prospect of being disarmed under the orders of their anarchist leadership. Their opposition to class collaboration was the empirical conclusion of their direct experience with the forceful "militarization" of the militias. However, this didn't contradict their affiliation to the CNT since the anarchist ideal of libertarian communism, a stateless society based on a decentralized economy run by local workers committees, was something that still looked feasible to them. However, the Friends of Durruti's political positions were in motion, like those of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists who witnessed and embraced the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Friends of Durruti learned from the negative example of the CNT; but they first had to break with their anarchist prejudices against the Leninist vanguard party and the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to fully embrace a revolutionary program. That opportunity presented itself in May 1937.
The Barcelona May Days
Almost a year had passed after the "July events" in Barcelona when on 3 May 1937 the government decided to take the Telefónica building out of the hands of the CNT workers who ran it. Assault Guards commanded by the Stalinist Rodriguez Salas arrived at the building and, on behalf of the popular front, ordered the workers to abandon it. Workers put up resistance and the exchange of fire began. The word of an attack on the Telefónica spread like wildfire. In four hours a general strike was declared and the city was engulfed in street fighting with barricades being formed, as during the "July events," by workers of the CNT-FAI, the left-POUM and, this time, the Friends of Durruti and the Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninists.
The CNT-FAI tops and the popular-front government sent GarcÃa Oliver and other CNT bureaucrats from Valencia to order the workers back to their homes. He urged the workers: "Hold your fire; embrace the Assault Guards!" The POUM defended their headquarters at the Hotel Falcon from the Assault Guards but refused to take any step forward. The local leaderships of the CNT and POUM met that night, but the anarchist bureaucracy insisted on no more than the dismissal of Salas and the formation of a new government in order to stop the confrontation. The workers had a different agenda though, pushed by their instinct of class self-defense.
On May 4, Barcelona was under the control of the workers, except for the center of the city, where the battles continued until dusk. One of the first workers detachments in the early hours of that night was 400 Friends of Durruti fighters who occupied the whole of Las Ramblas Avenue and patrolled the surrounding area. The same day, the Bolshevik-Leninists handed leaflets to the workers on the barricades that called for a "General strike in all the industries that don't work for the war" and for the "arming of the working class." Workers desperately needed a leadership!
The Friends of Durruti met with the Executive Committee of the POUM and apparently acquiesced to the POUM's position that the movement was lost given the CNT's capitulatory actions. Both agreed on seeking guarantees against retaliations before the workers began to abandon the barricades. However, the next day the Friends of Durruti issued a leaflet which caused a hue and cry among the CNT-FAI bureaucracy, calling for a revolutionary junta, the disarming of the armed bodies (meaning the Assault and Civil Guards) and the socialization of the economy. The leaflet was received with great enthusiasm on the barricades. Needless to say, the Friends of Durruti had used extremely "authoritarian" measures to get their leaflet printed in the middle of a general strike! Balius describes the scene as follows:
"We banged on the door until the owner [of the print shop] came out, who didn't want to know anything and refused categorically to open the print shop. He promptly backed up in the face of ‘armed violence'.... Just before midnight...we were able to take with us four to five thousand leaflets still wet."
Still on May 5, the local bureaucracy of the FAI in Barcelona, in another despicable act of betrayal of the working class, refused reinforcement by militias ready to leave the front. But even worse than that, the CNT workers committees started to abandon the barricades, obeying the call of the top bureaucracy.
On May 6, various anarchist groups, including the Friends of Durruti, met with the POUM. The POUM held a minority position, which was for the creation of a "revolutionary central committee." This was against the local representatives of the anarchist committees, who, following orders from their national leadership, advocated withdrawal from the barricades.
What was the response of the POUM? Let's have their leader Gorkin tell the story:
"But we couldn't impose our views. It was the representative of the Regional Committee [Nacional] who they [the workers] were listening to.... The Friends of Durruti advocated a CNT-FAI-POUM government. Due to tactical reasons we didn't attack the leadership of the CNT."
—Quoted in Amorós, La revolución traicionada
I want to emphasize some points here. During the May Days, the CNT carried out a contemptible and clear betrayal against the working class in Barcelona, as they had already chosen to collaborate with the bourgeoisie. The centrist POUM knew this, and instead of fighting against it, they buried their heads in the sand like ostriches and waited for the CNT to give the order to disband. The Friends of Durruti, in contrast, called for a local junta centered on the CNT and the POUM. Had there been an authoritative revolutionary leadership then, it would have taken up the Friends of Durruti's call for a junta and transformed it first into a military united front against the bourgeois forces and the Stalinists and then into the core of a workers government to fight the counterrevolution with an internationalist program. It would have called for independence for Morocco in order to undermine Franco's army and appealed to the workers on the other side of the Pyrenees to follow their example.
After the May 6 meeting, Balius proposed that CNT workers advance a column to the town of Tarragona and bring reinforcements to Barcelona. Predictably, the CNT bureaucracy boycotted this proposal. Amorós explains: "The Friends of Durruti couldn't understand why the CNT committees had stopped the fight, when victory was so close." The Friends of Durruti didn't have the understanding that flows from a revolutionary program—the understanding to realize the dead end of anarchism and to politically break with the CNT. That had to be the role of a Marxist vanguard party.
Unfortunately, the Bolshevik-Leninists didn't have the time to generate roots in the proletariat during the few months of their existence and they lacked authority among the working class. However, the power of their Trotskyist program is shown by the fact that despite their small numbers they were one of the first to be targeted by the Stalinists and the bourgeois reactionaries once the proletariat was defeated and the barricades were brought down. Before the May Days, the Friends of Durruti helped to distribute the Trotskyists' press on the streets and made their offices available to the Bolshevik-Leninists to organize their meetings. However, the Bolshevik-Leninists didn't achieve much in a meeting with the Friends of Durruti's leadership on May 5:
"Every time the word Authority was pronounced...Balius got mad. The interview or meeting ended without discussing the real problems at bottom.... As for Balius, Carlini and others—not everybody—to continue the fight only on the barricades was the just position, and that is how we split."
Under the orders of the CNT-FAI, and in the face of the POUM's prostration, the workers were ultimately demobilized and defeated. Five hundred died and over a thousand were wounded during the May events. Following the defeat, the state, with the aid of the Stalinists, launched its persecution, imprisonment and murder of the Trotskyists and POUMists (the latter on charges of "Trotskyism"). The anarchist bureaucracy proceeded to attempt the expulsion of the Friends of Durruti from the CNT ranks; meanwhile, the government censored the CNT's paper Solidaridad Obrera. The POUM's paper, La Batalla, was banned and its main leader, Andrés Nin, as well as anarchist leader Camilo Berneri, died at the hands of the Stalinists.
During the Franco dictatorship, 300,000 workers and peasants were assassinated and many others were locked up in concentration camps. All working-class leaders were exterminated or expelled, political and trade-union groups and associations were dissolved. The popular-front government paved the way for Franco's triumph in 1939. One of the greatest revolutionary opportunities for the international proletariat had been drowned in blood.
Anarchists proclaim that the Friends of Durruti never broke with the principles of anarchism. Unfortunately, they are right. They continued to believe, as their leaders in the CNT did, that a classless society could be created simply through force of will; that such a society could be created without first establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, a centralized democratic workers state to suppress the forces of counterrevolution. Anarchist historian Vernon Richards, in his book, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939) [second enlarged edition, 1972], expresses the ultimate consequences of such an idealist perspective:
"We believe there is something more real, more positive and more revolutionary in resisting war than in participating in it; that it is more civilised and more revolutionary to defend the right of a fascist to live than to support the Tribunals which have the legal powers to shoot him; that it is more realistic to talk to the people from the gutter than from government benches; that in the long run it is more rewarding to influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion."
Marxists, on the other hand, reject the false arguments of anarchists that classless communism is simply the product of a psychological regeneration. We fight to overthrow the capitalist system in order to organize production so as to raise it to such a high level that scarcity will no longer exist. Only then can we lay the material basis for the emancipation of humanity from exploitation, war and poverty. We tell anarchist youth today, as Trotsky said to the international proletariat in Lessons of October (1924): "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer." This is the main lesson of the Spanish Civil War.
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Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 828, 11 June 2004 and 829, 9 July 2004
The following is a slightly edited presentation by Spartacist speaker Adrian Ortega at a Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth Club public educational in New York City on April 3.
Part One
Anarchism today has become fashionable among youth and left-liberal intellectual circles. Refracted in a myriad of ways, from "Green radicalism" to "Platformism," these youth seek to oppose a social reality dictated by an economic system based on the production of profits for the handful of capitalists. The emergence of anarchism as a prevalent ideology among radicalized youth today is a reflection of what we Marxists understand as a global retrogression in political consciousness following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet degenerated workers state and the deformed workers states of East Europe.
As the title of this forum indicates, this presentation will center on the counterposition between two political worldviews, Marxism and its contemporary continuation, Trotskyism, and anarchism, which played a decisive role in the events of the Spanish Civil War.
The Civil War (which lasted from approximately 1936 to 1939) represented the last opportunity for the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and open the road to socialism in Spain before the rise of the Francoist military dictatorship that would last more than 30 years and kill hundreds of thousands. In the key industrial center of Spain, Catalonia, armed workers organized militias and factory committees that shook the foundations of the capitalist order, private property and the state. But the most radical mass leaders of this movement (the anarchist FAI and the National Confederation of Labor [CNT] it controlled, and the centrist Workers Party of Marxist Unification [POUM]) along with the rest of the left (the Socialist Workers Party [PSOE] and the Stalinist Communist Party [PCE]) showed their political incapacity to lead the working class toward emancipation. It was only small groups (like the Friends of Durruti anarchists and the Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninists) who sought during the barricades fighting in May 1937 to bring revolutionary leadership to the proletariat. But these groups were not able to overcome their own limitations—centrally the Trotskyists' lack of authority among the proletariat and the Friends of Durruti's incapacity to break with an anarchist worldview—and lead the workers to power. Had there been a successful revolution in Spain, this would have drastically changed the shape of the world in which we live now.
This talk aims to explain why the strategic "mistakes" made by the anarchist leadership in the Spanish Civil War were not only "mistakes" but the logical conclusion of a program that inherently rests on class collaboration—i.e., a political alliance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which constrains and subordinates the workers and their struggles to the framework of capitalism. I would like to give a few initial considerations regarding the political foundations of both currents.
Anarchists claim to fight for a classless society, and some of them understand the centrality of the proletariat in such a task, just as we Marxists do. However, they reject any form of "authority" and consequently oppose the existence of any state (meaning the use of organized violence to protect the interests of the class in power). They also renounce concepts like leadership and centralization and counterpose to them "autonomy" or "spontaneity." On the contrary, Marxists explain that "Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society" (Friedrich Engels, "On Authority" [1872]). In other words, we don't blindly condemn authority as an abstract concept divorced from a certain social and economic reality. Most of the world today is based on the authority of a property-owning class, the bourgeoisie, exercised over the working masses through the instrumentality of a state, the capitalist state. We oppose and work to destroy that authority and the state that helps preserve it. But we welcome the authority of mass organizations of workers and other oppressed sectors in society, like workers councils (soviets), which would coordinate and centralize the proletariat's efforts to create a society based on workers democracy and prevent the destruction of the gains resulting from a social revolution—a workers state. Through eliminating the irrationality of capitalist production, economic planning under a workers state would allow the free development of productive forces and eliminate the material basis for social inequality. This would have to be a joint enterprise of the world proletariat and is the only way to eliminate the state and create a society based on "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
The anarchist abstract condemnation of "authority" has concrete ramifications on the organizational level. Anarchist organizations are decentralized entities that claim to exercise no authority over their members. This in itself is a complete fallacy, which the events in the Civil War completely prove. Marxists, on the contrary, explain the necessity of a centralized, democratic organization of the working class that groups together the proletariat's most conscious elements, works to raise the consciousness of the working class as a whole and exercises leadership, including leading the decisive struggles for workers power; a vanguard party that embraces the highest levels of democracy in its internal life and intervenes in struggle as a unified, conscious political force.
