Will China Beat Us Back to the Moon?December 29, 2021
China just released its latest space exploration plans, according to Chinese state media, and it turns out the Middle Kingdom plans to put taikonauts (Chinese astronauts) on the moon ahead of schedule. Bloomberg had the story:
The space rivalry between the U.S. and China is suddenly heating up after a top Chinese scientist said his nation may be able to send astronauts to the moon for the first time by 2030.
Coming just weeks after President Joe Biden’s top space official set out a similar timetable for new American lunar exploration, the comments set up the possibility of dueling missions between the two of the world’s best-financed space powers.
While China has made no secret of its desire to launch crewed lunar missions, the optimistic outlook from Chinese Academy of Sciences member Ye Peijian raises the possibility of an accelerated timetable to match the Americans.
“As long as the technological research for manned moon landing continues, and as long as the country is determined, it is entirely possible for China to land people on the moon before 2030,” Ye told state broadcaster CCTV, according to a report on Sunday from the official Xinhua News Agency.
China is untrustworthy enough when it comes to pronouncements of what it has already accomplished, let alone bold predictions about future accomplishments. All the same, China boasts impressive achievements in space technology as of late.
However seriously we choose to take China’s ambitious moonshot prediction, we would be foolish not to take the occasion to revisit America’s own plans to repeat a manned mission to the moon.
Officially, the United States is definitely landing its astronauts on the moon by 2025.
Toward this end, NASA launched the Artemis program in 2017, with an original goal of reaching the Moon by 2028. Notably, even at the beginning of the program, NASA already allotted itself three extra years than it took the original Apollo program to go from inception to lunar landing — and that was despite the fact that, unlike Apollo, Artemis wasn’t starting from scratch.
The Artemis program itself is a scaled-back, less-ambitious version of President George W. Bush’s 2004 proposal, in the wake of the Columbia disaster, to send Americans back to the moon as a prelude to a manned Mars mission. Naturally, that proposal got about as far as making CGI concept art of Americans on Mars before stalling out.
In 2019, Vice President Pence proudly announced that Artemis’s timetable would be accelerated by four years, with a moon landing planned for 2024. Straightforward enough, right? Seven years to do what America did half a century before in eight.
To land on the moon in 2024, Artemis required:
New spacesuits
A new heavy launch rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS)
A landing module, the Human Landing System (HLS), capable of supporting two humans on the lunar surface for a full week.
And hey, America already did all of this fifty years ago, so how hard could it be?
You know the answer. Two years have passed since Pence’s announcement of a sped-up timeline, and none of the three core elements above are complete. Expectations are already dropping faster than the fragments of an exploded space shuttle. The goal was actually 2024 until this spring, when acting NASA director Steve Jurczyk said it was no longer a “realistic” target due to insufficient funds. In August, the delay to 2025 became official when the agency’s inspector general said that, thanks to Covid-19 delays, it would take until at least April 2025 to produce two Moon-ready space suits.
Yes, you got that right. The original Manhattan Project went from creation to Trinity test in less than four years: today, America takes longer than that to design a space suit, according to Slate:
The new line of spacesuits just falls short in one minorly important way: hitting deadlines. Originally, these spacesuits were supposed to be tested on the ISS in 2023 with a target date for the Artemis missions in 2028. After Trump’s acceleration, NASA required xEMU suits to be delivered for mission integration by March 31, 2023. Well, that’s not going to happen—with over 20 months of delays currently on the books.
…
Misaligned schedules between various NASA offices have compounded issues in intra-agency coordination. Coordination is extra complicated because NASA is “assembling the spacesuit from components supplied by 27 different contractors and vendors.”
The last point is particularly telling. Back in 1965, Playtex designed and sewed its contract-winning prototype spacesuit in just six weeks. Just two corporations handled the manufacture of the original Apollo suits. But in today’s “everyone gets a piece” federal behemoth, even products designed to be used by a single human being are farmed out to more than two dozen companies. The mess around the Artemis space suit calls to mind the disastrous trillion-dollar F-35 fighter boondoggle, which has stayed alive for more than two decades in part because Lockheed Martin farmed out parts parts production for the fighter to forty-five U.S. states, giving almost every part of the country an economic stake in the program’s perpetuation.
Revolver spoke with a scientist with decades of experience working with NASA and a a strong familiarity with its current operations. He said that while it is technically possible for NASA to hit its 2025 timetable, more delays are nearly a certainty.
“By 2025? Right now I’d say 10% chance, maybe less,” the scientist said. “Everything would have to go right, and it never does, especially in the modern diversity-first NASA. And on top of everything going right, they have to not lose political will.”
A sober look at the progress of the launch rocket (SLS) and landing module (HLS) suggests that this seemingly dour prognosis is actually optimistic.
Let’s consider the launch rocket first.
To this day, the most powerful rocket in US history remains the F-1 rocket engine. This was the engine used to propel the Apollo moon missions. But today, American rocket engineers are incapable of reproducing the F-1. They have evidently lost skills and know-how to match earlier achievements from generations ago.
In other words, antiquated technology is as elusive to us today as future technology. America reached its high water mark for a task as rote and mechanical as rocket power over 50 years ago.
And this is not for lack of throwing money at the problem. The Space Launch System (“SLS”), the launch rocket intended for the Artemis program, was supposed to be NASA’s solution to America’s rocket impotence problem. NASA began development on SLS 10 years ago, and despite costs to taxpayers ballooning up to $20 billion and counting, it still has never even launched.
For some perspective, note that the entire Apollo space program from 1961-1972 cost roughly 200 billion in today’s dollars. That is 200 billion (inflation adjusted) dollars for every aspect of the Apollo program: R&D, government contracts, labor, promotion, and six successful manned moon missions spanning over a decade, including the first ever manned moon mission in history. And this was all achieved with pre-pocket calculator technology!
Now, over a half century later we have spent so far spent 10 percent (inflation adjusted) of the entire Apollo program’s budget on a rocket that has still never even launched.
NASA’s SLS has done nothing but miss deadlines, fail tests, and burn through budgets for a decade. It has been a beached whale. Indeed, when all is said and done the total cost of the SLS rocket could very well exceed 50 or even 100 billion– and this is just one of several components necessary to repeat one successful manned moon mission.
When Americans squander decades of time and billions of dollars only to get nothing in return, they can rest assured a defense contractor is lurking somewhere in the storyline.
And sure enough, just as was the case with the James Webb Hubble Telescope, military contractors have cleaned out the US Treasury’s piggy bank as they failed their way forward.
With the James Webb telescope it was Northrop Grumman; for the SLS, the prime contractor is Boeing.
If things are looking bleak for rocket development, perhaps things are looking more optimistic with the lunar landing module, which is another major component that would be necessary for a manned moon mission.
So far the story of the lunar module’s development has been the story of intense competition between two of the richest men in world history, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. For some interesting perspective, Musk and Bezos each possess a net worth that exceeds the budget of the entire Apollo program. The fact that these two wealthy resourceful titans have exhibited considerable dedication to producing the lunar lander would seem to speak well to the lander’s prospects.
Sadly, the competition between Musk’s Space X and Bezos’ Blue Origin has so far only impeded the lunar lander’s development. After NASA awarded a 6 billion contract to Musk’s Space X to build the lunar lander, Bezos’ Blue Origin engaged in a vigorous legal battle challenging the propriety of the contract process during which time all development of the lunar lander had to be halted. Courts recently ruled in favor of Space X, allowing for development to resume, though recent progress reports are not terribly encouraging:
Though SpaceX technically hasn’t started building a prototype of the actual Starship Moon lander that will returns humans to the lunar surface, every single Starship and Super Heavy booster it builds and tests mature’s the foundation of that crewed variant’s design, as well as the fleet of boosters and ships that will be required to fuel it in orbit. By all appearances, Starship S20 – the first completed orbital-class prototye – has passed all the tests thrown at it and is ready for the program’s first orbital-velocity launch attempt. If the speed of recent testing continues, Super Heavy Booster 4 may not be far behind it. [Teslarati.com]
If you ignore the window-dressing, you’ll see above that it’s not just that Space X isn’t done with the lunar module, and it’s not even that they’re not quite done with a prototype–they haven’t even started building a prototype! It is safe to say based on this lack of progress that we won’t be seeing a functional lunar module anytime soon — and no great loss, because the SLS rocket that the lunar lander would attach to is nowhere near completion either!
This sorry state of affairs should perhaps not be too surprising. There is no reason that same toxic stew of corporate sluggishness, bureaucratic incompetence, and woke pathology that thwarts every other would-be great achievement in America shouldn’t apply to space travel as well.
In America, the highest goal is not success in the sense that our forefathers would understand. America isn’t trying to put a person back on the moon. It’s trying to put the first woman and first person of color on the moon. In September, NASA even released a comic book to celebrate this currently-nonexistent achievement:
NASA released its first digital, interactive graphic novel on Saturday in celebration of National Comic Book Day. “First Woman: NASA’s Promise for Humanity” imagines the story of Callie Rodriguez, the first woman to explore the Moon.
While Callie’s story is fictional, the first woman and the first person of color will walk on the Moon, achieving these historic milestones as part of NASA’s Artemis missions. Through this graphic novel, NASA aims to inspire the next generation of explorers – the Artemis Generation.
NASA wants diversity, colleges want diversity, America’s physicists want diversity, both of America’s political parties want diversity. Who actually wants to go to the moon?
So, given current trends, China will (probably) beat America back to Earth’s sole satellite. And make no mistake, losing this race does matter. A lunar landing might be seen as a frivolity, but it’s an important symbol of how far America has decayed as a scientific superpower. It’s easy to make excuses for America not achieving new things as rapidly as it once did, but it’s far harder to explain why, despite all of the money, time, promises, and extended deadlines, America now seems likely to fail at something it achieved fifty-two years ago in an era that hadn’t even invented the pocket calculator. Tweet
America losing the second space race would show that, for the first time in nearly 70 years, America’s status as the premier scientific power on the globe is in jeopardy. For today’s regime, which cloaks its theology in the garb of Science, this is a deadly development.
As today’s America falls short on objective markers of success, it will turn more toward subjective ones that reflect the ideological prison it has built for itself. Sure, America’s ruling class will assure itself, China may be launching space missions that are more timely, more efficient, and more technically impressive, but we are the nation that will put the first woman on the moon, the first black on the moon, the first transgender on the Moon. China may have more vulgar earthly achievements, but America has the correct woke religion.
Without a dramatic course correction, America’s loss of technical (and eventually economic) preeminence will be impossible to hide. It will be impossible for many to accept such a total indictment of America’s policy choices in the years since 1969. Americans, even “conservative” ones, will not want to admit that America’s anti-white, anti-male, pro-crime, diversity-first civic religion was a cataclysmic error. And so, rather than admit America’s decline, many will decide that America simply never achieved much in the first place.
With the passage of time, a growing portion of the population simply thinks the original lunar landings never happened. In a 2019 poll, those over 54 (old enough to personally remember the landings) were essentially unanimous in rejecting skeptical theories about it, but of those under 35 nearly one in five believed the landings were fake.
Why should we be surprised? Young Americans today look at the America of today and see a country that bungled Covid and Afghanistan, a country that fumbles its greatest projects, a country that actively wages war on its most talented and productive for the sake of its most anti-social and parasitic. To them, it is unfathomable that the U.S. government of today could ever, from scratch, with pre-pocket calculator technology, organize and execute something as technically demanding as a a moon landing, with the whole process taking less than a decade. Unable to imagine how much greater America once was as a country, young Americans instead imagine the past was as much of a joke as today.
But the truth, of course, is that old America simply was a better country. Old America was such an industrial powerhouse that it crushed both Germany and Japan at the same time while supplying a huge portion of the war material used by its allies. Old America completed the Manhattan Project from inception to nuclear test just three years, then launched its first nuclear-powered submarine just ten years after that. As we wrote back in September, while discussing the oft-delayed launch of the James Webb Telescope:
In the 1960s, America’s frenzied push for national excellence was so powerful, that it eagerly employed Wernher von Braun, a former SS member implicated in the use of slave labor by the Third Reich. In contrast, is there any doubt today that any NASA engineer, no matter how talented or important, would be completely ruined if a tape surfaced of them using the N-word five years ago?
Old America really was capable of dramatic, large-scale, centrally-organized advancement at a rapid speed, because it was a country that cultivated, rewarded, and celebrated merit and ability. Even more importantly, it didn’t actively sabotage merit and ability in the name of buzzwords like “diversity” and “equity.”
If America’s leaders simply recognized the superiority of old America, not in a wistful nostalgic sense but in a practical way that recognizes what it did better, then they could quickly start setting this country on the path to recovery. They might even manage to get America back to the moon ahead of China.
But America’s leaders will not do that. First, adopting a real merit-based system would mean an instantaneous loss of status for themselves. But even more importantly, adopting such a system is simply not thinkable for them. America’s leaders are actively repulsed by the very idea of a society that prioritizes greatness and excellence over resentment and grievance. And when a society’s leaders despise greatness, why should we expect anything great from them?
On June 28, 34-year-old longshore worker Byron Jacobs was killed on the docks in Longview, Washington, when a mooring line being used to move a ship down the pier snapped, recoiled and hit Byron at a speed of over 450 miles per hour. The chief mate of the ship, 41-year-old Pingshan Li, who was struck by the other end of the line, died a few hours later. A fifth-generation longshoreman, Byron was secretary-treasurer of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21 when he stood on the union’s front lines during its 2011-12 battle against the all-out union-busting offensive by the Export Grain Terminal (EGT) bosses in Longview. WV labor correspondent Gene Herson noted in a July 3 letter of condolence to Local 21 (printed below) that the courage and determination of Byron and other unionists, fighting with a militancy not seen in this country in decades, was an inspiration for all of labor.
At a July 6 memorial meeting, a WV representative joined hundreds of ILWU members and other unionists alongside the Jacobs family and friends to commemorate Byron’s life. His stepfather proudly recalled Byron leading the charge to defend ILWU International president Robert McEllrath, who was being dragged away by the cops who had brutally attacked a 300-strong picket line that blocked a train loaded with grain headed for the EGT terminal on 7 September 2011. Many others recalled Byron’s courageous defense of members of Local 21’s women’s auxiliary against the cops a few weeks later.
Despite facing multiple felony charges for his heroic actions, Byron never retreated from the fight. But the ILWU International leadership did. In the end, as military forces were mobilized by the Obama administration to escort the first shipment of scab grain out of the EGT terminal, an agreement between the union and company was signed. The contract set a trend for other Pacific Northwest grain bosses in their war against the ILWU. Sacrificing workers’ safety, these agreements allowed for dangerous 12-hour work shifts and undermined previous provisions allowing the union to “stand by” (stop work) when safety was threatened.
In a letter to the Longview Daily News (7 July) following the deaths of Byron Jacobs and Pingshan Li, one retired ship pilot wrote: “I don’t know the specifics what went wrong here, but in my years as a ship pilot, I learned how quickly Longview’s swirling, weaving river current can introduce sudden and extreme line stress…. I advocated hiring a pilot and tug for less than ideal conditions. However, I think cost-conscious ship’s captains still make the call.” In a recent phone call, Dan Coffman, former president of Local 21, noted that: “In the early days, we used to use a lot of tug assists and they’ve gotten away from that.” He went on, “It was all about dollars and cents and so they quit using the tugs.”
Byron’s wife Megan has filed a $16 million lawsuit against the ship’s owner and the company operating it. Although no amount of money could ever compensate for Byron’s life and his family’s devastation, the ILWU should make sure that she gets every penny.
For the shipping companies and terminal operators, workplace injuries and death are simply collateral damage in their pursuit of higher profits. A genuine tribute to the life of Byron Jacobs would be for the union to fight to build union safety committees with the authority to shut down unsafe work on the spot, and to set the terms for practices that would preserve the life and limbs of longshore and all maritime workers. Byron proudly traced his fighting spirit back to his Lumbee Indian kin who drove the Klan out of their North Carolina county in 1958. He embodied many of the qualities necessary to forge a union leadership that will mobilize labor’s power in defense of the interests of the working class, as well as all of the oppressed.
* * *
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I am writing to express my deepest condolences and those of my comrades to the members of ILWU Local 21 as well as the family and other friends of Byron Jacobs. His tragic and horrific death is a body blow to all fighters for labor’s cause against the cutthroat employers.
I met Byron during Local 21’s battle against EGT’s union-busting assault during which I traveled to Longview several times as a labor reporter for Workers Vanguard. He was not only a true union stalwart but someone who had a thoughtful and keen appreciation of the plight of others. In many ways, this was exemplified when Byron courageously came to the defense of Ladies Auxiliary members who were under police attack during the ILWU’s September 21, 2011 protest against a train bound for the EGT terminal. It was such militancy and determination which inspired many other trade unionists in the region and around the country.
My comrade Tony who got to know Byron recalls his amusement that rather than being made to serve jail time, the court sentenced him to an “anger management” class. Anyone who knew Byron knew him as a kind, gentle and big-hearted man. It was exactly those qualities that made him such a determined fighter against the real injustices perpetrated by the bosses with the backing of the police, courts and government of this country.
As a former member of the National Maritime Union for 20 years whose arm was pulverized in the process of shifting a ship, I know the deadly dangers longshoremen and other maritime workers face. More often than not this is at the hands of companies trying to save money by cutting corners on safety. Thus the deep sadness that I felt on learning of Byron’s death was also tempered by anger at those who would sacrifice the lives of working people in the service of their bottom line.
Myself and other comrades who met Byron send our deepest sympathies to all of you. It is a devastating loss. The best salute to his life will be to continue the fight for labor’s cause and that of all the downtrodden victimized by this brutal society.
In sympathy and solidarity,
Gene Herson Labor correspondent for Workers Vanguard
Thirty years have now passed since the USSR collapsed. The largest state in the history of the world has left a mixed legacy and much of the promise of the Perestroika-era has never been fulfilled.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has touched upon the collapse of USSR multiple times, and the wider public has strong feelings on the subject. The latest VTSIOM poll shows that 58% want to see the former giant country reunified. Almost unanimously, they believe that in 1991, there was a chance to keep the Soviet Union as a single economic and political space. In this article, RT discusses the consequences of those dramatic events for the Russian people.
To this day, the history of its breakup remain relevant to people in Russia and in former Soviet republics, as the end of a strict dictatorship also signaled national revivals. Despite their dominant role in the USSR, as the largest member state, this applied to Russians as much as any of the other nationalists in the union. Perhaps even more so, as Russian identity was suppressed by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, nobody from Moscow or Saint Petersburg ever led the Soviet Union, and the two longest serving heads of state, during the period, were a Georgian (Joseph Stalin) and a Ukrainian (Leonid Brezhnev).
While many were left behind by transition to capitalism, and the 1990s was a decade of great distress, it can be argued that Russians have never been as free, or as prosperous, as they are today. Also, the fact that Moscow no longer has to subsidize Socialist parties throughout the world, or as many poorer far away “republics,” has had obvious financial benefits.
***
Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov died of hunger in Sergiyev Posad, near Moscow, less than 18 months after the October Revolution. He never accepted the Bolshevik coup and the toppling of Tsar Nicholas II in February 1917.
“Holy Rus fell to pieces in three days,” Rozanov wrote about the death of the monarchy. Ironically, a similar sentiment could be shared by the descendants of the Bolsheviks some 70 years later; 16.5 million members of the Communist Party, years of nurturing the ‘new Soviet man’, absolute state control over law enforcement and security agencies – nothing could prevent the collapse of the regime known as the Red Empire by both its citizens and the numerous Russian migrant communities.
Of all the outcomes of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the loss of territory is the first that comes to mind. Russia found itself surrounded by independent states, each requiring its own foreign policy approach. Moscow’s territory shrunk back to its 17th century borders. Not all of the republics wanted to distance themselves from Russia. On March 17, 1991, nine out of the 15 republics held a referendum on the future of the Soviet Union; 76.4% voted to stay. Even in Ukraine, with its active dissident and anti-Soviet movement, 70% of the people supported this decision.
The dissolution of the once united country has made the Russians the most numerous of the divided people in Europe. Political analyst and philosopher Aleksey Dzermant in his interview to RT said that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many Russians were stripped of their rights in new independent states. They’ve been losing their social status and influence in the last 30 years.
As the Soviet Union was formed, administrative borders rarely matched national ones. Belarus and Ukraine were given entire regions by the Bolsheviks, while some Central Asian nations acquired statehood for the first time in their history. This resulted in numerous cross-national conflicts that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union (Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria and Abkhazia, the Fergana Valley riots). Russians have become the largest national minority in Ukraine (22.07% of the population in 1991), Kazakhstan (37%), the Baltic states (30.3% in Estonia, 33.8% in Latvia and 8.6% in Lithuania), Kyrgyzstan (21.5%) and Moldova (13%).
These issues persist to this day. Many Russians in the Baltic do not have citizenship in their countries of residence: they are treated like second-class subjects, are banned from certain professions and cannot participate in political life. The Donbass war has been, in many ways, rooted in the national policies of the first Soviet leaders. The Russian community in Kazakhstan had its share of hardships, too, when in summer of 2021 local nationalists organized “language patrols” and forced service workers to apologize on camera for using the Russian language.
Still, in some ways, Russia was able to benefit from the collapse of the USSR. Before the dissolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was the strongest economy in the Union. In 1990, it accounted for 60.33% of the aggregate GDP (followed by Ukraine with 17.8%). The RSFSR subsidized all other republics, including Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, which were all industrial powerhouses in their own right. However, Russia’s own population did not fare particularly well – the fruits of its labor were redistributed among other less developed republics. Gaining independence cut them off Russia’s ‘balance sheet’, so the country was able to focus on its own development and start investing in itself.
According to executive director of the international monitoring organization CIS-EMO Stanislav Byshok, PhD, it was the ‘Stop feeding the other republics!’ slogan that brought enormous popularity to Boris Yeltsin. “The ultimate question of why the Russians refused to save the USSR from collapsing boils down to the fact that they essentially had to save it from themselves – from their own dissatisfaction with Russia’s status as the financial backer for the entire union,” Byshok said. The expert believes that, in the hypothetical scenario where the Soviet Union survived after 1991, it’s likely that Russia – which was already struggling economically – could have been simply overwhelmed by the pressure to bankroll the other republics. “People who blame everything on the ‘wild 1990s’ tend to forget that the standard of living had started falling long before the dissolution of the USSR – a factor that had, in many ways, contributed to the collapse,” said Byshok.
The Soviet national policy, which discriminated against the Russian people, was finally gone. The Bolsheviks had tried to create a new ethnicity – the ‘Soviet people’ – with Russians, as the most numerous, serving as its foundation. To do this, the Bolsheviks suppressed their identity so they could glue together all other nationalities – nationalities that were able to raise their own intellectual elites, create their alphabets and national cultures thanks to the Bolsheviks. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian culture restored its status and could finally move forward.
In an interview with RT, Byshok explained that the Soviet nationalities policy closed off some paths for Russian national development while opening up others. The concept of a greater Russian nation, heavily promoted in the final decades of the Russian Empire, was replaced by the concept of a ‘fraternity’ of Eastern Slavic peoples – united, but different. The expert believes that, for the Russians in the USSR, just as for the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, one’s ethnic identity did not contradict the notion of ‘civic’ identity as a Soviet person or a Yugoslavian. However, Byshok noted, Bolshevik ideology stated that non-Russian peoples of the USSR were first supposed to self-identify (with the help of the state) as independent nations, and then, as it were, realize the need to abandon one’s narrow national identity in favor of an all-union one – and ultimately identify with the world’s proletariat. “That didn’t work out,” he said.
The breakdown of the unified political space wasn’t just a matter of culture and ethnicity. The entire Soviet economy was based on the concept of the division of labor. Specialized industrial clusters were distributed across the Union, so the dissolution meant losing major industrial centers. Production of rocket and aviation engines was left with Ukraine, part of the automotive sector with the newly independent Latvia, and the Baikonur Cosmodrome ended up in Kazakhstan.
Eventually, Russia overcame these transitional pains. Today, the country boasts a socially-oriented economy (albeit with a considerable state participation) and developed financial and IT sectors. On average, Russians are 1.5 times wealthier than the RSFSR citizens before the collapse, according to official statistics, which generally underestimate real finances in the former USSR. Still, the inequality brought about by capitalism remains high.
There is but another post-Soviet malady that can be traced to the economic crisis of the 1990s. The Soviet Union had invested heavily in socialist movements around the world. Socialist countries in Asia and Africa received loans and were able to get goods at reduced prices; Moscow provided them with experts and supplied all the necessary equipment. Eastern European countries also received help. Massive amounts of money were spent.
Economic problems of the 1990s and the transition period undermined Russian influence in those countries. Money and effort ended up being spent for nothing. To Mikhail Gorbachev, promises were enough, so he did not demand any legally binding guarantees from NATO not to expand to the east as the socialist republics of Eastern Europe fell and the Soviet Union had to withdraw its troops. Surely enough, the promises were quickly broken. Many former Soviet nations joined the bloc, granting it direct access to the Russian border. This remains one of the key national security issues for the Russian government, and it will decide the nature of Russia’s relations with the West and the former Soviet republics for years to come. In many ways, it was the desire for NATO membership that led to conflicts with Ukraine and Georgia.
Dzermant pointed out that the dissolution of the USSR dealt a serious blow to Russia’s global influence and escalated a number of conflicts along its borders. According to the expert, Moscow had to build a new security system, and the process is not completely over yet.
Russia has definitely benefited from the fall of the Iron Curtain. Its people were allowed access to Western culture and technologies, and were able to join the scientific discussions of international academia. Contemporary Russian culture has also been recognized in the West, but there still hasn’t been a political rapprochement.
When the Soviet Union was on its last legs, there were talks about the “common European home,” with Russia as an integral part of the new concept. The vision Charles de Gaulle had of a Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok appealed to Gorbachev and his government of the newly independent Russia. In the late 1990s-early 2000s, some even suggested that Russia should join NATO to help fight global terrorism.
Dzermant thinks that it was Gorbachev’s shortsighted policy that led NATO to believe that it was free to do as it wished, and its activities didn’t have to abide by any law. “Integrating former Soviet republics in NATO’s sphere of influence definitely threatened Russia’s security,” he commented.
But as soon as Russia overcame the crisis of the 1990s, rebuilt its economy and became active on the international stage, the world immediately reverted to a bipolar system. All ideas of rapprochement were abandoned. Western politicians viewed Russia as the heir to the Soviet Union that sought to expand its ideology and political system to the rest of the world.
Dzermant believes that restoring national ideology in its Soviet form is completely impossible today, since the information space is very diverse and numerous ideas are constantly competing. However, he is convinced that Russia, just like any other country, must have its own paradigm that would define the country’s global interests and understanding of justice, name its potential allies and describe its worldview. “This would be our core, our foundation. But others shouldn’t be pressured into it, it must be promoted through soft power mechanisms,” he added. That’s how Russia could explain itself and its actions to the world.
Byshok believes that the absence of ideology in modern Russian politics is a major advantage. “Some are of the opinion that Russia is in dire need of some kind of grand overarching idea – and, by extension, some self-imposed global mission or duty. This opinion is based on nothing but ideological preferences of the people expressing it,” he said.
Byshok argued that the left sees Russia as a country that champions a fair multipolar international order, the right sees some elements of conservative rhetoric and politics, while the Kremlin is trying, with varying success, to balance and reconcile the ‘red’and the ‘white’ aspects of Russia’s historical experience. “Naturally, Moscow relies on certain ideological notions in domestic and foreign policy now and then, but that’s an ad hoc approach – it depends on the situation,” said the expert.
Russia has changed a lot over the past 30 years. It is no longer a state with a strict ideology. Moscow’s foreign policies have nothing to do with spreading a ‘global revolution’ or communist ideals; Russia’s diplomats are pursuing political and economic goals that deal with national security, scientific and economic development and protecting the Russian-speaking population of the former Soviet Union. For Russia, the main lesson of the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union is that it does not want to restore the communist system, but it cannot completely renounce its past, too. Russia’s current political and economic system is much closer to that of Western ideals compared to 30 years ago. And like any Western nation with great history and culture, Russia wants to be powerful enough to be able to protect its own interests.
………………………
By Dmitry Plotnikov, a political journalist exploring the history and current events of ex-USSR countries.
What was to be done? On the gas workers labor union picket line
It was dark, before sunrise, before 6am. We drove to the labor union picket line with revolutionary news papers and leaflets supporting the gas worker’s strike. I thought I felt a tension in the car. We were going to a picket line with mostly white workers who were relatively well paid and not know to favor hard left wing views or opposition to the Democratic Party. So of the comrades in the car had spent more time at anti-war rallies on Boston Common than time at factory gates in the early morning.
We were on the street in front of the Boston Gas facility and joined about a hundred labor union members on the sidewalk. The team captain went up to the union official who was the picket line captain and introduced herself and showed an issue of the paper and a leaflet while explaining that we were there to support the strike and walk the picket line. We were allowed to join the action and got into the picket line now moving from sidewalk to sidewalk in front of a roadway coming out of the facility.
I walked with the newspaper on a clipboard under my arm. Other activists walked next to a picketer and showed the paper and spoke. I am not a member of the newspaper staff, and I am not an official representative of the group. If the crowd is small enough I just let the members speak to people as they probably will encounter everyone. At a larger demonstration I walk around and offer the paper, but try not to talk to much and let the paper speak for itself and the organization’s ideas.
This strike action by the gas workers labor union was the first one against Boston Gas in decades. Many of the younger workers may never have been on a picket line, or even to a demonstration.
The labor union leaders see politics as mostly about schmoozing with Democrats and getting deals done with the elite leaders of society. Most labor unions spend much more helping Democrats get elected than they ever would helping striking workers.
The picket line moved slowly in the dark with no one saying a word. One hundred people in twos and threes walking in a line in front of the driveway silently.
A truck appeared coming out of the building in the distance. The vehicle driven by a ‘replacement worker’ scab moved slowly toward the picket line.
No one said a word.
It wasn’t my place, I’m not a member of the gas workers union. I’m not a member of the revolutionary workers newspaper staff. I’m nobody.
But… Something had to be done. Something had to be said. I was the only one moved to shout out a challenge to the scab vehicle approaching the union picket line.
The air was cold and carried the sound.
“Stop the scabs!” I shouted at the top of my voice. Others joined in and the entire picket line took up the chant.
I had felt a reluctance to speak first, would the labor union leaders be opposed to an outsider starting a chant? Would my friends with the working class newspaper be against my initiating an action? But… somebody had to say the obvious. Things were so bad that they needed me to shout out what should have been the first thing on everyone’s lips when we saw the truck in the distance.
The labor union misleaders stepped up to make sure the picket line parted for the scab gas company truck. The police did not have to do anything as the labor misleaders acted for the police.
Critics of U.S. policy with and about Israel like myself have been relatively successful in describing the considerable downside in the bilateral status quo. We have demonstrated that the lopsided relationship supports absolutely no U.S. interest and that, on the contrary, considerable damage is done to the American people, to include involvement in armed conflict in the Middle East which serves no purpose beyond “protecting Israel.”
Israel benefits from billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars annually in a $3.8 billion lump sum for “military aid” plus hundreds of millions more in special procurements and projects that are together considered untouchable in Washington. Add to that the quasi legal “charitable” tax exempt contributions from wealthy American Jews and groups that fuel apartheid policies in Palestine and pay for the illegal settlements. Many of those same groups are themselves tax exempt and they exploit that status to actively lobby on behalf of the Jewish state, successfully shielding it from any consequences for its war crimes and human rights violations. They also avoid registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, even though many of them collude directly with the Israeli government through its embassy in Washington and are directed by the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu government. In fact, no Israel Lobby component among the six hundred or so Jewish groups that have protecting Israel as part of their agenda has ever been required to register as a foreign agent.
Under President Donald Trump, one Jewish billionaire Sheldon Adelson contributed as much as $300 million to GOP coffers, money which had with it a quid pro quo, that Trump should do a series of favors for Israel, which he did. The Democrats have their own counterpart in Israeli film producer Haim Saban, who has said that he is a “one issue guy and his issue is Israel.” Neither major party can be counted upon to resist Israeli pressure on foreign policy or even on domestic issues that might limit the “aid” that the Jewish state receives.
The money coming from the Israel Lobby has corrupted American government all the way down to the local level and special preferences for Israeli businesses in states like Florida and Virginia have added even more to the cash flow that goes in only one direction. Ironically, Israel does not really need the money. It is a socialist state that has a European level standard of living, to include free health care and university education, benefits that Americans do not possess.
Add to that Israel’s deplorable human rights record, which Washington is required to defend in international fora, as well as Israel’s record of persistent and highly damaging spying against the United States. It all means that little more need to be said, apart from restating the fact that it is a very bad deal for the American people. And it has also brought with it collateral damage to include attacks on fundamental rights like Freedom of Speech and Assembly. As the politicians in both major parties are bribed or otherwise coerced into continuing to behave the way that they do, count on things getting even worse, with criminalizing of any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism currently making the rounds of pending legislation.
All of that said, when I and others lay out the laundry list of Israel’s crimes against America, some sympathizers inevitably respond: “Okay, so what are you going to do about it?” So now I am going to address some of the things that can be done by ordinary Americans and by groups that are correctly appalled by Washington’s wag the dog relationship with the Jewish state.
First of all, demand from our elected officials that American law be enforced on Israel. There are several areas where that is relevant. First, as mentioned above, is the failure of the Justice and Treasury Departments to enforce registration of pro-Israel lobbying groups. Registration would force groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) to open their books regarding the money they receive and spend and could also require them to reveal details of their lobbying activity.
Another area where the law is not being enforced is regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which was created by stealing both technology and enriched uranium from the U.S. The Symington Amendment on foreign relations forbids giving aid to any country that is either a nuclear proliferator or is in possession of undeclared nuclear weapons. Demand that it be enforced fully now and end all aid to Israel.
U.S. Israel-centric charities or foundations should also have their tax exemptions strictly enforced. Humanitarian aid is fine, but if they are funding the illegal West Bank settlements, which many of them are, they should have their exemptions revoked. And finally, Israelis caught spying or Americans who are assisting in the theft of U.S. classified or sensitive information should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to include use of the Espionage Act. Currently, such individuals are almost always given a pass. If President Joe Biden can continue the persecution of legitimate journalist Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, he can certainly do the same vis-à-vis Israel’s spies.
Second, call for the end of Citizens United, which enables the Zionist oligarchs to dictate U.S. policy in the Middle East through their PACs and direct political donations. Beyond that, make your voice heard more generally. Sure, calling or writing to a congressional office is most often a waste of time but Capitol Hill staffers have told me many times that if a congressman gets multiple complaints about a certain policy or issue, he or she will begin to pay attention. That is not to say that they will give a damn about their actual constituents versus the powerful Israel Lobby but the background noise might make them just a bit more sensitive on the issue.
Likewise, with the mainstream media and the entertainment industry, which are Jewish/Israel dominated. When one reads an article or watches a documentary that is heavily slanted towards the Jewish state, make an online comment or write a letter to the editor or producer saying that the bias is evident. As in the case with congress, if newspaper or television editors begin to see a lot of commentary hostile to their spin they just might begin to be more cautious for fear of losing readers, viewers or advertising dollars. And just a little bit of loosening of the Israeli grip in the media will mean that the public will begin to appreciate that the “news stories” that have been promoted for so many years are nothing but a tissue of lies.
