Lessons- Leon Trotsky On Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate"

Lessons- Leon Trotsky On Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate"

Leon Trotsky

Problems of the Chinese Revolution

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The Strangled Revolution

February 9, 1931
Prinkipo

The book by André Malraux, Les Conquérants, was sent to me from various quarters and I think in four copies, but to my regret I read it after a delay of a year and a half or two. The book is devoted to the Chinese revolution, that is, to the greatest subject of the last five years. A fine and well-knit style, the discriminating eye of an artist, original and daring observation – all confer upon the novel an exceptional importance. If we write about it here it is not because the book is a work of talent, although this is not a negligible fact, but because it offers a source of political lessons of the highest value. Do they come from Malraux? No, they flow from the recital itself, unknown to the author, and they go against him. This does honour to the author as an observer and an artist, but not as a revolutionist. However, we have the right to evaluate Malraux too from this point of view; in his own name and above all in the name of Garine, his other self, the author does not hesitate with his judgements on the revolution.

This book is called a novel. As a matter of fact, we have before us a romanticized chronicle of the Chinese revolution, from its first period to the period of Canton. The chronicle is not complete. Social vigour is sometimes lacking from the picture. But for that there pass before the reader not only luminous episodes of the revolution but also clear-cut silhouettes which are graven in the memory like social symbols.

By little coloured touches, following the method of pointillisme, Malraux gives an unforgettable picture of the general strike, not, to be sure, as it is below, not as it is carried out, but as it is observed from above: the Europeans do not get their breakfast, they swelter in the heat, the Chinese have ceased to work in the kitchens and to operate the ventilators. This is not a reproach to the author: the foreign artist could undoubtedly not have dealt with his theme otherwise. But there is a reproach to be made, and not a small one: the book is lacking in a congenital affinity between the writer, in spite of all he knows, understands and can do, and his heroine, the revolution.

The active sympathies of the author for insurgent China are unmistakable. But chance bursts upon these sympathies. They are corroded by the excesses of individualism and by aesthetic caprice. In reading the book with sustained attention one sometimes experiences a feeling of vexation when in the tone of the persuasive recital one perceives a note of protective irony towards the barbarians capable of enthusiasm. That China is backward, that many of its political manifestations bear a primitive character – nobody asks that this be passed over in silence. But a correct perspective is needed which puts every object in its place. The Chinese events, on the basis of which Malraux’s “novel” unfolds itself, are incomparably more important for the future destiny of human culture than the vain and pitiful clamour of Europe parliaments and the mountain of literary products of stagnant civilization. Malraux seems to feel a certain fear to take this into account.

In the novel, there are pages, splendid in their intensity, which show how revolutionary hatred is born of the yoke, of ignorance, of slavery, and is tempered like steel. These pages might have entered into the Anthology of the Revolution if Malraux had approached the masses with greater freedom and intrepidity, if he had not introduced into his observations a small note of blasé superiority, seeming to excuse himself for his transient contact with the insurrection of the Chinese people, as much perhaps before himself as before the academic mandarins in France and the traffickers in spiritual opium.

* * *

Borodin represents the Comintern in the post of “high counsellor” in the Canton government. Garine, the favourite of the author, is in charge of propaganda. All the work is done within the framework of the Guomindang. Borodin, Garine, the Russian “General” Galen, the Frenchman Gérard, the German Klein and others, constitute an original bureaucracy of the revolution raising itself above the insurgent people and conducting its own “revolutionary” policy instead of the policy of the revolution.

The local organizations of the Guomindang are defined as follows: “groups of fanatics – brave of a few plutocrats out for notoriety or for security – and crowds of students and coolies”. (p.24) Not only do bourgeois enter into every organization but they completely lead the Party. The Communists are subordinate to the Guomindang. The workers and the peasants are persuaded to take no action that might rebuff the devoted friends of the bourgeoisie. “Such are the societies that we control (more or less, do not fool yourself on this score).” An edifying avowal! The bureaucracy of the Comintern tried to “control” the class struggle in China, like the international bankocracy controls the economic life of the backward countries. But a revolution cannot be controlled. One can only give a political expression to its internal forces. One must know to which of these forces to link one’s destiny.

“Today coolies are beginning to discover that they exist, simply that they exist.” (p.26) That’s well aimed. But to feel that they exist, the coolies, the industrial workers and the peasants must overthrow those who prevent them from existing. Foreign domination is indissolubly bound up with the domestic yoke. The coolies must not only drive out Baldwin or MacDonald but also overthrow the ruling classes. One cannot be accomplished without the other. Thus, the awakening of the human personality in the masses of China, who exceed ten times the population of France, is immediately transformed into the lava of the social revolution. A magnificent spectacle!

But here Borodin appears on the scene and declares: “In the revolution the workers must do the coolie work for the bourgeoisie,” wrote Chen Duxiu in an open letter to the Chinese Communists. The social enslavement from which they want to liberate themselves, the workers find transposed into the sphere of politics. To whom do they owe this perfidious operation? To the bureaucracy of the Comintern. In trying to “control” the Guomindang, it actually aids the bourgeoisie which seeks “notoriety and security” in enslaving the coolies who want to exist.

Borodin, who remains in the background all the time, is characterized in the novel as a “man of action”, as a “professional revolutionist”, as a living incarnation of Bolshevism on the soil of China. Nothing is further from the truth! Here is the political biography of Borodin: in 1903, at the age of 19, he emigrated to America; in 1918, he returned to Moscow where, thanks to his knowledge of English, he “ensured contact with the foreign parties”; he was arrested in Glasgow in 1922; then he was delegated to China as representative of the Comintern. Having quit Russia before the first revolution and having returned after the third, Borodin appeared as the consummate representative of that state and Party bureaucracy which recognized the revolution only after its victory. When it is a question of young people, it is sometimes nothing more than a matter of chronology. With people of 40 or 50, it is already a political characterization. If Borodin rallied successfully to the victorious revolution in Russia, it does not in the least signify that he was called upon to assure the victory of the revolution in China. People of this type assimilate without difficulty the gestures and intonations of “professional revolutionists”. Many of them, by their protective colouration, not only deceive others but also themselves. The audacious inflexibility of the Bolshevik is most usually metamorphosed with them into that cynicism of the functionary ready for anything. Ah! to have a mandate from the Central Committee! This sacrosanct safeguard Borodin always had in his pocket.

