The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paulette Goddard’s “The Unholy Four” (1954)

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

The Unholy Four (released in England as A Stanger Came Home), starring Paulette Goddard , Hammer Productions, 1954

In my long career in the film reviewing racket, a profession if you will which is overall pretty subjective when you think about it, I have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. As the headline above indicates I have been doing a serious of reviews of B-grade film noirs by the English Hammer Production Company from the early 1950s. A B-grade film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, and The Last Man Standing to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different. In the current series the well-known Hollywood producer Robert Lippert contracted with Hammer for a series of ten films which would star let’s say a well-known if fated Hollywood star like Dane Clark or Richard Conte as a draw and an English supporting cast with a thin storyline.     

I had done a bunch of these reviews (minus a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not see, the film. All well and good until about my five review when a reader wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film. Moreover and this is the heart of the issue she mentioned that perhaps I was getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was reviewing. Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have had various contracts for work over the years but not that one. The long and short of it was that the next review was a stripped down version of the previous reviews which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film series The Thin Man from the 1930s and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me with that odious expression of hers. (By the way one of the pitfalls of citizen journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one wants to say the most unsavory things and not fame any blow-back.

Here is the “skinny” on the film under review The Unholy Four (released in England and on the continent as A Stranger Came Home which as usual in this series is closer to the nub since in fact a stranger does come home to face all kinds of hell) in any case as is my wont and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. Four guys, four rich guys not of the nobility in England anyway, took a trip not shown trip to Portugal and only three came back. One guy vanished for four years and as the film opens up he shows up unannounced one party night. The guy, a guy named Phil, had this dishy wife, Angie, played by fading American screen star Paulette Goddard the first female fading star in the series which as mentioned before jacks up the film more than if there were only English nobodies playing the roles, who the other three guys on that fateful trip were in varying degrees interested in. Our man Phil, kind of a chain-smoking cuckoo, was waylaid by one of the three guys and he is well enough now to go the distance to find out who fucked him up enough that he lost his memory and is now seeking revenge-or at least answers to what happened to him and to his wife.

Problem, big problem, or really two problems one of the three guys winds up very dead the night Phil comes back home and guess what he is built to specifications to be the fall guy, to take the big-step off since everybody in their set knew that dead guy was crazy for Angie. Still the peelers don’t have enough evidence to throw him in the slammer and throw away the key. That second problem is that Phil is not altogether sure that good-looking if faded whorish Angie wasn’t playing footsie with one or more of the guys while Phil was lost in the rain out in Lisbon waiting with Victor Lazlo for some airfare to the States. She has a hell of a time trying to persuade Phil and the coppers for a bit that she did rub the dead man out. With only two guys left though Phil honed in on the killer and his lamester reasons for bopping Phil and killing the other dude. Phil lays the dude down and he and Angie head off into the sunset or something like that. For a while the film took turns like a real thriller but the dialogue and the wooden acting by the Brits (and by faded Paulette too) make this thing a holy goof. Despite the come hither title and the titillating advertisement poster (see above) for the film this one fades away on its own dead weight. B-noir but seriously B not heading to classics-no way.                      

Interloper’s Interlude-William Powell’s “My Man Godfrey” (1936)-A Film Review, Of Sorts

Interloper’s Interlude-William Powell’s “My Man Godfrey” (1936)-A Film Review, Of Sorts

DVD Review

By Special Guest Reviewer Frank Jackman

My Man Godfrey, starring William Powell, Carol Lombard, 1936

You know they don’t make bums, tramps, hoboes like they used to at least back in the day, back in the Great Depression, the world-wide 1930s one, if one is to believe the plotline of the film under review My Man Godfrey. I have been handed. asked for, this assignment since I know, or knew for a relatively short time, the sociology of the outcasts of society, when I myself was on the bum for a while after hitting the skids as a result of military service in Vietnam back in the 1970s. (Although I had my fair share of run-ins and run-downs during that period the real deal expert from that time was my old friend from high school the late Pete Markin, always called “Scribe” in our circles who had his own fair share of problems adjusting to the “real” world after his military service but who wrote an award-winning series of articles for the East Bay Other, I think it was that now long gone publication on the West Coast  although it could have been another alternative newspaper now also long gone The Eye, about a bunch of ex-military guys who couldn’t adjust to the real world and wound up forming some kind of travelling nation community along the railroad tracks and bridges of Southern California.)

In my experience, unlike in the comedic effort in the film under review, the guys, and it was mostly guys since ragamuffin women would be is serious danger in the camps and flop houses I ran into, were not anywhere near nature’s noblemen as portrayed here, especially in the person of Godfrey, maybe better particularly in the  person of Godfrey. They were as likely to steal everything you owned as share anything even shaking DTs booze when a guy was on the hammer (I lost several personal items including cash before I figured out how to store my goods). As likely to con you as speak truth and as likely to sell you out to the nearest copper to save their own necks as not. There is nevertheless a hierarchy among the varieties of outcasts which mainly reflect their relationship to the work ethic from no work on principle to enough day work to keep going.

I learned a lot of this lore running into a guy named Dragon Rocky who was a hobo, the highest rank among the outcasts and recognized as such by one and all along the tracks and under the bridges, who was also, or had also been, it was never clear where he stood on this, a folk song writer and when he was sober a performer at clubs and small concerts on those infrequent days when he wasn’t on the bum.  He was some kind of high figure among the brethren and knew more about how to handle himself in that cutthroat world than any man I met then, or have met now.  So philosopher-king kind heart Godfrey would have gotten no play, would have been skinned alive in real hobo, tramp, bum society.  

But see this guy Godfrey was, if you can believe that anybody sane would do such a thing if for no other reason than to avoid the fleas and coughs, faking it, well maybe not faking it but more like he was on a lark, was trying to find himself or something according to the way he told it to one of his high and mighty friends when he was finally caught out by proper society. See, this Godfrey played by William Powell last seen in this space squiring Myrna Loy around seemingly endlessly in the Dashiell Hammett-inspired The Thin Man film series (that information according to the regular film critic here Sandy Salmon), was an interloper, a man of the upper classes in Boston who had gone to Harvard and decided to become déclassé as they say in sociology, or used to, after having a personal epiphany and rather than dunk his head in the East River down New York City way he became a tramp (no way and Dragon Rocky if he were still alive which is improbable given the dramatically Hobbesian shortened, nasty brutish life along the tracks and embankments.

Fair enough, although hobos, tramps and bums, real ones have little enough room to breathe on the outer edges of society to rightly and righteously resent a guy on a flyer. Grabbing up precious resources better used by real brethren. Not to worry though our man will land on his feet once he gets a job as butler to a screwball bunch of Riverside swells, Mayfair swells, if you want to know who have the social consciousness of amoebas until Godfrey puts them straight, settles their affairs and along the way falls for the family’s younger screwball airhead daughter. Not only that but outduel one Karl Marx in the capitalist-communist battle by saying screw you to the class struggle and on the sly opening up swanky nightclub for those Mayfair swells and providing honorable work for the denizens of the dump which had been their (and Godfrey’s) abode before this act of urban renewal. Hell, talk about paeans to trickle-down economics that one guy much later called “voodoo” economics.  A funny film in spots but don’t take any social message seriously.       

Serving Them Off The Arm-Ellen Burstyn And Kris Kristofferson’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) - A Film Review

Serving Them Off The Arm-Ellen Burstyn And Kris Kristofferson’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) - A Film Review

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, starring Ellen Burstyn, Kristofferson, directed by Martin Scorsese, 1974     

You know some films in this wicked old world appeal to some people and for very different reasons not to others. Take the film under review Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore which I recently saw with my old friend and colleague from American Film Gazette days (when that publication was hard copy and not solely on-line as today) who got me my job here and who still clutters cyberspace as film critic emeritus and his lovely long-time companion Laura Perkins (companionship being the better option after he had had three marriages and three divorces and a parcel of nice kids along the way who nevertheless almost drove him over the edge when those college tuition bills came floating through his door). I won’t speak of my reaction to the film here since it will become apparent throughout the review. Sam did not like the film since he wrote it off as a so-so effort in the eternal Hollywood boy-meets girl formula department where from the minute the two central characters finally meet you know the flames will burn brightly. Laura loved the film mainly for the reason that it was nice to see an older film which dealt with the issue even if in a somewhat funny way of single motherhood AND the inevitable boy-girl subtext. In short this one played out as a “chick flick” as my old friend film critic Anna Devine one time coined to give this kind of genre a label to grab onto.       

I do not believe that anybody involved in the production of this film saw it as a chick flick although it certainly had qualities which would qualify it for that type of film. I believe that the producers were looking to deal in a funny and unobtrusive way with the then emerging social category of single motherhood and it trials and tribulations. Here Alice, played by Ellen Burstyn, is a recently widowed mother living in nowhere Socorro, New Mexico, her late husband’s hometown, with a let us say giving him the benefit of the doubt precocious son whom she loves dearly but who tries her patience more than somewhat. Cash short and dreaming of her own childhood home Monterey out in California and expecting to use her talents as a singer to make ends meet they blow that burg and hit the road. Hit the road to Phoenix first where Alice meets and beds a wild man wife abuser and has to flee. Flee to the next best thing Tucson where short on dough and short on singing possibilities she gets a job serving them off the arm at let’s call it the Last Chance Café.          

Between the snotty and never-ending demands of that what did we call him, oh yes, precocious son and the dead-end waitressing job (now known as wait person or wait staff) in a flea-bitten diner she is at wits end. Enter rancher handsome Johnny David, played by singer-song-writer Kris Kristofferson in his early movie career days, who makes the big play for Alice. But she isn’t buying after that run-in with that crazy wife-beater in Phoenix and she is still intent on hitting the road for Monterey when she gets enough dough together to flee this burg. But the guy grows on her and so that was that. Things went along well for a while until David tried to discipline her son and that threw the whole thing off. Done. Well almost done since David was ready to move heaven and earth to stay with Alice as he made clear in a public mea culpa in the two-bit diner-even to move to Monterey to be with her. (That Laura mentioned was the key turning point of why she loved the film.) On reflection Alice decided that she could sing for her supper anywhere and so they will stay in Tucson after all. Happy ending. 