The Spanish Revolution
On 17 July 1936, General Francisco Franco assumed command of the Moors and Legionnaires of Morocco under the banner of the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic church. With the support of the most reactionary forces in Spain, Franco launched a military coup to overthrow the Republican government of president Manuel Azaña, which was a liberal bourgeois government, to replace it with a military dictatorship. This was to enforce through blood the interests of the propertied classes over the workers and peasants, and to put an end to decades of highly militant labor struggles in Spain. Azaña hid the advancement of Franco's army from the working class and made frantic and unsuccessful attempts to contact the military leaders and to come to an agreement with them. The Spanish proletariat, which had just gone through two years of harsh state repression under a right-wing government, distrusted the Azaña government and took matters into their own hands. They independently mobilized to gather weapons and build barricades to fight the bourgeois pro-monarchist reaction.
Some of the most epic battles between the Francoist forces and the armed proletariat started almost concurrently in major cities like Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. I would like to read excerpts from Abel Paz's book, Durruti: The People Armed (1976), in his chapter "Barcelona in Flames":
"On July 19, 1936, at 5 A.M. a new page in the revolution was beginning to the sound of gunfire, the crackling of machine guns which were mixed with the deafening sound of factory sirens, informing the people that the decisive hour had arrived. The seventh artillery regiment had left San Andres Park, divided, and was trying to reach the center of the capital by two different routes. But at the crossing of the ‘Diagonal' the first detachment ran into a group of workers armed with grenades and pistols, which blocked its advance....
"One part of the Montesa regiment followed by important military units of engineers, managed to slip into Marques del Duero Avenue (Paralelo) but was checked by a strong barricade put up by the workers of the Woodworkers' Union....
"At the same time, near the Plaza de Palacio, the dockworkers of the Barceloneta district had routed the Montana artillery regiment....
"Towards noon after four hours of fighting the uprising appeared to be defeated. One by one, all the areas of resistance fell into the hands of the people....
"From then on the morale of the workers who were fighting, increased. In addition an important collection of weapons (guns and machine guns) fell into their hands. Barcelona began to have a new look."
This period is known as the "July events" in the Spanish Civil War. Heroic actions sprang from the workers' barricades to become class-struggle history. Within a few days, all Catalonia was in the hands of the proletariat. Madrid had seen the Francoist forces defeated by workers armed with scant stores of arms—with cobblestones and kitchen knives in Valencia—in the face of the embargo on arms by the government. Most of these workers were members of the CNT or the POUM.
Asturian miners outfitted a column of 5,000 dynamiters for a march on Madrid, which arrived one day later to guard the streets. Armed workers committees displaced the customs officers at the borders, and a joint committee of the General Workers Union (UGT—affiliated to the PSOE) and the CNT took charge of all transportation in Spain. A union book or membership card from a leftist party was the only requirement to enter the country. The police, the Civil and Assault Guards, which had sided against the workers in the battles, had been replaced by workers militias that patrolled the cities. But how did workers get to this point? Let me back up a few years and make some clarifications.
Anarchism was the predominant ideology among the Spanish proletariat in the 20th century, in great part thanks to the country's slow economic development during the previous three centuries. In the northern and eastern regions of Spain, like Catalonia and Aragon, the principal anarchist trade-union federation, the CNT, organized the most politically advanced workers in those provinces. The leaders of the CNT represented a trend inside anarchism called syndicalism. The syndicalists correctly recognized the industrial proletariat as the central agency for overthrowing capitalism. They believed, though, that trade unions would be the only instrument necessary to bring about a socialist revolution, and opposed, as all anarchists do, the idea of a vanguard party of the working class.
Given their relationship with the working class, anarcho-syndicalists sometimes had very good political impulses. During the First World War, when Spain's neutrality meant that its production increased, a staunch opposition to the war within the Spanish left was found among the anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT, who, in some cases, according to Gerald H. Meaker in his book The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923, "went beyond mere pacifism and instinctively favored ending the war by a popular revolution." The revolutionary Marxist V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in Russia had forthrightly opposed the war from the first day and fought for the defeat of their own bourgeoisie through the seizure of power by the working class.
With the support of important sectors of the Russian proletariat and the oppressed, Lenin had called for a workers revolution in Russia to end the war, collectivize industry, nationalize the land and expropriate the bourgeoisie and the banks. In October 1917 (under the old Russian calendar), the Bolsheviks leading the soviets, organs of proletarian power, led a proletarian insurrection that established the first workers state in history. Workers democracy found its concrete expression in congresses of soviets and councils of workers, peasants and soldiers, which had begun to run the economy of the biggest country in the world.
I.P. Goldenberg, a member of the Mensheviks (a reformist party in Russia) had denounced Lenin as "a candidate for one European throne that has been vacant for thirty years—the throne of Bakunin!" for fighting for workers revolution. However, the truth is that anarcho-syndicalists in Russia and elsewhere, including Spain, like Joaquin MaurÃn and Andrés Nin (future leaders of the POUM), realized from the experience of the Russian workers the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Gerald Meaker speaks of one anarchist militant who wrote in the anarchist paper Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom):
"The Russian revolution, according to this militant, was not yet an Anarchist society, but it offered the ‘direct means' by which to achieve one. All the Anarchists of the world would have to do as the Russian ‘maximalists' had done: they would have to ‘destroy authoritatively...the present edifice based upon privilege and injustice in order to begin constructing the great city of happiness, Anarchy'." [emphasis added]
The best of this generation of anarchists and syndicalists—like Victor Serge, the Marxist historian and Trotsky biographer; Alfred Rosmer, a leading anarcho-syndicalist in France who later became Trotsky's close collaborator; and James P. Cannon, an anarcho-syndicalist in the American Industrial Workers of the World who became the founder of Trotskyism in the U.S.—were won to revolutionary Marxism by the living example of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Revolution. Anarchism can't lead to a successful socialist revolution, as the events in Spain show.
The Betrayal of the Popular Front
The 1933 Nazi victory in Germany propelled mass unrest throughout Spain, including a general strike led by the CNT and UGT in October 1934. That same month, miners and other sectors of the proletariat in the northern region of Asturias rose up in arms against the recently formed government of Alejandro Lerroux. The anarchists abstained in the elections won by Lerroux; but not on the basis of any principles (as we will see later). Their main reason was their "apoliticism," an absurd rejection of participation in elections or parliament. But if you are serious about fighting for socialist revolution, would you waste any opportunity to let significant numbers of people know what you stand for? Imagine the effect that a speech in Congress by a Trotskyist denouncing the colonial occupation in Iraq would have on both the American working class and the soldiers in Iraq. To Marxists, the question of whether or not to participate in elections is a tactical question based on concrete circumstances. At the same time, Marxists renounce in principle the taking of any executive ministerial post in any capitalist government because it could not mean anything other than the direct administration of the capitalist state.
Lerroux governed in coalition with the CEDA (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rightists) of José Maria Gil Robles, and, given the victory of Hitlerite fascism in Germany, Lerroux's regime was feared as representing the rise of reactionary, right-wing forces in Spain. The bloody defeat of the Asturian uprising at the hands of Franco-led forces (5,000 people killed and 30,000 arrested) paved the way for two years of increased repression against the labor movement.
In January 1936 (six months before Franco's attempted coup) the popular-front coalition led by the Republican Left, the party of the liberal bourgeoisie, had come up with a program for the February elections which basically allowed a nominal restoration of regional autonomy for the Catalan region and offered to free political prisoners imprisoned during the prior two years. The program called also to guarantee respect for private property rights in the countryside and the cities, rejected any nationalization of the land and called to maintain capitalist control over industry and the banks.
The Republicans led an electoral bloc with Manuel Azaña at its head. The coalition included the UGT, the PSOE, the PCE and the POUM. And it was supported by the anarchists. This was a popular-front coalition, where the interests of the proletariat were subordinated to those of the capitalist class.
What was the POUM? The POUM was what we call a centrist party, i.e., a party that is revolutionary in words but reformist in deeds. It had emerged from the fusion between the Trotskyist Spanish Communist Left of Andrés Nin, and the BOC (Workers and Peasants Bloc) of Joaquin MaurÃn, which was a more right-wing centrist party that adapted to Catalan nationalism. Trotsky strenuously denounced the signing of the electoral pact by the POUM as a "betrayal of the proletariat for the sake of an alliance with the bourgeoisie" and broke political relations with them.
Azaña took office as president in May 1936 in the midst of a great wave of strikes. From June 10 to the first days of July, the number of workers striking against the deepening economic crisis had grown from half a million to over a million. Bourgeois democracy was starting to crumble.
Around the same time as Franco's attempted coup and the workers uprising during the "July events" in 1936, big chunks of the bourgeoisie in Catalonia (the region that comprised 70 percent of the industry in Spain) had fled the country, leaving their factories, lands and properties behind. Once the reaction had been defeated, CNT workers began to seize the abandoned factories and create workers committees that organized production on a local level. A similar phenomenon occurred in the countryside. These workers committees, and the workers militias formed to fight against Franco's army, became the basis for what we call a dual power situation, i.e., a temporary state of affairs in which both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie directly contest for power. It is necessary to study these workers cooperatives and militias, since they represent the embodiment of the anarchist economic and military program.
On July 20, with workers celebrating the defeat of Franco, Luis Companys, who was the president of the bourgeois Generalitat government in Catalonia, met with the leadership of the CNT-FAI—with GarcÃa Oliver as the main anarchist spokesman. Companys was an astute bourgeois politician who had been at some point a lawyer for the CNT. Here is what he proposed to GarcÃa Oliver and the rest of those in attendance:
"You have won and the power is in your hands. If you don't need me and if you don't want me as President of Catalonia, tell me now and I will be only one more soldier in the struggle against fascism. But if on the contrary you believe that in this job, where I would have been killed if there had been a fascist victory, I and my men, my name and my prestige can be useful in the struggle which has ended in Barcelona today, but whose outcome is still unknown in the rest of Spain, you can count on me. You can count on my loyalty as a man and a party leader who believes that a shameful past came to an end today, and I sincerely hope that Catalonia will be in the vanguard of the countries who are the most progressive in social matters."
—quoted in Abel Paz, Durruti: The People Armed
And the anarchists went for it. GarcÃa Oliver reports the results of the discussions in the CNT and the FAI as follows: "On July 21, 1936, a Regional Plenum of the Local Federations...took place in Barcelona. The situation was analyzed and it was decided not to speak about Libertarian Communism as long as part of Spain was in the hands of the fascists. The Plenum decided for collaboration opposed by only one delegation from ‘Bajo Llobregat'.... Any extreme position inspired by adventurism or inflexibility could have been a disaster because the revolution would have been exhausted..." [emphasis added]. With this, the anarchist workers were subordinated through their leadership to the will of the Generalitat government. Nine months later, Companys was on the phone calling for an air strike against the CNT-FAI headquarters.
