From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-From The Late Communist Leader James P. Cannon-"Those Who Labor Must Rule!"

Workers Vanguard No. 999
30 March 2012

Those Who Labor Must Rule!

(Quote of the Week)
In the midst of a hard-fought 1936-37 West Coast maritime strike, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon emphasized that labor can advance its cause only by relying on its own class strength and solidarity against the capitalist class enemy. Ben Hanford, who is referred to in the selection below, was a leader of the U.S. Socialist Party in the early 20th century.

A good deal is said about strike “strategy”—and that has its uses within certain clearly defined limits—but when you get down to cases this strike, like every other strike, is simply a bullheaded struggle between two forces whose interests are in constant and irreconcilable conflict. The partnership of capital and labor is a lie. The immediate issue in every case is decided by the relative strength of the opposing forces at the moment. The only strike strategy worth a tinker’s dam is the strategy that begins with this conception.

The problem of the strikers consists in estimating what their strength is, and then mobilizing it in full force and pressing against the enemy until something cracks and a settlement is achieved in consonance with the relation of forces between the unions and the organizations of the bosses. That’s all there is to strike strategy. You cannot maneuver over the head of the class struggle.

We pass over entirely the question of who is “right” in the maritime strike, for we believe with Ben Hanford that the working class is always right. From our point of view the workers have a perfect right to the full control of industry and all the fruits thereof. The employers on the other hand—not merely the shipowners; all bosses are alike—would like a situation where the workers are deprived of all organization and all say about their work and are paid only enough to keep body and soul together and raise a new generation of slaves to take their places when they drop in their tracks.

Any settlement in between these two extremes is only a temporary truce and the nature of such a settlement is decided by power; “justice” has nothing to do with it. The workers will not have justice until they take over the world. The demands of the workers in a strike are to be judged solely by their timeliness and the way they fit realistically into the actual relation of forces at the time.

—James P. Cannon, “The Maritime Strike” (November 1936), reprinted in Notebook of an Agitator (1958) 

***From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From The Pen Of American Communist LeaderJames P. Cannon At The End-"Youth And The Socialist Movement"

Click below to link to a Wikipedia entry for American Communist leader (CP and SWP) James P. Cannon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Cannon
 
Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Youth and the Socialist Movement

Rich Finkel, National Secretary of the Young Socialist Alliance, had the following discussion with James P. Cannon on March 15, 1974, in Los Angeles.
Finkel: On my tour this spring, I've already visited Texas, Arizona and part of California. I get the impression that many students who were active during the height of the antiwar movement and the Black struggle haven't quite figured out what kind of role they can play in a period of different dimensions, opportunities and problems, such as we are facing right now.
Cannon: I think it's very important for us to adopt a completely realistic view of the situation and adjust to the changed consciousness and at­titude on the campus. The party is tested just as much by times like this as by times of an up­swing in activity.

During the fifties, we lived so long in hard times, I think some of the old-timers found it difficult to adjust to the big upsurge we had during the Vietnam war.

It should be made a point of our educational propaganda that a revolutionist's spirit and at­titude is not determined by the popular mood of the moment. We have a historical view and we don't allow the movement to fade away when it runs into changed times, which can happen as we know from experience.

You're acquainted with my pamphlet, America's Road to Socialism? It's a series of six lectures given at the height of the McCarthyite period in the fall of 1952, when reaction seemed to reign supreme. There were practically no actions of any kind. So we decided on the lectures as a deliberate party action. They were given here in Los An­geles as a series of forums on what socialism means. What socialist America will look like. We had a regular attendance of 100, give or take a few, at each lecture.

Don't you find that the young people you talk to have a great interest in what socialism is, what it will look like and so on? There's a temptation in a period of upswing of activities to neglect the exposition of our fundamental program in its historical perspective. But I can recall from
my youth, which was in the heyday of the So­cialist Party! in this country —the Debs2 period — that seemed to be the question that most interested people who were contacted around the party. What is this socialism? What will it look like? How will it come about? And so on. And I think that's true today too, if you really probe the minds of young people.

Finkel: We've noticed that quite a bit. I think one of the stimulants right now is the energy crisis. People know that the oil monopolies prevail. They see what capitalism does, and they ask, "What is socialism? How do we organize it? How do we get there?"

We get more of these questions about socialism today than we did during the antiwar movement. I think that the questions are different at this par­ticular period —more fundamental. With the Water­gate revelations, people want to know, "How can we organize government without corruption? Is it possible?"

Your pamphlet, America's Road to Socialism, was one of the first things I read when I joined the YSA in 1968. It was an old copy, but it an­swered a lot of questions I had. I think that's true for many YSA members.

Could you explain a little about some of the previous experiences of the workers movement with youth groups? That's one of the questions that we often get in the YSA. What happened with the Wobblies? How did the Socialist and Communist parties build their youth organizations? What were their problems and successes?

Cannon: First of all, we've got to understand that the past of the radical and revolutionary movement in this country is part of our heritage — both with its positive and negative sides. We have to know about that. Our new members should be thoroughly schooled in our exposition and analy­sis of the preceding movements — their strong points and their errors which we are trying to correct as a result of experience and greater know­ledge that we've gained from other sources, most importantly from the Russian revolution.

Finkel: Did young people play a special role in the Wobblies or in the early Socialist Party? Were there student members? What sort of role did the radicalizing youth find in the socialist movement?
Cannon: The IWW itself was predominantly a young workers movement. It had no special youth organization. The drive and idealism of youth were a large part of its power and its merit, but again, it had no separate youth organization. There was no need for it as far as anybody could see. There was not even any talk of it.

In the West particularly, the IWW was predomi­nantly a movement of migratory workers. They had to be young because it was a hard life. In the Midwest, for example, the harvest would start early in Texas and Oklahoma, and a great mass of migratory workers traveled by freight train down to the centers where the hiring took place and worked a few weeks or a month —whatever it took to finish the harvest.

