Monday, January 21, 2013

The Conductor and the Conducted
The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”
Paperback, 222 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-58367-256-3
Cloth (ISBN-13: 978-1-58367-257-0)
July 2012
e-book available!
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Price: $15.95
Read an excerpt here!
What was “real socialism”—the term which originated in twentieth-century socialist societies for the purpose of distinguishing them from abstract, theoretical socialism? In this volume, Michael A. Lebowitz considers the nature, tendencies, and contradictions of those societies. Beginning with the constant presence of shortages within “real socialism,” Lebowitz searches for the inner relations which generate these patterns. He finds these, in particular, in what he calls “vanguard relations of production,” a relation which takes the apparent form of a social contract where workers obtain benefits not available to their counterparts in capitalism but lack the power to decide within the workplace and society.
While these societies were able to claim major achievements in areas from health care to education to popular culture, the separation of thinking and doing prevented workers from developing their capacities as fully developed human beings. The relationship within “real socialism” between the vanguard as conductor and a conducted working class, however, did not only lead to the deformation of workers and those elements necessary for the building of socialism; it also created the conditions in which enterprise managers emerged as an incipient capitalist class, which was an immediate source of the crises of “real socialism.” As he argued in The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, Lebowitz stresses the necessity to go beyond the hierarchy inherent in the relation of conductor and conducted (and beyond the “vanguard Marxism” which supports this) to create the conditions in which people can transform themselves through their conscious cooperation and practice—i.e., a society of free and associated producers.
From the author’s preface:
This is not a book for those who already know everything important there is to know about “Real Socialism.” For those fortunate souls who have inherited or adopted the eternal verities of particular political sects on the left, empirical footnotes that strengthen their claim to leadership are the principal tasks of scholarship. As a result, the central question about this book for them is likely to be, “Is he with us or against us?” In short, is this book good for the chosen?
I presume, however, readers who begin with questions rather than answers. What was this phenomenon known as “Real Socialism,” or “Actually Existing Socialism,” a concept created in the twentieth century by the leaders of countries in order to distinguish their real experience from merely theoretical socialist ideas? What were its characteristics? How was this system reproduced? And why did it ultimately yield to capitalism without resistance from the working classes who were presumably its beneficiaries?
Where fresh insights are rare, indeed, Michael Lebowitz provides a bundle of them. Although no one will (or perhaps should) agree with everything here, the book provides rich material for badly-needed discussion.
—Paul Buhle, author, Marxism in the United States
‘The owl of Minerva only flies at dusk’—it was Hegel’s old maxim that seemed confirmed when in 1991 the Socialist Register published Michael Lebowitz’s article on the nature of ‘real socialism’ amid its very demise. This new book takes off from there, but its wings are buoyed by Lebowitz’s work since then, from Beyond Capital to The Socialist Alternative. The profound understanding in this new book of why twentieth-century attempts at constructing socialism failed must be an essential element in the socialist renewal emerging amid the first great capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century. It thus appears that the old wise owl also flies at dawn.
—Leo Panitch, editor, the Socialist Register
If we want socialism for the twenty-first century, we need to understand why the ‘real’ socialisms of the last century so often ended in capitalism. In this book, Lebowitz shows, theoretically and historically, that the socialism practiced in the Soviet Union and Central Europe was doomed because vanguard relations of production weakened the working class, ensuring that it would have no primary role in the battle ultimately won by the logic of capital (represented by managers) over the logic of the vanguard (represented by the party). We must, he concludes, reject vanguard Marxism and embrace a Marxist vision of socialism in which, from the beginning, the full development of human capacities is actively promoted. There is a lot to learn here.
—Martin Hart-Landsberg, professor of economics, Lewis and Clark College
One doesn’t have to agree with all the theses presented in Michael Lebowitz’s latest book in order to acknowledge that this is a major contribution to the international debate on Socialism of the Twenty-First Century. Drawing lessons from the dramatic failure of so-called “Real Socialism,” he argues, with powerful and persuasive logic, that a new society, based on values of solidarity and community, cannot be created by a state standing over and above civil society: only through autonomous organizations—at the neighborhood, community, and national levels—can people transform both circumstances and themselves.
—Michael Löwy, co-author, Che Guevara: His Revolutionary Legacy (with Olivier Besancenot)
What would Marx have thought had he lived to see the Soviet Union? Nobody has interpreted Marx to greater advantage to answer this question than renowned Marxist scholar Michael Lebowitz, who explains in The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’ why Marx would not have been pleased!
—Robin Hahnel, professor of economics, Portland State University
A riveting exploration of what can be learned from the first attempts to create socialist systems, specifically the period from 1950 through the 1980s. Lebowitz convincingly demonstrates that the distortions of the model developed in the Soviet Union and copied in eastern European countries (‘real socialism’) were caused by setting in motion two contradictory forces—ending up with the worst aspects of both capital and leadership and control by a ‘vanguard.’ He examines the development of ‘real socialism’ as a complex system, with the various parts explained and scrutinized in their interactions and interrelations as part of the system. Required reading for those interested in avoiding diversions and pitfalls in a post capitalist alternative—on the path to creating a system under social, instead of private, control in which the goal is meeting everyone’s basic needs and encouraging and allowing the full human development of all.
—Fred Magdoff, professor emeritus of plant and soil science, University of Vermont; co-author, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism (with John Bellamy Foster)
We need this well-written book to understand that socialism did not die with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
—François Houtart, Executive Secretary of the World Forum for Alternatives
Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of The Socialist Alternative, Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class (winner of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize for 2004), Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-First Century, and Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis. He was Director, Program in Transformative Practice and Human Development, Centro Internacional Miranda, in Caracas, Venezuela, from 2006-11.

Budget for All: Budget Briefing and Action Planning

When: Sunday, January 27, 2013, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Where: Haymarket People's Fund • 42 Seaverns Ave • Green Street T (Orange Line) • Jamaica Plain
The Budget for All Coalition presents a briefing on the federal budget battles now underway.
The Budget Briefing will analyze the budget battle in Congress, our moment of opportunity, and the national strategy to save social programs and make Pentagon cuts. First, we’ll look at what’s in the Jan. 1 deal and what’s coming up to be addressed by Congress before the Mar. 1 deadline. We’ll review the programs that would be cut under “sequestration” vs. those that would be cut by the Republican, Administration, and progressive proposals. We will look at the impact of various budget scenarios on jobs and public programs in Massachusetts. We’ll examine the Pentagon budget and proposals to cut or increase it.
Then we'll do Action Planning so our elected officials honor the will of the people of Massachusetts in their votes on upcoming budget legislation, including significant decisions to be made by February. We'll work on plans for our Feb. 14 "Have a Heart" rallies, legislative action, and plans to contact the media.
Budget for AllAs it becomes clearer that key programs will not avoid cuts, we expect the political outcry to grow during the money of February. Our job is to ensure that Pentagon cuts and taxes on corporations and the rich are continually presented as viable alternatives.
Presenters will include Mike Prokosch, national coordinator of the New Priorities Network, member of Dorchester People for Peace and of the Budget for All steering committee; Michael Kane, executive director, Massachusetts Alliance of HUD tenants; Cole Harrison, executive director, Massachusetts Peace Action