Garine is not a functionary, he is more original than Borodin and perhaps even closer to the revolutionary type. But he is devoid of the indispensable formation; dilettante and theatrical, he gets hopelessly entangled in the great events and he reveals it at every step. With regard to the slogans of the Chinese revolution, he expresses himself thus: “democratic chatter – ‘the rights of the proletariat’, etc.” (p.32.) This has a radical ring but it is a false radicalism. The slogans of democracy are execrable chatter in the mouth of Poincaré, Herriot, Léon Blum, sleight-of-hand artists of France and jailers of Indochina, Algeria and Morocco. But when the Chinese rebel in the name of the “rights of the proletariat”, this has as little to do with chatter as the slogans of the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. At Hong Kong, the British birds of prey threatened, during the strike, to re-establish corporal punishment. “The rights of man and of the citizen” meant at Hong Kong the right of the Chinese not to be flogged by the British whip. To unmask the democratic rottenness of the imperialists is to serve the revolution: to call the slogans of the insurrection of the oppressed “chatter”, is involuntarily to aid the imperialists.

A good inoculation of Marxism would have preserved the author from fatal contempt of this sort. But Garine in general considers that revolutionary doctrine is “doctrinaire rubbish” (le fatras doctrinal). He is, you see, one of those to whom the revolution is only a definite “state of affairs”. Isn’t this astonishing? But it is just because the revolution is a “state of affairs”, that is, a stage in the development of society conditioned by objective causes and subjected to definite laws, that a scientific mind can foresee the general direction of processes. Only the study of the anatomy of society and of its physiology permits one to react to the course of events by basing oneself upon scientific foresight and not upon a dilettante’s conjectures. The revolutionist who “despises” revolutionary doctrine is not a bit better than the healer who despises medical doctrine which he does not know, or than the engineer who rejects technology. People who without the aid of science, try to rectify the “state of affairs” which is called a disease, are called sorcerers or charlatans and are prosecuted by law. Had there existed a tribunal to judge the sorcerers of the revolution, it is probable that Borodin, like his Muscovite inspirers, would have been severely condemned. I am afraid Garine himself would not have come out of it unscathed.

Two figures are contrasted to each other in the novel, like the two poles of the national revolution; old Chen Dai, the spiritual authority of the right wing of the Guomindang, the prophet and saint of the bourgeoisie, and Hong, the young leader of the terrorists. Both are depicted with great force. Chen Dai embodies the old Chinese culture translated into the language of European breeding; with this exquisite garment, he “ennobles” the interests of all the ruling classes of China. To be sure, Chen Dai wants national liberation, but he dreads the masses more than the imperialists; he hates the revolution more than the yoke placed upon the nation. If he marches towards it, it is only to pacify it, to subdue it, to exhaust it. He conducts a policy of passive resistance on two fronts, against imperialism and against the revolution, the policy of Gandhi in India, the policy which, in definite periods and in one form or another, the bourgeoisie has conducted at every longitude and latitude. Passive resistance flows from the tendency of the bourgeoisie to canalize the movement of the masses and to make off with it.

When Garine says that Chen Dai’s influence rises above politics, one can only shrug his shoulders. The masked policy of the “upright man”, in China as in India, expresses in the most sublime and abstractly moralizing form the conservative interests of the possessors. The personal disinterestedness of Chen Dai is in no sense in opposition to his political function: the exploiters need “upright men” as the corrupted ecclesiastical hierarchy needs saints.

Who gravitate around Chen Dai? The novel replies with meritorious precision: a world of “aged mandarins, smugglers of opium and of obscene photographs, of scholars turned bicycle dealers, of Parisian barristers, of intellectuals of every kind”. (p.124.) Behind them stands a more solid bourgeoisie bound up with England, which arms General Tang against the revolution. In the expectation of victory, Tang prepares to make Chen Dai the head of the government. Both of them, Chen Dai and Tang, nevertheless continue to be members of the Guomindang which Borodin and Garine serve.

When Tang has a village attacked by his armies, and when he prepares to butcher the revolutionists, beginning with Borodin and Garine, his party comrades, the latter with the aid of Hong, mobilize and arm the unemployed. But after the victory won over Tang, the leaders do not seek to change a thing that existed before. They cannot break the ambiguous bloc with Chen Dai because they have no confidence in the workers, the coolies, the revolutionary masses, they are themselves contaminated with the prejudices of Chen Dai whose qualified arm they are.

In order “not to rebuff” the bourgeoisie they are forced to enter into struggle with Hong. Who is he and where does he come from? “The lowest dregs.” (p.36) He is one of those who are making the revolution and not those who rally to it when it is victorious. Having come to the idea of killing the British governor of Hong Kong, Hong is concerned with only one thing: “When I have been sentenced to capital punishment, you must tell the young to follow my example.” (p.36) To Hong a clear program must be given: to arouse the workers, to assemble them, to arm them and to oppose them to Chen Dai as to an enemy. But the bureaucracy of the Comintern seeks Chen Dai’s friendship, repulses Hong and exasperates him. Hong exterminates bankers and merchants one after another, the very ones who “support” the Guomindang, Hong kills missionaries: “those who teach people to support misery must be punished, Christian priests or others” (p.274) If Hong does not find the right road, it is the fault of Borodin and Garine who have placed the revolution in the hands of the bankers and the merchants. Hong reflects the mass which is already rising but which has not yet rubbed its eyes or softened its hands. He tries by the revolver and the knife to act for the masses whom the agents of the Comintern are paralysing. Such is the unvarnished truth about the Chinese revolution.

* * *

Meanwhile, the Canton government is “oscillating, in its attempt to stay straight, between Garine and Borodin, who control the police and the trade unions, on the one hand, and Chen Dai, who controls nothing, but who exists all the same, on the other.” (p.68) We have an almost perfect picture of the duality of power. The representatives of the Comintern have in their hands the trade unions of Canton, the police, the cadet school of Whampoa, the sympathy of the masses the aid of the Soviet Union. Chen Dai has a “moral authority”, that is, the prestige of the mortally distracted possessors. The friends of Chen Dai sit in a powerless government willingly supported by the conciliators. But isn’t this the régime of the February revolution, the Kerenskyist system, with the sole difference that the role of the Mensheviks is played by the pseudo-Bolsheviks? Borodin has no doubt of it even though he is made up as a Bolshevik and takes his make-up seriously.