Then they rode north by freight until they ended up in Minnesota and the Dakotas. That would be the whole summer long. And there would be rail­road construction work and things of that kind. Migratory workers, as they were called, were some­thing like the harvest pickers of today, except that they were all single men in those days. The wheat fields of Texas and Oklahoma would just be harvested about the time it was getting ripe in Kansas, and then in Nebraska and so on.

Another big source of their membership was the lumber woods of the Northwest. That con­stituency consisted of the same type of workers. And in the East in the textile mills, the IWW at one time had a strong movement, many strikes, mostly of young foreign-born and women workers.

Socialist youth organizations

Finkel: What were the first socialist youth or­ganizations in this country?

Cannon: Well, to my recollection, there have been several histories written of the socialist move­ment which I think I mentioned in my book, The First Ten Years of American Communism. Up until the thirties, the socialist movement didn't amount to much on the campuses. There was a pretty sharp division between students and work­ers in those days. College boys came from the better-off classes and didn't associate with the workers.

The first manifestation of a ripple of the move­ment on the colleges came when Jack London and Upton Sinclair, who were the two literary heroes of the movement at that time, gave some lectures at Yale or Harvard or a place like that on so­cialism—"How I Became a Socialist" and so on.
They received a favorable response, and the result of it was the formation of what I think was called the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. It was a very thin movement because the percentage of people going to college was not great in those days.

Colleges were by no means the center of radicalization. Just the contrary. They were the center of conservatism. The Intercollegiate Socialist So­ciety, I think, later changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). It still exists, doesn't it?

Finkel: Yes. In fact, SDS —the Students for a Democratic Society — was originally the youth group of LID. Prior to 1959, I think, it was called the Student League for Industrial Democracy. But in 1964 the LID disowned it, because SDS wouldn't exclude groups like the YSA from an antiwar march it was planning in Washington, D.C.

Cannon: Anyway, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society became sort of a gentlemen's socialist club on the campuses. They called it the country club of the movement. The real movement itself had virtually nothing on the campuses. I don't know the exact year when the Young People's Socialist League4 was formed. You can probably check it in the history books, but it didn't really amount to much before the thirties when there was an upsurge of interest in political questions during the depression. Campus radicalism was at that time dominated by the Communist Party. The Socialists were quite a secondary factor, but they were largely swamped by the Communist Party.

There's been of course a great, fundamental change since then. One of the big changes to note is the percentage of people going to college now. I don't know the statistics, but you can easily check it. I think you'll find that the difference is practically qualitative.

In the old days of the IWW, anybody who'd been to high school was an exception. The average worker was lucky enough to finish grade school, get some kind of job, and that was it. But various factors, including the development of technology and the improved standard of living, greatly ex­panded the college population. Have you ever thought of that or have you ever read anything about it? Tremendous expansion.

For example, we've had here in our household over the last number of years 15 or 20 people who've lived here with me. There are two people here now. Six months ago there were two others. I think every single one of them had been to college. They were all working. They have either finished college or have had some college ex­perience, but they're working. And I guess a large percentage of those who attend college today go to work not as managers of prosperous family empires, but as workers in the labor force.

In 1919 Harvard students-had a great holiday going to Lawrence to help break a strike^ there. You can hardly imagine such a thing today.

The same thing happened in England in the general strike of 1926. There was a big move­ment recruiting strikebreakers from universities and prep schools and so on. They tried to help break the general strike.

Student radicalism in the '30s

In the thirties during the depression, that was the first time I ever noticed — the first time it came to general public attention —that there was a great rumbling on campus. The Communist Party had a very strong student membership. The Socialist Party too. We had a few, but nothing numerically significant.

The CP developed an antiwar movement on the campuses during the depression years. They ab­sorbed to a large extent the young socialists, the YPSL people, in a broader movement called the League Against War and Fascism.
The big problem for a person going to college then was what you were going to do after you got out There was no job to go to. That was the fate of many of them.

I remember Ted Draper, the author of The Roots of American Communism, told me that he con­centrated on the humanities courses in college rather than on the courses that would equip him for some kind of technical job. He said, "What was the use? Everybody knew there was no job to go to." He was preparing himself to be a writer.

An odd little story about the Socialist Party and the Communist Party is the story of the Draper brothers. You've heard of Hal Draper, the peren­nial YPSL? He's the brother of Ted Draper, the historian. Hal Draper was the Socialist, and the Socialists had a rather militant left wing in those days. He was one of the outstanding leaders of YPSL, and Ted Draper was one of the outstanding leaders of the Stalinists in the New York college community.

I was told that a big feature of that period was the debates between the two Draper brothers over questions of policy, war and so on. Hal Draper was a left-wing Socialist and Ted Draper was a Stalinist. In those days many Socialists stood to the left of the Stalinists.

A great many of those young people recruited by the Stalinists came out of college — either as graduates or dropouts. The Communist Party dominated a big unemployment movement, the Unemployed Councils. And young CP members who had acquired certain skills on the campuses in the organization of the movement—learning how to speak at meetings, make motions and do other things which the average person is afraid to even think of—went into the unemployment movement where they got further experience in organizational work.

When a slight upturn in industry came in the mid-thirties, they were sent into the factories. Many of these leaders of the Stalinist movement, as well as the Socialist Party to a lesser extent, became prominent. Some of their leaders in auto and other mass production industries began as former stu­dents, former Unemployed Council workers. I bet if a statistical record could be made, a large per­centage of their most dynamic and influential peo­ple had had some experience on the colleges, as well as in the Unemployed Councils.

I always think of that whenever I hear this chatter of the sectarian groups who make a hue and cry about leaving the campus and getting into the factories. Theoretically if s all right in the long run, because you certainly can't make a rev­olution on the campuses. For one reason, they don't have the industrial power. But workers re­cruited and convinced of the historical trend toward socialism and committed to it—and who have also had the benefit of a college education and experience in college organizations —can become very effective leaders in the mass movement of the workers.

And the same holds true for the unemployment movement, which will become, in my opinion, a big phenomenon in a period of serious economic crisis in this country.

I think we should think of our work on the campuses as preparatory work for the coming upsurge of the workers movement, in which the people who were recruited and trained as social­ists can play a great role. Both their education and their experience in organization will be very im­portant factors and can be extremely advantageous in a surging new movement of workers—whether in unemployed movements or in unions or both.