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Cole Harrison

Executive Director

Massachusetts Peace Action

11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138

617-354-2169 w

617-466-9274 m


Twitter: masspeaceaction

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The Revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg
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Jan 15, 2010
By Peter Taaffe, from Socialism Today
Lessons of Luxemburg’s inspirational, revolutionary legacy
On 15 January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the finest brains of the German working class and its most heroic figures, were brutally murdered by the bloodthirsty, defeated German military, backed to the hilt by the cowardly social-democratic leaders Noske and Scheidemann. On this important anniversary, it is vital to look at Luxemburg’s inspirational, revolutionary legacy.
Their murders, carried out by the soldier Otto Runge, were decisive in the defeat of the German revolution but were also indissolubly linked to the victory of Hitler and the Nazis 14 years later. Wilhelm Canaris, the naval officer who assisted the escape of one of Rosa’s murderers, 20 years later was to command the Abwehr, German military intelligence, under the Nazis. Other luminaries of the Nazi regime were similarly ‘blooded’ at this time for the future murderous activities in their own country and throughout Europe. Von Faupel, the officer who, at the time, tricked the delegates to the recently-formed workers and soldiers’ councils, 20 years later was Hitler’s ambassador to Franco’s Spain. The political power behind the throne to better-known generals was Major Kurt von Schleicher, who became German Chancellor in 1932 and a gateman for Hitler and the Nazis. But if the German revolution had triumphed then history would not, in all probability, have known these figures or the horrors of fascism. Rosa Luxemburg, as a top leader and theoretician of Marxism, could have played a crucial, not to say decisive, role in subsequent events up to 1923 and the victory of the revolution if she had not been cruelly cut down.
Karl Liebknecht is correctly bracketed with Luxemburg as the heroic mass figure who stood out against the German war machine and symbolised to the troops in the blood-soaked trenches, not just Germans but French and others, as an indefatigable, working-class, internationalist opponent of the First World War. His famous call – “The main enemy is at home” – caught the mood, particularly as the mountain of corpses rose during the war.
But Rosa Luxemburg, on this anniversary, deserves special attention because of the colossal contribution she made to the understanding of Marxist ideas, theory and their application to the real movement of the working class. Many have attacked Rosa Luxemburg for her ‘false methods’, particularly her alleged lack of understanding of the need for a ‘revolutionary party’ and organisation. Among them were Stalin and Stalinists in the past. Others claim Rosa Luxemburg as their own because of her emphasis on the ‘spontaneous role of the working class’ that seems to correspond to an ‘anti-party mood’, particularly amongst the younger generation, which is, in turn, a product of the feeling of revulsion at the bureaucratic heritage of Stalinism and its echoes in the ex-social democratic parties. But an all-sided analysis of Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas, taking into account the historical situation in which her ideas matured and developed, demonstrates that the claims of both of these camps are false.
She made mistakes: “Show me someone who never makes a mistake and I will show you a fool.” Yet here is a body of work of which, read even today almost 100 years later, is fresh and relevant – particularly when contrasted to the stale ideas of the tops of the ‘modern’ labour movement. They can enlighten us particularly the new generation who are moving towards socialist and Marxist ideas. For instance, her pamphlet ‘Reform and Revolution’ is not just a simple exposition of the general ideas of Marxism counterposed to reformist, incremental changes to effect socialist change. It was written in opposition to the main theoretician of ‘revisionism’, Eduard Bernstein. Like the labour and trade union leaders to day – although he was originally a Marxist, indeed a friend of the co-founder of scientific socialism, Friedrich Engels – Bernstein under the pressure of the boom of the late 1890s and first part of the 20th century, attempted to ‘revise’ the ideas of Marxism, which would in effect have nullified them. His famous aphorism, “The movement is everything, the final goal nothing,” represented an attempt to reconcile the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) with what was an expanding capitalism at that stage.
Rosa Luxemburg, as had Lenin and Trotsky, not only refuted Bernstein’s ideas but in an incisive analysis adds to our understanding of capitalism then, and to some extent today, the relationship between reform and revolution (which should not be counterposed to each other from a Marxist point of view) and many other issues. She wrote: “What proves best the falseness of Bernstein’s theory is that it is in the countries having the greatest development of the famous "means of adaptation" - credit, perfected communications and trusts - that the last crisis (1907-1908) was most violent.” Shades of today’s world economic crisis, particularly as it affects the most debt-soaked economies of the US and Britain?
Social democracy supports the war
Moreover, Luxemburg was amongst the very few who recognised the ideological atrophy of German social democracy prior to the First World War. This culminated in the catastrophe of the SPD deputies in the Reichstag (parliament) – with the original single exception of Karl Liebknecht – voting for war credits for German imperialism. The leaders of the SPD, along with the trade union leaders, had become accustomed to compromise and negotiations within the framework of rising capitalism. This meant that the prospects for socialism, specifically the socialist revolution, were relegated to the mists of time in their consciousness.
This was reinforced by the growth in the weight of the SPD within German society. It was virtually “a state within a state”, with over one million members in 1914, 90 daily newspapers, 267 full-time journalists and 3,000 manual and clerical workers, managers, commercial directors and representatives. In addition it had over 110 deputies in the Reichstag and 220 deputies in the various Landtags (state parliaments) as well as almost 3,000 elected municipal councillors. Apart from in 1907, the SPD seemed to progress remorselessly in electoral contests. There were at least 15,000 full-time officials under the sway of the SPD in the trade unions. This was, in the words of Ruth Fischer, a future leader of the Communist Party of Germany, a “way of life… The individual worker lived in his party, the party penetrated into the workers’ everyday habits. His ideas, his reactions, his attitudes, were formed out of the integration of his personal and his collective.” This represented both a strength and a weakness. A strength because the increasing power of the working class was reflected in the SPD and the unions. But this was combined with the smothering of this very power, an underestimation by the SPD leaders, indeed a growing hostility to the revolutionary possibilities which would inevitability break out at some future date.
Rosa Luxemburg increasingly came into collision with the SPD machine, whose stultifying conservative effect she contrasted to the social explosions in the first Russian revolution of 1905-07. Luxemburg was a real internationalist; a participant in the revolutionary movement in three countries. Originally a Pole, she was a founder of the Social Democratic party of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), in the Russian movement as a participant in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and a naturalised German and prominent member of the SPD. She contrasted the flair and energy from below in Russia, witnessed at first hand, to the weight the increasingly bureaucratic machine of the party and unions in Germany, which could prove to be a colossal obstacle to the working class taking power, she argued, in the event of a revolutionary eruption.
In this sense, she was more farsighted even than Lenin, who passionately absorbed in Russian affairs and who saw the SPD as the ‘model’ for all the parties of the Second International, and its leaders, such as Kautsky, as teachers. Trotsky pointed out: “Lenin considered Kautsky as his teacher and stressed this everywhere he could. In Lenin’s work of that period and for a number of years following, one does not find a trace of criticism in principle directed against the Bebel-Kautsky tendency.” Indeed, Lenin thought that Luxemburg’s increasing criticisms of Kautsky and the SPD leadership were somewhat exaggerated. In fact, in his famous work, ‘Two Tactics of Russian Social Democracy” of 1905, Lenin wrote: “When and where did I ever call the revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky ‘opportunism’? ... When and where have there been brought to light differences between me, on the one hand, and Bebel and Kautsky on the other? ... The complete unanimity of international revolutionary Social Democracy on all major questions of programme and tactics is a most incontrovertible fact.”
