On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution -Leon Trotsky on the 90th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 1938

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts 

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.     

Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19^th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20^th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

*********

The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution -Leon Trotsky on the 90th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 1938

Click on title to link to the Karl Marx Internet Archive's copy of "The Communist Manifesto".

The publication of the Communist League's Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in 1848, a document that has played a central role in world history since then, if not always happily. On March 12, 2007 I posted (reposted on March 12, 2008)a review of this document that I wrote in 2006 and proudly stand by today. Additionally, here I post Leon Trotsky’s article on the 90th Anniversary of the Manifesto in 1938 from the Trotsky Internet Archive. What unites the two pieces is the thought that we both share that the Manifesto read for Trotsky and reads for me today like it could have been written about conditions in either of these periods. Forward.

NINETY YEARS OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO-Preface to Communist Manifesto by Leon Trotsky

Written: October 30,1937

First Published: In Afrikaans in South Africa for the first edition of the The Communist Manifesto in that language. First published in English the February 1938 edition The New International, New York; This version from Fourth International, New York, Volume IV, 10, October 1948, Pages 28-31;

Translated: Fourth International

Transcription/HTML Markup: David Waiters

Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the
GNU Free Documentation License

It is hard to believe that the centennial of the Manifesto of the Communist Party is only ten years away! This pamphlet, displaying greater genius than any other in world literature, astounds us even today by its freshness. Its most important sections appear to have been written yesterday. Assuredly, the young authors (Marx was twenty-nine, Engels twenty-seven) were able to look further into the future than anyone before them, and perhaps than anyone since them.

As early as their joint preface to the edition of 1872, Marx and Engels declared that despite the fact that certain secondary passages in the Manifesto were antiquated, they felt that they no longer had any right to alter the original text inasmuch as the Manifesto had already become a historical document, during the intervening period of twenty-five years. Sixty-five additional years have elapsed since that time. Isolated passages in the Manifesto have receded still further into the past. We shall try to establish succinctly in this preface both those ideas in the Manifesto which retain their full force today and those which require important alteration or amplification.

1. The materialist conception of history, discovered by Marx only a short while before and applied with consummate skill in the Manifesto, has completely withstood the test of events and the blows of hostile criticism. It constitutes today one of the most precious instruments of human thought. All other interpretations of the historical process have lost all scientific meaning. We can state with certainty that it is impossible in our time to be not only a revolutionary militant but even a literate observer in politics without assimilating the materialist interpretation of history.

2. The first chapter of the Manifesto opens with the following Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto words: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." This postulate, the most important conclusion drawn from the materialist interpretation of history, immediately became an issue in the class struggle. Especially venomous attacks were directed by reactionary hypocrites, liberal doctrinaires, and idealistic democrats against the theory which substituted the struggle of material interests for "common welfare," "national unity/' and "eternal moral truths" as the driving force of history. They were later joined by recruits from the ranks of the labor movement itself, by the so-called revisionists, i.e., the proponents of reviewing ("revising") Marxism in the spirit of class collaboration and class conciliation. Finally, hi our own time, the same path has been followed in practice by the contemptible epigones of the Communist International (the "Stalinists"): the policy of the so-called People's Front flows wholly from the denial of the laws of the class struggle. Meanwhile, it is precisely the epoch of imperialism, bringing all social contradictions to the point of highest tension, which gives to the Communist Manifesto its supreme theoretical triumph.

3. The anatomy of capitalism, as a specific stage in the economic development of society, was given by Marx in its finished form in Capital (1867). But even in the Communist Manifesto the main lines of the future analysis are firmly sketched: the payment for labor power as equivalent to the cost of its reproduction; the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalists; competition as the basic law of social relations; the ruination of intermediate classes, i.e., the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry; the concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-diminishing number of property owners, at the one pole, and the numerical growth of the proletariat, at the other; the preparation of the material and political
preconditions for the socialist regime.

4. The proposition in the Manifesto concerning the tendency of capitalism to lower the living standards of the workers, and even to transform them into paupers, had been subjected to a heavy barrage. Parsons, professors, ministers, journalists, Social Democratic theoreticians, and trade union leaders came to the front against the so-called "theory of impoverishment." They invariably discovered signs of growing prosperity among the toilers, palming off the labor aristocracy as the proletariat, or taking a fleeting tendency as permanent. Meanwhile, even the development of the mightiest capitalism in the world, namely, U.S. capitalism, has transformed millions of workers into paupers who are maintained at the expense of federal, municipal, or private charity.

5. As against the Manifesto, which depicted commercial and industrial crises as a series of ever more extensive catastrophes, the revisionists vowed that the national and international development of trusts would assure control over the market, and lead gradually to the abolition of crises. The close of the last century and the beginning of the present one were in reality marked by a development of capitalism so tempestuous as to make crises seem only "accidental" stoppages. But this epoch has gone beyond return. In the last analysis, truth proved to be on Marx's side in this question as well,

6. "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." This succinct formula, which the leaders of the Social Democracy looked upon as a journalistic paradox, contains in fact the only scientific theory of the state. The democracy fashioned by the bourgeoisie is not, as both Bernstein and Kautsky thought, an empty sack which one can undisturbedly fill with any kind of class content. Bourgeois democracy can serve only the bourgeoisie. A government of the "People's Front," whether headed by Blum or Chautemps, Caballero or Negrin, is only "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," Whenever this "committee" manages affairs poorly, the bourgeoisie dismisses it with a boot.

7. "Every class struggle is a political struggle." "The organization of the proletariat as a class [is ] consequently its organization into a political party." Trade unionists, on the one hand, and anarcho-syndicalists, on the other, have long shied away—and even now try to shy away—from the understanding of these historical laws. "Pure" trade unionism has now been dealt a crushing blow in its chief refuge: the United States. Anarcho-syndicalism has suffered an irreparable defeat in its last stronghold—Spain. Here too the Manifesto proved correct,

8. The proletariat cannot conquer power within the legal framework established by the bourgeoisie. "Communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." Reformism sought to explain this postulate of the Manifesto on the grounds of the immaturity of the movement at that time, and the inadequate development of democracy. The fate of Italian, German, and a great number of other "democracies" proves that "immaturity" is the distinguishing trait of the ideas of the reformists themselves.