Organizational independence

Finkel: How did the YPSL and the Young Com­munists organize? Were they independent of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party? Were they controlled from the top down?

Cannon: They were completely controlled. The theory of the Communist youth organization as laid down in Russia by the Bolsheviks was ap­plied only on paper here. The formula was an organization of young people politically subordi­nate, but organizationally independent of the party. That was the formula. But in practice it didn't amount to much here. The control of the party was pretty absolute—as you see it now in the Communist Party.

The Young Communist League in my day in the twenties played no independent role. It was an appendage of the party. And the able young people in it were only too eager to get through with their YCL experience and get into the party, into the party faction fights where the real action was.

Max Shachtman, for instance, was the editor of the Young Worker, which was the Young Com­munist League paper. And Martin Abern was na­tional secretary. As I say, they considered them­selves as going through an apprenticeship. Their real interest was in the party. They belonged to the Cannon faction, as it was called, in the early twenties.

I didn't take much interest in YPSL in the twen­ties, so I can't speak from direct experience. But I think it was pretty much the same thing. Sort of shepherded by the party.

YPSL broke loose in the thirties. The YPSLs turned left politically faster than the Socialist Party. So that when we came to the showdown in 1937 — at the time we were in the Socialist Party6—at the national convention held in Philadelphia, the Trotskyists had a majority in YPSL, and we took a majority of YPSL with us.

I think YPSL at that time had about 1,000 members. Hal Draper was the national secretary, and he stayed with us a few years and then went out with the Shachtmanites. He remained a YPSL at heart. The last I heard of him, he was still operating on the campus.

YSA a new phenomenon

The Young Socialist Alliance of today is an entirely new phenomenon, as far as my experience can judge, by its composition, its general activity and in practically every other way.

The earlier youth movements were not nearly as serious as the party itself. A great many of them seemed really to be playing with ideas for awhile before turning their attention to some career. I used to hear the expression "career-oriented." That meant that they were not aiming to fight the rest of their lives for socialism; they were look­ing for a good job or profession or something of that sort.

This was true even of the left-wing young so­cialists that we recruited in 1937. The great ma­jority were not serious. The Shachtman and Burn-ham gang took the majority of them and they were fully entitled to them because they weren't made for a serious party.
Our youth movement of today benefits greatly from the tradition that we carried over with us from the Communist Party —the Leninist con­cepts of the movement. A serious movement of people who join and commit themselves to fight for socialism under any circumstances. And the conception of a professional staff.

This concept was not originated in America. It came entirely from the Bolsheviks like many of our other best ideas. I don't know how big a staff we now have in the party and the youth movement, but in the movement before the Russian revolution everything was a very casual affair. The national office consisted of a national secre­tary, a couple of stenographers, a bookkeeper and a lecture bureau and that was about it The IWW national office consisted of a general sec­retary, Vincent St John, in the days when I used to go there. SL John, a stenographer and a book­keeper and that was it

Finkel That was all?

How the IWW was organized

Cannon: That was the national office of the IWW. There was a tremendous movement of what was called the "decentralizers," who thought even that was too damn big of a bureaucracy to have hang­ing around their necks. They conducted a bitter fight to transform the national office into simply a communications center where the locals would send communications that would be forwarded to others. In 1913 we had a knock-down-drag-out fight at the convention with the decentralizers.

In addition to the national office of St John, the stenographer and the bookkeeper, you see, there was a General Executive Board of I think seven members who met about once every three months. The rest of the time they went out as field organizers, sometimes on the payroll, some­times not, according to how the finances stood out in the field.

And the decentralizers howled their heads off at the 1913 convention (that's the last one I at­tended) demanding that the organization be de­centralized and that all power be in the hands of the rank and file. The rank and file meant the locals. Each local for itself. They should com­municate with each other through the national office, sending letters to Chicago. And Chicago would forward a copy. On such things they ar­gued for days and days.

Well, they were defeated by St. John, who had an overwhelming personality. He was an organiz­er of the first quality and knew that organization required some centralization. And then St. John was succeeded by Bill Haywood7 —in 1914 I think.

Haywood went to prison in 1918, and the de-centralizers took over by a quiet operation in 1919. They adopted a motion that the national officers, the national secretary and the national organizer (who was not in the office but out in the field all the time) and any other national of­ficials should serve only one term. Just about the time they got their hands into their jobs, they'd be out and the new force would come in. And that was one, but not the main reason I think, for the decline of the IWW after the big persecu­tion8 during the First World War and the prison terms of the top leaders and so on.

I think there's some kind of myth or legend about the IWW which is entertained maybe by a lot of students. They've heard so much about it. And there was a wonderful militancy in the IWW.

But the IWW after the big persecution where hundreds were jailed, after 1920 or 1921, had no action whatever in the industrial field that any­body can recall. When the time came for the IWW project of industrial unions to be realized, it came from below in the mass production industries and the IWW was standing on the sidelines with their mouths open.9 They had nothing to do with it except as participants under different auspices.

Finkel: One of the questions we often get is how students can be effective. They don't see the work­ing class in motion and they often wonder what difference it makes or matters if they join the YSA. It's very abstract to them. How would you an­swer a question like that?

Cannon: Well, I would say a good beginning is to adopt a historical view of society. Try to get a clear idea of where we came from and where from all indications we're heading.

And the second would be, as a beginning, to read my pamphlet America's Road to Socialism and get the beginning of a concept of the historical collision that's in the making and that's not so far away. Students today are going to face such crises that they will see that any plan they've made for a settled, secure and a quiet career of making a lot of money is not in the cards any­more.

Things are going to blow up. There's either go­ing to be a revolution that transforms the whole social system or there isn't going to be anything left.

And we don't need to say that with any exag­geration or hysteria at all. That's what practically all scholars and other observers of society take for granted. One of the most common expressions you read in historical prognoses these days is "In the future, if there is to be a future of the hu­man race, it has to be different."

