Anat Kimchi, a 31-year-old Israeli-born doctoral candidate and scholar at the University of Maryland, wrote a paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2019 attempting to prove America’s criminal justice system was racist against “young black offenders” and “black drug offenders.”
While visiting Chicago over the weekend, Kimchi was ambushed and stabbed in the back and neck while walking near a homeless encampment at 401 South Wacker at around 3:35 p.m. Police said witnesses told them the assailant was a homeless “slim black male with long dreadlocks who wore a red bandana and a blue tank top,” CWB Chicago reported.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday that police know the man who fatally stabbed her and are “scouring the various homeless encampments downtown” to find him.
While speaking with CBS 2 Chicago, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown expressed bafflement that Kimchi would walk on such an “obscure route” which only leads to a freeway and an underpass with a homeless encampment.
Given her field, one can imagine she may have purposefully gone to the encampment to see first hand the horrible oppression that “white supremacist America” was subjecting these disadvantaged, underprivileged victims of white supremacy to due to no fault of their own.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that if/when the assailant is caught we’re going to learn he had a lengthy criminal record and rather than us finding an “overcharged victim of white supremacy” we’re going to find a criminally insane homeless man who was shown incredible leniency by what we’re told is our “systemically racist criminal justice system.”
Old Testament – Torah – Book of Proverbs – 5 – Living Bible Translation
Listen to me, my son! I know what I am saying; listen! Watch yourself, lest you be indiscreet and betray some vital information. For the lips of a prostitute are as sweet as honey, and smooth flattery is her stock-in-trade. But afterwards only a bitter conscience is left to you, sharp as a double-edged sword.
She leads you down to death and hell. For she does not know the path to life. She staggers down a crooked trail and doesn’t even realize where it leads. Young men, listen to me, and never forget what I’m about to say: Run from her! Don’t go near her house, lest you fall to her temptation and lose your honor, and give the remainder of your life to the cruel and merciless; lest strangers obtain your wealth, and you become a slave of foreigners. Lest afterwards you groan in anguish and in shame when syphilis consumes your body, and you say,
“Oh, if only I had listened! If only I had not demanded my own way! Oh, why wouldn’t I take advice? Why was I so stupid? For now I must face public disgrace.”
Drink from your own well, my son–be faithful and true to your wife. Why should you beget children with women of the street? Why share your children with those outside your home? Be happy, yes, rejoice in the wife of your youth. Let her breasts and tender embrace satisfy you. Let her love alone fill you with delight. Why delight yourself with prostitutes, embracing what isn’t yours? For God is closely watching you, and he weighs carefully everything you do.
…………………..
So, every time one is with a prostitute Yahweh is watching. Every time…
……………………..
Proverbs 7
I was looking out the window of my house one day and saw a simpleminded lad, a young man lacking common sense, walking at twilight down the street to the house of this wayward girl, a prostitute.
She approached him, saucy and pert, and dressed seductively. She was the brash, coarse type, seen often in the streets and markets, soliciting at every corner for men to be her lovers. She put her arms around him and kissed him, and with a saucy look she said, “I was just coming to look for you and here you are!
Come home with me, and I’ll fix you a wonderful dinner, and after that–well, my bed is spread with lovely, colored sheets of finest linen imported from Egypt, perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come on, let’s take our fill of love until morning, for my husband is away on a long trip. He has taken a wallet full of money with him and won’t return for several days.”
So she seduced him with her pretty speech, her coaxing and her wheedling, until he yielded to her. He couldn’t resist her flattery.
He followed her as an ox going to the butcher or as a stag that is trapped, waiting to be killed with an arrow through its heart. He was as a bird flying into a snare, not knowing the fate awaiting it there. Listen to me, young men, and not only listen but obey; don’t let your desires get out of hand; don’t let yourself think about her.
Don’t go near her; stay away from where she walks, lest she tempt you and seduce you. For she has been the ruin of multitudes–a vast host of men have been her victims. If you want to find the road to hell, look for her house.
Along with capitalism’s voluminous debt mountain a veritable avalanche of books on debt and the financial crisis has descended onto the market place. With almost four hundred pages of text, a further sixty of notes and a substantial bibliography, David Graeber’s book is an encyclopaedic attempt to situate today’s global debt crisis into the wider context of credit, indebtedness and obligation which he argues make up the web of human relations that exist in one form or another in all human societies.
Despite the title, this is not a history book. It is rather a treatise on how the existence of money — in both metallic and ‘virtual’ or tally accounting form — always undermines the basic ‘give and take’ that is the essence of any human community. Once someone’s debt to another becomes monetised, whatever form that money takes: whether cattle, nubile females, cowrie shells or silver coin, then danger lurks. From a simple “rearrangement of relations between people” one of the sides in the arrangement “becomes unequal when obliged to the other” and eventually “hierarchy takes hold”. When that happens tribute, debt peonage, slavery are the order of the day. It is a version of the money is the root of all evil proverb. And yes, you’ve guessed if you didn’t know already, David Graeber is an anarchist — an anarchist anthropologist at that. He’s also a Wobbly — or at any rate he’s in the modern version of the IWW and (in an online video) cheerily maintains that these days ‘most Wobblies are anarchists’. Maybe so. In any case the working class hardly feature in his narrative, much less the prospect of workers taking over industry and thereby establishing communism.
When it comes to communism it is the influence of Kropotkin that is far more in evidence. This is despite the fact that in his section on ‘Communism’ Graeber defines ‘communism’ as “any human relationship that operates on the principles of from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” Churlishly he refuses even here to acknowledge the words are those of Karl Marx. This is no accident. His intention is to replace materialism with moralism. This communist principle, he boldly asserts, “is the foundation of all human sociability” and as such is a “principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership” which means “that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some degree in any transaction — even commerce.” When it comes to ‘exchange’ (whether it be barter, simple commodity exchange or presumably full-blown capitalism, since Graeber does not distinguish one from the other) there is always a moral aspect in both sides of the relationship which the author now prefers to call ‘mutuality’. This moral aspect to any ‘deal’ can be anything from one-upmanship to saving face, keeping one’s word and maintaining integrity etc. The meaning becomes decidedly vague but he consistently argues that “any system of exchange is always necessarily founded on something else, something that is, in its social manifestation at least, is ultimately communism” (p.267).
David Graeber
As if this were not enough to destroy any vision of communism as a specific communal way of organising production to directly meet human needs, some of Graeber’s other remarks fly in the face of even (surely?) an anarchist vision of a classless society without private property. In fact Graeber specifically rejects the notion of what he calls ‘discrete societies’ (well, you would if communism is simply a timeless issue about morality) and makes some utterly daft assertions such as: “We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children.”(p.114) For Graeber there can be communism amongst the rich (when they help each other out) just as “communistic relations can easily start slipping into relations of hierarchical inequality…”. So, like the poor, like debt, like hierarchy, communism is always with us. It’s just a matter of teasing it out.
But if this is the essence of what Graeber has to say, why bother reading the book? It would be ungenerous not to acknowledge that his wide-ranging narrative, based on anthropological research, sociology, histories from near and far, plus anecdotes and even jokes, makes for a good, at times fascinating, read. In this sense it is recommendable. However, behind the chatty style there is a not-so-hidden agenda which is basically to sideline Marx and historical materialism. In the process Graeber manages to jettison any prospect of capitalism being superseded by a “new and higher social structure than was the case in the preceding forms of slavery, serfdom, etc” (Marx). This is not because the book is an ‘academic’ work rather than a political tract. It is the very heart of his overview of world history.
At first the argument appears innocuous enough even if he does set up a straw man in order to easily prove his point. Briefly, Graeber argues that economists always assume that money first arose from barter in its role as medium of exchange and this is how they explain the origins of ‘the market’. On the contrary, says the anthropologist, history shows that money first arose around 3000 BC as unit of account, or rather a record of ‘who owes what to whom’ in a complex web of debt and obligation in the ‘great agrarian empires’ of the Near East. The role of this ‘virtual money’ had little to do with exchange, was not based on coinage and only incidentally involved silver bars at the great grain storage sites of the temples. Coinage, he maintains, is indeed associated with the market which, far from being free from the state is indirectly created by states when rulers (kings) introduce coins in order to pay the armies they need for their imperialist aggrandisement they turn to as a way out of their debt crisis. This is not just a pot shot at Adam Smith and the modern capitalist myth of the free market (and of course at Marx, who is criticised in a footnote for tacitly agreeing with Smith), the argument that ‘virtual money came first’ (and indeed is always present in some from or other) is central to his interpretation of what capitalism is today.
For Graeber, who does not ask what is the basis of any particular society’s wealth, who does not see how the value produced by a minority of productive wage workers can support a much wider population, who in fact denies that wage labour is the basis of modern capitalism, who cannot see beyond merchant capital and does not take on board the function of money as capital nor how the credit system within capitalism differs from usury, history is an eternal cycle. Basically he portrays history as divided into alternating ages according to whether they are based on credit and virtual money or on bullion. “… while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace … in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal”. (p.213) Thus:
The Age of the First Agrarian Empires (3500-800 BC) characterised by periodic debt cancellations (at least for personal debt, not for trade) “in the face of a world plunged into chaos” secured the continued existence of the regimes. Followed by:
The Axial Age (800BC – 600AD), a time of commodity markets, born of war and typified by the decline or end of slavery and appearance of world religions (which were opposed to slavery and debt). Followed by:
The Middle Ages (600-1450AD) and the return to virtual credit money where, “However oppressed medieval serfs might have been, their plight was nothing compared with that of their Axial Age equivalents.” Followed by:
The Age of the Great Capitalist Empires (1450-1971) which “turned away from virtual currencies and credit economies and back to gold and silver” and brought with them a host of other nasty things which had been held at bay in the Middle Ages (“vast empires and professional armies, massive predatory warfare, untrammelled usury and debt peonage”) but also had some good sides, such as “scientific and philosophical activity”. The classification itself is part of Graeber’s refusal to acknowledge any significant difference between mercantile capitalism (based on profits derived from commodity exchange) which gave way to the domination of industrial capitalism (based on the production of commodities by wage labour).
In any case this era came to an end with Nixon’s floating of the dollar (which is roughly when we Marxists identify the return of capitalism’s cyclical crisis of profitability). This ushered in the present period or:
The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined. With little understanding of why Nixon was obliged to de-link the dollar from gold (he opts for “the need to pay for bombs” for the Vietnam War) Graeber argues that this opened up another age of the domination of ‘virtual money’. At the same time he tries to take on board the significance for US power in the world by the dollar being the world’s reserve currency, something he thinks began in 1971, not in 1944 when the greenback was made the standard by which all other currencies were fixed (albeit linked to gold). What happened in 1971 was that the rest of the world, with currencies still linked to the dollar, felt the immediate impact of the devalued US currency which doubled up as the currency of international trade. In any event, Graeber takes the present international financial crisis with its ballooning of government and state debt, unpaid credit card loans, the yet-to-be-written-off losses from financial speculation and banking black holes, as evidence of a return of the world to an age of virtual money where,
If history holds true, an age of virtual money should mean a movement away from war, empire-building, slavery and debt peonage (waged or otherwise), and toward the creation of some sort of overarching institutions, global in scale, to protect debtors.(p.368)
He admits that “What we have seen so far is the opposite.” But then, its early days yet … sooner or later, who knows? He leaves unsaid the obvious conclusion from his own historical overview: Maybe capitalism will save itself by a programme of wholesale debt forgiveness, as with the ancient Sumerians or the Hebrew Jubilee year of the Old Testament when every 50 years or so the land was returned to its original owners, debts were cancelled and slaves were freed. (Perhaps on 5 June we’ll see more than street parties on the streets of Britain.) Maybe the slate will be wiped clean, but apparently not before “capitalism — “or anyway, financial capitalism” — simply explodes”. Then we can start all over again, with debts and obligations mounting up on one side and the power over others that accrues to the creditors…
It’s not much to look forward to. Instead of the ‘end of history’ we have a never-ending cycle where the best we can hope for is that people be kind to one another in some sort of moral economy. Abolition of wage labour? It doesn’t matter. What matters is mutual aid, whether between employers and workers or between workers. Capitalist production having created the material basis for a classless society where production will directly meet human needs? Nonsense. There will always be exchange of some sort. In the face of the almost inescapable evidence that capitalism is a system in historical decline Graeber is unable to see a way out. At the end of the day his a-historical anthropological approach only reinforces his essential petty bourgeois anarchist outlook: ignore the fundamental robbery of the surplus value produced by wage labour and demand that human relations be placed on a fairer footing where debtors are protected.
This is the mind set of a radical reformist. (For Graeber is not just an academic, he has a track record as an activist, from campaigning for the abolition of Third World debt to his more recent infamous involvement in the Occupy Wall St movement.) In the right sort of circumstances radical reformism can be transformed into millenarianism: it’s not impossible to imagine a modern version of the Peasant’s Revolt sweeping the capitalist world, demanding cancellation of debts. But even if all personal debts were cancelled as in ancient times, this would simply exacerbate the capitalist crisis and bring even harsher wage cuts and austerity.
Moreover, Graeber does not understand that by far the largest part of the global ‘debt burden’: is in the form of a gargantuan mass of fictitious capital that has amassed since the freeing up of financial markets in the 1980s. The flight to finance is one of the consequences of the low rate of return (due to the falling rate of average profit) on capital invested in production. Once this fiction is destroyed the real crisis of capitalism will be even more acute than it is already.
And historically the ultimate solution of capitalism to its crisis of profitability is to devalue real capital values: in the last century this was done on a global scale through two World Wars. A universal debt amnesty is a utopian dream that would not put an end to the advance of the capitalist crisis. Ultimately this has earth-shattering implications.
Rather than waste effort demanding that capitalism reform itself, rather than watch capitalism descend into its own particular form of barbarism in the hope of a millenarian revolt to cancel debts, communists, as always, call for a conscious political act not simply to forgive debts but to overthrow the existing ruling class and with it the whole method of producing and distributing wealth.
Despite David Graeber’s scholarship and easy style what starts out as a good read gradually reveals itself as an underhand challenge to Marxism and any idea of working class revolution. Read it by all means but don’t expect to be any the wiser about how to get from capitalism to communism. https://archive.is/VfqZ2
Je fais tellement de courtes vidéos sur tellement de sujets que j’oublie que j’ai parfois fait la vidéo.
Un sujet peut me venir à l’esprit ou je vois quelque chose dans les nouvelles ou en ligne qui chatouille mon intérêt. Je recherche des images fixes ou des dessins avec une recherche en ligne. Si j’obtiens dix ou vingt images, je peux facilement créer un diaporama vidéo avec mouvement ou des effets intégrés avec un programme de montage vidéo peu coûteux. Je trouve une chanson ou une musique, ou, pour des raisons de droits d’auteur, le silence.
Oui, l’âge de l’accès facile et des copies parfaites m’a donné le droit de garder le silence.
Je faisais beaucoup de vidéos en janvier et février sur mon ordinateur de cuisine pendant que je cuisinais, rêvais ou regardais par la fenêtre arrière la lune qui se levait perpétuellement. Malheureusement, l’ordinateur a cessé de fonctionner. Le flux de ma sortie vidéo a été interrompu alors que je réfléchissais à un remplacement pour l’ordinateur du portail du foyer et utilisais un ordinateur portable pour communiquer désespérément avec le monde extérieur. (Eh bien, sauf quand je sortais et parlais avec des voisins ou des parents ou des descendants ou des antécédents mythiques ou… les animaux dans les arbres tout autour.)
Je me suis enregistré dans un endroit sur Reddit, je pense r/AnythingGoesPic, où j’ai mis beaucoup de vidéos au cours des derniers mois car je me suis rendu compte que je pouvais mettre des vidéos avec de la musique sur Reddit et qu’il ne semblait pas y avoir de censeur des droits d’auteur. Je continue d’expliquer à tous ceux qui écouteront, liront ou remarqueront des peintures murales – Lénine a aboli le droit d’auteur, Staline a rétabli le droit d’auteur.
Dois-je peindre un tableau ? Je pourrais. En fait, je l’ai peut-être déjà fait. Parfois, je me déplace si vite artistiquement, visuellement, verbalement et avec la vidéo que j’oublie ce que j’ai fait le matin après m’être réveillé après une sieste de deux heures à midi. Je commence la journée frais.
Mais, parfois, je trouve que les elfes semblent avoir terminé le travail que j’avais découpé pour moi.
Godzilla contre. Kong a rugi dans les salles le week-end dernier alors que le match tant attendu entre les deux bêtes mâles légendaires. Le film avait une action à couper le souffle et un spectacle à couper le souffle, mais cela m’a laissé me demander: est-ce le film dont nous, femmes et alliés, avons besoin en ce moment? Comment ce film fait-il avancer ou entraver les droits des femmes ?
Je me suis assis dans le théâtre, mon masque et mon écran facial fermement attachés à mon visage. Quelqu’un a toussé trois rangées – mais la chose la plus effrayante dans cet endroit n’était pas la menace de mourir de COVID. C’était le manque d’agenda intersectionnel féministe progressiste à l’écran alors que nous regardions un singe mâle et un lézard mâle se frapper. D’où viennent ces créatures ? Ont-ils des mères ? Cherchent-ils des partenaires ? La plupart des mâles de toutes les espèces ne se battent pas avec d’autres mâles de la même espèce. Pas dans ce film « Sifflet de chien ». Ni Sa Majesté King Kong ni Godzilla San ne semblent avoir d’organes génitaux. Les membres de la communauté Gay Bi Trans Lesbian Non-Binary prétendent que Godzilla est gay depuis des années si l’on additionne tous les indices dans les nombreuses œuvres de l’œuvre des stars.
Mais, malheureusement, quiconque recherche une intersectionnalité flagrante, ou même une alliance féministe nuancée, ce n’est pas ça.
C’était l’idée qui me traversait la tête pendant la dernière opportunité manquée de 160 millions de dollars de défendre les personnes trans et de lutter pour les corps opprimés du BIPOC en Amérique.
Avec autant de potentiel de messages sociaux directs sur des problèmes progressistes, Godzilla contre Kong n’a absolument pas réussi à explorer les réflexions de Godzilla sur les plus grandes injustices sociales de notre époque. Bien sûr, nous connaissons la position de Godzilla lorsqu’il s’agit de lutter pour le sort de la Terre, mais pourquoi n’avons-nous pas exploré son point de vue sur la pandémie, l’identité de genre, la rupture raciste du Royaume-Uni avec l’UE et le changement climatique ? L’histoire de Godzilla n’est-elle pas l’histoire d’une Mère Nature métaphorique perturbée et ramenant d’anciens monstres du temps des dinosaures ? Mais ce message est si subtil qu’il passe au-dessus de la majeure partie de la tête du public.
Sommes-nous juste censés nous asseoir et regarder deux hommes dans un match de boxe à Hong Kong ? Ne pouvons-nous pas aller sur des sites d’information et voir de vrais affrontements dans les rues de Hong Kong entre des manifestants masculins et féminins, des policiers et des civils pro-chinois. De vrais combats de poings.
Bien sûr, le réalisateur a ajouté une petite fille à laquelle les spectateurs peuvent s’identifier et une figure maternelle pour que l’enfant gagne toujours un échange verbal avec le blanc qui se trompe pour punir tous les hommes blancs du public pour leur privilège blanc. . D’accord, jusqu’à présent, mais c’est juste à côté de contrer le combat principal homme contre homme. N’avons-nous pas tous déjà vu ce film?
C’était déjà assez grave quand Kong n’a pas respecté les directives appropriées en matière de distanciation sociale lorsqu’il s’est attaqué à Godzilla, mais ce n’est pas ce qui m’a complètement sorti du film. Après avoir échappé aux griffes des humains, ma mâchoire est tombée alors que je regardais le réalisateur de Kong refuser d’utiliser son script comme plate-forme pour s’exprimer sur le contrôle des armes à feu.
Encore et encore, les monstres font face à des tirs d’armes d’assaut flétris et aucune conséquence n’est montrée. Le monstre traite les balles comme des piqûres d’épingles irritantes. Qu’est-ce que cela enseigne aux enfants dans le public. Que les armes à feu sont des jouets amusants. Cela normalise le meurtre de masse. Exactement ce que veulent les hommes, en particulier les hommes blancs meurtriers. C’est écrit dans le film ? Non. On montre souvent des femmes soldats et des autorités attaquant les créatures géantes.
Toute immersion était perdue pour moi car il était tout simplement incroyable que quelqu’un dans la position du réalisateur choisisse de garder le silence au lieu de dire la vérité au pouvoir. Juste un autre millionnaire hollywoodien qui refuse d’affronter le système capitaliste dominé par les hommes de l’impérialisme mondialiste.
Et puis, bien sûr, il y a toujours eu la question lancinante sans réponse de la sexualité de Godzilla. Certes, cela a été laissé entendre ici et là, regorgeant sous la surface de signes cryptiques, mais évidents pour ceux qui y prêtent attention (il est gay, soit dit en passant) mais jamais de réponse définitive. C’est plus que frustrant. Le public s’interrogeant, j’ai été obligé de crier haut et fort « GODZILLA EST GAY ! au théâtre pendant un moment calme où je pensais que le drame manquait.
Alors que Freud est certainement dépassé, on pourrait se demander pourquoi Godzilla et Sa Majesté King Kong se trouvaient tous les deux dans le célèbre quartier gay arc-en-ciel de Hong Kong. Était-ce un message plus subliminal adressé au public de la communauté gay friendly que Godzilla est une «reine»? Quelle autre réponse pourrait-il être?
Et dans un spectacle d’action de 2 heures, n’y a-t-il pas de place pour une scène de 20 minutes dans laquelle les personnages discutent de la suprématie blanche et des préjugés inconscients ? Tout au long du film, jamais Kong n’intervient et ne répond de son privilège d’avoir sa propre île. Par conséquent, il lui est incompréhensible que d’autres n’aient peut-être pas eu la tâche si facile, ce qui se manifeste clairement dans son traitement envers Godzilla. Je n’ai pas pu m’empêcher de penser à la montée de la haine anti-asiatique en regardant Kong frapper le célèbre lézard japonais.