Lenin recognised that there would be opportunist trends within mass parties of the working class but he compared the Mensheviks in Russia not with Kautskyism but with the right-wing revisionism of Bernstein. That lasted right up to the German social democrats’ infamous vote in favour of war credits on 4 August 1914. With the initial exception of Liebknecht and later Otto Rühle, they were the only two out of 110 SPD deputies who voted against. Indeed, when Lenin was presented with an issue of the SPD paper, ‘Vorwärts’, supporting war credits, he first of all considered it a ‘forgery’ of the German military general staff. Rosa Luxemburg was not so unprepared, as she had been involved in a protracted struggle, not just with the right-wing SPD leaders but also with the ‘left’ and ‘centrist’ elements, like Kautsky.
Trotsky also, in his famous book, ‘Results and Prospects’ (1906), in which the Theory of the Permanent Revolution was first outlined, did have a perception of what could take place: “The European Socialist Parties, particularly the largest of them, the German Social-Democratic Party, have developed their conservatism in proportion as the great masses have embraced socialism and the more these masses have become organized and disciplined… Social Democracy as an organization embodying the political experience of the proletariat may at a certain moment become a direct obstacle to open conflict between the workers and bourgeois reaction.” In his autobiography, ‘My Life’, Trotsky subsequently wrote: “I did not expect the official leaders of the International, in case of war, to prove themselves capable of serious revolutionary initiative. At the same time, I could not even admit the idea that the Social Democracy would simply cower on its belly before a nationalist militarism.”
Spontaneous mass action
It was these factors, the immense power of the social democracy, on the one side, and the inertia of its top-heavy bureaucracy in the face of looming sharp changes in the situation in Germany and Europe, on the other side, which led to one of Luxemburg’s best-known works, ‘The Mass Strike’ (1906). This was a summing up of the first Russian revolution from which Luxemburg drew both political and organisational conclusions. It is a profoundly interesting analysis of the role of the masses as the driving force, of their ‘spontaneous’ character in the process of revolution. In emphasising the independent movement and will of the working class against “the line and march of officialdom”, she was undoubtedly correct in a broad historical sense.
Indeed, many revolutions have been made in the teeth of opposition and even sabotage of the leaders of the workers’ own organisations. This was seen in the revolutionary events of 1936 in Spain. While the workers of Madrid initially demonstrated for arms and their socialist leaders refused to supply them, the workers of Barcelona – freed from the inhibitions towards ‘leaders’ – rose ‘spontaneously and smashed Franco’s forces within 48 hours. This ignited a social revolution which swept through Catalonia and Aragon to the gates of Madrid, with four fifths of Spain initially in the hands of the working class. In Chile in 1973, on the other hand, where the working class listened to their leadership and remained in the factories as Pinochet announced his coup, the most militant workers were systematically rounded up and slaughtered.
We also saw, without a ‘by-your-leave’ to their leaders, a spontaneous revolutionary explosion in France in 1968 when 10 million workers occupied factories for a month. The leaders of the French Communist Party and the ‘Socialist’ Federation, rather than seeking victory through a revolutionary programme of workers’ councils and a workers and farmers’ government, lent all their efforts to derailing this magnificent movement. Similarly, in Portugal, in 1974, a revolution not only swept away the Caetano dictatorship but meant that, in its first period, an absolute majority of votes to those standing in elections under a socialist or communist banner. This led in 1975 to the expropriation of the majority of industry. The Times (London) declared that “capitalism is dead in Portugal”. This proved not to be so, unfortunately, because the initiatives from below by the working class, and the opportunities they generated, were squandered. This was because there was no coherent and sufficiently influential mass party and leadership capable of drawing all the threads together and establishing a democratic workers’ state. These examples show that the spontaneous movement of the working class is not sufficient in itself to guarantee victory in a brutal struggle against capitalism.
The ‘spontaneous’ character of the German revolution was evident in November 1918. This spontaneous eruption of the masses, moreover, flew in the face of everything that the social-democratic leaders wanted or desired. Even the creation before this of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), which came from a split in the SPD in 1917, arose not from any conscious policy of its leaders – including Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding, as well as the arch-revisionist Bernstein. It developed because of the indignation and revolt of the working class at the SPD’s executive throttling within the party of all objections and resistance to their policy on the war. This split was neither prepared nor desired by these ‘oppositionists’. Nevertheless, they took with them 120,000 members and a number of newspapers.
The general strike
Connected to Rosa Luxemburg’s emphasis on ‘spontaneity’ was the issue of the general strike. Basing herself on the mass strikes of the Russian revolution, she nevertheless adopted a certain passive and fatalistic approach on this issue. To some extent, this later affected the leaders of the Communist Party (KPD) after her death. Rosa Luxemburg correctly emphasised that a revolution could not be made artificially, outside of a maturing of the objective circumstances that allowed this possibility.
However, the role of what Marxists describe as the ‘subjective factor’, a mass party, far-sighted leadership, etc, is crucial in transforming a revolutionary situation into a successful revolution. So is timing, as the opportunity for a successful social overturn can last for a short time. If the opportunity is lost, it may not recur for a long time, and the working class can suffer a defeat. Therefore, at a crucial time, a definite timeframe, a correct leadership, can help the working class to take power. Such was the role of the Bolsheviks in the 1917 Russian revolution.
The opposite was the case in 1923 in Germany. The opportunity of following the example of the Bolsheviks was posed but lost because of the hesitation of the KPD leaders, who were supported in this wrong policy by, among others, Stalin. This was partly conditioned by historical experience until then, in which ‘partial general strike action’ featured in the struggles of the working class in the decades prior to the First World War. In this period, there were instances where governments took fright at the general strike at its very outset, without provoking the masses to open class conflict, and made concessions. This was the situation following the Belgian general strike in 1893, called by the Belgian Labour Party with 300,000 workers participating, including left-wing Catholic groups. A general strike, on a much bigger scale, took place in Russia, in October 1905, on which Rosa Luxemburg comments. Under the pressure of the strike, the Tsarist regime made constitutional ‘concessions’ in 1905.
The situation following the First World War – a period of revolution and counter-revolution - was entirely different to this, with the general strike posing more sharply the question of power. The issue of the general strike is of exceptional importance for Marxists. We do not have a fetish about the general strike. In some instances, it is an inappropriate weapon; at the time of General Lavr Kornilov’s march against Petrograd in August 1917, neither the Bolsheviks nor the soviets (workers’ councils) thought of declaring a general strike. On the contrary, the railway workers continued to work so that could transport the opponents of Kornilov and derail his forces. Workers in the factories continued to work too, except those who had left to fight Kornilov. At the time of the October revolution, in 1917, there was again no talk of a general strike. The Bolsheviks enjoyed mass support and under those conditions calling a general strike would have weakened them and not the capitalist enemy. On the railways, in the factories and offices, the workers assisted the uprising to overthrow capitalism and establish a democratic workers’ state.
In today’s era, a general strike, ‘generally’, is an ‘either-or’ issue where an alternative workers’ government is implicit in the situation. In the 1926 general strike in Britain, the issue of power was posed, where ‘dual power’ existed for nine days. In 1968, in France, the biggest general strike in history posed the question of power but for the reasons explained above, the working class did not seize it.