If you think, on top of everything else, that they've already got enough atomic weapons of var­ious kinds that can reach all points on the globe at the push of a button — enough to destroy the whole human race seven or eight times over. And if you think that every time there's any sign of a sharp international crisis everybody gets apprehensive about who's going to drop the first atom bomb and what will follow it, then you realize that the old slogan of the days before the First World War — that is, the historical perspective is either socialism or barbarism — is even more true today.

Today everybody with any knowledge of things will have to admit that the perspective is either socialism or annihilation. That's even worse than barbarism, because theoretically you can recover from a new barbarism. But nobody's yet recovered from the ashes of atomic destruction.

I believe that young people are particularly re­sponsive to discussions of that kind. And that's not some pipe dream at all. These are the demon­strable facts of life in the year 1974. The only worthwhile thing for a young person to commit herself or himself to is a movement to make pos­sible the continuation of the human race and its further evolution, development and progress. That can be stated seriously as a practical proposi­tion. "That's the way it is," as Walter Cronkite says when he winds up his evening news.

We couldn't say that with such assurance in the old days. One of the hardest things to answer was, "Well it's a good idea, but we'll never realize it. People will never agree to it." or "It's a hundred years away, so what's the use of worrying about it?"

But that's not the case today. The young genera­tion you're talking to is going to see it one way or another. And you may be able to decide. That's really a terrific thought—that one single person may make the difference.

I heard on TV several years ago an interview with the philosopher Bertrand Russell who was greatly disturbed about the development of atomic weapons and was agitated about the danger of them. He had accumulated considerable knowledge of atomic weapons' potential for destruction.

He was asked, "What do you consider is your main concern?" He hesitated a moment, and he said, "I want to see the human race continue." And then he was asked, "And what do you think are the odds?" He replied, "About four to six as I see it right now" — about four to six, for the chances of the human race continuing. The next question was, "What can we do about it?" And he said, "The only thing I know is to keep work­ing and struggling to change the odds."

I always thought of this as a very perceptive statement of the dilemma facing the young genera­tion today. Not at all what it was 50 or 100 years ago. In some of my last speeches before I fell into retirement, so to speak, I quoted this along with opinions of other informed people. I found a great response to that formulation and developed it further.

I said, "Suppose by our efforts we can push the odds up to 50-50, which is easily conceivable. By our efforts we can make it five to five instead of four to six! There's a point where one feather on one side of the scale or the other can make a difference on the basic question. It doesn't matter who we are, or where we're situated, or what we do; any one of us can make that difference."

It's a sobering formulation, isn't it? And yet, I personally feel that it is not at all a fantastic for­mulation. I feel that the human race is at the point where it's got to decide and hasn't too much time to do it. I'm almost certain it's going to be de­cided one way or another in the lifetime of the new generation entering the world of political action.

And then you should consider that the human race hasn't yet had a real chance to show what it's capable of doing. It has been the victim throughout the millenia of the social system that it has been born into. Humanity has done pretty well in coping with the problems of nature, of science and technology, but we have not yet gained control of our own social system. Nobody knows what's possible. But we can say all things are pos­sible if we had an organized, consciously directed and planned organization of society and produc­tion.

It just staggers the mind to think of what could be done if everybody in the world had access to all the knowledge that has been accumulated over the ages and had an opportunity to develop the latent talents that everybody has to a greater or lesser extent. How much waste in the social system could be eliminated and converted to con­structive uses! Good God! Just think, in this coun­try we throw away $80 billion a year on weapons of destruction. Just that alone, to say nothing of what we throw away on useless advertising, dirty tricks and things of that sort in politics. God almighty!

And then, as Trotsky said in one of his articles in Literature and Revolution, humanity under so­cialism for the first time will begin to understand itself and to consciously develop to its best capac­ity. That's never been done. That requires a change in the social system. And he predicted that we will develop the human race to the point where the average person reaches the height of an Aristotle, or a Goethe or a Marx, and beyond that, new peaks will rise.

Well, I think a young person listening to those arguments will have a hard time coming up with an answer to them. You've got to pose the ques­tion flatly: that there's a danger that the human race may not continue; and if it's going to con­tinue it's got to take control of its own social system and reorganize it and plan and eliminate the constant day-to-day danger of annihilation.

Finkel: Then they ask you how do you do it?

Cannon: Well, we're not going to say it's an easy thing to do. It's a lifetime job for each and every­one of us. But the thing that inspires one's life and makes it worth living in the face of all this calami­tous danger everywhere, uncertainties and insecuri­ty, is to commit yourself to an effort to change it. And not to belittle oneself and think you don't count. You may be the decisive factor.

Finkel: Thank you very much, Jim.

Cannon: Thank you for giving me a chance to sound off. I don't get on the soapbox much any more these days. If I can convey any sug­gestion to you it's this —the longer you live in this fight, the more determined you are to try to win it and the more confident you are that the human race will survive.
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In Honor Of The 64th Anniversary Year Of The Chinese Revolution of 1949- From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-Problems Of The Chinese Revolution (1927) –A Strangled Revolution-and Its Stranglers-June 13, 1931-Kadikoy

Click on link below to read on-line all of Leon Trotsky's book, Problems Of The Chinesee Revolution

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/pcr/index.htm

Markin comment (repost from 2012):

On a day when we are honoring the 63rd anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 the article posted in this entry and the comment below take on added meaning. In the old days, in the days when I had broken from many of my previously held left social-democratic political views and had begun to embrace Marxism with a distinct tilt toward Trotskyism, I ran into an old revolutionary in Boston who had been deeply involved (although I did not learn the extend of that involvement until later) in the pre-World War II socialist struggles in Eastern Europe. The details of that involvement will not detain us here now but the import of what he had to impart to me about the defense of revolutionary gains has stuck with me until this day. And, moreover, is germane to the subject of this article from the pen of Leon Trotsky -the defense of the Chinese revolution and the later gains of that third revolution (1949) however currently attenuated.