Third, support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement as well as organizations that are actively critical of Israel. BDS is non-violent and increasingly effective, particularly on college campuses. Always remember that Israel and its friends do not have a grip on Congress, the White House and the media because they are wonderful warm people that others find to be sympathetic. It is difficult even to imagine a scintillating conversation with a malignant toad like former casino magnate Sheldon Adelson or with congressional slime balls like Senators Chuck Schumer and Ben Cardin.
Israel’s ability to corrupt and misdirect is all based on Jewish money, a well-established process whereby Zionist oligarchs buy their way to power and access. So to restore the relationship to something more like the normal interaction between countries the solution is to hit back where it really hurts – boycott Israel and Israeli products or services and do the same for the companies that are the sources of income for those American Jews who are the principal supporters of the Zionist project. If you want to visit Las Vegas, by all means go, but don’t patronize the casinos and hotels now owned by Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli wife Miriam, which include The Venetian and Sands Resort.
Democratic party major donor Haim Saban, meanwhile, is a producer of Hollywood children’s entertainment, including the lucrative Power Rangers. You can stop your children from watching his violent programming and tell the network’s advertisers why you are doing so. And then there are businessmen including Bernard Marcus, who is a co-founder of Home Depot and a major supporter of Israel, and Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. No one really has to spend $1000 to go to a football game, particularly if the owner is a good friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, and if you need something for your home or are seeking entertainment, choose to spend your dollars somewhere else. Readers can do the homework for the businesses and services that they normally patronize. If outspoken advocates for Israel own the company, take your dollars elsewhere.
Also put direct pressure on the mostly high-tech U.S. companies that invest in Israel, which are particularly vulnerable because they are thereby sending American jobs overseas, particularly as they country they are sending them to will steal the technology as likely as not. Make Israel’s cash-rich supporters pay a price for promotion of an apartheid/racist regime that is contemptuous of Americans even as it robs us blind, in the process doing terrible damage to the United States.
I am confident that readers will come up with other ideas regarding what might be done to counter Israel and all its works right here in the United States. If we lapse into apathy and think that nothing can be done to oppose the Israeli juggernaut, we will all lose. And, to be sure, the Israelis and their friends in America and Europe have one huge weakness. It is their hubris. They think that they are invulnerable because of their money and political power, but they fail to understand that in history the rich and powerful have inevitably gone too far and have finally received their comeuppance. Perhaps the “gone too far” moment has finally arrived.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website ishttps://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email isinform@cnionline.org
One of the most trenchant arguments made by proponents of forced masking is some variation of “it’s just an inconvenience”, so/and/or “why do you have to make such a big deal about it”. (To be clear, this is not a legitimate scientific or factual argument for the adoption of any policy, but that is not what this article is about.) I am largely going to avoid the issues unique to masking children – what is plainly institutionalized child abuse – and for people with disabilities or past trauma, as many of the harms inflicted by masks are readily apparent and easily articulable.
On the surface, this contention seems like a morally and factually compelling argument. After all, if masks had any meaningful efficacy, wouldn’t it be a worthwhile tradeoff to endure a little discomfort to reduce the far worse suffering and death that would otherwise be inflicted by covid?
Yet this argument – “what’s the big deal” – does not square with how many people experience masks and mask mandates, including practically everyone who disagrees with masking as a policy. It is undeniable that millions of people are considerably more tormented by facemasks than what we would expect is reasonable or even possible for something that is indeed merely an “inconvenience”. People generally do not profoundly suffer from trivialities.
In other words, clearly facemasks are a considerably greater burden for many people than how they superficially appear; and yet few people are able to work out for themselves what about them is so abusive or terrible. The goal of this article is to enumerate some of the myriad harms and emotional abuses inflicted by forced masking, specifically those that are difficult to articulate or identify the connection to masking.
So what exactly is the big deal about wearing masks?
In a nutshell – as was just stated – mask wearing is to many people something that is enormously stressful, and something that evokes inordinately powerful negative emotions. This is simply the reality, irrespective of whether such feelings “make sense”.
Now, as a general rule, if someone feels powerfully about something, there’s a reason; or in other words, there is something that is provoking the strong emotions. And the source of these feelings does not have to be the thing that the feelings attach to. The only thing that matters is that the feelings exist, however misguided they may be.
This is not to say that the reality of feelings should be the dominant consideration above everything else. The current radical ‘social justice’ movement that has elevated one’s subjective “identity” as the defining characteristic of a person is the Reductio ad Absurdum of enshrining subjective feelings in place of objective reality itself.
What is true however is that the emotional distress and suffering of people is quite real. So even if you happen to be in favor of mask mandates and not at all bothered by mask wearing, that does not make the profoundly distressing experience of someone else any less real of an experience.
The following list is not exhaustive, just a collection of some of the factors that make mask wearing, especially forced masking, so distressing to many people.
A few important things to keep in mind:
Not every listed issue is true for every person who finds masks distressing.
Each issue amplifies the other ones, so that the cumulative distress is far greater than the sum of its parts. It’s like the difference between 1+2+3+…10 and 1x2x3x…10 (55 vs 3,628,800).
This list is not exhaustive.
The short explanations are intended to give a bit more insight into how people might typically experience that particular stress. They are not intended to comprehensively define the issue.
Emotional Stresses of Mask Mandates
Deprivation of Personal Autonomy
Depriving someone of their personal autonomy is stressful and demeaning. This is amplified when it is about something that is emotionally fraught, subject to strong opinions and feelings, relates to morality/values, and/or is something that has an implication that you lack the capacity to look out for your own interest. Free will is a defining trait of being human, and the abrogation thereof is experienced as an assault on ones individuality.
A Sense of Helplessness
Being at the mercy of the arbitrary and capricious whims of others makes you feel a sense of helplessness, which is extremely stressful and grueling, and can eventually break a person mentally and emotionally, and is therefore a favored tactic used by tyrants to break the will of the population so that they are too broken to revolt (see Stalin’s reign of terror).
Invalidating Your Personal Identity
Masking is now – regardless of the factual merits – a political symbol in society. Being forced to mask is by definition being forced to yield in ones own actions – and worse, in ones public appearance – to your ideological and/or political opposition. Imagine if the government decided to make wearing a religious skullcap mandatory for everyone – you can make the same argument that is being made for masking – what’s the big deal, you barely notice it, etc – I am quite confident that atheists for instance would would feel very keenly the assault on their personal identity.
Assaulting Your Sense of Morality / Making You Feel Like You’re Immoral and Selfish
Mask mandates force people opposed to internalize that they are acting immorally and selfishly for two reasons. The first is that society is enshrining into law that how you act is immoral and selfish, which is a public declaration to the world that you are immoral and selfish. The second is that how you act outwardly always exerts influence in how you fell and identify internally, so constantly wearing a mask eats away at your internal convictions – even if you can withstand this, it creates some degree of cognitive dissonance internally. No one likes to feel like they are evil or selfish.
Deprives / Ruins Human Interactions
The quality and nature of social interactions is greatly reduced. Every interaction behind masks is fundamentally different. Interacting in this way can feel sad, despondent, isolating, cold, and/or cruel, among other things.
Over Time Changes Your Personality
Facemasks are a radical and unnatural impingement on normal mental and emotional functioning. Over time, this can change your personality – such as making you less social, less outgoing, more suspicious, decreased tendency or desire to be kind and so on.
Turns Other People Into Abusive Tyrants
This is meant to capture the phenomenon of a subset of people who have turned into cruel and vicious individuals, and abuse people whom they have power over.
A General Feeling of Being Trapped in a Nightmare
Many people feel a clear and distinct sense of being trapped in some sort of perverse nightmare as a result of covid policies, which is an extremely distressing experience, especially when there feels like there is no end in sight.
Elementary Lack of Fairness
People are very sensitive to fairness, and can feel enormous stress and distress when treated unfairly, especially when the unfair treatment is egregious. Mask policies are literally imposing on some people so other people can feel safer – a grotesquely unequal treatment, that in order to help the emotional health of the scared-to-death-of-covid pro-maskers, everyone else’s mental & emotional health will be trampled on by forced masking. Moreover, mask mandates preferentially enshrines the political, moral, and ideological views and sensibilities of one segment of society without any justification.
Repeated Experience of “Losing” in Public Policy Decisions
The experience of losing again, and again, and again in substantial, significant public policy decisions is itself very distressing. This happens to be one of the more prominent animating forces that drove Trump’s voter base – that they felt they always lost again and again and again and again. Covid policy for a substantial portion of the population has been a series of devastating losses as practically every policy choice cuts against them.
Feeling That Other People Matter While I Don’t
This is a distinct distress in addition to the lack of fairness – that “I don’t matter”; this is amplified considerably when “other people matter”. This is what people who are systematically disregarded tend to feel, and it is very painful.
And this is especially pronounced in racial minorities who already feel this way from previous history — mostly white liberal elites are forcing their preferences on blacks and other minorities.
The Stress of Difficulty Communicating
The frustration that comes from difficulty communicating is underappreciated, and tends to leave people feeling annoyed, frustrated and stressed.
The Damage From Failed Communication
This particular harm also has another, more tangible dimension – often, people having a hard time communicating simply give up, and giving up is itself an added stress factor that leaves people frazzled. If you’re talking to your doctor and you “give up” instead of making sure you understood what he was trying to tell you – especially older people who psychologically tend to both give up faster and have more innate difficulty physically hearing to begin with – that could be a big problem.
The Distress of Constant Harassment
Mask mandates are a constant intrusion into people’s personal lives that leaves people feeling exasperated – “just leave me alone already” / “just let me live in peace”. It is a basic human need to not be constantly harassed by others.
Living In Constant State of Worry, Fear, and Anger
Knowing that you have to submit to the mask mandates in many places where you need to go leaves you always feeling a variety of negative and unhealthy emotions about it.
Saps the Joy From Many Different Activities
Take shopping, for instance. For many people, shopping is a leisure activity that can be an effective emotional detox from life stresses… but not when you have to wear a mask to do it.
Living In Perpetual Stress From Social Enforcers
Inevitably, people opposed to mask mandates will not be particularly zealous about following them to a “T”, whether it be letting the mask slide down your face, taking it off for a few minutes here and there, or just munching on a bag of peanuts for 3 hours. There is always a baseline stress of constantly having to be alert for the “mask police” (whether they are actual police or just really annoying Karens).
Public Humiliation
The aforementioned “mask police” are often extremely zealous – unhinged, really – a non-masking-compliant person getting dressed down in public is a common occurrence. Public humiliation can be a traumatic experience.
Emotional Abuse
Mask mandates leave many people feeling emotionally abused. This is both from the masking being forced upon people despite all the mental and emotional distress it causes – in other words, abuse – and from the constant manipulation that is characteristic of abusers that is part and parcel of mask mandates.
Bullying Plain and Simple
Mask mandates are forced coercion jammed down the throats of those who strongly resent them. This is vicious bullying. No one enjoys feeling bullied, or having someone else’s will imposed on them against their own will.
The Distress of Being Under the Control of Someone You Loathe
Think of it this way: Imagine two ppl vying for the same promotion who hate each others guts, and then the winner is made the boss of the loser. This is an added, separate affront to the loser. Same idea here – the anti- mask people are being specifically dictated to by the very opponents they despise, and on the very issue that they’re fighting over. This isn’t just at a national level – this is more true about local county or school board fights, and this is a reliable recipe for bad blood and lasting enmity to boot.
The “Tax” of Buying Masks that are Less Unpleasant
Many people choose to buy fancier masks than the nasty surgical masks widely available everywhere, because they are far less unpleasant (and far more sanitary and subject to manufacturing standards and quality control). This itself is a further indignity – if the government wants to impose a draconian mandate on us, the least the government can do is to make comfortable masks available, especially considering the government is throwing cash everywhere because of covid – it’s an added insult and disrespecting of the people being imposed upon, in the sense that it’s just plain coldhearted to act this way to someone else, at least have a little sensitivity and try to make your own mandates as tolerable as possible on the people you’re imposing on.
Irrational Government Actions Breed A Sense of Fear and Instability
Watching the government act in such a factually irrational manner is itself very stressful to many people, as is living under an irrational regime. One’s sense of stability and trust in the world is rooted by necessity in the belief that rationality is a limiting principle at some point upon what government and people/institutions with power in society are able and willing to do.
Makes People Doubt Their Sense of Reality
The very fact of making a crazy policy is itself deeply destructive to people’s sense of reality. In other words, there is tremendous cognitive dissonance of on the one hand knowing that masking is nuts, but on the other hand, watching the government make mask mandates – it is very hard to have a genuine emotional conviction that essentially the entire medical community and all of society’s institutions have gone stark raving mad. Such cognitive dissonance is very damaging psychologically to your sense of self and your sense of reality, and is also mentally and emotionally exhausting.
Destroys People’s Sense of Trust & Stability
Being forced to do irrational and insane things erodes a person’s sense of confidence that there is a baseline rationality in society — something that provides people with a sense of stability and security in life generally. It is distressing to feel like there is absolutely no rational limiting principle on government actions or policies, since this by definition means that there is nothing that you can trust is sacred and beyond government (or someone else) coming and destroying. (This also actively erodes the social fabric that relies upon people being rational.)
Destructive of People’s Humanity and Dignity
Being forced to act irrationally causes you to lose your sense of dignity as a human being with an intellectual faculty that distinguishes man from animals. In other words, the more you are suppressed from acting in accordance with intelligence, the less you feel the unique transcendence of being a human being – treating people like animals makes them feel like animals.
Dehumanization Through Forced Anonymity
The face is the most visibly manifest characteristic that sets you apart as a unique individual. Masks, by covering your face, strip you to some degree of your sense of being a unique individual and instead makes you feel more like a number than a person. It also distorts your sense of the humanity of others, as you inevitably become trained to perceive other people as lacking human-ness.
They’re so Darn Uncomfortable
Masks can be extremely uncomfortable to wear, especially for long stretches at a time. They can also be quite gross to wear – if you sneeze into the mask, well……
Pragmatic Harms of Mask Mandates
Promotes Authoritarianism and Fascism
This is true as written – the ascendance of authoritarian and tyrannical governance has been as shocking as it was swift. Mask mandates – which are objectively draconian and authoritarian regardless of whether they are scientifically warranted – internalize in people that authoritarian governance is normal, acceptable, and not evil. This is a problem. Every genocidal regime started this way. This by itself is sufficient justification to fight mask mandates “to the death”.
On a more relatable level, mask mandates accustom government officials to acting like tyrants, and enjoying their newfound dictatorial powers, a ‘perk’ they are very unlikely to part with willingly.
Promotes Religious Cultism
Masks have become a religious symbol of virtuosity of a fanatical cult of irrational beliefs that has completely forsaken thinking for the cult members (like lone drivers wearing masks in their cars). Cults have committed some of the most horrific and bizarre atrocities over the past century.
Socially Conditions the Citizenry to Be Docile and Unthinking
Authoritarian mandates that are based only upon the word of people (the “experts”), especially in stark contradiction to facts and common sense, conditions people to be docile, and to not think about anything (as their intellects and opinions are scorned and said to be of too poor quality to be legitimate sources of knowledge for anyone, including themselves). This destroys the vibrancy and energy of the society, and conditions people to not think of themselves as individually capable beings who have the potential to achieve greatness, a critical driving force necessary to impel people to make something of themselves.
Balkanizes Society
Mask mandates help to further sow division and enmity between the factions of society by oppressing one faction while also giving the other faction the moral grounds to claim that the anti-mask faction by not going along with the mandate policies are in violation of the law, and are acting immorally as defined by societal approbation of mask mandates as a crucial health measure.
All-Encompassing Harms of Mask Mandates
Stress
The most obvious general harm of mask mandates is stress. Stress is known to be aggressively destructive to your health, and something that significantly exacerbates every known medical condition. Everything listed above causes the people afflicted to be stressed.
Breach of the Social Compact
When part of society is so wantonly destructive towards another part of society, the society loses its legitimacy in the eyes of the oppressed, and the rule of law is incorrigibly eroded, since one side simply inflicts their will upon the other side regardless of the laws, conventions, and norms of society; and without any limiting principle. “Rule of law for thee but not for me” is not rule of law, and has no moral legitimacy for the “thee” to respect or comply.
Indefinite Nature of the Suffering
The indefinite-ness of the situation is itself a source of considerable suffering, or a powerful amplification of the suffering one is already experiencing. It is infinitely easier and more bearable to handle suffering that you can see its end, when it will pass, versus suffering that seems inescapable and endless. (The feeling that the suffering is inescapable is a ubiquitous factor that leads people to commit suicide.)
C’mon, most of these are silly?
The ultimate refuge of someone trapped by the facts is scorn and mockery. Human nature drives a person to feel and act derisive about something that requires depth to grasp. Human nature also strongly tends towards not just denying but mocking anything that challenges the morality and prudence of your opinions and actions. Thus people are told that their experiences and suffering from mask mandates is not real and makes no sense – one of the most insidious and abhorrent forms of abusive manipulation.
It is very difficult to gain an appreciation and understanding of most of the things on this list. On the other hand, it is far easier to destroy any sense of comprehension and emotional awareness of these – all that is necessary is one pithy line scorning this whole notion as delusional. Such is the power of mockery, that one witty zinger can completely vanquish the awareness gained from many hours of thoughtfulness and introspection.
So no, these are not silly, and feeling these does not make you a baby. This accusation is nothing more than the panicked derision that is the last defense of someone who can’t debate the actual facts.
The Manipulative Nature of an Abusive Relationship
One of the textbook tactics utilized by abusers to maintain control in an abusive relationship is to define the context and facts of anything related to the relationship so as to get in the victim’s head so to speak and distort their sense of reality so that they are unable to articulate – even to themselves – the fact of their abuse and victimization.
As we all can see, the constant claims of “facemasks are not a big deal”, “there’s no conceivable reason for anyone to think that masks can be harmful”, etc, accomplished this quite effectively. The goal of this article was to unwind this pernicious and abusive lie in order to re-empower victims of forced masking against the proponents of mask policies who are abusive and manipulative. (Sometimes mask policies are reluctantly put in place in order to accommodate political or legal realities where masking is the least destructive option.)
This can be summed up as one more type of emotional distress inflicted by mask mandate proponents:
The contention that “facemasks are just an inconvenience” amounts to abusive manipulation that steals the ability of the victims of forced masking to identify and articulate the suffering and harm they experience from forced mask wearing.
To conclude, the quote at the top of this article from DA Henderson – widely credited with the eradication of smallpox – is very revealing:
“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted”
It is hard to imagine a greater disruption to normal living than the highly visible and symbolic masks ubiquitously worn everywhere.
“You’ve come a long way, baby,” crooned the old Virginia Slims commercials on TV in the late 1960s, and the bourgeois media has picked up the tune again on this, the fiftieth anniversary of the Pill (no further definition necessary—everyone knows you are talking about s-e-x). And everyone knows the Pill is all about sex. When in 1975 Loretta Lynn sang, “I’m tearin’ down your brooder house ’cause now I’ve got the pill,” the hearts of millions of women across America beat in time to the rhythm of her song, which dozens of radio stations tried to censor—until it made the hit charts.
The Pill was the first reliable contraceptive that gave women control over their own reproduction. This tremendous medical advance enabled women to separate sexual enjoyment from fear of pregnancy, freeing them from the now excessive fertility with which evolution has endowed our species. But birth control and abortion remain restricted throughout the capitalist world by the state, by the institution of the family, and by organized religion, which all serve to enforce women’s oppression. As long as the capitalist order exists, the benefits of science will be limited by the exploitation and oppression of this class system. Marxists look forward to the day when science can be “applied with full understanding to all the fields of human activity,” to quote the words of German socialist leader August Bebel, whose 1879 work Woman and Socialism was one of the first major Marxist works on the woman question.
Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, underlined that birth control and abortion are among woman’s “most important civil, political and cultural rights” (The Revolution Betrayed [1936]). We fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. We call for free abortion on demand as part of free, quality health care for all and for free, 24-hour childcare to address the deep class and racial oppression of poor and minority women. The wealthy will always get their medical care, including their abortions, while myriad anti-abortion laws and restrictions on birth control target young, working-class and poor women, who can’t afford quality health care, childcare and housing.
At the time of its first release by the pharmaceutical company Searle, big predictions were made about the effect that the Pill would have on society. Moral bigots wailed that it would promote female promiscuity and the decline of religion and the patriarchal family, while birth control advocates believed it would save the family, create happy marriages and end the world population explosion. The Pill was even hailed as the solution to the “Red Menace.” In her book America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010), historian Elaine May speaks of how some Cold Warriors believed that the Pill “would alleviate the conditions of poverty and unrest that might lead developing nations to embrace communism, and instead promote the growth of markets for consumer goods and the embrace of capitalism.”
In fact, the “sexual revolution” that is often credited to the Pill was the result, in one way or another, of the convulsive social struggles of the civil rights movement, which broke the back of Jim Crow segregation in the South, and of opposition to U.S. imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese Revolution. The major social upheavals of the 1960s that broke up the reactionary Cold War consensus also led to substantial advances in access to higher education and professional jobs for women. At the same time, the civil rights movement could not eradicate the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of American capitalism, just as the institution of the family, the main source of women’s oppression in capitalist society, is a bulwark of the bourgeois order.
Abortion Rights Under Attack
While U.S. bourgeois pundits celebrate the reproductive freedom that the Pill has given women, it is striking that most do not mention the precipitous decline in women’s access to abortion. The assault on women’s right to abortion continues unabated in the courts and halls of government, especially on the state level. As of June, some 370 bills to restrict abortion rights had been introduced this year alone in state legislatures across the country, and many have already passed. These range from Oklahoma’s cruel requirement that a doctor show the woman an ultrasound of the fetus, to Nebraska’s ban on all abortions after 20 weeks based on the claim that the fetus can feel pain. Perhaps the most barbarous is Utah’s new law. Passed after a desperate 17-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her in an effort to induce a miscarriage, the law now allows homicide charges against women in similar cases! Meanwhile, the lies that abortion causes depression and breast cancer continue to circulate, and some recent polls show that for the first time more Americans call themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice.”
The arsenal of legal measures on the federal as well as the state level has already made abortion virtually inaccessible to a large number of women. Thirty-eight states prohibit abortions after a specified point in pregnancy. Fully 35 states require one or both parents of women under 18 to be notified and/or consent to an abortion. Some 87 percent of U.S. counties and 31 percent of metropolitan areas have no abortion services.
In May 2009, the “pro-life” war on women claimed yet another life. Dr. George Tiller—one of only three doctors whose clinics provide late-term abortions in the United States—was assassinated while attending his church in Wichita, Kansas, by a right-wing anti-abortion bigot. Tiller, a main target of the anti-woman God squad for decades, was the eighth person murdered in this anti-abortion, “family values” onslaught since 1993. In an article titled “The New Abortion Providers,” the New York Times (18 July) details the long decline in the number of doctors trained in performing abortions and tells the story of young doctors in groups like Medical Students for Choice fighting to make abortion part of a doctor’s regular practice. Abortion is a medical procedure, now one of the safest in the world, that does not need to be carried out in isolated clinics, where doctors and their families, friends and co-workers can easily be subjected to harassment, violence and death by anti-abortion fanatics.
Ever since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the basic democratic right of legal abortion has been under attack. The war on abortion rights has become a spearhead for social and political reaction because at its heart lies the question of legal and social equality for women. Providing women with some control over whether or not to have children, abortion is viewed as a threat to the institution of the family.
Access to contraception, too, is limited by cost and lack of basic information, while “conscience clauses” allow pharmacies to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and Plan B, the “morning-after” pill. To all this can be added anti-woman moralizing, which rants that a girl shouldn’t want to have sex. The argument goes that while any unwed mother is a bad girl, if she can claim she got carried away, maybe the sin is not quite as great (as long as she doesn’t have an abortion). But having birth control implies premeditation. Precisely! In the words of the late comedian George Carlin, “Not every ejaculation deserves a name.”
Today sex education in schools is increasingly under attack, while abstinence remains the focus of government-funded programs like the State Personal Responsibility Education Program, established by Barack Obama’s recent health care “reform” act. Abortion clinics are overwhelmingly outnumbered by “pregnancy crisis centers”—fake clinics set up by anti-abortion groups with the purpose of subjecting pregnant women to anti-abortion propaganda and otherwise pressuring them to carry the fetus to term. According to the Nation, some 4,000 of these centers have received over $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds. As a result of the ignorance and miseducation produced by this tangle of social reaction, almost half of pregnancies in the U.S. every year are unplanned, according to the most recent government survey.
While U.S. newspapers headline “The Pill: Making Motherhood Better for 50 Years” (Washington Post, 9 May), the masses of working-class, minority and poor women have missed the celebration. The Great Recession rages on; union-busting is destroying what good union jobs remain; homes are in foreclosure; millions of working people cannot get jobs and their children cannot get a decent education or affordable health care. Except for the women at the very top of society, where the rich are certainly getting richer, the decades-long assault on the working class and the poor has more than canceled out the important improvements in women’s legal status over the last 50 years.
In times of substantial class and social struggle, the capitalist class may be forced to cede some reforms. But as long as the capitalist order remains, the ruling class will seek to overturn these gains, as it is now doing, when such struggles are at an ebb. As revolutionary communists, we defend every gain that’s been won for the exploited and oppressed, such as the gains wrested during the hard struggles of the civil rights movement. But these reforms have a fundamentally token quality to them because they leave untouched the capitalist system. The source of black oppression and anti-woman bigotry is not the particular capitalist party in power—whether Democratic or Republican—but the capitalist order that breeds oppression and bigotry as a necessary corollary to its system of exploitation.
Sex and Social Control
The capitalist class seeks to buttress the family, which, along with organized religion and the state, form a triad that props up the exploitation of labor. To free women from their deeply entrenched special oppression will take a workers revolution to rip this system of exploitation out by the roots and replace it with a workers government to begin the construction of a socialist world. Only then can we undertake the profound changes in the fabric of everyday life where the institution of the family is replaced by socialized childcare and housework, enabling women to fully participate in social and political life.
The family is not an immutable, timeless institution, but a social relation subject to historical change. In his classic 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels traced the origin of the family and the state to the division of society into classes. The development of agriculture allowed the creation of a social surplus. In turn, that surplus gave impetus to the development of a leisured ruling class, thus moving human society away from the primitive egalitarianism of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic). The centrality of the family began with its role in ensuring “legitimate heirs” for the patriarchal inheritance of property, which required women’s sexual monogamy and social subordination. In the 10,000 years since the advent of class society, the family has taken many forms—including polygamous, extended and nuclear—reflecting different political economies and their cultures and religions. But the oppression of women is a fundamental feature of all class societies.
The family is a socially conservatizing force that imposes certain behavioral norms. For example, in this country the definition of “manhood” is, besides getting a girl pregnant, the ability to support a wife and children. But that is becoming ever more difficult given the lack of decent-paying union jobs. If not for wives entering the workforce, the entire bottom 60 percent of the U.S. population would have had real income losses since 1979. At the same time, the institution of the family serves the capitalist rulers by placing the burden of raising a new generation of proletarians on working men and women. Indeed, the “family values” crowd (which encompasses Democrats as well as the Republicans) wails about the so-called “crisis of the family” and insists that it is both right and proper that parents should be wholly responsible for the upbringing of their children.
Even the most cursory examination of laws regulating abortion, contraception and the like that go back thousands of years shows that they are integrally related to the maintenance of the family. Some of the first documented legal measures to strengthen the patriarchal family were enacted in ancient Rome under Augustus Caesar. These included prohibitions against adultery, incentives for widows to remarry, “sin” taxes on bachelors 30 years and older, and incentives for fathers of three or more children. The concern of the government was to have enough Roman citizens to fill the ranks of the army and maintain the city of Rome as the core of the Empire.
Modern abortion laws show how social and legal institutions have changed to reflect the interests of the capitalist class. In 1803 the British Ellenborough Act marked the advent of abortion as a statutory crime in the English-speaking world. The interest of the ruling class in this law and others following it was to protect the male’s right to heirs, punish (especially single) women for illicit sex and encourage population growth for the newly forged capitalist nation-state, its army and labor pool.
Alongside legal prohibition stands religion, the strongest ideological force against birth control and abortion, especially the Roman Catholic church. The claims by the Pope and other clergy about the “souls” of unborn children are revealed as so much superstition by the science of human development. Yet thanks to the reactionary influence of religion, tens of thousands of women die each year from illegal abortions—lives that would have been saved with access to birth control and abortion. A brief look at Catholic doctrine shows that the church has changed its mind several times about when the nonexistent “soul” enters into the conceptus. For most of the existence of the church, this was considered to be the time of “quickening,” at about the fourth month, when the pregnant woman can feel the movement of the fetus. John XXI, who became pope in 1276, was the author of a book called Treasury of Medicines for the Poor, which is the greatest single source of information about the practical means of birth control and abortion that was known in the Middle Ages. It was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX declared that abortion “from conception” was a sin. This was a political calculation carried out in exchange for recognition of “papal infallibility” by French Emperor Napoleon III, who was seeking to stem France’s decades-long decline in the birth rate.
The woman-hating strictures against birth control and abortion, the poisonous bigotry against homosexuals, the witchhunting of “deviant” sex (who defines that?), the relentless pressure on youth to somehow refrain from giving in to their raging hormones—all these are corollaries of the institution of the family and the social control that it gives the ruling class. As communists we oppose attempts to fit human sexuality into legislated or decreed so-called “norms.” Government out of the bedroom! The guiding principle for sexual relations between people should be that of effective consent—that is, nothing more than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. All consensual relations are purely the concern of the individuals involved, and the state has no business interfering in human sexual activity.
Some History of Birth Control
In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 1994), John M. Riddle explores the ways that pre-industrial people might have tried to enjoy sex without the consequence of procreation. Nobody knows if the methods he documents had much effect on the birth rates, but they certainly show intent. One city in Northern Africa, Cyrene, is believed to have made its name and its fortune from a wild giant fennel that grew nearby, which people believed to have abortifacient effects. Its use became so widespread that it was harvested to extinction.
Peter Fryer, in his witty and erudite book The Birth Controllers, documents that ancient Egyptians used crocodile-dung pessaries (vaginal suppositories) and other dubious methods to control fertility. The Christian Bible’s story of Onan is only the most well known of a long-practiced method (withdrawal), a story used for centuries to put the terror of hell into countless adolescents for masturbation. Some historians believe that the tens of thousands of women who were executed as witches in early modern Europe may have been abortionists and birth control practitioners. In 20th-century America, before the Pill, housewives often resorted to the dangerous practice of douching with Lysol.
In the 1830s, a Massachusetts doctor named Charles Knowlton was the first person in the history of birth control to be sent to prison for advocating it. The United States also has the dubious honor of passing the first nationwide laws prohibiting the dissemination of birth-control methods. In 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Act, named for its sponsor, Postmaster General Anthony Comstock. It outlawed the circulation of contraceptive information and devices through the U.S. postal service as “pornography.” In 1915 Comstock boasted that he had convicted enough people of “sexual misconduct” to fill a 60-car passenger train.
One of Comstock’s prominent targets in later years was Margaret Sanger. Sanger, who would go on to found Planned Parenthood, began her political life as a member of the Socialist Party, working on the party’s women’s committee. She was working as a nurse, visiting immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side, where she saw firsthand the suffering of women whose health had been ruined by too many pregnancies, who were struggling to feed children they could not afford to support, who all too often ended up butchered by some back-alley abortionist. Soon she began writing about sex education and health for the party’s women’s page under the heading, “What Every Girl Should Know.” In early 1913 Comstock banned the column, and the paper ran in its place a box titled “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.”
Sanger soon left the Socialist Party to focus single-mindedly on fighting for birth control, a term that she herself invented. A courageous woman, Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in the country and endured arrests and imprisonment as she sought to overturn the Comstock Law and to educate women and doctors in birth control methods. She traveled to Europe to research the latest techniques and wrote a sex manual in 1926 where she describes the act of sex in ecstatic, uplifting terms. Seeking to promote the cause of birth control among the wealthy and influential, she steered her movement away from the socialist movement. Sanger, a bourgeois feminist, was willing to make any political compromise she saw as necessary to win advocates to her side and thus embraced some ugly arguments popular among bourgeois reformers of the time, such as endorsing eugenics, including the call to bar immigration for the “feebleminded.” While the eugenics movement, which stigmatized the poor for their own oppression, was at the time not yet associated with the genocidal movement that would emerge in Nazi Germany, it was widely opposed by socialists. American socialist and birth control pioneer Antoinette Konikow denounced the presence of eugenicists at a 1921 New York City conference on birth control, declaring that the working-class mothers she represented “are often considered to be not fit” by such forces.
The “Population Bomb”
Behind the scenes (or not), people have always struggled to control fertility for their own private reasons. But there is also a longstanding chain of argument in favor of population control on the part of bourgeois ideologues. The most notorious of these was made by Church of England parson Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population predicted unrelenting misery on account of population growth that would, he claimed, inevitably outstrip available resources. Writing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Malthus proposed two solutions: leave the poor to die of their misery (he opposed poor relief) and postpone the age of marriage so as to reduce the number of children per couple (that is, “abstinence” as birth control).
Malthusianism was, as Friedrich Engels characterized it in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, “the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat.” Lenin, too, denounced Malthusianism in a short 1913 article, “The Working Class and Neomalthusianism.” At the same time, he noted, “It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc.” Lenin called for “freedom for medical propaganda and the protection of the elementary democratic rights of citizens, men and women.”
The corollary of Malthusianism, eugenics, with its calls for compulsory sterilization and forced abortions, has its contemporary advocates, including Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren. In 1977, Holdren co-authored Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment with the (now largely discredited) population “experts” Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Dripping with contempt, Holdren et al. wrote: “If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children…they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility.” Such “reproductive responsibility” laws could include “compulsory abortion,” “adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods,” “sterilizing women after their second or third child” and other “involuntary fertility control” methods that would be implemented by a “Planetary Regime,” which “might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world.” The ravings of Holdren and the Ehrlichs are worthy of the genocidal Nazi eugenics movement.
Marxists are of course not indifferent to the problem of rapid population growth. But our starting point is the fight for socialist revolution to open the widest vista of human freedom. As we wrote in part two of “Capitalism and Global Warming” (WV No. 966, 8 October):
“Only a society that can raise the standard of living worldwide can provide the conditions for a natural decline in reproductive rates….
“Under communism, human beings will have far greater mastery over their natural and social environments. Both the division between town and country and economic dependence on the family will be overcome. The time when people were compelled to have more children in order to ensure enough manpower to work the land or to care for the elderly will have long passed.”