The central idea of Garine and Borodin is to prohibit Chinese and foreign boats, cruising towards the port of Canton, from putting in at Hong Kong. By the commercial boycott these people, who consider themselves revolutionary realists, hope to shatter British domination in southern China. They never deem it necessary first of all to overthrow the government of the Canton bourgeoisie which only waits for the moment to surrender the revolution to England. No, Borodin and Garine knock every day at the door of the “government”, and hat in hand, beg that the saving decree be promulgated. One of them reminds Garine that at bottom the government is a phantom. Garine is not disconcerted. Phantom or not, he replies, let it go ahead while we need it. That is the way the priest needs relics which he himself fabricates with wax and cotton. What is concealed behind this policy which weakens and debases the revolution? The respect of a petty-bourgeois revolutionist for a solid conservative bourgeois. It is thus that the reddest of the French radicals is always ready to fall on his knees before Poincaré.

But perhaps the masses of Canton are not yet mature enough to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie? From this whole atmosphere, the conviction arises that without the opposition of the Comintern the phantom government would long before have been overthrown under the pressure of the masses. But let us admit that the Cantonese workers were still too weak to establish their own power. What, generally speaking, is the weak spot of the masses? Their inclination to follow the exploiters. In this case, the first duty of revolutionists is to help the workers liberate themselves from servile confidence. Nevertheless, the work done by the bureaucracy of the Comintern was diametrically opposed to his. It inculcated in the masses the notion of the necessity to submit to the bourgeoisie and it declared that the enemies of the bourgeoisie were their own enemies.

Do not rebuff Chen Dai! But if Chen Dai withdraws in spite of this, which is inevitable, it would not mean that Garine and Borodin will be delivered of their voluntary vassaldom towards the bourgeoisie. They will only choose as the new focus of their activity, Chiang Kai-shek, son of the same class and younger brother of Chen Dai. Head of the military school of Whampoa, founded by the Bolsheviks, Chiang Kai-shek does not confine himself to passive resistance; he is ready to resort to bloody force, not in the plebeian form, the form of the masses, but in the military form and only within limits that will permit the bourgeoisie to retain an unlimited power over the army. Borodin and Garine, by arming their enemies, disarm and repulse their friends. This is the way they prepare the catastrophe.

But are we not overestimating the influence of the revolutionary bureaucracy upon the events? No, it showed itself stronger than it might have thought, if not for good then at least for evil. The coolies who are only beginning to exist politically require a courageous leadership. Hong requires a bold program. The revolution requires the energies of millions of rising men. But Borodin and his bureaucrats require Chen Dai and Chiang Kai-shek. They strangle Hong and prevent the worker from raising his head. In a few months, they will stifle the agrarian insurrection of the peasantry so as not to repulse the bourgeois army command. Their strength is that they represent the Russian October, Bolshevism, the Communist International. Having usurped authority, the banner and the material resources of the greatest of revolutions, the bureaucracy bars the road to another revolution which also had all chances of being great.

The dialogue between Borodin and Hong (pp.182-4) is the most terrific indictment of Borodin and his Moscow inspirers. Hong, as always, is after decisive action. He demands the punishment of the most prominent bourgeois. Borodin finds this sole objection: Those who are “paying” must not be touched. “Revolution is not so simple,” says Garine for his part. “Revolution involves paying an army,” adds Borodin. These aphorisms contain all the elements of the noose in which the Chinese revolution was strangled. Borodin protected the bourgeoisie which, in recompense, made contributions to the “revolution”, the money going to the army of Chiang Kai-shek. The army of Chiang Kai-shek exterminated the proletariat and liquidated the revolution. Was it really impossible to foresee this? And wasn’t it really foreseen? The bourgeoisie pays willingly only for the army which serves it against the people. The army of the revolution does not wait for donations: it makes them pay. This is called the revolutionary dictatorship. Hong comes forward successfully at workers’ meetings and thunders against the “Russians”, the bearers of ruin for the revolution. The way of Hong himself does not lead to the goal but he is right as against Borodin. “Had the Tai Ping leaders Russian advisers? Had the Boxers?” (p.190) Had the Chinese revolution of 1924-27 been left to itself it would perhaps not have come to victory immediately but it would not have resorted to the methods of hara-kiri, it would not have known shameful capitulations and it would have trained revolutionary cadres. Between the dual power of Canton and that of Petrograd there is the tragic difference that in China there was no Bolshevism in evidence; under the name of Trotskyism, it was declared a counter-revolutionary doctrine and was persecuted by every method of calumny and repression. Where Kerensky did not succeed during the July Days, Stalin succeeded ten years later in China.

Borodin and “all the Bolsheviks of his generation”, Garine assures us, were distinguished by their struggle against the anarchists. This remark was needed by the author so as to prepare the reader for the struggle of Borodin against Hong’s group. Historically it is false. Anarchism was unable to raise its head in Russia not because the Bolsheviks fought successfully against it but because they had first dug up the ground under its feet. Anarchism, if it does not live within the four walls of intellectuals’ cafés and editorial offices, but has penetrated more deeply, translates the psychology of despair in the masses and signifies the political punishment for the deceptions of democracy and the treachery of opportunism. The boldness of Bolshevism in posing the revolutionary problems and in teaching their solution left no room for the development of anarchism in Russia. But if the historical investigation of Malraux is not exact, his recital shows admirably how the opportunist policy of Stalin-Borodin prepared the ground for anarchist terrorism in China.

Driven by the logic of this policy, Borodin consents to adopt a decree against the terrorists. The firm revolutionists, driven on to the road of adventurism by the crimes of the Moscow leaders, the bourgeoisie of Canton, with the benediction of the Comintern, declares them outlaws. They reply with acts of terrorism against the pseudo-revolutionary bureaucrats who protect the moneyed bourgeoisie. Borodin and Garine seize the terrorists and destroy them, no longer defending the bourgeois alone but also their own heads. It is thus that the policy of conciliation inexorably slips down to the lowest degree of treachery.

The book is called Les Conquérants. With this title, which has a double meaning when the revolution paints itself with imperialism, the author refers to the Russian Bolsheviks, or more exactly, to a certain part of them. The conquerors? The Chinese masses rose for a revolutionary insurrection, with the influence of the October upheaval as their example and with Bolshevism as their banner. But the “conquerors” conquered nothing. On the contrary, they surrendered everything to the enemy. If the Russian Revolution called forth the Chinese revolution, the Russian epigones strangled it. Malraux does not make these deductions. He does not even suspect their existence. All the more clearly do they emerge upon the background of his remarkable book.

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.