I watched a couple of episodes of the successful television spin-off of this film, Alice, in setting up this review which was overbearing and trite but I think that I agree with Laura that this Martin Scorsese-directed film has merit as a look at the troubles of raising a child alone. Enough said.    

No Matter How You Spin It-War Is Hell-In This Year Of The 100th Anniversary Of Armistice Day Just Ask A Veteran-Colin Firth And Nicole Kidman’s “The Railway Man” (2013)-A Film Review

No Matter How You Spin It-War Is Hell-In This Year Of The 100^th Anniversary Of Armistice Day Just Ask A Veteran-Colin Firth And Nicole Kidman’s “The Railway Man” (2013)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sam Lowell

The Railway Man (railway automatically telling you this is a British film), Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, 2013

Sometimes a name of a place, especially a place when war or some other catastrophe passed though will make your gut churn up, make a tear come to your eye when you think about that name. The various Holocaust death camp sites in Europe come to mind as do places like My Lai in Vietnam. In my family the Burma Highway comes to those emotional senses. My grand uncle, Frank, had been one of those who died working, no, no, no, not working slaving to produce what the Japanese in World War II were trying to do in the infested jungles of Southeast Asia to get a railroad track laid as a shortcut to from point A to point B in their determination to subject all of Asia to their will. I never knew that uncle having been born after news that he had died on the highway, news that his body had been recovered from a mass grave along that highway came our family’s way. Would not have had a chance to know him even if he had not died that endless death since he had gone back to Ireland when he could not find work in America during the 1930s and then when Ireland did not prove to be any better than America fatefully migrated to Australia. Migrated just at the wrong time since the Japanese were raising hell in all the British possessions and threatened Australia. He joined one of the regiments that would head to Singapore to support the British defense there just before they surrendered to the Japanese. And from there to the death highway. (Why an Irish nationalist, and he was, wound up defending the Brits is a story I never got from my Grandmother Riley since you could not mention Frank’s name without her crying and so I stopped doing so.)

That brings us to the film adaptation of Eric Lomax’s autobiography The Railway Man. The story of his horrible torturous experiences on that same railway that my grand uncle perished. In this case Lomax, played by stiff upper lip Colin Firth, was an officer in the British Engineers who got caught in the same round-up when the British surrendered in Singapore and wound up transported to the Malay Peninsula. Unlike my grand uncle we know what happened to Lomax in great detail from the film. As an engineer he was forced to work on designing the best route through the dense jungle for the Japanese. Lomax though was an industrious sort, a tinkerer, a harmless tinkerer with radios and a love of railroads. He made the almost fatal mistake of building a radio set which the Japanese found out about and assumed was some sort of communication device to get messages to their enemies. No, all Eric was doing was attempting to keep morale up, his own and that of his comrades, by getting information from the BBC International service. For that, which he took sole responsibility for, he was mercilessly tortured by the Japanese military police, especially one Nagase. Eventually the British prisoners, those who survived physically, were liberated by Allied forces.            

That experience as one could expect was a life-long psychic wound that never was either far from the surface or something that he was able to get over as the film edges forward. Enter some thirty years later Patricia, played by fetching Nicole Kidman, met on a train heading toward Scotland. They got along, got along very well although Patricia was unaware of the effects of that prison camp experience until after they   had been married and he displayed symptoms of the nightmares that haunted his dreams and incapacitate him to the point on physical withdrawal, Through an Eric friend who also went through the Burma railway experience she learned what had happened to her husband. Through that same friend who would eventually commit suicide over his own memories Eric found out that the torturer Nagase was still alive and well and had never been prosecuted for war crimes committed during the prison tortures. After his friend commits suicide and urged on by Patricia, he went to Asia to confront Nagase who had been working as a museum guide at the very place where he had been a torturer.               

They met and Eric at that point was determined to get his well-deserved revenge that the Allies had not been able to do. But upon meeting and after talking although it was a close thing Eric decided not to do the murder he had in his heart. This an example of so-called reconciliation between the transgressor and his victim. In the end as we find out through the afterword the pair became lifelong friends. What I ask though is where was justice for my grand uncle-and relief for my poor grandmother. 

We’ll Meet Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When”-In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of Armistice Day-Teresa Wright, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews and Fredric March’s “The Best Years Of Our Lives” (1946)-A Film Review

We’ll Meet Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When”-In Honor Of The 100^th Anniversary Of Armistice Day-Teresa Wright, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews and Fredric March’s “The Best Years Of Our Lives” (1946)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Seth Garth

The Best Years Of Our Lives, starring Teresa Brewer, Dana Andrews, Frederic March, Myrna Loy 1946

I have noted in the headline to this piece that on November 11, 2018 we commemorated the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day which ended the bloody slaughter of World War I, the so-called war to end all wars. And that is a fitting honor although the subject matter of the film under review, The Best Years Of Our Lives, is the ending of a subsequent war, the bloody slaughter of World War II. There was a real scramble among the older writers here to review this Academy Award-winning film since a number of us, including myself, had fathers who served in that war and who are themselves veterans of the bloody slaughter in Vietnam, again including myself and so were, are very familiar with the subject matter of this film, the return to civilian life after the displacement of lives caused by that service. I won the “lottery” site manager Greg Green used to determine who would write the review solely on the basis of having been the only one born that year of the presentation of the film, 1946.        

Despite my “victory,” a number of the other guys, Sam Lowell, Si Lannon, and Lance Lawrence come to mind, could have written this piece with the same starting paragraphs about our own problems with what we Vietnam-era vets call returning to the “real world.” In my own case I drifted for several years around the West Coast searching for some common-sense reasons to even go on. Suicide while not near the surface at the time was not far from being contemplated. One only has to look at the statistics to know that “option” was on the very top of the surface for a number of Vietnam vets and now we see that same thing, maybe worse by percentages, happening to the younger Iraq-Afghanistan War vets. Mainly though I couldn’t adjust to the idea of a nine to five existence that I had frankly dreamed about prior to my military service after having done, having seen being done by others, having been done by the government to the people of Vietnam who I had no quarrel with.   

Let me go by the numbers. I had ill-advisedly gotten married before I left for Vietnam under the then normal idea that I would have somebody to come back to. Bad mistake, very bad in the end since when I did get back I could not get behind the nine to five job, little white house and kids and dogs scenarios that was her dream (and as I have said already said mine previously). Moreover when I got back and was unresponsive to her needs, she took up with another guy, a guy who was smack daub into that dream of hers (and they are still married the last I heard). That marriage, the first of three, over I drifted from the East back out to California where in 1967, during the days of the Summer of Love, our old late comrade and fellow veteran Pete Markin brought us to see what was going on out there. I was thinking that a fresh start would do me good.

A false fresh start since I got heavily involved, along with Markin and Josh Breslin who writes for this publication as well, in drugs and other illegal stuff. After a while unlike Markin who headed to Mexico and a fateful bloody end and Josh who headed back East to school under the GI Bill I drifted to Southern California and the hobo camps along various rivers or under bridges with other veterans mostly, although not all from my generation but some from WWII and Korea as well. After a while though that got stale and I headed back East myself and from that point, more or less, I was in a more positive direction.  Although sometimes when the moon is full I wish I was back there among the righteous hobo veterans, had not taken a turn to the nine to five world.

In a way this film is good piece of what Sam Lowell has called on other occasions “a slice of life” hook that has saved him on more than one review when he was in pitch darkness for what Hollywood thought was going on. Unfortunately after a brief survey of fellow writers who are part of the fading baby-boomer generation that got its start in the immediate post-World War II period we would never had found out from our taciturn fathers what it was like to readjust to civilian life as they were too distance, too sullen, too driven to get ahead in the dog eat dog world to let on what they were feeling. Never spoke of what they went through in their war. Strangely, despite this insight on my part, a survey of my kids from those three failed marriages finds that I too never spoke of what I went through, was distance, sullen and so on. That was tough medicine to swallow after I thought about it some.

No question this film is moderately melodramatic and maybe today it would be impossible to find backing for its production for despite the old chestnut about a good film being a good film even fifty or seventy-five years later like this one or Casablanca. Probably impossible to get the “gee whizz” notion of community that glued towns together. But enough of that and let’s get to that summary that old Sam Lowell has always cried to the heavens about that every film reviewer owes his or her reader. Starting with the proposition that good story-lines come in threes.

Three is the number of ex-GIs who had recently been discharged from the military service after various stints in the European or Pacific theaters. We have rather than Tom, Dick and Harry-Al, Fred and Homer. A combination of names befitting the times if rather old-fashioned now. A combination of ranks too somewhat counter-intuitive with the banker and middle-class partisan Al having been an NCO while from the wrong side of the tracks Fred had been an officer and Homer nothing but a swabbie what in the Army would be called a grunt-low on the totem pole. And a combination of conditions from Al’s discontent to Fred’s thwarted ambitions to Homer’s war-related physical condition having lost his hands when his ship was sunk out in the China seas.      

What cinematically brings the threesome together is they are from the same city, Boone City, and don’t bother to try to locate that on any U.S. map and have “hitched an Air Force transport ride home. This homecoming must have been somewhat after the various celebrations commemorating victories in Europe and Asia since they all went to their respective homes without fanfare. I would note that whatever public celebrations of WWII happened none were forthcoming when I, or others from my home town, came home after Vietnam service. A different time and different response to what happened in the latter war.

Okay let’s set the stage. Homer had a longtime sweetheart and next-door neighbor who he did not until the very end of the film realize still loved him and will wind up marrying him despite his physical afflictions. There were probably a number of stories with that kind of ending although I know at least one from my own Vietnam experience, Bob Petty, who lost a leg at Danang and whose high school sweetheart just couldn’t deal with that trauma. I am sure there were more such cases. Al, middle-class banker Al, must have volunteered since he had a grown-up family and had been married for twenty years to a wife played by Myrna Loy who was troubled by Al’s behavior, his sullen discontents, coming back from the war. Al was also somewhat estranged from his two kids, the most important for the film being daughter Peggy, played by classic girl next door is Teresa Wright.