Genesis of the Pill
Margaret Sanger first had the idea of a “magic pill” to prevent conception in 1912, but the scientific knowledge to create it did not exist. By the end of World War II, decades of research into human reproductive biology had revealed the crucial role of hormones in conception and pregnancy. In 1953 Sanger, accompanied by International Harvester heiress Katherine McCormick, paid a visit to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, where Gregory Pincus, who in the 1930s engineered the first in vitro fertilization (a rabbit embryo), conducted his privately funded research. Pincus’s early work had been cited as a great scientific achievement, but the storm of media condemnation over “babies in test tubes” led to him being denied tenure by Harvard University and all but driven from mainstream research as a “mad scientist.” Another maverick scientist, chemist Russell Marker, had developed a technique, later refined by Carl Djerassi, to extract massive, cheap amounts of a synthetic progestin from a species of enormous yam that grew only in Mexico. The research to create an oral contraceptive was funded almost entirely out of McCormick’s private fortune; the pharmaceutical companies would not touch research into contraception at that time.
The post-World War II years were hard for American women. The outbreak of the Cold War, the purge of communists and other militants from the unions and the rise of McCarthyism also included a wholesale campaign to put women back into the kitchen and nursery. Many women had escaped from such drudgery during World War II, when their labor was necessary for the war economy. As the government investigated “subversives,” there was an unprecedented state intrusion into family life and the deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life. A “normal” family and a vigilant mother were supposed to be the front line of defense against treason, while anti-Communists linked “deviant” family or sexual behavior to sedition. Most women were married by age 19; the birth rate became the highest in U.S. history.
At the same time, the groundbreaking reports by Alfred C. Kinsey documented what Americans really did behind the bedroom door (and in some other places, too). And women wanted better contraception. The Pill was first marketed in 1957 as a treatment for menstrual disorders. When word circulated that it suppressed ovulation and prevented pregnancy, doctors across the country were besieged by hundreds of thousands of women asking for prescriptions to treat their suddenly discovered menstrual problems.
The leap to respectability and mainstream medicine for the Pill came through Harvard gynecologist John Rock, a fertility specialist, who had the medical practice and experience in working with women patients that enabled the first clinical trials to be conducted. A devout Roman Catholic, Rock later wrote a book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control, trying to garner public support in a fruitless campaign to make the Catholic church change its denunciation of birth control as a sin.
In its first incarnation, the Pill had doses of progesterone and estrogen far higher than it does today, leading to serious side effects in some users. These dangers were seized upon by anti-woman bigots, including in the Senate, which in 1970 held a series of hearings to “investigate” the matter. Over the years the Pill has been massively tested in many combinations. While risks remain regarding breast cancer and stroke for some, the Pill in fact helps to protect women from ovarian and uterine cancer. Because it reduces or eliminates the menstrual flow, it also reduces the risk of anemia, a serious problem in poor countries. The experience of millions of women, researchers and doctors working to improve the safety of the Pill has provided the basis for the clinical trials and testing now routinely used by the Food and Drug Administration.
From Carter to Reagan: Resurgence of the Religious Right
By 1960 the Pill was available by prescription as a contraceptive, but laws against contraception remained on the books in many states. Until 1965, it was illegal for married people in Connecticut to use birth control. Until 1972, it was illegal for single people to use birth control in Massachusetts and many other states as well. Bill Baird, a heroic fighter for women’s right to abortion and contraception, spent three months in jail in Massachusetts for giving a package of contraceptive foam and a condom to a Boston University student as a challenge to the law. His case later went to the Supreme Court and helped lay the basis for the right to privacy—the main legal argument behind Roe v. Wade, which established legal abortion in the United States in 1973.
The legalization of abortion was itself a product of the explosive struggles of the 1960s. For the American bourgeoisie, the all-sided social turmoil and defiance of authority of that period were deeply disturbing. U.S. imperialism was suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of Vietnam’s heroic workers and peasants. In the late 1970s, a major bourgeois ideological assault was launched to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”—popular hostility to direct U.S. military intervention abroad—and to instill an unquestioning acceptance of “free enterprise,” God and the family among the population, which included the desirability of dying for one’s country. Coming to office in 1977, the Democratic Carter administration brought “born again” religious fundamentalism front and center into the White House as it kicked off a renewal of U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive to destroy the Soviet degenerated workers state, garbed in the call for “human rights.”
This was the backdrop for the decades-long anti-sex witchhunt against abortion rights, pornography, gay rights and teen sex as well as for the vicious persecution of AIDS patients and day-care workers, who were targeted and jailed as “child molesters” amid hysterical allegations of “satanic ritual abuse.” Beginning in the 1980s, scientific research into new contraceptive methods virtually screeched to a halt as Reagan slashed funding for family planning internationally, including for abortion and birth control, leaving many Third World women with not much to turn to. While Obama has reversed this particular policy, he explicitly disavowed defending the rights of women as well as immigrants in his health care proposal, proclaiming that “the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally” and that “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.” Obama pledged to uphold the Hyde Amendment, which outlaws Medicaid funding for abortions.
For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Birth control methods like the Pill, medical knowledge, understanding of women’s health—these things have indeed taken giant leaps forward in the last 50 years. But exploitation, poverty and religious and cultural strictures deprive most women on the planet of these benefits. For them, daily life is little more than that of a beast of burden. Across vast regions of the globe, in the backward neocolonial capitalist countries oppressed by imperialism, women are swathed in the veil, sold into marriage against their will, or subjected to barbaric punishments like death sentences for “adultery” in Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere. Poverty and backwardness, buttressed by imperialist domination, mean that much of the basic infrastructure necessary to bring basic medical care, contraception and abortion to Third World women is simply not there. Some researchers estimate that in Latin America and the Caribbean the primary cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 39 is complications from illegal abortions.
Feminism, a worldview counterposed to Marxism, is not capable of generating a program for the liberation of women. Feminism analyzes society as gender-based rather than class-based. It views anti-woman ideology as just bad thinking and puts forward that what is needed is to spread correct ideas and then maybe people will catch on and stop being bigots. Feminism is an anti-egalitarian ideology of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women who support the capitalist system and seek their own power and privilege within it. Indeed, for women like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, the good life will only continue to get better. But for working-class, poor and minority women, jobs disappear, wages plummet and life only continues to get harder. The fundamental source of women’s oppression is not bad laws or male chauvinist attitudes—these are but reflections of the subordination of women in the institution of the family and the capitalist system that requires it.
The liberation of women can be realized only with the victory of proletarian revolution, which will smash all forms of social oppression, lay the material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interest of all. The family cannot simply be abolished; rather, its social functions like housework, child rearing, preparation of food, etc., must be replaced by social institutions. This perspective requires a tremendous leap in social development, which can be achieved only through sweeping away capitalist rule on a global basis and replacing it with a rational, democratically planned economy. The International Communist League fights to forge Leninist-Trotskyist parties throughout the world to lead the struggle for working-class power. Inscribed on the banners of these parties will be the struggle for women’s liberation, which is an integral part of the emancipating goals of communism. As we wrote in “In Defense of Science and Technology” (WV No. 843, 4 March 2005):
“Communism will elevate the standard of life for everyone to the highest possible level. By eliminating scarcity, poverty and want, communism will also eliminate the greatest driving force for the prevalence of religion and superstition—and the attendant backwardness, which defines the role of women as the producers of the next generation of working masses to be exploited.”
For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!
Remember, I drill this idea in for a long time: only powerful issue ultimatums. Weak cannot issue ultimatums which mean anything.
1. Russia did issue ultimatum to the combined West. Drafts of the framework for new security agreement between Russia and the West (NATO) are but a small part of a larger ultimatum. Albeit this ultimatum also is articulated through statements of the high level Russia’s Foreign Ministry people, such as statement by the Deputy Foreign Minister Grushko:
Translation:“We just make it clear that we are ready to talk about how to translate the military scenario or the military-technical scenario into a political process that will actually strengthen the military security <…> of all states in the OSCE, Euro-Atlantic, Eurasian space. If this is not going to happen, then we have already designated them (NATO – TASS comment), then we will also switch to this mode of creating counter-threats, but then it will be too late to ask us why we made such decisions, why we have deployed such systems, “he said.
I highlighted in yellow and underlined this crucial semantics.
2. I am ON record for years: Russia has both overwhelming military advantage and escalation dominance in the Eastern Europe, thus the threats in case US (NATO) decide that they want to continue to play dumb:
a) Removing guarantees of non-invasion of Ukraine and, in fact, preparing for regime change in Kiev. If need be, NATO intel installations and troops’ bases could be wiped out (possibly without warning) as a warm up.
b) Russia will position hypersonic weapons, including nuclear-tipped near NATO members (such as Baltic States) and may in addition:
c) Create additional shock (in reality–strike) tank armies;
d) Russia will supply China with earlier versions of 3M22 (possibly Kinzhal) and will ensure that China has a decisive advantage over US and Royal Navies in her First Island Chain, while simultaneously providing China with latest AD/AM defense. S-500 may appear there even earlier than in India.
e) There is some pool of Russia’s weapon systems we haven’t seen yet and I can only imagine what those can do. I think some people in Pentagon have an idea and they wouldn’t want to deal with that.
f) Russia, certainly, will accelerate the rearmament of pr. 949A to 949AM and pr. 971M SSGNs to carry 3M14 Kalibr and P-800 Onyx and will return them to patrols along both shores of North America.
3. Russia understands the split with the West and is ready to take any consequences, including, already declining, shrinkage of trade and reduction of the supply of hydrocarbons to EU. Let the US deal with it… Ah, wait, US is making a killing in South East Asia selling its LNG and, frankly, EU is not a competitor with Asian economies which do not even bargain–they just buy all energy whatever the price. If Europe wants to say something to Russia–individual countries can go to Moscow and see if Moscow cares.
Those who follow this blog attentively, they should remember this from month ago:
As I repeat ad nauseam–Russia is the only country in the world which can, without resorting to nuclear weapons, defeat NATO in Europe. Moreover, it is the only country in the world which can self-sustain economically or can sustain herself without trade with EU. This trade was going downhill anyway. And while Russia’s exports to EU grew as of lately, much of it is also due to Russia making a killing on gas spot market. Judging by the scale of Power of Siberia and moves to build (in Russian) Power of Siberia-2, with Xi and Putin discussing this issue 3 days ago, Russia’s strategic reorienting towards Big Asia is essentially complete and, hey, they can continue to sanction whatever they want. I know some kindergartens near my mom’s home which they didn’t sanction yet. How reckless of them.
Conclusion: Russia is ready (she was for some time) and she gives NATO the last chance to save face and improve the atmosphere. If not–Ukraine will be eliminated. Plus NATO’s military infrastructure will be removed from Baltic States.
Only strong issue ultimatums. Plus, as Russian proverb says: Русские долго запрягают, но быстро ездят. Russians take a long time to harness, but they drive fast.
We print below, edited for publication, an educational given by comrade Sam Kirk at the Spartacus Youth Club “Youth Maintenance Work-In” on 18 June 2005.
I had one big “problem”—that was a good one to have—in preparing this class. This same material has already been covered in excellent classes given by comrades George Foster and Joseph Seymour some years ago [see: “Prelude to the Bolshevik October: The Russian Revolution of 1905,” WV Nos. 288 and 289, 11 September and 25 September 1981 and “Lenin and the Vanguard Party” in the Spartacist pamphlet of the same name, 1978]. So don’t expect to hear a lot that is new if you did the reading. But just because it exists on paper isn’t enough. Every generation must tackle the key questions of revolution and party building for itself. Marxism is not a religion where revealed truths are handed down by the “chosen.” It takes a lot of work to assimilate the experiences of the past in order to shape our current tasks.
We study the 1905 Russian Revolution not simply because it was, in retrospect, the prelude to the first successful workers revolution in history, the October Revolution of 1917. The 1905 Revolution was world-historic in its own right. As Lenin laid out in his January 1917 “Lecture on the 1905 Revolution,” this was the first time in history that the industrial working class played the leading role in a revolution. What began as a workers political protest to pressure the tsar rapidly escalated in the course of the year to mass political strikes, mutinies, the formation of soviets and armed uprisings that fought for power.
Bolshevism vs. Menshevism
While the Russian Revolution inspired many, its mechanisms were not widely understood. The world saw the working class fighting, but did not have a programmatic understanding of the political disputes within the leading, most dynamic party of the revolution, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). The RSDLP emerged as the premier force for a revolutionary wing of the Second International and was really two parties, the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.
The RSDLP was formally founded in 1898 in a tiny meeting in Minsk under constant threat of police repression. The Second Congress in 1903 was essentially the founding congress of a coordinated national revolutionary movement in Russia representing the consolidation of disparate local groups around an agreed-upon program to be applied in a regular paper, Iskra, the political scaffolding around which the party would be built. The 1903 Congress resulted in an unexpected split between two shadings of the party—informally referred to as “hards” and “softs”—that became the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks respectively. The immediate catalyst for the split was the definition of party membership and the composition of the Iskra editorial board. But underlying this were deeper political differences that were not fully expressed at the time.
In “Lenin and the Vanguard Party,” comrade Seymour gives a compelling description of the Bolshevik faction in 1904:
“Above all it represented a firm commitment to revolutionary social democracy [communism], particularly the leading role of the proletarian party in the struggle against tsarist absolutism. It further represented an intransigent attitude toward demonstrated opportunists, like the Economist leaders, and a distrustful attitude toward their possible conversion to revolutionary politics. Lenin was committed to a centralized, disciplined party, and consequently intransigently hostile to the circlism-cliquism characteristic of the Russian social-democratic movement.”
We would do well to live up to this!
In February 1904, Russia entered into its losing war against Japan after the Japanese navy trapped Russia’s Pacific Fleet in Port Arthur (today Dalian) in Manchuria. The potential military defeat of the autocracy raised the possibility of some kind of internal reform in Russia. The Russian liberal bourgeoisie, which had a growing economic power but was subject to the whims of the autocratic political system and tied to the more powerful European capitalists, understood on some level that Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1854-56 had led to the tsarist reform of 1861 that had semi-emancipated the serfs. That reform was part of a program that built up capitalist relations in Russia in an effort to strengthen the state against its imperialist enemies.
Seeing a chance to push forward its own interests, the liberal bourgeoisie embarked on a mildly defeatist course during the war, epitomized by the Zemstvo [provincial council] “banquet campaign.” If it doesn’t sound very revolutionary, you’re right. These nobility-run, largely peasant assemblies meekly called for a national representative assembly and greater civil liberties. The method of the bourgeoisie was meetings, banquets and petitions, but these developments were symptomatic of deeper stirrings in society.
One important result of the Zemstvo campaign of 1904 was that it fleshed out the reformist impulses of the Mensheviks. On the eve of the revolution the Mensheviks wrote:
“If we take a look at the arena of the struggle in Russia then what do we see? Only two forces: the tsarist autocracy and the liberal bourgeoisie, which is now organized and possesses a huge specific weight. The working mass, however, is atomized and can do nothing; as an independent force we do not exist; and thus our task consists in supporting the second force, the liberal bourgeoisie, and encouraging it and in no case intimidating it by presenting our own independent political demands.”
—Quoted in Gregory Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party: A Popular Outline (1923)
Lenin ridiculed the timid bourgeoisie, and the Mensheviks charged him and the Bolsheviks with intimidating the liberals. Lenin shot back that the Mensheviks were therefore guilty of being intimidated by the shadow of the intimidated liberals! In the RSDLP, what had begun as heated fights on secondary questions had crystallized into a fight over the central role of the working class in the revolution. The Mensheviks’ self-relegation to cheerleaders for the liberals provided a much clearer line of political demarcation between Bolshevism and Menshevism than had existed since the 1903 split. “A process of consolidation began within Bolshevism and like a sponge soaking up water it began to draw in the most revolutionary elements in social-democracy of that time who had finally become convinced of its correctness” [Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party: A Popular Outline].
Police “Socialism”
Any discussion about January 9, the beginning of the 1905 Russian Revolution, must address the radical Russian Orthodox priest Father Gapon. His movement was a second failed attempt inspired by the Russian secret police forces to undercut social-democratic influence in the labor movement by organizing workers into secretly police-led unions based on a reactionary program. This supplemented tsarism’s preferred method of dealing with the working class, which was bloody repression of any attempt to organize and fight. Gapon’s movement was more independent of direct state control than an earlier attempt by Sergei Zubatov, the chief of the Moscow secret police who set up workers societies under police control. The way the Bolsheviks dealt with Zubatovism was to expose the reactionary nature of his societies and, at the same time, to support them when they took part in leading strikes. After Zubatov’s societies led several strikes, Zubatov was informed by his masters that his experiment was over. Nevertheless, he directly influenced Father Gapon.
Gapon set up his Assembly of the Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg at about the same time as the war began against Japan. Membership was open to Russian and other Christian subjects of the empire. The Ministry of the Interior approved the statutes of the organization. At the same time, in order to be attractive to the masses, Gapon quietly gathered around himself former Social Democrats, and they came up with a secret “Program of the Five” which had elements of the Social Democracy’s minimum program.
In the second half of 1904 events accelerated. A bomb thrown by a member of the Social Revolutionary party killed the notorious anti-Semitic Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav Plehve. Plehve was an ultrareactionary who had been responsible for dissolving the Zubatov societies and supported the conservative wing of the Zemstvo movement. He was replaced by a tsarist “moderate.” This, combined with total defeat at Port Arthur (the Pacific fleet was lost and 80 percent of the besieged troops killed) resulted in a very heated political atmosphere. Gapon’s organization grew rapidly from a couple of hundred to several thousand industrial workers in the space of months. This was alarming, particularly to the factory owners of the city.
In retaliation for the growing influence of Gapon’s Assembly, a handful of its active members was fired from the massive Putilov metal works in late December. Under extreme pressure to act, Gapon held mass meetings on how to respond and more than half the workers at the plant joined the Assembly. In the face of intransigence from management, Gapon found himself at the head of a strike that began on January 3 and was quickly joined by a large number of the workers in St. Petersburg.
In an effort to resolve this dispute by less confrontational means, Gapon produced a petition to be presented on Sunday, January 9, in person, most humbly, by the toilers of Russia to the tsar at the Winter Palace, the center of autocratic power. The content of the petition was contradictory, with many supportable demands, like the eight-hour day and the separation of church and state, mixed in with total groveling before the tsar. Events snowballed. That morning, dressed in their Sunday best, well over 100,000 workers with their families, the bulk of the working population of the capital, began to gather at various meeting points around the city to begin the march to the Winter Palace located in the city center.
Bloody Sunday
Before we consider the fate of the march, let’s consider the character of the local Bolshevik organization. This underground group had around 200-300 members, most of whom were in their twenties. One member of the Kiev group in his memoirs gave a general description of the local party organizations in Russia as “mostly callow youths, hotheaded and resolute but weakly linked to the working masses and uninfluential in the factories.” Nevertheless, they constantly attempted to gain a hearing in the proletariat in the face of fierce state repression. A typical profile for a student activist was six months of semipublic work, followed by prison, exile and hopefully escape. To the extent that they had members in the factories, they were often apprentices and didn’t have a lot of authority with the more skilled workers. As one Putilov worker put it, young workers who tried to talk politics were told to “learn first how to hold a hammer and use a chisel and a knife, and then you can begin to argue like a man who has something to teach others” [quoted in Gerald Dennis Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society and Revolution (1989)].
The Social Democrats in the Narva District, which contained the massive Putilov works, had about 40 supporters out of a total of 30,000 workers, organized in a handful of underground study circles. The initial attitude of the Bolsheviks towards Gapon was to correctly denounce him as a suspicious adventurer, but also to underestimate the extent to which his Assembly was quickly gaining a hearing. Lenin waged a fight from afar to get the party to intervene in this movement aggressively.
Attempts to intervene in Gapon’s Assembly prior to the Sunday demonstration were difficult. One Bolshevik, as soon as he identified himself as a party member, had his speech interrupted by Gapon who explained, “It is essential for all to see that this is not a revolutionary movement, but a peaceful procession to the tsar.” He continued, “I have always respected you and considered you honest people. I bow to you, I bow low to you: do not bring friction into our movement. Let us go under one united banner of peace towards our sacred goal” [quoted in Walter Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday (1976)]. Gapon commanded that the Social Democrats march at the rear of the demonstration “to keep up the spirits of the crowd.” This softcore censorship was combined with the hardcore version. Bolshevik agitators were often denied speaking rights at meetings of the Assembly, and were at times beaten up and their leaflets destroyed. For the demonstration itself, red banners were forbidden.
The Bolshevik Party Committee was correctly wary that the demonstration was a police trap. It was decided to send teams around to the various feeder points for the march with leaflets and banners, but to wait until the mood of the crowd was sympathetic. Typical of what was occurring around the city, at one such meeting point, only about a dozen party supporters showed up. The guy who was supposed to bring the banner never showed; he was an undercover cop. The marchers were not widely receptive to communist propaganda as they set off full of illusions that Gapon’s way would win concessions. Red flags were not unfurled, leaflets not distributed. As the tens of thousands of workers marched to the center of the city by various routes, they were met by concentrations of troops who fired multiple volleys at pointblank range into the tightly packed crowds. Over 1,000 were killed and almost 4,000 injured in the day that is known to history as Bloody Sunday.
One definition of a revolution is when “the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way and the masses no longer want to live in the old way.” From the moment the first shots were fired, Gaponism was dead. The masses went from bowing to the tsar to demanding his death. Openness to revolutionary propaganda exploded. By the afternoon of Bloody Sunday, red flags were flying and Bolshevik leaflets were being snapped up. Through explosive events, the political scene can change very dramatically in a short period of time. In this changing situation, all programs are considered and tested. All trends get their chance. It was the Bolsheviks who had the program that showed the way forward corresponding to the felt needs of the working class and, due to the events triggered by January 9, they gained a sympathetic hearing from millions of workers, students and soldiers. Among these, tens of thousands began looking to become revolutionary activists and were looking for a party to join.
Lenin was quite critical of the local Bolshevik leaders, the “committeemen,” who were slow to react to new events. There is his famous [February 1905] letter to local party leaders Alexander Bogdanov and Sergei Gusev where he metaphorically called for “shooting on the spot anyone who presumes to say there are no people to be had” [i.e., no people to be recruited to the party]. Lenin got a lot of opposition to broadening the organization from the committeemen. The cadre of the Bolsheviks had become habituated to operating under the incredibly difficult conditions of underground work. It took Lenin’s strong intervention from a distance to turn things around. Interestingly, Lenin had to carry out a related fight against a tendency to dismiss the influence of their leftist opponents.
With the disaster of Bloody Sunday, the tsar allowed the setting up of what was called the Shidlovsky Commission. This allowed the workers to elect representatives to come and grovel before the tsar. This committee was a farce, yet it is often cited as the origin of the idea of soviets. As in the soviets, representation was one delegate for 500 workers. The elections to the commission provided an opening for Social Democratic agitation at mass meetings. In gushing letters to Lenin, Gusev bragged: “Hurray! The PC [party committee] can be proud; its whole plan, all its resolutions, all the tactics it had worked out, even the details—all has gone through brilliantly.” Lenin sent back a sarcastic letter that warned, “You are all too much of an optimist if you hope to get the better of the Peter Mensheviks so easily” [see Solomon Schwartz, The Russian Revolution: The Workers’ Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism and Menshevism (1967)]. In fact, many workers entering the political struggle for the first time often saw little difference between the two factions. The committeemen flipped from a tendency toward abstention to bragging that political obstacles would evaporate with little struggle.
It is important to understand that, at the time, their reformist opponents derisively called the Bolsheviks a “sect.” Likewise, many of the histories of 1905, written from a perspective hostile to the building of a vanguard party, quote fights by Lenin with the committeemen. In defense of the committeemen, these were dedicated revolutionaries who were organizationally competent and politically hard. They organized thousands of workers on a communist basis. But they made mistakes and these were often corrected.
Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution
What every revolutionary was grappling with was the nature of the revolution in a country with a relatively small, but powerful, working class and a huge peasantry. The Menshevik position has already been discussed. It was tailism of the liberal bourgeoisie. First there would be a bourgeois revolution and then down the road an indefinite period, a workers revolution. This is known today as the theory of the two-stage revolution, and Stalinists and Maoists alike embrace its basic framework. The reality of this theory, as shown by the experience of many failed revolutions in the last hundred years, is that the workers hand the bourgeoisie the power during the first stage, and in the second stage the bourgeoisie drowns the workers in blood.
The position of the Bolsheviks was a strong rejection of this kind of tailism. They looked to the working class to form a revolutionary alliance with the peasantry in a joint struggle to bring down tsarism and fight for democratic demands. At the same time the working class would fight for socialist demands. The question of what role the peasantry would play was a huge question in a country where the working class was less than 10 percent of the population. At the end of his life, Trotsky summarized Lenin’s position:
“The backward Russian bourgeoisie is incapable of completing its own revolution! The complete victory of the revolution, through the intermediacy of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,’ would purge the land of medievalism, invest the development of Russian capitalism with American tempo, strengthen the proletariat in city and village and make really possible the struggle for socialism. On the other hand, the victory of the Russian revolution would give a tremendous impetus to the socialist revolution in the West, while the latter would not only protect Russia from the dangers of restoration but would also enable the Russian proletariat to come to the conquest of power in a comparatively brief historical period.”
—Leon Trotsky, “Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution” (1939)
Trotsky considered this perspective unrealizable and incomplete because it characterized the stages of the revolution incorrectly, but nevertheless the immediate operational conclusions for the general direction of the struggle were correct and the same as Trotsky’s.
The limitations of Lenin’s theory did not become operational in 1905 because the revolution did not go far enough. But when discussing the three concepts of the revolution, it’s almost impossible not to consider what happened subsequently, in 1917. That is, Lenin dropped his analysis as outdated and in substance embraced Trotsky’s position. But in 1905, Trotsky’s theory, which became known as permanent revolution, by his own account “met practically no recognition” [“Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution”].
Trotsky rejected the idea of a two-class dictatorship as formulated in Lenin’s position and instead conceived of the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the peasantry. He summarized his perspective of permanent revolution as:
“The complete victory of the democratic revolution in Russia is conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution. Only the victory of the proletariat in the West could protect Russia from bourgeois restoration and assure it the possibility of rounding out the establishment of socialism.”
—Trotsky, “Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution”
Keep in mind that Lenin’s main thesis, “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” was written in the summer of 1905 before the key battles of the proletariat had taken place. Trotsky’s groundbreaking “Results and Prospects” was written as the revolution was winding down in 1906 and was based on his direct personal experience at the center of events.
At the time, Lenin’s position provided the marching orders for the revolutionary party in Russia, the Bolsheviks. He emphasized that a general strike is not enough by itself. Along with it a fight for power through armed uprisings must be organized. The vanguard party doesn’t just advocate revolution, but provides leadership. The Mensheviks denounced this as adventurism and rebellion and counterposed it to building consciousness. But even Rosa Luxemburg, who worked closely with Lenin beginning in 1905, took a long time to get beyond an idealization of the mass strike.
Keep in mind that although the activity on the ground of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was at times similar, their purpose was different, especially the higher up you go in leadership. Both were energetic in trying to organize and lead the working class in strikes against the tsarist state. This points to the push from the ranks for unity between the factions that resulted from events of the year. Trotsky was certainly a spokesman for this tendency for unity as chairman of the Petersburg Soviet; it wasn’t until 1917 that he fully gave up on unity between the factions and came over to the Bolsheviks.
The St. Petersburg Soviet
In May 1905, the Russian military was conclusively defeated by Japan. The Baltic Fleet that had been sent halfway around the world to save Port Arthur after the loss of the Pacific fleet, arrived five months too late. En route it was almost completely destroyed in a one-day battle in the Tsushima strait (located between Japan and Korea).
Following defeat on the seas and on the battlefield, in August the tsar finally agreed to a representative assembly, the Duma, which would be based on a limited franchise and be allowed to offer him nonbinding advice. This was met by most of society as a bad joke. The Bolsheviks proclaimed a boycott of the elections. Instead of quieting the political scene as intended, anger boiled over.
In September, the U.S.-brokered Treaty of Portsmouth was signed, codifying the overwhelming victory of Japan. In this case, the defeat of one’s own ruling class in war was a good thing for the Russian working class. In October, a revolutionary wave shook tsarism to its foundations. The establishment of the Petersburg Soviet followed a series of strikes culminating in a general rail strike. Trotsky wrote movingly about the incredible unity of the rail workers who not only started but also stopped their strike with the highest discipline [see Trotsky, 1905 (1922)]. Now there was a working-class, revolutionary, representative body in the capital of the empire, the Soviet, largely based on workers in the war industries. The tsar had seen enough. Without meaningful reform, he faced overthrow. The October Manifesto was issued granting a constitution and giving the future Duma legislative power.
Fundamentally this was very little, but the liberal bourgeoisie had seen enough. As the proletariat appeared more and more as an independent force, the bourgeoisie more fully threw its lot in with the camp of open counterrevolution. Their embrace of the October Manifesto further exposed the Mensheviks politically.
The granting of the October Manifesto was coordinated with a nationwide, government-organized onslaught against the Jewish population. Historically in Russia, reactionary counterrevolution means pogroms (i.e., anti-Jewish pillaging and lynching). Lenin cites the figures of 4,000 murdered and 10,000 mutilated during the course of the revolution. Some pogroms occurred at the end of 1904 in a wave of pro-war patriotism; the Jews were ridiculously blamed for aiding Japan. Interestingly, 30,000 Jews served in the Far East for the Russian military. But the vast majority of the pogroms occurred between the issuing of the October Manifesto and the end of the Moscow insurrection in December (i.e., in two months).
The whipping up of hatred for Jews, carried out by the reactionary “Black Hundreds,” was a conscious government attempt to derail the revolution. It was heroically opposed by Jewish socialist organizations, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks who organized armed defense guards. Importantly, industrial workers, especially the mainly Russian rail workers, played an important role in defending Jews. Significantly in Petersburg there were no pogroms because the working class showed its determination in advance to defend the Jewish population, arms in hand.
An example of how backward nationalist consciousness can change rapidly under the pressure of revolutionary events can be seen on the question of Poland. The revolution inspired the struggles of the nationalities in the tsarist “prison house of peoples” where less than half the empire was Russian. The oppressor Russian nationalism fomented anti-Polish chauvinism and, in turn, the nationalism of the oppressed Polish nation was anti-Russian. This infected the working class. The revolution cut across this. Upon hearing of the events of Bloody Sunday, Warsaw and many other Polish cities erupted in general strikes led by communists. Polish communists, led by Feliks Dzerzhinsky (heroic future head of the Cheka [Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage formed to defend early Soviet workers state]), intersected the large number of Russian troops in Poland with internationalist propaganda. In November, when martial law was declared in Poland, the Russian workers repaid their class brothers when the Petersburg Soviet declared a general strike in defense of Poland! [See Robert Blobaum, Feliks Dzierzynski and the SDKPiL: A Study of the Origins of Polish Communism (1984).]
The experience of the St. Petersburg Soviet was a glorious step forward for the revolution. Under Trotsky’s leadership a body was established that went beyond general strikes and provided an organizational structure for the proletariat to fight for power. Its conduct was heroic and revolutionary from beginning to end, including at the trial of its leaders after it was crushed, which was used as a platform for revolutionary ideas.
The Bolshevik committeemen had trouble dealing with this. They were not against soviets per se; in fact the Bolsheviks established the first one in June. Their problem was that they didn’t want to support one that they didn’t lead. They had similar problems with trade unions, which were rapidly being formed for the first time. Lenin intervened to the effect that leadership must be won in struggle, but that the soviets and unions can and should be built on the broadest basis. The committeemen saw the opportunists in the soviets and unwisely abstained because they were for a split with the opportunists. Tactics toward these new phenomena had to be hammered out in struggle.
The Moscow Insurrection
The Moscow insurrection of 7-19 December was a general strike that grew into an armed uprising. Lenin considered it the high point of the revolution, which unfortunately was characterized by the masses having a leadership that lagged behind them. That is, events moved a step faster than the leadership of the working class on the ground was prepared to go.
There is the example of the confrontations with police at the Fielder Academy where groups of students and workers were holding constant meetings. All over the country the universities were centers of working-class organizing and political discussion. The gendarmes, after being surprised at meeting armed resistance, regrouped and shelled the school, slaughtering several students, and carried out mass arrests. It is one thing to have a political line for armed struggle and another to carry it out in the face of a hostile and organized state. There were pitched battles all over the city, barricades going up and fighting units giving battle. There was a battle for the loyalty of the troops, with Lenin estimating 5,000 loyal to the government and 10,000 wavering.
In his balance sheet of the events, Lenin cited Marx that “revolution progresses by giving rise to a strong and united counterrevolution, i.e., it compels the enemy to resort to more and more extreme measures of defense and in this way devises even more powerful means of attack” [“Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” 29 August 1906]. The masses were learning from their own experience Lenin’s point that the general strike was not enough. The question was posed: Who was going to rule? How were they to accomplish the revolution? Lenin was very insistent that revolution is an art and needs to be coordinated, specifically by developing tactics of guerrilla warfare supported by the proletariat.
To get a sense of how serious the Bolsheviks were, look at the example of Leonid Krasin. He was politically the most senior Bolshevik leader in Petersburg and a consummate professional revolutionary. Among other things he organized the production at a high technical level (he was an accomplished engineer) of grenades and trained the fighting units in their use. He organized and ran technical/defense squads. One of these squads was prepared to blow up the railway to Moscow from Petersburg (thereby preventing the dispatch of the troops that eventually put down the Moscow uprising), but the team was unsuccessful at carrying out its mission. Bolshevik Party cadres were deadly serious about an armed uprising, but they were dealing with young and untested forces [see Timothy O’Connor, The Engineer of Revolution: L.B. Krasin and the Bolsheviks, 1870-1926 (1992)].
The Moscow uprising was put down in just over a week of fighting. Strikes shut down the city. Fighting units and barricades were met by troops and artillery. Over 1,000 were killed and the uprising was followed by a campaign of arrests and executions.
International Significance of 1905 Revolution
It is important to realize the tremendous impact that the events in Russia had internationally. This is something that should guide us as members of the International Communist League as we seek to consolidate and extend national sections of revolutionary Marxism around the world. We are building a programmatically hard, disciplined international that seeks to provide revolutionary leadership. In this struggle we understand that the world economy organically links all nations.
Comrades have hopefully spent the week combatting in practice the effect of bourgeois society’s stultifying division between manual and mental labor at this summer’s “youth maintenance work-in.” In left-wing politics today we are familiar with the division between “direct action” and reformist opportunism (for example, anarchists versus organizations like the International Socialist Organization and Workers World Party), a divide more of form than content. On a much smaller scale, this recalls the political divisions among hundreds of thousands of working-class militants in the world of 1905. The false division between action and theory was contained on the one hand in the anarcho-syndicalists who were known for championing direct action through the “mass strike” and for their rejection of “politics” (i.e., programs, theories, parliamentarism). On the other hand there was the revolutionary, but increasingly conservative, social-democratic Second International, led by August Bebel, Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). They were moving toward a reformist program increasingly limited to raising the consciousness of the working class gradually through education and parliamentary activity.
Within both of these tendencies there was a revolutionary wing—James P. Cannon, who joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and later helped found the American Communist Party, Alfred Rosmer and Victor Serge, anarcho-syndicalists who later became communists, and Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were the leaders of the revolutionary wing of the SPD. They were attempting to combat the anti-revolutionary conclusions of each tendency. The Russian Revolution of 1905 presented the possibility of combining the best aspects of both currents in a revolutionary way.