9. For the socialist transformation of society, the working class must concentrate in its hands such power as can smash each and every political obstacle barring the road to the new system. "The proletariat organized as the ruling class"—this is the dictatorship. At the same time it is the only true proletarian democracy. Its scope and depth depend upon concrete historical conditions. The greater the number of states that take the path of the socialist revolution, the freer and more flexible forms will the dictatorship assume, the broader and more deepgoing will be workers' democracy,

10. The international development of capitalism has predetermined the international character of the proletarian revolution. "United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat." The subsequent development of capitalism has so closely knit all sections of our planet, both "civilized" and "uncivilized," that the problem of the socialist revolution has completely and decisively assumed a world character. The Soviet bureaucracy attempted to liquidate the Manifesto with respect to this fundamental question. The Bonapartist degeneration of the Soviet state is an overwhelming illustration of the falseness of the theory of socialism in one country.

11. "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character." In other words: the state withers away. Society remains, freed from the straitjacket. This is nothing else but socialism. The converse theorem: the monstrous growth of state coercion in the USSR is eloquent testimony that society is moving away from socialism.

12. "The workingmen have no fatherland." These words of the Manifesto have more than once been evaluated by philistines as an agitational quip. As a matter of fact they provided the proletariat with the sole conceivable directive in the question of the capitalist "fatherland." The violation of this directive by the Second International brought about not only four years of devastation in Europe, but the present stagnation of world culture. In view of the impending new war, for which the betrayal of the Third International has paved the way, the Manifesto remains even now the most reliable counselor on the question of the capitalist "fatherland,"
Thus, we see that the joint and rather brief production of two Young authors continues to give irreplaceable directives upon the most important and burning questions of the struggle for emancipation. What other book could even distantly be compared with the Communist Manifesto1? But this does not imply that after ninety years of unprecedented development of productive forces and vast social struggles, the Manifesto needs neither corrections nor additions. Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol-worship. Programs and prognoses are tested and corrected in the light of experience, which is the supreme criterion of human reason. The Manifesto, too, requires corrections and additions. However, as is evidenced by historical experience itself, these corrections and additions can be successfully made only by proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the foundation of the Manifesto itself. We shall try to indicate this in several most important instances.

1. Marx taught that no social system departs from the arena of history before exhausting its creative potentialities. The Manifesto excoriates capitalism for retarding the development of the productive forces. During that period, however, as well as in the following decades, this retardation was only relative in nature. Had it been possible in the second half of the nineteenth century to organize economy on socialist beginnings, its tempos of growth would have been immeasurably greater. But this theoretically irrefutable postulate does not invalidate the fact that the productive forces kept expanding on a world scale right up to the world war. Only in the last twenty years, despite the most modern conquests of science and technology, has the epoch of out-and-out stagnation and even decline of world economy begun. Mankind is beginning to expend its accumulated capital, while the next war threatens to destroy the very foundations of civilization for many years to come. The authors of the Manifesto thought that capitalism would be scrapped long prior to the time when from a relatively reactionary regime it would turn into an absolutely reactionary regime. This transformation took final shape only before the eyes of the present generation, and changed our epoch into the epoch of wars, revolutions, and fascism.

2. The error of Marx and Engels in regard to the historical dates flowed, on the one hand, from an underestimation of future possibilities latent in capitalism, and, on the other, an overestimation of the revolutionary maturity of the proletariat. The revolution of 1848 did not turn into a socialist revolution as the Manifesto had calculated, but opened up to Germany the possibility of a vast future capitalist ascension. The Paris Commune proved that the proletariat, without having a tempered revolutionary party at its head, cannot wrest power from the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the prolonged period of capitalist prosperity that ensued brought about not the education of the revolutionary vanguard, but rather the bourgeois degeneration of the labor aristocracy, which became in turn the chief brake on the proletarian revolution, In the nature of things, the authors of the Manifesto could not possibly have foreseen this "dialectic."

3. For the Manifesto, capitalism was—the kingdom of free competition. While referring to the growing concentration of capital, the Manifesto did not draw the necessary conclusion in regard to monopoly, which has become the dominant capitalist form in our epoch and the most important precondition for socialist economy. Only afterwards, in Capital, did Marx establish the tendency toward the transformation of free competition into monopoly. It was Lenin who gave a scientific characterization of monopoly capitalism in his Imperialism.

4. Basing themselves on the example of "industrial revolution" in England, the authors of the Manifesto pictured far too unilaterally the process of liquidation of the intermediate classes, as a wholesale proletarianization of crafts, petty trades, and peasantry. In point of fact, the elemental forces of competition have far from completed this simultaneously progressive and barbarous work. Capitalism has ruined the petty bourgeoisie at a much faster rate than it has proletarianized it. Furthermore, the bourgeois state has long directed its conscious policy toward the artificial maintenance of petty-bourgeois strata. At the opposite pole, the growth of technology and the rationalization of largescale industry engenders chronic unemployment and obstructs the proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie. Concurrently, the development of capitalism has accelerated in the extreme the growth of legions of technicians, administrators, commercial employees, in short, the so-called "new middle class." In consequence, the intermediate classes, to whose disappearance the Manifesto so categorically refers, comprise even in a country as highly industrialized as Germany about half of the population. However, the artificial preservation of antiquated petty-bourgeois strata in no way mitigates the social contradictions, but, on the contrary, invests them with a special malignancy, and together with the permanent army of the unemployed constitutes the most malevolent expression of the decay of capitalism.