This old comrade, by the circumstances of his life, had escaped that pre-war scene in fascist-wracked Europe and found himself toward the end of the 1930s in New York working with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the period when that organization was going through intense turmoil over the question of defense of the Soviet Union. In the history of American (and international) Trotskyism this is the famous Max Shachtman-James Burnham led opposition that declared, under one theory or another, that the previously defendable Soviet Union had changed dramatically enough in the course of a few months to be no longer worth defending by revolutionaries.

What struck him from the start about this dispute was the cavalier attitude of the anti-Soviet opposition, especially among the wet-behind-the-ears youth, on the question of that defense and consequently about the role that workers states, healthy, deformed or degenerated, as we use the terms of art in our movement, as part of the greater revolutionary strategy. Needless to say most of those who abandoned defense of the Soviet Union when there was even a smidgeon of a reason to defend it left politics and peddled their wares in academia or business. Or if they remained in politics lovingly embraced the virtues of world imperialism.

That said, the current question of defense of the Chinese Revolution hinges on those same premises that animated that old Socialist Workers Party dispute. And strangely enough (or maybe not so strangely) on the question of whether China is now irrevocably on the capitalist road, or is capitalist already (despite some very un-capitalistic economic developments over the past few years), I find that many of those who oppose that position have that same cavalier attitude the old comrade warned me against back when I was first starting out. There may come a time when we, as we had to with the Soviet Union and other workers states, say that China is no longer a workers state. But today is not that day. In the meantime study the issue, read the posted article, and more importantly, defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution.

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Leon Trotsky

Problems of the Chinese Revolution

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A Strangled Revolution-and Its Stranglers-June 13, 1931-Kadikoy

Urgent work prevented me from reading sooner the article by Malraux in which he defends, against my criticism, the Communist International, Borodin, Garine, and himself. As a political publicist, Malraux is at a still greater distance from the proletariat and from the revolution than as an artist. By itself, this fact would not justify these lines, for it is nowhere said that a talented writer must necessarily be a proletarian revolutionist. If I nevertheless return to the same question again, it is for the sake of the subject, and not of Malraux.