Rosa Luxemburg, in her 1906 work The Mass Strike: The Political Party and the Trade Unions, hailed the 1905 developments in Russia as the “historical liquidation of anarchism” because, after years of the anarchists holding up the general strike as the highest goal, it was the social democrats in Russia who had actually led it. But the thrust of her polemic was against the conservatism within her own party. She explained that Marx’s dynamic criticism of the adventurism of anarchism was being turned into a smug caricature of Marxism: the view that socialism would be arrived at only after a slow, peaceful march to educate the workers by an ever-growing social democracy. Conservative social-democratic opposition to the general strike was summed up in the paradox: “Either the proletariat as a whole are not yet in possession of the powerful organization and financial resources required, in which case they cannot carry through the general strike; or they are already sufficiently well organized, in which case they do not need the general strike.”
The masses in Germany were greatly affected by the events in Russia where in one year they saw that the “bastion of nineteenth-century reaction became the vanguard of twentieth-century revolution” [Carl E. Schorske, German Social-Democracy, 1905-1917: the Development of the Great Schism (1955)]. As many workers went out on strike in Germany in 1905 as in the previous five years combined. For the entire year the Russian Revolution was front-page news every day in the socialist papers. The fact that the working class dared to vie for power in tsarist Russia was a huge blow to the “evolutionary theory” of socialism whose influence had been steadily growing as a pro-capitalist layer of “labor lieutenants” was consolidating itself within the socialist and trade-union movement in Europe and the U.S. At the same time, the socialist trade-union leadership was increasingly becoming a privileged layer, which the imperialist rulers could afford to bribe with material benefits. The union bureaucracy derived its privileges from its position atop the workers movement and became increasingly comfortable operating within the framework of capitalist society. In Germany the trade-union leadership came out in open opposition to the left wing as it treacherously sought to limit and defuse the strike movement throughout 1905 [see Schorske].
Luxemburg’s polemics were scathing and largely correct against the conservative and opportunist elements in her own party. But the left wing, like all wings of social democracy, subscribed to the theory of the “party of the whole class,” which maintained that the working class should have only one party with all political tendencies represented. In Europe, this theory served to prevent an organizational break with opportunism within the workers movement and eventually served to subordinate the revolutionary wing to the reformist wing. This was not an abstract question. With the rise of radicalism in 1905, Luxemburg formally won the SPD to her line of advocating and employing the tactic of the political mass strike, but by 1906 the conservative trade-union leadership won a rotten “compromise” that gave them the right to veto the party line as it applied to their activity.
Luxemburg envisioned that the revolutionary wave would wipe away conservative opportunism like a rapidly moving river empties a stagnant pond of scum. Luxemburg’s belief that an upsurge of militant class struggle would naturally dispel the opportunists proved very wrong. Comrades are aware that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered in 1919 during the counterrevolutionary terror unleashed by a government run by their former “comrades.”
Despite political criticisms, we honor Luxemburg as a revolutionary internationalist to the core. She wrote in her 1906 pamphlet TheMass Strike that it would be:
“entirely wrong to regard the Russian revolution as a fine play, as something specifically ‘Russian,’ and at best to admire the heroism of the fighting men, that is, the last accessories of the struggle. It is much more important that the German workers should learn to look upon the Russian revolution as their own affair, not merely as a matter of international solidarity with the Russian proletariat, but first and foremost, as a chapter of their own social and political history.”
James P. Cannon made a similar point for American workers in his essay on the anarcho-syndicalist IWW, which was founded in 1905 amid intense praise of the Russian Revolution.
In Asia the influence of the revolution was also felt, but in a very different way. There were two related events: first, the defeat suffered by Russia, a major European power, at the hands of Japan, an emerging force in the imperialist world, in the Russo-Japanese War. This marked the first time in modern history that an Asian country defeated a European country. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was an interimperialist war in which the working class had no side. Yet Lenin in his burning hatred for tsarism incorrectly supported the victory of the Japanese bourgeoisie over the tsarist autocracy as the victory of “advancing, progressive Asia” over “backward and reactionary Europe” (“The Fall of Port Arthur,” January 1905). Seen in the light of the interimperialist world war that broke out in 1914, Lenin’s position in 1905 was a mistake. But in 1905, capitalist imperialism was a new phenomenon and Lenin had not yet arrived at a theoretical understanding of the imperialist epoch. Thus he viewed the Russo-Japanese conflict through the prism of the 19th-century Marxist view that progressive national wars were supportable and that tsarist Russia was the chief reactionary power in Europe. Russia’s defeat showed the masses of Asia that the colonialist countries of Europe and the United States were not invincible.
But what really shook the East was that in the midst of this war the masses of Russia, with the working class in the lead, rose up to shake off their own oppressor, the autocratic system of capitalist Russia. This provided an internationalist example to the national struggles against colonial domination. It is interesting to consider China, a country which has such an important place in the world today. Northern China provided much of the battleground for the Russo-Japanese War. Russian troops occupied Manchuria and among these troops it is estimated that by the end of the war, in mid 1905, there were 3,500 active Bolshevik supporters agitating for demobilization of the troops. Chinese revolutionaries who returned from Russian territory after the revolution played central roles in the Chinese Eastern Railroad strikes of 1906-07. In 1907, Chinese and Russian revolutionaries organized a joint political strike to commemorate the second anniversary of the Bloody Sunday massacre of Russian workers by tsarist forces.
Iran offers another example with a large number of Iranian immigrants working in Southern Russia, largely centered in the Baku oilfields where there was a direct organizational connection to the Russian Social Democracy. When the Iranian revolution broke out in December 1905 it was the working class at the forefront with a general strike in Tehran. In India and Turkey, 1905 also marked a dramatic beginning to the anti-colonial movement.
Dress Rehearsal for 1917
Ultimately, the 1905 Revolution was defeated. That the bourgeoisie internationally was relatively stable was a factor contributing to the revolution not going further. The world was not in the turmoil it would be in 1917 after three years of world war. In that sense the ruling class had room to recover and save itself through state repression. Another factor is that the protests in the cities did not penetrate deeply enough into the countryside where the rate of protest by the peasantry was perhaps 20 percent that of the proletariat. That is to say, the illusions that the St. Petersburg proletariat had in the tsar prior to January 9, although greatly undermined, were held longer in the countryside. That was reflected in the fact that the army did not split, with a section going over to the side of the revolution. That is not to say that there weren’t some huge cracks. Lenin and Trotsky both cited the example of sympathetic troops during the Moscow insurrection marching down the street singing the Marseillaise. Likewise, during the summer of 1905 the mutineers of the Battleship Potemkin tried to join with the revolutionary workers of Odessa (the fourth largest city in Russia). The police were able to prevent this only by slaughtering 1,000 demonstrators in one day on the docks.
The authority of the ruling class was greatly undermined by the revolution and the liberal bourgeoisie was exposed. Despite their best efforts, the memory of 1905 could not be erased. The clock could not be turned back. That is to say that subsequent periods (the period of reaction, the period of working-class resurgence, World War I and ultimately the 1917 revolutions) were all played out under the shadow of the experiences of 1905.
The revolution was defeated, but the real gain was a Bolshevik Party with thousands of new members who showed in struggle that they meant business and who gained the authority and active support of thousands upon thousands of workers. The party had a leadership that could generalize the lessons and correct errors. A party that was hard enough to combat the illusions in the working class that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks should just get together, that the programmatic differences “weren’t that serious,” but flexible enough to bring in revolutionaries like Trotsky in 1917 and incorporate the substance of his correct theory of permanent revolution and his several thousand supporters by 1917. The Bolshevik Party that began the revolution of 1905 as a propaganda group of 1,000 to 2,000 ended it as a small mass party. In 1907, before the onset of reaction decimated the ranks of the party, the Bolsheviks had about 45,000 members. And, thanks to their previous experience, the party and the class had a much better chance at clarity and success for the next time. To really learn about 1905 provides a glimpse of what we, as a small propaganda group, have ahead of us if we are to live up to our slogan that “we are the party of the Russian Revolution!”
I hope this talk provides a framework to inspire further study. One hundred years later, world reality is not pretty. The idea that experiences of the past are irrelevant to a “new world reality” is unfortunately prevalent, especially among the left. This is an aspect of acceptance of the “death of communism” mythology of bourgeois public opinion. We are fully confident that these people will go the way of the Mensheviks when hit with revolutionary situations where their program is exposed (by us) as having no revolutionary answers to the burning questions. In our fight we are guided by Lenin who observed on the fifth anniversary of 1905 that “only stern battles, only civil wars, can free humanity from the yoke of capital, and, on the other hand, that only class-conscious proletarians can and will give leadership to the vast majority of the exploited.” Long live the memory of the 1905 Revolution!
……………..
One Hour of Russian Revolutionary Music – Pre-1917
Our comrade Bonnie Breen died in New York City at the age of 63 after a prolonged illness. Her death is a painful blow to comrades around the world. A longtime leading cadre of the International Communist League, Bonnie was greatly respected: a hard-working communist and a tenacious character who rejected the idea of mellowing with age.
Bonnie was born in Sacramento into a religious Christian Science family and broke from her upbringing. From a young age, the genocide of Native Americans sparked her social conscience and burning hatred of the crimes of the U.S. government. Like many of her generation, Bonnie was radicalized by the Vietnam antiwar movement, the Black Panthers’ fight against racial oppression and the struggles for women’s sexual freedom and social equality. Recruited as a campus activist at UC Berkeley in 1974, Bonnie, unlike most New Leftists, stayed true to the ideals of her youth and devoted her entire life to the fight for socialism.
Bonnie was red in tooth and claw—one of the ICL’s finest polemicists. In 1985, after the spectacular blowup of the British Healyites, pretenders to orthodox Trotskyism, Bonnie was selected to be on a team with more senior comrades to interview Jim Robertson and other 1966 London Conference participants on our definitive rupture with Gerry Healy two decades earlier (see “Healyism Implodes,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 36-37, Winter 1985-86). A short list of Bonnie’s greatest hits can be found in issues of our Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacist League pamphlet series. Just as everything V. I. Lenin wrote was a polemic against false ideas and organizations that were roadblocks on the path to proletarian state power, so too the ICL exposes our opponents claiming to be Trotskyist, including by reprinting their polemics against us.
Bonnie wrote the 1984 article, “Marxism and Bloodthirstiness” (reprinted in Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacist League No. 5: “The Bolshevik Tendency”), which stakes out the Marxist position that we are for the victory of just causes and the defeat of imperialism, but do not groove on the deaths of American soldiers sent to die for the U.S. ruling class. Year after year, Bonnie led our intervention at the U.S. Socialist Workers Party annual summer camp, engaging the few subjectively revolutionary elements there and often scoring that organization’s internal bulletins. Bonnie was also the main author of the 1990 Hate bulletin produced by the Spartacist League/Britain and the Dublin Spartacist Youth Group against Workers Power and the Irish Workers Group. This pamphlet is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the Russian Question and what it meant to be Soviet defensists in a period when Cold War II burned white-hot.
After her recruitment, Bonnie went on to be a Spartacist organizer in Boston and Cleveland. She rocketed to the leading national body of the Spartacus Youth League, serving as national organizational secretary and then editor of the monthly Young Spartacus. Our treaty on youth-party relations, modeled on the Bolsheviks’ work among youth, provided for an exchange of representatives on leading bodies. Bonnie was elected by the youth organization as its full representative on the Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee. She was a central participant in the struggles to hammer out a correct political line for the youth organization on many important questions—including mobilizing against fascist terror, driving CIA/NSA and military recruiters off campus, intervening in campus divestment struggles, and combating the racist rollback of affirmative action in university admissions as part of our fight for open admissions and free tuition.
In the time-honored tradition of communist youth organizations making periodic forays into ultraleft sectarianism, Bonnie and the national youth leadership (as well as the party reps) had to be won away from a position that distorted the united-front tactic. They had insisted that other organizations must agree with our defense of the Soviet Union to engage in joint actions against U.S. imperialism in Central America in the 1980s. The fights to correct such errors are valuable parts of our party’s revolutionary continuity.
In 1978, the party waged a fight against the jocularly named “cloned youth”—a layer of young male intellectuals who imbibed the alien bourgeois values of great male “thinkers” served by female “doers.” Bonnie was one of several “earnest young women” whose symbiotic relationship with the “clones” was inimical to the Spartacist League’s conscious policy to develop leading women and black cadre. But Bonnie was won over, hard, and through this fight became a younger peer of the senior party leadership. One party rep to the youth press recalls that Bonnie was the best and most enjoyable of many Young Spartacus editors he worked with because she did not bow to power, nor was she subjective or defensive. She cared most about achieving political clarity.
SL/U.S. National Chairman Jim Robertson motivated a battlefield promotion for Bonnie as a full member of the Central Committee in 1986 for her stand-out role in combating instances of party passivity in the face of rising fascist activity and fighting political liquidation. Later that year, Bonnie was transferred to Britain to help lead the section in the wake of the collapse of its leadership, which had indicated a willingness to support Labour Party traitor Neil Kinnock in upcoming elections. Bonnie took over as editor of Workers Hammer and wrote the savage polemics exposing Kinnock as “Thatcher’s poodle” and giving voice to the angry coal miners and other proletarian sectors that had been stabbed in the back by Her Majesty’s Labour leaders.
Bonnie was a night owl on the prowl in the party office wherever she was stationed in the world. Her nocturnal habits and organizational skills positioned her to carry out a key task during the ICL’s 1989-90 intervention in the nascent political revolution in East Germany—from London. As there were no accessible phone lines from East Germany to West Germany, teams of Spartacist comrades in the East would make late-night calls to Bonnie in London, and she would then relay their reports and needs to a Spartacist organizer in West Berlin. Hours later, Berlin-based comrades would give boxes of our propaganda weapon, Spartakist-Arbeiterpressekorrespondenz, to train conductors and ask them to toss a carton from the train in Eisenhüttenstadt or wherever Bonnie reported that there were potential recruits to the Spartakist-Gruppen waiting to use our literature to fight capitalist reunification of Germany.
Bonnie became an alternate member of the ICL’s International Executive Committee in 1992. She transferred to Australia, where in 1993 she became editor of Australasian Spartacist and subsequently the central leader of the section. An Australian comrade wrote: “Bonnie had a lasting effect on raising the understanding of the section here, and by extension internationally, as to the horrendous legacy and hideous present of Aboriginal oppression and the role of this question in the battle for social revolution.” Bonnie fought to win the section to champion even partial victories in the Aboriginal struggle to claw back some of their land and/or wrest compensation.
In 1996, Bonnie moved back to the United States, where she worked closely with Workers Vanguard, remaining on its Editorial Board until her death. She went off the IEC in 1998, but was re-elected to that body as an alternate member in 2003, briefly serving in the International Secretariat. In 2004, she became a full member of the SL/U.S. Central Committee and was part of the Political Bureau for several years. Bonnie played a crucial role in working with young writers and paid special attention to training the editors of the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard. Her death evoked an outpouring of grief and tributes from former youth editors who closely worked with her. One comrade recounted how she “despised those who pretended to know more than they did, and had great fun expressing this.”
Bonnie’s sense of humor was forceful and angular, but also dry and ironic. She was keenly attuned to the world of bourgeois politics, in all its absurdity and hypocrisy, and was a news junkie. Bonnie had a stubborn, adventurous and independent spirit. She was also known for her keen sense of fashion. In recent years, Bonnie’s health deteriorated, and she left the SL/U.S. Central Committee in 2015 and the IEC earlier this year. Already seriously ill, she was hit hard by the death of comrade Ed Cliffel in September. They were close friends who enjoyed feisty arguments—suitably lubricated with copious quantities of vodka, wine and cigarettes. Her last contribution to the party was a written remembrance of Ed.
Ever unbowing to convention, Bonnie lived the life she wanted and devoted herself to the cause of international proletarian socialist revolution. We honor her and miss her.
The Platypus Affiliated Society is a talk shop that holds discussions and movie showings on two elite Chicago campuses, as well as blogging ad nauseam in cyberspace about “reformulating the Marxian Left.” Beneath the “Marxian” verbiage, the Platypus group’s political purpose is defense of U.S. imperialist “democracy,” as exhibited in particular by Platypus leader Chris Cutrone’s support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq! This argument echoes the neocons. Nonetheless, we felt compelled to respond to this pretentious clot because they have been using our materials on their reading lists. As an act of political sanitation, the Chicago Spartacus Youth Club produced the leaflet that we reprint below to expose these academic apologists for U.S. imperialism for who they are. Buyer beware!
Copies of our leaflet were snapped up by people attending a 6 November 2007 Platypus panel discussion, “The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and ‘Resistance’: The Problematic Forms of ‘Anticapitalism’ Today.” In his closing remarks, Cutrone insinuated that the left was ashamed of its history. Our comrade responded that we are proud of our history. We stand in the tradition of the Bolshevik Party that led the Russian Revolution. In contrast, both Platypus and the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS—represented on the panel by Marisa Holmes) seek to refurbish the image of racist U.S. imperialism. SDS does this through appeals to the capitalist Democratic Party.
Our leaflet and interventions struck a nerve with Cutrone, who sent us an e-mail two days later whining that “I have never in any form suggested, let alone said, because I do not believe that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was good and supportable, but only questioned the alternatives” (our emphasis). There’s a distinction without a difference—the alternative that Cutrone has “questioned” (repeatedly) is an end to the U.S. occupation! Workers Vanguard has already replied to two letters in which Cutrone argues that the blood-drenched U.S. imperialists are playing a progressive role in Iraq (see “An Exchange on the Iraq ‘Resistance’,” WV No. 847, 29 April 2005 and “Exchange on Iraq Occupation,” WV No. 874, 4 August 2006).
The SYCs call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. In doing so, we stand in the tradition of V.I. Lenin, who wrote in 1915: “Any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory against the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ‘Great’ Powers” (Socialism and War). Our leaflet of 6 November 2007 was reissued November 12 and has been distributed at the University of Chicago.
* * *
The Platypus group, a Chicago-based pseudo-“Marxian” study circle—whose defining position is its support to the U.S. occupation of Iraq—is an acute if minor expression of pro-imperialist “death of communism” politics. Their outlook is framed by the 1991-92 Soviet counterrevolution, a historic catastrophe for workers and the oppressed worldwide, which not only devastated Russia and Eastern Europe, but also removed the main military obstacle to the blood-drenched U.S. rulers’ imperialist adventures. In its wake, bourgeois ideologues trumpeted that “communism is dead” and socialism is a “failed experiment.” The reformist “socialists,” most of whom cheered the collapse of the USSR, have embraced those same lies. Today the reformists accept the imperialist order as inviolable, aiming merely to pressure the ruling class to conform to a bogus ideal of liberal bourgeois “democracy.”
Platypus imbibes the worst of all worlds: the worst of the reformist left, the worst of bourgeois academia, the worst of post-modernist claptrap. Centered at the University of Chicago and School of the Art Institute [SAIC], two bastions of class privilege and academic pretension, Platypus’s guru is one Chris Cutrone, an SAIC instructor and U of C grad student, who briefly passed through the Spartacus Youth Club in the 1990s. His Platypus outfit is of note to us mainly because its reading lists include a number of our Spartacist polemics on such topics as imperialism, the New Left and black nationalism. But Platypus guts our Trotskyist arguments of any revolutionary content, twisting them to fit their own reactionary anti-Marxist ends. So it is necessary to restate some basic Marxist principles and expose this campus talk shop’s pro-imperialist politics, in case anyone might be fooled into thinking they have anything, “theoretical” or otherwise, to offer inquiring radical minds.
For Platypus, the fundamental social divide is not the class struggle of proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, but an amorphous and classless contest of “Left” vs. “Right.” And according to the Platypi, “the Left is dead.” Disdaining a proletarian perspective, Platypus argues that in the post-Soviet world the main forces opposing U.S. imperialism abroad come from the “Right,” i.e., Islamic reaction. They therefore uphold U.S. imperialist “democracy” against the Iraqi peoples as the “lesser” evil. As Cutrone said recently in one of his interminable Web posts: “I take no comfort whatsoever in the fact that the U.S. and the political process it is fostering is being ‘resisted’ in Iraq. In this sense, I would be happy to see the U.S. be ‘successful’ in Iraq (according to what it claims to be doing there)” (platypus1917 yahoo group [“pyg”], 13 September 2007). In a 2006 letter to Workers Vanguard, Cutrone alibied U.S. imperialism’s crimes in Iraq, writing: “The reality is that the US troops in Iraq stand between the Iraqi workers and Leftists and the insurgents and Iraqi-government affiliated paramilitaries” (“Exchange on Iraq Occupation,” WV No. 874, 4 August 2006).
No! The racist and rapacious U.S. ruling class—in both its Democratic and Republican wings—is an enemy of the working people and the oppressed around the globe! War is the inevitable product of the capitalist competition for profits, resources and markets. Only socialist revolution can end war! Every blow struck against the imperialist occupiers is a blow in the interests of workers and the oppressed worldwide. During the 2003 invasion, we uniquely took a side in defense of Iraq, calling for a class-struggle opposition to U.S. imperialism. Today we call for immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Insofar as the forces on the ground aim their fire against the occupiers and their lackeys, we call for their military defense against U.S. imperialism. At the same time, we are intransigent opponents of the Islamic fundamentalists’ and Ba’athist remnants’ murderous inter-communal violence, and warn that, absent working-class struggle against the occupation, the victory of one of these forces would likely come about through a bloody alliance with imperialism.
In the face of the imperialists’ war provocations against Iran, Cutrone grotesquely argues that he cannot defend Iran because “the U.S. is more civilized” (pyg, 9 October 2006). U.S. imperialism more “civilized”?! Tell that to the victims incinerated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtered in Vietnam, tortured at Abu Ghraib, or left to drown in the man-made racist atrocity in the face of Hurricane Katrina. Iran needs nuclear weapons to defend itself against the blood-drenched U.S. rulers. Imperialist hands off Iran! As part of his defense of Western bourgeois “democracy” and “civilization,” Cutrone also nauseatingly declares that “the Israeli state/govt.” should be defended “against what I think Hamas (and even Fatah, e.g., the al-Aqsa brigades) represent” (pyg, 15 June 2007). We say: Defend the Palestinian people! All Israeli troops, settlers out of the Occupied Territories! At bottom, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is one of interpenetrated peoples, two populations laying claim to the same small piece of land, whose conflicting national claims cannot be resolved under capitalism. The liberation of the Palestinians demands a perspective of socialist revolution throughout the Near East. We defend Hamas and Fatah against the Zionist butchers, while giving them not one iota of political support. We also vigorously oppose acts of indiscriminate terror against innocent Israeli civilians, which only drive the Hebrew-speaking population toward its own ruling class.
At home, from the vantage of the ivory tower, Cutrone disgustingly slanders courageous black militants like Malcolm X as “pathological” (pyg, 26 April 2007). The Platypi hate Malcolm X for the same reason that the racist capitalist rulers feared and hated him: he was an uncompromising fighter for black freedom. While lacking a Marxist understanding of the need to mobilize the multiracial working class independent of its capitalist masters, Malcolm X was a truth-teller who exposed the hypocrisy and lies of the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties and advocated the right of armed self-defense against Klan and police terror. Platypus instead promotes the liberal integrationist program of Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, which shackled the civil rights movement to the Democratic Party of racism and war based on the illusion that black equality can be won within the confines of capitalism. Understanding that black oppression is the bedrock of American capitalism, the SYCs fight for revolutionary integrationism. We seek to mobilize labor’s power to combat every instance of racist discrimination, such as the racist political frame-up of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Jim Crow “justice” meted out to the Jena Six. At the same time, we understand that black freedom will not be won short of socialist revolution. For black liberation through socialist revolution!
Platypus’s academic “Marxian” pretensions add up to little more than a handful of Marxist terms—commodity fetishism, alienation—gutted of revolutionary content and wrapped in a fog of gobbledygook cribbed from such “theorists” as the dreary German anti-communist Theodor Adorno. Platypus’s hot air has absolutely nothing to do with what Marx himself considered most essential, namely that “class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Letter to J. Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852). As Lenin explained in The State and Revolution: “A Marxist is one who extends the acceptance of class struggle to the acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Herein lies the deepest difference between a Marxist and an ordinary petty or big bourgeois.”
The 1917 Russian Revolution is a litmus test, posing the question of proletarian dictatorship pointblank. The petty-bourgeois Cutrone sneers that “The Bolshevik Revolution was a disaster, almost from the beginning,” and became “less and less defensible over time, beginning at least as early as 1918” (pyg, 20 March 2007). 1918 notably was the year when the Bolsheviks expropriated the bourgeoisie, and imperialist troops invaded to smash the fledgling workers state. As Trotskyists, we hail the Bolshevik Revolution! Despite the Stalinist degeneration that began in 1923-24, we fought for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack and counterrevolution. Cutrone also dismisses the Vietnamese workers and peasants’ battlefield defeat of U.S. imperialism as a “pyrrhic victory.” There was nothing “pyrrhic” about this great victory, which drove out the imperialists and overthrew the national bourgeoisie through a social revolution. This stinging defeat also produced the “Vietnam syndrome,” helping to stay U.S. imperialism’s hands militarily for over a decade. Today we defend the remaining deformed workers states—China, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea—while calling for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies.
The Platypi’s outright support to the neocolonial occupation of Iraq may set them somewhat apart from other reformist leftists active at SAIC and U of C, such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), Spark and Socialist Alternative (SAlt). Not that this stopped the ISO from rubbing shoulders in oh-so-comradely dialogue with Cutrone at Platypus’s January 30 “Imperialism” forum. At bottom, no less than Platypus, these other fake socialists stand for class collaboration with imperialism. They too are anti-Marxist opponents of the revolutionary workers movement. They enthusiastically backed the capitalist rulers’ anti-Soviet war drive in the 1980s, taking a side with the imperialist-backed Islamic reactionaries against the Red Army in Afghanistan, and then cheering the Yeltsin/Bush counterrevolution that overthrew the Soviet Union in 1991-92. None of these groups took a stand in defense of Iraq in 2003. Instead, the ISO, RCP, Spark and SAlt show their faith in the capitalist class enemy by trying to build an “antiwar movement” consisting of “peace-loving” people of all different classes to pressure the imperialist rulers to end the occupation and put resources into “jobs not war.” Their goal is simply to pressure the Democratic Party—the other party of racist U.S. imperialism—to put a more “humane” face on the capitalist profit system.
In sharp contrast, the SYCs fight to dispel all illusions that capitalism can be reformed to serve the interests of the working people and the oppressed. We fight for socialist revolution under the leadership of a proletarian vanguard party like Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. Youth interested in joining this fight should check out our revolutionary Trotskyist program and literature.
April 2nd, 2021, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a virtual panel on “The Legacy of Trotskyism” as part of the 2021 Platypus International Convention. In 2011 at its third international convention, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a plenary discussion titled “The Legacy of Trotskyism.” That panel’s introduction specifically mentioned the Socialist Workers Party (UK), International Socialist Organization (USA), and New Anticapitalist Party (France) as contemporary representatives of Trotskyism. Since 2011, all three groups have significantly declined, or collapsed outright. The smaller Trotskyist sects, once a familiar sight outside socialist and trade union meetings, seem unable to replace their aging membership through recruitment and face the prospect of their long-term leaders passing away without a new generation prepared to continue their mission.
The current generation of “Left” activists, whether inspired by social democracy or “new social movements,” seem to have bypassed Trotskyism entirely, in contrast to the 2001-2008 antiwar movement, which drew heavily on existing organizations’ experience and discipline. If Trotsky’s foremost accomplishment was his political and intellectual opposition to Stalinism, this raises the question of what Trotsky and the Trotskyists have to say about our present circumstances.
What is the relevance of Trotskyism for the Left today? What has Trotskyism made of Trotsky’s Marxism? Finally, is the collapse of Trotskyism a progressive or regressive overcoming? Panelists: Bryan Palmer (professor emeritus of Canadian studies and history at Trent University) Mike Macnair (Communist Party of Great Britain, Provisional Central Committee) Wayne Price (revolutionary anarchist) Richard Rubin (Platypus Affiliated Society) __________________________ Curious to learn more about Platypus? E-mail coordinator@platypus1917.org to be connected with a chapter in your area. The Platypus Affiliated Society organizes reading groups, public fora, research, and journalism focused on problems and tasks inherited from the “Old” (1920s-30s), “New” (1960s-70s) and post-political (1980s-90s) Left, for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today
AUGUST 21—After it was revealed that Facebook handed over the private information of some 87 million users without their consent to the political data firm Cambridge Analytica, CEO Mark Zuckerberg came before Congress in April to assure lawmakers, especially Democrats, that his company would self-regulate against “fake news” and “bad actors.” Coming amid the Democratic-fueled hysteria against “Russian meddling” in the 2016 elections, Zuckerberg’s message to politicians was clear: we will carry out surveillance and censorship for you. And Facebook is doing it.
In late July, with the midterm elections approaching, Facebook deleted the event page for the “No Unite The Right 2” protest in Washington, D.C., which was called in response to fascist rallies over the August 11-12 weekend. Over 3,000 users who indicated interest in the anti-fascist event received notices claiming that it was created by “fake accounts.” But the event was real, and the page Facebook deleted was one of the main announcements for it. The shutdown of the anti-fascist event page, which had been used by activists including Black Lives Matter, was the centerpiece of Facebook’s announcement trumpeting its closure of 32 pages and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The implication was that they were of Russian origin, although not even Facebook can define what “inauthentic” exactly means. The content shared by the users was generally left-liberal, with pages like “Black Elevation,” “Aztlan Warriors” and “Resisters.” As we go to press, Facebook announced it had taken down another 652 “fake accounts,” linking them to a purported new “political influence campaign” with ties to Russia and Iran.
Facebook shut down the initial 32 pages in collaboration with the Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRL), which ominously depicted them as “designed to catalyze the most incendiary impulses of political sentiment.” DFRL is an arm of the Atlantic Council, which Facebook teamed up with in order to “prevent our service from being abused during elections” and to monitor “misinformation and foreign interference.” A pro-U.S. think tank with ties to NATO, the Atlantic Council includes certified war criminals like Henry Kissinger and former CIA chief Michael Hayden on its board of directors.
Meanwhile, Facebook has knowingly hosted the “inauthentic” accounts set up by police departments around the country to spy on activists. It came out this month that the Memphis Police Department had set up a fake profile for at least two years to track and entrap black organizations and activists. A 2013 study indicated that more than half of the police departments polled admitted to using such phony profiles (the figure is likely much higher).
After Facebook removed the pages in July, Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, encouraged further censorship in the name of fighting “foreign bad actors” who are “dividing us along political and ideological lines, to the detriment of our cherished democratic system.” This is part of the endless effort to paint working people and minorities who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as dupes of Russian bots working for Trump’s victory. In fact, it was one of the jewels of America’s “cherished democratic system,” the Electoral College, that denied Clinton her crown despite her winning the popular vote.
The “Russiagate” hysteria, including the investigation into Trump’s “collusion” with Russian president Vladimir Putin, is a lot of smoke and mirrors to obscure the fact that the U.S. capitalist system is based on the brutal exploitation of the working class and racist oppression and violence. The notion that working people who can barely make ends meet are angry at the Washington establishment because of some fake social media accounts is both absurd and obscene. Likewise, in a country built on the backs of black slaves, and where the majority of black people remain subjugated at the bottom of society, it doesn’t take “foreign bad actors” for black people to know that they’re in the gun sights of the killer cops.
Supposed electoral meddling by Russia should not matter one bit to the U.S. working class. Deceit, manipulation and hypocrisy are used by the capitalist rulers—represented by both Democrats and Republicans—to maintain their system of wage slavery, black oppression and global imperialist domination. As for “influencing” elections, the U.S. imperialists are unrivaled in such “regime change,” like bloody coups and invasions. As part of opposing its own exploiters, the working class must stand against U.S. imperialist sanctions against Russia.
Behind the lurid tales of a Kremlin puppet in the White House lies a real threat. The Democrats are seizing on legitimate revulsion toward Trump to promote the murderous FBI and CIA as defenders of “democracy” and to push for increased government surveillance and censorship. Earlier this month, many liberals cheered when Facebook, YouTube (owned by Google) and Apple podcasts, among others, banned Alex Jones’s loony far-right, conspiracy-peddling Infowars. These tech conglomerates, which are virtual monopolies, have ordained themselves arbiters of what is sacred or profane for American eyes and ears.
The growing trend to censor media content, including against reactionaries like Jones, is ominous and will always redound against leftists, minorities and any perceived opponent of the U.S. rulers. Facebook, in collaboration with the Israeli government, has just this year shut down at least 500 accounts of Palestinian journalists and publications, including the Safa Palestinian Press Agency, grotesquely equating advocacy of Palestinian rights with anti-Jewish “hate speech.” Meanwhile, Zuckerberg treats accounts denying the Nazi Holocaust as merely “things that different people get wrong.”
Leftists who post material that the Facebook czar disagrees with may find themselves part of a scene from Kafka’s Trial. One article on the International Socialist Organization’s Socialist Worker website (7 August) by Dana Cloud, a professor at Syracuse University, described what happened when she tried to run a Facebook ad for an anti-I.C.E. protest. Initially denied because her account was not “authorized for ads with political content,” she was then required to hand over all her personal information to Facebook, which all but assures that it will be handed over to the government. When she put a Socialist Worker post on her page, she was warned that it might be “divisive” and sponsored by a foreign power. Although Socialist Worker—socialist in name only—criticizes some aspects of censorship, it had given credence to the “genuine concerns raised by the issue of Twitter bots and fake accounts” (12 October 2017), adding its own fuel to the fire.
Democracy under capitalism is a fig leaf for the class dictatorship of the capitalists. “Equality before the law” serves as a cloak for the class division of society, where, as Anatole France quipped, the rich and poor are forbidden alike from sleeping under a bridge or stealing a loaf of bread. To promote their interests, the rulers rely on their kept media, from print and television news to the likes of Facebook. Following the overthrow of bourgeois rule by the working class in the 1917 October Revolution, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained the policy of the newly founded workers state toward the press:
“For the bourgeoisie, freedom of the press meant freedom for the rich to publish and for the capitalists to control the newspapers, a practice which in all countries, including even the freest, produced a corrupt press.
“For the workers’ and peasants’ government, freedom of the press means liberation of the press from capitalist oppression, and public ownership of paper mills and printing presses.”
— “Draft Resolution on Freedom of the Press,” 4 November 1917
Above all, the bourgeoisie has the armed force of the capitalist state—its cops, prisons and military—to enforce its rule. The precondition for a genuinely free society, including the eradication of exploitation, racial oppression and imperialist war, is the expropriation of the means of production from the wealthy few capitalists through working-class revolution.
In essence, I will use my academic background to show why images are important in a struggle for existence and power, and how those images are used by a certain group to weaken the White race. Over a decade ago, I began on this site an examination of the changing representations of who we Americans are. As part of that, I introduced academic texts that — to be honest — accurately showed “the deep-rooted stereotypes which have fueled anti-black prejudice” and buttressed White dominance, which is not really surprising given that Whites comprised roughly 90% of America’s population (and all of the elite) for the entirety of European settlement in the lands that were to become The United States. Breathlessly, we read in grad school books such as Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture and White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture that dutifully convicted the American majority of racism. In short, all such accounts concluded: “White Man Bad.”