En ce qui concerne l’action, tout est fait avec compétence. Le lézard crache du feu, tandis que le singe frappe des trucs. Mais alors que les deux détruisent la ville, j’ai remarqué un manque total de représentation du BIPOC parmi ceux écrasés sous les pieds de ces monstres. Doit-on continuer à blanchir une industrie blanche déjà austère?
La nature problématique du film s’étend même aux principaux choix de casting : les voix de Godzilla et Kong sont toutes deux générées numériquement pour être manifestement masculines et hétérosexuelles. Pourquoi n’ont-ils pas été exprimés par de vrais monstres géants ? Godzilla est asiatique. Ne pourraient-ils pas trouver un monstre asiatique gay sur une île indonésienne avec des lézards géants ? Où évitent-ils l’Indonésie à cause de l’islamisationphobie?
Au lieu de cela, un ingénieur du son masculin surpayé collecte un dépôt direct tandis que deux autres animaux asiatiques et africains parfaitement qualifiés sont sans emploi. Il est difficile de croire que je dois réellement en parler en 2021.
Je ne peux pas croire que je sois obligé d’écrire sur ce sujet douloureux après le stress de regarder le film, une fois au cinéma et trois fois sur HBO Max. . J’ai changé l’audio en espagnol sur HBO Max à la maison pour qu’il soit intersectionnel. Étrangement, les monstres grondaient et rugissaient de la même manière en anglais ou en espagnol. Ah bon? C’est l’impérialisme culturel anglophone. Godzilla devrait rugir en japonais. Son Magesty King Kong… Je ne sais pas quelle langue des mers du Sud il parlerait, le tamoul ou le cambodgien?
Alors que le film terminait sa 5e bagarre totale, je me suis demandé si les monstres représentés à l’écran en train de se déchirer n’auraient pas dû être nous à la place. J’ai pensé regarder ma montre-bracelet, mais je n’ai pas eu de montre-bracelet depuis une quinzaine d’années. Je n’osais pas sortir mon téléphone portable car il y avait deux huissiers costauds qui patrouillaient dans les allées pour vérifier les masques et dire aux gens de ne pas sortir de téléphone portable pour essayer de filmer le film. Alors j’ai sorti mon téléphone à la maison et fait un clip du film avec mon chat ; Je voulais combattre les suzerains capitalistes d’Hollywood. Nous avons battu les maisons de disques sur le front de la musique.
Regarder les titans combattre un mammifère contre un reptile et entendre les coups charnus des coups de poing de Kong, j’ai eu une révélation.
J’ai eu une pensée profonde et originale : les humains sont les vrais monstres. Lorsque je choisis de voir le film à travers cet objectif – comme une métaphore de toutes les lacunes du genre humain, le film devient quelque peu récupérable. Il peut être considéré comme une fable féministe intersectionnelle du triomphe de l’anarchisme sur l’autoritarisme. À la fin du générique, j’ai crié à tue-tête : « Fuck Stalinist China!
Le théâtre se vide. Je revérifie mon écran facial et me lève pour partir. Il y a un mauvais arrière-goût dans ma bouche, et ce n’est pas du pop-corn ou de l’énorme boîte de Good and Plenty qui coûte cinq dollars.
C’est d’après ce dont je viens d’être témoin : un film qui n’a pas du tout fait avancer l’agenda. Un film du mauvais côté de l’histoire. Un film dans lequel deux monstres masculins géants se sont frappés pour «divertir» et «distraire» un public de la superstructure de la suprématie blanche tout autour de nous. Où étaient les voix des communautés marginalisées de couleur ou de genre ou sans genre du tout ? Où étaient-ils? Pas sur l’écran de cinéma devant lequel je me suis assis. J’allais réclamer mon argent. Je me suis retourné en me levant en écoutant mes pieds coller au sol du théâtre et j’ai récupéré mon manteau.
J’ai regardé derrière moi pour voir un groupe d’hommes blancs applaudir, ayant apprécié le film.
Bien sûr, ce sont des hommes blancs, pensai-je. Ce film est fait pour eux.
A group called the Breatharians claims to have the answer to this worldwide dilemma of “what’s for dinner” and to other food-related diseases: stop eating. Or rather, live off prana, which is a Sanskrit word that translates to “life air” or “life force.” (Click here to learn more about prana in the Vedas, the sacred texts of Hinduism). The concept of prana appears in many other traditions. China, Japan and Polynesia all have their own words for this sustaining life force.
Breatharians believe that a person can give up food and water altogether and live purely off prana, which they also call “living on light” or “living on air.” Foremost Breatharian, Jasmuheen, formerly Ellen Greve, is credited with starting today’s Breatharian movement. Her Prana Program advises followers to convert to Breatharianism gradually: Become a vegetarian; become a vegan; move to raw foods, then fruits, then liquids and finally prana. You replace physical food with air and light as well as metaphysical nourishment.
Fasting is a spiritually important aspect of most major religions, including Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Mahatma Gandhi, the famed spiritual and political leader and humanitarian, referred to a complete fast as “the truest prayer.” He conducted fasts throughout his life for religious and political reasons. The main difference between fasting and the Breatharian approach to food is that fasting has an end point. Breatharianism is a total fast for life — that is, however long you live.
Jasmuheen claims she’s lived for years without nourishment, although she admits to having mouthfuls of food for taste every once in a while. But Breatharianism has taken the lives of some of its followers. Verity Linn, a 49-year-old woman, was found dead in a remote part of Scotland after attempting the Breatharian conversion. Timo Degen, a kindergarten teacher, tried the Breatharian plan and slipped into a coma. Degen recovered after four weeks of IV drips, only to die a short while later [source: The Sunday Times via Rick Ross].
Lani Morris kept a diary throughout her time as a Breatharian. Morris, a mother of nine, died with symptoms of pneumonia, severe dehydration, kidney failure and the effects of a severe stroke. She was in the care of two Breatharians, Jim and Eugenia Pesnak [source: The Australian via Rick Ross]. Morris was isolated and had the understanding that she would be given orange juice after one week and nothing at all for two weeks after that. She indicated in her diary that she dreamed of food. She lost the use of her legs, became incontinent and began coughing up a black, sticky fluid. The Pesnaks claimed that they did not know Morris was seriously ill until it was too late.
Next, we’ll examine what happens to a person who stops eating completely and why the Breatharian plan can be a dangerous path to enlightenment.
Le ciel était gris et l’air était frais. J’ai marché sur Ashmont Hill avec un sac à dos noir chargé de papier. J’avais du papier à dessin, des crayons, des crayons et des stylos. J’avais une vingtaine d’anciens numéros de Workers Vanguard. J’avais un jour de congé et j’allais au centre-ville pour prendre quelques photos de Workers Vanguard dans des boîtes à journaux.
J’ai souvent été au centre-ville de Boston ces derniers temps. Les travailleurs de sept hôtels sont en grève et j’ai marché avec eux et j’ai levé le poing en l’air. J’ai également distribué Workers Vanguard et parlé aux travailleurs du journal et de la grève. J’ai également apporté quelques anciens numéros de Workers Vanguard. J’ai pris le métro jusqu’à Boston avec un bloc-notes sur mes genoux pour copier un dessin de « The Cask of Amontillado ». Dans la cave tapissée de briques, deux hommes font face à un mur empilé d’ossements.
En feuilletant les histoires quelque peu jaunies, j’ai remarqué que les problèmes remontaient tous à environ 2011 à 2012. Je suppose que je les ai laissés sur une étagère isolée. J’essaie généralement de transmettre les numéros de Workers Vanguard afin que le plus de personnes possible puissent voir le journal. J’ai eu envie de simplement jeter les vieux papiers dans la corbeille. Qui veut les papiers d’hier ? Mais… chaque numéro de Workers Vanguard pourrait être un éveil intellectuel pour la bonne personne. Il y a des années, quelqu’un m’a donné un numéro de Workers Vanguard qui contenait un article sur le conflit en Irlande du Nord. J’ai lu le long article d’une seule traite, puis j’ai relu le long article.
Le lendemain matin, j’ai posté un abonnement à Workers Vanguard. Donc, je connais le pouvoir qu’un article bien écrit dans un journal révolutionnaire peut avoir. Il y a des années, j’avais côtoyé le Socialist Workers Party qui avait un journal intitulé “The Militant”. Les spartakistes ne s’opposaient pas aux centrales nucléaires. Mais, vers la mi-vingtaine, j’ai commencé à rencontrer des gens qui expliquaient les idées spartakistes avec plus de sympathie. Une des personnes avec qui j’ai parlé politique m’a donné la copie de Workers Vanguard avec les idées sur l’Irlande du Nord. Après avoir lu cela, j’ai sympathisé avec les Spartakists et Workers Vanguard, et non avec le SWP et The Militant.
Je dessinais soigneusement le sol en pavés de la cave que Poe a décrit dans le Cask of Amontillado. Brique par brique, le mur se courbait alors que je passais du clair au sombre alors que le train passait de la lumière grise du jour au tunnel souterrain et à l’obscurité à travers les vitres. Il y avait beaucoup de place dans le train en milieu de matinée. J’avais trois sièges pour moi. Je dessinais avec un crayon mécanique à mine épaisse.
Les lignes n’étaient pas lourdes, mais je pouvais scanner le dessin plus tard et épaissir les lignes. Quand je suis allé aux piquets de grève hier à l’hôtel Westin Copley en face de la bibliothèque, la ligne avait l’air assez grande avec plus de vingt ou trente personnes encerclant avec des pancartes et frappant des seaux oranges de cinq gallons en rythme. Ils n’ont fait aucune tentative pour arrêter les voitures qui roulaient jusqu’à la porte d’entrée sur une rampe. Les grévistes se séparèrent poliment alors que leur ligne de piquetage était franchie.
J’ai trouvé une boîte à journaux avec une vitrine en plexiglas juste devant l’entrée de la bibliothèque sur Boylston Street. J’ai glissé mon doigt pour desserrer le clip en plastique qui maintient le papier serré et j’ai mis un papier Workers Vanguard à afficher.
J’ai marché dans la rue devant les différentes personnes devant le bureau de vote du jour de l’élection installé dans la bibliothèque publique de Boston. Un groupe de trois personnes tenait des pancartes préconisant un vote « oui » sur la question n° 3 protégeant les droits des transgenres. Un homme seul se tenait avec une pancarte “Charlie Baker” encourageant le gouverneur républicain de l’État à être réélu.
Un groupe de sans-abri à l’air rugueux était assis sur un rebord près de l’entrée du métro de la Ligne verte. À côté de l’entrée du métro, près d’un abribus, il y avait environ quatre boîtes à journaux en plastique avec des vitrines. J’ai exposé trois autres avant-gardes ouvrières. Il y a un certain nombre de stands de nourriture à Copley Square et je suis passé devant des boîtes de journaux sur le côté. Certains disent que Trinity Church, à Copley Square, est le plus beau bâtiment de Boston.
Un de mes amis militants socialistes a dit qu’il aimait le bâtiment moderne derrière l’église. J’ai marché dans la rue devant le bâtiment au 500 Boylston. Un critique d’architecture a déclaré que le bâtiment ressemblait à “un décor d’opéra” lorsqu’il a été construit il y a quelques années. Je pense que le processus de vieillissement a ajouté un peu de gravité au bâtiment et cela ne ressemble plus à une construction de scène.
J’ai mis des papiers dans les cartons à Arlington Street Station.
Il m’est arrivé de sortir un numéro sur les droits des homosexuels lorsque j’utilisais la boîte de nouvelles de Bay Windows. Bay Windows est une publication hebdomadaire gay.
J’ai regardé les jardins publics et les couleurs d’automne sur les arbres. Les photos que j’ai trouvées sur Google Maps pour illustrer cette pièce proviennent d’une chaude journée ensoleillée. Aujourd’hui était une journée grise et froide. J’avais une capuche et des gants pour me réchauffer avec ma veste zippée jusqu’en haut.
Descendre Boylston Street était agréable. Comme c’est agréable d’être en ville avec le temps de simplement se promener le long du trottoir à la recherche de boîtes de journaux gratuites.
Je suis passé devant la statue d’Edgar Poe et un magasin de curiosités sur Boylston Street en face de Boston Common. J’ai pensé prendre une photo de la statue de Poe, mais ma batterie était morte plus tôt. J’ai vu une petite fille d’une dizaine d’années prendre des photos de la statue avec sa famille debout. Elle s’accroupit et obtint un gros plan du corbeau.
Dans mon sac à dos, sur mon bloc-notes, se trouvait le dessin d’une des histoires de Poe. Et le voilà dans la rue en métal. L’homme est mort alors qu’il était dans la quarantaine il y a plus de cent cinquante ans. Poe est né à Boston, et une partie de lui vit toujours dans les rues de Boston. Je me suis attardé à regarder dans la vitrine du magasin de curiosités. Je n’ose pas entrer, ou je serais tenté d’acheter quelque chose. J’ai déjà assez de bibelots chez moi. Plus qu’assez. J’ai un faux Corbeau pour me rappeler le poème de Poe.
À l’extérieur de la loge maçonnique, j’ai mis des avant-gardes ouvrières pour illuminer les illuminati.
Est-ce que quelque chose au Québec serait assez ésotérique pour eux ?
J’ai descendu Tremont Street puis Avery Street pour voir les grévistes à l’hôtel Ritz-Carlton. Il y avait un groupe d’une douzaine de piqueteurs qui marchaient avec des pancartes et tapaient du tambour. J’avais rejoint cette ligne hier. Je n’avais pas de papiers en cours à leur proposer aujourd’hui.
Je suis allé au coin de la rue pour regarder la ligne de piquetage des grévistes devant l’hôtel ‘W’ Marriott sur Stuart Street. J’avais une «carte-cadeau» pour le restaurant Panera Bread et j’ai trouvé les tables près de la fenêtre avec une vue magnifique sur la rue et les grévistes.
En mangeant, j’ai lu le rapport de Workers Vanguard sur la grève des travailleurs de l’hôtel. L’article soulignait que les grévistes n’essayaient pas d’empêcher les livraisons ou les gens de traverser les lignes de piquetage. Les grévistes et leurs dirigeants comptent sur la sympathie du public. Bonne chance avec ça. J’ai pensé à la nouvelle de Poe « L’homme de la foule ». Dans le conte, un homme est assis dans un restaurant à Londres et regarde la foule passer dehors, notant les différents personnages et imaginant leur histoire. Il aperçoit un étrange petit homme avec un regard rusé vers lui. Sur une impulsion, le narrateur quitte le restaurant et suit l’homme alors qu’il traverse Londres pendant plusieurs heures. Le petit homme aux cheveux noirs et raides d’une soixantaine d’années semble s’intégrer partout et s’adresse à toutes sortes de personnes, de la classe supérieure et des plus modestes.
J’ai d’abord lu cette histoire à l’université sur la recommandation d’un professeur marxiste dont je me souviens avoir dit que Londres était le personnage. Je me suis interrogé sur l’histoire et je suis retourné au travail plusieurs fois au fil des ans. Qui est le petit vieux qui parcourt la ville et semble passer sans qu’on s’en aperçoive ? En décrivant l’homme, le narrateur « décrit un ensemble de caractéristiques contradictoires : « il s’élevait confusément et paradoxalement dans mon esprit, les idées d’un vaste pouvoir mental, de prudence, de misère, d’avarice, de sang-froid, de méchanceté, de sang. soif, de triomphe, de gaieté, de terreur excessive, d’intense – de suprême désespoir ».
L’habillement de l’homme est également contradictoire : son linge est sale mais « d’une belle texture », et à travers une déchirure de son manteau, le narrateur aperçoit un diamant et un poignard. d’un sur mon téléphone. Mais, on m’a empêché d’aller à l’hôtel de ville de Boston hier parce que j’avais un couteau à ma ceinture. Après avoir réfléchi à l’histoire de Poe pendant de nombreuses années, je me suis soudain rendu compte que j’étais comme le personnage de “L’homme de la foule”. Glisser au travers. Pendant que je mangeais et lisais, j’ai regardé la ligne de piquetage de l’autre côté de la rue alors que les panneaux se déplaçaient en cercle et que les tambours battaient. J’ai pris une photo il y a quelques semaines qui a été présentée dans Workers Vanguard.
Je descends Washington Street avec mon briquet de sac à dos. Je suis passé par Caffe Nero où j’ai eu une conversation agréable et un café après une vente de Workers Vanguard aux travailleurs hospitaliers qui avaient été en grève. Je me souviens des étranges meubles dépareillés de l’endroit qui m’ont donné un sentiment d’intimité.
À Downtown Crossing, il y avait quelques boîtes de journaux gratuites, et j’en ai sorti d’autres.
J’ai descendu le centre commercial piétonnier de Washington Street en pensant au moment où j’avais vendu The Militant devant l’ancien grand magasin Filene. Mon père y travaillait et il était l’une des seules personnes à m’avoir acheté le journal il y a toutes ces années.
De l’autre côté du bâtiment, il y a maintenant un ensemble d'”escaliers vers nulle part” sur lesquels les gens peuvent s’asseoir. J’avais l’habitude de distribuer des tracts aux ouvriers du textile en grève en dehors de Filene il y a des décennies. Il y a environ un an, après une manifestation antifasciste à Boston Common, je me suis assis pour parler avec mon ami Rod avec qui j’avais l’habitude de distribuer les tracts de boycott il y a toutes ces années. Nous avons beaucoup parlé de Trotsky et de la lutte de classe révolutionnaire à l’époque, et il est toujours une personne intéressante à qui parler. C’est lui qui m’a donné mon premier exemplaire de Workers Vanguard. Quand je lui disais que je soutenais le Socialist Workers Party et The Militant, il disait : « Non, vous avez l’air d’un Spartaciste qui lit Workers Vanguard. » Il avait raison.
Quelques marches plus loin, il y avait quelques dernières boîtes de nouvelles pour mettre des papiers à côté de l’église où David Duke a prononcé un discours en 1991. Workers Vanguard et les Spartacists ont organisé un grand rassemblement pour s’opposer à Duke et à son message ” Klan in a Suit ” . Je faisais partie de l’équipe de défense des travailleurs qui a assuré la sécurité du rassemblement.
Aujourd’hui, j’étais au même endroit en train de mettre un journal avec des idées centrées sur la classe ouvrière dans des boîtes à journaux en plastique. C’est ici que je suis à court de papiers. Un journal vieux de sept ans, et le titre pourrait dater d’hier.
J’ai regardé de l’autre côté de la rue vers la librairie Old Corner, qui ne vend plus de livres, et j’ai pensé à tous les auteurs célèbres qui s’étaient arrêtés à cet endroit dans un passé lointain. Au 19e siècle, des gens comme Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens avaient affaire avec le libraire et l’éditeur qui s’y trouvaient. Cet endroit était également le site de la maison d’Anne Hutchinson qui a été expulsée de Boston en 1638 pour avoir parlé de religion alors que les femmes devaient se taire.
De l’autre côté de School Street, il y a des sculptures pour commémorer la famine irlandaise du 19ème siècle. Beaucoup d’Irlandais se sont retrouvés à Boston à cause des mauvaises conditions en Irlande.
Mes papiers étaient partis et tout ce que j’avais dans mon sac à dos était mon papier à dessin, mon tableau à pince, mes crayons et mon crayon. J’étais prêt à rentrer chez moi sur la ligne rouge et à dessiner en chemin. J’espère que quelqu’un qui cherche des réponses tombe sur l’un de mes messages dans une bouteille. Dans les rues de Boston, Poe a le dernier mot, parlant de mauvais hôtels…
In January 15, 1919, the revolutionary leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood by a gang of right-wing army officers. Their killings came after the crushing of the January Uprising in Berlin, and enjoyed the tacit approval of leading members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which had taken power only weeks earlier. Sending shockwaves across Germany, their deaths went down in history as a decisive turning point in the postwar wave of popular uprisings — snuffing out hopes of socialism spreading across the rest of Europe.
January 19, 1953: A communist march in East Berlin to commemorate the deaths of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, cofounders of Germany’s Spartacist League.
A wide array of forces supported the counterrevolution — but the mastermind behind the killing was Waldemar Pabst, a first general staff officer in the German Army. A proud monarchist and nationalist and a bitter opponent of democracy and socialism, his career embodied all that was rotten about the imperial Germany striving to defend itself against the advancing revolution. But his influence also extended deeper into German history — showing the lineages of German nationalism and militarism in the postwar West German state.
Weathering the “Storm of Steel”
Waldemar Pabst was a man with a monstrous biography, whose influence on the politics of the first third of the twentieth century went underestimated for decades. First and foremost, he was a representative of the rising bourgeoisie in the semi-absolutist German Empire, or Kaiserreich. Only becoming a united country in 1871 under the leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, in the late nineteenth century, Germany was desperate to make up for lost time and claim its “place in the sun” among the other European powers. Eager to prove himself, Pabst enthusiastically subjected himself to the inhumane training regimen of the cadet academy and began to rise up the ranks.
Already an officer when World War I began in August 1914, Pabst saw the war as an excellent opportunity to assert himself as a loyal and successful member of the Prussian military caste. The “Storm of Steel” (as his fellow nationalist Ernst Jünger once called it) unleashed by German imperialism, resulting in the first industrial-scale massacre on European soil, would end only in November 1918. And it resulted not in victory, but in defeat on the Western Front and revolutionary tumult at home.
This seemingly cataclysmic event brought with it the downfall of Pabst’s beloved Kaiser, his army — and his entire world. In response, Pabst organized the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division — an elite division of the imperial army — into a highly aggressive, proto-fascist Freikorps. The Freikorps were armed squadrons of decommissioned soldiers who blamed socialists, trade-unionists, and Jews for Germany’s defeat and sought to restore the imperial order. Rising to the top of such an important reactionary force, Pabst had turned himself into a commander of the German counterrevolution.
The SPD’s Ally
Pabst was a small, vain man with a personal ax to grind: the revolution of November 1918 had thwarted his own promotion to major. But his continued rise would have been unthinkable without the help of the leading men of the SPD.
The party’s turn into a counterrevolutionary force had matured even before the outbreak of World War I. Indeed, by 1913 at the latest, the leading functionaries of the trade unions and the SPD had abandoned internationalism and become willing aides to Germany’s expansionist war policies, promoted by the big bourgeoisie, the cartels, the oligopoly, and the military. Their desire to shake off their stigmatization as “scoundrels without a Fatherland” by proving their fierce patriotism — a precondition for securing their positions within this rising great power — aligned with authoritarian fixations inherited from the Prussian tradition.