I have saved Fred for the last part since his fate intertwined with Al’s family. He, like me, and many others married on the wartime quick decision run, had known the spirited young women for only a short time before shipping out. He had been nothing but a soda jerk before his military service but he had a skill set for dropping bombs mainly in the right place and so thrived in that environment. Back home though he suffered from two serious problems, again which I have many of examples of, including my own. First, that on- the-fly wife turned out to a party girl, any man’s woman, any man with some dough and good looks, a tramp is what we would have called her back in the old neighborhood hang-outs. She married Fred for those precious allotment checks married men were entitled to. Secondly, after the war, after getting out of soda jerk routines he wanted more than to serve giddy teenagers hot fudge sundaes. But he couldn’t land anything that he could keep, that precision bombing skill set of no use in civilian life. No dough, no serious job tells it all. You know that that tramp was going to be heading to greener passages after, hell, maybe before, she divorced our Fred. Don’t worry though our Fred will have a soft landing since along the way Fred and that daughter of Al’s, Peggy fell in love and that divorce was a rather convenient device to bring them together. Yeah, Sam Lowell, was right this was a “slice of life” classic but also rang a bell for a latter- day veteran too.             

Will Bradley The Legend-Slayer Amps Up His Game- Going After The Big Guys-Going After A Fake Hero -With “Solo: A Star War Story” (2018) In His Sights

Will Bradley The Legend-Slayer Amps Up His Game- Going After The Big Guys-Going After A Fake Hero -With “Solo: A Star War Story” (2018) In His Sights

By Will Bradley

Solo: A Star Wars Story, starring a guy named Alden Ehrenreich as Han, Hans, Hand, Hands, Jimmy Hands, Hans Bricker or whatever alias he is using these days to cover up his assorted criminal activities, Emilia Clarke, and the rightly legendary Chewy who has correctly distanced himself from the Solo, so-called rebellion cabal and its hangers-on       

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I think I am ready for the “bigs” now-ready to take on and slay the legend of legends one Han Solo (aka Hans, Hand, Hands, Hans Bricker, Jimmy Hans, Hans Christian Anderson and a fistful of other alias gleaned from interplanetary police files, most reliably the planet Krypton known for its efficient record-keeping only outshined by the Earth’s Inquisition when they were riding high in Europe under the guidance of various pontiffs a few centuries ago) late of the so-called rebellion against some phantom Empire of his mind. Ready, to as I will explain more below, take on the weak link in the ominous Star Wars industry which has done a tremendous disservice to the movie-going population by touting a mob of kinky humans and their “alien” hangers-on from every god forsaken planet and piece of shrapnel in the universe. (By the way any use of word “alien” refers not in these troubled Earth times to displaced Earthlings without a visa looking for some safe haven but denizens of other planets seeking to get into Earth without proper papers or with the explicit desire to do criminal wrong.) 

Making mock heroes of weak-link Han, originally from Kanas home of another legendary faker Dorothy Smith and her faithful and heroic dog Toto who saved her ass more times than I can count, a kid named ominously Luke Skywalker from out in the high desert of California whose police record spans at least one galaxy, an ex-call girl who goes by the name Leia, Lea, Lee something like that posing as the Czar of all the Russia missing-link daughter, a few out of date worthless tinpot robots with single letter or numbered names and assorted miscreants of various nationalities, planetary homes and so-called occupations. I will, let me make it clear, not hear a word said against one Chewbacca, aka Chewy, who was dragged down in the mud by this Han character and who after have seen the light exposed this bum of the month for what he is. Chewy has also in exchange for no prison time given me valuable information about all the rotten things this crew did again law and order, hell, against small-case reason.     

I freely admit that I am not ready to take on the whole cabal, not ready to go after the “biggest of the big” yet but feel confident that once I take down this hoodlum Han I will be fired up for a frontal assault on this whole sorted legend, freeing humankind at least from serious grafters, con men and women and midnight shifters. No question I have had major success in de-fanging the legends of small fry starting with modern guys like Johnny Cielo. Yes, Johnny Cielo the so-called famous early American aviator who if you had believed the legend was just behind Icarus and well ahead of the Wright Brothers down at wind-swept Kitty Hawk in the pantheon of manned flight. (That debunking was easy since Johnny was three-years old, I have a copy of his birth certificate for public inspection for those who still want to hang on to their silly illusions about this Piper Club pilot, when the brothers soared into the breathless air down there in heavy blow coastal North Carolina). Identified the woman posing as 1940s film siren and nothing but pure eye candy even at this remove Rita Hayworth which was supposedly his claim to fame as Jenny Homes, a street hooker from Hoboken who did resemble Rita superficially but could not have acted her way out of a paper bag. She would later run off with some Mach V test pilot when Johnny’s money ran out and she ran him down as a two-bit hustler when she fled back to Key West and started telling the tale. Telling it to some stumble-bum drunk who then retailed it to a desperate reporter in Miami and that was that. I also have the ticket receipts and flight plan of Johnny last flight before falling down into the ocean with four passengers in the Gulf of Mexico busting the legend that he was the main guy transporting guns and supplies to Fidel and his boys when it counted before 1959. Hogwash.

More, more cred if you like since I am going after very big prey, attempting to knock down Star Wars legends for crying out loud. I need all the cred I can get, maybe a few strong-arm guys wouldn’t hurt either-with or without sidearms once the “industry” feels threatened, feels my sting. Which may already be happening since this so-called prequel hagiographic film hardly earned its keep and righty so since the world need never hear of another hard-luck story about how a guy like poor Hank, Hack, Ham, very appropriate name, or whatever name he is using under whatever current rock he is under was abused by nefarious around him. I weep no tears on that score.

To continue with my resume I took one Robin Hood, he of “give to the poor” fame and through his church and estate records, the ones still intact which by every academic account are right, took him down for the count as a rack-renting gouger of his tenants lands, livestock and young daughters. All while working under the name Robert Hawkins, whom the Medieval historian Lawrence Staines has exposed as a malignant jack-roller and whoremaster as well. (I thank Brother Staines for his help in debunking this stiff whom we have come to know as Robin the Hood around my way.) Took down a what turned out to be a poor farm boy imagined by some cloistered young woman sent to convent to keep her away from mantraps to be a great lover, named him Don Juan, real name, Diego Nunes and described him to all the world warts and all. Took down a guy named Zorro too, although a little sorrowfully since the guy who did a review of a Zorro movie starring Antonio Banderas proudly spoke of his Spanish heritage via his mother and liked the idea that a Spaniard would get positive play in the legend game. Sorry Si but old Zorro once he used the peasants out there in California before the republic to beat back the then all-powerful Dons who had bogus Spanish land grants was like Robin Hood as greedy and callous toward them as the latter had been toward his yeomen. Maybe worse since in a modern twist emulated later by the coal barons back East forced those poor buffers to buy all their supplies from his overpriced and cheapjack company stores.

My most recent expose, the one I am rather personally happy about since I had to endure walking through the catacombs on the lower level of hell to view a whole exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston when they were corralled by some misbegotten loveless curators into presenting a show about the ill-named Age of Casanova, the so-called great lover who never painted picture number one so what the hell was that about anyway in a well-thought of art museum. Such misguided approaches only add to the chaos around various ill-deserved legends. Nevertheless I took down this clownish, boorish, asexual, according to various memoirs left behind by his supposed one nightstand lovers, as easily as Diego Nunes. Turned out he was another one of those figments of the imagination this time of a smart young Renaissance woman who nevertheless paid the price for her indiscretions refusing to recant when the Inquisition rolled into old Venice town taking no prisoners. Funny, sad funny anyway one of the few heroic and therefore worthy of a legend has never gotten any recognition for her brave stand against the night-takers.     

This Han Solo business, not his real name as I have alluded to up above and will detail below, though is a big jump and I will tell you why. If you were to believe the story being retailed of late in the seemingly never-ending Star War-related industrial complex through this film I have just waded through you would have assumed that he was an orphan imprisoned in one of those still nasty dungeons by some savage predators. Not so, Han, Han Brown was born, I have a copy of the birth certificate, in Lawrence, Kansas begotten by Ellis Brown through his wife Amy not in some honky-tonk interplanetary gin mill as he always was claiming. He left home of his own will, ill-will when he was sixteen to either become the best spaceship pilot in the universe or the richest sneak thief or both. After leaving home he picked up this tramp in some bar in Tulsa, a young woman with a funny name beginning with a “Q” that nobody could ever pronounce and so she took the name Queenie and they went through the petty crime night like Bonnie and Clyde. The few times they were caught Han would talk some gibberish and get out of it. Until the great irium caper where he was caught big-time and sent Queenie over since he was afraid of closed spaces like jails. Off on his own he ran into Chewy who tried to straighten him out but failed and maybe if he had left this delinquent, he could have avoided having to fink the bum out to save his own hide, to avoid jail time. Han, like Johnny Cielo talked like he was the king of the hill as a pilot but looking through his police files I noticed that he flunked the flying test twice before he was granted a license. Moreover after ditching a couple of ships with passengers in deep space after he bailed out his license was actually suspended the first time and then revoked after the second incident and so he was officially flying illegally under Empire law.

Han, using the alias, Handel Smith, did grab a job running weapon to the rebels against that Empire which without the steady hand of a guy like Darth Vader was crumbling, was rift with every con artist in the black hole. Offered more money by king-pin Johnny Dryden, king of the fairy queens, Hanry grabbed the loot with all arms and grabbed Queenie who had done her time, his time and was ready to crush the universe if necessary, to get back on track. Something had changed in her, had changed in her in prison like with a lot of women, men too as she was as happy to be a bad ass girl as good. Han did not know that but the bastard was instrumental in breaking her. What else can I say. A classic bum of the month but I know millions will say he was such a good-looking funny, fun-loving boy. Ask Queenie that question if you dare.      

You Ain’t In Paris Anymore-Kate Winslet’s “The Dressmaker” (2015)-A Film Review

You Ain’t In Paris Anymore-Kate Winslet’s “The Dressmaker” (2015)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley   

The Dressmaker, starring Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hensworth, 2015   

This is a first at least according to my boss Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon. The first being in this case reviewing a film like the one here, The Dressmaker, produced by an on-line operation, a streaming affair, Amazon the giant merchandise mart. Although Sandy (and film critic emeritus Sam Lowell) have shied away from reviewing such productions these operations probably are a fair representation of where the film industry might very well be heading since Netflix and others have also entered the fray.