The German revolution of 1918-1924 also witnessed general strikes and partial attempts in this direction. The Kapp putsch in March 1920, when the director of agriculture of Prussia, who represented the Junkers and highly-placed imperial civil servants, took power with the support of the generals, was met with one of the most complete general strikes in history. Like France in 1968, the government “could not get a single poster printed” as the working class paralysed the government and the state. This putsch lasted for a grand total of 100 hours! Yet even with this stunning display of the power of the working class, it did not lead to a socialist overturn, precisely because of the absence of a mass party and leadership capable of mobilising the masses and establishing an alternative democratic workers’ state. In fact, the erstwhile followers of Luxemburg in the newly-formed Communist Party made ultra-left mistakes in not initially supporting and strengthening the mass actions against Kapp.
The role of a revolutionary party
The issue of leadership and the need for a party is central to an estimation of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and work. It would be entirely one-sided to accuse her, as has been attempted by some critics of both her and Trotsky, of ‘underestimating’ the need for a revolutionary party. Indeed, her whole life within the SPD was bent towards rescuing the revolutionary kernel within this organisation from reformism and centrism. Moreover, she herself built up a very ‘rigid, independent organisation’, that is a party, with her co-worker Leo Jogiches in Poland. However, her revulsion at the ossified character of the SPD and its ‘centralism’ meant that she did, on occasion, ‘bend the stick too far’ the other way. She was critical of Lenin’s attempt to create in Russia a democratic party but one that was ‘centralised’.
On the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, Luxembourg she was a ‘conciliator’ in her approach, as was Trotsky (shown in his participation in the ‘August bloc’). She sought unity between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in Russia. But after the Bolsheviks had won four fifths of the organised workers in Russia by 1912 a formal split took place between them and the Mensheviks. Lenin understood before others that the Mensheviks were not prepared for a struggle going beyond the framework of Russian landlordism and capitalism. Lenin’s approach was vindicated in the Russian revolution, with the Mensheviks ending up on the other side of the barricades. Following the 1917 Russian revolution, Rosa Luxemburg did come close to Bolshevism subsequently and became part of its international trend, as did Trotsky.
The main charge that can be made against Luxemburg, however, is that she did not sufficiently organise a clearly delineated trend against both the right of the SPD and the centrists of Kautsky. There were some criticisms both at the time and later that suggested that Luxemburg and her ‘Sparticist’ followers should have immediately split with the SPD leaders, certainly following their betrayal at the outset of the First World War. Indeed Lenin, as soon as he was convinced of the betrayal of social democracy – including the ‘renegade Kautsky’ – called for an immediate split, accompanying this with a call for a new, Third International. A political ‘split’ was undoubtedly required, both from the right and ‘left’ SPD. Rosa did this, characterising the social democracy as a “rotten corpse”.
The organisational conclusion from this was of a tactical rather than a principled character. Moreover, hindsight is wonderful when dealing with real historical problems. Rosa Luxemburg confronted a different objective situation to that facing the Bolsheviks in Russia. Spending most of their history in the underground, with a relatively smaller organisation of cadres, the Bolsheviks necessarily acquired a high degree of ‘centralisation’, without, at the same time, abandoning very strong democratic procedures. There was also the tumultuous history of the Marxist and workers’ movement in Russia, conditioned by the experience of the struggle against Narodya Volya (People’s Will), the ideas of terrorism, the 1905 and 1917 revolutions, the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the first world war, etc. Rosa Luxemburg confronted an entirely different situation, as a minority, and somewhat isolated in a ‘legal’ mass party with all the attributes described above.
Although she was a naturalised German citizen, Luxemburg was considered an ‘outsider’, particularly when she came into conflict with the SPD leadership. Indeed, despite this, Luxemburg’s courage and fortitude shines through when one reads the speeches and criticisms that she made of the party leadership over years. She criticised the “clinging mists of parliamentary cretinism”, what would be called “electoralism” at the present time. She even lacerated August Bebel, the ‘centrist’ party leader who increasingly “could only hear with his right ear”. At one stage, accompanied by Clara Zetkin, she said to Bebel: “Yes, you can write our epitaph: ‘Here lie the last two men of German social democracy’.” She castigated the SPD’s trailing after middle-class leaders in an excellent aphorism appropriate to those who support coalitionism today. She wrote that it was necessary “to act on progressives and possibly even liberals, than to act with them”.
But a vital element of Marxism, in developing political influence through a firm organisation or a party, was not sufficiently developed by Rosa Luxemburg or her supporters. This does not have to take the form necessarily, on all occasions, of a separate ‘party’. But a firmly-organised nucleus is essential in preparing for the future. This, Luxemburg did not achieve, which was to have serious consequences later with the outbreak of the German revolution. Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches correctly opposed “premature splits”. Luxemburg wrote: “It was always possible to walk out of small sects or small coteries, and, if one does not want to stay there, to apply oneself to building new sects and new coteries. But it is only an irresponsible daydream to want to liberate the whole mass of the working class from the very weighty and dangerous yoke of the bourgeoisie by a simple ‘walk out’.”
Working in mass organisations
Such an approach is entirely justified when a long-term strategy is pursued by Marxists within mass parties. Such was the approach of Militant, now the Socialist Party, when it worked successfully within the Labour Party, in the 1980s, in Britain. Militant established perhaps the most powerful position for Trotskyists, in Western Europe at least, probably since the development of the international Left Opposition.
But such an approach – justified at one historical period – can be a monumental error at another, when conditions change and particularly when abrupt revolutionary breaks are posed. Rosa Luxemburg and Jogiches could not be faulted for seeking to organise within the social democracy for as long as possible and, for that matter, the USPD later. Indeed, Lenin, in his eagerness to create mass communist parties in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, was sometimes a little impatient and premature in his suggestions for splitting from social-democratic organisations. He proposed a rapid split of the communists from the French Socialist Party in 1920 but changed his mind after Alfred Rosmer, in Moscow during that year, suggested that the Marxists would need more time to bring over the majority to the stand of the Communist (Third) International.
Even Lenin, while proposing a split from the Second International and the formation of the Third International, following the August 1914 debacle, was even prepared to amend his position if events did not work out as he envisaged. For instance, on the issue of the Third International he wrote: “The immediate future will show whether conditions have already ripened for the formation of a new, Marxist International… If they have not, it will show that a more or less prolonged evolution is needed for this purging. In that case, our Party will be the extreme opposition within the old International – until a base is formed in different countries for an international working men’s association that stands on the basis of revolutionary Marxism.” When the floodgates of revolution were thrown open in February 1917 in Russia, and the masses poured onto the political arena, even the Bolsheviks – despite their previous history – had about 1% support in the soviets, and 4% by April 1917.
The real weakness of Luxemburg and Jogiches was not that they refused to split but that in the entire preceding historical period they were not organised as a clearly-defined trend in social democracy preparing for the revolutionary outbursts upon which the whole of Rosa Luxemburg’s work for more than 10 years was based. The same charge – only with more justification – could be levelled at those left and even Marxist currents that work or have worked in broad formations, sometimes in new parties. They have invariably been indistinguishable politically from the reformist or centrist leaders. This was the case in Italy in the PRC where the Mandelites (now organised outside in Sinistra Critica) were supporters of the ‘majority’ of Bertinotti until they were ejected and then left the party. The SWP’s German organisation (Linksruck, now Marx 21) pursues a similar policy within Die Linke (the Left party) today as the left boot of the party and consequently will not gain substantially.