    

If You First Practice To Deceive-Humphrey Bogart’s “Beat The Devil” (1953)-A Film Review

If You First Practice To Deceive-Humphrey Bogart’s “Beat The Devil” (1953)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Laura Perkins

Beat The Devil, starring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, directed by John Huston who co-write the screenplay with Truman Capote and thus the gold standard on this sent-up of noir-ish films, 1953      

Sometimes I am more than willing to steal and idea from a fellow writer. Not in this case, the case of my fellow writer here Leslie Dumont, an idea for a story or review but a ploy to get something I wanted, or getting rid of something I didn’t want. My last film review if you can believe this was of the Marvel Comics cinematic version of the comic book character Thor.  Without going into the gory details of how this came to be for an elderly adult writer who never had the boys’ fetish for comic book adventures and fantasies let me just say that it came to pass when our new site manager had a half-bright idea about reaching younger audiences and force-marched the whole staff into writing films reviews galore on the genre. Leslie’s story was a bit different in that she complained, complained publicly, that she was given five, count them, five “women’s films” in a row and though she was being type cast as such. The complaint, the very public complaint, got her a nice assignment thereafter. I took the same tact with this comic book super-hero tripe. And now I have a real review with a minor classic of the spook genre, Beat The Devil, with the likes of John Huston as director and screenwriter, Truman Capote as screenwriter as well and, most importantly, Humphrey  Bogart as lead actor along with Gina Lollobrigida and Jennifer Jones.             

That Bogie as “most importantly” is most important for me personally since this is in a sense a notice that I have arrived. My longtime companion fellow film review writer Sam Lowell has earned a certain fame as an expert in film noir, in the private detective branch especially with films like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out Of The Past, Lady In The Lake and the like in which Bogie played a central role. Sam would regale me with all kinds of quaint tips about what was what in those films and why he spent what he considered a worthwhile youth watching them mostly in revival theaters and retrospectives since even he is not old enough to have seen then in the original runs. Now I get to review maybe not the best Bogie vehicle but a good one as he closed out his worthy career.     

Here is as Sam always said in his by-lines and I have picked up because I like the sound of it “the skinny.” This is about the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” a group of four, count them, four unsavory characters who are trying to corner the uranium market in 1950s Africa, a time when most of Africa was still colonial or close to it. Bogie comes into the act as the respectable if broke American businessman drawn into the scheme because he needs some dough, needs it badly to keep him and scratching wifey, played by Gina in clover-or else. This motley crew and a few others like the British couple of which Jennifer Jones is the flirty flighty wife are waiting on Italian shores for a ship to be ready to take them to the African shores and to those ill-gotten riches. Nothing goes right as to be expected in a spoof, a comedy of errors and mistaken intentions, especially by the leader of the cabal Ferguson (played by Robert Morley who did not evoke shades the “Fat Man” Sydney Greenstreet as the jovial but deadly treasure-seeker in The Maltese Falcon if as so critics contend this is a spoof of that classic) who suspects the Brit of trying to beat him to the punch in Africa, the imprisonment of that Englishman by the captain of the ship and the eventual fact that the wily Brit does grab the brass ring in the end.

Leaving Bogie laughing the laugh of the conned, very conned and our brigands under arrest. Like I say not the best Bogie, that would be The Maltese Falcon (also a Huston directed film), the super-classic Casablanca and the 1940s steamy with their clothes on To Have and Have Not with paramour Lauren Bacall. Still I can brag in the family that I did a Bogie film review and worked a con to get it. Not bad, huh.     

For Georgia O’Keeffe At Peabody-Essex Just Because She Lighted The Firmament For Long While And Made Me Appreciate Luscious Desert Blooms And Such

For Georgia O’Keeffe At Peabody-Essex (2017) Just Because She Lighted The Firmament For Long While And Made Me Appreciate Luscious Desert Blooms And Such    

By Lenny Lynch

Defiant, independent, no lover of men, boys either as she put it fore-square in her late Victorian high school yearbook (making me wonder if she was not some preternatural Frida Kahlo taking her pleasures where she found them but the sever looks with that hard-press bun of a hairpiece done about six ways to severity make me think that she lived for her art and thought about sex through her fleshy vaginal lush flowers. And so she went to see William Merritt Chase the godfather of many of her generation. Went too a-skimming to that oasis of modernism and protest art politics the Art Student League in New York City then Mecca on the rise (ASL making me think that it was a popular front invention of those devious American-born Stalinists with their hands deep in the pie but no that institution stands on its own although when you look at the roster from Stuart Davis to Jackson Pollack and beyond makes you wonder-good wonder, the wonder of Scotty Fitzgerald’s lonesome Dutch sailors as they coursed  Long Island Sound and saw, hell, saw the fresh green breast of a new land. Pity later-okay.         

Hit the town running pushing into old Stieglitz’s workshop, what did he call it oh salon, he onto something about art once the camera took pretty pictures out of an artist’s hands (took praise be ugly pictures too picture old dusty Okies travelling, sideshow geeks, drag queens working too hard to be Miss Judy Garland, gay lovers in secluded closets before the Stonewall wash us clean, holy goofs and con men, things blowing up, things being blown up but mainly the human comedy to make one think that something somewhere went awry) and left the field shattered dumping those picture perfect pantries filled with precise foods, prefect flowers in season or out, and brilliant baskets of fruit, my god, millions of brilliant baskets of fruit, grapes gleaning pearl-like. No the times, like all times, required something more and Ms. O’Keeffe was showing just a glimmer of that understanding when she went to upstate New York and painted red, blue, green barns, and the like showing us a new pastoral.      

But forget all that. No, put it in the past once she headed Western, an Eastern girl born for the West just look at those later photographs of her like some wizen Earth Mother pioneer stock come a-blazing to tame the land to her brush. Make desert-forsaken whitened cracked cattle bones and sagebrush come alive in the new dispensation. Made that homestead Ghost Ranch (dude ranch so figure we are close to Professor Turner’s closing of the frontier Clark Gable will do the rest come The Misfits time) come alive with Western-strewn colors all siena brown, mojave yellow, death valley red. Did it with some style too, something to look at in big gallery art museum walls. Something to ponder about living for your art and be damned with the rest. Be damn with the men, boys too.         

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Steppenwolf's "America When Are You Now...We Can't Fight Lone Against The Monster"

Songs For Our Times-Build The Resistance-Steppenwolf's "America When Are You Now...We Can't Fight Lone  Against The Monster"   

During, let’s say the Obama administration or, hell, even the Bush era, for example  we could be gentle angry people over this or that notorious war policy and a few others matters and songs like Give Peace A Chance, We Shall Overcome, or hell, even that Kumbaya which offended the politically insensitive. From Day One of the Trump administration though the gloves have come off-we are in deep trouble. So we too need to take off our gloves-and fast as the cold civil war that has started in the American dark night heads to some place we don’t want to be. And the above song from another tumultuous time, makes more sense to be marching to. Build the resistance!