The essence of this pathetic episode and the anarchist betrayal is perfectly described by Felix Morrow in the following quotation from his book, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Spain (1938):
"Class collaboration, indeed, lies concealed in the heart of anarchist philosophy. It is hidden, during periods of reaction, by anarchist hatred of capitalist oppression. But, in a revolutionary period of dual power, it must come to the surface. For then the capitalist smilingly offers to share in building the new world. And the anarchist, being opposed to ‘all dictatorships,' including dictatorship of the proletariat, will require of the capitalist merely that he throw off the capitalist outlook, to which he agrees, naturally, the better to prepare the crushing of the workers."
Even one of the most radical anarchists, Buenaventura Durruti, a prominent military leader, expressed his desire "to accept the agreements only provisionally, that is to say until the freeing of Saragossa." When the plenum ended, the anarchists proposed that Companys create a Central Committee of Militias, which included representatives from the CNT and UGT trade-union federations, the PSOE and the POUM. However, it also included representatives from bourgeois parties like the Catalan Esquerra (Companys' party) and the Republican Union.
The Committee became, then, a tool for class collaboration and ultimate control by the Catalan government over the militias. A Marxist revolutionary party would have fought to expel the bourgeois representatives from the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias and for the centralization of the militias under the command of workers and soldiers committees. Durruti and his anarchist collective "Nosotros," inside the CNT-FAI, were aware of the dangers of class collaboration inside the Anti-Fascist Committee. However, they decided to follow its orders and, as promptly as July 24, a militia column, with Durruti at the head of it, was dispatched to the city of Saragossa to fight against the right-wing forces headed by Franco. In that way, Companys and the CNT bureaucracy got rid of the anarchist elements that could have caused problems for their alliance in Catalonia.
But what about the workers collectives? In Barcelona, workers collectives were created in thousands of enterprises, from key industries like shipping, mines, electric power, transportation, gas and water to others like perfumeries, breweries and small workshops. These workers collectives achieved outstanding economic goals, particularly in the industries that supplied munitions for the militias. But how did these cooperatives work? Gaston Leval, a prominent CNT militant and French anarchist, notes in Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (1975):
"Too often in Barcelona and Valencia workers in each undertaking took over the factory, the works, or the workshop, the machines, raw materials, and taking advantage of the continuation of the money system and normal capitalist commercial relations, organized production on their own account, selling for their own benefit the produce of their labour....
"There was not, therefore, true socialisation, but a workers' neo-capitalism, a self-managment straddling capitalism and socialism, which we maintain would not have occurred had the Revolution been able to extend itself fully under the direction of our Syndicates."
—quoted in "Leninism and Workers Control," WV No. 162, 17 June 1977
In other words, these autonomous committees functioned under the premise of competition for markets and suppliers. Those factories that had inherited advanced technology and abundant raw materials had better opportunities to compete in the market than did others which didn't have those conveniences. Such economic relations ultimately tended to recreate the conditions of a primitive form of market capitalism.
These collectives were also centralized organs on a local level. In each workplace, an assembly of workers elected a committee, which would elect a manager to oversee the day-to-day running of the workplace. Within each industry there was an Industrial Council which had representatives of the two main unions (CNT and UGT) and representatives from the local committees, where the CNT and UGT were also prominent. However, bourgeois representatives from parties like the Esquerra and the Republican Left were part of these councils also. It is important to understand that in the absence of a planned, socialized economy, run by mass workers organizations (i.e., soviets), where left political parties could have full representation, what the CNT and UGT were doing was at best administering the workers collectives on behalf of the bourgeois popular front. Meanwhile, the government got ready to take the factories away from the anarchists and social democrats at the next opportunity.
Moreover, some of these committees depended heavily upon credits from banks and government subsidies. Nonetheless, the anarchists didn't have any plan to take control of the banks and they didn't do it, which meant condemning those collectives dependent on bank credits to their ultimate disappearance. At the beginning of 1937, the government and the banks practically strangled these collectives, resorting to economic sabotage. The supply of raw materials was denied which ultimately stopped production in these factories.
As I said before, the CNT and FAI didn't see the phenomenon of workers management in the factories as a temporary condition, but as the realization of the anarchist economic ideal, autonomous productive units. In contrast, true revolutionaries would have resolutely defended workers management as a kernel of dual power. But they would have also called to oust the bourgeois representatives from the management of the collectives, while explaining that true socialization was only possible through a centralized, planned economy. A small group of Trotskyists called the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain, affiliated to Trotsky's Movement for the Fourth International, issued a leaflet in January 1937 titled "Hail the Workers, Peasants and Combatants' Committees!" in the midst of the economic boycott against the committees. The leaflet read:
"The bourgeois offensive against the committees must be responded to by strengthening them, forming them where they don't exist, extending their influence and coordinating between them in assemblies or congresses that study and resolve, independent of the bourgeois political power, those problems...posed by the necessities of the war and revolution.
"It is fundamentally necessary that the committees resolve the problems of nationalization and centralization of the private banks, unified command and military discipline....
"The committees…will take over leadership of the country, annulling the organs of the capitalist state...and establishing in their place the proletarian state based on the committees and on socialized property; establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie."
—AgustÃn Guillamón, Documentación histórica del trosquismo español (1936-1948) (Ediciones de La Torre, 1996)
The Bolshevik-Leninists propagandized for a perspective to transform the workers committees into mass organs of workers power at a national level, as incipient organs of workers rule—i.e., soviets—where political debate would be open to all left tendencies. The situation of dual power couldn't last indefinitely; it had to be solved on the side of the workers or against them. The Bolshevik-Leninists had the program to solve it on the side of the proletariat. However, in January 1937 they were brand new and by May had only 30 people, without enough authority among the working class as a political tendency, although most of their leaders had fought in the POUM militias.
Part Two
With the armed proletariat in the militias and the workers committees growing at a great rate, the capitalists were afraid of a new workers radicalization like that of July. In September 1936, in order to appease the workers, Azaña appointed a new cabinet in his government with the PSOE [Socialist Workers Party] and UGT [General Workers Union—affiliated to the Socialists], the PCE [the Stalinist Communist Party] and the bourgeoisie. In Catalonia, the anarchists for the first time joined the government; and two months later, they entered the national government. In Catalonia, the popular-front government also included the POUM [the centrist Workers Party of Marxist Reunification] for four months. That is, the Spanish left groups with significant influence in the working class sealed their alliance with the bourgeoisie.
What was the internal functioning of the CNT [the anarchist National Confederation of Labor] and the FAI [the political arm of the CNT] at the time? Miguel Amorós explains in his book La revolución traicionada: La verdadera historia de Balius y Los Amigos de Durruti:
"The plenums didn't take into account the assemblies of the unions and ignored the opinion of the militias. Against every norm of the confederation, it was the committees who called on them and elaborated the agenda, which was not always communicated to the delegates. The delegates attended without a mandate and without knowing what they were going to discuss or the relevance of decisions to be adopted."
The CNT and FAI bureaucracies, sharing power with the bourgeoisie, started going after those anarchists who criticized the corrupt methods of the leadership. Such anarchists included the writer Jaime Balius, a future leader of the Friends of Durruti group who was ousted from Solidaridad Obrera (Workers Solidarity—the CNT's main paper) in December of 1936 along with other members of the editorial staff. How about that for "anti-authoritarian organizations"?
Now I'll read another quote:
"As soon as they were faced with a serious revolutionary situation, the Bakuninists had to throw the whole of their old programme overboard. First they sacrificed their doctrine of absolute abstention from political, and especially electoral, activities. Then anarchy, the abolition of the State, shared the same fate.... They then dropped the principle that the workers must not take part in any revolution that did not have as its aim the immediate and complete emancipation of the proletariat, and they themselves took part in a movement that was notoriously bourgeois. Finally they...sat quite comfortably in the juntas of the various towns, and moreover almost everywhere as an impotent minority outvoted and politically exploited by the bourgeoisie."
Is this Leon Trotsky on 1936? No, it is Friedrich Engels polemicizing against the Spanish anarchists in 1873! Anarchism was, is and will always be class collaborationist at its core.
But not all the anarchists in Spain in 1936-37 shared the class collaborationism of the CNT-FAI bureaucracy. The Friends of Durruti group organized in opposition to that treachery. The CNT-FAI, in an attempt to better consolidate the forces against Franco's right-wing reactionaries, began to acquiesce to, and carry out, the "militarization" of the proletarian militias in September of 1937. This meant putting the militias under the orders of a centralized bourgeois army. The Republicans ordered the militarization of the militias, and the Socialist and anarchist ministers in the popular front voted for it. The majority of the members of the Friends of Durruti came from the thousands of anarchist militants who refused to submit to the militarization. Pablo Ruiz, who had fought with Buenaventura Durruti himself on the front, represented one wing of the group, and the prominent writer Jaime Balius represented another.
The four thousand members of the Friends of Durruti stood against the class collaborationism of the CNT-FAI and counterposed to it the call for revolution. They defended this by pointing out that "all revolutions are totalitarian." They raised the call for a "Revolutionary Junta!" According to Amorós, this was a variant of the concept advocated by the CNT of a "National Committee of Defense" in the face of the failure exhibited by the decentralization of the militias against Franco. The Friends of Durruti were CNT workers and militiamen who faced the prospect of being disarmed under the orders of their anarchist leadership. Their opposition to class collaboration was the empirical conclusion of their direct experience with the forceful "militarization" of the militias. However, this didn't contradict their affiliation to the CNT since the anarchist ideal of libertarian communism, a stateless society based on a decentralized economy run by local workers committees, was something that still looked feasible to them. However, the Friends of Durruti's political positions were in motion, like those of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists who witnessed and embraced the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Friends of Durruti learned from the negative example of the CNT; but they first had to break with their anarchist prejudices against the Leninist vanguard party and the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to fully embrace a revolutionary program. That opportunity presented itself in May 1937.
The Barcelona May Days
Almost a year had passed after the "July events" in Barcelona when on 3 May 1937 the government decided to take the Telefónica building out of the hands of the CNT workers who ran it. Assault Guards commanded by the Stalinist Rodriguez Salas arrived at the building and, on behalf of the popular front, ordered the workers to abandon it. Workers put up resistance and the exchange of fire began. The word of an attack on the Telefónica spread like wildfire. In four hours a general strike was declared and the city was engulfed in street fighting with barricades being formed, as during the "July events," by workers of the CNT-FAI, the left-POUM and, this time, the Friends of Durruti and the Trotskyist Bolshevik-Leninists.
The CNT-FAI tops and the popular-front government sent GarcÃa Oliver and other CNT bureaucrats from Valencia to order the workers back to their homes. He urged the workers: "Hold your fire; embrace the Assault Guards!" The POUM defended their headquarters at the Hotel Falcon from the Assault Guards but refused to take any step forward. The local leaderships of the CNT and POUM met that night, but the anarchist bureaucracy insisted on no more than the dismissal of Salas and the formation of a new government in order to stop the confrontation. The workers had a different agenda though, pushed by their instinct of class self-defense.
On May 4, Barcelona was under the control of the workers, except for the center of the city, where the battles continued until dusk. One of the first workers detachments in the early hours of that night was 400 Friends of Durruti fighters who occupied the whole of Las Ramblas Avenue and patrolled the surrounding area. The same day, the Bolshevik-Leninists handed leaflets to the workers on the barricades that called for a "General strike in all the industries that don't work for the war" and for the "arming of the working class." Workers desperately needed a leadership!