Luxemburg politically did not act like this but she did not draw all the organisational conclusions, as had Lenin, in preparing a steeled cadre, a framework for a future mass organisation, in preparation for the convulsive events that subsequently developed in Germany. It was this aspect that Lenin subjected to criticism in his comments on Rosa Luxemburg’s’ Junius’ pamphlet, published in 1915. Lenin conceded that this was a “splendid Marxist work” although he argued against confusing opposition to the First World War, which was imperialist in character, and legitimate wars of national liberation. But Lenin, while praising Luxemburg’s pamphlet, also comments that it “conjures up in our mind the picture of a lone man [he did not know Rosa was the author] who has no comrades in an illegal organisation accustomed to thinking out revolutionary slogans to their conclusion and systematically educating the masses in their spirit”.
Here lie some of the differences between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin systematically trained and organised the best workers in Russia in implacable opposition to capitalism and its shadows in the labour movement. This necessarily involved clearly organising a grouping, ‘faction’ – one that was organised as well as based on firm political principles. Lenin organised for future battles, including the revolution.
Rosa Luxemburg was an important figure in all the congresses of the Second International and generally carried the votes of the Polish Social Democratic party in exile. She was also a member of the International Socialist Bureau. However, as Pierre Broué points out: “She was never able to establish within the SPD either a permanent platform based on the support of a newspaper or a journal or a stable audience wider than a handful of friends and supporters around her.”
The growing opposition to the war, however, widened the circle of support and contacts for Luxemburg and the Sparticist group. Trotsky sums up her dilemma: “The most that can be said is that in her historical-philosophical evaluation of the labour movement, the preparatory selection of the vanguard, in comparison with the mass actions that were to be expected, fell too short with Rosa; whereas Lenin – without consoling himself with the miracles of future actions – took the advanced workers and constantly and tirelessly welded them together into firm nuclei, illegally or legally, in the mass organisations or underground, by means of a sharply defined programme.” However, Luxemburg did begin after the revolution of November 1918 her “ardent labour” of assembling such a cadre.
A programme for workers’ democracy
Moreover, Luxemburg posed very clearly the ideological tasks: “The choice today is not between democracy and dictatorship. The question which history has placed on the agenda is: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy for the dictatorship of the proletariat is democracy in a socialist sense of the term. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean bombs, putsches, riots or ‘anarchy’ that the agents of capitalism claim.” This is an answer to those who seek to distort the idea of Karl Marx when he spoke about the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which in today’s terms, as Luxemburg pointed out, means workers’ democracy. Because of its connotations with Stalinism however, Marxists today, in trying to reach the best workers, do not use language which can give a false idea of what they intend for the future. This, unfortunately, includes the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which can be construed as connected to Stalinism. The same idea is expressed in our call for a socialist, planned economy, organised on the basis of workers’ democracy.
The German revolution not only overthrew the Kaiser but posed the germ of a workers government through the institution of a network of workers and sailors’ councils on the lines of the Russian revolution. A period of dual power was initiated and the capitalists were compelled to give important concessions to the masses such as the eight-hour day. But the social-democratic leaders like Gustav Noske and Philipp Scheidemann conspired with the capitalists and the reactionary scum in the Freikorps (predecessors of the fascists) to take their revenge. General Wilhelm Groener, who led the German army, admitted later on: “The officer corps could only cooperate with a government which undertook the struggle against Bolshevism … Ebert [the social-democrat leader] had made his mind up on this … We made an alliance against Bolshevism … There existed no other party which had enough influence upon the masses to enable the re-establishment of a governmental power with the help of the army.” Gradually, concessions to the workers were undermined and a vitriolic campaign against the ‘Bolshevik terror’, chaos, the Jews, and particularly, “bloody Rosa” was unleashed. Bodies like the Anti-Bolshevik League organised its own intelligence service and set up, in its founder’s words, an “active anti-communist counter-espionage organisation”.
In opposition to the slogan ‘All power to the soviets’ – the slogan of the Russian revolution – the reaction led by Noske’s Social Democrats mobilised behind the idea of “All power to the people”. This was their means of undermining the German ‘soviets’. A ‘constituent assembly’ was posed as an alternative to Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s ideas of a national council of soviets to initiate a workers and farmers’ government. Unfortunately, the muddled centrist lefts, whose party grew enormously as the social-democratic leaders lost support, let slip the opportunity to create an all-Germany council movement.
The discontent of the masses was reflected in the January 1919 uprising. Such stages are reached in all revolutions when the working class sees its gains snatched back by the capitalists and comes out onto the streets; the Russian workers in the July Days of 1917 and the May Days in Catalonia in 1937 during the Spanish revolution. The events of the German revolution were dealt with in Socialism Today (Issue 123, November 2008) and The Socialist (Issue 555, 4 November 2008).
The July Days in Russia developed four months after the February revolution whereas in Germany the uprising took place a mere two months after the revolutionary overturn of November 1918. This itself is an indication of the speed of events that developed in Germany at this stage. Given the isolation of Berlin from the rest of the country at that stage, a setback or a defeat was inevitable. But this became all the greater for the working class with the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. It was as if both Lenin and Trotsky had been assassinated in Russia in July 1917. This would have removed the two leaders whose ideas and political guidance led to the success of the October revolution. Lenin – extremely modest on a personal level – was quite aware of his own vital political role and took steps, by going into hiding in Finland, to avoid falling into the hands of the counter-revolution.
Despite the urging of those like Paul Levi to leave Berlin, both Luxemburg and Liebknecht remained in the city, with the terrible consequences that followed. There is no doubt that Luxemburg’s sure political experience would have been a powerful factor in avoiding some of the mistakes – particularly ultra-left ones – which were subsequently made in the development of the German revolution. In the convulsive events of 1923 in particular, Rosa Luxemburg with her keen instinct for the mass movement and ability to change with circumstances, would probably not have made the mistake made by Heinrich Brandler and the leadership of the KPD, when they let slip what was one of the most favourable opportunities in history to make a working-class revolution and change the course of world history.
Luxemburg and Liebknecht are in the pantheon of the Marxists greats. For her theoretical contribution alone, Rosa Luxemburg deserves to stand alongside Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Those who try and picture her as a critic of the Bolsheviks and the Russian revolution are entirely false. She hailed the work of Lenin and Trotsky. Her book written in prison in 1918 – in which she criticised the Bolshevik regime – was a product of isolation, which she was persuaded not to publish and did not pursue later when released from prison. Yet still in her most erroneous work she wrote of the Russian revolution and the Bolsheviks: “Everything that a party could offer of courage, revolutionary farsightedness, and consistency in a historic hour, Lenin, Trotsky and the other comrades have given in good measure… Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian revolution; it was also the salvation of the honour of international socialism”. Only malicious enemies of the heroic traditions of the Bolshevik party circulated this material after her death in an attempt to divide Luxemburg from Lenin, Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the great work of the Russian revolution.
Luxemburg made mistakes on the issue of the independence of Poland. She was also wrong on the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (even in July 1914 supporting the opportunists who stood for the ‘unity’ between them) and, as Lenin pointed out, also on the economic ‘theory of accumulation’. But also in the words of Lenin, “In spite of her mistakes she was – and remains for us – an eagle”. So should say the best workers and young people today who have occasion to study her works in preparation for the struggle for socialism.