The most fitting example of this trend was the encounter between Pabst and SPD man Gustav Noske, who became the new civilian commander in chief after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Their cooperation as the “executive duo” of the counterrevolutionary pact between the SPD executive and the Supreme Army Command was based on similar fixations.
Pabst and Noske were also responsible for introducing terror into German domestic politics in March 1919, building on previous developments in imperial Germany’s war policy. Unhindered by liberal or Enlightenment developments, Prussian militarism had early on established a style of war geared toward annihilation, first apparent in the genocide of the Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia. This approach was then unleashed in World War I with massacres against the Belgian civilian population — and after the revolution, it was turned against even former soldiers returning to Germany.
Indeed, those ex-soldiers who joined the uprising were no longer “comrades,” but excluded from the German ethnic community known as the Volksgemeinschaft, just like other “races.” This meant, in principle, that their leaders could be shot without a problem. Beginning in 1919, in response to the failed January Uprising in Berlin, leading Social Democrats also participated in this kind of exclusion, as the SPD-led government was equally convinced that the rules of war no longer applied. No one did more to advance this attitude than Waldemar Pabst and Gustav Noske, now serving as defense minister, with their terror orders of March 1919.
As in January, when Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed, the SPD-led government and its military backers launched a full-scale offensive against a wave of renewed strike activity. Soldiers obliterated the last remaining armed workers’ brigades created during the revolution and pursued them into their strongholds. In Berlin, they even resorted to firing artillery and conducting air raids in working-class neighborhoods to flush out what was left of the resistance. More than a thousand died — most of them innocent civilians.
Pabst was the initiator of the massacre — the policy of annihilation targeting the lower classes — but he could only pull it off because he had found in Noske a commander who thought and felt the same way. Noske, in turn, had the support of the SPD executives, particularly Friedrich Ebert, Wolfgang Heine, and Gustav Bauer, behind whom stood other SPD bureaucrats eager to get in on the action. When Noske spoke in parliament and repeated the Prussian military dictum that “necessity knows no law” — underlining his illegal operation with the remark that “articles count for nothing, the only thing that counts is success” — the minutes of the session noted thunderous applause from both Social Democrats and the Right.
A War of Annihilation
Noske, who helped the perpetrators avoid justice before the courts even years after the massacres, applied Pabst’s war-of-annihilation principle without hesitation. He deployed it against sailors, workers, soldiers, intellectuals, and many members of his own party. The result was a level of violence against civilians not seen since the Thirty Years’ War, killing thousands and demoralizing the lower classes in revolt. It is in this context that we should see Pabst’s most infamous and consequential deed: the “murder of the revolution” via the liquidation of its heroic leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
Pabst himself masterminded the killing. The two socialist icons were arrested on January 15 and taken to Berlin’s luxurious Hotel Eden, where he had established his command post. After questioning, they were escorted to prison in separate cars by a squad of nationalist soldiers personally assembled by Pabst. It would be the revolutionaries’ last journey.
The driver of Liebknecht’s escort stopped in the Tiergarten, one of the city’s largest parks, citing car trouble. The soldiers then ordered Liebknecht to continue on foot, before shooting him in the back after he had taken a few steps. The official report claimed that he had been shot while trying to escape.
For her part, Luxemburg rode in an open-top car. As it pulled away from the hotel, she was shot in the head by an officer who emerged from the shadows, disguised as an angry civilian taking justice into his own hands. Her corpse was thrown into a nearby canal and left to rot for months. The true nature of the crime would only be revealed decades later, long after the socialist threat had subsided.
The direct approval of their murder by Noske — and, indirectly, Ebert — was above all apparent in the SPD-installed military court’s refusal to pursue justice in any meaningful way. Noske enabled Pabst’s deed twice: first by knowingly permitting it (even without issuing a direct order), and then by allowing the culprits to roam free after the fact. But Pabst’s influence as the first general staff officer of the largest Freikorps cannot be emphasized enough. It was he who convinced the SPD of the need to strike a crushing blow against the revolution, through a kind of political terrorism that Kaiser Wilhelm II had always threatened but only the SPD oligarchy allowed to occur. Through his largely hidden but, in Noske’s words, “considerable military influence,” Waldemar Pabst briefly but decisively influenced the rise of German fascism — and Europe’s twentieth-century history.
A Reactionary Life
The killing of the leaders of the revolution was not the end of Pabst’s political interventions. With the revolution defeated, in summer 1919, he released himself from his pact with the SPD — which, for him, had always been a merely temporary arrangement. The party had failed in his eyes, managing neither to prevent the imposition of the Treaty of Versailles nor to fulfill his ambition of an ultramilitarized, protofascist society with a professional army at its core and a paramilitary horde of millions at its side. The entente of victorious powers in World War I would simply not permit such an outcome.
Faced with this situation, Pabst continued his counte-revolutionary endeavors — trying to draw Gustav Noske onto his side as a dictator. Noske was not disinclined, but, certain that such a move would spark renewed working-class uprisings, he stepped back from the plan. This was enough for the frustrated Pabst to attempt a coup d’état in July 1919, but he launched it without reaching any prior agreement with the similarly coup-inclined General Walther von Lüttwitz, and the plan soon failed. Forced to retreat, Pabst was subsequently denied the title of major and a general staff uniform.
The embittered Pabst continued to agitate. He now gathered right-wing forces in the “Nationale Vereinigung,” a conspiratorial group of reactionary officers funded by the same sections of big industry that had already supported the Freikorps and determined to overthrow the SPD-dominated government. Yet as Lüttwitz moved forward on his own initiative, launching a coup in March 1920 despite Pabst’s own incomplete preparations, the retired officer lost his nerve and fled. This moment of weakness saved Noske, Ebert, and other members of the government from arrest, decisively weakening the so-called “Kapp Putsch.” Pabst had missed his chance — and he would never get another.
The coup was defeated in four days thanks to the biggest general strike in German history. But, bolstered by indecision and weakness on the part of the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) and Communist Party (KPD), the SPD leaders chose to pursue Pabst’s methods of illegal mass executions. Secret orders were taken out of cold storage and put to use — not against the coup plotters, but against the uprisings in Central Germany and the Ruhr Region sparked by the putsch. The rebellious workers were decimated by the paramilitaries of the Freikorps, under orders from the same SPD government which they had mounted a coup against only days beforehand.
As one of the leading figures in the failed plot, Waldemar Pabst was forced to flee first to Bavaria and later to Austria, where he immediately began building the fascist Heimwehr organization and tried to establish a “White International” uniting fascist parties across Europe. He later returned to his homeland and became a leading figure in Adolf Hitler’s armaments industry, though he never joined the Nazi Party and decamped to Switzerland toward the end of the war. There he enjoyed a successful career as an international arms dealer before moving back to West Germany in 1955, where he was shielded by powerful government figures despite being a key player in early neo-fascist networks. Waldemar Pabst, mastermind of Rosa Luxemburg’s murder, died in 1970 as a wealthy and unrepentant nationalist and never faced a German court for his crimes.
Directed by Christoph Waltz; written by David Auburn
“As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces, and done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, Iam an amateur by comparison.” – Monsieur Verdoux(1947), directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin
Georgetown is an intriguing and intelligently made film by Austrian-German actor Christoph Waltz now available for streaming. It is a fictionalized account of the exploits in Washington D.C. of one Albrecht Gero Muth, who murdered his wife, Viola Herms Drath, more than 40 years his senior, in August 2011.
Vanessa Redgrave and Christolph Waltz in Georgetown
German-born Muth attempted, with some initial success, to scale the political and diplomatic ladder in Washington in the 1990s and beyond, eventually hosting parties attended by Pierre Salinger, Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia and others.
According to Franklin Foer’s 2012 New York Times Magazine article “The Worst Marriage in Georgetown,” which inspired Waltz’s film, Muth formed the “Eminent Persons Group” in 1999, ostensibly aimed at bringing together “a collection of prestigious international thinkers to advise the U.N. secretary general. Among others, Muth enlisted the Pakistani cricket star (and now leading presidential candidate) Imran Khan and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. A co-chairman of the group was former Prime Minister Michel Rocard of France. [Billionaire] George Soros provided seed money.”
Waltz and screenwriter David Auburn have changed the names of Muth, Drath and a few more individuals, permitting them to treat the various incidents and relationships more flexibly, but the central core of the actual events remains. The title, Georgetown, refers to the affluent, historic Washington neighborhood and commercial district, home to many influential politicians and lobbyists, as well as the location of numerous embassies.
Waltz’s film shifts backward and forward in time. In the opening scenes, 91-year-old Elsa Breht (Vanessa Redgrave) meets her death, apparently through an accident at the Georgetown residence she shares with her much younger husband, Ulrich Mott (Waltz). Homicide detectives are polite but obviously interested in Mott’s whereabouts at the time of Breht’s demise.
Christoph Waltz in Georgetown
Georgetown then recounts how the pair met. Mott is a fast-talking, social-climbing German émigré who squeezes his way into Washington society in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At a White House Correspondents Dinner, which he attends on stolen credentials, he makes himself known to Breht, a much older, German-born journalist and socialite. When Mott—at the time an intern giving guided tours of the Capitol building—asks Elsa to lunch, she is amused and flattered by his effrontery but informs or reminds him she is married.
When Elsa’s husband dies, sure enough Mott pops up again in her life, quite forcefully. He makes himself indispensable to the older woman. Her daughter, Amanda (Annette Bening), is off to Boston to take a tenured position at Harvard University, leaving her mother alone and vulnerable. Later, when Mott announces his engagement to Elsa, Amanda is clearly appalled.
After their marriage, Mott continues being what Elsa a little contemptuously refers to as “the perfect butler.” He waits on her hand and foot. “Is that all you want to be?” she asks him provocatively. Set into motion, Mott begins his political-diplomatic ascendancy. He first offers his services to a Soviet diplomat and former deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Petrovsky, as the latter’s “Washington eyes and ears.”
Mott’s social “Ponzi scheme,” as one of his lawyers will later term it, leads him through a process of careful name-dropping and buttering up, from one high-ranking individual to the next. He founds his Eminent Persons Group (EPG), first drawing in Nebraska Republican Senator (and future Secretary of Defense under Obama) Chuck Hagel (Richard Blackburn), who, in turn, makes it possible for him to grab the attention of former French Prime Minister (and “far leftist” in 1968) Michel Rocard (Jean Pearson), then a member of the European Parliament and active in European Union affairs.
Eventually, at the pinnacle of his success, Mott comes to the attention of Soros and McNamara (Michael Millar). Elsa beams at his triumphs, even while some of her husband’s outlandish deceits, such as claiming to have been in the French Foreign Legion, and eccentricities, for example, an eye patch that comes and goes as need be, threaten to make him a laughing stock.
The Iraq War in 2003 seems to send Mott over the edge, as one might say it did to a considerable section of the American ruling elite and upper middle class. He proposes to officials of the new puppet Iraqi government in Washington the “mother of all peace conferences,” which would bring together rival Shia and Sunni factions under the aegis of his EPG. The Iraqis, unimpressed, more or less laugh at his plan. Reeling home that evening, Mott confronts an enraged Elsa. “You stink of alcohol,” she snaps. Not to be outdone, Mott replies venomously, “You reek of the grave.” He physically abuses her, bringing the police.
When Elsa finds Mott one afternoon in bed with a man, she throws him out. “You disgrace! You lie, you lie!” She lets him know he is nothing but a “disgusting gigolo.” Exiled from Washington and his wife’s house, Mott begins some time later to phone Elsa and let her know he is involved in the “most exhilarating and terrifying work I’ve ever done.” He avers that he is in Iraq, embedded as a double agent with the forces of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia leader then at odds with the US, attempting to implement a plan to end the war in Iraq by—again—bringing together the various Iraqi sects. His faxes and communications, which read “Villa Zarathustra, Sadr City, Iraq,” reach the US State Department, whose officials respond negatively to this supposed “one-man, freelance diplomatic operation.” On his (alleged) return to the US, Mott purports to be a brigadier general in the new Iraqi army and wears what he claims is its uniform and medals.
The viewer has reason to be skeptical about Mott’s grandiose pretensions, which painfully and tragically unravel.
Georgetown is something of a “slow burn.” Perhaps Waltz’s film never quite bursts into flame, but it diligently and intelligently sets about its work. Waltz is fine here, and almost makes one forget his presence in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, both dreadful works. Redgrave and Bening do well. The script is carefully written and organized.
Annette Bening in Georgetown
Waltz excels at a type of European ironic satire, portraying an intensely self-important and transparently insincere individual whose words are at sharp odds with his actions. Here, his Mott is a highly conflicted figure, fanatically polite and formal, even ceremonial in public, but beset in private by bitter resentments, self-loathing and self-doubt. However, unlike the politicians and diplomats he attempts to cajole and influence, Mott is unable to subdue his personal demons (alcohol doesn’t help either), a failing that leads to his downfall.
Georgetown presents Washington and its leading personalities in a very poor light. Supposedly substantial figures, whatever their political views and official positions, Hagel, McNamara, Soros, Rocard, Scalia, Cheney and the rest, some of whom we see, some of whom we do not, must strike one as vain, superficial and essentially stupid human beings. These “movers and shakers” are easily taken in by a glib con artist, armed only with a handful of banal phrases, “old world charm” and the ability to improvise.
Writing about the real man, Foer in the Times Magazine commented: “To attract eminences to his group, Muth began by ordering thick stationery that he adorned with a crest of his own design. He signed the letters with an impressive title—Count Albi—which Muth claimed was a distant relative, who had suffered a debilitating fall from an Indian elephant passed down to him. … To score a big-name dinner guest or a favor from a V.I.P. in Washington, there was no point messing around with official channels or wasting time with midlevel functionaries. Underlings fear for their careers and are more likely to examine new acquaintances for potential peril. But there’s an unexpected naïveté among the truly powerful; they assume that anyone who has arrived at their desk has survived the scrutiny of handlers.”
Foer refers to “Washington’s susceptibility to fakery,” which helps to explain “how Muth [after 2003] could continue living his Iraq fantasy.” But one needs to be more precise. This is not simply some general, transhistorical “susceptibility.” Involved here are the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the “unipolar moment” that mesmerized America’s politicians and generals and convinced them to embark on the drive for global hegemony that has cost the populations of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and the US so much misery and suffering. This is not necessarily what Waltz had in mind, but it will occur to many viewers.
Mott fabricates, fantasizes to get ahead. But he was only imitating his “eminent” betters. This was the era during which the Big Lie truly and forcefully entered and indeed took hold of American political life. The Bush administration’s “case” against Iraq, involving accusations that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, was long ago exposed as a tissue of falsehoods.
Speaking of the pretext for the invasion of the Middle Eastern nation in March 2003, the WSWS once observed that not since “Hitler and the Nazis dressed up storm troopers as Polish soldiers and staged ‘attacks’ on German positions in 1939 has there been such a flagrant and cynical effort to manufacture a casus belli.”
Absurdly, Mott presents a certificate, which he obviously obtained through the mail, confirming his rank as an Iraqi general. This is an act of fraud, but it should be seen in the proper context. In 2008, the Center for Public Integrity, the public policy journalism organization, counted at least 935 demonstrably false statements made on 532 separate occasions during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq by the following officials: Bush, Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the rest of the leading American media outlets played their parts as well. Millions have died as a result.
In Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, referred to above, the comic genius plays an urbane, mild-mannered bank teller laid off after 30 years of service. To support his invalid wife and his child, he turns to marrying and murdering wealthy widows. At his trial, Verdoux argues that the world encourages large-scale killing, and he is little more than an amateur.
Albrecht Gero Muth was convicted of first-degree murder by a jury for his brutal crime in January 2014. A “D.C. Superior Court judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison,” reported the Washington Post, “stopping short of prosecutors’ request for life without parole.”
Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice and the others walk around scot-free.
Gives Commandments on Who to Enslave, How to Enslave, When to Beat, When to Rape
Slavery
Except for murder, slavery has got to be one of the most immoral things a person can do. Yet slavery is rampant throughout the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments. The Bible clearly approves of slavery in many passages, and it goes so far as to tell how to obtain slaves, how hard you can beat them, and when you can have sex with the female slaves.
Many Jews and Christians will try to ignore the moral problems of slavery by saying that these slaves were actually servants or indentured servants. Many translations of the Bible use the word “servant”, “bondservant”, or “manservant” instead of “slave” to make the Bible seem less immoral than it really is. While many slaves may have worked as household servants, that doesn’t mean that they were not slaves who were bought, sold, and treated worse than livestock.
The following passage shows that slaves are clearly property to be bought and sold like livestock.
However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you. You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way. (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT)
The following passage describes how the Hebrew slaves are to be treated.
If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for only six years. Set him free in the seventh year, and he will owe you nothing for his freedom. If he was single when he became your slave and then married afterward, only he will go free in the seventh year. But if he was married before he became a slave, then his wife will be freed with him. If his master gave him a wife while he was a slave, and they had sons or daughters, then the man will be free in the seventh year, but his wife and children will still belong to his master. But the slave may plainly declare, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children. I would rather not go free.’ If he does this, his master must present him before God. Then his master must take him to the door and publicly pierce his ear with an awl. After that, the slave will belong to his master forever. (Exodus 21:2-6 NLT)
Notice how they can get a male Hebrew slave to become a permanent slave by keeping his wife and children hostage until he says he wants to become a permanent slave. What kind of family values are these?
The following passage describes the sickening practice of sex slavery. How can anyone think it is moral to sell your own daughter as a sex slave?
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment. (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)
So these are the Bible family values! A man can buy as many sex slaves as he wants as long as he feeds them, clothes them, and has sex with them!
What does the Bible say about beating slaves? It says you can beat both male and female slaves with a rod so hard that as long as they don’t die right away you are cleared of any wrong doing
When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property. (Exodus 21:20-21 NAB)
You would think that Jesus and the New Testament would have a different view of slavery, but slavery is still approved of in the New Testament, as the following passages show.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ. (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)
Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed. If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful. You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts. Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them. (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)
In the following parable, Jesus clearly approves of beating slaves even if they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong.
The servant will be severely punished, for though he knew his duty, he refused to do it. “But people who are not aware that they are doing wrong will be punished only lightly. Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given.” (Luke 12:47-48 NLT)
Electric vehicles are incredible. Beyond eliminating fossil fuels, they are whisper quiet, accelerate faster than gasoline cars, and according to a new Consumer Reports study, operate with less expensive maintenance over time. But one of the biggest benefits of EVs that they are revolutionizing the way cars are built.
How? As this new video from Israeli startup Ree demonstrates, the EV of tomorrow is basically just a giant skateboard. With tiny motors placed inside the wheels, the car can assume any form imaginable; any sort of seating or storage arrangement can be built right on top of this flat base.
Traditional gas cars were built atop a flat chassis, too. But that chassis was hardly so self contained. Components like your engine and steering system are on top. Then the motor propels a complex series of axles under the car. Of course you have brakes, suspension, cooling systems, gas lines, and other systems to snake around, too. It all adds up to 30,000 parts which are screwed, pressed, glued, and welded together. Today, most modern manufacturing uses robots to frame out the entire car first like a house—from chassis to body—meaning your car’s floorpan is permanent from its earliest moments on the assembly line.
Ree was one of our Most Innovative Companies of 2020, and it’s one of several manufacturers working on an alternative platform. Peers include automotive mainstays like VW, newer startups like Rivian, and even Tesla. But Ree’s new video, seen here, is the first time I’ve witnessed the odd spectacle of these flat chassis whipping around a track with no other filigree attached.
The smallest is a nimble EV made for tight turns and small cargo deliveries for last-mile delivery services. The medium is for transporting goods and people short distances. And the largest you see is a full Class 1 vehicle–a typical car or delivery van.
With all components of the drivetrain and steering built into this base, a Ree vehicle doesn’t need the metal frame or plush seating of a cabin to drive. (The skateboards appear to be operated by a remote control for this demo—they are not self-driving.) But seeing how little an EV needs in terms of hardware to functionally drive really cements just how wild and open the future of electric vehicle design will be. Everything from the wheels up can be reimagined.
Such a vision has already been teased by IDEO in one of the most impressive car concepts of the past decade. IDEO proposed an office on wheels. It’s basically a square room where the walls are windows.
Ree is making some of these more aggressive EV thought experiments real (VW is about halfway there with its much-hyped electric bus). Ree’s technology has already been licensed by Toyota for the Japanese car maker’s electric truck subsidiary Hino. In a presentation last year, Hino detailed how this platform could power small city buses, sure, but also beauticians and doctor offices on wheels. Hino even went so far as to detail a mount, which would allow these modular “service spaces” to pop on and off the chassis at will.
How long would that process take? Only long enough to put the cabin on jacks to pull it off the chassis, kind of like you’re changing a spare tire. With the right business model, you could even imagine bringing in your minivan for repair, and rather than giving you a loaner, the dealer just pops off the cabin and sticks it onto a new or refurbished bottom. So your car as you know it would stay the same, but the drivetrain would be new—a process that would take mere minutes.
Delivery giants like Amazon are interested in these electric skateboards to power delivery fleets, as it just revealed new electric vans built atop a similar electric platform made by Rivian. For Amazon to have 100,000 EVs on the road by 2030, it needs these vehicles to be simple to repair, with interoperable parts. The skateboard design ensures a delivery vehicle is never out of commission for long.
But what about cars for the rest of us? With a bit more imagination, you can picture consumer vehicles becoming far more personalized, as dozens of aftermarket companies build varying cabins for a skateboard base. Even if you don’t want to buy such a car for yourself, small business owners probably will. Vehicles could mobilize the nature of brick and mortar retail and services, much like food trucks shook up the restaurant industry in the mid-aughts. Design studio NewDealDesign has even suggested that, linked together, individual vehicle storefronts could amass to something like a mobile city that can cruise like a parade, or perhaps a mall on wheels. We’re well on our way to a world of wildly diverse vehicles, where design is limited more by the legalese of our road laws than by the creative decisions made by a few big automakers.