The Friends of Durruti met with the Executive Committee of the POUM and apparently acquiesced to the POUM's position that the movement was lost given the CNT's capitulatory actions. Both agreed on seeking guarantees against retaliations before the workers began to abandon the barricades. However, the next day the Friends of Durruti issued a leaflet which caused a hue and cry among the CNT-FAI bureaucracy, calling for a revolutionary junta, the disarming of the armed bodies (meaning the Assault and Civil Guards) and the socialization of the economy. The leaflet was received with great enthusiasm on the barricades. Needless to say, the Friends of Durruti had used extremely "authoritarian" measures to get their leaflet printed in the middle of a general strike! Balius describes the scene as follows:
"We banged on the door until the owner [of the print shop] came out, who didn't want to know anything and refused categorically to open the print shop. He promptly backed up in the face of ‘armed violence'.... Just before midnight...we were able to take with us four to five thousand leaflets still wet."
Still on May 5, the local bureaucracy of the FAI in Barcelona, in another despicable act of betrayal of the working class, refused reinforcement by militias ready to leave the front. But even worse than that, the CNT workers committees started to abandon the barricades, obeying the call of the top bureaucracy.
On May 6, various anarchist groups, including the Friends of Durruti, met with the POUM. The POUM held a minority position, which was for the creation of a "revolutionary central committee." This was against the local representatives of the anarchist committees, who, following orders from their national leadership, advocated withdrawal from the barricades.
What was the response of the POUM? Let's have their leader Gorkin tell the story:
"But we couldn't impose our views. It was the representative of the Regional Committee [Nacional] who they [the workers] were listening to.... The Friends of Durruti advocated a CNT-FAI-POUM government. Due to tactical reasons we didn't attack the leadership of the CNT."
—Quoted in Amorós, La revolución traicionada
I want to emphasize some points here. During the May Days, the CNT carried out a contemptible and clear betrayal against the working class in Barcelona, as they had already chosen to collaborate with the bourgeoisie. The centrist POUM knew this, and instead of fighting against it, they buried their heads in the sand like ostriches and waited for the CNT to give the order to disband. The Friends of Durruti, in contrast, called for a local junta centered on the CNT and the POUM. Had there been an authoritative revolutionary leadership then, it would have taken up the Friends of Durruti's call for a junta and transformed it first into a military united front against the bourgeois forces and the Stalinists and then into the core of a workers government to fight the counterrevolution with an internationalist program. It would have called for independence for Morocco in order to undermine Franco's army and appealed to the workers on the other side of the Pyrenees to follow their example.
After the May 6 meeting, Balius proposed that CNT workers advance a column to the town of Tarragona and bring reinforcements to Barcelona. Predictably, the CNT bureaucracy boycotted this proposal. Amorós explains: "The Friends of Durruti couldn't understand why the CNT committees had stopped the fight, when victory was so close." The Friends of Durruti didn't have the understanding that flows from a revolutionary program—the understanding to realize the dead end of anarchism and to politically break with the CNT. That had to be the role of a Marxist vanguard party.
Unfortunately, the Bolshevik-Leninists didn't have the time to generate roots in the proletariat during the few months of their existence and they lacked authority among the working class. However, the power of their Trotskyist program is shown by the fact that despite their small numbers they were one of the first to be targeted by the Stalinists and the bourgeois reactionaries once the proletariat was defeated and the barricades were brought down. Before the May Days, the Friends of Durruti helped to distribute the Trotskyists' press on the streets and made their offices available to the Bolshevik-Leninists to organize their meetings. However, the Bolshevik-Leninists didn't achieve much in a meeting with the Friends of Durruti's leadership on May 5:
"Every time the word Authority was pronounced...Balius got mad. The interview or meeting ended without discussing the real problems at bottom.... As for Balius, Carlini and others—not everybody—to continue the fight only on the barricades was the just position, and that is how we split."
Under the orders of the CNT-FAI, and in the face of the POUM's prostration, the workers were ultimately demobilized and defeated. Five hundred died and over a thousand were wounded during the May events. Following the defeat, the state, with the aid of the Stalinists, launched its persecution, imprisonment and murder of the Trotskyists and POUMists (the latter on charges of "Trotskyism"). The anarchist bureaucracy proceeded to attempt the expulsion of the Friends of Durruti from the CNT ranks; meanwhile, the government censored the CNT's paper Solidaridad Obrera. The POUM's paper, La Batalla, was banned and its main leader, Andrés Nin, as well as anarchist leader Camilo Berneri, died at the hands of the Stalinists.
During the Franco dictatorship, 300,000 workers and peasants were assassinated and many others were locked up in concentration camps. All working-class leaders were exterminated or expelled, political and trade-union groups and associations were dissolved. The popular-front government paved the way for Franco's triumph in 1939. One of the greatest revolutionary opportunities for the international proletariat had been drowned in blood.
Anarchists proclaim that the Friends of Durruti never broke with the principles of anarchism. Unfortunately, they are right. They continued to believe, as their leaders in the CNT did, that a classless society could be created simply through force of will; that such a society could be created without first establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat, a centralized democratic workers state to suppress the forces of counterrevolution. Anarchist historian Vernon Richards, in his book, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939) [second enlarged edition, 1972], expresses the ultimate consequences of such an idealist perspective:
"We believe there is something more real, more positive and more revolutionary in resisting war than in participating in it; that it is more civilised and more revolutionary to defend the right of a fascist to live than to support the Tribunals which have the legal powers to shoot him; that it is more realistic to talk to the people from the gutter than from government benches; that in the long run it is more rewarding to influence minds by discussion than to mould them by coercion."
Marxists, on the other hand, reject the false arguments of anarchists that classless communism is simply the product of a psychological regeneration. We fight to overthrow the capitalist system in order to organize production so as to raise it to such a high level that scarcity will no longer exist. Only then can we lay the material basis for the emancipation of humanity from exploitation, war and poverty. We tell anarchist youth today, as Trotsky said to the international proletariat in Lessons of October (1924): "Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer." This is the main lesson of the Spanish Civil War.
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From The Pages Of The Socialist Alternative Press-Greece: Euro crisis deepens
Click on the headline to link to the Socialist Alternative (CWI) website.
Greece: Euro crisis deepens
May 22, 2012
By Tony Saunois, CWI and Andros Payiatsos, Xekinima (CWI in Greece)
Revolution and counter-revolution
This article was written for Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales)
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras: it’s “a war between people and capitalism”
The Greek elections called on May 6 resulted in a political earthquake. Powerful after-shocks are still hitting the global economy, the EU, and Greece itself. These are now set to be the precursor to even stronger political and social upheavals in Greece and throughout the EU.
The workers’ organisations and youth in Britain and throughout the EU need to extend their solidarity to the Greek workers. The workers’ movement throughout the EU needs to oppose the demands that the “Troika” and others are making for the Greek workers to accept more austerity. Such solidarity is a part of the struggle of workers in all countries against the attacks made on them by their own ruling class and governments.
This article is part of the June edition of Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales)
The elections shattered the old established political allegiances but left no coalition of parties from either the left or the right able to form a parliamentary majority. The government has been left paralysed, and new elections have been called for June 17.
This paralysis in parliament is a reflection of a Greek society convulsed in turmoil. There are powerful features of both revolution and counter-revolution. As the Financial Times has warned: “Looting and rioting could occur. A coup or civil war would be conceivable” (18/5/12).
Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), whose share of the vote leapt from 4.6 percent to 16.78 percent, emerged as the second most successful group in the elections. This tremendously positive development, which has given hope to many workers and socialists internationally that something similar could take place in their own countries, has terrified the ruling class in Greece along with Merkel, Cameron, Rajoy and the other political leaders of capitalism. It has thrown down a potential challenge to the “Troika” and the austerity programme dictated by it.
The crucial question now is: can this left advance be pushed further and channelled into a bigger victory in the second election? Will the Greek working class and its organisations embrace a rounded out revolutionary socialist programme? Without this it will not be possible to resolve the crisis in Greece or begin to solve the devastating social consequences of the austerity packages thus far introduced.
As the elections on May 6 also demonstrated, if the left fails to meet this political challenge with the correct programme, slogans, intensity of struggle, and methods of organisation, then the extreme far right will certainly be willing to step into the void. The growth of the fascist Golden Dawn, which emerged from the election with 6.97 percent of the vote and 21 MPs, is a serious warning to the Greek and European working class. It illustrates the threat which will emerge as the crisis deepens in the next weeks and months if the left fails to offer a real alternative to capitalism.
The collapse of the established political parties, especially New Democracy (ND) and PASOK, was the clearest manifestation of the overwhelming rejection of those parties which have enacted the austerity programmes, slavishly following the demands of the “Troika”. Under both New Democracy and PASOK governments, and the outgoing coalition led by them, Greece has been under effective occupation from international bankers, the ECB, IMF, and EU. The European capitalist classes have adopted a modern version of colonial rule, appointing EU commissioners as overseers in each government Ministry.
The stooge parties of the EU have been vomited out by the Greek people. In the last three decades ND and PASOK garnered between 75 percent and 85 percent of the votes in each election. The combined vote of both these parties this time was a mere 32.02 percent - 18.85 percent for ND and 13.18 percent for PASOK.
Brutal attack on living standards
The Greek working and middle classes have suffered a brutal attack on living standards and working conditions for years. As a result of the economic crisis and austerity packages, Greece’s GDP (total output) will have fallen 20 percent from its 2008 level by the end of 2012. This is one of the largest ever falls in GDP suffered by any capitalist country since the depression of the 1930s.
These are not cold statistics. The lives of millions of working- and middle-class people have been shattered. The social consequences have been devastating. Public sector workers have seen wages slashed by 40 percent. A cup of coffee costs the same in London or Athens. Yet in Greece many workers are paid only €400 per month – a pittance. These are literally starvation wages for many. The church estimates it now feeds 250,000 people at soup kitchens every day. Healthcare patients are now expected to pay in advance for treatment, and the number of hospital beds is being slashed by 50 percent. One hospital refused to release a newborn infant until the mother paid the bill. Thousands of schools have been closed down. Many tens of thousands have fled the cities and gone back to the countryside where they can live with families and at least get access to food.
The middle class is being destroyed, with many becoming homeless, left to queue alongside the most downtrodden immigrant workers at food and homeless refuge camps. These camps appear like a southern European version of the “favela” shanty towns of Brazil. Unemployment has soared to over 21 percent – and an astonishing 51 percent amongst the youth.
The right wing and the fascist Golden Dawn have tried to whip up nationalism and racism by targeting illegal immigrants, whose numbers are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. This is a major challenge for the workers and left organisations. Emergency measures to house and feed these people through the introduction of a special public works programme should be demanded by the left. A programme not at the expense of the Greek workers, but funded by the EU.
Workers fight back
The Greek working class has tenaciously fought against these attacks and each government which has enacted them. PASOK replaced New Democracy in the autumn of 2009, only to cave to the diktats of the “Troika” by applying the most vicious attacks against the Greek workers since the end of the civil war in 1949, ignoring its own promises to the contrary. PASOK’s support then collapsed as workers rejected its policies. The trade union leaders have been compelled since the beginning of 2010 to call sixteen general strikes – three of them for forty-eight hours – by the pressure of the workers. Still, the attacks have continued to rain down on the Greek population. The failure of the trade union leaders to take the struggle forward led to exhaustion among workers as one general strike followed another, appearing to lead nowhere. Now in the elections they have vented their rage against the pro-austerity parties.
Tens of thousands, out of desperation, have emigrated. Many more are on the waiting lists. Some have sought a way out by moving to Australia, Britain, and Canada. It has been estimated by the Greek press that in Australia alone there are currently 30,000 illegal Greek immigrants. Some, incredibly, have even gone to Nigeria and Kazakhstan, so desperate has life become in Greece.