The best figures of the novel, I said, attained the stature of social symbols. I must add: Borodin, Garine and all their “collaborators” constitute symbols of the quasi-revolutionary bureaucracy, of that new “social type” which was born thanks to the existence of the soviet state on the one hand, and on the other to a definite régime in the Comintern.
I declined to classify Borodin among the “professional revolutionists”, as he is characterized in the novel. Malraux endeavours to show me that Garine has enough mandarin’s buttons to give him the right to this title. Here, Malraux finds it in place to add that Trotsky has a greater quantity of buttons. Isn’t it ridiculous? The type of the professional revolutionist is not at all some sort of an ideal type. But in all events, it is a definite type, with a definite political biography and with salient traits. Only Russia created this type during the last decades; in Russia, the most perfect of this type was created by the Bolshevik Party. The professional revolutionists of the generation to which Borodin belonged began to take shape on the eve of the first revolution, they were put to the test in 1905, they tempered and educated (or decomposed) themselves during the years of the counter-revolution; they stood the supreme test in 1917. From 1903 up to 1918, that is, during the whole period when, in Russia, was being formed the type of professional revolutionist, Borodin, and hundreds, thousands of Borodins, remained outside of the struggle. In 1918, after the victory, Borodin arrived to offer his services. This does him honour: it is worthier to serve the proletarian state than the bourgeois state. Borodin charged himself with perilous missions. But the agents of bourgeois states in foreign countries, especially in colonial countries, also and that quite frequently, accomplish perilous tasks. Yet they do not become revolutionists because of that. The type of the functionary-adventurer and the type of the professional revolutionist, at certain moments and by certain qualities, can find points of similarity. But by their psychological formation as much as by their historical function, they are two opposite types.
The revolution pursues its course together with its class. If the proletariat is weak, if it is backward, the revolution confines itself to the modest, patient and persevering work of the creation of propaganda circles, of the preparation of cadres; supporting itself upon the first cadres, it passes over to mass agitation, legal or illegal, according to the circumstances. It always distinguishes its class from the enemy class, and conducts only such a policy as corresponds to the strength of its class and consolidates this strength. The French, the Russian or the Chinese proletarian revolutionist, will look upon the Chinese workers as his own army, of today or of tomorrow. The functionary-adventurer raises himself above all the classes of the Chinese nation. He considers himself predestined to dominate, to give orders, to command, independently of the internal relationship of forces in China. Since the Chinese proletariat is weak today and cannot assure the commanding positions, the functionary conciliates and joins together the different classes. He acts as the inspector of the nation, as the viceroy for the affairs of the colonial revolution. He arranges combinations between the conservative bourgeois and the anarchist, he improvises a program ad hoc, he erects policies upon ambiguities, he creates a bloc of four classes, he swallows swords and scoffs at principles. With what result? The bourgeoisie is richer, more influential, more experienced. The functionary-adventurer does not succeed in deceiving it. But for all that, he deceives the workers, filled with the spirit of abnegation, but not experienced, by turning them over to the hands of the bourgeoisie. Such was the role of the bureaucracy of the Comintern in the Chinese revolution.
Considering as natural the right of the “revolutionary” bureaucracy to command independently of the forces of the proletariat, Malraux informs us that one could not participate in the Chinese revolution without participating in the war, and one could not participate in the war without participating in the Guomindang, etc To this, he adds: the break with the Guomindang would have meant, for the Communist Party, the necessity of passing into illegality. When one thinks that these arguments sum up the philosophy of the representatives of the Comintern in China, he cannot refrain from saying: Indeed, the dialectic of the historical process sometimes plays bad jokes upon organizations, upon men and upon ideas! How easy it is to solve the problem: in order to participate successfully in the events directed by the enemy class, one must submit to this class; in order to avoid repressions on the part of the Guomindang, one must paint oneself up in its colours! There you have the secret of Borodin-Garine.
Malraux’s political estimate of the situation, of the possibilities and the tasks in China in 1925, is entirely false; it hardly reaches the border line where the real problems of the revolution begin. I have said elsewhere all that had to be said on this subject, and Malraux’s article gives no ground for a re-examination of what has been said. But even by standing on the ground of the false estimate Malraux gives of the situation, one can in no case justify the policy of Stalin-Borodin-Garine. In order to protest in 1925 against this policy, certain things had to be foreseen. In order to defend it in 1931, one must be incurably blind.
Did the strategy of the functionaries of the Comintern bring the Chinese proletariat anything but humiliations, the extermination of its cadres and above all, a terrific confusion in the mind? Did the shameful capitulation before the Guomindang avert repression for the Party? On the contrary, it only accumulated and concentrated the repressions. Was not the Communist Party compelled to pass into illegality? And when? In the period of the crushing of the revolution! If the Communists had begun by illegal work, at the beginning of the revolutionary tide, they would have emerged upon the open arena at the head of the masses. By effacing and demoralizing the Party with the aid of the Borodins and Garines, Chiang Kai-shek compelled it later, with all the greater success to take refuge in illegality during the years of the counter-revolution. The policy of Borodin-Garine entirely served the Chinese bourgeoisie. The Chinese Communist Party must begin all over again at the beginning, and that on an arena encumbered with debris, with prejudices, with uncomprehended mistakes and with the distrusts of the advanced workers. Those are the results.
The criminal character of this whole policy reveals itself with particular acuteness in isolated questions. Malraux presents as a merit of Borodin and Company the fact that in turning over the terrorists to the hands of the bourgeoisie, he deliberately pushed under the knife of the terror the leader of the bourgeoisie, Chen Dai. This machination is worthy of a bureaucratic Borgia or of the “revolutionary” Polish szlachta (gentry and nobility) who always preferred to fire with the hands of others behind the backs of the people. No, the task was not to kill Chen Dai in ambush, but to prepare the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. When the party of the revolution is obliged to kill, it does it on its open responsibility, in the name of tasks and immediate aims understood by the masses.
Revolutionary morals are not abstract Kantian norms, but rules of conduct which place the revolutionist under the control of the tasks and aims of his class. Borodin and Garine were not bound up with the masses, they did not absorb the spirit of responsibility before the class. They are bureaucratic supermen who consider that “everything is permitted” within the limits of the mandate received from above. The activity of such men, effective as it may be at certain moments, can only be directed, in the last instance, against the interests of the revolution.
After having killed Chen Dai with the hands of Hong, Borodin and Garine then turn over Hong and his group to the hands of the executioners. This stamps their whole policy with the brand of Cain. Here too Malraux poses as a defender. What is his argument? Lenin and Trotsky also punished the anarchists. It is hard to believe that this is said by a man who came near the revolution, even if but for a moment. Malraux forgets or does not understand that the revolution takes place in the name of the domination of one class over another, that it is only from this task that revolutionists draw their right to violence. The bourgeoisie exterminates the revolutionists, sometimes also the anarchists (more and more infrequently, because they become ever more obedient) in the name of safeguarding the régime of exploitation and baseness. Under the domination of the bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks always defend the anarchists against the Chiappes. After having conquered power, the Bolsheviks did everything to draw the anarchists over to the side of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They succeeded in actuality in drawing the majority of the anarchists behind them. Yes, the Bolsheviks severely punished those anarchists who undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat. Were we right or weren’t we? That depends upon the manner in which one evaluates our revolution and the régime instituted by it. But can one imagine for a single instant that the Bolsheviks – under Prince Lvov or under Kerensky, under the bourgeois régime – would act as its agents in the extermination of anarchists? It is enough to formulate the question clearly, to turn aside in disgust. Just as Bridoison interests himself only in the form and ignores the essence, so the quasi-revolutionary bureaucracy and its literary attorney interest themselves only in the mechanics of the revolution, ignoring the question of what class and what régime they should serve. Here lies the abyss between the revolutionist and the functionary of the revolution.
What Malraux says about Marxism is a joke. The Marxian policy was not applicable in China because, you see, the proletariat was not class-conscious. It would seem then that from this flows the task of awakening this class-consciousness. But Malraux deduces a justification of the policy directed against the interests of the proletariat.
The other argument is no more convincing and still less amusing: Trotsky speaks of the need of Marxism for revolutionary politics; but isn’t Borodin a Marxist? And Stalin, isn’t he a Marxist? Then it is not a question of Marxism. I defend, against Garine, the revolutionary doctrine, just as I would defend, against a sorcerer, the medical sciences. The sorcerer will say to me in his defence that diplomaed doctors also very often kill their patients. It is an argument unworthy of a moderately educated burgher, and not only of a revolutionist. The fact that medicine is not omnipotent, that the doctors do not always effect cures, that one finds among them ignoramuses, blockheads and even poisoners – can this fact serve as an argument for giving the right to practise medicine to sorcerers, who have never studied medicine and who deny its significance?
I must make one correction, after having read Malraux’s article. In my article I expressed the idea that an inoculation of Marxism would do Garine good. I don’t think so any more.

***Out In The 1960s Night- Michael Caine and Demi Moore’s Flawless  

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

Flawless, starring Demi Moore, Michael Caine, 2008

No question, no question at all that it was tough, tough as hell, to be a woman with executive level skills, CEO-type skills in the international diamond business then based in London, or any business for that matter, in the 1960s. But what were you, that woman, to do about it, except endlessly smoke cigarettes and fume. No question, no question at all that the private health insurance racket for serious illnesses in England, or anywhere for that matter, is predicated on providing the least possible help for the sick when all is said and done. Those two hurts, the first held by Demi Moore, the other by Michael Caine (in about his twelve millionth film) around the treatment of his dead wife is what drives the plotline in this film under review, Flawless (as in flawless diamonds or flawless plan, I assume).         

Naturally, naturally for a suspense thriller these hurts can only be resolved by action, here by criminal action. See Michael, a janitor at the London Diamond Exchange, recruits Demi, a middle- level executive there to a plan that he has cooked up to get revenge for his wife’s death on the insurance executive whose policy didn’t provide the expected coverage when she developed cancer.  And as part of the package help Demi get even for being passed over when promotion time came up and some lesser guy, lesser male got pushed ahead in that old rat race.