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On MLK Day-The Truthteller-Malcolm X on Racist America



Markin comment:
Read the entries below. Does that first entry sound like a man who was on the same page politically as "DeLawd," Martin Luther King? To pose the question is to give the answer. As close as I was to the King-led movement in those days Malcolm X could still stir me in a way King with all his obvious eloquence could never do. Truth to power-no question.

Malcolm X on Racist America
The text of this telegram to Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, was read aloud by Malcolm X at a public rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unitv in Harlem on January 24. 1965.

Public Notice to George Lincoln Rockwell
"This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad's separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary."

Discussion with American Ambassador in Africa
"He said, 'As long as I'm in Africa, I deal with people as human beings— For some strange reason color doesn't enter into it at all.'

"He said, 'But whenever I return to the United States and I'm talking to a non-white person, I'm conscious of it, I'm self-conscious, I'm aware of the color differences.'

"So I told him, 'What you're telling me, whether you realize it or not, is that it is not basic in you to be a racist, but that society there in America, which you all have created, makes you a racist.' This is true, this is the worst racist society on this earth. There is no country on earth in which you can live and racism be brought out in you— whether you're white or black—more so than this country that poses as a democracy. This is a country where the social, economic, political atmosphere creates a sort of psychological atmos¬phere that makes it almost impossible, if you're in your right mind, to walk down the street with a while person and not be self-concious, or he or she not be self-conscious— But it's the society itself."
*******
From Spartacist- May-June 1964
MALCOLM X

Of all the national Negro leaders in this country, the one who was known uniquely for his militancy, intransigence, and refusal to be the liberals' front-man has been shot down. This new political assassination is another indicator of the rising current of irrationality and individual terrorism which the decay of our society begets. Liberal reaction is predictable, and predictably disgusting. They are, of course, opposed to assassination, and some may even contribute to the fund for the education of Malcolm’s children, but their mourning at the death of the head of world imperialism had a considerably greater ring of sincerity than their regret at the murder of a black militant who wouldn't play their game.

Black Muslims?

The official story is that Black Muslims killed Malcolm. But we should not hasten to accept this to date unproved hypothesis. The New York Police, for example, had good cause to be afraid of Malcolm, and with the vast resources of blackmail and coercion which are at their disposal, they also had ample opportunity, and of course would have little reason to fear exposure were they involved. At the same time, the Muslim theory cannot be discounted out of hand because the Muslims are not a political group, and in substituting religion for science, and color mysticism for rational analysis, they have a world view which would encompass the efficacy and morality of assassination, a man who has a direct pipeline to God can justify anything.

No Program

The main point, however, is not who killed Malcolm, but why could he be killed? In the literal sense, of course, any man can be killed, but why was Malcolm particularly vulnerable? The answer to this question makes of Malcolm's death tragedy of the sharpest kind, and in the literal Greek sense. Liberals and Elijah have tried to make Malcolm a victim of his own (non-existent) doctrines of violence. This is totally wrong and totally hypocritical. Malcolm was the most dynamic national leader to have appeared in America in the last decade. Compared with him the famous Kennedy personality was a flimsy cardboard creation of money, publicity, makeup, and the media. Malcolm had none of these, but a righteous cause and iron character forged by white America in the fire of discrimination, addiction, prison, and incredible calumny. He had a difficult to define but almost tangible attribute called charisma. When you heard Malcolm speak, even when you heard him say things that were wrong and confusing, you wanted to believe. Malcolm could move men deeply. He was the stuff of which mass leaders are made. Commencing-his public life in the context of the apolitical, irrational religiosity and racial mysticism of the Muslim movement, his break toward politicalness and rationality was slow, painful, and terribly incomplete. It is useless to speculate on how far it would have gone had he lived. He had entered prison a burgler, an addict, and a victim. He emerged a Muslim and a free man forever. Elijah Muhammad and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam were thus inextricably bound up with his personal emancipation. In any event, at the time of his death he had not yet developed a clear, explicit, and rational social program. Nor had he led his followers in the kind of transitional struggle necessary, to the creation of a successful mass movement. Lacking such a program, he could not develop cadres based on program. What cadre he had was based on Malcolm X instead. Hated and feared by the power structure, and the focus of the paranoid feelings of his former colleagues, his charisma made him dangerous, and his lack of developed program and cadre made him vulnerable. His death by violence had a high order of probability, as he himself clearly felt.

Heroic and Tragic Figure

The murder of Malcolm, and the disastrous consequences flowing from that murder for Malcolm's organization and black militancy in general, does not mean that the militant black movement can always be decapitated with a shotgun. True, there is an agonizing gap in black leadership today. On the one hand there are the respectable servants of the liberal establishment; men like James Farmer whose contemptible effort to blame Malcolm's murder on "Chinese Communists" will only hasten his eclipse as a leader, and on the other hand the ranks of the militants have yet to produce a man with the leadership potential of Malcolm. But such leadership will eventually be forthcoming. This is a statistical as well as a social certainty. This leadership, building on the experience of others such as Malcolm, and emancipated from his religiosity, will build a movement in which the black masses and their allies can lead the third great American revolution. Then Malcolm X will be remembered by black and white alike ad a heroic and tragic figure* in & dark period of our common history. •


Bay Area Spartacist Committee, 2 March, 1965

From The American Left History Blog Archives (2002) - On American Political Discourse-


 

 

Markin comment:

 
In 2007-2008 I, in vain, attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious, in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies, the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on.     

************

 

 

 

A CALL TO ALL WORKING PEOPLE / ANTI-IMPERIALIST YOUTH: HAVE NO ILLUSIONS-----WAR WITH IRAQ IS COMING!!!

 

BUILD A WORKER/ANTI-IMPERIALIST YOUTH UNITED FRONT AGAINST UNITED STATES/ UNITED NATIONS ATTACK ON IRAQ!

 

DEFEND IRAQ AGAINST U.S./UN ALLIED IMPERIALIST ATTACK!

 

SUPPORT EFFORTS BY IRAQI WORKERS, PEASANTS, RELIGIOUS AND ETHIC MINORITIES TO OVERTHROW THE HUSSEIN REGIME!

 

DOWN WITH THE UN STARVATION BLOCKADE!

 

 

          The war-crazed Bush-led United States government is leading the world to war. Tens of thousands of American and British troops are getting positioned for a full-scale attack on Iraq, while other powers from Australia to Turkey elbow each other for a role in the slaughter and share of the loot. The White House has already revealed plans for a post-Saddam military occupation of Iraq. Look at the war chest of nuclear weapons that the United Sates has and threatens to use today and it is clear that the fate of life on this planet is threatened by the continued existence of this American led world disorder.

          In this war against Iraq workers and students in the United States and elsewhere clearly have a side: we must stand for the military defense of Iraq without giving any political support to the Hussein regime. Hussein is a bloody oppressor of Iraqi workers, leftists, Shiite Muslims, the Kurdish people and others. As such he was in the past a close ally and client of the American government for a full two decades before he made a grab for Kuwait in 1990. Mow the American government wants a more pliant regime and tighter control of the oil spigot, not the least to put economic rivals like Japan and Germany, who are more dependent on Near East oil, on rations. With the latest renewed saber rattling over North Korea, Washington has made it clear that that country will be next on its hit list in the event of an easy win in Iraq. Every victory for the American government and its allies in their predatory wars encourages further military adventures, every setback serves to assist the struggles of the working peoples and the oppressed of the world.

          The tremendous military advantages of the United Sates against neocolonial Iraq- a country that has already been bled white through 12 years of United Nations sanctions which have killed more than one and one half million civilians- underscores the importance of class struggle in the imperialist centers as the chief means to give content to the call to defend Iraq. Every strike, every labor mobilization against war plans, every mass protest against attacks on workers and minorities, and every struggle against domestic repression and against attacks on civil liberties represents a dent in the imperialist war drive. To put an end to war once and for all, the capitalist system that breeds war must be swept away through a series of revolutions and the establishment of a rational, planned, egalitarian socialist economy on a world scale.

 

ANTI-IMPERILALISM ABROAD MEANS CLASS STRUGGLE AT HOME! DEFEND IRAQ AGAINST AMERICAN ATTACK!