Others, driven by desperation and the humiliation of the plight they find themselves in, have taken a more tragic exit. The international press featured the suicide of 77-year-old retired pharmacist, Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in front of Greek parliament because of debt. The trigger was effectively pulled by the “Troika” and its policies.
Having increased 22 percent, the suicide rate in Greece is now the highest in Europe. One radical journalist who recently returned from Greece witnessed a Mercedes car driven into the sea by a small businessman who killed himself. Under Greek law debts cannot be passed onto the family.
These are conditions reminiscent of those described in John Steinbeck’s epic novel about the U.S. depression – The Grapes of Wrath.
There is bitterness, hatred, and anger directed toward the Greek rich elite and their politicians, who cannot safely walk the streets or enter public restaurants. The rich are transferring their money to Switzerland and other European countries while the mass of the population is left to suffer the consequences of the crisis.
In the May 6 elections, the Greek people punished all those politicians and parties that had implemented the austerity policies.
Syriza oppose coalition with PASOK and ND
The leadership of Syriza, particularly its top figure, Alexis Tsipras, correctly took a bold stand by refusing to join a coalition with either PASOK or ND given their support for the terms of the bailout and their continuing acceptance of austerity. He offered to instead form a left block with the Greek Communist Party, KKE, and tried to include the split from Syriza – Democratic Left – in order to fight for a left government.
Although limited, he proposed such a left front be based on a programme of freezing any further austerity measures; cancelling the law which abolishes collective bargaining and slashes the minimum wage to 490 euros per month; and launching a public investigation of the Greek debt, during which period there would be a moratorium on debt repayments. This programme, although inadequate to deal with the depth of the crisis in Greece, would have served as a starting point for developing the struggle against austerity and as a basis for a programme necessary to break with capitalism.
Scandalously, the leadership of the KKE refused to even meet with Tsipras, which was a continuation of its previous sectarian approach towards Syriza, the rest of the left, and the trade union movement. Syriza had correctly proposed a left front together with the KKE and ANTARSYA – the anti-capitalist left alliance in the elections. This was refused. The idea of a left front of Syriza and the KKE was something initially campaigned for by the Greek CWI section, Xekinima, in the period 2008-2010. Though viciously attacked initially, this idea gradually developed support and was eventually taken up by Tsipras and the Syriza leadership.
Had such a joint election list been formed it would have emerged as the largest force and gotten the 50-seat bonus in parliament that the Greek election system gives to the largest party. Even if this was not enough to form a parliamentary majority, it would have put the combined left forces in a commanding position to enter second elections and to offer the realistic prospect of a left government.
While the KKE refused to even consider joining a coalition left government, historically they were prepared to join a capitalist coalition. The KKE entered a coalition with ND in 1989. The KKE General Secretary, Aleka Papariga, has argued that they have learnt from this experience and use this to justify not joining forces with Syriza. However, a united left front, on the basis of fighting against austerity, is entirely different from joining a pro-capitalist government with ND.
A working-class left front led by workers’ parties could have served to unite in action the fragmented left forces in Greece. It could have led to the building of a powerful, organised movement outside parliament as a basis to challenge capitalism. Unfortunately, other left forces like ANTARSYA (Anti-capitalist Left Coalition) also adopted a similar attitude during the first election. However, they now face huge pressure from below, and there are sections of their ranks demanding a united front of some kind with Syriza in the June 17 elections. The issue is still being debated in their ranks, with the majority in the leadership wanting to stand against Syriza. If this line is the one adopted in the end by ANTARSYA, they will pay a heavy price with a serious fall in their support (ANTARSYA won 2 percent in the local elections of 2010 which fell to 1.2 percent in the May 6 election).
The sectarianism of the KKE leadership has provoked opposition within their own ranks as well. Some party members said in the election they would vote for the KKE but urged others to vote for Syriza. A continuation of this policy is certain to provoke further opposition in the ranks of the KKE and the possibility of a split within it.
The KKE has paid a price for this sectarian policy. Its vote only increased by 19,000 – 1 percentage point – to 8.48 percent in the May election. A recent poll for the election in June gave it 4.4 percent.
Despite the inadequacy of Syriza’s programme, its clear stand against austerity and refusal to enter coalition with any pro-austerity parties means it is strengthening its position. It is likely to emerge even stronger in the June elections. Recent opinion polls have put its level of support between 20 and 26 percent, which would mean it could be the largest party.
Tsipras has threatened not to pay the whole of the national debt, to cut defence spending, and to crack down on waste, corruption, and tax evasion by the rich. He has also supported public control of the banking system, at times implying nationalisation. He has also spoken favourably of Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. It is a radical reform programme but does not break with capitalism. However, it is a starting point for an emergency public works programme linked to the need for the nationalisation of the banks and key sectors of the economy and the introduction of a democratic socialist plan.
The rapid electoral growth of Syriza has important lessons for left forces in other countries including TUSC in Britain. Such organisations can experience a rapid electoral growth from a low base when objective conditions are ripe for this. They need to establish a firm and clear profile of fighting for workers’ interests to capitalise on the situation when other political parties have been tried and rejected. The electoral success achieved by the ULA in Ireland, especially the Socialist Party, illustrates this.
Syriza’s refusal to join a pro-cuts coalition with PASOK and ND, even on the basis of their promise to renegotiate the Memorandum with the “Troika”, is in marked contrast to other left forces and parties at this stage. In Italy, the PRC entered such coalitions at the local level and consequently destroyed its support. The IU in Spain, whose support grew in the recent election, has also now wrongly joined a coalition with PSOE in Andalucia. A continuation of this policy could erode the growth and development of the IU.
The pro-cuts parties, led by ND and PASOK, along with the “Troika”, are desperately trying to turn the second election into a referendum on membership in the euro zone and the EU rather than on their austerity policies. They, along with the EU establishment, are launching a clear campaign arguing that to oppose the austerity package will mean Greece being ejected from the euro and probably from the EU.
The EU and the euro
This is a central issue in the Greek crisis, and it is crucial for the left to have a clear policy and programme to face up to this question.
Unfortunately, despite taking a bold stand against austerity and against coalition with ND and PASOK, Tsipras and the Syriza leadership are not arguing for a clear alternative. In part, this reflects the pressure of a majority of Greeks – 79 percent according to one recent poll – who, while rejecting austerity, want to remain in the euro.
This reflects an understandable fear of what would follow Greece being ejected from the euro, including the potential isolation of Greece’s relatively small economy. The Greek masses are terrified of Greece being thrown back to the social conditions of the 1950s and ‘60s or the high inflation of the 1970s and 1980s. Syriza and the left need to answer these fears and explain what the alternative is.
It is also clear that Tsipras is gambling that the EU would not throw Greece out of the euro zone because of the consequences it would have for the rest of the EU. Yet this is not at all certain.
The KKE, on the other hand, opposes the euro and the EU and attacks Syriza for its attitude toward the EU and the euro. Politically, this is one of the justifications they use for not joining a left front with Syriza. While the KKE formally speaks in very radical rhetoric about a “people’s revolt” or an “uprising”, they adopt a propagandistic, abstract approach in practice which is totally unfitted to the class polarisation and willingness to struggle which currently exist in Greece. They even justified not joining a left governmental front because “what would then be the character of the opposition?” Opposition to the EU and the euro on a nationalist basis means they are trapped in a capitalist framework. What is necessary is an internationalist socialist approach that links together the struggle of the Greek workers with the working class in other EU countries.
It is true that a section of the European ruling classes are terrified of the consequences of throwing Greece out of the euro zone. The Centre for Economic and Business Research estimates that a “disorderly” collapse of the euro caused by Greece leaving could cost up to US$1 trillion. An “orderly” collapse would cost 2 percent of EU GDP – US$300 billion. Undoubtedly such a development would have massive consequences for the whole of the EU and could result in the break up of the euro zone with Spain and other countries possibly breaking from it.
However, the over-riding fear of the German ruling class and others is that if substantial concessions are made to Greece then Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland would clamour for even more. This they cannot risk. Thus the same Centre for Economic and Business Research concludes: “The end of the euro in its current form is a certainty”.
Tsipras and Syriza mistakenly believe that it is possible to remain in the euro zone and at the same time not introduce austerity policies against the working class. Yet the euro itself is an economic corset which allows the larger capitalist powers and companies to impose their austerity programme throughout the euro zone.
Syriza is correct to say it will refuse to introduce austerity. But how would it then face up to the threat of Greece’s ejection from the euro? This is the inevitable course events are now taking. It is not credible simply to respond by saying Greece will remain in the euro and oppose austerity. If they did this, and a left government on that basis were thrown out of the euro, Syriza would not be prepared to answer being blamed by the right wing for this.
While most Greeks fear being ejected from the euro at this stage, that does not mean that the euro can or will be accepted at any price indefinitely.
Syriza needs to respond to this attack by clearly explaining that if Greece rejects austerity it will be ejected from the euro zone. Even without a government opposing austerity Greece could be ejected from the euro.
Faced with such a situation, a left government should immediately introduce capital and credit controls to prevent a flight of capital from the country, nationalise all banks, finance institutions, and major companies. It should cancel all debt repayment to the banks and financial institutions. The books should be opened to inspect all of the agreements made with international banks and markets. The assets of the rich should be seized and safe guards given to small savers and investors. It should introduce an emergency reconstruction programme drawn up democratically as part of a socialist plan, which would include measures to assist small businesses.
Need for socialist internationalism
At the same time, Syriza and a democratic government of workers and all those exploited by capitalism should appeal to the working people of Europe – especially those facing a similar situation in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy – to join them in solidarity and begin building a new alternative to the capitalist EU and euro. The massive crisis erupting in Spain and elsewhere would mean the working people would rally to such a call. This could be the first step toward the formation of a voluntary democratic socialist confederation involving these countries as a step towards a socialist confederation of Europe.
Such a process should be begun now with direct links being built with the left and workers organisations in these countries.
Unfortunately, a failure to boldly answer the threat of being ejected from the euro will only serve to partly disarm the movement of struggle against austerity. It may prevent Syriza from emerging as the largest party. The Greek ruling class and the “Troika” are campaigning to make the election about membership in the euro, not about austerity. They are attempting to terrify people out of voting for Syriza and to rally fragmented right-wing voters - including from right-wing parties that failed to enter parliament - around New Democracy. However, after years of austerity measures and brutal attacks it is not certain this strategy will succeed.
Despite Syriza’s weakness on the EU and euro, at the time of writing Syriza seems certain to increase its support and has a serious possibility of becoming the largest party in close competition to ND. Recent polls have put both parties at between 20 and 23 percent of the vote.
New phase of the struggle
Should Syriza emerge in the lead or at the head of a government this would not signal the end of the crisis, but it would begin a new phase that the workers’ organisations need to urgently prepare for if they are to take the struggle forward.
Syriza itself needs to be strengthened by workers, youth, the poor, and all those opposed to austerity joining its ranks and getting organised. Syriza, as a coalition, is now attempting to broaden out to begin including social movements and organisations.
Tsipras has rightly called for the left to come together in a united front. This needs to be given a concrete organised expression through the convening of a national assembly of rank-and-file delegates from the left parties, trade unions, workplaces, universities, neighbourhoods, and community organisations.
Local assemblies of elected delegates from these same spheres should be urgently formed under the initiative of Syriza to prepare for the coming struggles and to ensure that a future left government carries out policies in the interests of working people.
The ruling class is beginning to feel threatened by the emerging challenge of Syriza and the left. There is the threat of a collapse in society if the left does not seize the moment. Government funds may even run out before the election on June 17.
Lessons from Chile
Although in a different era, there are some parallels between the situation in Greece today and the situation which developed in Chile between 1970 and 1973. There are also many parallels with developments taking place in Latin America today in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina.