About the author
Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company who has written about design, technology, and culture for almost 15 years. His work has appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach
Over sixty years ago, in November 1959, the American Petroleum Institute co-sponsored a symposium at Columbia University in New York City to commemorate the U.S. oil industry’s centennial year. Among the guest speakers was renowned physicist Edward Teller, who warned the audience of scientists, government officials and industry representatives that burning large quantities of fossils fuels risked “contaminating the atmosphere” with carbon dioxide to such an extent as to provoke rising global temperatures:
“Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.… It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.” —Guardian, 1 January 2018
Teller’s warning was based on a small but growing body of scientific research over the preceding decade that detailed the contribution of industrial activity to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). By 1965, the U.S. President’s Science Advisory Committee submitted a 20-page paper to Lyndon Johnson indicating that the growth in CO2 emissions “may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate” (Inside Climate News, 13 April 2016). Over the next two decades, as more and better data was analyzed by scientists around the world, a clear and unmistakable picture emerged of the consequences of increased emissions of various “greenhouse gases” (including CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons). It would result in not simply smog, acid rain and/or a thinning ozone layer but an average rise in global temperatures and qualitative changes to the climates and surface features that have sustained human life on Earth.
Tom Hanks presents at the Oscars show during the 92nd Academy Awards in Hollywood, Los Angeles, Calif., February 9, 2020. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)
How an ideology leads to mental contortions — and to not-so-quasi-totalitarianism.
Last week, the actor Tom Hanks responded to calls for a more robust accounting of America’s racial history by penning a piece in the New York Times about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. “For all my study,” Hanks conceded, “I never read a page of any school history book about how, in 1921, a mob of white people burned down a place called Black Wall Street, killed as many as 300 of its Black citizens and displaced thousands of Black Americans who lived in Tulsa, Okla.” This, Hanks suggested, was perhaps because “History was mostly written by white people about white people like me, while the history of Black people — including the horrors of Tulsa — was too often left out.”
Yesterday, writing for NPR, Eric Deggans explained that what Hanks had written in the Times was “not enough.” “Tom Hanks,” Deggans proposed, “is a non-racist.” But, he added, “it’s time for him to be anti-racist.” Echoing almost verbatim an argument that has been advanced by Ibram X. Kendi, Deggans explained that there is a “difference between being non-racist and being anti-racist” and that Hanks had not yet bridged the gap. “Anti-racism,” Deggans submitted, “implies action — looking around your universe and taking specific steps to dismantle systemic racism.” And while Hanks’s words are nice, they did not change the fact that he “has built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men Doing the Right Thing.” “If he really wants to make a difference,” Deggans concluded, “Hanks and other stars need to talk specifically about how their work has contributed to these problems and how they will change.”
Deggans’s essay serves as a perfect illustration of the cynical Motte and Bailey game that is currently being played by America’s self-appointed “anti-racists.” While in their Motte, the sponsors of critical race theory and its equally ugly relatives insist that all they truly want is for America’s schools to do a better job of teaching the history of American racism. On Twitter yesterday, Berkeley’s Robert Reich provided a solid example of this position with the claim that, by opposing the adoption of CRT in schools, the Republican Party is “trying to ban educators from teaching about the anguished role racism has played in the shaping of America.” In the safe haven of the Bailey, however, such defensible-sounding arguments are quickly swapped out for a set of considerably more extreme contentions, such as the claim that unless a person spends his days actively dismantling whatever “structures” a handful of “experts” have decided are problematic — including himself and his work, if necessary — he is in practice aiding and abetting racism. Clearly, Tom Hanks thought that he was playing inside the Motte. Clearly, he was not.
Critics of this grotesque tactic are invariably informed that they do not actually understand what critical race theory or modern “anti-racism” really are — and, as such, that they are in no position to oppose its adoption by America’s schools. But no such confusion can be alleged in this case. In Slate last week, Kendi was called forth to “explain critical race theory” for the benefit of those who don’t “know what it is.” Kendi’s explanation makes clear that the framework Deggans used in his essay on Tom Hanks is simply the application of CRT’s core structural claims to the movie industry, along with the verbatim utilization of the “racist”/“non-racist”/“antiracist” categories that Kendi himself has made famous. Want to know what critical race theory does to a person’s mind? Look no further than to Eric Deggans.
Ultimately, Deggans’s approach is a totalitarian one, from which there is no meaningful chance of escape. Had Tom Hanks elected to stay quiet, he would have been deemed guilty of inadvertently endorsing the unequal status quo. Had he rejected Deggans’s premise entirely, he’d have been deemed guilty of explicitly endorsing the unequal status quo. Having chosen to speak up in a way that tracked neatly with what he was told was expected of him, he was deemed guilty of inadequately fighting the unequal status quo. Even if he were to follow Deggans’s advice to the letter, he would still be deemed guilty of something.
Deggans complains that Hanks has often portrayed heroic white men on screen. But, as a white man, was he supposed to do the opposite? (And, if he had, what do we think would have been the response?) Deggans complains that, by promoting stories about the heroes of D-Day, the Apollo program, the Maersk Alabama hijacking, and other adventures, Hanks has spent a career “amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism.” But the people Hanks has played really were heroes — which means that if Hanks were truly to “dismantle and broaden the ideas [he] helped cement in the American mind,” he would either have to lie about history, ignore it, or condemn his entire life’s work purely on the basis of his race — thereby committing the very sins that, when they are sitting in their Motte, “anti-racists” such as Deggans strenuously deny they are demanding. Perhaps anticipating this objection, Deggans concludes his litany of complaints by submitting that Hanks has failed to use his position to tell other important stories. But, even if this were true, it would still represent a trap. Tom Hanks could announce tomorrow that he intends to spend the rest of his life making films of which Eric Deggans approves, and within hours he would be accused of taking up spaces that belong to black actors, writers, producers, and directors; within days, it would be said that he was undermining important “voices of color”; and within a month, he’d be charged with possession of a “white savior complex.”
In the grand scheme of things, Eric Deggans’s view of Tom Hanks is not going to have a profound effect on the future of the United States. But the degree to which the country adopts the ideology that motivated that view most certainly will. Like Ibram X. Kendi, Deggans has adopted a Manichean worldview in which each and every person is placed on either the wrong or the right side of a set of inchoate and ever-shifting lines. That Tom Hanks, of all people, has been found wanting should tell us all we need to know about the integrity, the efficacy, and the conceivable consequences of this most peculiar and destructive of ideas.
The sky was grey and the air was cool. I walked over Ashmont Hill with a black backpack heavy with paper. I had some drawing paper and crayons and pencils and pens. I had about twenty old issues of Workers Vanguard. I had the day off and I was going downtown to take some pictures of Workers Vanguard in newspaper boxes.
I’ve been downtown in Boston a lot lately. Workers at seven hotels are on strike and I have marched with them and raised my fist in the air. I have also distributed Workers Vanguard and talked to workers about the paper and about the strike. I also brought some back issues of Workers Vanguard.I rode the subway train into Boston with a clipboard on my lap to copy a drawing from ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’ In the cellar lined with bricks two men face a wall piled with bones.
I rode through the dark tunnels at 10:10 in the morning. I had a backpack filled with the revolutionary newspaper Workers Vanguard. Yesterday I had gone to the striking hotel workers picket lines and given my last current issues of Workers Vanguard to union members in the line. A picture I had taken at the ‘W’ Marriott hotel near the central Boston Public Library was featured with a story about the strike.
I would have gone back to join the labor union picket lines if the picket lines weren’t so noisy. The UNITE HERE Local 26 union seems to have loud noise from banging drums and chants through bullhorns as their signature. I wear earplugs, and even wore noise deadening earmuffs, but the noise still rings in my ear long after the picket line is over. I noticed that I had about twenty back issues of Workers Vanguard on a shelf. The articles are still relevant because Workers Vanguard has a magazine style length to stories that are ‘think’ pieces, not just a current report of the news. The writers try to highlight Marxist principles and working class guidelines. The articles should stand the test of time.
As I flipped through the somewhat yellowed stories I noted that the issues were all from about 2011 to 2012. I guess I left them on an isolated shelf. I usually try to pass on issues of Workers Vanguard so that as many people as possible can see the paper. I had an impulse to simply toss the old papers into the recycle bin. Who wants yesterday’s papers? But…each issue of Workers Vanguard could be an intellectual awakening for the right person. Years ago someone gave me an issue of Workers Vanguard that had an article on the conflict in Northern Ireland. I read the long piece in one sitting and then read the long article again.
The next morning I mailed a subscription to Workers Vanguard. So, I know the power a well written article in a revolutionary newspaper can have. Years ago I had been around the Socialist Workers Party who had a newspaper called ‘The Militant.’ The people in the SWP castigated the Spartacists and Workers Vanguard because the Spartacists opposed a separate nation for black Americans, the Spartacists opposed gun control, and the Spartacists did not oppose nuclear power plants. But, in my mid twenties I began to meet people who explained the Spartacist ideas with more sympathy. One of the people I talked politics with gave me the copy of Workers Vanguard with the ideas on Northern Ireland. After reading that I sympathized with the Spartacists and Workers Vanguard, and not the SWP and The Militant.
I was carefully drawing the cobble stone floor of the cellar that Poe described in the Cask of Amontillado. Brick by brick the wall curved up as I went from light to dark as the train moved from the grey light of the day to the underground tunnel and the darkness through the window glass. There was lots of space on the train at mid morning. I had three seats to myself. I was drawing with a mechanical pencil with thick lead.
The lines were not heavy, but I could scan the drawing later and thicken up the lines. When I went to the strike picket lines yesterday at the Westin Copley Hotel across from the library the line looked pretty big with more than twenty or thirty people circling with signs and banging orange five gallon buckets in a rhythm. They made no attempt to stop the cars driving up to the front door on a ramp. The strikers parted politely as their picket line was crossed.
I located a newspaper box with a plexiglass display window right outside the library’s Boylston Street entrance. I slipped my finger to loosen the plastic clip that holds the paper tight and put a Workers Vanguard paper in to be displayed.
I walked down the street past the various people in front of the election day polling station set up in the Boston Public Library. A group of three people were holding signs advocating a ‘Yes’ vote on Question #3 protecting transgender rights. A lone man stood with a ‘Charlie Baker’ sign boosting the Republican governor of the state for re-election.I looked up at the brownstone intricacy of Old South Church across from the library.
A group of rough looking homeless people were sitting on a ledge near the Green Line subway entrance. Next to the subway entrance near a bus shelter there were about four plastic newspaper boxes with display windows. I put three more Workers Vanguards on display. There are a number of food stands in Copley Square and I walked past to some newspaper boxes to the side. Some say that Trinity Church, in Copley Square, is the most beautiful building in Boston.
One of my socialist activist friends said he liked the modern building behind the church. I walked down the street past the building at 500 Boylston. An architecture critic said that the building looked ‘like an opera set’ when it was built some years ago. I think the aging process has added a little gravitas to the building and it doesn’t look like a stage construction anymore.
I put some papers in the boxes at Arlington Street Station.
I just happened to pull out an issue on Gay Rights when I was using the Bay Windows news box. Bay Windows is a gay oriented weekly publication.
I looked across at the Public Gardens and the fall colors on the trees. The pictures I found on Google Maps to illustrate this piece are from a warm sunny day. Today was a cold grey day. I had a hood and gloves to warm myself with my jacket zipped to the top.
Walking down Boylston Street was pleasant. How nice to be in the city with time to simply stroll along the sidewalk looking for free newspaper boxes.
I passed by the Edgar Poe statue and a curiosity shop on Boylston Street across from Boston Common. I thought of taking a picture of the Poe statue, but my battery had died earlier. I saw a little girl of about ten taking pictures of the statue with her family standing by. She squatted down and got a closeup of the raven.
In my backpack, on my clipboard, was the drawing from one of Poe’s stories. And here he was in the street in metal. The man died when he was in his forties over a hundred and fifty years ago. Poe was born in Boston, and a part of him is still living on the streets of Boston. I lingered looking in the shop window of the curio shop. I dare not go in, or I would be tempted to buy something. I have enough curios in my home already. More than enough. I have a fake Raven to remind me of Poe’s poem.
Outside the Masonic lodge I put some Workers Vanguards to illuminate the illuminati.
Would something about Quebec be esoteric enough for them?
I went down Tremont Street and then down Avery Street to see the strikers at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. There was a group of maybe a dozen picketers marching with signs and banging their drums. I had joined that line yesterday. I had no current papers to offer them today.
I went around the corner to watch the strikers picket line in front of the ‘W’ Marriott hotel on Stuart Street. I had a ‘gift card’ for the Panera Bread restaurant and found the tables by the window a great view of the street, and the strikers.
As I ate I read the Workers Vanguard report on the hotel workers strike. The article emphasized that the strikers were not trying to stop deliveries or people from crossing the picket lines. The strikers and their leadership are relying on public sympathy. Good luck with that. I thought about Poe’s short story ‘The Man of the Crowd.’ In the tale a man is sitting in a restaurant in London watching the crowd go by outside noting the different characters and imagining their backstory. He spots a strange short man with a crafty look to him. On impulse the narrator leaves the restaurant and follows the man as he makes his way across London over a number of hours. The short wiry dark haired man of about sixty seems to fit in everywhere and speaks to all kinds of people, upper class, and the lowest of the low.
I first read that story in college on the recommendation of a Marxist professor who I seem to remember saying that London was the character. I’ve wondered about the story and gone back to the work many times over the years. Who is the little old man who goes all over the town and seems to slip by without people noticing? In describing the man, the narrator “describes a set of contradictory characteristics: ‘there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense – of supreme despair’.
The man’s dress, too, is contradictory: his linen is dirty but ‘of beautiful texture’, and through a tear in his cloak the narrator glimpses a diamond and a dagger.’I don’t have any diamonds unless I look up a picture of one on my phone. But, I was stopped going into Boston City Hall yesterday because I had a knife on my belt. After thinking about the Poe story for many years it suddenly dawned on me that I was like the character in ‘The Man of the Crowd.’ I travel around the city, among rich and poor, high class, and workers, and I manage to slip through. As I ate and read I watched the picket line across the street as the signs moved in a circle and the drums thumped on. I took a picture a few weeks ago that was featured in Workers Vanguard.
I set off down Washington Street with my backpack lighter. I passed by Caffe Nero where I had a pleasant conversation and coffee after a Workers Vanguard sale to hospital workers who had been on strike. I remember the odd mismatched furniture the place featured that did give a homey feeling to me.
At Downtown Crossing there were a few free newspaper boxes, and I got more papers out to display.
I walked down the pedestrian mall on Washington Street thinking of when I had sold The Militant in front of the old Filene’s department store. My father worked there and he was one of the only people who bought the paper from me all those years ago.
On the other side of the building there is now a set of ‘stairs to nowhere’ that people can sit on. I used to hand out leaflets for striking garment workers outside of Filene’s decades ago. About a year ago, after an anti-Fascist demonstration on Boston Common I sat talking with my friend Rod who I used to hand the boycott leaflets out with all those years ago. We talked a lot of Trotsky and revolutionary class struggle back then, and he is still an interesting person to talk to. He was the person who gave me my first copy of Workers Vanguard. When I used to say to him that I supported the Socialist Workers Party and The Militant he said, ‘No, you sound like a Spartacist reading Workers Vanguard.’ He was right.
A few steps further down there were some final news boxes to put papers in next to the church that David Duke gave a speech at in 1991. Workers Vanguard and the Spartacists organized a large rally to oppose Duke and his ‘Klan in a Suit’ message. I was on the workers defense team that provided security to the rally.
Today I was at the same place putting a newspaper with working class centered ideas in plastic newspaper boxes. Here is where I ran out of papers. A seven year old paper, and the headline could be from yesterday.
I looked across the street to the Old Corner Bookstore, which no longer sells books, and thought of all the famous authors who had stopped by that location in the distant past. Back in the 19th century people like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens had business to do with the bookseller and publisher located there. That spot was also the site of the home of Anne Hutchinson who was expelled from Boston in 1638 for speaking about religion when women were expected to be silent.
On the other side of School Street there are sculptures to memorialize the Irish Famine of the 19th Century. A lot of Irish ended up in Boston because of the bad conditions in Ireland.
My papers where gone and all I had in my backpack was my drawing paper and clip board and crayons and pencil. I was ready to ride the Red Line home and draw on the way. I hope someone who is looking for answers bumps into one of my messages in a bottle. On the streets of Boston, Poe has the last word, speaking of bad hotels…
The Christ depicted in this gospel is a heavenly spirit who is a rabbi and priest of the perfect temple in the heavens. The temple in Jerusalem is an imperfect copy and the priestly rabbis are imperfect humans making a weak sacrifice of animals each year for the sins of the Jewish people.
In the social and political ferment of the Eastern Mediterranean, conquered first by Hellenizing Greeks and then Romans, many Jewish people questioned the Temple priests and different subgroups formed with unorthodox ideas.
Evidence surfaced in caves in the deserts with writings stored in clay pots with some echoes of stories of a ‘great teacher.’ The Dead Sea Scrolls were stumbled upon decades ago, and in Egypt religious works were found hidden in clay pots to avoid destruction by whoever was in charge then.
A living literary artifact many have on their bookshelf is contained in the ‘official’ New Testament. ‘Letter To Hebrews’ is the title in my edition ‘The New English Bible’ from Oxford, Cambridge. As shown above the Mp3 audio file is about 53 minutes and in my edition it is 12 pages in print. I never glanced at the work before as this Bible sat patiently on my shelf, although I do take it out and look at what atheist writers are quoting all the time.
I was reading Richard Carrier’s book On the Historicity of Jesus where the scholar who can read those ancient languages such as the Greek of the New Testament demolishes any claim of evidence for a historical Jesus. Christ never existed. There is zero historical proof.
But, Christians existed.
Around the year 20 AD – CE there seems to have been organized meetings of Jewish people who believed they saw evidence in Torah, Old Testament, Scripture that there was a heavenly savior in the invisible realm above the earth. In the perfect Temple in the Heavens that previous prophets saw when Yahweh’s angels took them into the sky, and made an imperfect copy below in Jerusalem, there was a perfect priest, Joshua or in Greek Jesus.
This Jesus never comes to Earth until after he has tricked the Demons in the Sky, Satan, and The Archons of this Eon, into crucifying him to conquer Death. All humans can now go to paradise because of Jesus the Christ’s spiritual sacrifice.
With a kind of Bible Scrabble cherry picking of a verse here and a line there, the ancient Jewish cultists imagined a new demi-god who was at the Right Hand of God, and Yahweh declares his son in Hebrews.
So, I looked up an audio version of Hebrews to listen to the work for the first time. As Richard Carrier says, what other explanation can there be for this work except that these people think Jesus Christ was a kind of Angel in the Heavens raised to God’s Son after a great sacrifice.
I looked up what ‘main stream’ scholars were saying about the work. Most of the academic scholars have to maintain a pro-Christian belief system. They can not make any sense out of this work. They claim that the main thrust is that some people were going back to Jewish temple worship who had previously been at Christian meetings and believed in Jesus. That is a small part. They ignore or obfuscate the main ideas.
I found the great dramatic reading that I have provided an audio file of above. Great voice and a little dramatization.
The work is supposed to be some of the best Greek in the New Testament, but, I would not know. It’s all Greek to me.
I have listened to the fifty minute reading maybe a dozen times over the last three days. I was roller blading around as I listened to the gospel. Carrier called the work perhaps the first Christian gospel because the writer is talking about how the Jewish Temple should end animal sacrifices. The Letter to Hebrews tells Temple priests that their imperfect sacrifices on earth of animal has been superseded by the Heavenly Rabbi Jesus Christ who wiped all sin away with a perfect sacrifice.
The Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in 70 AD – CE by victorious Romans.
But the author of a Letter to Hebrews does not know that happened. So, the work was written before the temple destruction.
The ‘Jewish War’ of the Romans in Palestine began in 64 AD – CE and the writer on Hebrew doesn’t take note of the notable events that were happening to Hebrews.
This work is 60 AD – CE, or earlier.
The writer does not mention Jesus being born on earth, there is no Mother Mary, or Cuckold Joseph. The writer never mentions Jesus walking around and performing miracles or teaching or fighting with the Temple priests. The writer of Letter to Hebrews has never heard of any of these myths. They hadn’t been dreamed up yet.
The work is a strange tale of Jesus in the clouds with demons. As I listened I had a good idea of what was going on. The author gives quite a tour de force of Torah / Old Testament history with a little Genesis and Noah and Abraham thrown in to give detail. The translation of the Jewish Torah into the Greek Septuagint along with the widespread Hellenistic Greek learning available to the upper classes gives the writer the background to weave a very Jewish justification for Jesus the Latest Joshua Messiah.
The earliest Christian writings before 70 AD / CE appear to be the genuine Letters of Paul, Letter to Hebrews, and maybe some letter of Clement.
The official earliest gospel is supposedly The Gospel of Mark obviously written after the Temple destruction.
Letter to Hebrews is a window to view the early ideas of a minor Jewish-Hellenistic cult’s early ideas of a Spirit in the Sky. The cult later became the compulsory State Religion of Rome, and has roughly 1,000,000,000 believers in the world today. God help us.
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 19, 11 May, 1940
Mother’s Day comes this Sunday, May 12. What a mockery! The brain storm of those miracle men of this ailing system, the advertising specialists, who conceived it as business tonic and a rare opportunity to unload on a limitless public (everyone has a mother) tawdry and unsaleable merchandise that might otherwise remain unsold. Thus a fine and genuine emotion is degraded and distorted by contact with the world of quick sales and huge profits. Mother love is now given its market value by these worthy sentimentalists, the manufacturers and shopkeepers, whose crabbed souls respond to only one overpowering emotion — greed for profit.
Today mother is feted with candy and flowers and gifts. Today, by order of the bosses, everyone remembers mother. Tomorrow and tomorrow, for 364 tomorrows mother continues to struggle with problems created by those very bosses and their system — poverty, unemployment, hunger, want, disease, and the scourge which often deprives her of her motherhood — war.
What does motherhood mean to the wife of a worker or middle class man today? Mother may be the wage earner, partially or totally. Motherhood means extra work and constant worry not only for the immediate present but also for the future. Mothers recall their own unhappy childhood, their overworked, embittered parents dulled and aged by lives of toil and drudgery with whom no real companionship was possible. They remember their dreams-of school, of training for useful work, of simple luxuries, of contact with an unknown world of art and music-most of which were never realized. And because they so love their children, born and unborn, women today recoil from motherhood rather than see repeated by those dear to them a miserable childhood and thwarted preparation for adult life.