 

          The extent to which Washington’s allies in the United Nations, especially Germany, have openly criticized the Bush administration’s rabid provocations in the Near East is a measure of the growth of tensions among the capitalist powers in recent years. But, while objecting to the rudeness of an American cowboy boot on their necks all of the subordinate capitalist states will acquiesce to the dictates of the master of the capitalist ruling classes, the United States, and they want to be rewarded with at least a share of the spoils. As an official of a French oil company stated, “We want the oil and we want to be in the game of rebuilding the country. If there were a new regime and we have not been with the Americans, where will we be?”

 

War: THE CONTINUATION OF POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS

 

          The American ruling class manipulated the grief and horror felt by millions at the criminal and demented attack on the World Trade Center to wage war on Afghanistan. But the patriotic consensus in the United Sates is wearing thin and elsewhere there is massive opposition to a war against Iraq. War demands civil peace and from Los Angeles to London the imperialist war makers are revealed as vicious union-busters and strikebreakers. Declaring that a strike could “threaten national security,” the Bush administration has brought down the force of the capitalist state to coerce the powerful American dockers union, the ILWU, to work under the dictates of the union-busting employers association. Across the seas, British firefighters are threatened with strikebreaking by the army. Plunging stock markets rob millions of workers of their pensions while public scandals expose insatiable corporate greed. Tens of thousands of working people, including the entire workforce at a number of Fiat plants in Italy. Face a future of being unemployed by owners seeking to protect their own profit margins amid the capitalist economic crisis. Civil liberties have been shredded and the capitalists have intensified their assault on social welfare and other gains wrested through decades of workers struggles.

 

          Everywhere the anti-immigrant witch-hunt has been whipped up to fever pitch in an effort by the capitalist rulers to deflect working-class struggle with racism and xenophobia. The anti-immigrant hysteria provokes a tide of blood as thousands of disparate refugees die trying to cross the U.S. border from Mexico or to land a rickety boat in Australia or Europe. Now as the mass of immigrants is not needed the capitalist system shows that it is the biggest threat to workers everywhere. A decade ago the rulers crowed about the supposed “death of communism.” But capitalism has once again brought the world to an impasse which the Iraq war illuminates with the terrifying glare of missiles streaking across the night sky. A workers student united front against these imperialist acts is the only way forward.

          In the United States, not even the dizzying flag-waving or the heavy fist of state repression has induced the masses to embrace war with Iraq. In Europe, hundreds of thousands of workers and anti-imperialist youth have demonstrated their opposition to this war. The problem is that the anti-war protests in Europe have all been channeled into a national-chauvinist direction of getting one’s “own” rulers to stand up to the Americans. In America, antiwar liberals and leftists bleat, “Money for jobs, not for war” and so fuel the lie that fundamental priorities of the capitalist rulers can be altered to serve the interests of working people.

          The truth is that this whole capitalist system is based on the extraction of profit for the owners of the means of production through the exploitation and subjugations of the workers who produce the wealth of society. War is a concentrated expression of this, as competing capitalist ruling classes scramble to steal natural resources and to carve out new markets for export of capital and fresh sources of cheap labor. The leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin, emphasized the difference between bourgeois pacifism, which lulls the masses into passivity and embellishes capitalist democracy, and the yearning for peace of the masses   

          In wars between the imperialist predators and plunderers and their colonial and semi colonial victims. The proletariat has a side. As Lenin stressed in his 1915 pamphlet SOCIALISM AND WAR:   “If tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Tsarist Russia, and so on, these would be ‘just,,’ and ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great Powers.”

          There are palpable opportunities to organize class-struggle opposition to imperialist war and to break the narrow nationalist and economist limits of strikes contained by the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. During the 1999 U.S./NATO war against Serbia, Italian COBAS unions organized a one-million-strong political general strike against that war. Fiat workers, who today battle plant closings in Italy, organized a campaign of material aid- a campaign supported by all partisans of the international working class- for the workers of the Yugoslav Zastava auto plant, which had been bombed by the imperialists. In 2001, Japanese dock workers at Sasebo pointed the way forward by “hot-cargoing” (refusing to handle) Japanese military goods for the war in Afghanistan.

          What is essential is to draw the class line and unshackle the working people and anti-imperialist youth from capitalist politicians, their agents in the trade unions and others who channel their justified hatred of war into illusory calls for parliamentary reforms of the profit-driven system that breeds war and, in West Europe, into support for their own ruling classes against the Americans. Here, in the heart of the beast the workers and anti-imperialist youth united front can point the way forward building an internationalist perspective in the antiwar protests. Our demands should be: Struggle against the bosses at home- the main enemy is at home Defend Iraq against imperialist attack Down with the United Nations starvation blockade. All U.S./ UN and allied troops out of the Persian Gulf and Near East

Sunday, January 20, 2013

***Those Oldies But Goodies…Out In The Be-Bop ‘60s Song Night- The Tune Weavers’ “Happy, Happy Birthday Baby”






THE TUNE WEAVERS
"Happy, Happy Birthday Baby"

Happy, happy birthday, baby

Although you're with somebody new

Thought I'd drop a line to say

That I wish this happy day

Would find me beside you


Happy, happy birthday, baby

No I can't call you my baby

Seems like years ago we met

On a day I can't forget

'Cause that's when we fell in love


Do you remember the names we had for each other

I was your pretty, you were my baby

How could we say goodbye


Hope I didn't spoil your birthday

I'm not acting like a lady

So I'll close this note to you

With good luck and wishes too

Happy, happy birthday, baby

**********
Damn he never should have sent that note, that short, silly, puffed-up cry baby note trying to worm his way back into Lucy’s arms with memory thoughts about this kiss, or that embrace. And bringing up old seawall sugar shack beach nights holding hands against the splashed tides, against full moons, against tomorrow coming too soon; double date drive-in movies, speakers on low, deep-breathing car fog-ups on cold October nights, embarrassed, way embarrassed, when they surfaced for intermission's stale popcorn or reheated hot dogs; and, that last dance school dance holding tight, tight as hell, to each other as the DJ, pretending to be radio jockey Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsberg, played Could This Be Magic? on that creaky record player used at North Adamsville high school dances since his mother’s time, ancient Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday times.

Damn, a scratchy, scribbly note, a note written on serious stationary and with a real fountain pen to show his sincerity, and not the usual half- lined sheet, pulled out a three-ring subject notebook, and passed to Lucy during their common study class. Notes the passing of which sometimes got them severe looks from the study monitor, Miss Green, and giggles and taunts, usually some lewd or luscious remarks fraught with sexual innuendo from their fellow students, boys and girls alike, about fogged-up cars and trash talk like that who also tried to intercept those precious notes without success. Yah, “the note heard round the world” that would expose him to all kinds of ridicule, endless be-bop jive patter, and snide questions about his manhood from guys, and probably girls too, around the school, hell, all around North Adamsville and maybe already had if Lucy decided to cut his heart out and tell one and all what a square he, Luke Jackson, was when all was said and done.

He could hear it now, and could hear the words ringing in his ears. What a soft guy Luke Jackson really was, a guy known to be a love ‘em and leave ‘em guy before Lucy. A guy, a used to be sharp guy who shrugged off more things that you could shake a stick at and came back swinging but who was getting all misty-eyed and cry baby just because some dame, a good looking dame in all the right places, yes, a dame all the guys were ready to pursue once he was out of the picture, but still a dame, a young high school dame, when all was said and done, got under his skin, like they were married or something. Hell, he thought, thought now too late, to himself, that he would have been better off, much better off, leaving it at calling Lucy on the telephone every few hours and either hanging up before she answered or when she did answer freezing up. But that was costing money, serious add up money, since he had to use a public pay telephone up the street from his house because the telephone service had been turned off for non-payment as his family could not afford to pay the bill the past few months.