Tony Cliff and Max Shachtman: Pro-Imperialist Accomplices of Counterrevolution
The following article was published in Spartacist English edition No. 55, Autumn 1999.
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was a shaping event of the 20th century. The end of the First World War saw a wave of proletarian revolutionary struggle across the globe, swelled by widespread revulsion at the historically unprecedented butchery of the interimperialist slaughter. Revolutionary working-class upsurges struck Russia, Finland, Italy, Hungary, Germany; elsewhere armies mutinied and massive, militant strikes disrupted industry on a scale never before seen. Yet the old tsarist empire was the only domain in which the working class seized and successfully maintained state power, going on to expropriate the capitalist class and begin the construction of a collectivized, planned economy. The leadership of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party proved the decisive element in that victory. The vanguard layer organized by the Bolsheviks had achieved a thoroughgoing political split between themselves and the varieties of liquidationism, social-chauvinism, revisionism and reformism current in the workers movement of the tsarist empire. This enabled Lenin’s revolutionary Marxist workers party, when the opportunity presented itself, to clear away the obstacles and lead the working class in smashing the bourgeois state and creating a state based on workers councils, or soviets.
When the Second International disintegrated as the war began, with most of its individual parties supporting their own imperialist governments and helping to lead the proletariat into the slaughterhouse, Lenin recognized that it was dead as a revolutionary force. The Bolsheviks attempted to regroup the revolutionary internationalists in the struggle for a Third International, a Communist International, which was finally founded in Moscow in 1919. But in Germany and Italy the vanguard of the class broke too late with the reformists and social-pacifists; in Hungary and Finland the aspiring Communists were united with the Social Democrats as the proletarian uprisings unfolded. Promising revolutionary situations foundered due to the immaturity of the revolutionary leadership. The Social Democrats, meanwhile, proved themselves an indispensable aid to the imperialists in shackling the working class to the capitalist order, providing the “democratic” façade under which outright counterrevolutionary nationalist terror mobilized and did its bloody dirty work.
Writing after history’s first great revolutionary wave in 1848, Karl Marx insisted that a revolution in any state in Europe could not last long without engulfing England:
“Any upheaval in economic relations in any country of the European continent, in the whole European continent without England, is a storm in a teacup. Industrial and commercial relations within each nation are governed by its intercourse with other nations, and depend on its relations with the world market. But the world market is dominated by England and England is dominated by the bourgeoisie.”
— “The Revolutionary Movement,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 1 January 1849, reprinted in The Revolution of 1848-49 (1972)
Without being able to build upon the world division of labor created by capitalism it would be impossible to create the material abundance necessary for the construction of a socialist society. “Want,” as Marx had earlier put it, would “merely be made general, and destitution, the struggle for necessities, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced” (The German Ideology [written 1845-46]). Moreover, as long as economically powerful capitalist nations continued to exist, reaction would hold a bastion from which to mobilize for a counterattack. Written almost 80 years before Stalin promulgated the dogma of “building socialism in one country,” Marx’s words are a savage indictment of this absurdity.
The vicissitudes of the Russian Revolution after the Bolsheviks came to power reveal in abundant, sadistic detail the variety of weapons which world imperialism can bring to bear on an isolated revolutionary workers state. From the invasion by troops of 14 different capitalist nations, to an embargo on travel, trade and investment, to the arming of the indigenous forces of counterrevolution, the imperialist powers did their utmost to strangle isolated and economically devastated Soviet Russia. The world bourgeoisies refused to coexist with a state that had ripped a huge area of investment and exploitation out of the world market. That the workers state held out as a bastion of world revolution for five years in isolation was a major historical accomplishment; that in degenerated form the state issuing from October was maintained for almost 70 years is testimony to the incredible economic power of a planned and collectivized economy, despite the mismanagement of the Stalinist bureaucratic caste which seized power from the working class in early 1924. The continued historical reverberation of the Bolshevik Revolution was illustrated by the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of deformed workers states in the Stalinist image in East Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.
A decisive factor in the degeneration of the Russian Revolution was the outcome of the revolutionary economic and political crisis which rocked Germany, WWI’s defeated power, in 1923 when French troops invaded the Ruhr industrial region seeking payment of war reparations. At the end of 1918 in the midst of an unfolding revolution, the nucleus of the German Communist Party (KPD)—the Spartacist group led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht—had split from Karl Kautsky’s centrist USPD. Kautsky’s party used pseudo-Marxist rhetoric to mask its social-pacifism and opportunist practice, providing an essential cover for the outright reformist Social Democrats (SPD). The revolution of 1918-1919 was shipwrecked by the KPD’s failure to separate itself from Kautsky earlier, but subsequent events were to prove that even afterward the party’s programmatic and ideological break with Kautsky’s centrism was far from complete. The problem was only exacerbated by the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht in early 1919. It was not the leaders of the fledgling German Communist Party who answered Kautsky’s savage attacks against the Russian Revolution, but Lenin in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) and Trotsky in Between Red and White (1922). These works were written while their authors ran the Soviet state, fought the Civil War against the Whites, and inspired and led the Third International. The failure of the German party to even attempt a proletarian insurrection in the revolutionary year 1923 spread demoralization in the Soviet working class and prepared the way for Stalin’s victory early the next year. As Trotsky so powerfully explicated in his Lessons of October (1924), the incapacity of the KPD in 1923 proved in the negative that the problem of revolutionary leadership is the decisive question of the imperialist epoch.
In its compulsion to destroy the world’s first workers state, world imperialism enjoyed the assistance of its social-democratic lackeys and of many others to their left. From Karl Kautsky, to anarchists hostile to the dictatorship of the proletariat, to Max Shachtman, who split from the American Trotskyist movement in 1939-40, to the now-defunct Maoist movement, all kinds of forces have put forward all kinds of explanations over the years purporting to show that the USSR was some kind of “capitalist” or “new class” society. The rise of the brutal, conservative Stalinist bureaucracy, sowing revulsion and confusion in the ranks of class-conscious workers everywhere, was a great gift to anti-socialist ideologues and their “left” tails who sought justification for making common cause with capitalist imperialism in the name of “democracy.”
Today the best-known variant of such currents is the international tendency headed by Tony Cliff and the British Socialist Workers Party, whose affiliates include the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S. The Cliffites (and their numerous offshoots, such as Workers Power) stand in the direct tradition of Max Shachtman’s fundamental break from Trotskyism over the program of unconditional military defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state against external imperialist attack or internal attempts at capitalist restoration. This illustrates unambiguously that state capitalist “theory” is a bridge to reconcile supposed “socialists” with their own ruling class.
The “new class” theories of these renegades from Trotskyism like Shachtman and Cliff were an attempt to justify their betrayal of the class interests of the proletariat and their own reconciliation with capitalism by denying the working-class nature of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the post-WWII East European deformed workers states. In reality these “theories” were nothing but attempts—dressed up in pseudo-Marxist terminology—to conceal their real program of capitulation to anti-communist bourgeois public opinion and the renunciation of a proletarian revolutionary perspective.
Thus, Shachtman’s abandonment of unconditional defense of the USSR was precipitated by his capitulation to popular-frontist petty-bourgeois public opinion following the Soviet-German pact in 1939. In 1950, Tony Cliff broke from the Trotskyist Fourth International on the same question of defensism, this time precipitated by the anti-communist Cold War hysteria that accompanied the outbreak of the Korean War. Cliff reneged on the Trotskyist position of unconditional military defense of the Chinese and North Korean deformed workers states against imperialist attack, which took the form of a multi-nation “police action” under the auspices of the United Nations. This was a cowardly capitulation to the British bourgeoisie and its social-democratic lackeys: it was a Labour government that dispatched British troops to Korea.
While Cliff’s “theory” of state capitalism differs internally from the “bureaucratic collectivist” theory of Max Shachtman and originated a decade later, what they have in common is their service as vehicles for dumping the Trotskyist program of unconditional defense of the degenerated or deformed workers states from imperialist attack. Each took place on different national political terrains. Shachtman, operating in the U.S. during Roosevelt’s “New Deal” on the eve of World War II, reflected the Orwellian view of the “horrors of totalitarianism” represented by Hitler and Stalin, which gripped the petty-bourgeois milieus to which he was responsive; Cliff was accommodating to the rotten British Labour Party—which Lenin described as a “bourgeois workers party”—at the outbreak of the Korean War. Thus each in its own time represented an accommodation to its own bourgeoisie’s anti-Sovietism.
Little has been heard from supporters of the “theory” of “bureaucratic collectivism” since the Shachtmanites themselves became Cold Warriors in the extreme right wing of American social democracy. But a new book published in Britain by Sean Matgamna is attempting to revive “bureaucratic collectivism,” publishing texts of Shachtman and the Shachtmanites in a collection entitled The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume I (1999). Even as selected by a newfound admirer of Shachtman with the advantage of hindsight, Matgamna’s volume contains ample material demonstrating the profound emptiness of his mentor’s anti-Marxist analysis of the Stalinized USSR, as we shall see.
“Socialism in One Country”
Though the Bolsheviks repulsed the imperialist invasions and won the Civil War, the young Soviet Republic was shackled with a technically and socially backward agricultural base and it lacked the resources necessary to quickly rebuild the infrastructure and industries devastated by the imperialist and Civil wars. The proletariat had almost ceased to exist, its most conscious elements killed in the Civil War or co-opted into the state and party apparatus. Under these conditions the world’s first workers state underwent a political counterrevolution with the virtual exclusion of the Left Opposition at the 13th Party Conference in January 1924. In the degenerated workers state that emerged, the bureaucratic apparatus headed by Stalin did not destroy the socialized property relations but usurped political power from the proletariat. In his retrospective analysis of the bureaucracy, Trotsky used an analogy with the ouster of the radical Jacobins on the 9th of Thermidor during the French Revolution:
“Socially the proletariat is more homogeneous than the bourgeoisie, but it contains within itself an entire series of strata that become manifest with exceptional clarity following the conquest of power, during the period when the bureaucracy and a workers’ aristocracy connected with it begin to take form. The smashing of the Left Opposition implied in the most direct and immediate sense the transfer of power from the hands of the revolutionary vanguard into the hands of the more conservative elements among the bureaucracy and the upper crust of the working class. The year 1924—that was the beginning the of the Soviet Thermidor.”
— “The Workers State, Thermidor and Bonapartism” (1935)
After Lenin’s death, also in January 1924, the Stalin faction flooded the Bolshevik Party with nascent bureaucratic elements in the “Lenin levy” and in December 1924 put forward the false dogma of “socialism in one country.” “Socialism in one country” initially represented a dead-end road of impossible economic autarky and isolationism. Over the course of the next period, the Communist International’s policies zigzagged from a bureaucratic centrism which dictated the suicidal subordination of the Chinese Communist Party to the “national bourgeoisie” during the second Chinese Revolution of 1925-27, to the “Third Period” sectarianism which allowed Hitler to come to power in Germany in 1933 without a fight, to the overt reformist class collaborationism of the People’s Front, which strangled the 1936-37 Spanish Revolution. The Stalin faction first eliminated its rivals within the party, then the Stalin clique purged those capable of challenging it within the faction. As the bureaucratic caste represented by the Stalin clique attained a measure of historical consciousness, “socialism in one country” became the ideological justification for transforming the foreign Communist parties into bargaining chips in an illusory search for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism.
Stalin rigged the elections to the 13th Party Conference and, in subsequent years, unleashed wave upon wave of repression and purges (see “The Stalinist Thermidor, the Left Opposition and the Red Army,” page 2). The ferocity of Stalin’s repression against the Left Opposition, against former factional allies like Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, against the kulaks, artists and intellectuals stemmed from Stalin’s recognition that his regime was constantly in peril. To continue to claim the heritage of the Bolsheviks while politically expropriating the proletariat and overturning the Bolsheviks’ internationalist proletarian program, Stalin required the “Big Lie” backed up by police-state terror.
The capitalist system in its imperialist decay continued to present new revolutionary opportunities. The cyclical economic crises inherent in capitalism, notably the Great Depression of the 1930s which impelled radicalization among the proletariat, the bourgeoisies’ contradictions leading to fascist regimes in the poorer states and a new interimperialist war of mass destruction to redivide the world—these should have been again the mothers of revolution.
The West European Stalinists emerged from World War II at the head of the mass organizations of militant workers of Italy, France and elsewhere. But thanks especially to the Stalinists’ class collaboration, the American imperialists were able to restabilize capitalism in West Europe and Japan. A quarter-century later, the military defeat of the American imperialists at the hands of the Vietnamese Stalinists, which led to the establishment of a unified Vietnamese deformed workers state, severely weakened the imperialists. The late 1960s-early 1970s saw a series of prerevolutionary and revolutionary situations in Europe—France 1968, Italy 1969, Portugal 1975. These represented the best opportunities for proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries since the immediate post-WWII period. It was the pro-Moscow Communist parties which again managed to preserve the shaken bourgeois order in this region. Here the counterrevolutionary role of the Western Stalinist parties contributed immeasurably to the subsequent destruction of the Soviet Union.
The final undoing of the gains of October by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92 was the ultimate confirmation of the impossibility of “socialism in one country.” This catastrophe for the world proletariat has profoundly reshaped the world we live in. Mass impoverishment and ethnic strife have devastated the people of the former Soviet Union and East Europe. The nominally independent nations of the “Third World” can no longer maneuver between the “two superpowers” as they face the unrestrained economic exactions and brute military force of the imperialists. With interimperialist rivalries no longer restrained by the bourgeois rulers’ shared commitment to anti-Sovietism, the workers in the advanced capitalist countries face intensified attacks aimed at achieving greater competitiveness by increasing the rate of exploitation of labor. Proletarian consciousness has been thrown back; workers’ identification of their class interests with the ideals of socialism is at a nadir, as the bourgeoisie points to the collapse of Stalinism as “proof” that “communism is dead.”
Capitalist Counterrevolution: A “Step Sideways”?
Today Cliff’s U.S. followers unabashedly declare: “The revolutions in Eastern Europe were a step sideways—from one form of capitalism to another” (Socialist Worker, 23 April 1999). Don’t try this line on any Russian worker today. The unprecedented economic and social implosion now occurring in the territory of the ex-USSR is the real measure of just how historically progressive the planned, collectivized economy really was. In the chaotic conditions of post-Soviet Russia, the laws of capitalism have resulted in total economic collapse: production has fallen at least 50 percent since 1991, capital investment by 90 percent. Today a third of the urban labor force in Russia is effectively unemployed; 75 percent of the population lives below or barely above subsistence level and 15 million are actually starving. Life expectancy has fallen dramatically and now stands at a mere 57 years for men, below what it was a century ago, while the overall population actually declined by three and a half million from 1992 to 1997.
Statistics alone cannot convey the scale and intensity of immiseration. The infrastructures of production, technology, science, transportation, heating and sewage have disintegrated. Malnutrition has become the norm among schoolchildren. Some two million children have been abandoned by families who can no longer support them. The delivery of basic services like electricity and water has become sporadic in wide areas of the country. With the disintegration of the former state-run system of universal health care, diseases like tuberculosis are rampant. As Trotsky predicted, capitalist restoration has reduced the USSR to a pauperized wasteland prey to all the ravages of imperialist depredation.
While clinging to their threadbare theories, the Cliffites and their ilk are oddly modest about their real contribution. The restoration of capitalism in the USSR and East Europe was the implementation of their program. Like Shachtman, who supported Washington’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Cliff & Co. did their utmost to seek to bring victory to U.S. imperialism in the Cold War, lusting for the bloodying of Soviet forces in Afghanistan, championing the “trade union” credentials of Solidarnosc—instrument of the Vatican, Wall Street and Western social democracy for capitalist counterrevolution in Poland—and vicariously dancing with the black marketeers, monarchists and yuppies on Yeltsin’s barricades in 1991. Socialist Worker (31 August 1991) trumpeted Yeltsin’s victory: “Communism has collapsed…. It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing.” Well, now the Cliffites have what they wanted.
The absurdity of “state capitalist” and “bureaucratic collectivist” theories is manifest in light of the simple surrender of the Soviet degenerated workers state and the East European deformed workers states by the disintegrating Stalinist bureaucracy. No propertied ruling class in history has ever voluntarily given up its power. Nonetheless Cliff, whose reworking of Kautsky’s “state capitalism” is his main claim to fame as a “Marxist,” is now claiming that the counterrevolution in the ex-USSR confirmed his analysis. In an article, “The Test of Time,” in Socialist Review (July-August 1998), Cliff claims in passing that the “state capitalist” nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy was shown by the emergence today of some of the former bureaucrats as capitalists. In fact, Trotsky pointed out in his seminal works, such as the 1936 study The Revolution Betrayed, that the ruling caste had every bourgeois appetite and aspiration, but was constrained from implementing them by the socialized property forms of the degenerated workers state.
Cliff further asserts that “If Russia was a socialist country or the Stalinist regime was a workers’ state, even though a degenerated or deformed one, the collapse of Stalinism would have meant that a counterrevolution had taken place. In such circumstances, workers would have defended a workers’ state in the same way that workers always defend their unions, however right wing and bureaucratic they may be, against those who are trying to eliminate the union altogether.” The ICL has extensively analyzed the collapse of Stalinist bonapartism in Russia in our 1993 pamphlet How the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled, as well as in the documents by Joseph Seymour and Albert St. John published in Spartacist No. 45-46 (Winter 1990-91). In a capitalist state changes of political regime have little effect on the anarchistic bourgeois economy, which tends to function automatically. In contrast the proletarian revolution transfers the productive forces directly to the state it has created. A planned socialist economy is built consciously and its continued existence is inseparable from the political character of the state power that defends it. The fact that the Soviet proletariat did not fight the counterrevolution is testimony to the systematic destruction of proletarian consciousness by the bureaucracy. And as Trotsky noted in The Third International After Lenin (1928): “If an army capitulates to the enemy in a critical situation without a battle, then this capitulation completely takes the place of a ‘decisive battle,’ in politics as in war.”
The Cliffites, little different from the Shachtmanites, ultimately view disembodied “power,” rather than economics, as decisive. For them, the strength and presumed permanence of Stalinist rule flowed from the undeniable ruthlessness of its repression. Motivated by a profound pessimism regarding the revolutionary capacity of the working class, these renegades from Trotskyism mouth the same propaganda as the open bourgeois apologists for capitalism, who claimed that Stalin’s “totalitarianism” guaranteed the Russian workers would never again wage any struggle for their own interests, unlike the workers in the “democratic” West.
To elevate “democracy” to the ultimate progressive historical goal irrespective of its class content is the oldest trick in the book for defenders of the bourgeois order. In The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Lenin heaped scorn on the Kautskyite centrists—who were to return to the Social Democratic party of Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann in 1922—for “cringing before the bourgeoisie, adapting themselves to the bourgeois parliamentary system, keeping silent about the bourgeois character of modern democracy.” For a Marxist, Lenin noted, “the form of democracy, is one thing, and the class content of the given institution is another.”
The Class Nature of the Soviet State
Trotsky’s understanding of the bureaucracy as a corrosive ruling caste, not a possessing class but an excrescence upon the state and institutions issuing from October, defined the manifest contradictions which ultimately doomed Stalinism. As a kind of global middleman balancing between a state based on collectivized property forms and the world imperialist order, its rule was brittle and fundamentally unstable. In “The Class Nature of the Soviet State” (1933), Trotsky asserted:
“The class has an exceptionally important and, moreover, a scientifically restricted meaning to a Marxist. A class is defined not by its participation in the distribution of the national income alone, but by its independent role in the general structure of the economy and by its independent roots in the economic foundation of society. Each class (the feudal nobility, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the capitalist bourgeoisie and the proletariat) works out its own special forms of property. The bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property roots. Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule….
“Nevertheless, the privileges of the bureaucracy by themselves do not change the bases of the Soviet society, because the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations peculiar to it as a ‘class,’ but from those property relations that have been created by the October Revolution and that are fundamentally adequate for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
“To put it plainly, insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people (and this is done in various ways by every bureaucracy), we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale.”
As against Trotsky’s Marxist view, all manner of anti-revolutionary forces imbued the Stalinist ruling elite with some substantial solidity. Notable among these were, of course, the Stalinist ideologues themselves, who claimed to be securely “building socialism” within their own borders (until they finally discovered the alleged inevitability, indeed the superiority of capitalism). If the final undoing of the October Revolution confirms Trotsky’s analysis and program only in the negative, it at least exposes as threadbare all notions of Stalinism as a stable system.
Shachtman ridiculed Trotsky’s warnings that in the absence of proletarian political revolution the Stalinists were entirely capable of liquidating the workers state:
“Trotsky assigned to Stalinism, to the Stalinist bureaucracy, the rôle of undermining the economic foundations of the workers’ state. By gradually de-nationalizing the means of production and exchange, loosening the monopoly of foreign trade, Stalinism would pave the way for the restoration of private property and capitalism…. Nothing of the sort occurred.”
— Max Shachtman, “The Counter-revolutionary Revolution,” New International, July 1943, reprinted in Matgamna, ed., The Fate of the RussianRevolution
But that is exactly what did occur in the USSR and East Europe—a historic defeat which the authentic Trotskyists fought to prevent.
The “Russian Question” and the Trotskyist Program
Trotsky fought to unconditionally defend the workers state issuing from the October Revolution against and despite the Stalinist caste which usurped political power from the Soviet working class in 1923-24. The bureaucracy retained power only through a combination of terror and lies, atomizing and demoralizing the Soviet proletariat, subverting the planned and collectivized economy, blocking in the name of “socialism in one country” the possibilities for extending the gains of October through proletarian revolutions internationally. As Trotsky explained:
“Two opposite tendencies are growing up out of the depth of the Soviet regime. To the extent that, in contrast to a decaying capitalism, it develops the productive forces, it is preparing the economic basis of socialism. To the extent that, for the benefit of an upper stratum, it carries to more and more extreme expression bourgeois norms of distribution, it is preparing a capitalist restoration. This contrast between forms of property and norms of distribution cannot grow indefinitely. Either the bourgeois norm must in one form or another spread to the means of production, or the norms of distribution must be brought into correspondence with the socialist property system.”
— The Revolution Betrayed (1936)
Trotsky understood the situation very clearly: either a political revolution by the Soviet proletariat would overthrow the bureaucratic caste that had usurped political power or the bureaucracy would eventually prepare the way for capitalist restoration as it sought to guarantee its privileges by converting itself into a new possessing class. But meanwhile it was the urgent task of every class-conscious worker in the world to unconditionally defend the workers state and the Soviet workers from the external military attacks of imperialism or internal attempts at capitalist restoration. But there were those who capitulated to the pressures of bourgeois anti-Sovietism and abandoned their revolutionary duty to unconditionally defend the first workers state, in spite of its bureaucratic degeneration, claiming that to do so would be an endorsement of Stalinism, falsely equating the parasitic bureaucracy with the Soviet workers state. In 1934, Trotsky insisted:
“We have been informed by various sources that there is a tendency among our friends in Paris to deny the proletarian nature of the USSR, to demand that there be complete democracy in the USSR, including the legalization of the Mensheviks, etc….
“The Mensheviks are the representatives of bourgeois restoration and we are for the defense of the workers’ state by every means possible. Anyone who had proposed that we not support the British miners’ strike of 1926 or the recent large-scale strikes in the United States with all available means on the ground that the leaders of the strikes were for the most part scoundrels, would have been a traitor to the British and American workers. Exactly the same thing applies to the USSR!”
— Trotsky, “No Compromise on the Russian Question,” 11 November 1934
And Trotsky warned: “Every political tendency that waves its hand hopelessly at the Soviet Union, under the pretext of its ‘nonproletarian’ character, runs the risk of becoming the passive instrument of imperialism” (“The Class Nature of the Soviet State,” October 1933). Ostensible “socialists” of the Shachtman/Cliff/Matgamna stripe go far beyond being mere passive instruments.
In sharp distinction to the gibberish of Shachtman/Cliff, Trotsky advanced a precise Marxist analysis of the USSR under the rule of Stalin. He attacked the notion that “from the present Soviet regime only a transition to socialism is possible. In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible.” He noted:
“The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena.”
— The Revolution Betrayed
The Stalinist bureaucracy was an unstable caste resting parasitically on the socialized foundations of the workers state, which it was at times compelled to defend. This contradictory character was evident even in the last years of the Brezhnev regime, with the Soviet military intervention into Afghanistan against a CIA-backed insurgency by woman-hating Islamic reactionaries. It was reflected as well over the question of Soviet support to the 1984-85 British miners strike, which was backed by old-time Stalinists like foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and opposed by younger elements around Gorbachev, at the time the number-two figure in the Kremlin regime. Conversely, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, appeasing imperialism at the very borders of the USSR, was a tip-off that the Stalinists would soon renounce any intention of defending the Soviet Union itself against imperialism.
Irrespective of any subjective ideological commitment to socialized property on the part of the bureaucracy, the laws of economic motion in a degenerated or a deformed workers state differ from those operating under capitalism. An industrial manager in the USSR obeyed fundamentally different economic imperatives than a Russian capitalist today, even if they happen to be the same individual. The goal of a capitalist is to maximize profits, i.e., the difference between costs of production and market price. The main goal of a Soviet factory director, on which his future career depended, was maximizing the planned output of goods, although often to the detriment of quality and variety. The system thus generated full employment. In fact, Soviet enterprises were typically overmanned. And despite bureaucratic mismanagement and corruption, the planned, collectivized economy provided for universal medical care, housing, education, childcare and vacations, which were possible only because capitalism had been expropriated.
It is indicative that, unlike a ruling class, the Stalinist bureaucracy could not elaborate a new ideology justifying its privileges. Even at the grotesque and murderous heights of the “cult of personality,” Stalin, having murdered all of Lenin’s comrades, could never cease to claim to be Lenin’s successor. In contrast, the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union was accompanied by an open embrace of capitalist ideology: communism was an experiment that failed, the magic of the market means prosperity, Stalin was worse than Hitler, etc.
Noting that the world’s most advanced capitalist economies remained more productive than the Soviet economy, Trotsky observed that the power of cheap commodities would ultimately prove more dangerous to the USSR than open military hostilities. While strikingly prophetic, this observation was merely based on the basic Marxist understanding that socialism must be built as a world system. As long as Wall Street financiers, German industrialists and Japanese zaibatsu own most of the productive wealth on this planet, the communist vision of a classless and stateless society cannot be realized anywhere. The question, for Trotsky, was: will the workers overthrow the bureaucracy, or will the bureaucracy devour the workers state? There was nothing abstract about this question; Trotsky devoted his life, until his murder by Stalin, to seeking to rally the proletariat in the USSR and internationally to the defense of the gains of October, not least through the fight for new October Revolutions.
The Genesis and Evolution of Shachtman’s “Bureaucratic Collectivism”
The genesis of Shachtman’s “new class” theory of the USSR was in the abandonment by part of the American Trotskyist party of the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union when it counted. The precipitant was the 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact, which had a dramatic effect on the milieus of petty-bourgeois “progressives,” who in the previous period of the popular front honeymoon with Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had seen themselves as in some sense “friends” of the Soviet Union, while in reality still maintaining their fundamental loyalty to American “democracy.” Max Shachtman, James Burnham and Martin Abern, all members of the leading committee of the American Trotskyist party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), came together in 1939-40 to challenge the longstanding Trotskyist program of Soviet defensism. Because of the conditions created by the war in Europe, the struggle in the American section became a surrogate for a fight in the Fourth International as a whole.
Leon Trotsky, in the last major factional battle of his life, led the counterattack against the Shachtmanites. In a series of devastating polemics, subsequently published by the SWP as In Defense of Marxism (1942), Trotsky insisted that Stalin’s diplomatic and military alliance with Hitler changed nothing of the class character of the Soviet degenerated workers state which he had analyzed in The Revolution Betrayed. Trotsky exposed how the U.S. minority in the SWP had, in abandoning Soviet defensism, abandoned the theoretical underpinnings of revolutionary Marxism itself. He ridiculed the American minority’s argument that to militarily defend the USSR in Finland and Poland constituted political support to the Stalinist bureaucracy.
Soviet defensism had been a continual source of dispute within the Trotskyist movement. In the 1939-40 fight, Trotsky restated arguments he had made in 1929 against those Left Oppositionists who refused to defend the USSR against China in the dispute over the Chinese Eastern Railroad; against Hugo Urbahns, who generalized from this position to declare the Soviet Union “state capitalist”; against Yvan Craipeau in France, who insisted in 1937 that the Soviet bureaucracy was a new ruling class; against James Burnham and Joe Carter, who started out on their revisionist path in 1937 by arguing that the USSR could no longer be considered a workers state, though (until the Stalin-Hitler pact) they claimed to be defensist of the collectivized property and planned economy.
It was the Shachtmanites’ bowing to the pressure of bourgeois public opinion which was the real basis for their flight from the Fourth International’s program. James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, in his 1939-40 writings, later published in the book The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, the companion volume to Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism, exposed the link between the Shachtmanites’ politics and their base among vacillating petty-bourgeois layers of the party who had not broken from their historic milieus. In fact, the anti-Cannon bloc of 1939-40 had no coherent analysis of the nature of the Soviet state. James Burnham had come to view the Soviet Union as a new form of class society; already openly sneering at dialectical materialism, he was within months to abandon his erstwhile factional allies and the Marxist movement altogether. Abern and his clique claimed to view the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers state, but they had a long history of always putting petty organizational grievances against the Cannon “regime” above revolutionary program or principle. Shachtman claimed not to have a position on the Soviet state, arguing that in any case this was immaterial to the “concrete” question at hand. In one of his last documents as an SWP member, he claimed that if the USSR was ever really threatened with imperialist invasion, he would defend the Soviet Union.
The opposition bloc fell apart less than a month after Shachtman et al. exited the SWP, to found the Workers Party (WP). Burnham denounced Marxism and decamped to his bourgeois academic haunts, going on to write The Managerial Revolution (1941), which identified Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia as the harbingers of a new, bureaucratic class society. Shachtman and his followers (with Abern continuing his clique maneuvering until his death in 1947) also went on to generalize their initial flinch, characterizing the USSR as a new form of class society, “bureaucratic collectivism.”
The Shachtman minority had counted on the support of some 40 percent of the party and the majority of the SWP’s youth organization, i.e., some 800 members. By the fall of 1940, the WP claimed only 323 members. This produced a “dead cat bounce” effect: the center of gravity of the early Workers Party moved to the left of the original petty-bourgeois opposition, as the more right-wing elements—with Burnham in the lead—simply took the opportunity of the split from the SWP to exit from the field of politics altogether. During WWII, the WP was a left-centrist formation, groping toward a full-blown theory to justify their flight from Soviet defensism.
When Hitler turned on Stalin (as Trotsky had predicted) and invaded the USSR in June 1941, there was a fight in the WP over whether to defend the Soviet Union; a handful of WP youth in Los Angeles went back to the SWP when the WP failed to make good on Shachtman’s earlier declaration that he would defend the USSR in case of invasion. The WP’s position of class neutrality in the war between Germany and the USSR represented another giant step toward the WP’s consolidation of its revisionist course.
But the USSR-U.S. alliance after June 1941 put into abeyance domestic anti-Sovietism and allowed for a relatively leftist presentation of the “Third Camp.” With the opening of the war industries the previously chronically unemployed petty-bourgeois WP youth were able to get industrial jobs and were a real factor in the trade unions, competing with the SWP as a class-struggle opposition to the social-patriots in the Rooseveltian trade-union bureaucracy and the Stalinist Communist Party. The WP considered itself a section of the Fourth International; at the end of the war there were abortive “unity” negotiations between the WP and SWP.
In 1948, Shachtman definitively turned his back on the Fourth International, reflecting his rapid rightward motion in the face of renewed bourgeois anti-Sovietism with the onset of the Cold War. In 1949, the Workers Party, no longer aspiring to the leadership of the American working class, changed its name to the Independent Socialist League (ISL); most of the WP youth had long since left the unions for graduate school and petty-bourgeois careers. The press run of the Shachtmanite paper Labor Action, which had been 20,000-25,000 in the midst of WWII, plummeted to just over 3,000 by 1953. The ISL were vicarious social democrats, advancing the possibility of a peaceful road to socialism in Attlee’s post-war Britain and trying to pressure Autoworkers bureaucrat Walter Reuther to form a labor party. But the AFL and CIO bureaucracies were in the vanguard of the anti-Communist crusade. By the time of their liquidation into the dregs of American social democracy in 1958, the Shachtmanites were declaring, “We do not subscribe to any creed known as Leninism or defined as such. We do not subscribe to any creed known as Trotskyism or defined as such” (New International, Spring-Summer 1958). They soon disintegrated, with Shachtman and his closest co-thinkers ending up alongside George Meany in the most anti-Communist right wing of the Democrats, while Michael Harrington gravitated to the more liberal wing of the Democrats and Hal Draper mucked around in the Berkeley New Left, helping to found the Independent Socialists, precursor to the American ISO.
A Program Wrapped in a “Theory”
While the Cliffite version of “state capitalism” is today better known on the left than the earlier “bureaucratic collectivism,” the difference between the two theories is more a matter of context than of fundamental content. Cliffism is the British analog to American Shachtmanism, based on an identical political impulse and program but expressed on a different national terrain.
The British Trotskyist movement was already deeply fragmented and buried in the ruling Labour Party when Cliff bowed to the pressures of imperialism’s Cold War offensive during the Korean War. Hence the fight against Cliff’s revisionism was not the definitive polarization between petty-bourgeois and proletarian tendencies that the 1940 fight had been for American Trotskyism. But Cliff’s break with revolutionary Marxism was if anything more programmatically decisive. Cliff had already declared his intention to put a minus sign over the whole Soviet experience, working out the “state capitalist” theoretical justification for his abandonment of the defense of the world’s first workers state. Operating in Britain, with his capitulation to the bourgeois social order mediated through “little England” social democracy, Cliff is able to posture rather more to the left than the later Shachtman.
On the level of “theory,” Cliff rejected the idea that the Soviet bureaucracy was a new “bureaucratic collectivist” ruling class and resuscitated the Kautskyan notion that the USSR was merely a form of capitalism. Cliff’s putative credentials as a theoretician are based on his 1955 book, Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis. In this work he attempts a purportedly “Marxist” economic analysis to prove the “state capitalist” nature of the Soviet bureaucracy, simply by grossly and dishonestly redefining terms which have a precise meaning for Marxists: competition, accumulation, commodity, value, etc. According to Cliff, a “collective” capitalist class (itself an absurdity by any Marxist measure) is driven to accumulate “profit” in order to militarily “compete” with the capitalist West, generating a market economy driven by the law of value. Cliff had to do extreme violence to Soviet reality to make it fit this “theory.” (See “The Anti-Marxist Theory of ‘State Capitalism’—A Trotskyist Critique,” Young Spartacus Nos. 51-53, February, March and April 1977. For a discussion of the fallacy of “state capitalist” theory through an examination of classical Marxist economics, see especially Ken Tarbuck, “The Theory of State Capitalism—The Clock Without a Spring,” published in the British Marxist Studies Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1969-70, reprinted in July 1973 as No. 5 in the Marxist Studies series of the SL/U.S.)