The plan: steal a few million dollars in diamonds from the vast haul in the vault as restitution. Hell, their disappearance would never be noticed. He says. And the damn plan worked, worked real well. Except in the end though Michael had a bigger political objective, to ruin that insurance company so he ingeniously stole the contents of the whole vault and held it ransom. And the ransom after much hemming and hawing was paid. Nice work. Except that was not Michael’s point in this caper and so Demi wound up with the 100 million dollar ransom which she spent the rest of her life trying to give away to various charities. Yah, I know, far-fetched but what isn’t far-fetched is that for once crime did pay, did pay for the side of the angels for a change.     

 

 

***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through World War II-Peggy Lee Backed By The Benny Goodman Band- From Deep In The American Songbook-George Gershwin’s How Long Has This Been Going On …

And memories of that girl (or guy) who got away, or who was married to another, or who had another girlfriend (or boyfriend, or today mix and match, and then too come to think of it), or one of a thousand other reasons for parting, some good, some bad but in misty future time regret, sheer regret for that maybe first love and why things hadn’t worked out. Thus this song to get one by on that cold, lonely remembrance night.          

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Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down through the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin       

Additional Markin comment for this series:

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant to our parents or not, what sacred place it held in their youthful hearts, this is the music that went wafting through the house of many of those of us who constitute the Generation of ‘68. Those of us who came of age, personal, political and social age in the age of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot, and who were driven by some makeshift dream, who in the words of brother Bobby quoting  from Alfred Lord Tennyson were “seeking a new world.”  Those who took up the call to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture before the hammer came down. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note drifted out into the ebbing tide. But enough of that about us this is about forbears and their struggles, and the music that they dreamed by on cold winter nights or hot summer days.

This is emphatically the music of the generation that survived the dust bowl, empty bowl, no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, the time of the madness, the time of the night-takers, the time of the long knives. Survived god knows how by taking the nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search for… Search for something that was not triple decker bodies piled high cold-water flat with a common commode and brown stained sink, rooming house, hell, call it what it was flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines, or tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles falling, and get out on the open road and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.

Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and under railroad trestles when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses, robbed them as an old-time balladeer said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them. Survived the soap kitchens hungers, the endless waiting in line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to stick his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Out of work, or with little work waiting for that day, that full head of steam day in places like Flint, Frisco town, Akron, Chicago, hell, even in boondock Minneapolis when the score gets evened, evened a little, but until then shifting the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the rural fallow fields, and that gnarring hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all. 

Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the economic royalists, today’s 1%, who in their fortified towers tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. They fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread, trying to get out from under that cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot of comrades, yes, comrades, kindred in the struggle to put survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history, to take collective action to put things right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out.      

Survived to slog through the time of the gun in World War II, either carrying one on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific or waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie or Jimmy. Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and West, waiting for the other shoe to drop, hanging in some corner drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, sitting two by two at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana songs, rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs to get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.

Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, songs about faraway places, about keeping lamp- lights burning, about making a better world out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them, about Johnnie and Jimmie actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their dreams, hell, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later. Listened and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, told them to leave he was closing up, they made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, the back forty, the hills, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.               

It wafted through the large console radio centered in the living room of my house via local station WDJA in North Adamsville as my mother used it as background on her appointed household rounds. It drove me crazy then as mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure. 

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How Long Has This Been Going On  

As a tot, when I trotted in little velvet panties,
I was kissed by my sisters, my cousins, and my anties.
Sad to tell, it was hell, an inferno worse than Dante's.
So my dear I swore,
"Never, never more !"
On my list, I insisted that kissing must be crossed out.
Now, I find I was blind, and oh my ! , how I lost out !

I could cry salty tears ;
Where have I been all these years ?
Little wow, tell me now :
How long has this been going on ?

There were chills up my spine,
And some thrills I can't define.
Listen, sweet, I repeat :
how long has this been going on ?

Oh, I feel that I could melt ;
Into Heaven I'm hurled !
I know how Clombus felt,
Finding another world.

Kiss me once, then once more.
What a dunce I was before.
What a break ! For Heaven's sake !
How long has this been going on ?

Dear, when in your arms I creep,
That divine rendez-vous,
Don't wake me, if I'm asleep,
Let me dream that it's true !

Kiss me twice, then once more.
That makes thrice, let's make it four !
What a break ! For Heaven's sake !
How long has this been going on ?
--How long has this... been going ... on ?... .

From The Marxist Archives-In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The John Brown-Led Raid On Harpers Ferry-

Labor Struggles and the Capitalist State

 

STRIKE THE BLOW-THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN

Reclaiming John Brown for the Left

BOOK REVIEW

JOHN BROWN, ABOLITIONIST, DAVID S. REYNOLDS, ALFRED A. KNOPF, NEW YORK, 2005
From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harpers Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic- had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown and that Union soldiers marched to that song as they headed south. I was then, however, neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown’s (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas ‘proxy’ wars against the expansion of slavery. Later study filled in some of those gaps and has only strengthened my strong bond with his memory. Know this, as I reach the age at which John Brown was executed,I still retain my youthful admiration for him. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in America. Almost 150 years after his death this writer is proud to stand in the tradition of John Brown.

That said, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I can recommend Mr. Reynolds’s book detailing the life, times and exploits of John Brown, warts and all. Published in 2005, this is an important source (including helpful end notes) for updating various controversies surrounding the John Brown saga. While I may disagree with some of Mr. Reynolds’s conclusions concerning the impact of John Brown’s exploits on later black liberation struggles and to a lesser extent his position on Brown’s impact on his contemporaries, particularly the Transcendentalists, nevertheless on the key point of the central place of John Brown in American revolutionary history there is no dispute. Furthermore, Mr. Reynolds has taken pains to provide substantial detail about the ups and downs of John Brown’s posthumous reputation.

Most importantly, he defends the memory of John Brown against all-comers-that is partisan history on behalf of the ‘losers’ of history at its best. He has reclaimed John Brown to his proper position as an icon for the left against the erroneous and outrageous efforts of modern day religious and secular terrorists to lay any claim to his memory or his work. Below I make a few comments on some of controversies surrounding John Brown developed in Mr. Reynolds’s study.