Steppenwolf – Monster Lyrics

Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of Kingdom and pope

Like good Christians some would burn the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands, to court the wild
But she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

And once the ties with the crown had been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And till the railroad linked ocean to ocean
Many the lives which had come to an end

While we bullied, stole and bought a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man

But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands to court the wild
But she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light

The Blue and Grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war was over
They stuffed it just like a hog

And though the past has its share of injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But its protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it's a monster and will not obey

The spirit was freedom and justice
And its keepers seemed generous and kind
Its leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won't pay it no mind
Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
Now their vote is a meaningless joke
They babble about law and order
But it's all just an echo of what they've been told

Yeah, there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into the noose
And it just sits there watchin'

The cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
'Cause the whole world's got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner we can't pay the cost

'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into the noose
And it just sits there watchin'

America, where are you now
Don't you care about your sons and daughters
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

America, where are you now
Don't you care about your sons and daughters
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

America...America...America...America...

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VI-“Bumbling Up The Fight Against The Fascists”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon” (1942)-A Film Review

I Accuse-Unmasking The Sherlock Holmes Legend, Part VI-“Bumbling Up The Fight Against The Fascists”-Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce’s “Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon” (1942)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Bruce Conan

[Readers who are familiar with this series of short film reviews in the struggle to debunk the legend of the wiseass, sullen fake amateur private detective who went by the name of Sherlock Holmes but who used the moniker Basil Rathbone and whose real name was Lanny Lamont which will be explained below need go no further and can skip to the skimpy review below the end bracket. For those others who are clueless about the hopped up public relations created bumbling Holmes-Watson legend please read on to get caught up on one of the biggest scams in the history of private detection.   

Let’s get a couple of items straight from the get-go which will make what appears to be an exercise in futility on my part trying to overturn a massive fraud on the cinematic and literary public seem more necessary and vital to clear the air.

First if you look at my moniker in the byline above you will notice that I have used the name Bruce Conan. That alias of course, actually of necessity, had been forced on me by the notorious and nefarious group of blood-thirsty cultists who go by the name of the Baker Street Irregulars who seek my demise, my death according to some reports, for exposing their bloated homosexual hero (and his partner Doc, Doc Watson, the M.D. not the famous legendary blind bluegrass performer) for the bumbling fool that he is.

On the first five of these so-called film reviews (out of what I thought would be  twelve but have recently found out are fourteen films thus cutting my chances at completion down severely if I am not done in by some night-taker from that Irregular clot of inhumanity well before that) I was forced to use another moniker, Danny Moriarty. Yes that was in honor of the unjustly maligned heroic foe of Sherlock’s Professor Moriarty who it turned out was nothing but a fall guy for a dope and burglary ring that Holmes was running to keep up his opium-addled lifestyle. Unfortunately in the debunking business, in the whistle-blowing business you have to take some risks if the truth will out and somehow these determined holy goof cultists were able to figure out where I was and more ominously where I had sent my family for safe-keeping. Hence the new moniker and maybe another one or two before I am through to throw this menace off the scent while I get my family to other quarters and do my expose business.  

The second point. Readers, some irate although I think that they are just fronting, trolling would be the word in cyberspace times, for the notorious, nefarious Irregular cultists, have lambasted me for putting so much material in brackets throughout the review. Points about Holmes’ place in the private detection pantheon and that charged accusation of being back then when the times took a very different social-and legal- view on the subject of having a homosexual affair with Doc which explained some of the bumbling, the piling up of bodies, and the contempt for his fellow humans   before somebody else laid the bad guys low. Somebody else covered up his mistakes. To the extent that I think those anonymous readers have a point, whoever they are, I have decided to put the whole analysis here in one place. And as I have mentioned at the beginning the reader can move down past the end bracket to the obligatory although hardly pressing review or push on to find out the truth about a guy they might have thought that they admired at one time when they were kids.      

Genesis first. I had originally been assigned this series of film reviews by the previous site manager, Allan Jackson, who knew that I had done a series of reviews of films and books about two really legendary private detectives, the gold standard of the profession, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe whom I had spent many a youthful Saturday afternoon watching on the screen and many a youthful night reading and re-reading up in my bedroom. I had noted, and Allan seemed to agree, that these professional private detectives were the epitome of what was what among such career detectives. Without going into great detail here I noted that what made them special was their grit, their lack of fear, their ability to take a punch or a slug for the cause and keep their heads when the obligatory femme fatale came knocking on their doors. Went under the silky sheets with female danger while tilting some windmills to grab a little rough justice in the world be it for a partner like Miles Archer or a broken down old man like General Sternwood with a couple of wild daughters who were ready for anything from those silky sheets to murder, murder one when you think about it.          

When Allan gave me the original assignment I was actually doing a series of film reviews for another Hammett detective Nick Charles, and the indispensable Nora of course, so I begged off for a while. Then came a big internal shake-up at this publication which I will not bore the reader with the details of and the emergence of Greg Green as the new site manager. Greg noting that old Allan assignment schedule was very interested in doing the Holmes series as well and so here it was all set up.

I originally went about my business of the first Holmes review  with no particular animus toward the man although I cringed a bit at his condescension toward other mere mortals based on the flimsiest motive that he was some kind of king hell deductive reasoning guru. He seemed at the time to have the truly bumbling Doc, Doc Watson, under his spell and moreover to have his number as a punching bag incompetent to make his own mistakes seems trivial in comparison. Then I started to analyze what his modus operandi really was. To see the holes in his deductive reasoning methods against real pros like Spade and Marlowe, hell, even lady’s man Miles Archer and half-drunk Nick Charles looked good in comparison. What I noticed from the very first film was that once he was on the case he let the bodies pile up before the villains were caught. Caught not by him but by third parties. Cops and an occasional civilian.            

That wasn’t so bad, even bad boys Sam and Phil were not virgin pure when murder was in the air although they always brought the bad guys to justice on their own hook. Then I noticed that Holmes, I will call him Holmes since that is what he conned the world into believing was his name and maybe he was right to do so with a Christian name of Lanny Lamont to live down, that he was totally incompetent with a gun, could not “fucking shoot the side of a barn” as my sainted mother used to say. Then Holmes started to take his act to foreign countries and that was the limit.