The arguments of Cliff, and Shachtman before him, dovetailed with and sometimes led the way for overt Cold Warriors, as well as the social democrats who have made careers out of anti-Communist crusading throughout the world. Although, as we have seen, it took a while for the full anti-Soviet implications of Shachtman’s split from Trotskyism to be played out, when he died in 1972 Shachtman had spent his last decade as an unalloyed social-patriot, even backing U.S. imperialism’s attempt to drown the Vietnamese social revolution in blood. Perhaps his most concrete service to imperialism was as braintruster for the bureaucracy of the American teachers union, an epitome of “AFL-CIA” trade unionism, which worked as an arm of the U.S. State Department, backing and bankrolling anti-Communist gangsters who smashed combative leftist labor unions in West Europe after World War II and providing a “working-class” cover for the fascistic “captive nations” crowd working for counterrevolution in the “Soviet bloc.”
In essence, “bureaucratic collectivism” is based on a formal syllogism: The means of production belong to the state, the state “belongs” to (i.e., is controlled by) the bureaucracy; therefore the bureaucracy “owns” the property and constitutes a ruling class. But property has to be personally owned to be of continuing benefit to individuals—this is the bottom line for understanding exploitation. “Bureaucratic collectivism” dispenses with the very basis of Marxism, the understanding that there are two main classes in capitalist society, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, defined by relationship to the means of production. Shachtman’s theory posits the existence of a new “bureaucratic” ruling class, not defined by private ownership of the means of production. According to Shachtman, “bureaucratic collectivism” had the possibility to become the dominant mode of production worldwide, vying with both capitalism and socialism.
Shachtman’s theory was a product of his times. Much in the air in the U.S. of the 1930s was the idea that big corporations were no longer controlled by their owners, but by managers. An influential exposition of this view was The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), by A.A. Berle and G.C. Means. (Of course, writing off the importance of ownership in capitalist society was greatly facilitated by the Great Depression, when no dividends were being produced anyway.) This impressionistic view of a new managerial elite animated The Managerial Revolution, the opus of Shachtman’s erstwhile theoretician, James Burnham.
Bureaucratic collectivism posits that it is the lust for disembodied power, and not the private accumulation of wealth, that is the decisive motor force in human history. The logic of this view is also a profound historical pessimism, no longer seeing any possibility for the revolutionary proletariat to gain the consciousness needed to lead humanity out of its historic impasse. To paraphrase George Orwell in his 1946 essay, “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution,” in Burnham’s view the fate of the majority of the human race could be summarized as “a boot in the face, forever.” For many of those who left the Trotskyist movement in this period, the historical pessimism toward the prospects for proletarian revolution led to reconciliation with “democratic” imperialism. Trotsky’s former collaborator Victor Serge and the founding Chinese Trotskyist, Chen Duxiu, followed the logic of their despair into the camp of the “Allied” imperialists in WW II.
For a Marxist, a ruling class is a layer of people defined by their ownership of the means of production—not mainly by their ideology, their morality or lack thereof, their hunger for power, their standard of living, etc. The point is not to give a pejorative description of Soviet reality, but to analyze its laws of motion and direction of development. Against the early proponents of “state capitalist” theories, Trotsky noted:
“The attempt to represent the Soviet bureaucracy as a class of ‘state capitalists’ will obviously not withstand criticism. The bureaucracy has neither stocks nor bonds. It is recruited, supplemented and renewed in the manner of an administrative hierarchy, independently of any special property relations of its own. The individual bureaucrat cannot transmit to his heirs his rights in the exploitation of the state apparatus. The bureaucracy enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power. It conceals its income; it pretends that as a special social group it does not even exist. Its appropriation of a vast share of the national income has the character of social parasitism. All this makes the position of the commanding Soviet stratum in the highest degree contradictory, equivocal and undignified, notwithstanding the completeness of its power and the smoke screen of flattery that conceals it.”
And he continued:
“One may argue that the big bureaucrat cares little what are the prevailing forms of property, provided only they guarantee him the necessary income. This argument ignores not only the instability of the bureaucrat’s own rights, but also the question of his descendants. The new cult of the family has not fallen out of the clouds. Privileges have only half their worth, if they cannot be transmitted to one’s children. But the right of testament is inseparable from the right of property. It is not enough to be the director of a trust; it is necessary to be a stockholder. The victory of the bureaucracy in this decisive sphere would mean its conversion into a new possessing class.”
— The Revolution Betrayed
The “Theories” of Shachtman/Cliff Go Splat
In terms of their prognosis for the Soviet Union and East Europe, all “new class” theories proved a mockery. The bureaucratic caste was incapable of acting as a ruling class; persons with power but without a base for that power in the individual private ownership of the means of production couldn’t act like Alfred Krupp, Henry Ford, the Rockefellers or even William the Conqueror. In his book of Shachtmanite writings, Matgamna makes no attempt to measure Shachtman’s theorizing against historical development, against the workers revolts in East Europe in the 1950s, against the ultimate collapse of Stalinism in 1990-91. This in itself condemns the book as an exercise in sterility.
The single example of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution by itself decisively refutes the notion of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a ruling class. In the face of a pro-socialist workers political revolution directed against the hated Rákosi regime, the bureaucracy split vertically and 80 percent of the Communist Party went over to the side of the workers revolution. Virtually the entire officer corps of the army, as well as the Budapest chief of police, refused to suppress the working-class insurgency. Who ever heard of a ruling class behaving like this?
In the incipient proletarian political revolution in the DDR in 1989-90, and later in the Soviet Union, we fought to the best of our (limited) ability to mobilize the East German and the Soviet proletariats against the enveloping counterrevolution, fighting against the abdicating heirs of Stalin who simply handed over first the East European deformed workers states (most importantly the DDR) and then the USSR itself to the capitalists. Many of the Soviet and German workers whom we introduced to Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed told us that its descriptions of life under Stalinism read as though they had just been written. Stalinist ideology, dictated by the bureaucracy’s desire to maintain its privileged position, was an eclectic mélange of Marxist terminology used to dress up the utterly anti-Marxist program of “socialism in one country,” “peaceful coexistence” and a definition of “anti-imperialism” as the struggle between “progressive” and “reactionary” peoples. The Stalinists perverted Marxism, politically disarming working classes which were atomized by repression, destroying the only possible long-term basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat, a class-conscious working class fighting in its historic interests.
In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky linked the survival of the gains of October not only to the economic foundations of the workers state but also to the consciousness of the Soviet proletariat: “The October revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum, but not yet overthrown. It has a great power of resistance, coinciding with the established property relations, with the living force of the proletariat, the consciousness of its best elements, the impasse of world capitalism, and the inevitability of world revolution.”
Shachtman/Cliff: Anti-Communism vs. Marxism
The documents published in The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Volume I reveal how greatly the sands of Shachtmanite theory shifted over time. This shows that “bureaucratic collectivism” was useless as an attempt to understand reality and project its future development. Shachtman begins by arguing during the 1939-40 faction fight that the Soviet Union cannot be defended because the Stalinists will not overturn capitalist property relations in Finland and the Baltic states. By 1948, he and the rest of the Workers Party ideologues are arguing that the Soviet Union cannot be defended because in East Europe the Red Army is overturning capitalist property relations (thereby supposedly showing that it is a new ruling class).
Shachtman left the SWP arguing that revolutionaries should defend the collectivized property of the USSR if imperialism really threatened it, and he was still arguing this in the pages of the New International in December 1940. But when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the defense of the USSR became operational, he changed his tune and argued that Soviet defensism was impermissible because the USSR was militarily allied with the “democratic” imperialist camp.
In his one foray into original “theorizing,” Shachtman argued in his December 1940 “Is Russia a Workers’ State?” that the USSR was “bureaucratic state socialism,” and that revolutionaries should still defend its collectivized “property forms” while recognizing that it lacked collectivized “property relations.” This utterly spurious distinction between property forms and property relations, which lacks any basis in Marxism, was subjected to a devastating critique by Joseph Hansen (“Burnham’s Attorney Carries On,” Fourth International, February 1941). Joe Carter also attacked this false dichotomy invented by Shachtman; Matgamna’s book reprints Carter’s article, “Bureaucratic Collectivism” (New International, September 1941)—minus the attack on Shachtman.
When the Workers Party adopted the position that the Soviet bureaucracy was a full-blown “bureaucratic collectivist” ruling class in December 1941, they mimicked Trotsky in continuing to argue that Stalinist rule was a phenomenon unique to Russia, which arose due to the deforming isolation of the first workers state. Thus they posited a ruling class with no past and no future, no necessary relation to the means of production; one whose official “ideology” denied the very fact of its existence.
With the Red Army’s occupation of East Europe at the end of the war, bureaucratic collectivism blossomed into full-blown Stalinophobia, as the Workers Party insisted that Stalinist bureaucratism was a competitor to capitalism for world domination:
“What is before us concretely is the development of Stalinist Russia as a full-fledged reactionary empire, oppressing and exploiting not only the Russian people, but a dozen other peoples and nations—and that in the most cruel and barbarous way….
“The theory that the Stalinist parties (like the traditional reformist organizations) are agents of the capitalist class, that they ‘capitulate to the bourgeoisie,’ is fundamentally false. They are the agencies of Russian bureaucratic collectivism.”
— Workers Party resolution, New International, April 1947 (reprinted in The Fate of the Russian Revolution)
Trotsky expected that the brittle Stalinist bureaucracy would be overthrown in the working-class upsurge which would inevitably be provoked by WWII. Instead, the reformist Stalinist and Social Democratic parties deflected working-class struggle at the war’s end, allowing the invading Allied armies to restabilize capitalist rule in West Europe. In East Europe, the Red Army’s occupation in the wake of the fleeing Nazis and the Nazi-allied ruling classes provided a breathing space. Stalin’s creation of deformed workers states in East Europe was dictated by military/ security concerns as the Allied imperialists turned on their erstwhile ally and began the Cold War. Indigenous peasant-based revolutions by Communist-led forces in Yugoslavia and in 1949 in China also created new deformed workers states.
The Shachtman writings proudly trotted out by Matgamna in his book are permeated with Cold War anti-communism, as is obvious from assertions such as “Stalinism is shown at its ‘purest’ in the slave labor camps” (from a July 1947 article by Louis Jacobs [Jack Weber] published by Matgamna), or “Slave labor is not an accidental or surface excrescence of the Stalinist regime; it is integral, inherent, irreplaceable” (from a December 1947 New International article that Matgamna doesn’t reprint). The Stalinist gulag—which was designed for political suppression, not economic exploitation—did constitute a system of forced labor in Siberia and other areas where it was impossible to get workers to go voluntarily for low wages. But such methods are incompatible with labor requiring any skill or training. Far from proving “irreplaceable” to the Soviet economy, in the liberalization that followed Stalin’s death they were replaced with more rational forms of financial incentives. Capitalist counterrevolution, in contrast, has left the Siberian population as surplus, outside the political economy, left to die of starvation, disease and cold.
When the Soviet degenerated workers state was finally destroyed by Stalin’s heirs, the process unfolded in a manner which strikingly conformed to Trotsky’s projections. Thus in 1936 Trotsky had written:
“Bourgeois society has in the course of its history displaced many political regimes and bureaucratic castes, without changing its social foundations…. The state power has been able either to co-operate with capitalist development, or put brakes on it. But in general the productive forces, upon a basis of private property and competition, have been working out their own destiny. In contrast to this, the property relations which issued from the socialist revolution are indivisibly bound up with the new state as their repository….
“A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus to the abolition of state property. The bond of compulsion between the trusts and the factories within them would fall away. The more successful enterprises would succeed in coming out on the road of independence. They might convert themselves into stock companies, or they might find some other transitional form of property—one, for example, in which the workers should participate in the profits. The collective farms would disintegrate at the same time, and far more easily. The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture.”
— The Revolution Betrayed
Stalinism: Gravedigger of Revolution, Gravedigger of the Workers States
The unraveling of Stalinism over the course of decades had a significant generational component, as did the Stalinists’ destruction of proletarian consciousness. The regime of terror and lies did much to extirpate socialist idealism among the toiling masses. Starting from the theory of “socialism in one country,” Stalin pushed nationalist ideology as the basis of loyalty to the state. Russian nationalism was instrumental to the USSR winning World War II against Hitler (after an initial collapse of the army, demoralized by Stalin’s blood purges, which enabled the Nazis to overrun huge swaths of Soviet territory).
After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet bureaucracy was no longer able to use mass terror as a weapon against political opposition or economic crimes. With the economic situation in the USSR and East Europe recovering from the devastation of the war and, following a series of pro-socialist workers uprisings and protests in East Germany, Hungary and Poland which threatened the Stalinist regimes, the Khrushchev years were marked by a policy of increased production of consumer goods and a general increase in the standard of living for the workers. The large-scale corruption of the Brezhnev years greatly undermined residual egalitarian values in the population. The subsequent generation of the bureaucracy, exemplified by Gorbachev, reflected the increased weight in Soviet society of a privileged layer of bureaucrats’ children, technocrats and other would-be yuppies who aspired to hobnob in Western capitals with their opposite numbers from Harvard Business School at comparable income levels. Beginning with experiments in “market socialism,” justified as the only way to revitalize the Soviet economy (workers democracy of course not being an option), this layer had little internal resistance to scrapping Stalinist ideology outright: “socialism” has failed, long live capitalism. When Gorbachev proved unable to ram through his “capitalism in 500 days” shock treatment, he was replaced by the more ruthless ex-Stalinist bureaucrat, Yeltsin, who eagerly tried to sell the country to American imperialism.
The central event of the Russian counterrevolution was Yeltsin’s August 1991 “counter-coup” against the inept “perestroika coup” of Stalinist has-beens. Virtually all the anti-Soviet fake-Trotskyists either openly hailed Yeltsin and/or seized on the opportunity to declare that the Soviet degenerated workers state was instantly dead. Only the ICL sought to rally the working people of the USSR to rise in political revolution to defeat capitalist restoration. The ICL mass-distributed our article “Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!” throughout the Soviet Union. Yeltsin’s consolidation of his imperialist-backed power grab for “democracy”—in the absence of mass resistance by the working class to the encroaching capitalist counterrevolution—spelled the final destruction of the degenerated workers state.
Yeltsin’s counterrevolution was prepared by the introduction of economic measures known in East Europe as “market socialism” and in Russia as perestroika (restructuring). Tito’s use of market-oriented “reforms” in Yugoslavia prefigured Gorbachev’s perestroika. They were characterized by the atrophy of centralized planning, allowing enterprise relations to be largely governed by market forces. Closely associated with the abolition of the state monopoly on foreign trade was decentralization on regional lines, generating powerful pressures for breaking down the multinational character of countries such as Yugoslavia and the USSR, as wealthier republics were favored by the terms of trade established by market forces. These economic factors provided a huge boost to reactionary nationalist ideology, as—particularly given the absence of much capital—nationalism was used as the main battering ram for capitalist restoration in the ex-Soviet ex-bloc, leading straight to hideous, all-sided “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans and elsewhere.
In our propaganda throughout this period, the Spartacists warned of the anti-egalitarian impact of “market socialist” policies, the deadly danger of allowing the penetration of international finance capital into the economies of the deformed workers states and the growth of nationalist rivalries within these states. In our 1981 pamphlet, Solidarnosc: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers, we laid at the Stalinists’ door the responsibility for the destruction of the historically socialist consciousness of the Polish proletariat. Our analysis and predictions were strikingly confirmed by events, but it cannot be too strongly emphasized that our purpose was not merely to analyze but to intervene with our revolutionary program to fight for socialist consciousness, to rally Soviet and East European workers to defend the remaining gains of October against their deadly enemies abroad and at home.
In our pamphlet on “Market Socialism” in Eastern Europe, published in July 1988, we explained:
“The program of ‘market socialism’ is basically a product of liberal Stalinism. Enterprise self-management and self-financing is the road to economic chaos. It generates unemployment and inflation, widens inequalities within the working class and throughout society, creates dependency on international bankers, intensifies national divisions and conflicts, and enormously strengthens the internal forces of capitalist restoration….
“The nationalities question has been at the heart of the politics of ‘self-management.’ The social pressure for ever greater decentralization has come not from below—from workers in the shops—but from the bureaucracies in the richer republics, Croatia and Slovenia. The economic effects of devolution have in turn given rise to virulent national resentment in the poorest regions, especially in Kosovo, where the Albanian nationality in Yugoslavia is concentrated….
“The decentralizing measures of the ’60s also radically altered the way in which the Yugoslav economy interacted with the world capitalist market. In 1967, enterprises were allowed to retain a portion of the foreign exchange which they earned. Since then the scramble over foreign exchange has been a major source of regional/national and inter-enterprise conflict, at times leading to outright economic warfare….
“There is an inherent tendency for Stalinist regimes to abandon central planning in favor of an economic setup with the following major elements: output and prices determined through atomized competition between enterprises; investment, managerial salaries and workers’ wages geared to enterprise profitability; unprofitable enterprises are shut down, resulting in unemployment; price subsidies are eliminated, resulting in a higher rate of inflation; the role of petty capitalist entrepreneurs is expanded, especially in the service sector; increased commercial and financial ties to Western and Japanese capitalism, including joint ventures, are encouraged. These measures do not amount to creeping capitalism, as many Western bourgeois commentators and not a few confused leftists contend. But they do strengthen the internal forces for capitalist counterrevolution….
“Within the framework of Stalinism, there is thus an inherent tendency to replace centralized planning and management with market mechanisms. Since managers and workers cannot be subject to the discipline of soviet democracy (workers councils), increasingly the bureaucracy sees subjecting the economic actors to the discipline of market competition as the only answer to economic inefficiency. The restoration of workers democracy in the Soviet Union is not just an abstract ideal but a vital condition for the renewal of the Soviet economy on a socialist basis.”
A restored revolutionary workers regime in the USSR would have fought to extend the revolution to the citadels of world imperialism, the necessary prerequisite for the creation of socialism.
The Economic Program of the Left Opposition
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was a temporary retreat undertaken by the Bolsheviks after the devastation of the Civil War in a backward, overwhelmingly peasant economy in which industry had broken down and was utterly disorganized. The early NEP legislation, drawn up under Lenin’s direct guidance, while allowing free trade in agricultural produce, severely restricted the hiring of labor and acquisition of land. However, what began as a temporary retreat was later transformed by Bukharin and Stalin into a continuing policy reflecting the class interests of the peasantry. In 1925 restrictions were greatly liberalized in the direction of favoring the growth of agrarian capitalism. Kulaks and “NEP men” were welcomed into the party, where they became a significant wing of the now-ascendant bureaucracy.
The advocates of “market socialism” in Gorbachev’s Russia looked back fondly to the NEP of the mid-late 1920s, whose ideological exponent was Nikolai Bukharin and whose chief implementer was his then-bloc partner, Joseph Stalin. Bukharin urged the peasantry, “Enrich yourselves!” and declared that socialism would proceed “at a snail’s pace.” He insisted that the expansion of industrial production in the Soviet Union should be determined by the market demand of the small-holding peasantry for manufactures.
In his 1922 work, From N.E.P. to Socialism, E. A. Preobrazhensky had advocated the necessity of “primitive socialist accumulation” to build up the resources for the expansion of the Soviet industrial base. Trotsky’s Left Opposition, to which Preobrazhensky adhered, insisted on the need for rapid industrialization and central planning. As early as April 1923, in his “Theses on Industry” presented to the Twelfth Party Congress, Trotsky pointed to the phenomenon of the “scissors crisis” (the lack of sufficient manufactured goods to exchange for agricultural produce, leading the peasants to withhold food from the cities). In 1925, Trotsky warned that “if the state industry develops more slowly than agriculture…this process would, of course, lead to a restoration of capitalism” (Whither Russia?).
The historian Alexander Erlich recounted the party debates in his classic work The Soviet Industrialization Debate, 1924-1928 (1960). Against the policies of Bukharin/Stalin, the Left Opposition called for increased taxation of the kulaks to finance industrialization and for the “systematic and gradual introduction of this most numerous peasant group [the middle peasants] to the benefits of large-scale, mechanized, collective agriculture” (Platform of the Opposition [1927]). The Left Opposition advocated speeding up the tempo of industrialization not only to relieve the “scissors crisis” but, most importantly, also to increase the social weight of the proletariat.
Bukharin’s policy fueled the forces of social counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. The policy of “enriching” the kulaks predictably led not only to the exacerbation of class distinctions in the countryside, as the poor peasants were virtually reduced to their prerevolutionary status as sharecroppers, but also to blackmail of the cities by the kulaks. Meanwhile, the NEP men had continued to grow in strength: at the end of 1926, nearly 60 percent of the total industrial labor force worked in privately owned small-scale industry, under the grip of petty capitalists who controlled supply and distribution. By 1928, the kulaks were organizing grain strikes, threatening not only to starve the cities but to undermine the economic foundations of the workers state itself.
Stalin was the leader of the conservative bureaucratic caste that had usurped power in 1924. He feared for the future of his regime which had arisen on the property forms of a workers state. Capitalist restoration threatened the bureaucracy’s base of power and privilege and was not an option. He saw no other course but to lash out with an unplanned, ill-conceived and brutal policy of forced collectivization to break the hold of the kulaks and a forced-march industrialization. In seeking by his own methods and for his own reasons to maintain the working-class foundations of the Soviet state, Stalin had no choice but to co-opt key aspects of the Left Opposition’s program advocating rapid industrial development that he had previously vehemently opposed. As a result Stalin broke his bloc with Bukharin, whose economic policies were leading directly toward a complete social overturn of the degenerated workers state. (Bukharin and his expelled supporters internationally became known as the Right Opposition.)
In light of these events, it is revealing that Cliff and Matgamna date the ascendancy of their respective “new ruling classes” (or capitalist restoration) to this period. But since Stalin’s crackdown on the kulaks demonstratively prevented the restoration of capitalism in 1928, their real focus is Bukharin and his supporters who opposed the Stalinist bureaucracy from the right. Thus they retroactively place themselves outside of and in opposition to Trotsky’s International Left Opposition and its program of unconditional defensism from the beginning.
Today the fostering of powerful capitalist-restorationist economic forces within the framework of a deformed workers state has already gone much further in China than was seen in Tito’s Yugoslavia or Gorbachev’s Russia. Many of the social gains of the Chinese Revolution are being obliterated as unemployment has reached massive proportions while state-owned factories are being closed or privatized, and the monopoly of foreign trade is being undermined. The Chinese bureaucracy is itself a major participant in joint ventures with foreign capitalists in the “Special Economic Zones.” But the bureaucracy cannot fully implement its retrograde aspirations without breaking the resistance of the Chinese proletariat. Once again, the alternatives are posed: proletarian political revolution to defend the socialized economic basis of the state, or imperialist-backed capitalist counterrevolution.
Postscript: Sean Matgamna, Epigone of Shachtman
Sean Matgamna appears to have entered political life as a member of the Stalinist Communist Party, but in 1959 he was won to the ostensible Trotskyism espoused by the late Gerry Healy. Healy’s organization recruited a whole layer of Communist Party cadre after the 1956 Hungarian workers uprising by championing the Trotskyist program of proletarian political revolution to defend the anti-capitalist gains in the degenerated and deformed workers states. Emerging from deep entry in the Labour Party, in the late 1950s and early 1960s the Healyites displayed in journals such as Labour Review an impressive literary orthodoxy and command of Marxist literature and history. Underlying it all, however, was a fundamental political banditry that manifested itself first in internal bureaucratic practices. Matgamna was expelled by Healy in 1963, but he broke with him politically only a year later, when the Healy organization renounced any entry work in the Labour Party. Over the next two decades Matgamna entered, fused with or flirted with almost every other tendency claiming the mantle of Trotskyism in Britain, from Ted Grant’s Militant Tendency, to Tony Cliff’s International Socialists, to the Pabloites, to Workers Power.
In 1979, in the midst of the imperialist hue and cry over the Red Army’s intervention into Afghanistan, Matgamna’s tendency, organized as the International Communist League, abandoned their paper position for the military defense of the Soviet Union, claiming that the consequences of the Soviet Union’s defense of the left-nationalist government which sought limited land reform and to teach women to read and write were “unconditionally reactionary.” During the subsequent anti-Communist hysteria of Cold War II, Matgamna’s group, which remained deeply mired in the Labour Party, howled with the imperialists for the anti-socialist, anti-Semitic Polish Solidarnosc, supported capitalist reunification in Germany and hailed the counterrevolutions which destroyed the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states in East Europe in 1990-91.
Today Matgamna’s tendency, now called the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL), is still mired in the Labour Party—in fact, the New Labour Party, which Tony Blair is trying to remold as a capitalist party by severing its historic link with the trade unions. As good Labourites, the AWL takes their place with those who seek to put a “working-class” face on craven loyalty to their “own” imperialism. Nowhere is this more clear than in Northern Ireland, where the Matgamnaites (along with Taaffe’s Militant Labour, now called the Socialist Party) are notorious for their revolting affinity for British imperialism’s fascistic Loyalist gunmen like Billy Hutchinson, leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). Obscenely portraying the PUP, a front for the murderous Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), as a legitimate representative of the Protestant working class, the AWL has featured Hutchinson as a speaker at their events and given him a platform in their journal. In 1995, an AWL summer school featured a “debate” with Ken Maginnis, “security” spokesman for the Ulster Unionist Party and a paid adviser to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Needless to say, the AWL refuses to call for the immediate withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland, parroting the imperialist lie that the troops are some kind of neutral arbiter between Catholic and Protestant communities instead of an integral part of the armed fist of Orange supremacy.
With the outbreak of the NATO war against Serbia, the first large-scale war in Europe since World War II, the AWL swam comfortably in the stream of the whole British fake left, which slavishly supported the capitalist government of Blair’s New Labour and its aggressive forward posture in support of NATO’s terror bombing of Serbia, and in support of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), a puppet of NATO imperialism. The AWL was so dedicated to the British/U.S.-led NATO war that it avoided even the fig leaf of the “Stop the War” demonstrations. But it did mobilize for a 10 April 1999 Kosovo demonstration in London which was fulsomely in support of the NATO bombing. From the beginning, when even Tony Blair was hesitating, Matgamna was calling for ground troops: “If NATO troop landings put a stop to the Serb’s [sic] genocidal drive against the Kosovars we will be glad of it…. Socialists cannot one-sidedly denounce NATO and the US without either endorsing or being indifferent to the genocidal imperialism of Serb Yugoslavia” (“The Issues for Socialists,” Action for Solidarity, 2 April 1999). Today—in spite of all the rhetoric in favor of ‘independence for Kosovo’ during the war—the AWL naturally has no objections to Kosovo being militarily occupied by the major NATO imperialist powers. This was NATO’s intention from the beginning.
Throughout most of his political incarnations in the 1970s, Sean Matgamna, nominally a Soviet defensist, held that the Russian question was a “tenth-rate issue,” immaterial to the real stuff of British “Trotskyism,” which, as he learned at the feet of Gerry Healy and Ted Grant, was to “make the Labour lefts fight.” But the illusion that the Russian question didn’t matter was only possible during the brief window of “détente,” when U.S. imperialism, weakened by its defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese workers and peasants, needed to buy itself a little time before going back on the offensive. When in 1979 the Carter administration of U.S. imperialism seized on the Soviet Union’s military intervention in defense of the modernizing left-nationalist government in Afghanistan to launch the anti-Soviet “human rights crusade” that marked the opening of Cold War II, Matgamna rushed to join the parade as virtually the entire spectrum of fake-left tendencies jumped on the anti-Soviet bandwagon on the side of the bloodthirsty Islamic militias and their CIA backers. Suddenly the “tenth-rate” question of Soviet defensism became the central question of a loyalty oath to British and world imperialism.
Capitulating to bourgeois anti-Sovietism all down the line, in 1988 Matgamna’s organization took the position that Stalinism represented a new form of class society, with the bureaucracy constituting a “bureaucratic state-monopoly ruling class.” The positing of a new form of class society between capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat was in essence a restatement of Shachtman’s “bureaucratic collectivism.” When it comes to “little England” Labourite anti-Communism, Matgamna is even more crazed than Cliff. Matgamna resurrects Shachtman because he needs to distinguish himself on a theoretical level from Cliff’s SWP, which in Britain occupies the ostensibly Trotskyist reformist terrain that Matgamna aspires to. Matgamna is also so far gone in crass social-patriotism that he is no longer put off by Shachtman’s unsavory end.
Of course, the Shachtman who emerges from the pages of The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism is molded to be congenial for today’s “death of communism” left. The real Shachtman was an equivocal figure—an early Communist and one of the founding leaders of the SWP, his break from Trotskyism led him into the service of our class enemies.
As we have already seen, in the period right after his split from Cannon’s SWP, Shachtman appeared as more of a centrist, occasionally making correct critiques from the left of theoretical problems and flinches within the Trotskyist movement. Our tendency has always viewed the history of our movement critically and so we have acknowledged and learned from those instances when the Workers Party was correct against the SWP. One example was the SWP’s failure to see that when the U.S. directly took control of the fight against Japanese imperialism in China during World War II, the previously supportable anti-colonial struggle of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist troops became subordinated to the war effort of Allied imperialism.
Especially important for authentic Trotskyists is the Shachtmanites’ devastating critique of the “Proletarian Military Policy.” The PMP, for which Trotsky himself bore a heavy measure of responsibility, represented a profound revision of Marxism on the fundamental question of the class nature of the capitalist state. Because the PMP did not involve his own area of decisive departure from Marxism, Shachtman in 1940-41 was able to score some correct points against Cannon and the SWP (see especially Shachtman’s polemic, “Working-Class Policy in War and Peace,” first published in the New International, January 1941, reprinted in our Prometheus Research Series No. 2, “Documents on the ‘Proletarian Military Policy’” [February 1989], published by the Central Committee archive of the ICL’s American section).
The PMP was first proposed by Trotsky in 1940, in the last months of his life. World War II had already started in Europe and a brutal air war was raging over Britain, but the United States had not yet entered the war, although it was clear that they would. The PMP was an impatient and misguided attempt to find a bridge between the deep anti-fascist sentiments of the working class and the revolutionary program of overthrowing capitalism. It consisted of a series of demands for trade-union control of military training for the bourgeois army. These demands were a prominent part of the propaganda of the American SWP and especially the British Workers International League (WIL) in the early years of the war. The PMP’s thrust was reformist—it implied that it was possible for the working class to control the central core of the capitalist state, the army. It ran counter to the Trotskyist program of revolutionary defeatism toward all imperialist combatants, especially the “main enemy” at home. In the context of an interimperialist war where “anti-fascism” was the main ideological cover for the Anglo-American side, the PMP easily shaded over into social-patriotism, as Shachtman pointed out.
In the U.S., 18 leaders of the SWP and Minneapolis Teamsters union were prosecuted and jailed by the government for their opposition to the imperialist war. But their advocacy of the PMP did somewhat denature their revolutionary defeatist propaganda. In England, where the threat of a German invasion loomed as a real possibility, the WIL went much further toward full-blown social-patriotism, initially raising the slogan “arm the workers” and showing softness on the defense forces of the Home Guard. WIL propaganda called for “workers control of production” to end the “chaos” in war production; in 1942 Ted Grant gloated over the victory of Britain’s Eighth Army in North Africa, hailing it as “our” army. Only when it became clear in 1943 that the Allied camp would win the war did the PMP become a dead letter in both the U.S. and Britain.
The only area where Matgamna doesn’t agree with Max Shachtman are Shachtman’s left criticisms of the orthodox Trotskyists in WW II. Matgamna supports the PMP and insists on military support to Chiang Kai-shek even after his forces became subordinated to the Allied war effort. Being a consistent revisionist, Matgamna goes even further, openly advocating social-patriotism, “at least for Britain and France”:
“The Proletarian War Policy was, as expounded by the SWP/USA and the WIL/RCP in Britain, a confused mystification that rationally added up to a policy of revolutionary defencism. Revolutionary defencism means that the revolutionaries want to prosecute the war but do not abate their struggle to become the ruling class in order to do so. That is what [what] the Trotskyists, or most of them, said amounted to. To reject this because Britain and Germany were both imperialist is far too abstract.”
— Workers’ Liberty, June/July 1999
Here Matgamna blatantly echoes the bourgeois propaganda of WW II that this was a war of “democracy” against “fascism” when in fact it was a war between competing imperialist alliances, as was WWI. He understands full well and makes abundantly clear that he supports the PMP precisely because it was bourgeois defensist of the Allied side. So for Matgamna, there was no basis for defending the USSR against Nazi Germany but it was correct to defend Britain and France! What a perfect summary of anti-Soviet social-chauvinism, which in this case actually places Matgamna somewhere to the right of Winston Churchill. In retroactively making common cause with social-patriotism in WW II, Matgamna finds historical support for his current craven capitulation to British imperialism as it runs point for NATO in the first war in Europe since 1945.
As Shachtman’s Stalinophobia was a bridge to the Cold War led by the U.S. imperialists, the PMP in Britain was an open door to reconciliation with the left wing of Labour Party reformism and parliamentary cretinism. Their revolutionary fibre substantially eroded, the English Trotskyists could not stand up to the illusions in the capitalist Labour government of Major Attlee installed to contain the massive working-class unrest after the war. By 1949, all wings of ostensible British Trotskyism had liquidated themselves into the Labour Party.
The Labourite social-democratic substrate underlying British ostensible Trotskyism was fully displayed in their enthusiasm for Solidarnosc, the company union of the Vatican and Wall Street for capitalist counterrevolution in Poland. In September 1983, during the annual TUC Congress, Gerry Healy published in his News Line a flashy “exposé” of Arthur Scargill, based on a letter Scargill had written that rightly condemned Solidarnosc as anti-socialist. This set Scargill up for an orgy of red-baiting by the TUC tops and bourgeois press, which was used to isolate the mineworkers union on the eve of the heroic 1984-85 miners strike. The Healyites thus proved to be of considerable service to Margaret Thatcher in her campaign to smash the miners and break the spine of the British labor movement. The entire panoply of fake-Trotskyist charlatans in Britain—from Healy to Cliff to Matgamna to the Pabloite United Secretariat groupings—combined to cheer Solidarnosc as the authentic voice of the Polish working class. Their championship of Solidarnosc was concrete proof of their shared acceptance of the reformist framework of anti-Communist, “little England” nationalist Labourite politics. During the strike, Matgamna’s group campaigned for a general election to put in power the Labour Party led by Neil Kinnock, widely despised by the striking miners for his scabherding line. In a sordid postscript, in 1990 Matgamna’s Socialist Organiser group, along with Workers Power, sponsored a tour by a Russian fascist, Yuri Butchenko, who was working in cahoots with the CIA and MI6 in an effort to smear Scargill on false charges of misappropriating money donated during the strike by Soviet miners.