In Chile in the period 1970-73 a massive polarisation developed in society. The right and the ruling class prepared their forces - they could not allow the impasse to continue.
The fascist organisation Patria y Liberdad marched, bombed, and attacked local activists and acted as a fascist auxiliary to the military, which struck in a deadly coup on 11 September, 1973.
Golden Dawn, which praises the former Greek military dictatorship and Hitler, can act as a fascist auxiliary should the ruling class, or sections of them, conclude they have no alternative but to “restore order” from the chaos and social collapse which threatens Greek society through a military intervention. Although this is unlikely to be the first recourse of the ruling class, they could eventually move in this direction. If Golden Dawn’s support declines - as the polls indicate it will in this election - it would be positive, but it would not be the end of the threat posed by this fascist organisation.
The fascist leader of Golden Dawn, Nikolaos Michalokiakos, threatened those who have “betrayed their homeland”, saying: “[T]he time has come to fear. We are coming”. They cannot become a mass force in their own right, but like Patria y Liberdad they can become (and already are) a vicious organisation that can act as an auxiliary to attack minorities and the working class.
Golden Dawn is sending its “black shirt” thugs to attack immigrants, who suffer daily beatings and threats from them. According to press reports in Gazi, Athens, they left leaflets outside gay bars warning they would be the next target and attacked gay people leaving the bars.
This poses the urgent necessity of forming local anti-fascist assemblies that should establish groups to defend all those threatened by fascist attack.
In the June 17 election, should Syriza merge with other left forces to win a parliamentary majority, a left government headed by Syriza and Alex Tsipas could rapidly be pushed leftward under the pressure of the mass movement and depth of the crisis. This is also a fear of the ruling class. Such a development in Greece would also set an example in other countries, such as Spain and Portugal.
A government of this character could at some stage even include certain features of the Allende government in Chile 1970-73, as well as some features of the Chavez, Morales, and Kirchner governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina respectively. This could include taking measures that attack capitalist interests, including widespread nationalisations. While at this stage Syriza and Tsipras are not speaking of socialism as an alternative, this could change. In an interview published in the British daily paper The Guardian, he argued that there is “a war between people and capitalism” (19/5/12). This represents a significant step forward but illustrates how he and the Syriza leadership could be pressured by the situation to go even further to the left. When first elected to power, Chávez in Venezuela did not make reference to socialism. Such a scenario in Greece is not at all certain, but such developments could not be excluded at a certain stage. Particularly under the impact of the deepening crisis and class struggle, demands like nationalisation, workers’ control and management can be embraced by wide sections of the working class. This can push “left” governments to adopt such measures, at least partially. This was the experience of the first period of the PASOK government in 1981.
Should the pro-cuts parties be able to cobble together a coalition, on the basis of ND becoming the largest party and gaining the 50-seat bonus, then it would lack any credibility, authority, or stability. All such parties with such a low level of support forming such a government would effectively constitute a coup against the majority of the Greek people by minority pro-austerity parties. They would face intense anger and bitter struggles by the Greek working class. Such a government would face the huge anger of society and a ferocious struggle by the Greek workers to get rid of it, particularly as they will see the powerful possibility of a left government around Syriza, who would, under these conditions, be the main opposition force, deepening their presence and roots in society.
In this situation, Syriza should prepare a struggle against the government and the capitalist system. Xekinima, the Greek section of the CWI, would propose that under these conditions the central slogan should be for a struggle to bring these institutions down through strikes, occupations, and mass protests.
The rapid growth of Syriza is an extremely positive development. However, the depth of the social and political crisis unfolding in Greece will put it to the test along with all political forces. If it does not develop a fully rounded-out programme, set of methods, and approach of struggle that can offer a way forward to the masses, then it can decline as rapidly as it has arisen. To assist those forces in and around Syriza in drawing the necessary political conclusions as to the tasks needed to take the struggle forward, the strengthening of the Marxist collaborators of Syriza in Xekinima is also an urgent necessity.
Socialist Alternative, P.O. Box 45343, Seattle WA 98145
Phone: (206)526-7185
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Greece: Euro crisis deepens
May 22, 2012
By Tony Saunois, CWI and Andros Payiatsos, Xekinima (CWI in Greece)
Revolution and counter-revolution
This article was written for Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales)
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras: it’s “a war between people and capitalism”
The Greek elections called on May 6 resulted in a political earthquake. Powerful after-shocks are still hitting the global economy, the EU, and Greece itself. These are now set to be the precursor to even stronger political and social upheavals in Greece and throughout the EU.
The workers’ organisations and youth in Britain and throughout the EU need to extend their solidarity to the Greek workers. The workers’ movement throughout the EU needs to oppose the demands that the “Troika” and others are making for the Greek workers to accept more austerity. Such solidarity is a part of the struggle of workers in all countries against the attacks made on them by their own ruling class and governments.
This article is part of the June edition of Socialism Today, magazine of the Socialist Party (CWI England & Wales)
The elections shattered the old established political allegiances but left no coalition of parties from either the left or the right able to form a parliamentary majority. The government has been left paralysed, and new elections have been called for June 17.
This paralysis in parliament is a reflection of a Greek society convulsed in turmoil. There are powerful features of both revolution and counter-revolution. As the Financial Times has warned: “Looting and rioting could occur. A coup or civil war would be conceivable” (18/5/12).
Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), whose share of the vote leapt from 4.6 percent to 16.78 percent, emerged as the second most successful group in the elections. This tremendously positive development, which has given hope to many workers and socialists internationally that something similar could take place in their own countries, has terrified the ruling class in Greece along with Merkel, Cameron, Rajoy and the other political leaders of capitalism. It has thrown down a potential challenge to the “Troika” and the austerity programme dictated by it.
The crucial question now is: can this left advance be pushed further and channelled into a bigger victory in the second election? Will the Greek working class and its organisations embrace a rounded out revolutionary socialist programme? Without this it will not be possible to resolve the crisis in Greece or begin to solve the devastating social consequences of the austerity packages thus far introduced.
As the elections on May 6 also demonstrated, if the left fails to meet this political challenge with the correct programme, slogans, intensity of struggle, and methods of organisation, then the extreme far right will certainly be willing to step into the void. The growth of the fascist Golden Dawn, which emerged from the election with 6.97 percent of the vote and 21 MPs, is a serious warning to the Greek and European working class. It illustrates the threat which will emerge as the crisis deepens in the next weeks and months if the left fails to offer a real alternative to capitalism.
The collapse of the established political parties, especially New Democracy (ND) and PASOK, was the clearest manifestation of the overwhelming rejection of those parties which have enacted the austerity programmes, slavishly following the demands of the “Troika”. Under both New Democracy and PASOK governments, and the outgoing coalition led by them, Greece has been under effective occupation from international bankers, the ECB, IMF, and EU. The European capitalist classes have adopted a modern version of colonial rule, appointing EU commissioners as overseers in each government Ministry.
The stooge parties of the EU have been vomited out by the Greek people. In the last three decades ND and PASOK garnered between 75 percent and 85 percent of the votes in each election. The combined vote of both these parties this time was a mere 32.02 percent - 18.85 percent for ND and 13.18 percent for PASOK.
Brutal attack on living standards
The Greek working and middle classes have suffered a brutal attack on living standards and working conditions for years. As a result of the economic crisis and austerity packages, Greece’s GDP (total output) will have fallen 20 percent from its 2008 level by the end of 2012. This is one of the largest ever falls in GDP suffered by any capitalist country since the depression of the 1930s.
These are not cold statistics. The lives of millions of working- and middle-class people have been shattered. The social consequences have been devastating. Public sector workers have seen wages slashed by 40 percent. A cup of coffee costs the same in London or Athens. Yet in Greece many workers are paid only €400 per month – a pittance. These are literally starvation wages for many. The church estimates it now feeds 250,000 people at soup kitchens every day. Healthcare patients are now expected to pay in advance for treatment, and the number of hospital beds is being slashed by 50 percent. One hospital refused to release a newborn infant until the mother paid the bill. Thousands of schools have been closed down. Many tens of thousands have fled the cities and gone back to the countryside where they can live with families and at least get access to food.
The middle class is being destroyed, with many becoming homeless, left to queue alongside the most downtrodden immigrant workers at food and homeless refuge camps. These camps appear like a southern European version of the “favela” shanty towns of Brazil. Unemployment has soared to over 21 percent – and an astonishing 51 percent amongst the youth.
The right wing and the fascist Golden Dawn have tried to whip up nationalism and racism by targeting illegal immigrants, whose numbers are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. This is a major challenge for the workers and left organisations. Emergency measures to house and feed these people through the introduction of a special public works programme should be demanded by the left. A programme not at the expense of the Greek workers, but funded by the EU.
Workers fight back
The Greek working class has tenaciously fought against these attacks and each government which has enacted them. PASOK replaced New Democracy in the autumn of 2009, only to cave to the diktats of the “Troika” by applying the most vicious attacks against the Greek workers since the end of the civil war in 1949, ignoring its own promises to the contrary. PASOK’s support then collapsed as workers rejected its policies. The trade union leaders have been compelled since the beginning of 2010 to call sixteen general strikes – three of them for forty-eight hours – by the pressure of the workers. Still, the attacks have continued to rain down on the Greek population. The failure of the trade union leaders to take the struggle forward led to exhaustion among workers as one general strike followed another, appearing to lead nowhere. Now in the elections they have vented their rage against the pro-austerity parties.
Tens of thousands, out of desperation, have emigrated. Many more are on the waiting lists. Some have sought a way out by moving to Australia, Britain, and Canada. It has been estimated by the Greek press that in Australia alone there are currently 30,000 illegal Greek immigrants. Some, incredibly, have even gone to Nigeria and Kazakhstan, so desperate has life become in Greece.
Others, driven by desperation and the humiliation of the plight they find themselves in, have taken a more tragic exit. The international press featured the suicide of 77-year-old retired pharmacist, Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in front of Greek parliament because of debt. The trigger was effectively pulled by the “Troika” and its policies.
Having increased 22 percent, the suicide rate in Greece is now the highest in Europe. One radical journalist who recently returned from Greece witnessed a Mercedes car driven into the sea by a small businessman who killed himself. Under Greek law debts cannot be passed onto the family.
These are conditions reminiscent of those described in John Steinbeck’s epic novel about the U.S. depression – The Grapes of Wrath.
There is bitterness, hatred, and anger directed toward the Greek rich elite and their politicians, who cannot safely walk the streets or enter public restaurants. The rich are transferring their money to Switzerland and other European countries while the mass of the population is left to suffer the consequences of the crisis.
In the May 6 elections, the Greek people punished all those politicians and parties that had implemented the austerity policies.
Syriza oppose coalition with PASOK and ND
The leadership of Syriza, particularly its top figure, Alexis Tsipras, correctly took a bold stand by refusing to join a coalition with either PASOK or ND given their support for the terms of the bailout and their continuing acceptance of austerity. He offered to instead form a left block with the Greek Communist Party, KKE, and tried to include the split from Syriza – Democratic Left – in order to fight for a left government.
Although limited, he proposed such a left front be based on a programme of freezing any further austerity measures; cancelling the law which abolishes collective bargaining and slashes the minimum wage to 490 euros per month; and launching a public investigation of the Greek debt, during which period there would be a moratorium on debt repayments. This programme, although inadequate to deal with the depth of the crisis in Greece, would have served as a starting point for developing the struggle against austerity and as a basis for a programme necessary to break with capitalism.