5. Calculated for a revolutionary epoch the Manifesto contains (end of Chapter II) ten demands, corresponding to the period of direct transition from capitalism to socialism. In their preface of 1872, Marx and Engels declared these demands to be in part antiquated, and, in any case, only of secondary importance. The reformists seized upon this evaluation to interpret it in the sense that transitional revolutionary demands had forever ceded their place to the Social Democratic "minimum program," which, as is well known, does not transcend the limits of bourgeois democracy. As a matter of fact, the authors of the Manifesto indicated quite precisely the main correction of their transitional program, namely, 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery and wield it for its own purposes." In other words, the correction was directed against the fetishism of bourgeois democracy. Marx later counterposed to the capitalist state, the state of the type of the Commune. This "type" subsequently assumed the much more graphic shape of Soviets. There cannot be a revolutionary program today without Soviets and without workers' control. As for the rest, the ten demands of the Manifesto, which appeared "archaic" in an epoch of peaceful parliamentary activity, have today regained completelytheir true significance. The Social Democratic "minimum program," on the other hand, has become hopelessly antiquated.

6. Basing its expectation that "the German bourgeois revolution ... will be but a prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution," the Manifesto cites the much more advanced conditions of European civilization as compared with what existed in England in the seventeenth century and in France in the eighteenth century, and the far greater development of the proletariat. The error in this prognosis was not only in the date. The revolution of 1848 revealed within a few months that precisely under more advanced conditions, none of the bourgeois classes is capable of bringing the revolution to its termination: the big and middle bourgeoisie is far too closely linked with the landowners, and fettered by the fear of the masses; the petty bourgeoisie is far too divided and in its top leadership far too dependent on the big bourgeoisie. As evidenced by the entire subsequent course of development in Europe and Asia, the bourgeois revolution, taken by itself, can no more in general be consummated. A complete purge of feudal rubbish from society is conceivable only on the condition that the proletariat, freed from the influence of bourgeois parties, can take its stand at the head of the peasantry and establish its revolutionary dictatorship. By this token, the bourgeois revolution becomes interlaced with the first stage of the socialist revolution, subsequently to dissolve in the latter, The national revolution therewith becomes a link of the world revolution. The transformation of the economic foundation and of all social relations assumes a permanent (uninterrupted) character.

For revolutionary parties in backward countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, $ clear understanding of the organic connection between the democratic revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat—and thereby, the international socialist revolution—is a life-and-death question.

7. While depicting how capitalism draws into its vortex backward and barbarous countries, the Manifesto contains no reference to the struggle of colonial and semicolonial countries for independence. To the extent mat Marx and Engels considered the social revolution "in the leading civilized countries at least," to be a matter of the next few years, the colonial question was resolved automatically for them, not in consequence of an independent movement of oppressed nationalities but in consequence of the victory of the proletariat in the metropolitan centers of capitalism. The questions of revolutionary strategy in colonial and semicolonial countries are therefore not touched upon at all by the Manifesto. Yet these questions demand an independent solution. For example, it is quite self-evident that while the "national fatherland" has become the most baneful historical brake in advanced capitalist countries, it still remains a relatively progressive factor in backward countries compelled to struggle for an independent existence.
"The Communists," declares the Manifesto, "everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things." The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete, unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race. The credit for developing revolutionary strategy for oppressed nationalities belongs primarily to Lenin.

8. The most antiquated section of the Manifesto—with respect not to method but to material—is the criticism of "socialist" literature for the first part of the nineteenth century (Chapter III) and the definition of the position of the Communists in relation to various opposition parties (Chapter IV). The movements and parties listed in the Manifesto were so drastically swept away either by the revolution of 1848 or by the ensuing counterrevolution that one must look up even their names in a historical dictionary. However, in this section, too, the Manifesto is perhaps closer to us now than it was to the previous generation. In the epoch of the flowering of the Second International, when Marxism seemed to exert an undivided sway, the ideas of pre-Marxist socialism could have been considered as having receded decisively into the past. Things are otherwise today. The decomposition of the Social Democracy and the Communist International at every step engenders monstrous ideological relapses. Senile thought seems to have become infantile. In search of all-saving formulas the prophets in the epoch of decline discover anew doctrines long since buried by scientific socialism.

As touches the question of opposition parties, it is in this domain that the elapsed decades have introduced the most deepgoing changes, not only in the sense that the old parties have long been brushed aside by new ones, but also in the sense that the very character of parties and their mutual relations have radically changed in the conditions of the imperialist epoch. The Manifesto must therefore be amplified with the most important documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International, the essential literature of Bolshevism, and the decisions of the conferences of the Fourth International.

We have already remarked above that according to Marx no social order departs from the scene without first exhausting the potentialities latent in it. However, even an antiquated social order does not cede its place to a new order without resistance. A change in social regimes presupposes the harshest form of the class struggle, i.e., revolution, If the proletariat, for one reason or another, proves incapable of overthrowing with an audacious blow the outlived bourgeois order, then finance capital in the struggle to maintain its unstable rule can do nothing but turn the petty bourgeoisie ruined and demoralized by it into the pogrom army of fascism. The bourgeois degeneration of the Social Democracy and the fascist degeneration of the petty bourgeoisie are interlinked as cause and effect.

At the present time, the Third International far more wantonly than the Second performs in all countries the work of deceiving and demoralizing the toilers. By massacring the vanguard of the Spanish proletariat, the unbridled hirelings of Moscow not only pave the way for fascism but execute a goodly share of its labors. The protracted crisis of the international revolution, which is turning more and more into a crisis of human culture, is reducible in its essentials to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

As the heir to the great tradition, of which the Manifesto of the Communist Party forms the most precious link, the Fourth International is educating new cadres for the solution of old tasks. Theory is generalized reality. In an honest attitude to revolutionary theory is expressed the impassioned urge to reconstruct the social reality. That in the southern part of the Dark Continent our cothinkers were the first to translate the Manifesto into the Afrikaans language is another graphic illustration of the fact that Marxist thought lives today only under the banner of the Fourth International. To it belongs the future. When the centennial of the Communist Manifesto is celebrated, the Fourth International will have become the decisive revolutionary force on our planet.

On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -E.R. Frank-The Imperialist War and Revolutionary Perspectives (1944)

“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -

Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the slogan in the headline.