Operating on British terrain where anti-Americanism is a cheap shot, Matgamna seeks to disassociate himself from Shachtman’s support to U.S. imperialism in Vietnam and Cuba, asserting that “This end to Shachtman’s political life must for socialists cast a dark shadow on his memory.” But the unmistakable stench of Matgamna’s own social-patriotism reeks in passages like the following, from the introduction to his book:
“In the post-war world where the USSR was the second great global power, recognition that the USA and Western Europe—advanced capitalism—was the more progressive of the contending camps, the one which gave richer possibilities, greater freedom, more for socialists to build on, was, I believe, a necessary part of the restoration of Marxist balance to socialist politics.”
Here is a groveling apology for the crimes of British imperialism in Palestine, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, India, Hong Kong and for the brutal imperialist wars against the Algerian independence struggle and the Vietnamese Revolution. Only a smug social democrat who holds in utter contempt the struggles of the oppressed masses in the countries strangled by the Western imperialist powers could write such a passage. But then Matgamna’s 156-page introduction, which purports to deal comprehensively with Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism, never once mentions the Left Opposition’s fight against Stalin’s strangulation of the second Chinese Revolution in 1925-1927. The permanent revolution was never part of Matgamna’s nominal “Trotskyism.” He has no hatred for the Stalinist program of class collaboration—he fully shares it.
In common with the imperialist bourgeoisie (and the Stalinists, for that matter), Matgamna equates the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky with the Stalinist bureaucratic caste which usurped power in 1924, taking the first steps toward self-consciousness with its false dogma of “socialism in one country.” He equates the bureaucracy of 1925-28 —which represented a bloc of the centrist elements around Stalin with the Bukharin/Tomsky faction conciliatory of capitalist restoration—with the ascendant bureaucratic centrist Stalin clique after 1928. And he equates all of the above with the anti-revolutionary Stalinist apparatus which surrendered the German proletariat to Hitler without a shot in 1933, proving, as Trotsky wrote, that “The present CPSU is not a party but an apparatus of domination in the hands of an uncontrolled bureaucracy” (“It Is Necessary to Build Communist Parties and an International Anew,” 15 July 1933). In short, Matgamna deliberately seeks to obscure the fact that a political counterrevolution took place in 1924 that was the qualitative turning point after which the Stalin faction had become ascendant and the USSR had become a degenerated workers state. This qualitative turn was verifiable—a different program carried out by a different leadership with different methods alien to Bolshevism. In Matgamna’s (and Kautsky’s) view, Stalinism grew organically and inevitably out of Leninism and the Trotskyist Left Opposition was irrelevant.
Indeed, for Matgamna the “original sin” was the October Revolution itself. Writing in the introduction to his collection, Matgamna asserts: “The taking of power in 1917 turned out to have been a kamikaze exercise, not only for the Bolshevik party in its physical existence, though ultimately it was that, but kamikaze for a whole political doctrine.” Matgamna echoes the same arguments made by Kautsky and the Mensheviks who claimed at the time that Russia was not sufficiently “economically mature” for the proletariat to take power, a rationale for their gut hatred and fear of workers revolution.
Matgamna states openly what is in fact the real program of all the revisionist British ex-Trotskyists: opposition to new October Revolutions and prostration at the feet of the British Labour Party. The political line of these revisionists, whether or not they are formally members of the Labour Party, has boiled down at best to the posture of “make the Labour lefts fight.” Yet for Matgamna and his ilk, even this has become somewhat of a fiction, as his support to “democratic” imperialism—past and present—indicates. His chauvinist support to the NATO bombing of Serbia put him to the right of “left” Labourites such as Tony Benn. In contradistinction to all the fake lefts, we fight to forge a party with a revolutionary program to split the working-class base from the bourgeois leadership of the Labour Party, as part of a revolutionary strategy to overthrow capitalism in the British Isles.
As Shachtman was liquidating his organization into the U.S. Socialist Party, he wrote an article entitled “American Communism: A Re-Examination of the Past” (New International, Fall 1957), lamenting the Communists’ split with the Social Democracy. This nostalgia for the old American social democracy was telling. Among other things, Shachtman had to ignore the touchstone question of the American black population—a question on which the difference between the old SP and the early CP was qualitative. Thus, Shachtman in 1957 retrospectively embraced the tacit racism of the American social democracy.
Shachtman was sympathetic to the earlier Lenin, before he had completed his evolution from a revolutionary social democrat into a communist. What Shachtman really hated about Lenin the communist was Lenin’s recognition of the need for a political split in the working class as the precondition for proletarian revolution. In 1920, at its second congress, the Comintern codified this rejection of the Kautskyan “party of the whole class.” The “21 Conditions for Admission to the Communist International” drew a sharp programmatic line between communism, on the one hand, and the reformist (and particularly the centrist) opponents of revolution, on the other.
All the “state capitalist” and “new class” theories of the USSR, from Kautsky to Shachtman to Cliff and Matgamna, were predicated on the search for an illusory “third camp” between capitalism and Stalinism, which always proved sooner or later (mainly sooner) to be firmly situated at the side of their “own” ruling class. We take pride in having fought to the limits of our ability to defend the remaining gains of October against imperialism and counterrevolution. Today we fight for the unconditional military defense of the remaining deformed workers states: China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. We are for proletarian political revolution to sweep away the Stalinist bureaucracies that have driven these workers states to the brink of capitalist counterrevolution.
Trotsky’s predictions that “socialism in one country” would prove bankrupt, a step backward from the possibilities for world socialism opened by the Russian Revolution of 1917, were confirmed in the negative. Today our struggle is to vindicate Trotsky’s program through new October Revolutions worldwide to smash the system of capitalist imperialism and establish proletarian state power on a world scale. This task has been rendered immeasurably harder after the final undoing of the Bolshevik Revolution, accomplished thanks not only to the Stalinists themselves but to those like Cliff and Matgamna who hailed counterrevolution abroad as they embraced the social-democratic labor bureaucracies in their own countries.
Today these fake-left formations carry forward their strategy of class betrayal in supporting social-democratic governments of austerity, racism and imperialist war in a dozen European countries. They are obstacles to proletarian consciousness which must be exposed and swept away in the course of building the revolutionary Trotskyist parties required to put an end to the system of capitalism in its death agony.
In recent years, atheism has gained a certain currency among liberal-minded members of the American petty bourgeoisie. Atheist and secular humanist clubs have been formed not only on college campuses but also in small towns in the South. Atheist activism is also found in rather unlikely social milieus. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Sgt. Justin Griffith and a few cothinkers have established the Military Atheists and Secular Humanists and extended the organization to other military bases. Griffith and others objected when in the fall of 2010 the Ft. Bragg commanders sponsored an on-base event by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. In response, Griffith proposed to organize an atheist event featuring such speakers as Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion (2006), the best-known exposition of what is called the “new atheism.”
Sgt. Griffith’s views and activities highlight a seemingly contradictory situation. Adherents of the self-styled Christian right regard proponents of atheism as an abomination, a dire and insidious threat to the supposedly unique greatness of the American nation. On the other side, most atheists and other freethinkers in the U.S. today view themselves as good citizens and upholders of the American way of life and traditional political system. A 20,000-strong “rally for reason” in Washington, D.C., earlier this year was heavily promoted by Dawkins as a means to further the acceptability of “freethinkers” in political life.
What we have here is a particular manifestation of the changed political-ideological contours of the post-Soviet world. Since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, atheism is no longer so strongly identified in popular consciousness with communism or other forms of left-wing social radicalism. The intellectual promoters of the “new atheism,” which emerged in the mid 2000s, are and have always been hostile to Marxism. Dawkins as well as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, two other leading “new atheists,” are prominent exponents of “sociobiology,” a form of biological determinism used to justify reactionary garbage such as male dominance and black inferiority.
During the Cold War, a shared enmity toward the USSR and Communism muted the hostility of religious-minded rightists to irreligious liberal intellectuals. But especially over the last two decades, Christian fundamentalists, believing that international Communism was vanquished with the fall of the Soviet Union, have turned their fire against the secularist “enemy within” and the entire tradition of Enlightenment humanism and scientific rationality.
For evangelical preachers like Pat Robertson, it was no longer Karl Marx but rather Charles Darwin who was the main inspirer of the enemies of the “American Christian nation” (see “Hail Charles Darwin!” WV No. 854, 16 September 2005). In an essay explaining the origins of the “new atheism,” Victor Stenger, one of its leading figures, complained about “Christian attempts to force others to behave according to their beliefs; to set public policy based on faith rather [than] reason; and to transform America into a theocracy” (“What’s New About the New Atheism?” Philosophy Now, January/February 2011).
Then Came 9/11
The core canon, so to speak, of the “new atheism” consists of five works: Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and theFuture of Reason (2004), Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2007), Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion PoisonsEverything (2007) and Stenger’s The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Scienceand Reason (2009). While the similarities among the five authors are more important than their differences, there are differences in emphasis, that is, in their main concerns and foils.
Dawkins, Dennett and Stenger were primarily responding to the political ascendancy of the Christian right under the Republican administration of George W. Bush. Reactionary religious forces received a major boost from the “faith-based” Bush regime, whose often demented policies flowed from America’s continued position, based on its overwhelming military strength, atop the world order even as its economy stagnated. Dawkins & Co. were reacting in particular to the campaign to make creationism (“intelligent design”) an officially recognized alternative to Darwinian evolution. Their books mainly polemicize against arguments that aspects of the natural world (the origin of the cosmos, the origin and diversity of living organisms, human consciousness) cannot be explained except by the existence of a transcendent supernatural power.
The main concerns of Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens were different. They were basically responding to the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September 2001 by Islamic fundamentalists. Their books would not have been written (at least in their main content) had that event not occurred. Hitchens also edited the 2007 The Portable Atheist, which for the most part consists of representative irreligious thinkers, beginning with the materialist philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity. Four of the final six selections are specifically directed against Islam.
Harris and Hitchens represent that current of liberal intellectuals who supported the global “war on terror” on the grounds that Islamic jihadism had become a mortal threat to Western civilization. Harris was positively apocalyptic: “A future in which Islam and the West do not stand on the brink of mutual annihilation is a future in which most Muslims have learned to ignore most of their canon, just as most Christians have learned to do.” The British-born Hitchens, who died last year a U.S. citizen, was notorious for slinging mud on behalf of the Bush administration during the Iraq war, captured in his trashing of the antiwar country music band Dixie Chicks as “f—ing fat slags.” Having spent some of his youth in the International Socialists (now Socialist Workers Party), Hitchens went on to wave the Union Jack during Britain’s squalid war with Argentina over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in 1982 on his way to becoming a full-bodied pro-imperialist pig.
As Jeff Sparrow aptly put it in “The Weaponization of Atheism” (CounterPunch, 9 April), “the New Atheism was turbocharged by 9/11.” That goes for Dawkins as well as Harris and Hitchens. Dawkins, who along with numerous bourgeois liberals opposed the invasion of Iraq, has been on his home turf a voice of the Islamophobia that has been whipped up by and helped drive the “war on terror.”
Dawkins outraged Muslim groups in Britain two years ago by insultingly likening the Muslim women’s burqa to a trash-bin liner. The burqa is indeed both a symbol and instrument of women’s oppression. But Dawkins’ fulminations against Islam are those of a British chauvinist and shot through with class bias. While correctly denouncing “faith schools” for propounding anti-scientific nonsense, Dawkins reserves his main fire for Muslim schools, where children are “having their minds stuffed with alien rubbish,” not those following Church of England precepts (Daily Telegraph, 8 October 2011). Nor is the Anglican state church on the receiving end of the ridicule that Dawkins likes to dish out against Catholic dogma. As any Irishman could tell you, such ridicule is mighty common fare in the land of the bloody butcher’s apron (Union Jack).
Reading Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, one is reminded of the old watchword of British colonialism: “the white man’s burden.” These intellectuals promote the notion that the U.S. and West European states could and should use military force to bring the benefits of “secular democracy” to the benighted peoples of the Islamic world. Thus do the “new atheists,” from different points on the bourgeois political spectrum, act as apostles for Western (Christian) imperialism.
A Historical Materialist Understanding of Religion
Despite his reputation as “Darwin’s Rottweiler,” Dawkins is remarkably tolerant toward the Church of England, which has been described as “the Tory party at prayer.” In a recent televised “debate,” he told the Archbishop of Canterbury that he preferred to call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist and that he was “6.9 out of seven” sure of there being no god, evoking gasps on Twitter. Writing in the 1920s about Henry Brailsford of the Independent Labour Party, a self-described agnostic, Marxist revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky observed:
“This word is sometimes used in Britain as a polite, emasculated, drawing-room term for an atheist. Even more often, it characterizes a diffident semi-atheism—i.e., that variety of idealism which on the question of God, to use parliamentary language, abstains from voting. And so we see here the force of cant, of conventionality, of the half-truth, the half-lie, of philosophical hypocrisy.”
Combating religious obscurantism is an integral part of the struggle by the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League, to forge a revolutionary workers party that can provide political leadership of the working class, beginning with its most advanced elements. In the words of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin:
“The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of [philosopher Ludwig] Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion.”
At the same time, we oppose all forms of religious persecution and oppression and defend the separation of church and state—a fundamental gain of the American Revolution that is increasingly honored in the breach by the U.S. capitalist ruling class. Our comrades of the Spartacist League/Britain fight for the abolition of the state churches as well as the monarchy and the House of Lords as part of their struggle for a socialist federation of the British Isles.
Karl Marx’s attitude toward religion is popularly identified with the phrase “the opium of the people.” However, the passage in which this phrase is used is rarely quoted in its entirety. And when it is, it is usually interpreted in a sense contrary to Marx’s intent:
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
“To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion.” [emphases in original]
—“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction” (1843-44)
Marx’s aim here was not to convince the faithful to abandon their religious beliefs. He was addressing contemporary exponents of Enlightenment rationalism, in particular his fellow left Hegelians Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. The latter maintained that belief in Christianity, since it is based on the illusion of a benevolent and omnipotent supernatural being, could be dispelled by rational argumentation. Marx understood that religious beliefs—especially divine intervention in one’s earthly life and heavenly bliss in an afterlife—served as a solace for the exploited and oppressed masses. They are responding to the privation and injustice they suffer in class-based society while feeling powerless to change their objective condition.
Religion, therefore, will not disappear unless and until these conditions are overcome in a future communist society—an egalitarian and harmonious society in which economic scarcity has been eliminated through the further progressive development of scientific knowledge and its technological application in a world planned economy. As Marx explained in Capital, Volume I:
“The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.
“The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.”
For early man, religion was a response to a feeling of helplessness in the face of the often destructive forces of nature. Scientific studies of pre-class, pre-literate societies have shown a causal connection between religious beliefs and practices and the struggle to wrest a livelihood from the natural environment. One of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, observed that appeals to supernatural forces take place at the point where existing techniques cease to be reliably effective:
“In a maritime community depending on the products of the sea there is never magic connected with the collecting of shellfish or with fishing by poison, weirs, and fish traps, so long as these are completely reliable. On the other hand, any dangerous, hazardous, and uncertain type of fishing is surrounded by ritual. In hunting, the simple and reliable ways of trapping and killing are controlled by knowledge and skill alone; but let there be any danger or uncertainty connected with an important supply of game and magic immediately appears.”
—“Culture,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1931)
With the emergence of class-based society, religion underwent a significant change in character and function. Religious doctrine was manipulated and enforced by the dominant (property-owning) class and its priestly agents to sanctify wealth and power, while offering solace to the exploited classes. Thus, Lenin wrote with respect to the Russian Orthodox state church:
“What a profitable faith it is indeed for the governing classes! In a society so organised that an insignificant minority enjoys wealth and power, while the masses constantly suffer ‘privations’ and bear ‘severe obligations,’ it is quite natural for the exploiters to sympathise with a religion that teaches people to bear ‘uncomplainingly’ the hell on earth for the sake of an alleged celestial paradise.”
—“Political Agitation and ‘the Class Point of View’” (February 1902)
On the History of Atheism
Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, all currents of thought in Europe, however antagonistic, were confined within the bounds of Christian doctrine (leaving aside the small Jewish communities and Muslim Spain). Those considered disdainful toward religious authority were condemned for “impiety,” a term that implied lack of reverence, not outright denial of a supreme being. It was in the 16th century that the term and concept of atheism (derived from ancient Greek philosophy) became a factor in the European intellectual universe. For example, in 1611 Cyril Tourneur, a playwright in Renaissance England, published a work titled The Atheist’s Tragedy, a subject that would have been inconceivable a century earlier.
The new intellectual challenge to traditional Christian belief coincided with and was conditioned by the birth of modern science. A liberal intellectual historian, Jonathan I. Israel, observed: “It was unquestionably the rise of powerful new philosophical systems, rooted in the scientific advances of the early seventeenth century and especially the mechanistic views of Galileo, which chiefly generated the vast Kulturkampf between traditional, theologically sanctioned ideas about Man, God, and the universe and secular, mechanistic conceptions which stood independently of any theological sanction” (Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 [2001]).
There has been a decades-long debate among intellectual historians as to the extent of actual atheism in the Renaissance and early Enlightenment. Underlying this debate are a number of factors. To openly profess atheism was to invite torture and execution by the state authorities that enforced Christian orthodoxy. As late as the 1690s in Scotland, a university student, Thomas Aikenhead, was hanged for the capital crime of “blasphemy.” Evidence of this “crime” was verbal discussions he reportedly had with fellow students. In some cases, the personal writings of those accused of atheism were burned at the stake along with their authors. Few clandestine or posthumous manuscripts explicitly arguing against the existence of god in any sense have been found.
The accusation of atheism was promiscuously applied to anyone who questioned or challenged the locally dominant Christian orthodoxy. In fact, Catholics and Calvinists engaged in mutual recriminations that the rival doctrine logically led to atheistic conclusions. In many (possibly most) cases, the ideas of those accused of atheism who did reject Christianity corresponded more closely to deism, pantheism, agnosticism or an eclectic amalgam thereof.
An additional complicating factor was that the term atheism was used in two different senses. “Practical” atheists, who were assumed to be very numerous, were those who lived as if there were no god. They therefore supposedly engaged in all manner of vice and crime to satisfy their worldly desires without fear of eternal damnation. “Speculative” atheists, who were assumed to be very rare, were those who denied the existence of a supreme being on intellectual grounds. When heterodox thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza emphatically repudiated the charge of atheism, they were in part denying that they were morally depraved egoists indifferent to the needs of their fellow man.
Whether a particular heterodox thinker was a self-considered and consistent atheist is not a historically important question. What is significant is that the concept of atheism became an important and integral part of intellectual discourse in early modern Europe and in Britain’s American colonies. Moreover, almost all thinkers who rejected Christianity maintained that the betterment of mankind depended on the extension of scientific knowledge, not divine revelation.
The interrelationship between philosophical materialism and the new world of scientific discovery and experimentation was exemplified by Spinoza who, whatever the ambiguities of his actual thought, was viewed as the intellectual fountainhead of atheism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. After he was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam in the 1650s as a heretic, Spinoza earned his living by making high-quality lenses for microscopes and telescopes. In that capacity, he entered into a working relation with Christian Huygens, one of the greatest physicists of the era.
Spinoza maintained that there was no supernatural being or power separate from and transcending the material world. The material world was eternal (it had no beginning) and was governed by immutable laws. There was no spiritual component in human beings and therefore no immortal soul. Some scholars, such as Jonathan Israel, have argued that Spinoza was in effect an atheist. However, most intellectual historians and philosophers categorize him as a pantheist, that is, one who identifies god with nature. Why so? Spinoza believed that the natural world was imbued with a benevolent harmony that, if understood, would lead to harmonious relations among men. He was an early and outstanding representative of Enlightenment rationalism: the view that the well-being of humanity should be based on knowledge of and conformity with the laws of nature.
Significantly, the first published work (in 1770) openly expounding atheistic materialism was titled System of Nature, or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World by its author Baron d’Holbach (Paul Henri Thiry) and his collaborator Jacques-André Naigeon. These French philosophes believed that underlying all phenomena, including human thought and action, was matter in motion. They maintained that this matter in motion was governed by immutable laws that were in principle knowable through scientific investigation and experimentation. A present-day scholar, Alan Charles Kors, commented on the social implications of Holbach and Naigeon’s atheistic materialism:
“They believed that whatever the purposes to which theism and immaterialism had been put historically, these views ultimately arose from the natural desires of mankind to allay and deflect the helplessness that was felt in the presence of the awesome powers of the whole—nature—relative to the part—man. The tragedy of mankind, for them, lay not in those desires, but in the dysfunctional mode of their expression.”
—Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (1992)
Atheism and Bourgeois Society
For a century after Holbach and Naigeon’s seminal work, atheism remained the province of a small minority of the intellectual elite. Those bourgeois intellectuals who propagated atheism, such as Feuerbach in mid 19th-century Germany and Charles Bradlaugh in Victorian England, gained political notoriety precisely because of how exceptional their beliefs were.
Atheistic materialism could and did acquire a mass following among exploited workers only when industrial capitalism had developed to a point that overcoming economic scarcity became a realistic historic prospect. Although particularly in Britain religion would continue to play a significant role in the labor movement, in Europe the de-Christianization of the proletariat was an integral aspect of the development of progressive working-class consciousness and organization, at the trade-union and the political level. Beginning in the last decades of the 19th century, mass parties were formed expressing the aspiration of the most advanced elements of the working class for a socialist reconstruction of social and economic life based on material plenty for all.
In Germany, the Austro-Hungarian state and tsarist Russia, Marxism was the official doctrine of the workers movement. Not only leftist students but also politically advanced and thoughtful young workers acquired a materialist worldview by studying such works as Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring and Georgi Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View ofHistory. Even in countries such as France, where Marxism was not the official doctrine of the workers movement, its principal leaders (e.g., Jean Jaurès in the pre-1914 Socialist Party) were usually rational humanists who were hostile to the established churches. Conversely, right-wing bourgeois parties (e.g., the English Tories) appealed to the authority of traditional and often state-sponsored religion—and continue to do so.
The persistence and extent of religious belief and anti-materialist ideology ultimately reflect the condition of the class struggle, in particular the political consciousness of the working class. The late J.D. Bernal, a Marxist and prominent British biologist, commented in Science and History (1954):
“The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test of reality and on the necessity of change.”
As a British intellectual, Dawkins recognizes that religiosity is much more important in American society and Christian fundamentalists are more politically influential than is the case in Europe. However, his attempts at explanation are in the main fatuous, claiming, for example, that rival denominations employ the “aggressive hard-sell techniques of the marketplace.” One of the “hypotheses” he provides in The God Delusion points in the right direction, but not for the reason he gives: “America is a nation of immigrants,” who, “uprooted from the stability and comfort of the extended family in Europe, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil.”
America’s capitalist rulers have long thrived by sowing ethnic, religious and racial animosities—“Anglo-Saxon” against Irish, Protestant against Catholic immigrant, and, above all, white against black—in order to divide workers, weaken their struggles and retard the understanding of their common class interest. This is a major reason why the U.S., uniquely among advanced capitalist countries, has never seen the development of a workers party, even of a reformist sort, such as the British Labour Party. The lack of independent class political organization has in turn served to reinforce religion’s hold among those exploited and oppressed by the capitalist system. Religious belief and affiliation are especially strong not only among immigrants but also in the black population, for whom the churches have been the only organizations with a continuous existence dating back to the days of slavery.
With the decline of religiosity and the authority of the Christian churches in the working class in late 19th-century Europe, a current of bourgeois intellectuals sought to justify the capitalist system on supposedly scientific (materialist) grounds. An influential expression of this current in Britain as well as the United States was “social Darwinism” as expounded by T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer. They held up the “survival of the fittest” as the primary engine not only of evolutionary “progress” but also of human society. The bankruptcy of small, family-owned businesses and farms was likened to the extinction of species of birds or mammals that had failed to adapt to a changing natural environment. For Huxley and Spencer, a worker who became a foreman was analogous to a strong male tiger besting a weaker rival in fighting to mate with a tigress.
In the present-day English-speaking world, a somewhat similar intellectual niche is occupied by sociobiology. It is, as they say, no accident that leading “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris—are strong proponents of this doctrine and its offspring, evolutionary psychology. Adherents of sociobiology have made outrageous claims regarding supposedly innate racial and sexual differences. Steven Pinker, a member of the advisory board of Harris’ Project Reason Foundation, praised the “clear historical discussion” of IQ in Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s grotesque, pseudoscientific tract asserting black inferiority, The Bell Curve (1994). (For a debunking of this racist tract, see “The ‘Bell Curve’ and Genocide U.S.A.,” WV No. 611, 25 November 1994; reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 12, February 1995.) Similarly, when Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, infamously declared in January 2005 that women have less innate aptitude for the hard sciences, Pinker declared that there was “enough evidence for the hypothesis to be taken seriously.”
While Dawkins, Dennett and Harris steer clear of Pinker’s more outrageous claims, they all indulge in some variant of biological determinism, the view that genes dictate behavior. In The Selfish Gene (1976), the book that first brought him to prominence, Dawkins wrote that a society based simply on a genetic “law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop it being true.” Such statements earned Dawkins sharp criticism in Not In Our Genes, a work of prominent scientists attacking the racist, pseudoscientific field of sociobiology, particularly its defense of bogus studies upholding the inheritability of IQ.
Even as he distanced himself from the racist arguments about IQ, Dawkins’ foam-flecked review of Not In Our Genes accused its authors of presenting a “bizarre conspiracy theory of science” simply for having argued that scientific research (like everything in class society) may be influenced and at times distorted by ideological biases. In The Mismeasure of Man (1981) and other works, the late, renowned paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould exposed in great depth how “scientific” racism based on consciously or unconsciously twisted data is used to justify the lording of one class, sex or race over another (see “Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism,” WV No. 797, 14 February 2003). Gould was also among those evolutionary biologists who refuted the fallacy that Darwinian evolution by natural selection can be applied to human social development.
Where Dawkins and Dennett really indulge their pseudo-materialist itch is in discussing the basis of religious belief. Asking in his book Breaking the Spell why religion “means so much to so many people, and why—and how—does it command allegiance and shape so many lives so strongly,” Dennett answers with a confused and confusing hodgepodge, jumping back and forth between the animism of primitive hunter-gatherer bands and the Christian churches in present-day America. He relates later religious doctrine to universal psychological behavior that supposedly originates with our early hominoid precursors, such as the need for young children to accept the authority of their parents. One could just as well argue that a child’s awareness of the relation between cause and effect (e.g., kicking a ball with the front of one’s foot makes it move forward) predisposes him to scientific rationality in later life.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that religious behavior can be called “a human universal” demanding “a Darwinian explanation.” His “explanation” is the absurd notion of a religion “meme,” an obscurantist term defined as a unit of cultural inheritance. This concoction is presented as an analogue of the gene, supposedly replicating, mutating and responding to selective pressure. Dawkins asserts that “memetic natural selection” offers “a plausible account of the detailed evolution of particular religions” without indicating why one religious “meme” might be selected over another, or even the rules whereby such “memes” are transmitted. Here Dawkins has crossed over into the realm of vulgar pseudoscience. Unlike memes, genes actually exist—they can be sequenced, spliced, transplanted and traced. Memes are pure idealist sophistry.
Sociobiology purports to provide a materialist explanation for the inequalities, injustices, ideological currents and brutalities of modern society while rejecting the historical (dialectical) materialist understanding that these are fundamentally rooted in class divisions and class struggle. V.I. Lenin observed in “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” (March 1913) that “man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society” (emphasis in original). Protestantism, for example, arose as an adaptation of Catholicism in 16th- and 17th-century Europe along with the growing economic weight of the capitalist merchant class. This fact, which is accepted by far more than just Marxists, has no value in Dawkins’ realm of “memetic” fantasy.
Nationalism Trumps Religion in the Modern World
By focusing on the crimes perpetrated in the name of religion, the “new atheists” disregard and therefore implicitly deny that national chauvinism is the main source of popular ideological support for wars, oppression and social injustice. Racism, too, is given short shrift. In The End of Faith, Sam Harris argues:
“Religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v. Catholic Croats; Orthodox Serbians v. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims v. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists v. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims v. Timorese Christians), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians v. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis v. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. In these places religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last ten years.” (emphasis in original)
In fact, in the modern world religion is a subordinate aspect of nationalism, the predominant bourgeois ideology. A basic common bond linking all bourgeois politicians—from social democrats to fascists—and all bourgeois intellectuals—from secular humanists to religious fundamentalists—is elevating the interests of their nation-state above all other interests.
Since the 18th century, almost all major wars (excluding some civil wars) have been fought on the basis of national, not religious, divisions. Indeed, coreligionists have often been pitted against one another. In both the First and Second World Wars, young American men who were Protestants, Catholics and nonbelievers fought and sought to kill young German men who were Protestants, Catholics and nonbelievers. And vice versa. The primacy of national identity over religious affiliation is also evident in wars in the Islamic world. In the almost decade-long war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, Arab Shi’ite Muslims fought against Persian Shi’ite Muslims.
The “new atheists” ascribe a religious character to what are actually national conflicts. Like Harris, Dawkins contends that religious fanaticism is the main factor underlying the “Israeli/Palestinian wars” and the Northern Ireland “troubles.” The state of Israel was founded in 1948 by Jewish settlers from Europe who were perforce culturally European and in most cases physically distinguishable from the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. The Zionist rulers cohered a new nation in the Near East with its own distinct and unique language, modern Hebrew. A large fraction of the Israeli population does not believe in or practice Judaism as a religion. Such non-believing Israelis are for the most part just as virulently hostile to the dispossessed and oppressed Palestinian Arabs as are their religious-minded fellow nationals.
Superficially, the communalist conflict in Northern Ireland does appear to be based on religious divisions, since the antagonistic parties are conventionally called “Protestants” and “Catholics.” In this case, religious affiliation has been an important factor in defining divergent national identities. Nonetheless, there are atheist and other non-believing “Protestants” and “Catholics” in Northern Ireland. What then is the source of the conflict?
In the 17th century, successive English governments promoted settlement in northern Ireland by Protestants (Calvinists), mainly from Scotland, to strengthen their colonial rule over the native Irish inhabitants. The latter retained adherence to the Roman Catholic church. In that era, the language of the Irish people was still Gaelic, not English, a national (not religious) factor differentiating them from the Scottish-derived community in the northern part of the island. In the 18th century, many members of that community emigrated to Britain’s North American colonies, where they were conventionally called “Scots-Irish,” indicating their primary as well as secondary country of origin.
The British bourgeoisie’s rule over its Irish colony was based on its profit-accumulating, imperialistic interests, as the Spartacist League/Britain noted in writing about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the Republic of Ireland last year (“Down With the Monarchy and the ‘United Kingdom’!” Workers Hammer No. 215, Summer 2011). The article stressed “intransigent opposition to all forms of nationalism—first and foremost the dominant English chauvinism” and concluded: “Our programme is for workers revolutions to overthrow all the capitalist regimes in Britain and in Ireland, North and South. The myriad forms of national oppression will be resolved when workers revolution has swept away capitalist rule on both sides of the Irish border and both sides of the Irish Sea.”
Oppenheimer, Heisenberg and the Bomb
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger all cite with approval an aphorism by prominent American physicist Steven Weinberg: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” As Marxists, we do not share in this moralistic framework. But even on its own terms the statement is wrong, implying that “good people” have never committed atrocities when motivated by nationalism but only when motivated by religious fanaticism.
An instructive counterexample was provided by two world-class physicists during the Second World War: J. Robert Oppenheimer in the U.S. and Werner Heisenberg in Germany. Oppenheimer, a left-leaning intellectual whose relatives, friends and colleagues included supporters and sympathizers of the Communist Party, was the chief scientific administrator for the development of the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project). In leading the work, he was motivated by conventional national loyalty. Also, like many other scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, he was driven by hatred of fascism (falsely conflated with support to the Allied imperialists) and fear that Nazi Germany would first develop and use nuclear weapons to win the war.
Germany surrendered two months before the A-bomb was first successfully tested at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945. The decision was then made to drop the two bombs the U.S. had available on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one thought that Japan had the capability of building such a bomb, and a few top U.S. government officials and military men (e.g., General Dwight Eisenhower) expressed reservations about using atomic bombs against the Japanese civilian population. But Oppenheimer did not. He justified the mass murder of defenseless men, women and children in the name of liberal idealism. The very destructiveness of these weapons, he contended, would lead to a new, benign world order of peace and international cooperation. In a speech given when he resigned as head of the Manhattan Project in October 1945, Oppenheimer pontificated:
“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
“The peoples of the world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand…. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before the common peril, in law and in humanity.”
—quoted in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)
This is the language of bourgeois secular humanism in the imperialist epoch. It should be noted that the U.S. dropped the bombs as a message of U.S. military superiority, intended not for Japan and its imperialist rulers, who by that time were all but defeated militarily, but for the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state.
Werner Heisenberg was one of a small number of top-level German physicists who loyally served the Nazi regime through the war. He was not an adherent of fascist ideology and did not join the Nazi party. He was not an anti-Semite and had closely collaborated with Jewish physicists before Hitler came to power in 1933. During the Nazi regime, he defended the scientific validity of the theoretical work of Albert Einstein and other Jewish physicists against the demented advocates of “German physics.” Heisenberg served under the Third Reich out of conventional German patriotism. In her memoirs, his widow offered the following explanation of her husband’s mindset: “Heisenberg loved the country of his childhood and youth; he did not believe that the picture that was now looming so appallingly was the true countenance of Germany. Within himself he carried the picture of another Germany for which he thought he had to persevere” (Elisabeth Heisenberg, Inner Exile: Recollections of a Life with Werner Heisenberg [1984]).
In 1942, at a high-level conference on armaments attended by Albert Speer and other directors of the German war economy, Heisenberg explained the technical possibility of constructing an atomic bomb (“as large as a pineapple”) that could destroy a city. When Speer questioned him about the feasibility of producing such weapons, Heisenberg expressed uncertainty that it could be done in time to affect the outcome of the war. Speer decided not to pursue such a project. After the war, Heisenberg wrote that German physicists “were spared the decision as to whether or not they should aim at producing atomic bombs.” But he did not indicate that he and the others would have refused to do so out of moral scruples.
The bourgeois-rationalist “new atheists” do not acknowledge the pernicious role of national chauvinism in the world today because they are themselves loyal to protecting the power and position of their “own” capitalist nation-states. While religion has served as an ideological pillar for ruling classes since the advent of class society, bourgeois society cannot exist without basing itself on nation-states. Each of these states serves a nationally delineated capitalist class, which requires state power—i.e., armed bodies of men—to protect its rule and property against challenges from both the working class and capitalist rivals in other countries. Each bourgeoisie portrays itself as representing the entire people, holding that the workers and oppressed social groups share a common interest in preserving and bolstering the national economy and armed forces.
The aims of socialism are counterposed to all variants of nationalism. As Lenin stated:
“Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just,’ ‘purest,’ most refined and civilised brand. In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all nations in the higher unity….
“The proletariat cannot support any consecration of nationalism; on the contrary, it supports everything that helps to obliterate national distinctions and remove national barriers; it supports everything that makes the ties between nationalities closer and closer, or tends to merge nations.”