That is when I had to put my foot down and expose this nasty little bugger. Here is where the fake legend really got its start. Where whatever public relations guys Lanny, I mean Holmes, hired to build up his reputation in the prints went over the top. It was one thing for Holmes to get outsourced for jobs over the incompetent, venal, and corrupt coppers at Scotland Yard. Everybody knows the coppers there were on “the take” and I have since come to understand they have been paid off by the Baker Street Irregulars to see no evil when those cretins go about their blood rituals. And look the other way when they threaten me with murder and mayhem for tarnishing the image of their Nancy boy Holmes. I got that information by the way from a few ex-Irregulars who left the organization repelled by the blood rites and by the extortionate crimes committed to keep them in dough. It is another, however, to think that His Majesty’s MI6, its foreign spies, its James Bonds, was going to let Holmes within five hundred miles of any espionage case against the Hitlerite plague that was darkening the doors of Europe. The most bitter taste in my mouth was when he let an innocent fourteen year old serving girl get murdered while he on some landudum high.   

Everybody knows that real professional private detectives back in the day not only knew how to shoot, knew enough to keep innocent young girls from harm’s way, kept their own counsel in attempting to bring a little rough justice in the world but were committed skirt-chasers. Expected a little something more than another boy-scout merit badge in the fight for that rough justice. Nobody ever heard of a private detective who was not a womanizer. After the first film review I noticed that Holmes never looked at a woman, that he only seemed to be intimate with his teddy bear Doc, his roommate as it turned out and bedmate when they were on foreign cases. Once when he was captured by some bad guy and being held with a great looking young woman I noticed he never even looked at her. Sam or Phil would have looked her upside down and been grinning thinking about those silky satin sheets.

That slap against his manhood, his manliness, on top of all his other failures of nerve is what committed me to his exposure. I have taken more than my share of abuse from those criminals in the Irregulars who have started a smear campaign against me as being anti-gay, you know homophobic, against same-sex marriage and every other libel and slander they could produce in their insidious attempts to discredit me as I de-fang Holmes. Apparently, according to those ex-Irregulars who have come forward with information, there is a big internal battle between those who want to proudly “out” Holmes as a member of the Homintern pantheon and those who want to keep things hush-hush and go about their high-end criminal enterprises without the glare of such publicity. The latter clot seem to have become ascendant.    

Today there are probably a million gay private detectives and nobody thinks anything of the matter least of all me. Probably there are half a million gay partners and gay married private detectives although I don’t know if anybody bothers to keep such figures. But back in the day there were different social-and as I said before legal strictures against the “love that dare not speak its name,” against private detectives who were “light on their feet,” were “fags” and were keeping house with another man. So no way could Holmes, or Holmes and his paramour, qualify as real private detectives. That is the icing on the cake that is the way things were. And that explains why Holmes didn’t take look one at that good-looking young women he shared temporary prison with. As I keep saying a fake, yesterday’s news. Enough said.]

**********

Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Weapon, starring Basil Rathbone (I have mentioned previously my doubts that this was his real name since unlike myself he had never been transparent enough to say that he had been using an alias. I have since uncovered information that I was generally right and found at first that his real name was Lytton Strachey a known felon who spent a few years in Dartmoor Prison on weapons and drug trafficking charges. It turns out that I was either in error or the victim of a cyber-attack since then it has come out that his real name was not Strachey but Lanny Lamont, who worked the wharfs and water-side dive taverns where the rough trade mentioned by Jean Genet in his classic rough trade expose Our Lady of the Flowers did hard-edged tricks), Nigel Bruce (a name which upon further investigation has been confirmed as a British National named “Doc” Watson who also did time at Dartmoor for not having a medical license and peddling dope to minors in the 1930s and 1940s where I had assumed he and Lanny had met up. Again I think through another cyber-attack error they had met at the Whip and Chain tavern at dockside Thames while Lanny was doing his business on the sailor boys), 1942

It almost seems criminal after crucifying Lanny Lamont aka aka Basil Rathbone aka Sherlock Holmes above to bother running yet another bummer summary of one of these fake news cinematic storylines, here Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, which probably were made up on Fleet Street anyway at the behest of those nefarious Irregulars who through their media connections in the notorious Kit Kat Club, the haunt of the wild boys since about King George III, can get any libel published without recourse but I will simply use this as case number six in the struggle to topple Holmes and his ill-gotten fame.

      

Although Bond, James Bond, would sneer and M, the head of MI6, of British Intelligence would have heads rolling at 10 Downing Street somehow in the middle of World War II there was nobody available but a rank amateur key-hole peeper and known pervert Holmes to carry back some information and a key scientist who had developed a secret weapon that would change the war, would put Hitler to ground once the thing got into production. Assuming it worked, which it did.   

Of course the bloody British are all over the discovery and probably expected to use it on their colonials after a shortened war bout with the Germans on the plains of Europe. Fortunately heroic Professor Moriarty was onto the scheme, on to it as long he lived anyway before falling afoul of Holmes and a martyr’s death. The scientist who created the invention, the bombsight which would help decimate cities, towns, villages was a control freak (as I found that decimation did happen in Africa after the war when “the natives got uppity” and the “bloody wogs in India too when the British were still trying to hold onto the edges of empire). He divided up his secret into four parts to be worked on by four different unscrupulous Nazi-like scientists who did not know each other and did not know all the moving parts.

Fortunately despite Holmes’ best efforts the good Professor was able to thwart him in his efforts to piece together the four separate parts which Holmes had been given an inkling about since that mad scientist had given a code to his girlfriend in case anything happened to him or in the more likely case that he forgot the separate parts by being too clever by half when he divided everything up. Moriarty had the dastardly scientist in his clutches away from the nefarious British agents who were after the secret formula. Needless to say when Holmes went to that girlfriend’s “flat” (apartment) to grab the illicit code he did not take peek number one at her and she was if anything lovelier than the good-looking young woman he had scorned in Washington on another caper. Yet another example as if any more were needed about where the man’s proclivities were directed. Needless to say as well that Holmes would stop at nothing to do in poor Professor Moriarty and he laid a very devious trap for our good fellow which he fell into and went to his death. RIP, Professor, RIP.  

As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution Breaks The Logjam

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Continues -The Anti-War Resistance Builds –The Russian Revolution Breaks The Logjam    

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European and in some cases colonial youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other less lethal forms of  industrial production).

Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist  nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915, the famous Zimmerwald conference, one wag pointed out that they could all fit in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple white-crossed graves dug in the vast bone-crushed cemeteries that marked the nearby battle fields too numerous to mention). You see, and the logic is beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was built for peace-time but once the cannons roared then the “big tent” needed to be folded for the duration. Jesus.  

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long because “Long Live The Communist International,”  a new revolutionary international, would become the slogan and later order of the day in the not distant future), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century (including forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turned to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries and not just them), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                  

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

Leon Trotsky

The International
Will the Allies Throw Away the Last Chance?