Many women today are on strike against children, as their expression of protest against the conditions in which they must face motherhood and raise families. The first inquiry of every newly-married woman is how to avoid unwanted motherhood. Has human nature changed? Have women become hard and loveless and selfish? How absurd! The urge to recreate one’s own, to watch the development of a human being, almost part of yourself, from a little animal that sleeps and eats to a growing, thinking adult whose progress you follow with pride and concern-that Instinctive desire for progeny cannot be repressed — no! not even by the capitalist system that today deprives so many parents of their right to raise families. The dream of most young married couples is to achieve that condition of modest financial security which will make it possible for them to have a child and perhaps a whole family.
Women today are not granted (legally) the right to regulate the size and spacing of their family. Clinics and physicians in many states are not permitted to inform women about birth control. A business dealing in bootleg information, dispensing inadequate, expensive and often harmful drugs and appliances has been created because of this hypocritical and barbaric law. Women every day endanger their health, suffer pain and needless torture, rather than bear children whom they can offer nothing but love.
Today with war on the agenda, celebration of Mother’s Day adds insult to hypocrisy. “Mother,” the bosses say, “we appreciate you — you bear the young men we need for the army. You suffer and toil-sacrifice and plan, to produce fine healthy boys. We can use plenty of them in battle with the sons of mothers of other countries-to protect our trade and profits that is — democracy. The thought of those mothers whose sons are killed shouldn’t disturb you. They are enemies and haven’t the same feelings as you have. What’s that you say? Your son may be killed and the sons of other mothers who are not enemies? Yes, but then you will have the satisfaction of knowing he died a hero — and you will be rewarded with a gold medal and given an honor seat at public functions. Besides, he probably would not have had a job, and have been a bum or a crook, so perhaps it’s just as well.
Mothers! The sugar-coated gifts hide the bitter pill of the boss system. Under capitalism there can be no improvement of conditions for women, mothers of families. Only in a Socialist society will mothers achieve that security which will permit them to raise children without fear for their future. But no one will give you that as a gift. You will have to struggle and fight for Socialism, you together with the workers, men and women, black and white, old and young in this country and in others Mother’s Day Is May 12 — What of Other 364 Days? for their cause is yours and only through the victory of the workers will mothers solve their problems. Only when all mankind raises itself from slavery and exploitation and enjoys a free and full life will women choose motherhood happily, confidently and proudly. Rearing and preparing the young for a life in a socialist society, for useful labor, for boundless achievements in science, industry and art — that will indeed make of motherhood an interesting, important and honored profession.
Boston, Mass.
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 19, 11 May, 1940, p. 4. Transcribed by Marty Goodman & marked up by David Walters for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In August 1940, a Russian expatriate worked in his well-sheltered garden in Mexico City. He surrounded himself with chickens, rabbits, and peaceful trees. But the man was no vacationing grandpa—he was one of the most famous political exiles in the world, and his home in Coyoacan was surrounded by armed guards and fortress-like walls.
Leon Trotsky had been a political liability in Russia for years before his hasty expulsion. Though he had helped lead the Communist Party to power in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Trotsky quickly became persona non grata to Joseph Stalin. Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin’s bloated bureaucracy and his publicly-stated belief that Stalinism wasn’t taking Communism far enough toward permanent world revolution cost him everything.
When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, it was thought that Trotsky, who had endured a long marriage of political convenience with Lenin, might come to power. But Stalin helped drum up and took advantage of anti-Trotsky sentiment to seize Soviet control instead. Stalin acted swiftly against the former hero, and he swept Trotsky out of his political positions, the Communist Party, and eventually the USSR itself.
As Trotsky looked for a new state to call home, Stalin scrubbed him from photographs and published texts, but Trotsky was more concerned about preserving his actual life. Though he managed to find political asylum in Mexico, he survived multiple assassination attempts over the years and a raid on his compound.
However, on August 20, 1940, Trotsky’s luck ran out. A man who called himself Jacques Mornard had become friends with Trotsky and his armed guards. They exchanged sympathetic political views and chatted about trivial matters, but Mornard was actually Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent.
After drinking tea with Trotsky, Mercader found his chance. He used an ice axe intended for mountaineering to hack a hole into Trotsky’s skull. But the revolutionary wouldn’t die without a fight. He apparently grappled with Mercader, shouted for help, and even spat in his face and bit his hand during their altercation. Mercader was beaten by Trotsky’s guards and taken to prison.
Trotsky was removed from the scene of the crime and operated on, but he died some 25 hours after the attack. Mercader (as “Mornard”) was swiftly arrested and tried, claiming he had murdered Trotsky because he would not allow “Mornard” to marry a woman he loved. He served 20 years in prison under his assumed identity, though a secret counterintelligence project finally revealed his real name. While the Soviet Union denied any involvement in the murder of Trotsky, Mercader moved to Russia after his release and was eventually given an award for being a “Hero of the Soviet Union.”
And as for Trotsky, the leader who fell from national hero to axed-down exile? He was buried in his own backyard. Here is a more detailed account from another site:
Originally appeared in Metropolitan Barcelona:
On August 20th, 1940, a 27-year-old Catalan drove an ice axe into the head of Leon Trotsky at his Mexican home. The blow failed to kill him, and Trotsky struggled with his assassin. His guards, hearing the commotion, burst in and set upon the assailant, but Trotsky stopped them, exclaiming, “Do not kill him! This man has a story to tell.” Trotsky died the next day, and the murderer was turned over to the police. He identified himself as Jacques Mornard, a disillusioned Belgian Trotskyist. He said he had killed the old Bolshevik after quarrelling over a woman and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Though few knew Mornard’s true identity, the fact that the assassination had been ordered by Stalin was an open secret. Furthermore a number of Catalan republicans in Mexico knew something more. They recognised the killer’s photo in the press, but did not want to reveal his true identity for fear of provoking a reaction against the many Spanish refugees in the country. Finally in 1952, Mercader slipped up. A prison guard heard the “Belgian” singing a nursery rhyme Què li darem, en el Noi de la Mare? Què li darem que li’n sàpiga bo?1 in perfect Catalan from his cell. This clue led the authorities to his real identity: his name was Ramón Mercader, and he was indeed an NKVD agent.
Ramón Mercader was born in Barcelona to a well-to-do family on February 7th, 1913. His mother Caridad Mercader née Caridad del Río was from a family of aristocratic landowners in Santiago de Cuba. Following Spain’s loss of the colony in 1898, the family moved to Catalunya where Caridad, at the age of just 16, married Pablo Mercader, a rich Catalan industrialist. The couple had five children but Caridad grew to detest the staid, bourgeoisie existence and found herself drawn to the Bohemian life she discovered along El Paral.lel, with its heady mix of cabaret artists, bon viveurs and anarchists. Seduced by the latter’s revolutionary ideals, Caridad soon became involved in direct action, even setting fire to her husband’s factory before being caught and sent to a lunatic asylum. Her anarchist friends managed to spring her from captivity, and she fled to France with her children in 1925, never forgiving the Mercader family for imprisoning her.
In France, after her brief flirtation with anarchism, Caridad embraced communism, attracted by its discipline and surety of purpose. She become a fanatical Stalinist and eventually an NKVD agent. She also indoctrinated young Ramón as an ardent communist, filling him with hatred for all enemies of the party. In his early twenties, Mercader moved back to Barcelona, where he helped organise the then tiny Spanish communist party. For this involvement he was arrested and spent a brief period in prison, before being released in 1936 after the victory of the Popular Front.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Ramón took an active part in the successful defeat of the military rebellion in Barcelona. The war that would tear Spain apart had begun, but in Barcelona at least, the forces of the left, led by the CNT, were victorious. The anarchist CNT trade union was in virtual control of the city and at once set about collectivising huge swathes of Barcelona’s, commerce, services and industries. It was a revolution of historic proportions, comparable only with the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution itself.
Against this tumultuous background, on July 23rd, the Catalan communist and socialists met in the Bar del Pi (La Plaça del Pi) and hurriedly joined together to form the PSUC (Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña), thus forming a new communist party, independent from Madrid. Moscow was deeply suspicious of this new Catalan organisation, which had broken the Comintern’s iron rule of “One State, One Party.” They need not have bothered; The PSUC soon proved itself to be a loyal servant of Stalin’s policies and was so successful at crushing socialist opposition from within that the model of merging the two parties was copied in Hungary and Poland in the late Forties.
Two days later, on July 25th 1936, the first column of volunteers was organised under the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti, and Ramón, though a communist, signed up to fight. He was seriously wounded on the Aragonese Front and returned to Barcelona in December. Here, his mother convinced him to become a Soviet spy, and he cut his teeth, reporting on foreign volunteers and teaching espionage to David Crook, a young British communist in charge of spying on George Orwell who was in Barcelona.
The war staggered on, but the NKVD had greater plans for Mercader and in July he was summoned to Moscow. There, he was trained in the arts of deception, sabotage and assassination and given the code name Gnome. In 1938, Gnome was set up in the Sorbonne area of Paris as a wealthy Belgium student, Jacques Mornard. He was handsome, impeccably mannered and endowed with flawless French and English. He quickly seduced Sylvia Ageloff, an American confident of Trotsky. The relationship paid off and he eventually gained an invitation to the home of the old Russian near Mexico City. Mercader’s mother had also moved to Mexico to oversee the operation, entitled, appropriately enough, “Mother.” Once Mercader had ingratiated himself within Trotsky’s inner circle, it was simply a case of choosing his weapon and moment.
After 20 years in a Mexican jail without revealing a word, Mercader was finally released in 1960, he was 47 years old. After a year exiled in Cuba, he moved back to the USSR and was presented with the Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded to him originally by Stalin. He was only one of 41 foreigners to receive the country’s highest accolade. Mercader would then divide his time between Moscow and Cuba, his mother’s birth country, staying as an honoured guest of Castro’s government. Meanwhile, his mother, Caridad, a constant shadow in his life, worked at the Cuban embassy in Paris. She died in 1975 in some luxury, surrounded by her jewels, perfumes and expensive clothes, an unrepentant Stalinist, reputedly drinking 40 coffees and smoking 80 cigarettes a day.
The years passed and Mercader grew increasingly homesick for his native Catalunya. With the legalisation of the Communist Party of Spain in 1977 and the return of many of its leaders, Ramón saw his chance, and asked the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), Santiago Carrillo for permission to come home. Carillo, looking for an excuse to break with Moscow and a way to steer the party towards a Eurocommunist stance, invited Mercader to come back to Barcelona on the condition that he wrote his memoirs, telling all and naming his Moscow controllers.
Carrillo hoped that Mercader’s damning account would serve as justification for the rupture, but disciplined to the end, Ramón refused. Better to die in a foreign land than betray his comrades. Meanwhile, his party, the PSUC, went on to play a key role in the opposition to Franco and the transition of Catalunya. It underwent a process of destalinisation and eventually reformed in 1987 as Iniciativa, the current coalition partner in the Barcelona Council and Catalan government.
A man of his times, when individuals were swept away in ideological and geopolitical struggles, Ramón Mercader was a willing and murderous servant of Stalin to whom he remained stubbornly committed to until the very end. After dying of cancer in Santiago de Cuba in 1978, his ashes were flown to Moscow and buried in the Kuntsevo Cemetery, a place reserved for heroes of the USSR.
’What shall we give the mother’s boy? What shall we give him that tastes so good?’ One has to wonder whether he had in mind the constant dark shadow of his own mother when the rhyme slipped out.
I had a few thoughts on your article “Honor Abraham Lincoln” (Workers Vanguard, No. 938). I just finished Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 and reread some articles by Marx on the US Civil War. One of the things that’s striking is that Marx gave what is basically (critical) political support to a capitalist party, by congratulating Lincoln on re-election (see Karl Marx on Lincoln Re-Election, supra). Fake socialists have a long history of looking to some supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, so it’s striking when Marx himself seems to support that view, and it needs to be put in perspective.
It was essential to give military support to the North, but political support presumes that a class is performing a historically progressive role that could not be performed by a more progressive class, the proletariat. This is actually a time when the concept of a “two stage revolution” makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time. The US working class was small, unorganized and without the social weight it would possess a generation or more later. Chattel slavery was heinous in itself, but beyond that, as Marx said, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in its white skin, wherein its black it is branded.” It was inconceivable that there would be an advance in the class struggle, in terms of unions, never mind socialist revolution, while slavery existed. The aftermath of the Civil War, in particular Radical Reconstruction, gave birth to labor struggles and a modest rise in socialist consciousness in the US. Reconstruction’s defeat, symbolized by the withdrawal of federal troops to crush the rail strike of 1877, ended capitalism’s progressive role.
Marx was also writing about the US before the experience of the Paris Commune. (I cannot find any writings by Marx or Engels dealing with Reconstruction.) Marx’s writings on the US Civil War, along with radical abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and the whole thrust of Radical Reconstruction, presumed that one could use the capitalist state for progressive ends. The Paris Commune proved that false, or at least put that historical era clearly at an end. That task today can be fulfilled only by the proletariat.
Joel
WV replies:
The Civil War—the Second American Revolution—was the greatest event in U.S. history. By defeating the South, the industrialized system in the North uprooted the nearly 250-year-old institution of chattel slavery and paved the way for the expansion of capitalist property relations from one end of North America to the other.
Joel rightly emphasizes that the Northern ruling class in the Civil War era played a historically progressive role at a time when the small and unorganized working class lacked the social weight to supplant bourgeois rule. He concludes correctly that the class struggle, unionization and the prospect of socialist revolution could not advance as long as slavery existed.
However, Joel intimates that there is a common thread between Karl Marx’s congratulations to Abraham Lincoln for his re-election to the presidency in 1864 and the reformists’ political support for “liberal” bourgeois forces today: “Fake socialists have a long history of looking to some supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie, so it’s striking when Marx himself seems to support that view, and it needs to be put in perspective.”
Marx supported Lincoln because he was a bourgeois revolutionary in a period when, as Joel himself notes, the U.S. bourgeoisie was playing “a historically progressive role that could not be performed by a more progressive class, the proletariat.” Thus, this support has nothing whatsoever in common with the politics of today’s fake socialists, whose pro-Democratic Party program helps chain workers and the oppressed to their capitalist class enemies.
Joel correctly notes that the defeat of Reconstruction “ended capitalism’s progressive role.” Following the Civil War, the U.S. began to play an increasingly bellicose role abroad, waging war against Korea and clashing with its European competitors over Asia, the South Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. While the Republican Party had championed the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War and supported the great expansion of black rights during Reconstruction, it was quickly becoming the party of the big capitalists, who had little interest in the rights and advancement of black people. The years of the Grant administration saw the creation of new corporations that were, as described by Henry Adams at the time, “more powerful than a sovereign State” (quoted in “On Henry Adams and Democracy,” New York Review of Books, 27 March 2003). Moreover, as we noted in Part One of “The Grant Administration (1869-1877) and the Rise of U.S. Imperialism” (WV No. 938, 5 June), we see in this period “shades of the imperial presidency to come.” By the late 19th century, the U.S. had become an imperialist power, bringing death and destruction to subject countries such as the Philippines.
Joel suggests that the Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of the dictatorship of the proletariat in history, showed that one could no longer use the capitalist state for progressive ends. Actually, what the Paris Commune confirmed was that the proletariat, victorious in its social revolution, “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes,” as Marx underlined in The Civil War in France (1871). What the Paris Commune showed was that the working class must smash the existing capitalist state apparatus and replace it with its own state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The real issue at hand, in the case of the U.S. Civil War, is the question of when the bourgeoisie as a class ceases to play a historically progressive role. For various historical reasons, that question played out differently in Europe and the U.S. In fact, as early as 1848, amid the European revolutions of that year, Marx skewered the conservatism of the German bourgeoisie, writing, “The German bourgeoisie developed so sluggishly, timidly and slowly that at the moment when it menacingly confronted feudalism and absolutism, it saw menacingly confronting it the proletariat and all sections of the middle class whose interests and ideas were related to those of the proletariat” (“The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution” [1848]).
The 1848 revolutions marked the period when the European bourgeoisies ceased to play a historically progressive role. Indeed, they feared the prospect of revolutionary upheaval more than the dominance of the landed nobility, and allied themselves with the aristocracy against the working and artisan masses in revolt. At the same time, the proletariat was still too weak to immediately vie for power. It was the experience of the betrayals by the bourgeoisies in the 1848 revolutions that led Marx to emphasize the necessity of organizing the proletariat in a party independent of all other classes.
In the case of the U.S., as Joel himself notes, the working class could not play an independent role so long as the institution of slavery continued to exist. The North’s momentous suppression of the slaveholders’ rebellion gave great impetus to the industrialization of the country and fostered the development of the proletariat—capitalism’s gravedigger. The Civil War and Reconstruction represented the last progressive acts of the U.S. bourgeoisie.
Joel asserts that the period of the Civil War—including Marx’s support to Lincoln—“is actually a time when the concept of a ‘two stage revolution’ makes sense, even though the term was not used at that time.” However, this poses the question in an ahistorical manner. Marx was not working within the framework of “two stage revolution.” To the contrary, for Marx, the Civil War was not the first stage of a revolution whose sequel would bring the working class to power but the culmination of the bourgeois revolution. The dogma of “two stage revolution,” as originally developed for tsarist Russia, held that because Russia was a backward country that had not yet undergone a bourgeois-democratic revolution, a bourgeois republic was necessary to achieve modernization and prepare the proletariat for taking power. But by the time the two-stage conception appeared on the scene, capitalism was no longer capable of playing a historically progressive role.
Discussing this stagist strategy, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky remarked: “The Menshevik idea of the alliance of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie actually signified the subjection to the liberals of both the workers and the peasants” (“Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution” [1939]). All manner of Stalinists and fake socialists have sought to justify their “two stage” betrayals of the proletariat by pointing to Marx’s support to Lincoln and other similar instances. From the Mensheviks’ support to bourgeois liberalism during the 1917 Russian Revolution to the defeats of the Second Chinese Revolution in the late 1920s and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the two-stage framework has always been a straitjacket for the working class and a program for bloody counterrevolution.
Everything depends on time, place and circumstance, as Engels was fond of saying. In contrast to the Republican Party of the early 1860s, which fought to uproot black chattel slavery, the capitalist Republican and Democratic Parties today are the gendarmes of world reaction. Imperialism can be put out of business only by a series of working-class revolutions that overthrow capitalism, expropriate the bourgeoisie and prepare the way for a communist future for all of humanity. We struggle to build internationalist revolutionary parties dedicated to that goal.
Vasily Grossman, Stalingrad. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, New York Review of Books, 2019
In 2019, Vasily Grossman’s novel, Stalingrad (in Russian: Za pravoe delo or For a Just Cause), appeared for the first time in a complete English translation, almost seven decades after its first publication in 1952. The work is the prequel to Grossman’s well-known novel Life and Fate (1959). The author, in fact, conceived of the two as a unified whole. The publication of this masterpiece is a cultural event of considerable significance.
Stalingrad cover
The novel begins with a meeting between fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini on April 29, 1942, in which they discuss the progress of the war. Less than a year earlier, on June 22, 1941, the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union, launching the bloodiest conflict in the history of mankind. By the end of the war, in 1945, at least 27 million Soviet citizens, including 1.5 million Soviet Jews, would be dead. Despite the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Great Terror of 1936-38, the Soviet masses rose up to defend the conquests of the October Revolution against the fascist invaders.
In a partial but significant manner, the spirit that animated the Red Army during its early years, after it was created by Leon Trotsky and the Bolsheviks to defend the revolution, was revived. It is this same spirit that permeates Grossman’s novel.
The plot of Stalingrad is too complex to be recounted in full. Many of the protagonists, especially the physicist Viktor Shtrum and the Shaposhnikov family, will be familiar to readers of Life and Fate. Grossman offers a panoramic view of Soviet society at war. He portrays sections of the technical intelligentsia; miners in Siberia working in war production; children orphaned by the war; historical figures such as Gen. Andrey Yeryomenko, but, above all, Soviet civilians and soldiers, drawn from the working class and peasantry in Stalingrad.
The last portion of the work is focused entirely on the Nazi attack on Stalingrad, a vital industrial and transportation center in southern Russia, and the Soviet defense of the city through the first two weeks of September 1942. It was the battle of Stalingrad (August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943), on the western bank of the Volga in the “heart of Russia,” that effectively helped decide the outcome of the war and sealed the fate of the Nazis’ Third Reich. And everyone at the time, from Moscow to Berlin, London and Washington, understood this.
The Red Army had been taken by surprise by the Nazi invasion, largely due to the criminal Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and the beheading of the army’s leadership in Stalin’s Great Terror. It had been forced to retreat deeply into Soviet Russia, at the cost of millions of lives, until the autumn of 1942. However, throughout that year, the Soviet Union was able to mobilize immense economic resources for the war effort, thanks in large part to the planning principles in place, however limited and distorted by the bureaucracy, and the enormous sacrifices made by the Soviet population.
The Battle of Stalingrad
Though initially vastly outnumbered by the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces), the Red Army was able to defend Stalingrad and eventually go over to the offensive. By early February 1943, the entire 6th Army of General Friedrich Paulus had been destroyed, the first major military defeat suffered by the Nazis in the course of the war. As Leon Trotsky had predicted in 1934, “should the Russian Revolution … be forced to direct its stream into the channel of war, it will unleash a terrific and overwhelming force.”
A map of German advances in 1942
The tide in the war had been turned. The morale of the population throughout the Soviet Union and in Nazi-occupied Europe was boosted dramatically. The battle also galvanized the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, including the “White Rose” group of Sophie and Hans Scholl.
The sheer scale and brutality of the battle—the largest of the Second World War and, in fact, in all of human history—still almost defies comprehension. Well over one million men were involved in the battle on both sides, and the majority of them perished. On the Soviet side, conservative estimates put the number of military dead at 479,000, but it may be twice as high. The Wehrmacht lost an estimated 295,000 men.