Taking that idea into consideration I must say I was impressed by the production values and the acting, especially of the versatile Kate Winslet last seen in this space according to Sam in a review of Titanic although maybe his memory is not what it used to be since that was many moons ago and she has performed in many films between times so he must have reviewed something more current previously. This is a quirky film no question set in the Outback of Australia apparently the new Wild West of film-dom (another film Australia with Nicole Kidman also showing that tendency). What I don’t get though is why in the blubs about film consider this venture a comedy despite some marginal (and again quirky) moments.

Let me explain. Myrtle, Ms. Winslet’s role, returned home to that Outback after making a name for herself as a dressmaker (hence the appropriately named title) in the high-end fashion industry, okay, okay haute couture in Paris, that is in France not Texas. The at first murky reasons for her return after having been unceremoniously sent away from the town after she allegedly had murdered a fellow student who was tormenting her are what formally drives the plot. She ostensibly returned to take care of her ailing and seemingly unstable mother, Molly played by Judy Davis, and to try to figure out what actually happened back at that incident. (That taking care of “unstable” mother who as the film proceeds gets very, very stable and wise another example of film’s ability to raise the dead.)  And discover whether she is cursed by that event. Or should seek righteous revenge for being displaced out of spite since she was illegitimate and her un-acknowledging local bigwig father had been instrumental in sending her away.         

              

Of course as a professional dressmaker (she only brought one piece of luggage and a sewing machine home) Myrtle or rather Tilly as she preferred to be called was able to gain some cache in town by both wearing high fashion and making such for the braver women of the town. Still the past held her back. Held her back even when handsome Johnny Teddy, played Liam Hensworth, who really was something out of a New Age thoughtful male fantasy despite the 1950s feel of the film, started courting her and helping her retrace her steps to that dark past. And his work paid off as she is made to realize that that so-called murder was actually the tormenting boy killing himself in the act of physically abusing her. That the good part.

That said here is where the thing gets kind of mixed up in the genre department despite some off-beat funny moments. Gallant Teddy after Tilly and he became lovers dies in a freak grain elevator accident. Her “father” is murdered by his unstable wife after Tilly tells her what was what about her son’s so-called murder. In the final scenes Tilly after seeking and gaining revenge at the professional level gains final revenge by burning the town down. You figure out the genre and weird twists but don’t blame the fine performances by Ms. Winslet and Ms. Davis.    

“They Are Spoon-feeding Casanova To Make Him Feel More Secure”-Once Again The Legend-Slayer Cometh- Heath Leger’s “Casanova” (2005)- A Film Review-Of Sorts

“They Are Spoon-feeding Casanova To Make Him Feel More Secure”-Once Again The Legend-Slayer Cometh- Heath Leger’s “Casanova” (2005)- A Film Review-Of Sorts

By Will Bradley

Casanova, Heath Leger, 2005

This is a funny business, this film reviewing stuff that has been my entry into getting my feet wet in the on-line publishing industry now that I have a by-line. That by-line courtesy of the good work that Greg Green said I did in going mano a mano (my expression) with old-time film reviewer Seth Garth, yes, that Seth Garth that has garnered a handful of Press Globes on everything from film reviews to political reporting, on debunking the English private detective Sherlock Holmes. excuse me real name via my expose Larry Livermore, legend. I have been doing the same, have been building a solid reputation as a legend-killer with a bunch of other has-been legends. Here is the problem though every lonely hearts dingbat with time on his or her hands has been sending in requests about the to quote one of these geeks “real deal” on the likes of Snow White, Cinderella, the Wizard of Oz. Jesus, don’t these fools know the different between a real legend like say Johnny Cielo or Robin Hood and fairy tale characters. To the extent that these were innocent errors I will forgo further reprimanding but let it be known that I am Will Bradley the legend-killer not some sneak in the night disturber and disabuse of children’s dreams and fantasies.   

Now on to the real business of this review, a review of one Johnny Casanova, no, not the long-time and dare I say really legendary gangster, mob boss who ruled Trenton and its New Jersey environs for decades with an iron hand and a vast graveyard. No, this joker is the one reputed to be the great Italian lover back in the day, back in the 1700s. In short another one of those annoying cases where I have to pour through a million documents to burst some foolish balloon, some task I really should not have had to do.     

Excuse me but I am still burned up about those clowns who wanted to waste my time, my valuable time, theirs apparently not to them tthis hard fought for by-line without bringing down some very serious legends which I will in good time do to one John Casanova, or whatever his real name was. I almost lost my eyesight looking over the documents which proved that Sherlock Holmes was nothing but a London night pub crawler down at the waterfront with the tough sailor boys doing tricks. Had to go to the London Assizes for crying out loud to find that this Sherlock Holmes was some cad, some serious con man whose born name was Larry, or rather Lawrence Livermore, who was responsible for half the crimes committed against property in the greater London area during his reign of terror fronted by that Baker Street debauchery. Many people and you know how people are once they attach themselves to certain beliefs, to certain legends even after they have been scientifically debunked who will believe unto the end times about their heroes, refused to believe a man whom they had been spoon-fed to believe was a master criminal detective, smarter than Scotland Yard’s best although that might not be saying much was nothing but dross, a dung heap denizen. But some, and this is my sole purpose here beyond holding on to this by-line for dear life for de-fanging the legends, will read and listen and gain some worldly wisdom.       

Sherlock, excuse me, Larry, okay Lawrence Livermore, was just the tip of the iceberg, the beginning and in a certain way not the most famous legend snapped since it was pretty easy to get the goods on a famous scoundrel from the last hundred years or so. Going back in deep time, a time when all the records might not have survived is different. And that has been my trajectory ever since I got waylaid by debunking the Johnny Cielo legend. That one should have been easy since that was the case of the so-called famous early aviator whose main claim to fame beside the proven bogus claims that he was almost at Kitty Hawk when the deal went down there with manned flight was that he squired the eye candy 1940s actress Rita Hayworth around. Got her to go with him to Barranca down in Central America abandoning her movie career when he got run out town here. Later had the gall to have it put out that he was transporting guns and supplies to Fidel and the boys in the Sierra Madres. Said to have died in a plane crash in the Caribbean doing that heroic work. Baloney, he had some whore who looked like Rita on his arm who ran out on him when his money ran out and that plane crash was in the Gulf of Mexico when he was transporting well-fixed tourists from Naples in Florida to Key West.        

That nonsense made me swear off today’s legends as so much trade puffing and hubris so I have looked behind convent walls been heading back to the big ones from centuries ago. Guys like Robin Hood whose “rob the rich, give to the poor” was one of the greatest scams in history until I got a look at the church and estate records and found he gouged his tenants worse than old Prince John of dreams in Nottingham. Proved through the Spanish Inquisition records, those boys were nasty but they reveled in recording every moan and groan, that Don Juan, another great lover, was a figment of the imagination of one young rich heiress caught up in a convent a norm for young women of her class whose lies were echoed throughout the young women convent land that they had been ravished by this guy, who turned out to be some innocent some farm boy seen from behind convent walls. It did not, does not stop there. Despite my fondness for fellow reviewer Si Lannon and his well-kept and sorrowful secret about his mother’s heritage I had to expose Zorro as a blowhard and as an example of another kind of hysteria, mass hysteria among the peasantry when that is combined with no food, and no prospects. Tough work on that one.  

So now here we are with one Casanova. This will be a tough one to break because even the curators of a recent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston which young Sarah Lemoyne has reviewed in these pages got caught in the trap when they produced a yarn about the so-called age that Johnny boy lived in. And he wasn’t an artist or even had one painting to display although I hear that his brothers, if Casanova was his real name, were pretty good.

That is the crux of the matter. Naturally this film goes unabashedly along with the legend business, lets Casanova played by the late Heath Leger, run wild in convents and milady’s bedrooms and unquestioningly assumed that what he said he did was gospel true. Said and did via a doctored memoir of some 10,000 pages filled with more crap than any one person could shovel in a lifetime. Did what no “celebrity” today would dream of-selling his or her story on the low. Of course, the film would have done the producers no good financially if the Casanova legend was debunked and he was just some raggedy-assed quay bum working the dark canals for whatever passed his way. But sometimes a film plotline gives away more than it would think. 

The key here is the role played by Francesca, the so-called love of Johnny boy’s life, who was a writer, a proto-feminist writer which befits our time but would have been very advanced in her day. So advanced that she had to write under a male signature, moniker and go through hoops to get her works published. Not to speak of dodging the Inquisition which was still running full-bore although in Venice where most of the action in this propaganda film out of the Riefenstahl handbook takes place although they were being held back a little by the Doge and others who were covering for every kind of debauchery emanating from the emerging merchant class and its hangers-on.  

Francesca, no need to give her last name used in the film since that was a moniker too, as it turned out was the real creator of the Casanova legend, for good or evil. It seems from the Inquisition records, which I have noted are quite good and complete, Francesca admitted under the torturer’s thumb that she had been unhappy in love with one Billy Casanova, go figure, and in her desolate chambers had written the poor bastard up as a philanderer and debauchee. Worse had published the exploits which had developed a following among the plebeians assorted decadent nobility with time on their hands between wars. Before they hanged her from the yardarm or whatever their dastardly methods she refused to recant, refused to say that one of the things about Jimmy was that he was a poor lover in the bed department and so what we have is what she wrote. People will still believe this Casanova stuff but thinking people will know that they do so at their peril. Especially in these #MeToo days

How does that truth square with the film. Nowhere to be seen as our boy Johnny, Jimmy, Billy whatever he told anybody his name was cavorts with wenches, witches and wild novices not ready for the cloister. Makes him the gallant until he glams on Francesca who rightly dismisses him out of hand as a buffoon, braggard and a man with a small inconsequential member. From there on in his patently monogamous seeking only her love and attention. Our gallant even had made heroic gesture of seeking to take her place in the gallows but a clever ruse saved his ass. Some drunkard well met came through acting as a cardinal of dear Rome and proclaimed him free since it as the pontiff’s birthday. Too bad it could not have saved heroic Francesca who bravely went to her end event though smart young woman that she was would cause a serious delay in women’s liberation, in emancipation. And that ain’t no fairly-tale.    