(January 1918)

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Source: L Trotsky, “The International. Will the Allies Throw Away the Last Chance?,” The Call, 10 January 1918, p.3;
Transcribed: by Ted Crawford.

The following material appeared in the British Socialist weekly paper The Call in January 1918. It is not altogether well translated but is clearly an important political document of the time.

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The following pronouncement by L. Trotsky, the People’s Commissioner for Foreign Affairs in the Russian Government, was transmitted through the wireless stations of the Russian Government on December 29th. On Friday, January 4th, extracts were released for publication. The first paragraph appeared, and on the evening of that day the Liberal organs in the Press were demanding the reason for withholding the information for five days. The Press was, and apparently is still, without knowledge of the fact that the paragraphs published were but excerpts from a document of profound world importance.

TO ALL THE PEOPLES AND GOVERNMENTS OF THE ALLIED COUNTRIES.

The peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, between the delegation of the Russian Republic and the delegations of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria are interrupted for ten days till January 8th, with the purpose of giving the Allied countries the last possibility of taking part in the subsequent negotiations and of securing themselves against all consequences of a separate peace between Russia and the enemy countries. Two programmes have been formulated at Brest-Litovsk. The first expresses the views of the All Russian Congress of the Workmen’s, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. The second is in the name of the Governments of Germany and its Allies.
The programme of the Russian Government is the programme of an ultimate Socialistic democracy. This programme has for its object the creation of such conditions, first, that every nationality, independently of its strength and the level of its general evolution, should have complete freedom for its national progress, and, secondly, that all the people should be united in economical and cultural cooperation.
The programme of the Governments of the countries at war with us is characterised by the declaration that the Allied Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria) have not in view the forcible annexation of territories occupied during the war; that is to say, that the enemy countries are ready – in accordance with a peace treaty – to clear themselves away from the now occupied territories of Belgium, the Northern Departments of France, Serbia, Montenegro, Rumania, Poland, Lithuania, and Courland with the purpose that the future destinies of territories the nature of whose Governments is a matter of contest should be settled by the respective populations themselves. This step, which the enemy Governments are taking under the pressure of circumstances and chiefly under the pressure of their own labouring classes to meet the demands of Democracy, consists in the renouncing of new violent annexations and indemnities.
But, renouncing new annexations, the enemy Governments have they idea that the old annexations and the old violence, over the people are sanctioned by historical prescription. This means that the destinies of Alsace-Lorraine, Transylvania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and so on, upon the one side, and of Ireland, Egypt, India, Indo-China, and so on, on the other side, should not be subject to revision. Such a programme is profoundly inconsequent, and represents a compromise resting on no basis of principle between the pretensions of Imperialism and the demands of the Labouring Democracy. Nevertheless, the submission of such a programme is a big step forward.
The Governments of the Allied peoples (those in alliance with Russia) have not joined in the peace negotiations up to the present, and they have sternly refused to state clearly the reasons for their attitude. It is impossible now to affirm that the war is for freeing Belgium, the Northern Departments of France, Serbia, and so on, because Germany and her Allies are expressing their willingness to withdraw from these territories if a general peace is concluded.
Now that the enemies have declared their peace conditions it is impossible to solve the existing difficulties by general expressions as to the necessity of carrying the war onto the end. It is necessary to state clearly what is the peace programme of France, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States. Are they asking, like ourselves, that the right of the determination of their own destinies should be given to the peoples of Alsace-Lorraine, Galicia, Posen, Bohemia, and South Slavonia? If they are doing so, are they willing also to recognise the right to the determination of their own destinies in the case of the peoples of Ireland, Egypt, India, Madagascar, Indo-China, and other countries, just as under the Russian Revolution this right has been given to the peoples of Finland, Ukrainia, White Russia, and other districts? It is clear that the demand that the right of self-determination be given to peoples who are a part of the enemy States, and to refuse this right to peoples of their own States or their own colonies would mean the putting forward of the programme of the most cynical imperialism
If the Governments of the Allied countries would express their readiness, together with the Russian Government, to found a peace upon the complete and unconditional recognition of the principle of self-determination for all peoples in all States, if they would begin by the giving of this right to the oppressed peoples of their own States, this would create such international conditions that when the inherently contradictory programmes, of Germany, and especially Austro-Hungary, were shown in all their weakness objection would be overcome by the pressure of all the interested peoples. But up to the present, the Allied Governments have in no way shown, and, in view of their class character, they could not show, their readiness to accept a really democratic peace. They are not less suspicious and hostile in regard to the principle of national self-determination than are the Governments of Germany and Austro-Hungary. Upon this point the awakened proletariat of the Allied countries have as few illusions as ourselves. With the existing attitude of the Governments, all that is possible is that the programme of Imperialistic compromise, which is the basis of the peace conditions of Germany should be met by another programme of Imperialistic compromise or the war be continued. But now, when at Brest-Litovsk two programmes are before us, it becomes necessary to give a clear and categorical reply. Ten days were given for the continuation of the peace negotiations. Russia is not depending in these negotiations upon having the agreement of the Allied Governments. If these continue to be opposed to a general peace, the Russian delegation will nevertheless continue the peace negotiations. A separate peace signed by Russia undoubtedly will be a severe blow to the Allied countries, first of all to France, and to Italy. The provision of the inevitable consequences of a separate peace must determine the policy not only of Russia, but also of France and Italy, and all the other Allied countries. The Russian Government has striven all the time for a general peace. Nobody can deny the importance of the results obtained in this respect, but as to the future, all depends upon the Allied peoples themselves. To force their own Governments to state immediately their peace programmes and to participate in the peace negotiations has become a matter of national self-preservation with the various Allied peoples. The Russian Revolution has opened the way to an immediate general peace on the basis of agreement. If the Allied Governments are willing to make use of the last opportunity, general negotiations could be started immediately in one of the neutral countries. In these negotiations, with the conditions that there should be complete publicity, the Russian Delegation would continue to defend the programme of International Socialistic Democracy as opposed to the Imperialistic programme of the Governments, Allied and enemy alike. The success of our programme will depend upon the degree in which the will of the Imperialistic classes will be paralysed by the work of the Revolutionary proletariat in every country. If the Allied Governments with the blind tenacity which is characteristic of decadent perishing classes again refuse to take part in peace negotiations, then the working classes will be placed under the iron necessity of grasping the authority from the hands of those who cannot, or will not, give peace to the peoples.
In these ten days the destinies of hundreds of thousands and of millions of human lives will be settled. If on the French and Italian fronts an armistice is not concluded before there is a new offensive, irrational, pitiless and useless, like all those that have preceded, will demand new and incalculable sacrifices on both sides. This war, begun by the dominating classes, logically is leading to the complete destruction of European nations. But the people will live, and they have the right to live. They must overthrow all those who are not permitting them to live freely. Addressing the Governments with the present proposal to take part in peace negotiations, we promise every support to the working classes of every country which will rise against their own national Imperialists, chauvinists and militarists, under the banner of peace, the brotherhood of people, and the Socialist reconstruction of society.