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers' international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor ordered, by all means, be my guest, BUT only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
**************
E.R. Frank-The Imperialist War and Revolutionary Perspectives (1944)

Excerpts from International Report Delivered in the Name of the National Committee of the SWP
at the Eleventh Convention of the American Trotskyist Movement,
November 16, 1944

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From Fourth International, Vol.6 No.2, February 1945, Page 56-61.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The outbreak of the second world war did not catch us by surprise. We knew that without successful socialist revolutions, it was inevitable. We knew it was coming. We predicted it. And by our whole rounded political struggle, for our principles and our organization, we had steeled a cadre. We had prepared for the imperialist war. We were ready.

But right in our own party, the strongest, the best organized Trotskyist party, with the most tempered and experienced leadership, right in our own party, the Shachtmanite petty-bourgeois section of our leadership and membership buckled and folded up under the pressure of bourgeois public opinion the minute war broke out; unceremoniously abandoned the program to which they had promised to remain loyal and true and for which they had promised to fight come what may; abandoned the program of the Fourth International and attempted to engineer a split throughout our movement. We survived the fight with the petty-bourgeois opposition and emerged out of that fight stronger, healthier, more homogeneous, a more disciplined, a more effective party. Comrade Trotsky and we fought that fight as the steward of the whole International movement. We were able to assume this responsibility because we still enjoyed a measure of democracy, and could conduct the struggle in thorough-going fashion right to the end. We went into the war period with no illusions, with our eyes wide open. We knew that we, like the other Trotskyist parties, would be temporarily isolated. And we attuned our tactical orientation, we adjusted our tactics for the uphill pull in our political propaganda, our literary and organization activities, our trade union work. We didn’t change our program, we didn’t alter, much less abandon our principles. We merely adjusted our tactics, as realistic revolutionists, as Leninists always do. We knew that the fumes of war, the hypnotic spell of “national unity” would not long prevail. While at first, the war may halt the radicalization of the masses, may adversely affect the revolutionary process, it would soon impart to it a powerful impulse. Trotsky pointed out to us again and again that this war was not merely a continuation of the last one; that many factors were now more favorable from the point of view of the revolutionary vanguard; that the economic position of all the imperialist states, including the US was infinitely worse today; that the democratic and pacifist illusions of the last war were to a considerable extent absent; that the experience of the first world war did not pass without deeply affecting the masses.

We were able to proceed in our revolutionary work with patience, with tenacity, with confidence, because we kept our perspective, we kept our heads. We did not lose our nerve. We knew that life was working in our favor.

In this, our movement was unique. I am not referring here to the sell-outs of the Social Democrats and the Stalinists. In contrast to the last war, nobody was surprised or caught off-guard by the betrayal. We had anticipated this treason and had taken it into account in formulating our plans. I am now referring to the petty-bourgeois hangers-on, to the fellow travelers of the revolution. The retreat of the left-wing intellectuals from Marxism was converted into a precipitous flight. They madly rushed onto the bandwagon of the imperialist war. Darkest pessimism reigned supreme in all the left-wing intellectual circles, as well as the emigré groups. Some thought that Hitler’s victories were definitive; that Europe had slipped back to the dark ages; that the revolutionary movement had been irretrievably defeated; that Europe, that all suffering humanity would have to begin the long, painful climb over again. Others saw in Hitler’s victories proof that a new class of managers, of bureaucrats, had emerged; that the new form of society superseding dying capitalism would not be socialism, but bureaucratic collectivism, the managerial society, that the Marxist program had proved a Utopia.


A Feeling of Blackest Pessimism

In all these intellectualistic petty-bourgeois circles there reigned, as I said, a feeling of blackest pessimism. The picture was all dark and hopeless. And, of course, the petty-bourgeois quacks and fakes of the Shachtman group, veering like a weather vane in response to the pressure and mood of bourgeois intellectualdom, these fugitives from Bolshevism proclaimed in their turn that the clock of history had been set back so far that the political scene in Europe would be dominated by the fight for national liberation and bourgeois democracy. We were back in the nineteenth century! This pressure was so strong, this mood of defeatism was so pervading, that it found its way even inside the ranks of the Fourth International. A group of German refugee comrades published a document called the Three Theses, a thoroughly revisionist document, a thoroughly anti-Marxist thesis, which took for good coin Hitler’s boasts that his “New Order” would last centuries. They too thought that Europe was thrust back a hundred years, that the working class had lost its preeminent role and must dissolve itself in the middle class in the fight for “a national democratic revolution.” Stripped of its verbiage and theoretical “profundities,” what was implied here was the necessity of new Peoples’ Fronts to fight for “bourgeois democracy.” We decisively rejected this defeatist, this revisionist, this liquidationist “theory” at our last convention in 1942. We set our course on the perspective of the rise of the proletarian revolution.

The disorientation, the defeatism, the abandonment of the Fourth International program on the part of the German emigre comrades came about because they had lost all revolutionary perspective. They proclaimed the battle that had not yet started, already lost. We base ourselves on the rising working class revolution. They consider the European revolution already defeated.

We knew that out of the war would come a gigantic revolutionary explosion, above all in Europe, and we were confidently preparing for it. And less than a year after our 1942 convention, Italian fascism crashed to the ground. We saw in the downfall of Mussolini and the beginning of the Italian revolution the most striking confirmation of our analysis and program, and by the same token, an annihilating refutation of all the theories and speculations of our enemies. We immediately proceeded in our press to subject the Italian events to a thoroughgoing analysis and point to the road ahead.

We found no special difficulty in writing our plenum resolution on the European revolution, its perspectives and its tasks, any more than we found any special difficulty in analyzing the Italian events in our press. Do you know why? Because we were proceeding from a fundamental analysis. The Italian revolution represented for us merely the last link of a long chain that we had already wrought. We didn’t have to hunt for some new formulas. We didn’t have to devise new principles. We didn’t have to improvise, or proceed empirically from one step to another. We knew the answers ahead of time. I don’t mean the answer for every concrete problem that came up from day to day. There are no blueprints of that kind. But we had the general strategical answer and we understood the general trend and direction and meaning of the events.