From The American Songbook-Irene Dunne and Douglas Fairbank, Jr.’s “Joy Of Loving” (1938)-A Film Review

From The American Songbook-Irene Dunne and Douglas Fairbank, Jr.’s “Joy Of Loving” (1938)-A Film Review

  

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

Joy Of Loving, starring Irene Dunne, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., 1938 

I am a child of rock and roll, period. I was present at the creation, or close to it of the classic age of rock when Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee, Bully Holly, Bill Haley and a million other hungry for new music musicians came thundering out of the bland Cold War 1950s night and helped us break out of jail. While I have acquired tastes for other kinds of music like foundation blues and traditional folk I still to this day identify as a child or rock. Which is neither here nor there except in grabbing this film under review The Joy of Loving from Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon I noticed that the subject matter features a Broadway musical performer which is a very different part of the American Songbook that what has moved me musically over the years.

Of course the minute I (and some of my old-time high school friends) touch on the subject of musicals then I automatically think about the late Pete Markin who while also a child of rock and roll, maybe the child of rock and roll amongst the old crowd he was crazy for musicals, for the Cole Porter/Gershwins/Rodgers and Hammerstein and here Jerome Kern/Dorothy Fields segment of the American Songbook. Knew most of the lyric from the old shows that filtered into the popular culture by heart once he had seen the film version of Camelot back in the early 1960s and drove us crazy singing the title son and If Ever I Would Leave You until we almost ran him out of town. Broadway musical lyrics were not what drove a bunch of poor boy working-class corner boy kids to anything but serious doubts about a person’s, about Markin’s masculinity. Pete would have had a field day with reviewing this film and I wonder if he might have seen it back then at Mr. Cadger’s old long gone to condos Strand Theater where he would periodically do what are now called retrospectives of the old black and white films rather than first runs to cut down on expenses.

But so much for old touches. Let’s get to a look at what goes on here in this little sidebar musical about musicals. As usual in such vehicles the plotline is pretty thin, if existent. (The person I viewed it with kept asking me what the plot was, when it was going to develop.) Margaret, the role played by Irene Dunne, is a Broadway musical star who is apparently the greedy sole support of her entire extended stage-bound family (including a sister with two kids and a lightweight husband played by a young pre-I Love Lucy Lucille Ball). Despite making a ton of dough she is always behind due to said sponges and that has left her distraught despite her successes. Still her rags-to-riches success has made adamant about taking care of her kin.              

Enter one Dan, played by handsome Johnny Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. who one theater performance night tries to get to see her among the throngs. She thinking him a “masher” (quaint term) calls the coppers. Score one for Margaret. But Dan is smitten so he takes another stab at it on another night. Again thwarted but this time Margaret gets him in court and winds up as his “probation officer.” Naturally as such things go along the way Margaret’s interest in the lug (who turns out to the scion of a wealthy family) grows as she gets to know him. Know him and his idea that she should enjoy herself and dump that spongy family. The long and short of it is they get married but have tiff over that family business. Not to worry while Dan is heading to the great China seas, or claims to be, our girl sees the light and gives the family the old heave-ho. Thus the big number Kern/Fields song You Couldn’t Be Cuter is very apt for this little film.  Yeah Markin would have had a field day with this one.          

On The Anniversary - Celebrating the 1917 Russian Revolution For New October Revolutions!

On The Anniversary - Celebrating the 1917 Russian Revolution For New October Revolutions! Workers Vanguard No. 1123	1 December 2017

Celebrating the 1917 Russian Revolution

For New October Revolutions!

(Part One)

We print below the first part of a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at a November 4 forum in Chicago.

It is the 100th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution, the defining event of modern history and the greatest victory ever for working people. The proletariat, led by a Leninist vanguard party, smashed the bourgeois state and set up a workers state. I pondered what I could tell you in one hour—when after all, Leon Trotsky needed about 1,200 pages in his History of the Russian Revolution (1932). But if this talk encourages you to read or reread Trotsky’s History, then I will have accomplished something.

As the founder of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, put it:

“The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once and for all, took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality....

“The Russian revolution showed...how the workers’ revolution is to be made.... It showed in life what kind of a party the workers must have.”

— “Speech on the Russian Question” (1939), printed in Struggle for a Proletarian Party (1943)

The need for a revolutionary party will be one of the themes of this talk. During the course of the Russian Revolution, the multinational proletariat, drawing behind it the peasantry and the oppressed nationalities, forged its own new organs of class power, the soviets, or workers councils. With the smashing of the old capitalist state, these soviets, under Bolshevik leadership, formed the basis of the new workers state. The vanguard of the workers understood that they were not just taking power in Russia; they were opening the first chapter of international proletarian revolution. The Russian Revolution inspired workers uprisings throughout Europe and rebellions in the colonial countries.

The Soviet government expropriated the capitalists and landlords and repudiated totally the tsar’s massive debt to foreign bankers. It proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education, as the first steps to building a socialist society. Sounds good, doesn’t it?! The new workers state gave land to the peasants and self-determination—the right to their own independent state—to the many oppressed nations that had been ruled over by the hated tsar. I will speak some about the struggles V.I. Lenin waged to ensure the right of these nations to self-determination. The early Soviet government gave women in Russia an unprecedented level of equality and freedom.

Like many people, when I first came around the Spartacist League, I assumed that in a revolutionary situation all the left would get together and fight for socialist revolution. Comrades encouraged me to read about the Russian Revolution, which proves exactly the opposite. Believe me, if a group like the International Socialist Organization or Workers World has a reformist approach to pressuring the capitalist state now, then when the time comes, like the Mensheviks, they will wind up defending capitalism tooth and nail.

The bourgeoisie has always wanted to bury the October Revolution under a mountain of lies. There has been a bunch of articles in the press on the 100th anniversary. A few were interesting. Most were like, “Yikes, it was just a historical accident, let’s hope it never happens again.” But it happened because the socially organized productive forces of the planet had developed to the point where bourgeois private property forms and the bourgeois nation-states had become shackles on social progress. World War I marked the descent of the capitalist system into mass slaughter and barbaric destruction. It signaled that to free the planet’s productive forces from capitalist imperialism, proletarian revolution was necessary.

Capitalist imperialism is still caught in its fatal contradictions; it still creates a proletariat with the social power to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and it still creates the barbarism that we see around us. Under both capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans, U.S. imperialism has destroyed countries around the world. Much of the Near East is a bombed-out shell. Now Trump is threatening nuclear war against North Korea for their terrible crime of developing weapons to defend themselves. We call for the military defense of the North Korean and Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers states. It’s a good thing that North Korea is developing a credible nuclear deterrent. Without that, the U.S. would already have bombed them into oblivion.

Here at home, racist cop terror, union-busting, destruction of working people’s living standards, domestic surveillance and mass deportations continue apace under Trump as they did under Obama. Trump is not a fascist, but he has encouraged the fascist scum to come out of the woodwork. We all wish for there to be some hard class struggle in this country, and it will come—it is inevitable under capitalism. Our job is to make sure that there will be a party like Lenin’s in the right place at the right time. So this talk is not just about what happened in 1917 in Russia; it is also about the fight of the International Communist League to organize for new Octobers.

Russia’s Uneven and Combined Development

At this point I am going to discuss some of the background to the Russian Revolution and speak to why the first and, so far, only proletarian socialist revolution occurred in Russia. Russia was an acute example of what Trotsky called uneven and combined development. The country was ruled by a reactionary tsarist aristocracy presiding over a prison house of many oppressed nations. Seventy million Great Russians constituted the main mass of the country, but there were 90 million “outlanders.” So a majority of the country was oppressed nationalities. Barely 50 years out of serfdom, peasants made up some 85 percent of the population and lived in the most backward conditions imaginable. Ignorance and illiteracy were the norm. The ancient institutions of the traditional household and the communal village enforced a rigid patriarchal hierarchy and the degradation of women. Peasant women were beasts of burden; we have a picture in an article on “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women” of peasant women harnessed up like oxen to pull a river barge (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006).

But underdeveloped countries do not just mechanically go through every stage that the more developed countries went through: they jump over certain aspects while retaining many very backward elements. By 1914, massive investment from Europe had created a new urban proletariat (one-third women!) in large-scale, state-of-the-art industrial concentrations. The percentage of Russian workers employed in factories of more than 1,000 employees was higher than in Britain, Germany or the U.S. The late-emerging Russian bourgeoisie, subordinated to foreign capitalists and tied to the Russian aristocracy, knew that any mass upsurge against tsarism was bound to sweep them away, too.

It was in response to this uneven and combined development that Trotsky formulated his theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky projected that despite the economic backwardness of the country, the Russian proletariat could come to power before an extended period of capitalist development. Indeed, the workers would have to come to power if Russia were to be liberated from its feudal past because the weak and cowardly capitalists sure weren’t going to do it.

An essential aspect of Trotsky’s permanent revolution was, as he wrote in the August 1939 article “Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution” (also known as “Three Concepts”): “Only the victory of the proletariat in the West will shield Russia from bourgeois restoration and secure for her the possibility of bringing the socialist construction to its conclusion.” And that, of course, was and is the rub. With the delay of world revolution, particularly in the advanced industrial countries, the Stalinist bureaucracy usurped political power in the Soviet Union in 1923-24, and capitalism was eventually restored in 1991-92. I will make the point that the ICL defended the Soviet Union against capitalist counterrevolution to the bitter end, unlike most left groups.

Key to the Bolsheviks’ success in 1917 was the coming together of Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution with Lenin’s struggle to build a programmatically based vanguard party steeled against all manner of reconciliation with the capitalist order. The Bolshevik Party was cohered in the long years of struggle against the Mensheviks, who looked to the liberal bourgeoisie to overthrow tsarism.