If one understands the ongoing nature, from his early youth, of John Brown’s commitment to the active struggle against slavery, the scourge of the American Republic in the first half of the 19th century, one can only conclude that he was indeed a man on a mission. As Mr. Reynolds’s points out Brown took every opportunity to fight against slavery including early service as an agent of the Underground Railroad spiriting escaped slaves northward, participation as an extreme radical in all the key anti-slavery propaganda battles of the time as well as challenging other anti-slavery elements to be more militant and in the 1850’s, arms in hand, fighting in the ‘proxy’ wars in Kansas and, of course, the culmination of his life- the raid on Harpers Ferry. Those exploits alone render absurd a very convenient myth by those who supported slavery or turned a blind eye to it and their latter-day apologists for his so-called ‘madness’. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one.

For those who like their political heroes ‘pure’, frankly, it is better to look elsewhere than the life of John Brown. His personal and family life as a failed rural capitalist would hardly lead one to think that this man was to become a key historical figure in any struggle, much less the great struggle against slavery. Some of his actions in Kansas (concerning the murder of some pro-slavery elements under his direction) also cloud his image. However, when the deal went down in the late 1850’s and it was apparent for all to see that there was no other way to end slavery than a fight to the death-John Brown rose to the occasion. And did not cry about it. And did not expect others to cry about it. Call him a ‘monomaniac’ if you like but even a slight acquaintance with great historical figures shows they all have this ‘disease’- that is why they make the history books. No, the ‘madness’ argument will not do.

Whether or not John Brown knew that his military strategy for the Harper’s Ferry raid would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s plan, however, was essentially a combination of slave revolt modeled after the maroon experiences in Haiti, Nat Turner’s earlier Virginia slave rebellion and rural guerrilla warfare of the ‘third world’ type that we have become more familiar with since that time. 150 years later this strategy does not look so foolhardy in an America of the 1850’s that had no real standing army, fairly weak lines of communications, virtually uninhabited mountains to flee to and the North at their backs.

The execution of the plan is another matter. Brown seemingly made about every mistake in the book in that regard. However, this is missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. A few more fighting abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and better propaganda work among freedman with connections to the plantations would not have hurt the chances for success at Harpers Ferry.

What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist avenging angel in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years. It is possible that if Brown did not have this, by 19th century standards as well as our own, old-fashioned Calvinist determination that he would not have been capable of militant action. Certainly other anti-slavery elements never came close to his militancy, including the key Transcendentalist movement led by Emerson and Thoreau and the Concord ‘crowd’ who supported him and kept his memory alive in hard times.

In their eyes he had the heroic manner of the Old Testament prophet. Now this animating spirit is not one that animates modern revolutionaries and so it is hard to understand the depths of his religious convictions on his actions but they were understood, if not fully appreciated, by others in those days. It is better today to look at Brown more politically through his hero (and mine, as well) Oliver Cromwell-a combination of Calvinist avenger and militant warrior. Yes, I can get behind that picture of him.

By all accounts Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920’s. There other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown’s actions should be measured by history.

Militarily defeated at Harpers Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a ‘madman’ still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have also misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy which led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming American military superiority. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.

From a modern prospective Brown’s strategy for black liberation, even if the abolitionist goal he aspired to was immediately successful, reached the outer limits within the confines of capitalism. Brown’s actions were meant to make black people free. Beyond that goal he had no program except the Chatham Charter which seems to have replicated the American constitution but with racial and gender equality as a cornerstone. Unfortunately the Civil War did not provide fundamental economic and political freedom. That is still our fight. Moreover, the Civil War, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the reign of ‘Jim Crow’ and the subsequent waves of black migration to the cities changed the character of black oppression in the U.S. from Brown’s time. Black people are now a part of "free labor," and the key to their liberation is in the integrated fight of labor against the current one-sided class war and establishing a government of workers and their allies. Nevertheless, we can stand proudly in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown (and of his friend Frederick Douglass). We need to complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, not by emulating Brown’s exemplary actions but to moving the multi-racial American working class to power. Finish the Civil War.
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Workers Vanguard No. 987	30 September 2011

TROTSKY

LENIN

Labor Struggles and the Capitalist State

(Quote of the Week)

In fighting company union-busting, longshoremen in Longview, Washington, are confronting anti-labor laws enforced by government agencies, the courts and the police. Drawing some lessons of the successful 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon pointed out that many workers were learning from their own experience that the state was not neutral but was an agency of the capitalist class in suppressing labor struggles. He also explained that strike strategy and tactics must be guided by a realistic assessment of the actual balance of class forces in the concrete situation.

This spirit of determined struggle was combined at the same time with a realistic appraisal of the relation of forces and the limited objectives of the fight. Without this all the preparations and all the militancy of the strikers might well have been wasted and brought the reaction of a crushing defeat. The strike was understood to be a preliminary, partial struggle with the objective of establishing the union and compelling the bosses to “recognize” it. When they got that they stopped and called it a day. The strong union that has emerged from the strike will be able to fight again and to protect its membership in the meantime. The accomplishment is modest enough. But if we want to play an effective part in the labor movement we must not allow ourselves to forget that the American working class is just beginning to move on the path of the class struggle and, in its great majority, stands yet before the first task of establishing stable unions. Those who understand the task of the day and accomplish it prepare the future. The others merely chatter.

As in every strike of any consequence, the workers involved in the Minneapolis struggle also had an opportunity to see the government at work and to learn some practical lessons as to its real function. The police force of the city, under the direction of the Republican mayor, supplemented by a horde of “special deputies,” were lined up solidly on the side of the bosses. The police and deputies did their best to protect the strikebreakers and keep some trucks moving, although their best was not good enough. The mobilization of the militia by the Farmer-Labor governor was a threat against the strikers, even if the militia-men were not put on the street. The strikers will remember that threat. In a sense it can be said that the political education of a large section of the strikers began with this experience.

—James P. Cannon, “Minneapolis and Its Meaning,” New International (July 1934)