Lenin, Trotsky and others established 30 years ago that capitalism on a world scale, and that European capitalism in particular, was no longer expanding but contracting. Its absolute decline had begun. In addition to the internal decline, the capitalist states of Europe were suffocating, because every one of them was hemmed in behind tariff walls and artificial state boundaries. The huge standing armies were eating up the substance of Europe’s wealth. The national state had become a reactionary fetter upon the economy of Europe. The first world war was itself testimony that European capitalism was in a blind alley. The war destroyed Europe’s hegemony, it impoverished the continent, and left it weak and debt-ridden, accelerating its decay. Economic hegemony had definitely passed into the hands of the richer and more powerful American imperialism. The war further disunited and dismembered Europe, further exacerbated its trade rivalries. The Versailles treaty created 17 new national states, raised up new gigantic tariff walls and further increased the standing armies.

The blind alley into which European capitalism was thrusting the peoples was answered by the October revolution of 1917, which wrenched one sixth of the earth’s surface out of the grip of capitalism and opened up the revolutionary era in Europe. The fierce, sanguinary, class struggles that swept Europe from one end to the other further weakened capitalism, further hastened its decline.

In contrast, American imperialism was still rising. Wall Street which had entered the war as a debtor emerged as a creditor. In addition to its tremendous material preponderance over Europe, American imperialism still enjoyed “national unity” at home. As against a Europe torn by revolutionary struggles, the US was the home of class collaboration par excellence.

Now all this is not some new revelation which our National Committee thought up just the other day. This analysis was made by Trotsky 20 years ago and was adopted at that time as the official position of the Communist International. Trotsky wrote:

“... the staggering material preponderance of the US automatically excludes the possibility of economic upswing and regeneration of Capitalist Europe. If in the past it was European Capitalism that revolutionized the backward sections of the world, then today it is American Capitalism that revolutionizes over-mature Europe. She has no avenue of escape from the economic blind alley other than the proletarian revolution, the destruction of the tariff and state barriers, the creation of the Socialist United States of Europe.”

And further:

“American Capitalism in driving Europe more and more into a blind alley, will automatically drive her onto the road of revolution. In this is the most important key to the world situation.”

It is this fundamental twin concept: Lenin’s concept that we live in the epoch of wars and revolutions and Trotsky’s analysis of the relationship between America and Europe that has guided our struggle all these past years.

By 1923, the revolutionary wave, evoked by the October revolution of 1917, receded. The defeat of the revolution in Germany in 1923 marked the turning point, and made possible the stabilization of Capitalism in Europe. The US came in with its Dawes plan, its loans and credits, and buttressed the shaken Capitalist system. But this very stabilization and the upturn in European economy that followed was on a far lower foundation than before 1914. This so-called stabilization proved of a not very enduring nature. This very stability was extremely unstable. Only six years later, a catastrophic economic crisis struck US imperialism, the largest, the strongest, the “healthiest” imperialist power of the whole world.

And it was not very long before all of Europe—all of the world — was again writhing in the grip of crisis. For ten years Europe was gasping and choking. The consuming economic crisis was only interrupted now and then by pitiful cyclical rises followed by new depressions. But the crisis itself was never overcome. The crisis again sharpened the class struggles, first of all in Germany, which was thrust into a new revolutionary situation. The question was sharply posed: either Fascism or Socialism. There was no third alternative. Through the base treachery of the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaders, the revolutionary situations were all dissipated and the potential revolutions aborted, one after another, first in Germany, then Austria, then France, then Spain. The Capitalists were permitted to regain the upper hand; the path was cleared for their plunging the masses of Europe and soon all humanity into the bloody maelstrom of the Second World slaughter.

And even super-powerful, super-rich, super-stable American Imperialism—the US—where they thought they had exorcized the class struggle, where they thought Marx had been refuted by Henry Ford, even this colossus writhed and twisted and shook for ten years in the toils of terrible economic chaos. For ten years Wall Street tried every device to overcome the crisis, but found that it could not extricate itself from the contradictions of decaying world capitalism. Finally it too plunged into the war with the aim of crushing its rivals and establishing its own world domination. It sought to solve the crisis by its exploitation of the peoples of Asia, of Africa and even of Europe; by making Wall Street the center of world tribute. American imperialism had reached its heydey and was already moving into its period of decline at a far faster tempo than any previous imperialism.

The crisis at home gave birth to the modern trade union movement, the largest, the best organized, the most volcanic trade union movement in the world. The class struggle, far from having been exorcized, emerged in America in full fury. Its young militant working class had not tasted defeat; it was vigorous, full of confidence and moving leftward.

In the last war, Europe lost its hegemony to America. But Europe is losing its very independence to America in this war. Europe’s decay was accelerated as a result of the first world war. But Europe is prostrate and ruined as a result of this one. America could stabilize Capitalism in Europe after the last war on a lower foundation and could permit its revival within sharply defined limits. American imperialism can enter and is entering Europe today with no other program but its dismemberment, its despoliation, to prevent Europe from reviving to a competitive level, to reduce Europe to a semi-colony, a vassal of the Wall Street banks ... (Here follows a discussion of Wall Street’s political program, bourgeois democracy, and the position of Morrow and Logan. See Frank’s Speech in December 1944 Fourth International.)

Once we understand the trend of events correctly; once we have a correct analysis of the European situation, a correct understanding of the nature and role of American Imperialism, a correct appraisal of the European revolution, then our answers, our programmatic tasks, fall into their proper place. They are properly guided.

Our program for the European proletariat is the program of the October revolution, the program of Lenin and Trotsky in 1917, the program of the Socialist revolution, of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the Soviet power.

Our central unifying slogan is the Socialist United States of Europe. This is the revolutionary answer, the only alternative to the imperialist scheme of Balkanizing Europe and enslaving its peoples. It corresponds to the experiences and needs of the European masses, who are learning that it is necessary to destroy the reactionary and outlived state boundaries, and that only through the economic unification and socialist collaboration of the free peoples of Europe can the menace of recurrent devastating wars be abolished and freedom and economic well-being assured.

Our instrumentality to lead the revolution is the Bolshevik party. Lenin taught us the kind of party the working class must have to make the revolution.