(Signed) L. TROTSKY,
People’s’ Commissioner for Foreign Affairs.

MANIFESTO of the International Zimmerwald Socialist Commission and the Foreign Representatives of the Executive Committee of the Bolsheviks: –

“Men and women workers! On November 7th, in Petrograd, the workers and soldiers won a victory over the Government of capitalists and landowners. .... As you read this manifesto, the Baltic fleet, the army in Finland and the vast majority of the soldiers at the front and in the rear are ranged under the flag of the Government of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. The Government just hurled from power, and which had been set up by the people on the ruins of Tsarism, trod under foot the popular interests; raised the price of bread in the interests of the landowners.; left the war profiteers untouched; gave the masses courts-rnartial instead of freedom; made no attempt to enter into peace negotiations, but continued to drive the soldiers and workers to war, as the hostages of the Allied capitalist classes. The workers and soldiers of Petrograd drove out this Government, as they had previously driven out the Tsar. Their first word is Peace. They demand an immediate armistice, immediate peace negotiations, which must lead to the conclusion of an honourable peace without annexations or contributions, and on the basis of the right of every nation to decide its own fate. Men and women workers! Red Petrograd is appealing to you – to you, before whom stands the spectre of a fourth war winter; with his ice-cold hands outstretched towards your sons, fathers and brothers. The next word lies with you.

“However courageous the Russian workers and soldiers may, be, they cannot, alone, win bread, freedom or peace. The capitalists, landowners and generals of Russia, all the forces of exploitation and oppression, will use every effort to drown the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Revolution in blood. They will attempt to cut off the supply of foodstuffs to the towns; and they will egg on the Cossacks against the Revolution. This internal foe is not the only deadly danger threatening the pacifist policy of the Russian Revolution. The Governments of the Central Powers, as those of the Allies, are enemies of the Russian Revolution, for the latter paves the way for the liberation of the masses the world over. The Central Powers may attempt to take advantage of civil war to gain new victories, thereby strengthening the waning will of their peoples to continue the war. The Entente countries will help the counter-revolutionaries with money. Workers of all countries – it is a question of your own vital interests, of your own blood!

“If the Russian Revolution is defeated by the combined efforts of Russian and foreign capital, the capitalist classes will drag you from one battlefield to the other, until you are bled to death. We appeal, not for words of sympathy, but for real help in the fight. Rise in your might, go forth into the streets, exert pressure on your Government by every means at your disposal. There must not be a fourth winter campaign. Do not accept high-sounding peace-loving phrases. Judge each Government in accordance with its readiness to conclude an immediate armistice on all fronts; in accordance with its readiness to enter into negotiations and to conclude peace.

“We invite the representatives of all parties which intend to take part in this struggle for peace to Stockholm. Make insistent and energetic demands for passports, demand the liberation of imprisoned comrades who enjoy the confidence of the International proletariat, so that they, too, may take part in the work for peace. Let us have a speedy armistice! Let not another shot be heard! Forward for peace negotiations! Rise for the struggle for peace based on the free desires of all the peoples! Long live the international solidarity of the proletariat! Long live Socialism!”  

Honor The Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)

Honor The Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Communist International (March, 1919)- Honor The Anniversary Of The Historic First World Congress Of The CI 
Markin comment:

Some anniversaries, like those marking the publication of a book, play or poem, are worthy of remembrance every five, ten, or twenty-five years. Other more world historic events like the remembrance of the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as here, the founding of the Communist International (also known as the Third International, Comintern, and CI) in 1919 are worthy of yearly attention. Why is that so in the case of the long departed (1943, by Stalin fiat) and, at the end unlamented, Comintern? That is what this year’s remembrance, through CI documentation and other commentary, will attempt to impart on those leftist militants who are serious about studying the lessons of our revolutionary, our communist revolutionary past.

No question that the old injunction of Marx and Engels as early as the Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world needed to unite would have been hollow, and reduced to hortatory holiday speechifying (there was enough of that, as it was) without an organization expression. And they, Marx and Engels, fitfully made their efforts with the all-encompassing pan-working class First International. Later the less all encompassing but still party of the whole class-oriented socialist Second International made important, if limited, contributions to fulfilling that slogan before the advent of world imperialism left its outlook wanting, very wanting.

The Third International thus was created, as mentioned in one of the commentaries in this series, to pick up the fallen banner of international socialism after the betrayals of the Second International. More importantly, it was the first international organization that took upon itself in its early, heroic revolutionary days, at least, the strategic question of how to make, and win, a revolution in the age of world imperialism. The Trotsky-led effort of creating a Fourth International in the 1930s, somewhat stillborn as it turned out to be, nevertheless based itself, correctly, on those early days of the Comintern. So in some of the specific details of the posts in this year’s series, highlighting the 90th anniversary of the Third World Congress this is “just” history, but right underneath, and not far underneath at that, are rich lessons for us to ponder today.



First Congress of the Communist International

Declaration of the Participants in the Zimmerwald Conference, made at the Congress of the Communist International in Moscow
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Source: Theses Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congress of the Third International, translated by Alix Holt and Barbara Holland. Ink Links 1980;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.


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4 March 1919
The Zimmerwald and Kienthal conferences were of importance at a time when it was essential to unify all those proletarian elements ready to protest in any way against the imperialist slaughter. But the Zimmerwald Association, besides including men and women of a clearly defined Communist orientation, attracted other wavering, pacifist and ‘centrist’ socialists, who are now – as the Berne conference has shown – forging an alliance with the social-patriots to wage a struggle against the revolutionary proletariat. Thus, Zimmerwald is being exploited in the interests of reaction.

At the same time, the Communist current in a number of countries is gaining in strength. The struggle against the ‘centrist’ elements, which are obstructing the social revolution, is now a priority task for the revolutionary proletariat.

The Zimmerwald Association has outlived its usefulness. Everything in it that was truly revolutionary is passing over to the Communist International.

The undersigned members of the Zimmerwald movement declare that they regard its organisation to be dissolved and propose that all the documents of the Bureau of the Zimmerwald Conference be transferred to the Executive Committee of the Third International.