World War I had a profound impact on Lenin’s thinking. In 1916, he wrote the book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which explained that imperialism is not a policy, but is the highest stage of capitalism. Imperialist wars to divide and redivide the world are inevitable under monopoly capitalism. World War I triggered the collapse of the Second “Socialist” International, which the Bolsheviks had considered themselves part of, when the vast majority of its affiliated parties lined up behind their own bourgeoisies’ war efforts. Lenin at first didn’t believe it when he heard that the German Social Democratic Party’s parliamentary group had unanimously voted to support the war. I guess he thought it was what today might be called “fake news.” But it was true.

Lenin concluded that the war had demonstrated that capitalism was in its final stage of decay. He maintained that the path to proletarian revolution was the transformation of the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war and that socialists in the imperialist centers must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state in the war. Lenin also concluded that a new, revolutionary international, the Third International, must be built on the hard programmatic Bolshevik model.

National Liberation Struggles and Socialist Revolution

If you look at Lenin’s writings during the years leading up to 1917, a lot of them deal with the need for a hard position against the imperialist war and against not only the overtly pro-war fake socialists but also against the centrists like Karl Kautsky who covered for them. A number of the articles deal with the national question.

Now, the ICL has just had an intense internal struggle against a longstanding perversion of Leninism on the national question, particularly in relation to oppressed nations like Quebec and Catalonia within multinational states. As the fight unfolded internationally, it exposed a number of examples of chauvinist positions in opposition to just national struggles of oppressed nations. To get a sense of how these represented a capitulation to the pressures of Anglophone imperialism, read “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 65, Summer 2017).

The point is that our old position went against Lenin’s very extensive writings on the national question. In his 1914 article, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Lenin outlined a very definite programmatic stance: “Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.”

This stance applied not only to colonies but also to countries forcibly retained within multinational states. Lenin wrote:

“The proletariat must struggle against the enforced retention of the oppressed nations within the bounds of the given state.... Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words...”

Further:

“On the other hand, the socialists of the oppressed nations must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organizational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in face of all manner of intrigues, treachery and trickery on the part of the bourgeoisie.”

— “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1916)

During the war years, Lenin waged a struggle against the advocates of what he called imperialist economism. The original Economists of whom he speaks in What Is To Be Done? (1902) thought that the economic struggle was everything and that there was no need to bother with political problems and struggle. The imperialist Economists thought that since imperialism had triumphed, there was no need to bother with the problems of political democracy and self-determination. These included various Polish Social Democrats whom Lenin denounced for thinking that “self-determination is impossible under capitalism and superfluous under socialism” (“A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism” [1916]).

Lenin adamantly disagreed with both these propositions. He wrote: “Socialist parties which did not show by all their activity, both now, during the revolution, and after its victory, that they would liberate the enslaved nations and build up relations with them on the basis of a free union…these parties would be betraying socialism” (“The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” emphasis added).

This position was key to making the Russian Revolution. Our old articles contained phrases like “getting the national question off the agenda,” which we often used as an excuse for not supporting struggles for national liberation. The Bolsheviks saw that national liberation struggles could be catalysts for socialist revolution and sought to unleash their revolutionary potential. National liberation can be a motor force for proletarian rule if the proletariat acquires communist consciousness and is led by a communist party.

Fighting national oppression is one of the things the Bolsheviks were known for, as well as their workers mobilizations against anti-Jewish pogroms by the fascistic Black Hundreds. We could certainly use some of these workers mobilizations against today’s fascists. As Lenin said in What Is To Be Done?, the party must be “the tribune of the people...able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression.”

The February Revolution

So by now you’re all saying, “Enough already, let’s get on with the revolution!” The February Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsarist monarchy was carried out overwhelmingly by the working class, with the peasants, organized in the army, also playing a key role. The spark was a demonstration by women workers demanding bread on February 23 (which is March 8 in the new calendar, International Women’s Day). It shows it’s a good thing for women to get out of the villages and have some social power as workers! Then on February 25 there was a general strike in Petrograd, followed by a mutiny in some army regiments.

What broke the back of the tsarist monarchy was that the army no longer wanted to fight, and whole units were abandoning the front or refusing to carry out orders. A powerful indication was when the Cossack regiments, who were considered very loyal to the tsar, refused to suppress a workers demonstration in Petrograd. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky relates:

“The officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the [Sampsonievsky] Prospect, galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. ‘Some of them smiled,’...‘and one of them gave the workers a good wink’.”

If the Cossacks were winking at the workers, the tsar was in trouble.

You have to realize how bloody and unpopular the war was. The ABC of Communism (1920) by Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky estimated that by 1918 the number of Russian soldiers killed in the war was eight million. And they remarked acidly, “If we assume the average weight of a soldier to be 150 lb., this means that between 1 August 1914, and 1 January 1918, the capitalists had brought to market twelve hundred million pounds of putrid human flesh.” Trotsky encapsulated the situation as follows: “‘Everything for the war!’ said the ministers, deputies, generals, journalists. ‘Yes,’ the soldier began to think in the trenches, ‘they are all ready to fight to the last drop...of my blood’.”

Trotsky’s History shows the quick tempo of events. February 23 International Women’s Day demo; February 25 general strike; police and state officials were sent packing and on February 27 the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was formed. The soviets, which had previously arisen in the 1905 Revolution, were revived in the February Revolution, but they now included soldiers, who were mainly peasants and who would otherwise have been difficult to organize. By February 28 the tsar’s ministers were arrested, and by March 2 the tsar had abdicated.

The paradox of the February Revolution was that while the autocracy and the tsar had been overthrown by the workers, the official government that emerged was bourgeois. Even as street fighting was raging in Petrograd on the night of February 27, a self-appointed Provisional Committee composed of bourgeois-monarchist politicians met in the Tauride Palace, behind the back of the popular revolution. They declared a Provisional Government aimed at erecting a constitutional monarchy.

Meanwhile, in another wing of the Tauride Palace, a “Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies” was being formed. The leadership of the Soviet was dominated by the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs). While the SRs were largely based on the peasantry, the Mensheviks represented urban petty-bourgeois layers and the more conservative and privileged workers. The program of the Mensheviks and SRs was that the bourgeoisie should lead and rule, and they desperately appealed to the bourgeois Provisional Government to take control.

Trotsky often quotes the left Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov, who was a leader of the Soviet in its early days and himself wrote a history of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution quotes Sukhanov as saying: “The Executive Committee [of the Soviet] was in a perfect position either to give the power to the bourgeois government, or not give it.” Further: “The power destined to replace tsarism must be only a bourgeois power.... Otherwise the uprising will not succeed and the revolution will collapse.”

That’s blunt! When I first read about this, I had trouble believing that any kind of so-called socialist, with the workers in ascendancy and soviets being set up, deliberately runs around the city looking for capitalist politicians to hand over power to. But let me tell you something: This has happened many times. From the abortive Chinese Revolution of the late 1920s to Spain in the 1930s to Greece in the late 1940s after World War II, promising revolutionary situations have been betrayed by latter-day Mensheviks and deliberately handed over to the bourgeois executioners time and time again. These reformists seriously do not believe that the working class can take and hold power.

The February Revolution thus resulted in a situation of dual power. That is, alongside the Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie, there stood the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. There was continual conflict between the Provisional Government and the soviets. Trotsky notes that one bourgeois politician complained: “The government, alas, has no real power; the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are in the hands of the Soviet. The simple fact is that the Provisional Government exists only so long as the Soviet permits it.” Dual power is unstable and can only be resolved either by revolution or counterrevolution.

Rearming the Bolshevik Party

Trotsky comments that the February Revolution was led by “conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.” The Bolsheviks were in the soviets, of course, but as a minority. The Bolsheviks were slow off the mark, with a leadership underground and dispersed—Lenin was in exile—and, in general, lagging behind the masses. The soviets in February were dominated by the SRs and Mensheviks, who maintained that the February Revolution had achieved the main task of overthrowing the monarchy, and now the task was to defend “democratic” Russia against German imperialism. In other words, upholding the war aims of the Russian bourgeoisie, the Mensheviks and SRs took positions similar to the pro-war German Social Democrats. During Lenin’s exile and particularly after the return of Joseph Stalin and Lev Kamenev, the Bolshevik leaders in Russia began to bend in the direction of the Mensheviks’ defensism, dropping Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism and even mooting the possibility of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks merging! Lenin in exile was trying desperately to get back to Russia and wrote in a furious March letter: “I would choose an immediate split with no matter whom in our party, rather than surrender to social-patriotism.”

When he finally arrived in Petrograd, Lenin climbed atop an armored car to address the cheering workers who had brought down the tsar. Lenin hailed them and, to the shock of the official pro-war Soviet welcoming committee, gave an internationalist salute to the German revolutionary Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht, who was in prison for opposing German militarism. “The hour is not far when, at the summons of our comrade Karl Liebknecht, the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters.... Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution).

Lenin went straight on to a Bolshevik meeting, where he gave a two-hour speech. The speech is not preserved, but the ever-present Sukhanov, who was allowed into this Bolshevik meeting by an overindulgent Kamenev, describes Lenin as saying: “‘We don’t need any parliamentary republic. We don’t need any bourgeois democracy. We don’t need any government except the soviet of workers’, soldiers’, and farmhands’ deputies!’” Sukhanov bleats: “I will never forget that thunderlike speech, startling and amazing not only to me, a heretic accidentally dropped in, but also to the faithful.”

This was the opening shot of Lenin’s fight to rearm the party. Lenin’s “April Theses,” which he fought for at the April party conference, included recognition that the seizure of power by the proletariat in Russia would place on the order of the day not only the democratic tasks but also socialist tasks. So now Lenin is sounding more like Trotsky on permanent revolution. As Trotsky noted in Lessons of October (1924): “The fundamental controversial question, around which everything else centered, was this: whether or not we should struggle for power; whether or not we should assume power.”