Scandalously, the leadership of the KKE refused to even meet with Tsipras, which was a continuation of its previous sectarian approach towards Syriza, the rest of the left, and the trade union movement. Syriza had correctly proposed a left front together with the KKE and ANTARSYA – the anti-capitalist left alliance in the elections. This was refused. The idea of a left front of Syriza and the KKE was something initially campaigned for by the Greek CWI section, Xekinima, in the period 2008-2010. Though viciously attacked initially, this idea gradually developed support and was eventually taken up by Tsipras and the Syriza leadership.
Had such a joint election list been formed it would have emerged as the largest force and gotten the 50-seat bonus in parliament that the Greek election system gives to the largest party. Even if this was not enough to form a parliamentary majority, it would have put the combined left forces in a commanding position to enter second elections and to offer the realistic prospect of a left government.
While the KKE refused to even consider joining a coalition left government, historically they were prepared to join a capitalist coalition. The KKE entered a coalition with ND in 1989. The KKE General Secretary, Aleka Papariga, has argued that they have learnt from this experience and use this to justify not joining forces with Syriza. However, a united left front, on the basis of fighting against austerity, is entirely different from joining a pro-capitalist government with ND.
A working-class left front led by workers’ parties could have served to unite in action the fragmented left forces in Greece. It could have led to the building of a powerful, organised movement outside parliament as a basis to challenge capitalism. Unfortunately, other left forces like ANTARSYA (Anti-capitalist Left Coalition) also adopted a similar attitude during the first election. However, they now face huge pressure from below, and there are sections of their ranks demanding a united front of some kind with Syriza in the June 17 elections. The issue is still being debated in their ranks, with the majority in the leadership wanting to stand against Syriza. If this line is the one adopted in the end by ANTARSYA, they will pay a heavy price with a serious fall in their support (ANTARSYA won 2 percent in the local elections of 2010 which fell to 1.2 percent in the May 6 election).
The sectarianism of the KKE leadership has provoked opposition within their own ranks as well. Some party members said in the election they would vote for the KKE but urged others to vote for Syriza. A continuation of this policy is certain to provoke further opposition in the ranks of the KKE and the possibility of a split within it.
The KKE has paid a price for this sectarian policy. Its vote only increased by 19,000 – 1 percentage point – to 8.48 percent in the May election. A recent poll for the election in June gave it 4.4 percent.
Despite the inadequacy of Syriza’s programme, its clear stand against austerity and refusal to enter coalition with any pro-austerity parties means it is strengthening its position. It is likely to emerge even stronger in the June elections. Recent opinion polls have put its level of support between 20 and 26 percent, which would mean it could be the largest party.
Tsipras has threatened not to pay the whole of the national debt, to cut defence spending, and to crack down on waste, corruption, and tax evasion by the rich. He has also supported public control of the banking system, at times implying nationalisation. He has also spoken favourably of Roosevelt’s “New Deal”. It is a radical reform programme but does not break with capitalism. However, it is a starting point for an emergency public works programme linked to the need for the nationalisation of the banks and key sectors of the economy and the introduction of a democratic socialist plan.
The rapid electoral growth of Syriza has important lessons for left forces in other countries including TUSC in Britain. Such organisations can experience a rapid electoral growth from a low base when objective conditions are ripe for this. They need to establish a firm and clear profile of fighting for workers’ interests to capitalise on the situation when other political parties have been tried and rejected. The electoral success achieved by the ULA in Ireland, especially the Socialist Party, illustrates this.
Syriza’s refusal to join a pro-cuts coalition with PASOK and ND, even on the basis of their promise to renegotiate the Memorandum with the “Troika”, is in marked contrast to other left forces and parties at this stage. In Italy, the PRC entered such coalitions at the local level and consequently destroyed its support. The IU in Spain, whose support grew in the recent election, has also now wrongly joined a coalition with PSOE in Andalucia. A continuation of this policy could erode the growth and development of the IU.
The pro-cuts parties, led by ND and PASOK, along with the “Troika”, are desperately trying to turn the second election into a referendum on membership in the euro zone and the EU rather than on their austerity policies. They, along with the EU establishment, are launching a clear campaign arguing that to oppose the austerity package will mean Greece being ejected from the euro and probably from the EU.
The EU and the euro
This is a central issue in the Greek crisis, and it is crucial for the left to have a clear policy and programme to face up to this question.
Unfortunately, despite taking a bold stand against austerity and against coalition with ND and PASOK, Tsipras and the Syriza leadership are not arguing for a clear alternative. In part, this reflects the pressure of a majority of Greeks – 79 percent according to one recent poll – who, while rejecting austerity, want to remain in the euro.
This reflects an understandable fear of what would follow Greece being ejected from the euro, including the potential isolation of Greece’s relatively small economy. The Greek masses are terrified of Greece being thrown back to the social conditions of the 1950s and ‘60s or the high inflation of the 1970s and 1980s. Syriza and the left need to answer these fears and explain what the alternative is.
It is also clear that Tsipras is gambling that the EU would not throw Greece out of the euro zone because of the consequences it would have for the rest of the EU. Yet this is not at all certain.
The KKE, on the other hand, opposes the euro and the EU and attacks Syriza for its attitude toward the EU and the euro. Politically, this is one of the justifications they use for not joining a left front with Syriza. While the KKE formally speaks in very radical rhetoric about a “people’s revolt” or an “uprising”, they adopt a propagandistic, abstract approach in practice which is totally unfitted to the class polarisation and willingness to struggle which currently exist in Greece. They even justified not joining a left governmental front because “what would then be the character of the opposition?” Opposition to the EU and the euro on a nationalist basis means they are trapped in a capitalist framework. What is necessary is an internationalist socialist approach that links together the struggle of the Greek workers with the working class in other EU countries.
It is true that a section of the European ruling classes are terrified of the consequences of throwing Greece out of the euro zone. The Centre for Economic and Business Research estimates that a “disorderly” collapse of the euro caused by Greece leaving could cost up to US$1 trillion. An “orderly” collapse would cost 2 percent of EU GDP – US$300 billion. Undoubtedly such a development would have massive consequences for the whole of the EU and could result in the break up of the euro zone with Spain and other countries possibly breaking from it.
However, the over-riding fear of the German ruling class and others is that if substantial concessions are made to Greece then Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Ireland would clamour for even more. This they cannot risk. Thus the same Centre for Economic and Business Research concludes: “The end of the euro in its current form is a certainty”.
Tsipras and Syriza mistakenly believe that it is possible to remain in the euro zone and at the same time not introduce austerity policies against the working class. Yet the euro itself is an economic corset which allows the larger capitalist powers and companies to impose their austerity programme throughout the euro zone.
Syriza is correct to say it will refuse to introduce austerity. But how would it then face up to the threat of Greece’s ejection from the euro? This is the inevitable course events are now taking. It is not credible simply to respond by saying Greece will remain in the euro and oppose austerity. If they did this, and a left government on that basis were thrown out of the euro, Syriza would not be prepared to answer being blamed by the right wing for this.
While most Greeks fear being ejected from the euro at this stage, that does not mean that the euro can or will be accepted at any price indefinitely.
Syriza needs to respond to this attack by clearly explaining that if Greece rejects austerity it will be ejected from the euro zone. Even without a government opposing austerity Greece could be ejected from the euro.
Faced with such a situation, a left government should immediately introduce capital and credit controls to prevent a flight of capital from the country, nationalise all banks, finance institutions, and major companies. It should cancel all debt repayment to the banks and financial institutions. The books should be opened to inspect all of the agreements made with international banks and markets. The assets of the rich should be seized and safe guards given to small savers and investors. It should introduce an emergency reconstruction programme drawn up democratically as part of a socialist plan, which would include measures to assist small businesses.
Need for socialist internationalism
At the same time, Syriza and a democratic government of workers and all those exploited by capitalism should appeal to the working people of Europe – especially those facing a similar situation in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy – to join them in solidarity and begin building a new alternative to the capitalist EU and euro. The massive crisis erupting in Spain and elsewhere would mean the working people would rally to such a call. This could be the first step toward the formation of a voluntary democratic socialist confederation involving these countries as a step towards a socialist confederation of Europe.
Such a process should be begun now with direct links being built with the left and workers organisations in these countries.
Unfortunately, a failure to boldly answer the threat of being ejected from the euro will only serve to partly disarm the movement of struggle against austerity. It may prevent Syriza from emerging as the largest party. The Greek ruling class and the “Troika” are campaigning to make the election about membership in the euro, not about austerity. They are attempting to terrify people out of voting for Syriza and to rally fragmented right-wing voters - including from right-wing parties that failed to enter parliament - around New Democracy. However, after years of austerity measures and brutal attacks it is not certain this strategy will succeed.
Despite Syriza’s weakness on the EU and euro, at the time of writing Syriza seems certain to increase its support and has a serious possibility of becoming the largest party in close competition to ND. Recent polls have put both parties at between 20 and 23 percent of the vote.
New phase of the struggle
Should Syriza emerge in the lead or at the head of a government this would not signal the end of the crisis, but it would begin a new phase that the workers’ organisations need to urgently prepare for if they are to take the struggle forward.
Syriza itself needs to be strengthened by workers, youth, the poor, and all those opposed to austerity joining its ranks and getting organised. Syriza, as a coalition, is now attempting to broaden out to begin including social movements and organisations.
Tsipras has rightly called for the left to come together in a united front. This needs to be given a concrete organised expression through the convening of a national assembly of rank-and-file delegates from the left parties, trade unions, workplaces, universities, neighbourhoods, and community organisations.
Local assemblies of elected delegates from these same spheres should be urgently formed under the initiative of Syriza to prepare for the coming struggles and to ensure that a future left government carries out policies in the interests of working people.
The ruling class is beginning to feel threatened by the emerging challenge of Syriza and the left. There is the threat of a collapse in society if the left does not seize the moment. Government funds may even run out before the election on June 17.
Lessons from Chile
Although in a different era, there are some parallels between the situation in Greece today and the situation which developed in Chile between 1970 and 1973. There are also many parallels with developments taking place in Latin America today in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina.
In Chile in the period 1970-73 a massive polarisation developed in society. The right and the ruling class prepared their forces - they could not allow the impasse to continue.
The fascist organisation Patria y Liberdad marched, bombed, and attacked local activists and acted as a fascist auxiliary to the military, which struck in a deadly coup on 11 September, 1973.
Golden Dawn, which praises the former Greek military dictatorship and Hitler, can act as a fascist auxiliary should the ruling class, or sections of them, conclude they have no alternative but to “restore order” from the chaos and social collapse which threatens Greek society through a military intervention. Although this is unlikely to be the first recourse of the ruling class, they could eventually move in this direction. If Golden Dawn’s support declines - as the polls indicate it will in this election - it would be positive, but it would not be the end of the threat posed by this fascist organisation.
The fascist leader of Golden Dawn, Nikolaos Michalokiakos, threatened those who have “betrayed their homeland”, saying: “[T]he time has come to fear. We are coming”. They cannot become a mass force in their own right, but like Patria y Liberdad they can become (and already are) a vicious organisation that can act as an auxiliary to attack minorities and the working class.
Golden Dawn is sending its “black shirt” thugs to attack immigrants, who suffer daily beatings and threats from them. According to press reports in Gazi, Athens, they left leaflets outside gay bars warning they would be the next target and attacked gay people leaving the bars.
This poses the urgent necessity of forming local anti-fascist assemblies that should establish groups to defend all those threatened by fascist attack.