Our basic tactics to mobilize the masses and lead them forward to the revolution we have likewise learned from Lenin and the October Revolution. These tactics have been carefully studied by our movement over a great number of years. They have been enriched and refined through the study of their application, or more often, their lack of application, in the revolutions in Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Spain, China and elsewhere.

This work of careful preparation and training, of mobilizing the Trotskyist cadres for the revolutionary tasks ahead was crowned in 1938 with the holding of the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, right on the eve of the second world war. This conference adopted a world program for the present epoch. It is not merely a restatement of socialist doctrine and fundamentals, but the tactical program showing how the Fourth International must proceed to mobilize the masses for revolutionary purposes and win them to the banner of the Fourth international.

Trotsky, the author of this document, approached the whole question from this point of view: economically, he said, the world is ripe and over-ripe for the proletarian revolution, for Socialism. Capitalism in every sphere is disintegrating and sees no way out. The proletariat, in millions of masses, again and again moves onto the revolutionary road. But each time it finds itself blocked by its own conservative leadership. The crisis therefore is one of leadership. A new leadership, adequate to the revolutionary tasks at hand, must be created. This means the Fourth International, this small cadre, must find its way to the worker mass.

But how? By a program of transitional demands. The present epoch, said Trotsky, is distinguished not for the fact that it frees the revolutionary party from day-to-day work, but because it permits this work to be carried on indissolubly with the actual tasks of the revolution. We do not discard, said Trotsky, the old “minimum” demands; we defend the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers, but we carry on this work within the framework of our revolutionary perspective, and that is why the old minimum program is now superseded for us by the transitional program, the tasks of which lies in systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian revolution.

Now the job today in Europe is to take this program and apply it. In our opinion it is not necessary to hunt around for some new program, or new tactical schemes. We need only apply the Transition Program of the Fourth International. Of course, a program is not a blue-print, it is not a cure-all. You cannot become a master strategist of the revolution merely by memorizing a lot of slogans and rules, any more than you can become a master surgeon by memorizing the best text book on surgery. Other things are necessary. You must have experience. You must have talent. You must have the ability to correctly gauge and appraise a situation, to know what it is necessary to do at the particular moment. You must have the courage and heart of a revolutionary fighter to withstand all pressure and attacks from the camp of the enemy. You must have all of these things. But many of these things are beyond the scope of resolutions and cannot be supplied or imparted by resolutions. A resolution has got to provide a line. If it does that, if it provides a correct line, it is a good resolution, it does the job.


The Transition Program

The revolutionary party will win the confidence of the masses by its struggle for the program of transitional demands. Our transitional program does not have a propagandistic character but is invested with burning importance in Europe today. That means that the bridge to the fundamental slogans can be more or less rapidly crossed and that all immediate, minimum, democratic demands are of necessity intertwined with the transitional ones, the essence of which is contained in the fact, explained Trotsky, that they are directed ever more openly and decisively against the very bases of the capitalist regime ...

The revolutionary party that today has the firmness and strength to fight for its principles; to resist the pressure of bourgeois public opinion, which inevitably bears down in merciless fashion on the revolutionary vanguard; the party which resists the “temptation” to win the masses “the easy way” by watering down its program, will on the morrow have the opportunity of becoming the revolutionary leader of the masses. Because the masses want a decisive change, because they thirst for a genuine revolutionary leadership, because the catastrophic crisis is driving the masses ever more fiercely onto the revolutionary road. And as they grow disillusioned with their present misleaders, they will turn to the parties of the Fourth International.

* * *

We don’t have to say anything new about our programmatic position on the Soviet Union. That question was so thoroughly discussed and so magnificently illumined by Comrade Trotsky during our debate with the Shachtmanite petty-bourgeois opposition, that it retains all of its validity to this day in its basic, in its fundamental features. The Trotskyist position on the Soviet Union, an integral part of our world program for the world revolution, is the only position that has been vindicated by the events, that has proved its correctness in the struggle that provided correct guidance to the revolutionary vanguard through all the mazes, twists and turns of capitalist diplomacy, of war, of changing alliances and the like. All the other programs on the Soviet Union have already been consigned by events themselves to the dust heap.

Take as an example the most pretentious of the theories on the Soviet Union—Burnham’s theory of the managerial society. Burnham’s book, The Managerial Revolution, you may recall, enjoyed a passing vogue among capitalist executives, government bureaucrats and renegades from Marxism, both in the United States and England. Burnham told us that the proletariat did not possess sufficient inner strength to reorganize society on socialist foundations and that a new class of “managers” was emerging which would supersede dying capitalism and take over the helm to form a new exploitative class. On the basis of this theory, Burnham had no difficulty in foretelling that Stalin and Hitler, the two main representatives of this new class of “managers” which was destined to emerge all over the world, were united by an “affinity of ideologies” and had joined together “to drive death wounds into capitalism” . Hardly had the Professor spoken his prophecy, than Hitler threw his armed might against the Soviet Union and staked everything on crushing it. Burnham’s “theory” proved no more enduring than the Stalin-Hitler Pact.

Two years later, Mussolini, the very pioneer of Burnham’s “New society” , was deposed, more correctly dismissed, just as an employer dismisses his plant superintendent, when his services are no longer required. The precursor of the “new society” proved to be no more than a common adventurer and cutthroat in the service of the Italian bankers, monopolists and landlords. The Fascist regime simply fell apart like a rotten apple.

Today, Hitler’s “new order” in Europe has already collapsed under the double blows of his military opponents and the struggles of the insurgent masses. And the downfall and total destruction of the Nazi regime is not far off.

That is how events themselves have dealt with this bit of pretentious humbug which for a few years “cut a big swathe” in capitalist “cultural circles” and in the editorial offices of petty bourgeois intellectualdom. And this “theory” , let it be remembered, was the only half-serious attempt to counter-pose some sort of unified logical conception to Trotsky’s Marxist analysis of Fascism as well as his analysis of the Soviet Union and the Stalinist bureaucracy.