Grossman’s descriptions of the nightmarish bombardment of the city, which set the entire city ablaze, leave a profound impression. At least 40,000 people are believed to have died within just three days. He describes at length the desperate efforts by isolated Soviet troops from the 308th Rifle Division to hold fragments of the city, in the face of numbing and deafening shelling from the Wehrmacht, until reinforcement comes. In virtually every case, they do so at the cost of their own lives. For good reason these hellish experiences became deeply engrained in popular consciousness in the former Soviet Union.
Scenes of horrifying violence are followed by scenes that are humorous, poetic and tender. His depictions of the many who knowingly went to their deaths, defending the Soviet Union, are outstanding. Grossman has a keen sense for the complexity of human psychology in the face of these enormous historical convulsions and the accompanying mass destruction.
In one scene, Lena Gnatyuk, a young Red Army nurse, in some of the last moments of her life, is given an American aid package.
Lena removed the cord and began to unwrap the parcel. The crinkly paper squeaked and rustled. There were many different items inside, some very small, and she squatted down to prevent anything falling out and getting lost. There was a beautiful woolen blouse, embroidered with a red, blue and green pattern; a fluffy bathrobe with a hood; two pairs of lacy trousers with matching shirts adorned with little ribbons; three pairs of silk stockings; some tiny lace-embroidered handkerchiefs; a white dress made from fine lawn, also trimmed with lace; a jar of some fragrant lotion; and a flask of perfume tied with a broad ribbon.
Lena looked at the two commanders. There was a moment of silence around the station, as if to prevent anything from disturbing the grace and delicacy of her expression. Her look said a great deal: not only that she knew she would never become a mother but also that she took a certain pride in her harsh fate. As she stood there in the pit, in her soldier’s boots and badly fitting uniform, about to refuse these exquisite gifts, Lena Gnatyuk looked overwhelmingly feminine. “What use is all of this?” she said. “I don’t want it.” The two men felt troubled. They understood something of the young woman’s feelings—her pride, her understanding that she was doomed and her mistaken belief that she looked awkward and ugly.
Within hours, all these people would be dead.
The scenes involving the German troops are also important. Grossman gives a sharp and damning portrait of a careerist Wehrmacht soldier, Stumpfe, from the German petty bourgeoisie, who dearly loves his own family but engages in violent assaults on and plunder of the Soviet population. He denounces fellow soldiers critical of Hitler to the unit’s Gestapo representative and seeks to be “promoted” to work in one of the “death factories” for the Jews of occupied Poland, hoping this will give him more opportunity for self-enrichment.
Fighting in Stalingrad’s industrial district, October 1942. Photographer/ Georgy Samsonov
Schmidt, by contrast, is a former trade unionist, who used to work with revolutionary socialist leader Karl Liebknecht. Indifferent to the ridicule and humiliation he is subjected to by Stumpfe and others, he is disgusted by the war and the Nazi regime but does not know how to connect with like-minded soldiers. Grossman clearly rejected the Stalinist lie that the entire German people had willingly followed Hitler (the theory of “collective guilt”), a lie propagated widely especially during the war in an effort to cover up for the Stalinists’ own responsibility for the disaster of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933.
Grossman’s presentation of his characters is perceptive and, at times, scathing but never judgmental. Underlying all of it is a profound and deeply felt sympathy for their suffering and the enormous traumas that Soviet society had gone through—not simply in the bloody war but also in the Stalinist Great Terror of the 1930s. Moreover, the writer understood that in the midst all of this, people lived on, raised children, established, maintained and broke off relationships, acting at times in a petty and despicable or trivial, but often also in a noble, manner. He never isolates the individual from society and the historical process but rather shows the profound, but complex and not always direct, interconnection between the decisive social and political events of the time and the personal lives of individuals.
The characters of Krymov and Zhenya Shaposhnikova, his young and beautiful former wife, are perhaps among the most complex and important ones in this regard. Krymov is a convinced Stalinist but also dedicated to the revolution. A former official in the Communist International, he has lost many of his friends and comrades to the purges of 1936-38. Krymov himself only barely survives, yet his faith in Stalin remains unshaken. Zhenya leaves him during the terror, not out of concern for her own fate or disappointment with her husband’s declining career, but because she simply fell out of love.
With Stalingrad—and Life and Fate—Grossman no doubt wanted to produce a 20th century version of Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace. However, unlike Tolstoy, in his monumental account of the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century, the Soviet author does not take the nobility, or their contemporary equivalents, or the generals as his protagonists. His primary concern is with the body of the people, in all its social, political and psychological contradictions, its different layers and countless shades of character and personality.
Grossman keenly understood that the masses of humanity made history and that, while national elements played a role, the ideals of the 1917 October Revolution above all—social equality and freedom from oppression of all kinds—motivated the heroic efforts of the Soviet masses in resisting the Nazis. He no doubt thought of his work as a tribute to their heroism and sacrifices. In the traditions of the Russian socialist intelligentsia, Grossman conceived of art as something relentlessly honest and a means of contributing to the people and the cause of social progress more broadly.
Grossman’s battle with censorship
He began writing the novel in 1943, in the midst of the war, and completed it in 1949. His deep grasp of the war was rooted in his own experiences. As a journalist for the Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), an official military newspaper, he accompanied the Red Army during many of the conflict’s most critical battles. He witnessed the battle of Stalingrad from September 1942 through January 1943 and the Soviet liberation of Ukraine, parts of Poland and Germany. For years, he spoke to soldiers in the trenches. He wrote about their lives and experiences and what he called “the ruthless truth of war” in articles that often only appeared after heavy censorship. His well-known courage at the front, his honesty and love of detail with which he conveyed the experience of the Soviet people during the war made him one of the most popular and respected figures in the USSR, especially within the Red Army.
Vasily Grossman in Stalingrad in 1942
Grossman also authored some of the first accounts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. He was born in 1905, the year of the first Russian revolution, in the small Ukrainian shtetl Berdychiv. His mother was murdered in a massacre by an SS Einsatzgruppe of the town’s entire Jewish population of more than 30,000 in the first months of World War II. Grossman’s essay on Treblinka, one of six death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, later served as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials. Together with Ilya Ehrenburg, he compiled The Black Book of Soviet Jewry (1944), a comprehensive documentation of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union.
The Holocaust also features in Stalingrad, above all, through the character of Viktor Shtrum, whose mother, like Grossman’s, is murdered in a massacre in Ukraine. In fact, the character of Shtrum was one of the points of contention with the censors. In 1949, as Grossman was finishing his novel, Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges of sections of the intelligentsia and bureaucracy were underway. The Holocaust had become a taboo topic and would remain so for many years to come. Copies of Ehrenburg and Grossman’s Black Book were pulped, and the censors tried unsuccessfully to convince the latter to remove Shtrum’s character from Stalingrad.
Other elements of the book also made it “dangerous,” from the Stalinist point of view. The scene where a Red Army soldier on the front mockingly reminds Krymov that the latter had “proved” to him and others in 1932 “definitely” that the victory of fascism in Germany was absolutely impossible “with statistics of every kind” could not but have infuriated the censors. The repeated references to the terror, too, placed the book at obvious risk of censorship. Stalin is invoked as an admirable figure only by convinced Stalinists and otherwise is hardly mentioned at all.
“Bureaucrat” is a recurring and disparaging term used by both civilians and soldiers in Stalingrad. In one scene during the bombardment of the city, the bureaucrat-officials running a hospital are said to refrain, not to anyone’s surprise, from saving the patients, while the entire staff risk their own lives and run into the bombed and burning building. The officials only return once the danger has passed, to continue commanding their subordinates. Grossman captures the anti-bureaucratic sentiments that were not only widespread, but also relatively open during the war. These sentiments, often expressed in the hope that after dealing with Hitler, the Soviet people might do away with Stalin, were one of the major reasons that the bureaucratic caste engaged in another round of purges after the war and murderously suppressed oppositional youth groups in the early 1950s.
After returning to Stalingrad, refugees sit on the ruins where their home once stood, March 1943. Photographer/ N. Sitnikov
Other, seemingly secondary, depictions of the realities of the war also touched on taboo subjects and themes: the depictions of the chaotic mass evacuations from burning Stalingrad, of massive defeats and retreats and of the handful of bitterly anticommunist peasants who eagerly await the Nazis’ occupation of their village. All this—the plight of the civilian population and the presentation of pro-Nazi sympathies and collaborators within the Soviet population—were erased from the history books by the Stalinists. The portrayal of army commanders in a less than heroic manner, which includes their petty jealousies and rivalries, likewise caused the ire of censors and sections of the military leadership that became involved in the discussions about the book. Other dictated changes and excised passages were the result of the narrow-minded, anti-Marxist conceptions of “socialist realism.”
This battle with government and military censors took several years. The novel was ultimately published in 1952 in the journal Novy Mir. However, this was not the version preferred by Grossman. In fact, there are no less than 11 variations of this work. Most publications have so far relied on the 1956 variant. This version, assembled by the principal translator Robert Chandler in collaboration with Yury Bit-Yunan on the basis of three editions and Grossman’s archives, is the most complete edition in any language. The editors and translators have explained their decisions in careful notes, which allow the reader to trace the history of the manuscripts. They are to be commended for their work.
Speaking in Copenhagen in 1932, Leon Trotsky noted, “The most profound meaning of the Revolution, but the hardest to submit to immediate measurement, consists in the fact that it forms and tempers the character of the people.” More than perhaps any other Soviet writer, Grossman sensed precisely that—the impact of the October Revolution on the thoughts, feelings and aspirations of the Soviet people—and he was able to capture it in his writing, both as a journalist and a novelist. While his Life and Fate indicates growing disillusionment and pessimism, he remained a committed socialist until the end of his life. In a moving Russian documentary, his son recalled how every year on Victory Day, May 9, Grossman would put on his Red Army uniform and sing war songs. He was proud to be considered a writer of the war and never wavered in his conviction that the Red Army’s struggle against fascism was a historic contribution to the progressive development of humanity.
For Grossman, who depended as an artist so strongly on the interaction with his audience, it was no doubt a great tragedy that he never saw either this work or Life and Fate appear in his lifetime in the versions that he wanted. (Life and Fate was not published at all until decades after his death.) In 1991, the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union and restored capitalism, carrying out what the Nazis had failed to accomplish in World War II.
Today, three decades later, the English translation of Stalingrad will not only finally introduce a broad readership to a masterpiece of world literature. It will also help new generations, and especially young people, to understand the enormous impact of the October Revolution and to reconnect with this critical history.
The following was written as a contribution for a Spartacist League internal educational series.
February 12, 2009, marked the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Since the days of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, revolutionaries have held Lincoln in high esteem. His world-historic achievement—the single most important event in American history —was to lead the North in a horrendously bloody civil war that smashed the Southern Confederacy and abolished slavery in the United States. In “Comments on the North American Events” (7 October 1862), Marx wrote with characteristic eloquence:
“Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no cothurnus [dignified, somewhat stilted style of ancient tragedy], no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be ‘fighting for an idea,’ when it is for them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by an idea, talks about ‘square feet.’ He sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled by circumstances ‘to act the lion.’…
“Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!”
Many opponents of revolutionary Marxism, from black nationalists to reformist leftists, have made a virtual cottage industry out of the slander that “Honest Abe” was a racist or even a white-supremacist. The reformist who impugns Lincoln for his bourgeois conceptions, which in fact reflected his time, place and position, does not hesitate for a moment to ally with unctuous “progressives” today who praise “diversity” while fighting tooth and nail to maintain the racial oppression and anti-immigrant chauvinism that are endemic to this most brutal of imperialist countries.
Take the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In Cold Truth, Liberating Truth: How This System Has Always Oppressed Black People, And How All Oppression Can Finally Be Ended, a pamphlet originally published in 1989 and reprinted in Revolution (17 February 2008), the RCP writes:
“It is a lie that ‘Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves’ because he was morally outraged over slavery. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves (and not all the slaves at first, but only those in the states that had joined the southern Confederacy) because he saw that it would be impossible to win the Civil War against that southern Confederacy without freeing these slaves and allowing them to fight in the Union army.
“Lincoln spoke and acted for the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he conducted the war in their interests” (emphasis in original).
Aside from the scurrilous suggestion that Lincoln was not an opponent of slavery who abhorred that “peculiar institution,” the RCP rejects Marxist materialism in favor of liberal moralizing, denying that against the reactionary class of slaveholders and the antiquated slave system, the Northern capitalists represented a revolutionary class whose victory was in the interests of historical progress. Presenting the goals of the North and South as equally rapacious, the RCP neither sides with the North nor characterizes its victory as the consummation of a social revolution.
Indeed, the Civil War—the Second American Revolution—was the last of the great bourgeois revolutions, which began with the English Civil War of the 17th century and found their culmination in the French Revolution of the 18th. For the RCP, however, there is no contradiction whatsoever in condemning Lincoln as a representative of the 19th-century American bourgeoisie while doing everything in its power to embrace bourgeois liberalism today—from its antiwar coalitions with capitalist spokesmen to its implicit support for the Democratic Party and Barack Obama in the name of “drive out the Bush regime.”
Abraham Lincoln: Bourgeois Revolutionary
In the preface to his 1859 book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx wrote that in studying the transformation of the whole immense superstructure that arises from revolutionary changes in the economic foundation:
“It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”
The American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln was both bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time—with all the contradictions this implies. Because the task of the Second American Revolution was to eradicate an antiquated social system based on chattel slavery and erect in its place the dominion of industrial capitalism based on wage labor from one end of the North American landmass to the other, it could not eradicate every form of class and social oppression—the hallmark of all propertied classes throughout the history of class society. As materialists, Marxists do not judge historical figures primarily based on the ideas in their heads but on how well they fulfilled the tasks of their epoch. While Lincoln had bourgeois conceptions—how could it be otherwise!—he was uniquely qualified to carry out the task before him, and in the last analysis he rose to the occasion as no other. That is the essence of his historical greatness.
While bestowing begrudging praise on Lincoln’s achievements with the left hand, the leftist critic often takes it back with the right. Lincoln, the critic will admit, opposed slavery; he came to see that a hard war was necessary and prepared to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. However, the critic is more concerned with Lincoln’s attitudes than his deeds: Lincoln was not John Brown, he was not Frederick Douglass, he was not Marx and Engels, he was not even as left-wing as his Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase. For example, while Lincoln agreed with John Brown in thinking slavery wrong, he could not excuse Brown’s violence, bloodshed and “acts of treason” in attempting to seize the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry to spark a slave rebellion on the eve of the Civil War. Finally, the critic will argue, while Marx and Engels from 3,000 miles away knew that the American Civil War was about slavery, Lincoln and the Republicans sought to ignore the root of the problem and wage the conflict on constitutional grounds to save the Union. Such facts are indisputable, but they must be seen in their historical context.
In his Abraham Lincoln (2009), James M. McPherson remarks:
“Only after years of studying the powerful crosscurrents of political and military pressures on Lincoln did I come to appreciate the skill with which he steered between the numerous shoals of conservatism and radicalism, free states and slave states, abolitionists, Republicans, Democrats, and border-state Unionists to maintain a steady course that brought the nation to victory—and the abolition of slavery—in the end. If he had moved decisively against slavery in the war’s first year, as radicals pressed him to do, he might well have fractured his war coalition, driven border-state Unionists over to the Confederacy, lost the war, and witnessed the survival of slavery for at least another generation.”
Facing innumerable pressures when the war broke out in April 1861, Lincoln grappled with how to respond to them. But the pressures—as intense as they were—were not merely strategic in nature. As the president of a constitutional republic, Lincoln believed that it was his duty to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. While he detested slavery, he believed it was not his right to abolish it. That ideology flowed from the whole bourgeois constitutional framework of the United States.
In the first year of the war, Lincoln pursued a policy of conciliating the four border slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri—in an effort to retain their loyalty to the Union. Marx and Engels criticized this policy because it weakened the Union’s war effort and emboldened the slaveholders. However, did this policy stem from disdain for the enslaved black masses or from a desire on Lincoln’s part to let bygones be bygones—i.e., coexist with the slave South? No. It flowed from the whole previous history of the United States. In 1776, 1800 and even as late as 1820, the North and South had similar values and institutions. With the Industrial Revolution, however, the North surged ahead in virtually every area—railroads, canals, literacy, inventions—while the South stagnated. Yet the two regions remained part of the same nation, setting the stage for compromise after compromise. For a whole historical period, Lincoln was hardly alone in seeking détente. In 1848, even the more left-wing Salmon Chase rejected the view espoused by radicals in his Liberty Party that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish slavery in the states, preferring a bloc with antislavery Whigs and Democrats that would agitate merely for keeping slavery out of the territories.
While he conciliated the border states for a time, Lincoln stood firm against secession, countering his cabinet members’ willingness to compromise in the face of the Confederacy’s belligerence. After his fateful election in 1860, which set the stage for the secession of the Southern states and the Civil War, Lincoln reined in his future secretary of state William H. Seward for advocating support to the Crittenden Compromise, an attempt to allow slavery to flourish anywhere south of 36°30′. Then Lincoln rejected Seward’s proposal to abandon Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Had it not been for Lincoln’s relentless efforts to goad his officers to fight and his stubborn support for Ulysses S. Grant in the face of substantial Northern opposition, the North might not have vanquished the slavocracy in that time and place. Lincoln’s resoluteness, his iron determination to achieve victory and his refusal to stand down to the Confederacy are hallmarks of his revolutionary role and enduring testaments to his greatness.
Borrowing from today’s terminology, one could argue that Lincoln began as a reformist, believing that the reactionary social system in the South could be pressured into change and that the institution of slavery would eventually wither on the vine. But he underwent a radical shift when bloody experience in the crucible of war—combined with the mass flight of the slaves to the Union lines—taught him that the nation could be preserved only by means of social revolution. In contrast to this remarkable personal transformation, the Great French Revolution required a series of tumultuous stages to reach its revolutionary climax, a protracted process that was marked by the domination of different and antagonistic groupings—from the Girondins to the Montagnards to the Committee of Public Safety. The Mensheviks were also reformists, but they didn’t become revolutionaries but counterrevolutionaries.
Was Lincoln a Racist?
Although it is beyond dispute that Lincoln occasionally appealed to racist consciousness and expressed racist opinions, the record is not as cut-and-dried as the typical liberal moralist or his leftist cousin will assert. Before a proslavery crowd in Charleston, Illinois, during the fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas on 18 September 1858, Lincoln declared:
“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Yet two months earlier in Chicago, Lincoln had insisted, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position; discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”
However, more important than these words were Lincoln’s actions in defense of the slaves, the freedmen and the black troops in the Union Army. For example, in the autumn of 1864, pressure mounted for Lincoln to consummate a prisoner exchange that would exclude black soldiers. Some Republican leaders warned that Union men “will work and vote against the President, because they think sympathy with a few negroes, also captured, is the cause of a refusal” to exchange prisoners. Ignoring these threats, Lincoln’s agent in the exchange negotiations asserted, “The wrongs, indignities, and privations suffered by our soldiers would move me to consent to anything to procure their exchange, except to barter away the honor and the faith of the Government of the United States, which has been so solemnly pledged to the colored soldiers in its ranks” (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom [1988]).
That’s not all. Confronting growing defeatist sentiment in the North, the grim prospect of defeat in the impending 1864 presidential elections and a cacophony of demands to abandon the Emancipation Proclamation from Democrats and even staunch Republicans, Lincoln stood firm. In response to fulminations such as “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,” Lincoln responded, “If they [the black soldiers] stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Emphasizing the point, he maintained, “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.”
In the last months of the war, the emancipation of the slaves began to raise broader political and economic questions. When reports filtered northward of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s indifference toward the thousands of freedmen that had attached themselves to his army, Lincoln’s war secretary Edwin Stanton traveled to Savannah, Georgia, in January 1865 to talk with Sherman and consult with black leaders. As a result of Stanton’s visit, Sherman issued “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” which granted the freed slaves rich plantation land belonging to former slaveholders.
Indignantly protesting that Lincoln valued the restoration of the Union over the emancipation of the slaves, the RCP cites his famous letter to Horace Greeley of 22 August 1862, which declared: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” The RCP neglects to add that a month later, on September 22, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Commenting on this momentous event, Marx called Lincoln’s manifesto abolishing slavery “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.”
What was more important for Lincoln’s cause, Union or emancipation? The very question betrays a subjective idealist approach that ignores the objective reality of the time. The two tasks had become inextricably intertwined in the reality of a war that pitted a modern industrial capitalist mode of production in the North against an archaic agrarian slave system in the South. Restoration of the Union required emancipation, and emancipation required a Union victory. For embodying and melding those two great tasks, Lincoln will forever occupy an honored place in history.
Much Ado About Colonization
An oft-repeated theme among Lincoln’s detractors is that the 16th president—a racist to his bones, they assert—was dedicated above all else to deporting the freed black slaves to distant shores. The most caustic purveyor of this timeworn slander is Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor emeritus of Ebony and the author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000). Bennett shrieks that “Abraham Lincoln’s deepest desire was to deport all black people and create an all-white nation. It’s—sounds like a wild idea now and it is a wild idea, but from about 1852 until his death, he worked feverishly to try to create deportation plans, colonization plans to send black people either to Africa or to…South America, or to the islands of the sea” (interview with Brian Lamb, 10 September 2000, http://www.booknotes.org/transcript/?programID=1581).
Lincoln did not invent the idea of colonization. Schemes to remove black people from the United States went back to the American Colonization Society, which was founded in 1816. Very much a product of his times, Lincoln was long a supporter of colonization because he believed that the ideal of racial harmony in America was impossible. Although reprehensible and misguided, Lincoln’s colonization schemes were motivated not by racist antipathy toward black people but by his perceptions of enduring white racism in America. In the course of meeting with black leaders at the White House on 14 July 1862, Lincoln declared:
“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated….
“Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best, when free; but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.”
— cited in “Report on Colonization and Emigration, Made to the Secretary of the Interior, by the Agent of Emigration” (1862)
It is therefore not surprising that Lincoln advocated colonization most strenuously at the very moment that he was preparing his Provisional Emancipation Proclamation following the watershed Union victory at Antietam, which Marx said “decided the fate of the American Civil War.” With his colonization proposals, Lincoln sought to sweeten what many whites considered the bitter pill of black emancipation.