In the June 17 election, should Syriza merge with other left forces to win a parliamentary majority, a left government headed by Syriza and Alex Tsipas could rapidly be pushed leftward under the pressure of the mass movement and depth of the crisis. This is also a fear of the ruling class. Such a development in Greece would also set an example in other countries, such as Spain and Portugal.
A government of this character could at some stage even include certain features of the Allende government in Chile 1970-73, as well as some features of the Chavez, Morales, and Kirchner governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina respectively. This could include taking measures that attack capitalist interests, including widespread nationalisations. While at this stage Syriza and Tsipras are not speaking of socialism as an alternative, this could change. In an interview published in the British daily paper The Guardian, he argued that there is “a war between people and capitalism” (19/5/12). This represents a significant step forward but illustrates how he and the Syriza leadership could be pressured by the situation to go even further to the left. When first elected to power, Chávez in Venezuela did not make reference to socialism. Such a scenario in Greece is not at all certain, but such developments could not be excluded at a certain stage. Particularly under the impact of the deepening crisis and class struggle, demands like nationalisation, workers’ control and management can be embraced by wide sections of the working class. This can push “left” governments to adopt such measures, at least partially. This was the experience of the first period of the PASOK government in 1981.
Should the pro-cuts parties be able to cobble together a coalition, on the basis of ND becoming the largest party and gaining the 50-seat bonus, then it would lack any credibility, authority, or stability. All such parties with such a low level of support forming such a government would effectively constitute a coup against the majority of the Greek people by minority pro-austerity parties. They would face intense anger and bitter struggles by the Greek working class. Such a government would face the huge anger of society and a ferocious struggle by the Greek workers to get rid of it, particularly as they will see the powerful possibility of a left government around Syriza, who would, under these conditions, be the main opposition force, deepening their presence and roots in society.
In this situation, Syriza should prepare a struggle against the government and the capitalist system. Xekinima, the Greek section of the CWI, would propose that under these conditions the central slogan should be for a struggle to bring these institutions down through strikes, occupations, and mass protests.
The rapid growth of Syriza is an extremely positive development. However, the depth of the social and political crisis unfolding in Greece will put it to the test along with all political forces. If it does not develop a fully rounded-out programme, set of methods, and approach of struggle that can offer a way forward to the masses, then it can decline as rapidly as it has arisen. To assist those forces in and around Syriza in drawing the necessary political conclusions as to the tasks needed to take the struggle forward, the strengthening of the Marxist collaborators of Syriza in Xekinima is also an urgent necessity.
Socialist Alternative, P.O. Box 45343, Seattle WA 98145
Phone: (206)526-7185
Comments? Suggestions for improving our web page? Please email info@SocialistAlternative.org
From #Ur-Occupied Boston (#Ur-Tomemonos Boston)-General Assembly-The Embryo Of An Alternate Government-Learn The Lessons Of History-Lessons From The Utopian Socialists- Charles Fourier and The Phalanx Movement-“The Vices of Commerce”
Click on the headline to link to the archives of the Occupy Boston General Assembly minutes from the Occupy Boston website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011. The General Assembly is the core political institution of the Occupy movement. Some of the minutes will reflect the growing pains of that movement and its concepts of political organization. Note that I used the word embryo in the headline and I believe that gives a fair estimate of its status, and its possibilities.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend All The Occupation Sites And All The Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Protesters Everywhere!
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Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“The Vices of Commerce”
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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: Manuscrits de Charles Fourier. Années 1857-58.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden
Proofread: by Andy Carloff 2010.
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What are the vices inherent in the commercial mechanism? Others have defined it in flattering terms; I am going to adopt a very different tone and show commerce to be the source of all sorts of crimes and misdeeds. I will refer to just seven.
The first disorder is Bankruptcy which scoffs at the efforts of legislators and triumphs in spite of all their legal codes.[20] Just recently French legislation was put to shame when it purported to repress bankruptcy with a new code of commerce. Bankruptcy has only become bolder and more confident in changing its form, and the new code is merely a weapon with which the bankrupt threaten the creditors whom they wish to rob.
The second vice is Smuggling by which commerce rebels openly against authority and forms industrial Vendees against which the state must maintain parasitical armies of customs officers. Certain cities like Basel and other such centres of contraband exploit neighbouring empires in the same way that the Algerian pirates exploit seafarers. The ones are sea-robbers and the others are land-robbers. I shall prove in one of the chapters of this work that, by means of its contraband, the city of Basel alone exacts an annual tribute of several million from France. You can draw your own conclusions about the extent of the smuggling carried on each year over the whole territory of France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
What shall I say of the Usurers who, under the name of bankers, are waging war against property owners? Take for example the hordes of Jews and vagabonds who have practically overrun the four departments on the right bank of the Rhine. They would soon have gobbled up most of the French property there if the government had not restrained them by decrees and by means of an economic struggle that involved the Bank of France, which is an agent of resistance against usury.
Speculation is the fourth of the plagues to which I am calling attention; it is another one of the weapons used by commerce against governments. Speculation abuses public confidence and makes sport of the ascendency of the noblest heroes. Witness the campaign of Austerlitz during which a horde of Parisian speculators ravaged French industry, discredited the Bank of France and the government bonds, and created all the symptoms of a panic at the very moment when the Empire was echoing with cries of admiration and blind confidence in its illustrious chief.
Hoarding is not the least of the mercantile feats. It creates famine in the midst of abundance; by means of contrived panics it can double the price of goods and exploit society in the interest of the commercial vampires.
Parasitism is a less obvious but not less harmful disorder. Hosts of merchants encumber the cities, and the streets are cluttered with solicitors who swarm without limit or purpose. There was competition enough when their number was only a quarter of what it is today, and then agriculture profited from the capital and labour of the crowd of parasites with which commerce is now inundating the cities.
Of all the commercial vices Cheating is the one which is making the most rapid progress. Today it has reached such a point that merchants of the old type are thought to be incompetent because they don’t know the tricks to which abusive competition has given rise.
Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It, It’s Ours! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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Below I am posting, occasionally, comments on the Occupy movement as I see or hear things of interest, or that cause alarm bells to ring in my head. The first comment directly below from October 1, which represented my first impressions of Occupy Boston, is the lead for all further postings.
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Markin comment October 1, 2011:
There is a lot of naiveté expressed about the nature of capitalism, capitalists, and the way to win in the class struggle by various participants in this occupation. Many also have attempted to make a virtue out of that naiveté, particularly around the issues of effective democratic organization (the General Assembly, its unrepresentative nature and its undemocratic consensus process) and relationships with the police (they are not our friends, no way, when the deal goes down). However, their spirit is refreshing, they are acting out of good subjective anti-capitalist motives and, most importantly, even those of us who call ourselves "reds" (communists), including this writer, started out from liberal premises as naive, if not more so, than those encountered at the occupation site. We can all learn something but in the meantime we must defend the "occupation" and the occupiers. More later as the occupation continues.
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In the recent past as part of my one of my commentaries I noted the following:
“… The idea of the General Assembly with each individual attendee acting as a “tribune of the people” is interesting and important. And, of course, it represents, for today anyway, the embryo of what the ‘new world’ we need to create might look like at the governmental level.”
A couple of the people that I have talked to lately were not quite sure what to make of that idea. The idea that what is going on in Occupy Boston at the governmental level could, should, would be a possible form of governing this society in the “new world a-borning” with the rise of the Occupy movement. Part of the problem is that there was some confusion on the part of the listeners that one of the possible aims of this movement is to create an alternative government, or at least provide a model for such a government. I will argue here now, and in the future, that it should be one of the goals. In short, we need to take power away from the Democrats and Republicans and their tired old congressional/executive/judicial doesn’t work- checks and balances-form of governing and place it at the grassroots level and work upward from there rather than, as now, have power devolve from the top. (And stop well short of the bottom.)
I will leave aside the question (the problem really) of what it would take to create such a possibility. Of course a revolutionary solution would, of necessity, have be on the table since there is no way that the current powerful interests, Democratic, Republican or those of the "one percent" having no named politics, is going to give up power without a fight. What I want to pose now is the use of the General Assembly as a deliberative executive, legislative, and judicial body all rolled into one.
Previous historical models readily come to mind; the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune of 1871 that Karl Marx tirelessly defended against the reactionaries of Europe as the prototype of a workers government; the early heroic days of the Russian October Revolution of 1917 when the workers councils (soviets in Russian parlance) acted as a true workers' government; and the period in the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39 where the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias acted, de facto, as a workers government. All the just mentioned examples had their problems and flaws, no question. However, merely mentioning the General Assembly concept in the same paragraph as these great historic examples should signal that thoughtful leftists and other militants need to investigate and study these examples.
In order to facilitate the investigation and study of those examples I will, occasionally, post works in this space that deal with these forbears from several leftist perspectives (rightist perspectives were clear- crush all the above examples ruthlessly, and with no mercy- so we need not look at them now). I started this Lessons Of History series with Karl Marx’s classic defense and critique of the Paris Commune, The Civil War In France and today’s presentation noted in the headline continues on in that same vein.
********
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!
*******
****
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!
********
Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
“The Vices of Commerce”
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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: Manuscrits de Charles Fourier. Années 1857-58.
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden
Proofread: by Andy Carloff 2010.
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What are the vices inherent in the commercial mechanism? Others have defined it in flattering terms; I am going to adopt a very different tone and show commerce to be the source of all sorts of crimes and misdeeds. I will refer to just seven.
The first disorder is Bankruptcy which scoffs at the efforts of legislators and triumphs in spite of all their legal codes.[20] Just recently French legislation was put to shame when it purported to repress bankruptcy with a new code of commerce. Bankruptcy has only become bolder and more confident in changing its form, and the new code is merely a weapon with which the bankrupt threaten the creditors whom they wish to rob.
The second vice is Smuggling by which commerce rebels openly against authority and forms industrial Vendees against which the state must maintain parasitical armies of customs officers. Certain cities like Basel and other such centres of contraband exploit neighbouring empires in the same way that the Algerian pirates exploit seafarers. The ones are sea-robbers and the others are land-robbers. I shall prove in one of the chapters of this work that, by means of its contraband, the city of Basel alone exacts an annual tribute of several million from France. You can draw your own conclusions about the extent of the smuggling carried on each year over the whole territory of France, Germany, Spain and Italy.
What shall I say of the Usurers who, under the name of bankers, are waging war against property owners? Take for example the hordes of Jews and vagabonds who have practically overrun the four departments on the right bank of the Rhine. They would soon have gobbled up most of the French property there if the government had not restrained them by decrees and by means of an economic struggle that involved the Bank of France, which is an agent of resistance against usury.
Speculation is the fourth of the plagues to which I am calling attention; it is another one of the weapons used by commerce against governments. Speculation abuses public confidence and makes sport of the ascendency of the noblest heroes. Witness the campaign of Austerlitz during which a horde of Parisian speculators ravaged French industry, discredited the Bank of France and the government bonds, and created all the symptoms of a panic at the very moment when the Empire was echoing with cries of admiration and blind confidence in its illustrious chief.
Hoarding is not the least of the mercantile feats. It creates famine in the midst of abundance; by means of contrived panics it can double the price of goods and exploit society in the interest of the commercial vampires.
Parasitism is a less obvious but not less harmful disorder. Hosts of merchants encumber the cities, and the streets are cluttered with solicitors who swarm without limit or purpose. There was competition enough when their number was only a quarter of what it is today, and then agriculture profited from the capital and labour of the crowd of parasites with which commerce is now inundating the cities.
Of all the commercial vices Cheating is the one which is making the most rapid progress. Today it has reached such a point that merchants of the old type are thought to be incompetent because they don’t know the tricks to which abusive competition has given rise.
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!
*******
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
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