So much for Burnham’s theory and its inglorious fate. Little need be said at this date of his shamefaced pupils and imitators of the Shachtmanite variety with their pathetic attempts to discover a new “managerial class” but limited solely to the Soviet Union. In a new form and in a different connection, this is a recreation of the anti-Marxist idea of national exceptionalism, with a vengeance.

It is an elementary tenet of Marxism that a class is not an accidental phenomenon, but emerges as an inevitable and necessary vehicle of a given stage of production. Every ruling class has in its own way represented a historically necessary and unavoidable stage of social development and could be overthrown only when it had exhausted its historical possibilities. Marxism knows of no historically unnecessary classes and certainly knows of no classes that are limited to “one country” . History has annihilated Burnham’s “theory” of the new bureaucratic class. It has disposed of his anemic Shachtmanian imitators in passing.

Now I said that our question on the Soviet Union is an integral part of our whole program of world revolution. It does not stand apart from it. From our political characterization of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, we drew the conclusion that we must defend the Soviet Union unconditionally against any and all imperialist attacks. Now that program retains its validity. We don’t have to change it. But we always defended the Soviet Union in our own way, by our own methods, which had nothing in common with the methods of Stalinism. Only those methods, we said, were permissible that were not in conflict with the world revolution. Stalinist defense was carried on under the slogans: For the Fatherland! For Stalin! Our defense was carried on under the slogans: For Socialism! For the World Revolution! Against Stalin!

While our basic position retains all of its validity, naturally, we do not give equal emphasis to all sections of our program at all times. We invariably push to the fore that section of our program, that tactic, that slogan, which has the greatest application, which is required by the general political situation. That is the art of politics: to apply to the conditions of the day that part of your policy which has the most immediate, the most burning urgency. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, we began hollering at the top of our voices for the unconditional defense of the Soviet Union. That was the most important problem of world politics: save the Soviet Union from imperialist attack. That was a key position in protecting and advancing the revolution, which we knew would inevitably emerge out of the war.


A Different Situation

Today, however, we face a far different situation. The Soviet Union is no longer in immediate military danger. The Nazi attack has been successfully repulsed. Hitler’s “New Order” has already been destroyed. The Nazi regime faces imminent collapse. The continent is now in the process of military occupation by the armies of England, the United States and the Soviet Union. The European masses are in revolutionary ferment. The European revolution is rising and the Anglo-American imperialists have entered into a conspiracy with the Kremlin bureaucracy to strangle the revolution and to prop up decaying capitalism. That is the true picture of Europe today.

Under these conditions, it would be the height of unreal-ism, it would betray a complete lack of revolutionary generalship to keep on shouting the slogan of yesterday: Defend the Soviet Union. We do not alter our program; we do not discard this slogan which at a later date may possibly again acquire importance. But in the present situation this slogan recedes to the background and we push to the fore that section of our program which today has greatest importance; that section compressed in the slogan: “Defend the European Revolution against All Its Enemies,” against the imperialists, against the Kremlin bureaucracy, against all its agents and agencies. As I said, we do not change our program, but we very definitely are shifting our emphasis today, in conformity with the needs of the situation, in conformity with the changed relationship of forces, in conformity with the new requirements.

As a matter of fact, we haven’t made this shift in our emphasis, this tactical adjustment, just today. Some nine months ago our committee discussed this very problem and came to the conclusion that it was necessary to change the emphasis of our propaganda because of the new conditions in Europe. The discerning reader will have noticed that we conducted our propaganda in this spirit for a good many months. We propose now to incorporate this tactical prescription in our resolution, in order to make unambiguously clear to all, the nature of our tactical adjustment and the reasons for it.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, which emerged about 20 years ago, lost faith in the European revolution and proclaimed it realizable to build socialism in the Soviet Union alone. Today the process of degeneration has proceeded so far, this bureaucracy is so hated by the Soviet masses, it is in such conflict with the nationalized economy and its requirements, that it dreads, it mortally fears and opposes the European revolution which is now rising. That is why Stalin has rushed headlong into the arms of Roosevelt and Churchill, that is why he conspired with them at Teheran to crush the revolution and to uphold capitalism throughout Europe. That is why the Red Army, an instrument of the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, is used to prop up capitalism in Rumania, Bulgaria, etc. Stalin is preparing to repeat his hangman’s work in Spain on a Europe-wide scale.

Internally, we know that the bureaucracy has practically effaced all the basic political conquests of the revolution; it has destroyed the Bolshevik Party, the Soviets, the trade unions; it has murdered the generation of leaders who led the Russian revolution; it has reintroduced a savage despotism; it uses the Red Army as a gendarme of capitalist property in Europe. Politically, the bureaucracy has virtually gone the limit in its headlong drive toward reaction. Economically, nationalized property and planned economy, these basic conquests of the October revolution, still remain.

We know that the Kremlin bureaucracy does not represent a new class, which has a historic function to perform, but is a parasitic caste, thrown up because of a purely exceptional conjuncture of events, a caste that is transitory in nature.

Now if we assume that the Kremlin bureaucracy allied with the imperialists, succeeds in definitively crushing the European revolution, then the fate of Europe is sealed. It can only become the helpless vassal, a semi-colony of the Anglo-American brigands, a doomed continent. And sealed also is the fate of the Soviet Union. Because the path will be immediately cleared for the reintroduction of capitalism in the Soviet Union, either by internal counter-revolution or by external military intervention or by a combination of both.

If, on the other hand, the workers’ revolution emerges triumphant in any country, we can assume that it will more or less rapidly penetrate and make its influence felt among the Soviet masses and the Red Army troops. Once the Soviet masses are lifted to their feet, the very first thing they will proceed to do is overthrow the dictatorship of Stalin and his bloody henchmen and restore the Soviet Union on the principles and teachings of its founders—Lenin and Trotsky. In either case the Kremlin bureaucracy is doomed. The Soviet Union is in a transition period and that transition cannot too long endure. It is either: forward to Socialism or backward to Capitalism. It cannot indefinitely remain in its present form. And it is clear that its whole life is bound up with the fate of the European revolution. That is why we came back again to the same proposition: the fight to protect, to defend, to extend, to deepen the European revolution is in essence, and coincides with, the true defense of the Soviet Union itself ...