However indefensible the idea of colonization was, Lincoln insisted that it must be voluntary. Even then, blacks overwhelmingly rejected colonization as both racist and impractical, holding anticolonization meetings in Chicago and Springfield to protest it. Indeed, Frederick Douglass declared in September 1862: “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” One of the administration’s two concrete moves to implement colonization, the Île à Vache fiasco, led to the deaths of dozens of freed blacks. However, when Lincoln learned of the disaster, he did the honorable thing and ordered the Navy to return the survivors to the United States.
Besides free blacks and Radical Abolitionists, many other contemporaries of Lincoln were incensed at his colonization efforts. Publications like Harper’s Weekly considered the proposal to resettle millions of people to distant shores insane. In Eric Foner’s words, “For what idea was more utopian and impractical than this fantastic scheme?” (“Lincoln and Colonization,” in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed., Eric Foner [2008]).
By the waning days of the war, Lincoln’s utterances on colonization—if not his attitude—had evolved. In a diary entry dated 1 July 1864, Lincoln’s secretary John Hay remarked, “I am glad that the President has sloughed off the idea of colonization.” But much more to the point than attempts to decipher Lincoln’s attitudes is the indisputable fact that Lincoln’s policies on the ground were progressively rendering his colonization schemes a dead letter. Foner writes that in 1863 and 1864, Lincoln began to consider the role that blacks would play in a post-slavery America. He showed particular interest in efforts that were under way to establish schools for blacks in the South Carolina Sea Islands and in how former slaves were being put to work on plantations in the Mississippi Valley. In August 1863, he instructed General Nathaniel P. Banks to establish a system in Louisiana during wartime Reconstruction in which “the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.”
Historian Richard N. Current wrote, “By the end of war, Lincoln had abandoned the idea of resettling free slaves outside the United States. He had come to accept the fact that Negroes, as a matter of justice as well as practicality, must be allowed to remain in the only homeland they knew, given education and opportunities for self-support, and started on the way to complete assimilation into American society” (cited at “Mr. Lincoln and Freedom,” http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org). Indeed, on 11 April 1865, following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln gave a speech in which he declared that literate blacks and black Union Army veterans should have the right to vote in a reconstructed Union—an early step toward the 14th Amendment and citizenship for the freed slaves.
A dishonest charlatan that considers Lincoln no better than Hitler, Lerone Bennett brings the very concept of scholarship into disrepute. In disgust at Bennett’s diatribes, one critic, Edward Steers Jr., sarcastically titled his review, “Great Emancipator or Grand Wizard?” And McPherson wrote that while Lincoln “was not a radical abolitionist, he did consider slavery morally wrong, and seized the opportunity presented by the war to move against it. Bennett fails to appreciate the acuity and empathy that enabled Lincoln to transcend his prejudices and to preside over the greatest social revolution in American history, the liberation of four million slaves” (“Lincoln the Devil,” New York Times, 27 August 2000).
Honor Lincoln— Finish the Civil War!
At times, Frederick Douglass was highly critical of Lincoln’s moderation and his relegation of black people to the status of what he called “step-children.” But Douglass also saw another side of the 16th president. In his autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882), the great abolitionist wrote of his meeting with Lincoln at the White House in 1864:
“The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines. What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace.… What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”
Rather than weigh the “good” Lincoln against the “bad” in search of the golden mean, Marxists must seek to understand that he was a bourgeois politician in a time of war and revolution—“a big, inconsistent, brave man,” in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois (cited in Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Was Lincoln a Racist?” The Root, available at http://www.theroot.com/views/was-lincoln-racist).
With the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president, bourgeois media pundits are acting as if he is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Billboards show a huge portrait of Lincoln with Obama’s face superimposed on it. Obama takes the presidential oath on Lincoln’s Bible. Liberal students go a step further, preferring Obama over Lincoln because Lincoln, they assert, was a racist who would have disapproved of a black president. In fact, U.S. imperialism’s current Commander-in-Chief has as much in common with the bourgeois revolutionary Abraham Lincoln as British prime minister Gordon Brown has with the great English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell or French president Nicolas Sarkozy has with the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre.
In condemning Lincoln as a racist and besmirching his supreme role in the liquidation of slavery, fake leftists like the RCP surely must have a hard time with Marx’s November 1864 letter to Lincoln on behalf of the First International congratulating the American people for his re-election as president (see accompanying box). By declaring that the European workers saw the star-spangled banner as carrying the destiny of their class, was Marx forsaking the red flag of communism? Not at all. For Marx and the workers of the Old World, Lincoln’s re-election guaranteed the irreversibility of the Emancipation Proclamation; it meant that the Union Army—first and foremost its “black warriors”—did not fight in vain. And they understood that with the demise of the slave power, the unbridled growth of capitalism would lay the foundation for the growth of the American proletariat—capitalism’s future gravedigger.
At bottom, the impulse to denounce Lincoln and to minimize his monumental role in history denies that political people—even great ones—are constrained by objective reality. If only poor Lincoln had not lacked the necessary will to eradicate all forms of racial oppression! As Marx explained, “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]). The elimination of racial oppression in all its forms was not possible in 1861 or 1865 because the objective means to accomplish it were not yet present—the unfettered growth of industrial capitalism in America and the development of the working class.
Lincoln accomplished the task placed before him by history: the abolition of slavery. He could do so despite, and because of, the conceptions in his head. The task of Trotskyists—revolutionary Marxists—is different. Our aim is proletarian revolution. Our perspective is revolutionary integrationism. While opposing every manifestation of racist oppression, we underline that liberating black people from racial oppression and poverty—conditions inherent to the U.S. capitalist system—can be achieved only by establishing an egalitarian socialist society. Building such a society requires the overthrow of the capitalist system by the working class and its allies. This is possible only by forging a revolutionary, internationalist working-class party that champions the rights of all the oppressed and declares war on all manifestations of social, class and sexual oppression. That task will be fulfilled by a third American revolution—a workers revolution.
Only those of very hard hearts can fail to admire Beth, the heroine of Walter Tevis’s magnificent novel, and now a popular television series, The Queen’s Gambit. We love the idea of her, a girl who makes good, starting off from very modest beginnings. She overcomes alcohol and drug addictions and rises to the very top of her profession: chess.
But Beth’s story raises the question as to why there are so few female champion chess players.
At time of writing, there are 1,731 chess grandmasters, the acknowledged leaders in their field. In order to enter this honored company, a player needs to have attained a 2500 Elo rating from the International Chess Federation at any point in their career, and earned two favorable tournament results, referred to as norms. For some perspective, my own rating was around 1700 when I played in tournaments, which means I barely know which way the knight moves, so any grandmaster who couldn’t beat me with queen odds ought to be ashamed of himself.
How many women currently hold the grandmaster title? Only 37 as of January 2021. That’s just 2 percent. There are several hypotheses bruited about to account for this gargantuan disproportion.
Dog Days:James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 791, 15 November 2002.
The Prometheus Research Library (PRL), archive and central library of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League, is proud to announce the publication of its third book, Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933. This 752-page volume, available in both paperback and hardcover, includes 118 documents that chronicle a factional polarization which rent the American section of Leon Trotsky’s International Left Opposition (ILO) from 1931 to 1933. This was a period of stagnation that Cannon later aptly called the “dog days of the movement.” Pitting supporters of James P. Cannon against the generally younger followers of Max Shachtman, who were less experienced as workers’ leaders, the fight in the Communist League (CLA) presaged the defining split in American Trotskyism which occurred in 1939-40. Yet the 1931-33 struggle has never before been well documented.
The PRL’s new volume, which includes an exhaustive introduction that situates the CLA fight in the context of the political sorting out that occurred in the early ILO, sheds new light on the history of the Trotskyist movement. It also provides a lively picture of the membership and work of the Trotskyists during this early period, documenting the political and organizational growth of a small, fighting propaganda group which went on to lead one of the decisive American class battles of 1934—the great Minneapolis Teamsters strikes.
In the book’s Editorial Note, the genesis of the volume is explained: “In the political youth of James Robertson, co-editor of this compilation, the subject matter of this book had a somewhat mystical and mythical quality, wherein might be found the origins of the profound 1940 scission in the Trotskyist (i.e., the authentic communist) movement.” In 1939-40, Max Shachtman and his supporters departed decisively from a revolutionary proletarian and internationalist perspective, abandoning the unconditional military defense of the world’s first workers state, the Soviet Union. Cannon and Trotsky led a six-month-long struggle against Shachtman’s petty-bourgeois opposition, which composed some 40 percent of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—then the U.S. Trotskyist organization—and its youth organization.
The fight coincided with the outbreak of World War II, and many of the European Trotskyist organizations were functioning in conditions of illegality. The fight in the SWP “became in effect a discussion for the entire Fourth International and was followed with passionate interest by the members of all sections” (Fourth International, May 1940). Trotsky’s writings from the struggle were collected in In Defense of Marxism; Cannon’s were published in The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.
Shachtman and some of his supporters went on to establish the Workers Party, developing the view that the USSR was a new form of class society, “bureaucratic collectivist.” For a period, Shachtman’s organization claimed to adhere to the Fourth International (FI) and acted as a rival to the SWP, the FI section in the U.S. But under the impact of the Cold War, the Workers Party moved rapidly to the right and changed its name to the Independent Socialist League (ISL) in 1949. In 1958 the ISL liquidated into the pathetic dregs of American social democracy. By the 1960s, Shachtman was supporting the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and U.S. imperialism’s bloody war against the Vietnamese national and social revolution. His path of renegacy has been well chronicled by the Spartacist tendency, most recently in “The Bankruptcy of ‘New Class’ Theories—Tony Cliff and Max Shachtman: Pro-Imperialist Accomplices of Counterrevolution” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999).
Cannon remained National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party until he retired in 1953. He was then SWP National Chairman until his death in 1974. But by the late 1950s, the party began to succumb to the consequences of the Cold War anti-Communist witchhunt, including lack of recruitment and an aging cadre. By 1960, the party had given up on the struggle for revolutionary proletarian leadership, hailing Fidel Castro as an “unconscious Trotskyist” and tailing the liberal-pacifist leadership of the civil rights movement. The Revolutionary Tendency, forerunner of the Spartacist League, fought the party’s degeneration and was expelled from the SWP in 1963. The SL today stands on the heritage of Cannon’s revolutionary SWP, which has less than nothing to do with the increasingly quirky reformist sect around Jack Barnes that today calls itself the Socialist Workers Party.
The material published in Dog Days documents that there was a deepgoing polarization between supporters of Shachtman and those of Cannon already in the CLA, posing the possibility of a split in early 1933. But unlike in 1939-40, there was no decisive principled or programmatic difference. Trotsky intervened sharply in the spring of 1933, warning that the two sides “anticipate a lot by sharpening the organizational struggle between the groups and the members without any connection with the development of political work and the questions it raises.” He sought to get the two factions to dissolve so that their members could direct their energy into expanding the League’s mass work. Trotsky’s intervention coincided with an upturn in the class struggle in 1933-34, which provided the objective basis for the CLA to break out of the impasse and go forward.
Prelude to 1939-40 Faction Fight
In his History of American Trotskyism (1944), Cannon correctly called the CLA dispute “the premature rehearsal of the great, definitive struggle of 1939-40.” At the same time, he described only a “sea of petty troubles, jealousies, clique formations and internal fights.” The extent of the polarization was later downplayed or dismissed by many of the leading participants interviewed by the PRL in the 1970s and 1990s. Some of the old-timers were embarrassed by their positions in the early fight. (For example, Carl Cowl, later a follower of the ultraleftist Hugo Oehler, supported Shachtman in the CLA, a fact which he never mentioned when the PRL interviewed him.)
The exception was Albert Glotzer, a key leader of the Shachtman group, whose memory was fueled by anti-Cannon passions which burned as hot in later decades as they had in the early 1930s. By the time the PRL interviewed him in the early 1990s, Glotzer was a confirmed “State Department socialist” with ties to the imperialist secret services. (Richard Valcourt, editor of the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, spoke at his 1999 memorial meeting.) Yet Glotzer obscenely continued to insist that Cannon had never been a true Bolshevik! The PRL introduction to Dog Days makes use of the PRL’s interviews with former CLAers, as well as of interviews with Cannon and Shachtman conducted by others in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1939-40, the factional lineup among SWP National Committee members who had been part ofthe early CLA was almost identical to that of 1931-33. Shachtman, Martin Abern and Glotzer were pitted against Cannon, Vincent Dunne and Carl Skoglund. (The one exception was Morris Lewit—later known as Morris Stein—who supported Shachtman in the early fight but became a key collaborator of Cannon’s in 1934 and a stalwart of the Soviet defensists in 1939-40.) The magnum opus of the Shachtman side, the lengthy June 1932 “The Situation in the American Opposition: Prospect and Retrospect” (referred to hereafter as “Prospect and Retrospect”), harps on the same organizational themes of Cannon’s so-called “bureaucratic conservatism” that dominated the petty-bourgeois opposition in 1939-40. When Cannon sent his Struggle for a Proletarian Party to Trotsky in 1940, he noted, “Its length must be excused on the ground that the dam of ten years patience has been broken down.”
“Prospect and Retrospect,” signed by Shachtman, Abern and Glotzer, is the source of all subsequent accounts of Cannon as an unreformed Zinovievist and bureaucrat with little interest in Marxist theory or international questions. Submitted just before a June 1932 plenum of the CLA’s National Committee (NC), “Prospect and Retrospect” was withdrawn by its authors at the plenum and then resubmitted a month later. Carbon copies of the document circulated extensively in the CLA through private factional channels, but “Prospect and Retrospect” never appeared in the CLA Internal Bulletin because Cannon never completed the reply he was mandated to write by the National Committee majority. In Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933, “Prospect and Retrospect” is published for the first time.
The new volume draws together representative documents, motions and correspondence from both sides of the factional divide, as well as all of Trotsky’s correspondence and interventions into the CLA fight. But it does not reproduce Cannon’s major documents and factional correspondence, most of which were published by Pathfinder Press in 1985 as part of Cannon’s Writings and Speeches: The Communist League of America 1932-34. That volume includes Cannon’s partial, draft reply to “Prospect and Retrospect” as well as “Internal Problems of the CLA,” which Cannon co-authored with Arne Swabeck in March 1932. Cannon’s 1932-34 Writings and Speeches is an essential companion to the PRL’s new book; Pathfinder’s earlier volume, Cannon’s Writings and Speeches: The Left Opposition in the U.S. 1928-31, also provides important background information and context. Dog Days includes eight Cannon pieces not in the Pathfinder collection, all of which circulated in the minutes of the CLA’s leading committee resident in New York and in Internal Bulletins.
Most of Trotsky’s written interventions into the CLA fight were published in English as part of Pathfinder’s Writings of Leon Trotsky series. But they are spread over several volumes, and the bulk of them appears only in the Writings Supplement 1929-33. Dog Days gathers them together in one book for the first time, putting them in the context of the CLA’s internal disputes so that their full import is clear. The new volume also includes seven never-before-published letters by Trotsky, most of them from the section of the Trotsky papers at Harvard University covering his period in exile. This section was opened to the public only in 1980, after Pathfinder’s Trotsky Writings series was compiled. Trotsky had no English-speaking secretary at the time of the CLA dispute, so most of his letters were written in German, and a few in French and Russian. The PRL prepared new translations for Dog Days.
Dog Days includes letters and documents by many other CLA cadres, including Arne Swabeck, Carl Skoglund, Albert Glotzer, Martin Abern and Maurice Spector. PRL researchers searched the papers of leading CLAers in archives around the United States, unearthing in all some 600 items relating to the CLA dispute and the preceding organizational tensions and disputes on international questions. The 118 documents selected for the book give a representative picture of the faction fight as it unfolded. Short introductions by the editors give necessary background material. Extensive footnotes provide additional information and a 40-page glossary identifies people, institutions and publications that might be unfamiliar to the reader. There are 16 pages of photos—many never before published—of leading CLAers and the class-struggle events in which the Trotskyists participated, as well as reproductions of the organization’s publications. The volume contains an extensive index, and the paperback as well as the hardcover have durable smyth-sewn bindings.
The documents in Dog Days reveal just how profoundly Cannon was shaped by the CLA’s early factional struggle and especially Trotsky’s intervention, which completed Cannon’s education as a Leninist. Destroying the Shachtmanite myth that Cannon was simply a “hand-raiser for Trotsky,” this volume illustrates that the relationship between Trotsky and Cannon was forged over time—not least in fights against Shachtman. Dog Days is a kind of manual of the dos and don’ts of Leninist internal party struggle. As the PRL introduction notes:
“The documents reveal the myriad tensions that can tear apart a small communist propaganda nucleus. How the CLA overcame the ‘dog days’ to become one of the strongest sections of the Fourth International is an important lesson in the struggle to forge a revolutionary party and its cadre. The Prometheus Research Library, central reference archive of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League, is unique in understanding the importance of the CLA fight and making its history accessible to our own and future generations. The ICL, like the ILO, is a fighting communist propaganda group with the goal of forging parties of the proletarian vanguard to lead to victory new October Revolutions internationally.”
It is not a propitious time to bring out a specialized and detailed volume of communist history such as this. Interest in the history of revolutionary Marxism is currently at a low ebb as bourgeois ideologues continue to peddle “death of communism” triumphalism born out of the demise of the Soviet Union. But it was Stalinism that died when Stalin’s epigones gave the USSR back to the capitalist world economy in 1991-92, not communism. A crystallizing bureaucratic caste under Stalin usurped political power from the Soviet working class in early 1924. In the aftermath, the Stalinist propaganda machine at the top of the world’s first workers state perverted Marxism. To justify its policies, which oscillated between abject conciliation of imperialism and stupid adventurism, the Stalinist caste insisted that it was possible to build “socialism in one country” and to peacefully “co-exist” with imperialism. These dogmas belong on the garbage heap of history; they have nothing to do with genuine Marxism, i.e., Trotskyism.
Whatever the fads and fancies of bourgeois social sciences, the dynamic of the class struggle is built into the nature of the capitalist economy. The working class has the power and the interest to overthrow this decaying social order and to replace it with an internationally planned economy. The leap in development that comes with a planned economy—even a bureaucratically deformed and nationally limited one—has been made patently obvious by the devastation of infrastructure, industry, education and health that have accompanied capitalist counterrevolution in the old Soviet Union and East Europe. Future generations of proletarian revolutionaries will need to assimilate the indispensable legacy of the Russian Revolution. They will find much to instruct them in the pages of the PRL’s new volume. It is unfortunate that this book presently appears only in English.
The Impasse of the CLA
The American Trotskyist movement was founded in October 1928 when Cannon, Abern and Shachtman were expelled from the Communist Party (CP) for attempting to organize support for Leon Trotsky’s Left Opposition. Born in struggle against the Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Left Opposition fought, in both the Soviet party and the Communist International (CI) as a whole, to continue Lenin’s fight for international working-class revolution, against Stalin’s revisionist insistence on building “socialism in one country.” Cannon was won to the Left Opposition in 1928 while attending the Communist International’s Sixth Congress in Moscow, where he read the two parts of Trotsky’s Critique of the Comintern’s draft program that were distributed to members of the Program Commission. (The whole of the Critique, which consists of three parts, was later published as The Third International After Lenin.) Cannon and Canadian Communist Party leader Maurice Spector, also a member of the Program Commission, smuggled a copy of Trotsky’s manuscript out of the Soviet Union and began organizing support for the Left Opposition in their respective parties.
Working of necessity in great secrecy, Cannon managed to win over only a very few of his compatriots —centrally his companion, Rose Karsner, as well as Shachtman and Abern—before being expelled from the CP. However, the fledgling Trotskyist group immediately began publishing a newspaper, the Militant, to propagate its views. The group quickly won adherents. Cannon had been the co-leader, along with William F. (Bill) Dunne, of the smallest of the three major groups that vied for leadership in the factional wars that dominated the Communist Party in the 1920s. Cannon had a great deal of authority as a founding Communist with a history in the pre-communist workers movement, going back to his days as an itinerant organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1910s. He was elected chairman of the Workers Party when it was founded in December 1921 as a legal organization parallel to the underground Communist Party. While many members of the CP’s Cannon faction—including Bill Dunne—went along with Cannon’s expulsion, many others opposed or at least questioned it. These questioners, too, were unceremoniously expelled by the CP leadership, which was at the time in the hands of an opportunist faction led by the unprincipled, ambition-crazed adventurer Jay Lovestone (who later evolved into an imperialist secret service operative). After reading Trotsky’s Critique, the majority of the expellees declared for the Left Opposition and began distributing the Militant. The ILO considered itself an expelled faction of the Communist Party, fighting to return the Communist International to the program embodied in its first four congresses.
The Communist League of America, which initially included the Canadian comrades in a Toronto branch, had some 100 members at its founding convention in May 1929. The former Cannon faction members were joined by a handful of former adherents of the third CP faction, which was led by William Z. Foster. At the time the Trotskyists were expelled, the Cannon and Foster factions were in a bloc against the opportunist Lovestone leadership.Disgusted by the continued and sharpening rightward course of the CP under Lovestone, disaffected Fosterites gave the fledgling Trotskyists a hearing and some were recruited. But this source of new members was soon cut off, as the Dog Days introduction recounts. Lovestone, failing to accurately judge the winds blowing from Moscow, did not break early enough with his main Moscow sponsor, Nikolai Bukharin. He was expelled from the CP the same month the CLA was founded. Lovestone took his closest supporters with him, but Stalin had managed to isolate him from the vast majority of his faction, which remained in the party.
The expulsion of Lovestone was part of a wholesale left turn in the policies of CI parties decreed by Moscow in 1927-28. Stalin moved against the Soviet party right wing, led by Bukharin, which had advocated a series of economic concessions that were made to the well-off peasants who could hire labor (the kulaks) from 1925-28. Stalin and Bukharin had stood together in the fight against the Left Opposition, but the concessions made to the peasantry proved a horrible disaster (as the Left Opposition had predicted). By 1927 the kulaks were hoarding grain, threatening to starve the Soviet cities. In an abrupt about-face, Stalin moved to brutally and forcibly collectivize the peasantry and implement a planned, but adventurous, rate of industrialization. At the same time, the Comintern declared that a new “Third Period” of post-World War I political life had opened up in which revolution was just around the corner. Bukharin and most of the leaders of the right in the Soviet party soon capitulated to Stalin, but internationally Bukharin’s supporters were expelled from most communist parties. The Bukharinites congealed into an international Right Opposition which included the Lovestone group in the U.S.