Lenin could win over the party because his program corresponded to the needs of the proletariat and peasantry. And because there was a proletarian base to the party that had been waiting—as Trotsky says in his History of the Russian Revolution, “gritting their teeth”—for Lenin or someone to put forward a revolutionary strategy for the seizure of power by the Soviets. Yet, at the same time, there was a conservative wing of the party. As Trotsky points out in Lessons of October, “A revolutionary party is subject to the pressure of other political forces.” The party’s power of resistance is weakened when it has to make political turns and it “becomes, or runs the risk of becoming, the indirect tool of other classes.” The most abrupt turn is when the question of armed insurrection against the bourgeoisie is on the agenda. We’ll see a second part of this fight right before the insurrection. After Lenin’s successful struggle to rearm the party, the Bolshevik Party began to raise its revolutionary program, and its influence spread like wildfire.

Not surprisingly, the fall of the tsarist monarchy in February had stimulated national movements among the oppressed nations of Russia. Trotsky wrote: “In this matter, however, we observe the same thing as in all other departments of the February regime: the official democracy, held in leash by its political dependence upon an imperialist bourgeoisie, was totally incapable of breaking the old fetters.” They sure weren’t going to relinquish, as Trotsky put it, “Ukrainian grain, Donetz coal, and the ores of Krivorog.” So, after February as before, Lenin kept hammering away on the right of self-determination for oppressed nations.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers Vanguard No. 1124	15 December 2017

Celebrating the 1917 Russian Revolution

For New October Revolutions!

(Part Two)

We print below the second part of a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at a November 4 forum in Chicago. Part One appeared in WV No. 1123 (1 December).

The first Provisional Government, which was established after the February Revolution, was brought down by the uproar over its pledge to continue the hated imperialist war. A new cabinet was formed on May 5. This time Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party and Menshevik leaders in the soviets (councils of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies that arose in the wake of the February Revolution) took ministerial posts, alongside the bourgeois Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, in the capitalist government. Trotsky later called this Russian coalition government “the greatest historical example of the Popular Front” (“The POUM and the Popular Front,” July 1936).

The popular front was the name that the Stalinists would use, starting in the 1930s, to designate their coalition government betrayals. In South Africa it’s called the Tripartite Alliance. Such class collaboration is not a tactic but the greatest betrayal! When a workers party enters a popular front with capitalist parties, whether in government or in opposition, it is a pledge by the traitorous working-class leaders that they will not violate the bourgeois order; in fact, they’ll defend it.

The mood in Petrograd was changing in favor of the Bolsheviks, who had a near majority in the factories. In early June when a demonstration called by the Bolsheviks was banned by the Menshevik/SR-led Soviet, the Bolsheviks stood down and called it off. The conciliationist Soviet leadership then called a demonstration on June 18, but to their horror the workers came out en masse under Bolshevik slogans, including: “Down with the offensive!” “All power to the soviets!” and “Down with the ten capitalist ministers!”

Trotsky was now back in Russia and, finally understanding the need for a hard Leninist party, was working closely with Lenin. In response to the coalition government, Lenin and Trotsky devised the slogan, “Down with the ten capitalist ministers!” It meant: break the coalition with the capitalists; the soviets should take all the power!

By early July, Petrograd was in semi-insurrection. Workers and soldiers infuriated by the coalition government, now led by Alexander Kerensky, were demanding “All power to the Soviet!” In his History of the Russian Revolution (1932), Trotsky vividly quotes an eyewitness who saw Victor Chernov, an SR minister, trying to speak to a crowd of workers and soldiers: “A husky worker shaking his fist in the face of the minister, shouted furiously: ‘Take the power, you son-of-a-bitch, when they give it to you’.”

But the conciliationists didn’t want the power! This is very different from the Bolsheviks. Speaking at the First Congress of Soviets in June 1917, Lenin called for a Soviet government and asserted: “According to the previous speaker...there was no political party in Russia expressing its readiness to assume full power. I reply: ‘Yes, there is. No party can refuse this, and our Party certainly doesn’t’” (“Speech on the Attitude Towards the Provisional Government,” 4 June 1917).

The Bolsheviks were worried that a July insurrection in the cities was premature, that it would not be backed by the peasantry, and thus it would be impossible for the workers to hold power. But after initially opposing the July demonstrations, the Bolshevik leadership decided that it was better to go with the masses and try to provide leadership and prevent a premature insurrection. The Bolshevik estimation was correct, and after the demonstrations, a period of severe repression followed. Bolsheviks were killed, Trotsky was arrested and Lenin went into hiding. The repression, however, did make clear to the workers the true nature of this popular-front government—that it was nothing other than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

While in hiding, Lenin devoted what he thought might be his last days to writing The State and Revolution. He argued that while the bourgeoisie uses lies to hide its dictatorship, the truth is that the state is not a neutral arbiter above classes. He defended Friedrich Engels’ understanding that the core of the state is armed bodies of men—the military, prisons and police—who hold a monopoly of violence over society. These instruments exist for the social domination by the ruling class—under capitalism, the rule of the bourgeoisie.

Lenin’s pamphlet codifies a central lesson of revolutionary struggle: that the proletariat cannot take over the bourgeois state to wield it in the interests of the working class. Rather, the proletariat must smash the old state machinery, create a new state and impose its own class rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat—to suppress and expropriate the capitalist exploiters. As you can see, this was not an abstract discussion but a part of an ongoing political debate. There was supposed to be a seventh chapter of The State and Revolution, but Lenin had to stop writing and go back to Petrograd to actually lead the revolution. As he noted in a postscript: “It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.”

By August, the bourgeoisie had realized that only a military coup could stop the revolution and called on the commander-in-chief of the army, General Kornilov, to crush the soviets. Kornilov was a monarchist general of the anti-Jewish “Black Hundred” type. Trotsky notes that Kornilov had the heart of a lion and the brain of a sheep. The conciliationist soviet tops were paralyzed in response to the counterrevolutionary offensive, but the masses rallied around the Bolshevik-organized united-front action that stopped Kornilov in his tracks.

Lenin was very clear:

“Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here, which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise and allow themselves to be carried away by the course of events.

“We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness.”

Lenin was also very clear on the war even though by this time the German army was approaching Petrograd: “We shall become defencists only after the transfer of power to the proletariat” (“To the Central Committee of the RSDLP,” 30 August 1917).

It is also worth noting that a victory for Kornilov would have meant not only a slaughter of the pro-Bolshevik masses, but would also have been fatal for many of the compromisers as well. The failed coup showed that bourgeois democracy, as represented by the Provisional Government, was not viable in the historical sense in Russia in 1917. The real choices were represented by the Bolsheviks on the one hand and Kornilov and the forces of military reaction on the other.

Toward the Seizure of Power

A crucial corner had been turned by the beginning of September. The masses were convinced that the old soviet misleaders were politically bankrupt and that only the Bolsheviks would take decisive action to end the war, stop capitalist sabotage of the economy and lead the soviets to power. The general staff of the army was no longer capable of mobilizing military units against revolutionary Petrograd. The countryside was aflame as returning peasant soldiers seized the landlords’ fields and torched their huge mansions. On September 4, Trotsky was released from prison, and by the 23rd he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.

The Bolsheviks finally had solid majorities in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets. Trotsky declared, “Long live the direct and open struggle for a revolutionary power throughout the country!” The bourgeoisie and the conciliationists tried some parliamentary diversions—the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament—but it was too late for that. The crucial upcoming event was the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which was very popular with the masses because it was sure to have a Bolshevik majority.

The first showdown in the Bolshevik leadership over the insurrection was the famous central committee meeting of October 10, where the insurrection was voted up ten votes to two—Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev voted against. As Trotsky wrote: “Whatever remains in the party that is irresolute, skeptical, conciliationist, capitulatory—in short Menshevik—all this rises to the surface in opposition to the insurrection” (Lessons of October, 1924). The resolution, as is typical of Lenin, starts with the international situation, that is, the ripening of world revolution; the insurrection in Russia is regarded as a link in the chain. The idea of having socialism in one country was not in anyone’s mind then, even Stalin’s.

Alexander Rabinowitch, in The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976), tells a funny story about this meeting which had to be held secretly because Lenin was still subject to arrest:

“By an ironic twist of fate the gathering was to be held in the apartment of the left Menshevik Sukhanov.... But on this occasion Sukhanov was not in attendance. His wife, Galina Flakserman, a Bolshevik activist since 1905...had offered...the use of the Sukhanov flat, should the need arise.”

Rabinowitch continues:

“For her part, Flakserman insured that her meddlesome husband would remain away on this historic night. ‘The weather is wretched, and you must promise not to try to make it all the way back home tonight,’ she had counseled solicitously as he departed for work early that morning.”

He must have been irritated to miss this meeting.

So, after this decisive resolution, the workers were arming, drilling, setting up the Red Guards. Workers at the weapons factories were funneling weapons directly to the Red Guards. But there were still differences in the leadership. There was another meeting on October 16, where Lenin again argued for insurrection and Kamenev and Zinoviev again voted against it. Then Kamenev and Zinoviev got a public statement printed in a non-Bolshevik newspaper opposing the insurrection. Lenin called them strikebreakers and demanded their expulsion from the party. Luckily for them, the revolution intervened. Stalin voted with Lenin for insurrection but defended Kamenev and Zinoviev and minimized the differences. He was keeping his options open in case the revolution didn’t come off.

A decisive step toward the seizure of power came when the Petrograd Soviet, at the behest of the Bolsheviks, invalidated an order by Kerensky to transfer two-thirds of the Petrograd garrison to the front. Trotsky noted:

“The moment when the regiments, upon the instructions of the [Soviet] Military Revolutionary Committee, refused to depart from the city, we had a victorious insurrection in the capital, only slightly screened at the top by the remnants of the bourgeois-democratic state forms. The insurrection of October 25 was only supplementary in character.”

—Lessons of October

The Seizure of Power

On October 24, Kerensky foolishly tried to shut down the Bolshevik newspaper. The Military Revolutionary Committee immediately sent a detachment to reopen it and also to start taking over the telephone exchange and other key centers. Even at this point Lenin was frustrated with the lack of progress of the insurrection and went in disguise to the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute to oversee preparations personally. One Bolshevik remembered that Lenin “paced around a small room at Smolny like a lion in a cage. He needed the Winter Palace at any cost: it remained the last gate on the road to workers’ power. V. I. scolded...he screamed...he was ready to shoot us” (Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power).