Besides it was getting kind of creepy going in and out of the house at all hours, midnight by the telephone waiting like some lonely, awkward girl, walking up the street like a zombie, half mope, half dope, then hesitating before deciding to make the call, making it, or not, and then scurrying like a rat from the public glare of the booth. Christ, one time the cops looked at him funny, real funny, when he was calling at about midnight. And he had to admit that he might have called the police station a few times too after he looked at himself in the mirror upon returning home.

That note, sent the day before and probably in Lucy’s plotting hands right now, was a minute, a quick minute, brain-storm that he had thought up when he was just plain miserable, just plain midnight telephone tired too, and anyone could make such a rash decision under love’s duress, teenage love’s duress. Right then though all he could think of was all the notes, the cutesy, lined-sheet paper school-boyish notes, that he had sent her when love was in full blossom, full blossom before Jamie Lee Johnson came on the scene, came on the scene with his big old ’59 Chevy Impala, his money in his pocket, and his line of patter and stole his “sweet pea” Lucy away from her “sugar plum” Luke. And that picture sent him back to thoughts of when he and Lucy first met, when their eyes first met.

“Let’s see,” Luke said to himself it was probably at Chrissie McNamara’s sweet sixteen birthday party that he first laid eyes on her. Hell, who was he kidding, he knew that it was exactly at 8:32PM on the night of April 25, 1962 that he first laid eyes on her, big almost star-struck staring eyes. Or maybe it was a few seconds before because, to break the ice, he had gone up to her and asked her for the time, asked in his then bolder manner if she had time for him, asked her to dance, she said yes, and that was that. Oh, yah, there was more to it than that but both of them knew at that moment, knew somewhere deep down in their teenage hearts, they were going to be an “item,” for a while. And they were indeed sweet pea and sugar plum, for a while. Although Luke would get mad sometimes, fighting mad, fighting break-up mad, when Lucy teased, no, more than teased, him about his not having a car so that they could go “parking” by themselves and not always be on some clowny double-date down at the seashore on Saturday night (or any night in the summer). And Luke would reply that he was saving money for college, and besides sitting on the seawall (and sometimes in love’s heat down beneath its height), their usual habit, was okay, wasn’t it.

That simmer, that somehow inarticulated simmer, went on for a while, a long while. But Luke had noticed a few months back, or rather Lucy had made her sugar plum notice, that now that they were high school seniors sitting on the seawall was nothing but nowhere kids’ stuff and why did he want to go to college anyway, and wasn’t going to work down at the shipyard where he could earn some real dough and get a car a better idea. The real clincher though, the one that telegraphed to him that the heavens were frowning on him, was the night she, no bones, stated that she had no plans for college and was going right to work after graduation, and maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t be able to wait for him. And that’s where things started to really break down between them.

Enter one Jamie Lee Johnson, a friend of Lucy’s older brother Kenny, already graduated from North Adamsville two years before and working, working steady with advancement possibilities according to the talk, as a junior welder down at the shipyard making good dough. Making drive-in movies and even drive-n restaurant good time dough, and driving that souped-up, retro-fitted, dual-carbed, ’59 Chevy, jet black and hung to the gills with chrome to make a girl breathless. And before Luke knew it Lucy’s mother was answering the phone calls for Lucy from Luke saying that she wasn’t in, wasn’t expected in, and that she, Lucy’s mother, would tell Lucy that he had called. The runaround, the classic runaround since boy meets girl time began, except not always done over the telephone. And while Lucy never said word one about breaking it off between them, not even a “so long we had fun,” Luke, although not smart enough to not write that sappy note, knew she was gone, and gone for good. But see she had gotten under his skin, way under, and well, and that was that.

Just as Luke was thinking about that last thought, that heart-tearing thought, he decided, wait a minute, maybe she didn’t get the note, maybe he had forgotten to put a stamp on it and as a result of those maybes he fished around his pocket to see if he had some coins, some telephone coins, and started out of the house prison to make that late night pilgrimage creep, that midnight waiting by the telephone creep. Walking up the street, walking up the now familiar night street-lighted against the deathless shadows Hancock Street he noticed a jet black ’59 Impala coming his way, coming his way with Jamie Lee and Lucy sitting so close together that they could not be pried apart with a crowbar. Luke thought about that scene for a minute, steeled himself with new-found resolve against the love hurts like in the old love 'em and leave ‘em days, threw the coins on the ground without anger but rather with relief, turned back to his house wondering, seriously wondering like the fate of the world depended on it, what pet names they Jimmy and Lucy had for each other.



***When Literature Talked Politics- The Role of Literature In Revolutionary Politics-17th Century Style





Book Review

Politics Of Discourse; The Literature and History Of Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zucker, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987


No question these days in modern European democratic societies literature, high literature anyway, and politics do not mix, except by accident. This however has not always been true, and as the academic book under review here, Politics of Discourse, testifies to in the early modern democratic period the fit between the two was far tighter than the modern mind could imagine. And nowhere was this combination more prevalent that in 17th century England, from the immediate pre-revolutionary period through to the late restoration period. The specialized essays that make up this volume give a pretty clear impression that, at least at the level of “high culture” and courtier/bourgeois society, one could not be knowledgeable about the affairs of the day without reading the polemics, parables, and panegyrics of such luminaries as Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Carew, and John Dryden.

Of course the 17th century in England was the high point, or rather one of the high points, in the struggle over the role of religion in public life from such questions as toleration, an established state church, the nature of worship and liturgy, religious qualifications for public office, and the great internal and foreign policy struggles between international Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. So public men, literary sorts or not, had be aware of the stakes involved when they went about the business of polemicizing for their views. No question that given the very undemocratic nature of monarchical society under James I and Charles I (and the later Charles II and James II) that one had to couch their polemics for their positions in oblique terms. This is, after all, the great age of the parable, the masque, and the ethereal epic poem. Moreover, democratic stirrings or not, religious sentiment in public and private life at both the patrician and plebeian cultural levels drove all literary and political conversation, especially the manic drive to prove one’s point by reference to Scripture. Still this period produced some of the masterworks of English literature, none better than John Milton’s defense of Republican England under Cromwell, in Paradise Lost.

That said this book is not for those who are not at least somewhat familiar with the history of 17th century English, especially some knowledge of the issues around the titanic struggles in mid-century in the revolutionary period, the Puritan Revolution proper. With that in mind there are a few outstanding essay here worthy of taking the time to read: a great exposition on the Scottish historical sources that Shakespeare may, or may not, have been familiar with when creating his saga on monarchical legitimacy in Macbeth; an interesting study of a literary patroness, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, to detail the audience that any literary figure needed to address their works to; a generally overlooked subject during this period, that of a courtier literary figure and his defense of the monarchy, Thomas Carew; the trials, tribulations and twists of a literary politician trying to read which way the wind was blowing in creating his works, Andrew Marvell; the usages of the fable in the Restoration period to telegraph dissent (a literary devise still necessarily in use today, unfortunately); and, lastly, a couple of great essays on the great defender of the English revolution and of its republican virtues, John Milton.

Those last essays were my reason for reading this volume, especially the essay on the politics of Paradise Lost by Mary Ann Radzinowicz, featuring some ideas that the great British Marxist historian and Milton devotee Christopher Hill alerted us to in an earlier time, but the others mentioned deserve a reading as well.