The international turn toward “Third Period” ultraleft rhetoric—which was often combined with adventurist actions—assuaged many communists previously disaffected with the Comintern’s growing opportunism. The new policy further undercut the LO’s appeal by seeming to co-opt its call for a more rapid pace of Soviet industrialization.In Cannon’s words, the Third Period was “a devastating blow.” In the early ’60s, Shachtman recounted:
“We could no longer speak of the Party going further and further to the right. We could no longer speak of the Lovestoneites ruining the Party. We could no longer speak of the Fosterites having illusions that they would get the leadership of the Party. If anything resulted from that, it was a counteroffensive by the Fosterites—in the ranks, to be sure, unofficially, to be sure—to get us to return to the Party. They didn’t succeed in convincing a single one of our people, but not even the possibility of success existed any longer for us in recruiting dissident Fosterites.”
Just a few months after Lovestone’s expulsion, the stock market crash inaugurated the Great Depression. The CLA sank into the dog days. Not only were the Trotskyists cut off from the vast majority of class-conscious American workers organized in the Communist Party, but the CLA’s already meager financial resources all but disappeared as its members were laid off or forced to work for reduced wages. Class struggle in the country was at a low ebb. Moreover Cannon, whose first wife died just before the CLA was founded, leaving him responsible for their two children, had to get a job outside the organization. He underwent a period of evident demoralization, absenting himself from the CLA office for weeks at a time. The personal frictions and organizational grievances born in this period fueled the later faction fight and dominate Shachtman, Abern and Glotzer’s “Prospect and Retrospect.”
The Cannon Faction in the CP
The PRL introduction to Dog Days deals extensively with the 1929-30 frictions. Some of the tension grew out of the fact that Cannon recognized early on that the Third Period had shut off the CLA’s possibilities for immediate substantial growth. Shachtman and Abern resisted this conclusion, insisting on taking the Militant weekly in late 1929. Other tensions arose as the American Trotskyists avidly assimilated Trotsky’s writings, realizing the depth of the political deficiencies of the old Cannon faction in the Communist Party. Cannon explained in a 1974 interview referenced in Dog Days:
“As we began to get the writings of Trotsky, it opened up a whole new world for us. And they [Abern and Shachtman] discovered, this is my assumption, that while they had always taken what I said for gospel, they discovered there were a lot of things I didn’t know. That I was just beginning to learn from Trotsky. What they didn’t know was that I was learning as well as they were. Shachtman at least, I think, had the idea that he had outgrown me.”
Shachtman, Abern and Glotzer took great exception to Cannon’s 1930 statement that the CLA’s cadre had been “‘prepared by the past’ for our place under the banner of the International Left Opposition” (Militant, 10 May 1930). Labeling Cannon’s assertion a “theory of gestation,” they disparaged the record of the Cannon faction in the CP, insisting that their being won over to the Left Opposition was some kind of historical accident.
The PRL’s first book, James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1920-1928, which was published in 1992, covered Cannon’s years as CP leader, documenting the political evolution of the Cannon faction. The Cannon faction was motivated largely by national concerns and did not break fundamentally with the Stalinist dogma of “socialism in one country.” At the same time, the faction’s record proves that there was much in their worldview that led them to the ILO’s door. As the PRL noted in the introduction to James P. Cannon and the Early Years of American Communism:
“When, in 1932, Shachtman and Abern led a rebellion against Cannon’s leadership of the Communist League of America, they were only interested in telling one side of the story. The material presented here also tells another, one that predisposed a deliberate and considered workers’ leader like Cannon to turn away from high office within the American party in favor of remaining true to the revolutionism that had animated his youth and continued to animate the program of the Left Opposition.”
The introduction to Dog Days notes that in particular Shachtman et al. underplayed the importance of Cannon’s history of hard opposition to the opportunism of Lovestone, the American version of the Right Opposition. Trotsky fought many battles in the early ILO against those, like Spanish Opposition leader Andrés Nin, who sought to merge banners with the Right Opposition. It was a particular strength of the American League that its members, in general, were not disposed to make common cause with the Right Opposition.
The CLA’s extensive publishing program was key to the assimilation of its cadre into the international Trotskyist movement. Besides the weekly Militant, which often included articles by Trotsky, the CLA published an array of Trotsky pamphlets, including his major articles on the rise of fascism in Germany and on the unfolding revolutionary situation in Spain. They also published in book form a selection of Trotsky’s writings on the lost opportunity for proletarian revolution in China from 1925 to 1927, Problems of the Chinese Revolution. In letters included in Dog Days, Trotsky praised the quality of the CLA’s translations and publishing efforts, and he sought to get the North American Trotskyists to produce a theoretical journal (which they began only in 1934).
In late 1930, leading CLA member Arne Swabeck moved from Chicago to New York to help overcome the tensions in the CLA national office. Cannon was again fully politically engaged by this point, and he and Swabeck began an axis of collaboration which was key to the stabilization of the CLA and the expansion of its publishing program throughout 1931. In late 1931, the CLA began publishing a monthly youth press, Young Spartacus, as well as an episodic publication in Greek and a somewhat more regular publication in Yiddish. As the Dog Days introduction notes, Shachtman, Abern and Glotzer objected far more to Cannon’s revival than they had to his absence. Shachtman in particular had grown used to treating the CLA’s relations with Trotsky and other ILO parties as his personal fiefdom. He bridled at Cannon’s attempts to get the National Committee as a whole to take responsibility for international work. This was the issue that precipitated the factional polarization. In documenting the key role that international questions played in the CLA fight, Dog Days breaks new ground.
The International Questions
Shachtman was the first CLA leader to go to Prinkipo, Turkey, to meet with Trotsky in exile, after which he went to Europe and took part in the first ILO international gathering in April 1930. He was subsequently co-opted onto the ILO’s leading body, the International Bureau. In Europe he developed close relations with Kurt Landau, a leader of the ILO’s German section, and with Pierre Naville of the French Ligue Communiste. Trotsky subsequently waged sharp political fights against both men.
Shachtman treated his correspondence with Trotsky about the political struggles in Europe as “personal.” Moreover, he did not seek to get the CLA to take positions on the questions at issue. After a series of skirmishes in 1931, this issue finally broke out into the open in early 1932, when Cannon sought—over Shachtman’s opposition—to put the CLA on record in support of Trotsky’s positions in the internal ILO struggles involving Landau, Naville and others. The PRL introduction explains the basis for the ILO’s many political disputes:
“Many dissident Communist elements who sought to regroup under the ILO’s banner did not fully grasp the significance of the struggle in the Russian party. All were attracted to the Left Opposition’s struggle against bureaucratism in the Soviet party and state. But many saw this as a simple ‘democratic’ issue, misunderstanding or disagreeing with the underlying programmatic basis—the fight to forge the politically homogenous revolutionary proletarian vanguard in opposition to all varieties of centrism and reformism. Political softness toward the Right Opposition was common…. Trotsky’s primary task was the systematic education of the ILO cadre and the weeding out of opportunist, sectarian, accidental, and dilettantish elements. This entailed almost constant internal political struggle.”
The PRL introduction sketches out Trotsky’s arguments with Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Naville on the trade-union question in the French section, his fight against the cliquism of Kurt Landau, and his struggle against Andrés Nin’s centrist orientation toward unity with Joaquín Maurín’s Workers and Peasants Bloc in Spain. All these issues figure in the documents published in the volume.
Dog Days is divided into three sections—“Shachtman in the International,” “The Fight” and “The International Intervenes”—with documents presented chronologically within each section. The first section consists mostly of Trotsky and Shachtman’s correspondence on problems in the European ILO sections from 1930 to ’31. Those who know the ICL and its work will be struck by the familiarity of Trotsky’s concerns, especially his struggle to create a centralized political and administrative apparatus for the ILO. Trotsky’s aim was to forge a politically homogenous democratic-centralist tendency, even if it consisted at first of small propaganda groups. This aim, carried forward today by the ICL, separates us from all manner of fakers who (used to/sort of) pretend to be the continuators of the Left Opposition.
Trotsky fought against the Bordigists and others who wanted the ILO center to be simply a political clearing house for nationally delimited (and therefore necessarily centrist) parties. He fought for an early delegated international conference to establish an elected leadership, and he condemned the leadership of the Spanish section in particular for not paying enough attention to international questions and for not translating the ILO discussion bulletins for its membership. The CLA, it should be noted, took the responsibility early on for publishing the ILO discussion bulletin in English. Thus the North American membership was able to follow the disputes in the international movement.
The Trotsky-Shachtman correspondence illustrates Trotsky’s growing impatience with Shachtman’s refusal to make programmatic considerations primary, starting with Shachtman’s first foray into Europe in the spring of 1930, when (despite explicit instructions from Trotsky) he failed to ensure that the ILO’s first conference issue a political manifesto. Shachtman attempted to blunt the fight against Landau’s disastrous leadership of the German section, and he encouraged Nin in Spain and Naville in France. After Shachtman made a second trip to Europe in the fall of 1931, Trotsky was so alarmed that he wrote to the CLA National Committee to inquire if Shachtman represented the views of the CLA leadership as a whole. These documents expose Shachtman’s lying assertion, made later in the CLA fight, that he had never had significant differences with Trotsky. They also (in the words of the PRL introduction) “explode the image of Shachtman as Trotsky’s happy international commissar, a myth spread by Shachtman and his supporters in later years and more recently purveyed by Peter Drucker in his biography of Shachtman [Max Shachtman and His Left: A Socialist’s Odyssey Through the “American Century,” Humanities Press, 1994]. In fact, Trotsky’s opponents in Europe invoked Shachtman’s name in defense of their own actions.”
The Fight
After returning from his second trip to Europe, Shachtman refused to vote for Cannon’s 1931 draft NC statement supporting Trotsky’s positions in Europe. He resigned his post as Militant editor and attempted to deflect the discussion from the international questions by making an issue of Swabeck and Cannon’s supposed harshness toward a supercilious and scholastic group of petty-bourgeois youth in the New York local (the “Carter group”). Abern and Glotzer, who claimed to disagree with Shachtman on the debates in Europe, aided and abetted Shachtman in deflecting the discussion, co-signing “Prospect and Retrospect” and submitting it on the eve of the June 1932 NC plenum. The documents reveal that Spector and Glotzer privately prevailed on Shachtman to capitulate on the international question, which he did at the plenum. The two sides also managed to work out a joint motion on the New York local and the “Carter group.” Under pressure from Cannon and his supporters, who promised a reply if “Prospect and Retrospect” remained in the record, Shachtman et al. withdrew their document.
Yet the “unity” thus achieved exploded just a few weeks after the plenum. Over the next year, the two groups fought over a myriad of organizational issues, from the co-optations to the National Committee proposed by Cannon, to Cannon’s proposal to accept only working-class activists for membership in the New York local, to the date for the CLA’s third national conference. Documents from both sides of these disputes are published in the section of the volume titled “The Fight,” as well as representative internal factional correspondence from the Shachtman side. (Cannon’s letters to his supporters were published in the Pathfinder volume of Cannon’s writings from 1932-34.) As the PRL introduction notes, there is a sharp contrast between the correspondence from both sides: “Where Shachtman, Glotzer, and Abern are politically vague and gossipy, Cannon is programmatic and forward-looking. The same contrast can be drawn between Shachtman and Glotzer’s lengthy letters to Trotsky and Swabeck’s terse, informative correspondence.”
Organizational tensions were exacerbated by the League’s utter financial poverty as well as by some non-Leninist organizational practices. When Trotsky received a visa to visit Copenhagen in the fall of 1932, Shachtman and his supporters refused to send Swabeck—who was born and raised in Denmark—to Copenhagen immediately to take part in ILO deliberations. Although he missed the ILO gathering in Copenhagen, Swabeck was able to go to Europe in early 1933 to attend an important ILO meeting. He traveled on to Prinkipo, where his discussions with Trotsky played a great role in resolving the CLA’s polarization. The trip was possible only because funds were raised privately by the Cannon faction.
Cannon rightly saw the root of the problem as the petty-bourgeois basis of the Shachtman faction, concentrated in the New York local. As the Dog Days introduction notes, Cannon “was desperate to find an entry point into a mass proletarian movement and thus recruit a way out of the factional impasse caused by the political weight of the League’s literary recruits.” Cannon’s younger supporters like George Clarke and Sam Gordon went out into the field as itinerant party organizers. When Skoglund and Dunne began their work organizing the coal drivers in Minneapolis, Shachtman’s supporter there, Carl Cowl, branded them as “opportunists.”
The cavalier attitude of the Shachtman faction toward the CLA’s fragile roots in the proletariat was amply demonstrated by its periodic obstruction of the CLA’s work in the Southern Illinois breakaway from the United Mine Workers, the Progressive Miners of America (PMA). For most of the period covered by the book, the CLA’s best opportunity to recruit real working-class support appeared to lie with the PMA. A CLA member, Gerry Allard, was the editor of the PMA paper, Progressive Miner. The PRL introduction deals in detail with developments in the PMA, providing essential background for the reader. The volume includes a never-before-published letter by Cannon to Trotsky requesting advice on relations with Allard.
Throughout the period of the greatest organizational tensions, however, the two sides remained united on the League’s fundamental political tasks. When Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the decision to take the Militant from weekly to triweekly to champion the expected resistance of the German working class was not controversial. Neither did the two sides fight about the CLA’s work in the unemployed movement.
The polarization began to take on an embryonic political character only in early 1933, when Shachtman and Abern objected strenuously to Cannon’s raising the possibility of a role for the Soviet Red Army in a proletarian offensive to beat back Hitler’s rise to power. Shachtman and Abern were at the time capitulating to the prevailing “socialism in one country” opinion in the CP milieus to which the CLA oriented. The Shachtman faction’s opposition to posing the use of the Red Army outside the borders of the USSR presaged their 1939 abandonment of the defense of the USSR when the Red Army entered Finland and Poland. But in 1933 they dropped their objections after Trotsky intervened to support the thrust of Cannon’s position. Trotsky’s statement on this dispute, “Germany and the USSR,” has long been available as part of Pathfinder’s Trotsky collection, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. But its import is much clearer when it is read along with the documents from the CLA fight.
At the time of the Red Army dispute, Shachtman and Abern labeled Cannon an opportunist because he delivered a speech to a trade-union conference in Southern Illinois—in which the PMA was heavily involved—as a representative of a group of left-wing workers in New York instead of as a member of the CLA. But political groups had been banned from speaking at the conference, and the alternative would have been to cede the field to reformist and anti-Communist PMA leaders. Trotsky’s comments on the CLA’s work in the PMA—centrally “Trade-Union Problems in America” (previously published in Writings of Leon Trotsky Supplement 1929-33)—have a much bigger impact when read in the context of documents from both sides of the CLA divide. “Trade-Union Problems in America” is published in the new volume’s final section, “The International Intervenes.”
Trotsky’s Role
In many ways, “The International Intervenes” is the most powerful section of the book. Trotsky’s experience in internal party struggle was brought to bear, first in discussions with Swabeck in Prinkipo and later in his letters to CLA leaders on both sides of the factional divide. In addition to Trotsky’s correspondence, the section includes letters written by Swabeck to Cannon reporting on further discussions in Prinkipo. Criticizing both factions for drawing harsh organizational lines in the absence of programmatic differences, Trotsky pointed out that the Cannon group, as the majority of the NC, bore central responsibility for the tenor of internal discussion. As the documents reveal, Cannon immediately took Trotsky’s criticisms to heart, making substantive organizational concessions to the minority.
Under pressure from Trotsky to intervene sharply and prevent a split, the International Secretariat (I.S.) scheduled a plenum in May 1933 where the situation in the CLA would be thoroughly discussed. Swabeck was scheduled to attend on his way home from Prinkipo, and the I.S. requested that a minority representative also attend. Drawing on funds lent by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, then a Trotskyist sympathizer, Shachtman once again went to Europe. On the boat to Europe, Shachtman wrote to Glotzer, insisting that he would not dissolve their faction.However, he quickly changed his tune. In Paris he cosigned a resolution with Swabeck calling for dissolution of the factions and he traveled on to Prinkipo for discussions with Trotsky. His letters home to Abern and Glotzer—mimeographed for distribution to his faction in the League—are included in the book. They amplify and elaborate on Trotsky’s thinking about the situation in the CLA.
The CLA National Committee adopted a resolution in June calling for the cessation of the internal struggle and for turning the League outward to take advantage of new opportunities opening up before it. The campaign for a united-front working-class offensive against Hitler in Germany had a strong impact on the CP cadre and the CLA was again recruiting from the party. It was able to intervene to great effect in conferences called by the CP of the unemployed movement and legal defense organizations.
Yet the documents reveal that tensions continued to run high over Cannon’s proposal to move the CLA headquarters to Chicago. Aiming to take advantage of the proletarian nature of the city (as compared to New York) and the greater openness of CP milieus in Chicago, Cannon’s proposal was eventually supported by Trotsky, who saw it as part of turning the CLA outward toward the working class. While not campaigning against the move, Shachtman and Abern quietly planned to remain in New York and produce a theoretical journal. This was a recipe for a “cold split” in the CLA, and in late 1933 Cannon wisely shelved the idea of moving the organization’s center. This aspect of the fight has never before been dealt with in print.
Hard on the heels of the international attempts to mitigate the CLA struggle came Trotsky’s initiative for a bold political turn for the ILO as a whole. Already in May 1933 Trotsky had noted that the German Communist Party’s failure to organize any opposition to Hitler’s consolidation of power meant that it was dead as a revolutionary force. He called for a new party in Germany and in July 1933, after it was clear that no organized opposition had emerged within the Communist International as a whole, he proposed that the ILO reorient itself away from acting as a faction of the CI. Trotsky advocated the call for a new, Fourth International and suggested that the Opposition attempt to regroup with subjectively revolutionary elements who were now organizing outside the CI. The new orientation was endorsed by an I.S. plenum in August 1933 and enthusiastically embraced by the entire CLA National Committee.
The turn toward functioning as the embryo of a new party formation came just as the class struggle began to heat up in the United States. In January 1934, the CLA addressed an open letter suggesting discussions with the leftward-moving centrists of A.J. Muste’s American Workers Party, who advocated the formation of a new workers party in the U.S. Fusion between the CLA and the Musteites took place in December 1934 and was greatly facilitated by the CLA’s leadership of three strikes in the spring and summer which won union recognition for the Minneapolis Teamsters, and by the Muste organization’s leadership in a major class battle at Toledo Auto-Lite in the spring.
It was the new opportunities opening up before the American Trotskyists that laid the basis for the resolution of the CLA’s internal polarization. Shachtman and Morris Lewit went on to collaborate with Cannon in turning the League toward the class struggle, while the majority of the old Shachtman faction, now organized as the Abern-Weber clique, obstructed the work. That story is told in Prometheus Research Series No. 5, which reprints Shachtman’s 1936 document “Marxist Politics or Unprincipled Combinationism?”, a devastating indictment of the unprincipled, personalist methods of Shachtman’s former supporters. In this document Shachtman reveals that—despite the May 1933 agreement to dissolve the factions—the Shachtman/Abern/Glotzer faction in New York went on meeting through January 1934. The Abern clique remained as a fault line in the American Trotskyist movement throughout the 1930s, one that ruptured again in the 1939-40 struggle, when Shachtman rejoined it.
Prescient and Equivocal
Ruminating on the problems of party leadership as he was about to be sent to prison along with 17 other SWP and Minneapolis Teamsters leaders in 1943, Cannon drew a balance sheet of the CLA experience:
“At one time in the early days, the so-called Cannon-Shachtman fight, which was conducted with all the intensity of the final struggle with the petty-bourgeois opposition and even with more acrimony—in that struggle Comrade Trotsky made the comment that the two factions each anticipated too much. They fought each other not on the ground of the political merits and qualities which were fully demonstrated as of that day, but from a point of view of a generalization as to what the ultimate development of the political tendencies on each side would come to…. In such a situation, Comrade Trotsky said, the most progressive tendency is the conciliatory tendency—those who propose to make peace and test out in further common action what is the basis and merit of the accusations on each side. That advice of Comrade Trotsky was accepted in the old fight. Some people accepted it diplomatically and some honestly, but, in general, the prescription was to plunge the party into mass work, stop the faction struggle, disband the faction organizations, and test out in political action what were the tendencies of the two groups.
“And eventually we came to a solution of it in the year 1940—but the fight had begun ten years before, and if we had tried to solve it in 1933 by means of a split—which is the only way you can solve irreconcilable faction fights—there is no way the movement might have profited by it, because we would have had to explain to the workers outside the movement what the fight was about. And if we couldn’t make this clear to comrades inside the party how could we make it clear to the nonparty people we wanted to join? The result would have been the stagnation of the movement as was the case in England.”
— Cannon, “The Situation in the New York Local,” 23 December 1942, printed in The Socialist Workers Party in World War II: Writings and Speeches 1940-43
On questions of party organization and attitude toward workers struggle, the 1931-33 Shachtman faction embodied the same petty-bourgeois approach that Cannon exposed so eloquently in 1939-40 in TheStruggle for a Proletarian Party. But the decisive question for a Leninist is political program. The petty-bourgeois orientation of Shachtman, Abern and Glotzer took on decisive programmatic coloration in 1939-40, and it was only at that point that factional struggle was mandated. Cannon learned from Trotsky’s intervention into the early struggle, and he went on to prove himself a superb Leninist leader in the 1939-40 fight and beyond. He won the majority in 1940 because the American Trotskyists, having turned outward, had recruited a layer of serious, proletarian revolutionaries. The PRL introduction ends by drawing the central lesson of this experience:
“While the revolutionary character of a proletarian organization is defined by its program, which represents nothing other than the historic interests of the international working class, there is an interplay between a party’s program and its social composition. Marx insisted that ‘being determines consciousness,’ and this applies as much to aspiring revolutionaries as to other sectors of society. A Marxist vanguard without deep roots in the working class not only lacks the means to implement its program, but is necessarily more susceptible to the social pressures of alien classes.”
Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shachtman in the Communist League of America, 1931-1933 is an essential reference book for any communist.
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