Kerensky, by the way, escaped in the safety of a diplomatic vehicle flying the American flag. He wound up here in the U.S., home to counterrevolutionary gusanos of all varieties, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. There he wrote and lectured about how to fight communism—something which he hadn’t done too well in life.

The cruiser Aurora was firing on the Winter Palace when the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened. Lenin got up and opened his speech with the famous sentence: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” The three-point agenda was: end the war, give land to the peasants and establish the socialist dictatorship. The Bolsheviks’ proclamations were punctuated by the steady boom of Red naval artillery directed against the government holdouts in the Winter Palace, which was finally taken.

As we’ve seen, the soviets by themselves do not settle the question of power. They can serve different programs and leaderships. As Trotsky wrote in Lessons of October, “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.” At the opening session of the Congress of Soviets, the Mensheviks and the right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries were enraged that the Bolsheviks had taken power and walked out. Trotsky basically said “Good riddance!”

Consistent with their opposition to the seizure of power, the right wing of the Bolshevik Party leadership around Zinoviev and Kamenev argued for a coalition government. They had to back down when it became clear that there was nobody to form a coalition with. Far from wanting to help run a workers state, the Mensheviks and SRs immediately started organizing a counterrevolutionary uprising against the Bolsheviks, which was quickly suppressed.

Let me state as a general rule that it is a bad idea to seek a coalition with those who are actively trying to overthrow the workers state and kill you all. This right wing of the Bolsheviks would re-emerge after Lenin’s death and the defeat of the German Revolution of 1923, when a bureaucratic caste began to coalesce around J.V. Stalin. But for now, another acute party crisis had been overcome. Some Left SRs finally did join the government, at least for a while.

I will briefly comment on the “constituent assembly” call and recommend to people our article in Spartacist ([English-language edition] No. 63, Winter 2012-13), “Why We Reject the ‘Constituent Assembly’ Demand.” This was a longtime Bolshevik demand, but the problem is that a constituent assembly is a bourgeois parliament. When it finally came into being after the revolution, it was counterrevolutionary. As we state in our article:

“The issues of permanent revolution and the constituent assembly are closely linked because the central question is what form of state will be able to accomplish the democratic tasks of the revolution: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or that of the proletariat?...

“Even after the essential concepts of the perspective of permanent revolution came to be accepted—by Trotsky in 1905, by Lenin in early 1917—the relationship between soviets and constituent assembly remained to be tested in real life. It was the experience of the October Revolution that led Lenin and Trotsky to support the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, despite their previous support for calls to convene it.”

The Revolutionary Regime

Besides proceeding on peace negotiations and land to the peasantry, a new revolutionary government of People’s Commissars was appointed, which over the next period moved forward with nationalizing the banks, restarting industry and laying the foundations of the new soviet state.

On November 15, the new Soviet government issued the “Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia,” putting forward the following principles: equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia, the right of self-determination up to secession and formation of a separate state, abolition of all national and religious privileges, and the free development of all national and ethnic groups inhabiting Russia. Trotsky comments in his History of the Russian Revolution:

“The bourgeoisie of the border nations entered the road of separatism in the autumn of 1917, not in a struggle against national oppression, but in a struggle against the advancing proletarian revolution. In the sum total, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations manifested no less hostility to the revolution than the Great Russian bourgeoisie.”

True enough, and certainly the local bourgeoisie of various border areas were willing lackeys of the imperialist powers, including of course the U.S., which tried to overturn the Russian Revolution. But this is why Lenin’s position on the national question spoke so powerfully to the working masses. What he wanted was a voluntary union of nations. Writing in December 1919 about the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Lenin said:

“Regarding it as beyond dispute for every Communist and for every politically-conscious worker that the closest alliance of all Soviet republics in their struggle against the menacing forces of world imperialism is essential, the R.C.P. [Russian Communist Party] maintains that the form of that alliance must be finally determined by the Ukrainian workers and labouring peasants themselves.”

— “Draft Resolution of the C.C., R.C.P.(B.) on Soviet Rule in the Ukraine”

The question of national divisions does not go away the day after the socialist revolution, but only in the more distant communist future. The idea that the national question was no longer an issue was defeated in the debate in 1919 over the Russian party program. Actually, it was another go-around with those who had proposed “imperialist economism” before the revolution (see Part One of this presentation).

The party program asserted not only that “the colonial and other nations which are oppressed, or whose rights are restricted, must be completely liberated and granted the right to secede.” It also emphasized that “the workers of those nations which under capitalism were oppressor nations must take exceptional care not to hurt the national sentiments of the oppressed nations...and must not only promote the actual equality, but also the development of the language and literature of the working people of the formerly oppressed nations so as to remove all traces of distrust and alienation inherited from the epoch of capitalism” (“Draft Programme of the R.C.P.[B.]”).

Indeed, Lenin’s last struggle was waged against the Great Russian chauvinist bullying of Georgian Communists by Stalin and others. This was part of the struggle against the developing Stalinist bureaucracy. As Trotsky said: “Whatever may be the further destiny of the Soviet Union—and it is still far from a quiet haven—the national policy of Lenin will find its place among the eternal treasures of mankind” (History of the Russian Revolution).

This talk cannot take up in any depth the question of the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Marxists have always understood that the material abundance necessary to uproot class society and its attendant oppressions can only come from the highest level of technology and science based on an internationally planned economy. The economic devastation and isolation of the Soviet workers state led to strong material pressures toward bureaucratization.

In the last years of his life, Lenin, often in alliance with Trotsky, waged a series of battles in the party against the political manifestations of the bureaucratic pressures. The Bolsheviks knew that socialism could only be built on a worldwide basis, and they fought to extend the revolution internationally, especially to the advanced capitalist economies of Europe. The idea that socialism could be built in a single country was a later perversion introduced as part of the justification for the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution.

Despite the triumph of the bureaucratic caste in 1924 and the consequent degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the central gains of the revolution—embodied in the overthrow of capitalist property relations and the establishment of a collectivized, planned economy—remained. We of the International Communist League stand on the heritage of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which fought against Stalin and the degeneration of the revolution. We stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack and all threats of capitalist counterrevolution, internal or external. At the same time, we understood that the bureaucratic caste at the top was a mortal threat to the continued existence of the workers state. We called for a proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy, restore workers democracy and pursue the fight for the international proletarian revolution.

The gains of the revolution were apparent, for example, in the material position of women. Despite the grim poverty of Russia at the time of the October Revolution, the young workers state implemented far-reaching measures of equality for women. The Soviet government established civil marriage and allowed for divorce at the request of either partner; all laws against homosexual acts and other consensual sexual activity were abolished.

As explained in a pamphlet, The Sexual Revolution in Russia (1923), by Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, the Bolshevik position was based on the following principle: “the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon.” This is light-years ahead of the consciousness of liberals and fake leftists today, like Socialist Alternative, who go ballistic over our defense of Roman Polanski, who has been persecuted for consensual sexual activity, and NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association), which advocates the right of consensual relationships between youth and older men.

One of the few recent good articles in the New York Times about the Russian Revolution was an August 12 piece by Kristen R. Ghodsee titled “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” It was mostly about East European countries, which became bureaucratically deformed workers states after World War II. The article stated: “A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women.” Some examples:

“Consider Ana Durcheva from Bulgaria.... Having lived her first 43 years under Communism, she often complained that the new free market hindered Bulgarians’ ability to develop healthy amorous relationships. ‘Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance,’ she said. ‘After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased’.”

From a 30-something working woman of Germany today speaking of her mother’s desire for grandchildren: “She doesn’t understand how much harder it is now—it was so easy for women [in East Germany] before the Wall fell,” referring to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “They had kindergartens and crèches, and they could take maternity leave and have their jobs held for them. I work contract to contract, and don’t have time to get pregnant.”

Another quote from researchers in Poland when it was still a workers state: “Even the best stimulation...will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.” Indeed! In fact, the most amazing thing about this article is that the New York Times actually published it.

“Left” Apostles of Counterrevolution

The destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism there in 1991-92 and in East Europe transformed the political landscape of the planet and threw proletarian consciousness backward. Capitalist counterrevolution triggered an unparalleled economic collapse throughout the former Soviet Union, with skyrocketing rates of poverty and disease. Internationally, with the destruction of the Soviet Union as a counterweight, the imperialists felt they had a free hand to project their military might.

We actively fought counterrevolution from East Germany to the Soviet Union itself. The Socialist Workers Party of Britain, then affiliated with the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S., was just the bluntest of the “left” cheerleaders for counterrevolution when they triumphantly proclaimed: “Communism has collapsed.... It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991).

Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin and big shot in the Democratic Socialists of America, has this to say about the Russian Revolution:

“One hundred years after Lenin’s sealed train arrived at Finland Station and set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags [really?!], the idea that we should return to this history for inspiration might sound absurd. But there was good reason that the Bolsheviks once called themselves ‘social democrats’.”

So Sunkara believes Leninism leads to Stalinism and wants to return to every rotten social-democratic position that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to fight against to make the Russian Revolution. Todd Chretien, ISO honcho, endorses the article with a few oh-so-polite caveats and says: “Today, like it or not, all of us socialists are on the same train, even if we might start out on different cars...and communication between compartments is flowing freely”—between what he calls the “healthy sections of the socialist left,” i.e., the reformists of various varieties.

Well, we Trotskyists of the ICL are not on their train. We don’t spend our days trying to refurbish the capitalist Democratic Party; we don’t support U.S. imperialism’s bloody wars around the world; and we don’t promote counterrevolution in those countries, like China or North Korea, where capitalist rule was overthrown. And our goal isn’t trying to reform the capitalist system.

During World War I, Rosa Luxemburg posited that the choices were socialism or barbarism. That’s true now, too. We know we have a long row to hoe and that we are a small international revolutionary Marxist propaganda group. We also know that the tide will again turn and that future workers revolutions will need the Bolshevik political arsenal. Their cadres must be educated in the experiences of the October Revolution. So that’s our job and no one else’s. To quote James Cannon, “We are, in fact, the party of the Russian revolution. We have been the people, and the only people, who have had the Russian revolution in their program and in their blood” (Struggle for a Proletarian Party [1943]).