* * *

American imperialism, by its unbridled expansionism, by its attempt to displace all rival imperialisms—not only Japan and Germany, but also the defeated allies, such as France, and even its partner-in-arms, British imperialism—is destroying every semblance of stability in the Orient as well as in Europe, is exacerbating all the inter-imperial conflicts and is becoming the irritant provoking new revolutionary explosions. American imperialism, the greatest counter-revolutionary force of the whole world, with its program of Pax Americana, before which the ambitions of all previous imperialisms pale, with its mad schemes of dominating all the continents and all the seas, will become the very instrument of destroying the old equilibrium and provoking new rebellions of the exploited masses ...

We are going to have to pay a lot of attention to our international obligations in the period ahead. The revolution is rising and we must be prepared to aid our co-fighters in every possible way. We have already done quite a bit. But that is only a good beginning. The next period will see the extension and growth of the Trotskyist movement, especially in Europe, and our assistance will have to keep pace with the opportunities and the needs of the struggle. We must stand ready to give all possible help to our comrades who are on the firing line.

But the greatest aid that we can give our co-thinkers, the greatest of all contributions that we can make is to perfect our movement, strengthen our forces and redouble our fight against this predatory beast of American Imperialism, this international marauder, who would rob and subjugate the whole world.

We know the power of this Wall Street crew. We know that this gang of Wall Street freebooters is prepared to wade through rivers of blood to save its infamous rule. We know its armed prowess and its counter-revolutionary designs. But we are also aware of its insoluble contradictions. We know that our enemy will grow weaker and that, we will grow stronger and will conquer in the end.

The power of a revolution is a mighty power. Before its hot breath armies have been known to melt away and thrones come crashing to the ground. The flames of the European revolution which, once started, will surely spread throughout the continent like a prairie fire, will make their effects felt even here across the Atlantic. They will give a strong impetus to the process of radicalization of the workers that is already beginning, and they will inspire the coming class struggles here at home ...

The Night When The World Came Down Upon Peter Paul Markin’s Head-With Roy Lichtenstein’s 1968 Time Magazine Cover Of Bobby Kennedy In Mind

The Night When The World Came Down Upon Peter Paul Markin’s Head-With Roy Lichtenstein’s 1968 Time Magazine Cover Of Bobby Kennedy In Mind

By Bart Webber (with the ghost hand of Sam Lowell on his shoulder)

The ghost of the late sorely lamented Peter Paul Markin has hovered over this publication long after his early, too early demise back in the 1970s (and in its sister publications as well as a quick recent glance indicated starkly to me upon investigation). Maybe it because we have begun reaching a milestone, 50^th anniversary commemorations of various youth-defining events, maybe arbitrary, maybe as the late scientist Steven Jay Gould was fond of saying mere man-made constructs and no more but which has infested a number of us older writers some of who knew Markin personally and others who have been influenced by the hairy tales of his existence. (The younger writers mostly, as one told me, could give a fuck about an old junkie has been who didn’t have sense enough to not try some crazy scheme to get rich quick in the cocaine trade against the growing Columbian cartels so what could he expect.) Almost every event during this commemoration period had Markin’s imprint on it. (We always called him Scribe but I will stick with his surname here.)

Therefore it does not take much to flicker a flame if something going back to those days jumpstarts renewed thoughts of Markin. That happened one afternoon recently when Si Lannon was on assignment to do an article on the Cezanne Portraits exhibition at the National Gallery and as is his wont (and Sam Lowell’s too especially if Laura Perkins is along) he runs up to the National Portrait Gallery to see what is up there. Not much since the last time he was there except on a wall on the first floor under the title Remembrance there was Roy Lichtenstein’s famous Time magazine cover of Robert Kennedy done in the spring of 1968 shortly before his assassination in California after his primary victory over Eugene in June of that year. Si was so shaken by that picture that he immediately called me and I thereafter called a few other guys and the mere mention of that cover got us back to Markin square one.

See Markin, beyond being the guy who in our circle named the fresh breeze coming through the land for what would be called by others the Generation of ’68 and which we thanks to Markin we were card-carrying members was also far and away the most political of us all. Saw that any dreams of that newer world he was always hassling us about was going to require serious changes in the political winds. Moreover Markin had from I don’t remember how early on but as long as I had known him tied his fate to becoming some kind of politician, some kind of mover and shaker in that newer world. As for me I could have given a damn about politics then since I was starting up my printing business and, truth, was busy trying to get into my girlfriend’s pants. Not Markin though he had spent that whole spring working his ass off for Robert Kennedy, had gone up and down the East Coast trying to recruit resistant students not only to vote for Bobby but get out on the trail. That student resistance factored in by the fact that Bobby had not gotten into the presidential contest until after Lyndon Baines Johnson the sitting President and odds on favored in 1968 to win the election decided after the debacle of Vietnam, of Tet, not to run and the previously “Clean for Gene” crowd was reluctant to go with Bobby. Saw him as an interloper.       

Here is the beauty, maybe treachery now that I think about the matter, of that bloody bastard Markin before Lyndon blew himself up and Bobby entered the fray he was sitting on his freaking hands perfectly willing to      

give Johnson a pass as vile as Vietnam was against the expected contest against Richard Nixon. Didn’t think whatever lukewarm and ill-formed sympathy he had for McCarthy’s anti-war positions he could beat Nixon (or anybody else he once mentioned after the New Hampshire primary upended politics for good that year with McCarthy’s better than expected showing-wasn’t Bobby-like ruthless enough). Two minutes after Bobby announced he called up some Bobby operatives he knew from the Boston mayor’s fight in 1967 and was on his way.     

When Bobby went down I think, and this is only speculation on my part since I didn’t see him much after he went into the Army and then afterward headed out to California to start “a new life,” something went out of Markin, some sense that the whole thing had been a mirage and that he was doomed. He always thought of himself as doomed, spoke of it sometimes when he was depressed, or things were tough at home. So as the ghost of Bobby Kennedy showed up on that Lichtenstein cover know this the ghost of Markin is right there too.