—Critical Remarks on the National Question (October-December 1913)
Patriotic jingoism in the imperialist (advanced capitalist) states expresses the predatory appetites of the ruling bourgeoisies. Nationalism in the impoverished and oppressed semicolonial countries expresses both the aspirations of the weaker, dependent bourgeoisies to exploit their own working people and their manipulation of the masses’ legitimate hatred of imperialist subjugation. Marxists support the just struggles of oppressed countries against imperialist domination. But in doing so we oppose nationalist ideology, calling instead for the internationalist class unity of the workers in oppressed and oppressor countries against the ruling classes of both.
The “new atheists” vehemently oppose the position of some left-liberal intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, that there was a causal connection between Al Qaeda’s terrorist attack on the U.S. in 2001 and Washington’s policies in the Arab/Islamic world. In “What’s New About The New Atheism?”, Victor Stenger asserts: “Some commentators have tried to explain this tragic event in terms of social causes, such as the perceived American oppression of Muslim nations.” The term “perceived” implies that U.S. imperialism is guiltless in the oppression of the peoples of the Arab/Islamic world. More generally, none of the main “new atheist” works make reference to, much less condemn, the atrocities committed by the American state, e.g., the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, the razing of Korean cities and villages in the 1950s, the carpet bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s and early ’70s, the lethal economic warfare against Iraq in the 1990s.
A major theme of both Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great is the antagonistic relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and the West. Yet in neither book is there a discussion of European colonial rule over Islamic societies between the 17th and mid 20th centuries. Nor do they take up U.S. dominance and policies in the Near East during the Cold War era between the late 1940s and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Harris and Hitchens go from excoriating the Koran, written (supposedly) by Muhammad in the 7th century, to fulminating against present-day anti-Western jihadism as if the intervening 14 centuries have no relevance whatsoever. Basically, the “new atheists” view Osama bin Laden and his cothinkers just as the fundamentalists present themselves, that is, as faithful followers of Muhammad carrying out the authentic message of the Koran in today’s world.
Almost all countries where Islam is the dominant religion, from North Africa to Southeast Asia, were subjected to colonial rule by West European states. In some cases (such as what are now Indonesia and Bangladesh), colonial rule lasted for centuries; in other cases (Iraq, Syria), for a few decades. In all cases, the European imperialists utilized Islamic clerics and the native ruling elite to reinforce their domination and exploitation of the mass of toilers. At the same time, they exploited and aggravated all manner of ethnic (tribal), national and religious divisions, for example between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in British India. The state of Pakistan was deliberately created as an Islamic political entity in 1947 when the British partitioned the Indian subcontinent, over which they were no longer able to maintain colonial rule. The Partition resulted in horrific intercommunal slaughter, with an estimated one million dead.
The official ideology of French imperialism demonstrates that a lack of religious motivation is entirely compatible with imperialist subjugation and murderous repression on a mass scale. Because England had a state church, British colonialism had an official Christian sanction. By contrast, French colonial rule was carried out in the name of a secular, democratic republic claiming adherence to the liberal principles of the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.”
Many of the military officers and civilian administrators who governed France’s colonies in Africa, the Levant and Southeast Asia were nonbelievers, and some were strongly anticlerical. The French ruling class, represented by both Catholics and anticlerical secularists, tortured and killed millions of Arabs, black Africans and Vietnamese in seeking to maintain its wealth and power. The fact that the French colonial army was that of a secular republic did not make it in the least a force for progress and enlightenment.
Contrary to both the “new atheists” and Chomsky as well as some leftist groups like the British Socialist Workers Party, there is no basic conflict between Western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism. Notwithstanding both its recent bloody wars and occupations against the Muslim peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. imperialists, as well as their British junior partners, will support fundamentalist regimes and movements when they perceive it in their interest to do so. And, notwithstanding repeated outbursts of angry protest against Western governments (most recently over an Islamophobic film made in the U.S.), the Islamists are, in turn, just as opportunist in their relations with the Western imperialist powers.
For decades, Washington has supported and protected the Saudi monarchy, the mainstay of fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab world. Bin Laden’s outfit—the forerunner of Al Qaeda—was originally funded and armed by the CIA to combat Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Last year the U.S. and its West European allies conducted an air war against the Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi in support of tribally based insurgents, including a substantial jihadist component. In Egypt, political power following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak has for the most part been exercised by the military, which has long been heavily financed by the U.S. The military has at times collaborated with the Muslim Brotherhood—the main Islamist organization, which now holds the presidency—against Westernizing liberals. The generals would not have pursued such a policy without at least the tacit approval of the White House. In Afghanistan, the U.S. is negotiating with the Taliban to effect a “political settlement” that would allow a drawdown of military forces in a war that increasing sections of the U.S. ruling class recognize is unwinnable.
At a more fundamental level, the domination of capitalist imperialism has arrested the socio-economic and cultural development of North Africa, the Near East and South Asia. Pervasive poverty and social degradation form the material conditions that perpetuate Islamic traditionalism, including the barbaric treatment of women, among the downtrodden masses. The American state is the main external political and military enforcer of a social system from which the jihadist groups derive and on which they depend for their very existence.
Imperialism, Fundamentalism and Anti-Communism
By the late 1940s, the United States had become the dominant imperialist power in the Near East. But that dominance was challenged by the Soviet Union, supported by Communist parties that in some countries (e.g., Iraq and Iran) had attained a mass base of support, centrally in the working class. Despite their Stalinist leaderships and opportunist (class-collaborationist) policies, these parties embraced hundreds of thousands of politically advanced workers as well as leftist intellectuals who aspired to an egalitarian socialist society in which women would be liberated from the hideously oppressive conditions sanctioned by Islamic traditionalism. Almost all of the indigenous forces representing atheistic materialism and rational humanism were concentrated in and around the Communist movement.
In its Cold War against the Soviet Union and international Communism, U.S. imperialism utilized the forces of religious reaction in the Near East and elsewhere in the semicolonial world. This strategy was spelled out in 1950 by John Foster Dulles, soon to become Secretary of State: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it” (quoted in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth [1957]). The policy outlined by Dulles would be put into effect with important historical consequences to this day.
In Iran in 1953, the CIA organized a coup that overthrew the bourgeois-nationalist regime of Mohammad Mossadeq and replaced it with the autocracy of the Shah. The imperialists’ main target was not Mossadeq but the Communist Tudeh (Masses) party, which they saw as posing an imminent threat of “red revolution.” A major social force actively involved in the CIA-orchestrated coup was the Shi’ite Muslim hierarchy led by Ayatollah Kashani, a predecessor of the Ayatollah Khomeini. In Indonesia in 1965, Washington encouraged a military coup in which the Communist Party—then the largest in the world not holding state power—was physically exterminated. Over a million workers, peasants, leftists and ethnic Chinese were killed, many of them by mobs led by Islamic clerics.
The purging of Communism in the Near East in the early Cold War period was not just the work of U.S. imperialism and indigenous reactionary forces backed by Washington. Just as important, if not more so, were Arab bourgeois-nationalist regimes that were supported by the Stalinist misleaders in the name of “anti-imperialism.” In the late 1950s, the Egyptian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser—then viewed as the personification of Arab nationalism—crushed the Communist Party, imprisoning, torturing and killing its leaders. In the same period, the once powerful Iraqi Communist Party was broken by the murderous repression of successive bourgeois-nationalist regimes, the predecessors of Saddam Hussein (see “Near East, 1950s: Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Nationalism,” WV Nos. 740 and 741, 25 August and 8 September 2000). The betrayals and ultimate destruction of the once-powerful Communist movement was an important historical factor underlying the present conditions in the Near East: the pervasiveness of Islamic traditionalism in society and the political strength of Islamist parties and movements.
In The New Atheism, Stenger argues that a large fraction of the population in the world today no longer believes in religion. He points in particular to China: “I have seen estimates that there are as many as a billion nonbelieving Chinese alone.” Stenger may well overstate the extent of irreligiosity among the Chinese populace. Given the closed political conditions in China, it’s not possible to gauge the extent to which traditional beliefs and practices, such as ancestor worship, remain current, especially among the peasantry. Additionally, in recent years there has been a proliferation of “underground” Christian churches, which act as a conduit to and from anti-Communist movements in the U.S. and elsewhere. Nonetheless, it is incontestable that not only organized religion but personal religious attitudes and practices are much less important in China than in the Near East or South Asia.
Stenger makes no effort at a historical-materialist explanation of this difference and, indeed, is incapable of doing so. The difference lies in the fact that in 1949 China experienced a social revolution that liberated the country from capitalist-imperialist domination. That revolution and the workers state it created were bureaucratically deformed from the beginning by the Stalinist leadership of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party. Nonetheless, over the past six decades China has undergone a level of progressive socio-economic development and cultural advancement that has eroded the material grounds for religious belief among the populace. This is despite reactionary values fostered by the Stalinist regime, from its inculcation of Chinese nationalism to its sanctioning of “official” Protestant and Catholic churches—a policy that the early Soviet workers state would have considered an abomination (see “The Bolshevik Revolution vs. the State Church” on page 2).
Understanding Jihadism
Why after having received U.S. aid in the war against “godless Communism” did a significant current of fundamentalists, self-described as jihadists, turn violently against the West and especially the United States in the post-Soviet period? With the demise of the Soviet Union, fear of Communism among Islamic traditionalists was replaced by fear of “Westernization.” Islamists took the “democratic” ideological posturing of U.S. imperialism—now the self-proclaimed “world’s only superpower”—at face value. In the early 1990s, the Egyptian Islamist Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would become a central leader of Al Qaeda, denounced “democracy” (Western-type parliamentary government) as a sacrilege:
“In Islam, legislation comes from God; in a democracy, this capacity is given to the people. Therefore, this is a new religion, based on making the people into gods and giving them God’s rights and attributes. This is tantamount to associating idols with God and falling into unbelief….
“In democracy, the people legislate through the majority of deputies in parliament.
“These deputies are men and women, Christians, communists and secularists.”
— Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds., Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (2008)
The jihadists’ belief that the U.S. rulers aim to transform the Near East and other traditionally Islamic countries along the socio-cultural and political lines of present-day North America and West Europe is a delusion. There is, to be sure, a broad and influential section of bourgeois intellectuals, ranging from pro-Democratic Party liberals to right-wing Republicans, who think the U.S. government should do just that. Liberals like New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof have agitated for the U.S. government to actively promote “democracy” and “human rights” throughout the world, especially in the Near East. Feminists in academia and the media have also weighed in, pointing to the barbaric treatment of women, especially in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban. On the right, so-called neo-cons like William Kristol and Robert Kagan contended that Islamic fundamentalism had become a serious threat to America’s global interests.
The anti-Western jihadism of Osama bin Laden is the converse of the U.S. “human rights” imperialism expounded by the likes of Friedman, who supported the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 in the name of creating a “secular democratic society” in the Arab/Islamic world. Contrary to both the bin Ladens and Friedmans, the aim of the imperialists is not to create secular democracies in the Near East or elsewhere in the Third World. The shell of “democracy” by which the capitalists disguise their class dictatorship over the workers they exploit is reserved for the wealthier capitalist states. In plundering the neocolonial countries, imperialism perpetuates the backward social, economic and cultural conditions that sustain religion. At the same time, the penetration of these countries by imperialist capital creates elements of a modern infrastructure and a proletariat—the potential gravedigger of bourgeois rule.
In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels devoted a brief section to “feudal socialism,” a current of Christian intellectuals tied to the old aristocracies. These Christians denounced modern bourgeois society—its materialistic values and glorification of individual competitiveness—from a reactionary ideological outlook expressed in an idealized version of medieval European society. By analogy, one can describe Al Qaeda and the other jihadist groups as “feudal anti-imperialists,” opposing Western domination of the Arab/Islamic world in the name of an idealized version of medieval Islamic society and polity.
Resurrecting “Feudal Socialism”
“Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.”
—Communist Manifesto
A present-day version of “feudal socialism” has been propagated by Terry Eagleton, who, moreover, claims to be a Marxist. A professor of English literature in Britain, Eagleton published a polemical book against the “new atheists,” Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), in which he derisively refers to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as “Ditchkins.” This work is a defense of religion, in particular a leftist current in the Roman Catholic church (mainly in Latin America) called “liberation theology.”
Eagleton condemns modern capitalist society as a spiritual wasteland given over to hedonistic individualism and the satisfaction of creature comforts on the cheap:
“The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver…. A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the kind of depth where theological questions can even be properly raised.”
This book came out at the very moment that the capitalist world plunged into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In Britain, working people and the poor have been subjected to savage government-imposed austerity carried out in the interests of the financial moguls of the City of London. One would like to see Eagleton go into a working-class pub in London or the Midlands and spout off about the evils of “packaged fulfillment” and “consumer economics.” Barring divine intervention on his behalf, he would encounter a pretty ugly response.
While having a special fondness for Catholic “liberation theology,” Eagleton also has a good word for the moral rectitude and old-fashioned values of Christian fundamentalists: “In the teeth of what it decries as a hedonistic, relativistic culture, Christian fundamentalism seeks to reinstate order, chastity, thrift, hard work, self-discipline, and responsibility, all values that a godless consumerism threatens to rout.” Identifying “true” Christianity with sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, Eagleton willfully disregards “the wealthy are god’s chosen people” ethos of today’s Christian fundamentalism in the one country where its adherents wield real political influence: the United States. American evangelical Protestants have added two commandments to the ten handed down to Moses by Jehovah on Mount Sinai: “Thou shalt not tax the rich” and “Thou shalt not feed and give succor to the poor.”
For Eagleton, the socialist movement, like Christianity, is animated by altruism (love of one’s fellow man), not the material interests of the working class:
“For the liberal humanist legacy to which Ditchkins is indebted, love can really be understood only in personal terms. It is not an item in his political lexicon, and would sound merely embarrassing were it to turn up there…. The concept of political love, one imagines, would make little sense to Ditchkins. Yet something like this is the ethical basis for socialism.”
Yes, organizations claiming to be socialist have attracted idealistic intellectuals, some from very privileged social backgrounds, motivated by sympathy for the exploited and oppressed masses. However, the socialist movement has always been based on politically advanced workers, whose purpose is to qualitatively raise the material conditions (living standards) of their class and all those on the bottom, fighting for an egalitarian society. For Marxists, the ultimate goal is a society based on material superabundance, a necessary condition to fully realize the creative capacities of all its members. Consequently, underlying communism is a level of labor productivity far greater than in today’s advanced capitalist economies.
As Marx explained in Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (1857-58), the development of a collectivized economy would see the “free development of individualities” and hence “in general the reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, to which then corresponds the artistic, scientific, etc., development of individuals, made possible by the time thus set free and the means produced for all of them.”
In Defense of Marxism
The “new atheists” are hostile to Marxism. At the same time, they feel compelled to answer their theistic antagonists who raise the mass murder carried out by the regime of J.V. Stalin in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. That regime claimed atheistic materialism as an important component of its formal ideology. Dawkins and his cothinkers contend that the crimes of Stalin were not motivated by atheism as such but rather by a religious-like belief in Marxist doctrine. Dawkins links Stalin and Hitler, a lying amalgam often made by bourgeois ideologues (see “Black Book: Anti-Communist Big Lie,” WV No. 692, 5 June 1998). He wrote in The God Delusion:
“Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t; but even if he was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings.”
In The End of Faith, Harris similarly argues, “Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion. At the heart of its apparatus of repression and terror lurked a rigid ideology, to which generations of men and women were sacrificed.” Like almost all bourgeois intellectuals, the “new atheists” identify Stalinism with Marxism and Stalin’s Russia with the historical embodiment of Marxist doctrine.
V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky and the other leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution understood that socialism could be achieved only on an international scale. They viewed the October Revolution in Russia as sparking a wave of proletarian socialist revolutions in Central and West Europe, ultimately extending to North America. However, under the conditions of imperialist encirclement and economic backwardness, in the 1920s the Soviet workers state underwent a bureaucratic degeneration, as analyzed by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed (1936). The rule of a parasitic bureaucratic caste was consolidated by Stalin’s murderous regime and expressed ideologically in the anti-Marxist doctrine of building “socialism in one country.”
As Trotsky explained in the 1938 Transitional Program, the founding document of the Fourth International:
“The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation—not only theoretically but this time practically—of the theory of socialism in one country.
“The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers’ state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers’ state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism.”
In 1991-92, the negative of the two basic historical alternatives projected by Trotsky—capitalist counterrevolution—came to pass.
The “new atheists” not only falsely identify Marxism with Stalinism but also falsify Marxism as such. Daniel Dennett is particularly vulgar and contemptuous in his caricature of Marxism in Breaking the Spell:
“Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run.”
As a matter of fact, the beginning of the first section of Marx’s most famous and widely read work, the Communist Manifesto, clearly states that while the class struggle is inevitable, the outcome is not:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Half a century later, the revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg posed the historical alternatives facing mankind as “socialism or barbarism.” With the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, the profit-driven capitalist-imperialist system threatens to destroy civilization and even exterminate the human race.
It is common for bourgeois-liberal intellectuals, especially those who describe themselves as secular humanists, to argue that Marxism is a form of teleological idealism derived from the philosophy of Hegel. Attributed to Marx is the idea that the historical development of society will necessarily culminate in communism. Marxism is presented and condemned as a kind of secularized religion in which the promise of a future otherworldly heaven is replaced by the promise of a future earthly heaven.
In one of Marx’s first writings, he explicitly argued against a Hegelian-type teleological concept of history. The Holy Family, written in 1844 as Marx’s first collaborative work with Engels, states:
“Hegel’s conception of history presupposes an Abstract or Absolute Spirit which develops in such a way that mankind is a mere mass that bears the Spirit with a varying degree of consciousness or unconsciousness. Within empirical, exoteric history, therefore, Hegel makes a speculative, esoteric history, develop. The history of mankind becomes the history of the Abstract Spirit of mankind, hence a spirit far removed from the real man….
“History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth,’ it ‘wages no battles.’ It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” (emphasis in original)
In the political realm, the bourgeois-rationalist “new atheists” offer at best a species of liberal reformism, proferring advice to the rulers of a capitalist order that, at home and abroad, inculcates the reactionary, anti-scientific religious beliefs against which Dawkins et al. rail. Marxists, in contrast, strive to change the political consciousness of the working class in order to effect a revolutionary change in social conditions—i.e., the overthrow of that capitalist order—leading to the erosion and final elimination of all backwardness and superstition. In Marx’s own words: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Workers Vanguard No. 85416 September 2005 The Evolution Wars: Religious Reaction and Racist Oppression Hail Charles Darwin!
If ever there were an argument against “intelligent design,” it is George Bush, an ignorant and dimwitted reactionary with state power. Almost 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, this born-again Christian president has thrown the power of his office behind Christian fundamentalism by arguing that religious fables be given equal time with evolution in science classes in America. But the irrational obscurantism of leading circles of the American ruling class should not be mistaken for an absence of purpose. Now, as at other key moments in the history of this nation founded on black chattel slavery, religion is being promoted to inculcate acquiescence to injustice. The brilliant, self-educated former slave Frederick Douglass nailed the intrinsic relationship between the pious religiosity of Southern slaveowners and the hellish reality of those they lorded over:
“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity,—a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds,—and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me…. I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
For years, the fundamentalist Christian right has been politically pursuing its reactionary religious agenda. But since the second coming of George W. Bush to the White House, they’re stalking the country. Since 2001 there have been challenges to the teaching of evolution in 43 states! Even more widespread but harder to measure is the informal coercion of science teachers to suppress the “E” word. In March, the National Science Teachers Association reported that 31 percent of teachers surveyed responded that they felt “pressured to include creationism, intelligent design, or other nonscientific alternatives to evolution in their science classroom.” Some Imax theaters in science museums are refusing to show movies that mention evolution, the Big Bang or the geology of the earth!
A tangled web of billionaire Christian ultrarightists, their foundations and misnamed “think tanks” (like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute) provides the money behind this concerted drive to plunge the country deeper into ignorance and backwardness. The “Wedge Document,” an unusually blunt 1999 Discovery Institute manifesto, proclaimed its goal as “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” (New York Times, 21 August).
For all the conservative cant coming out of the Supreme Court about the “original intent” of the slaveowning framers of the Constitution, extreme right-wing religious elements seek to shred provisions of that Enlightenment-influenced document, and particularly the Bill of Rights, in favor of an America ruled as a theocracy under Biblical law. The particular version of Christian fundamentalism now associated with the Bush White House developed over the past four decades as an ideological umbrella enabling white racist bigots to link together their hostility to affirmative action and welfare, “women’s lib” and legalized abortion, and any tolerance of gay rights. They want a society without public schools, without unions, without separation of church and state, with the death penalty for abortionists and many others, with legal repression and extralegal terror for gays, and with black people and immigrants yoked as subhuman objects of exploitation in a nativist white Christian America.
Bourgeois liberals push reliance on the Supreme Court as the guarantor of the basic democratic rights that the government has in its cross hairs. That strategy offers no more protection than an umbrella with holes in it. The truth is that every gain and every protection that working people and minorities have won in this country have been wrested through class struggle and political battles and outright civil war. Holding on to past gains and gaining a position from which to fight for new conquests require a crystal-clear understanding that the government rules on behalf of the capitalist exploiters, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Political independence from the Democrats and a class-struggle perspective are key to any successful fight against the current onslaught.
Charles Darwin Statue, Christ’s College, Cambridge, England, UK
A ruling class that sends more black youth to prison than to college in a society that purports to have equal opportunity bolsters its policies by blaming its victims and finding “scientific” justification for segregation and subordination. Thus the ideological servants of American capitalism revive scientifically discredited myths of biological determinism and genetic inferiority of racial and ethnic minorities. In defense of an economic system and social order based on black chattel slavery, Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney deemed black people “far below” whites “in the scale of created beings” and so ruled in his infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection continues to be explosive in America today because it indicates that all modern humans came from a common African ancestor, and hence there is no scientific basis for separate “races.” The truth—that race is not a biological category, but a social and political construct—has profound political implications in the United States. As stated in the amici curiae brief filed by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee in the Supreme Court in 1985 against the teaching of Biblical creationism in Louisiana schools:
“Evolution, the science of man’s ‘descent with modification’ is the particular object of the fundamentalist religious attack. The reasons for this lie in the fact that evolutionary theory deprives man of a mythical ‘special’ status in nature, and exposes the lack of scientific basis for the various religious and other justifications for belief in racial inferiority. The not so hidden agenda of the proponents of teaching creationism in the schools is to enforce the destructive and dangerous dogma of racial inferiority.
“To the organizations here filing as amici curiae, the study of scientific evolution is fundamental to man’s quest for a materialist understanding of our world and human society, not the least because it provides material evidence that we are all part of the same human race, definitively destroying the myths of racial superiority.”
The Materialist View of History
Regarding the warfare between science and religion over Darwinian evolution, the eminent British scientist and Marxist J.D. Bernal wrote:
“The very persistence of the struggle, despite the successive victories won by materialist science, shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or a scientific one, but a reflection of political struggles in scientific terms. At every stage idealist philosophy has been invoked to pretend that present discontents are illusory and to justify an existing state of affairs. At every stage materialist philosophy has relied on the practical test of reality and on the necessity of change.”
—Science and History (1954)
Charles Darwin unshackled biological science from the chains of religion by providing a materialist explanation for the evolution of life on this planet through his careful, meticulously recorded studies of variation of species. As we wrote in our tribute to the late Stephen Jay Gould, who, despite having pathetically conciliated religion toward the end of his life, was a great Darwinian educator and propagandist:
“The revolutionary aspect of Darwin’s idea was that the whole evolution of the natural world could be explained on a purely materialist basis—natural selection—rather than through any supernatural intervention. The motor force was survival of the fittest: all organisms produce more progeny than can possibly survive within their ecological niche—the most intense competition is within a species, whose members all compete for the same lifestyle and food sources. The competition between species is important, but on a slightly lower level.”
—“Science and the Battle Against Racism and Obscurantism,” WV No. 797, 14 February 2003
Darwin argued that natural selection, along with other more random processes, drove the evolution of new varieties of life. Darwinian theory is entirely free of moral pronouncements on organisms, whether they diversify and thrive or go extinct. This is contrary to the “social Darwinists” who, unsupported by Darwin himself, exploited the term “survival of the fittest” as “scientific” evidence that the rulers were a higher order of being, in order to justify the status quo of the cruelest exploitation of man by man. Indeed, Darwin was an ardent opponent of slavery, writing in a 5 June 1861 letter to Asa Gray in the very early days of the American Civil War, “Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity…. Great God! How I should like to see the greatest curse on earth—slavery—abolished!”
Evolution is not “progressive,” nor does it necessarily lead to superior or more intelligent beings, and it is certainly not predetermined. The mechanics of evolution are a matter of continuing inquiry and argument among scientists. Darwin did not even like the word “evolution” because it implied a climb up a ladder from lower organisms to higher beings (grotesquely depicted in racist “scientific” illustrations of human evolution as a transition from stooped hairy apes to black people to Caucasians). Darwin preferred the term “descent with modification” and was a rigorous and consistent materialist in his interpretation of nature, not viewing a slug as lesser or more imperfect in its function or adaptation to its environment than an ermine-cloaked member of the royal family. As Gould wrote in Ever Since Darwin (1977): “Darwin was not a moral dolt; he just didn’t care to fob off upon nature all the deep prejudices of Western thought.”
Those deep prejudices were unleashed against Darwin upon the 1859 publication of his Origin of Species (which may in part explain why Darwin waited more than 20 years to go into print). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White, a co-founder of Cornell University who fought in the anti-slavery movement, documents the assault. In Britain, the Vatican founded the “Academia” to combat Darwinian science, while Protestants founded the Victoria Institute for the same purpose. In France, Monseigneur Ségur went into hysterics against Darwin, shrieking, “These infamous doctrines have for their only support the most abject passions. Their father is pride, their mother impurity, their offspring revolutions.” Thomas Carlyle, a former Chartist (revolutionary democrat) turned reactionary defender of slavery, was eviscerated by White for his attack on Darwin:
“Soured and embittered, in the same spirit which led him to find more heroism in a marauding Viking or in one of Frederick the Great’s generals than in Washington, or Lincoln, or Grant, and which caused him to see in the American civil war only the burning out of a foul chimney, he, with the petulance natural to a dyspeptic eunuch, railed at Darwin as an ‘apostle of dirt worship’.”
Behind the wrath of the rulers, their high priests and apologists, was worry. Geological evidence of the actual immense antiquity of the planet and fossil evidence of an evolving parade of life forms going back millions of years exposed the Biblical Book of Genesis as a fairy tale. Desperate explanations that God hid fossils within rocks to lure geologists into temptation were a bit far-fetched even for the most blindly faithful. When the geologist and Christian Sir Charles Lyell came over to Darwinism, the church feared that the Darwinian theory, like the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, might prove to be true. Suggestions of a divine design guiding evolution were advanced to shore up the crumbling foundation of Biblical literalism.
Darwin himself took on this forerunner to the “intelligent design” argument in correspondence with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a devout Protestant. Although Gray arranged for the Origin of Species to be published in America, he was troubled about the book’s theological implications and maintained the Christian belief that each living thing reflected intelligent design by a creator and constituted evidence of the loving character of God. In a typically mild but stunning reply, Darwin wrote back:
“I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”
Even conservative columnist George Will wrote, regarding the film March of the Penguins, “If an Intelligent Designer designed nature, why did it decide to make breeding so tedious for those penguins?” (Pocono Record, 28 August).
Darwin’s discovery of the continual motion and interaction between organisms and their environment was embraced enthusiastically by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to Gould, Marx offered to dedicate the second volume of Capital to Darwin (who declined as he had not read it). In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), Engels wrote:
“Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically…. In this connection Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of Nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself, are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years.”
Darwin put history into science. Karl Marx put science into history. Marx showed the mechanism by which labor collectively creates wealth that is privately appropriated by the capitalists, out of which they extract profit. Marx unearthed what had been “concealed by an overgrowth of ideology.” As Engels remarked in his 1883 “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx”:
“The production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”
Engels drew directly on Darwin’s work in his 1876 essay “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.” Engels observed that with the development of erect posture and bipedal motion, “the hand had become free,” allowing man to fashion tools. In turn, the use of tools, speech and social organization enabled man to begin to transform and master his environment. Engels wrote:
“Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind—religion.”
The division between mental and manual labor became key to a class-stratified society, and “all merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind.” So too, the idea of god became independent of the mind that invented it. Man created god yet became his subject.
Marx also recognized the duality of religion; it is both an instrument of oppression and a balm for the oppressed. Historically, the religiosity of black people in America has been a solace from unmitigated racist oppression and a promise of deliverance. As Marx said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
You Can’t Fight Republicans with Democrats
While it is a hoot to ridicule the demented rightists who think SpongeBob, a cartoon character, is gay (he holds hands with a starfish), or the Washington State Republican Party which outlawed yoga classes (did you know the word “om” is hidden in the word “communism”?), their agenda is serious and sinister. Readers are referred to the Web site http://www.theocracywatch.org run out of Cornell University for informative and regularly updated exposés of this crowd. Although the information provided there is valuable, the Web site’s banal, liberal political conclusion—that people should campaign and vote for Democrats in the midterm elections to reclaim the flag—is a false perspective that will only help keep things in this country running rapidly downhill.
It’s not just the Republicans! An infuriating series in the New York Times, “A Debate Over Darwin,” makes this clear. This august spokesman of liberal Democratic Party opinion splashed hogwash across its front page day after day (see nytimes.com/evolution) and legitimized the neo-creo kooky proponents of religious reaction by oh-so-judiciously presenting their views—as if one could debate human origins and evolution with creationists. Thus the Times abets the Discovery Institute’s purpose by accepting the logic of Bush’s demand to give equal status to science and religious superstition. Science and religion cannot be reconciled.
We salute the eminent British scientist Richard Dawkins (dubbed “Darwin’s Rottweiler”), whose forthright defense of science against the encroachments of religion have roiled the purveyors of superstition. Dawkins concluded in The Blind Watchmaker—Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1996):
“Nearly all peoples have developed their own creation myth, and the Genesis story is just the one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants. All these myths have in common that they depend upon the deliberate intentions of some kind of supernatural being.”
Every leftist who has ever tried to get so much as a letter printed in the New York Times learns the race and class bias of “all the news that’s fit to print” in that paper. Turning over page after page of their paper to proponents of “intelligent design” was a political decision in keeping with a decades-long Democratic Party strategy: to conciliate religious reaction in order to present themselves as credible rulers for God, country, family, and the “little guy.”
The “culture wars” in America—and evolution is a big one—do indeed reveal differences between the two capitalist parties. After Clinton’s 1992 election, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed the “Goals 2000: Educate America Act,” which would have required states to adopt federally approved standards for teaching science and history as a prerequisite for receipt of federal funds. Right-wing Republicans, led by neocon Lynne Cheney, went nuts over requirements to teach a little truth about the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism. When the Republicans recaptured a Congressional majority in the 1994 midterm elections, they quickly acted to allow states to adopt standards without federal oversight.
These are examples of the not unimportant distinctions between the oddly demented Bush gang and the more liberal Democrats. In the absence of a class alternative, it is precisely such distinctions that explain the, in many cases halfhearted, support for Democrats among labor and the oppressed. But the “lesser evil” is still the class enemy of the working people. Democratic president Clinton outflanked the Republicans by signing legislation to “end welfare as we know it,” by invoking the union-busting Railway Labor Act 14 times against potential rail and airline strikes, and by vastly augmenting the arsenal of state repression directed mainly against black people through the passage of his 1996 “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.” Hillary Clinton’s recent pandering to the anti-abortion bigots to secure her own electoral fortunes lies on the same continuum.
Jimmy Carter, Democratic president in the late 1970s, epitomizes the contradiction of the religious element in the ruling class. Underneath that humble Southern Christian peanut farmer shtick is a man who was trained as a nuclear engineer and helped design nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy. Carter brought being “born again” from its public perception as a backwoods affliction to the apex of political power in the White House. This served to morally rearm post-Vietnam U.S. imperialism for launching Cold War II against “godless Communism.”
Religion: Social Glue for a Society Riddled with Contradictions
America is a deeply unstable, stable bourgeois democracy. Stripped of its democratic mask, the state is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a class that accumulates vast wealth through the raw exploitation of labor. The working class is divided and prevented from uniting in its own interest mainly through the special oppression of black people as a segregated race-color caste—the last-hired, first-fired bottom rung in a society buttressed by the myth of social mobility for all. Yet black workers still have tremendous potential social power as a leading part of the working class. The material reality of racial oppression itself perpetuates fear of and prejudice against people forced by capitalism to live in filthy, violent ghettos with few social services. The color line is the visible birthmark left by slavery and so fundamental to modern American society that it cuts straight across the multiple fissures of successive waves of immigration. As the census forms say, “Hispanics may be of any race.” Sure, and where one lands on the wheel of fortune is heavily influenced by whether one appears to be black or white.
America’s other peculiarity among advanced capitalist countries is its deeply religious character. Nowhere else—not even in Italy where the Vatican still heavily influences civil society—is there such refractory religiosity and visceral hostility to the long-established facts of Darwinian natural selection as the motor force of evolution. Why? The absence of even a mass reformist workers party that expresses in even a blurry way that working people have needs and interests counterposed to those of their exploiters is a large part of the explanation for political backwardness in the U.S. But like everything else in this country, it also boils down to the central intersection of race and class. Religion in the U.S. supplies an ideology that can seemingly harmonize conflicting class interests while keeping this society with two races firmly ordered: capital above labor and white above black.
Although fundamentalist preachers and churches had been around for a while, it was the impact of World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and massive labor strikes that drew them together as a political movement to fight “godless Communism,” immigration, booze and the teaching of evolution. In the summer of 1919 the “World’s Christian Fundamentals Association” was founded. The country was gripped by fear, cynically manipulated by the government through legal and extralegal terror. Civil liberties were nullified as people were jailed for expressing antiwar views. Murderous racist pogroms raged, with 26 anti-black rampages across the country between April and October 1919. Immigrants (who were often anarchists and communists) were rounded up and deported. Labor strikes, such as the Seattle general strike of 1919, were denounced as unpatriotic “crimes against society” and “conspiracies against the government,” and broken by deployment of federal troops. In 1921, the trial of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti began, and they were executed in 1927.
The ways in which the fundamentalist movement served to bind a reactionary yet deeply contradicted society together were played out in Tennessee when a former Chicago Cubs outfielder turned evangelical preacher, Billy Sunday, arrived for an 18-day crusade in 1925 against the teaching of evolution. Leaping across the stage and screeching that “education today is chained to the devil’s throne,” Sunday whipped up more than 200,000 people in multiply segregated rallies against “the old bastard theory of evolution.” Summer for the Gods (1997), Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Scopes trial, recounts:
“Thousands attended Men’s Night, where males could freely show their emotion out of the sight of women. Even more turned out for Ladies’ Night. The newspaper reported that ‘15,000 black and tan and brown and radiant faces glowed with God’s glory’ on Negro Night. An equal number of ‘Kluxers’—some wearing their robes and masks—turned out for the unofficial Klan Night.”
That was the immediate backdrop to the most famous battle between evolution and creationism in U.S. history. In 1925, the Scopes “monkey trial” took place in Dayton, Tennessee. That same year, some 40,000 Klansmen in full regalia marched through the nation’s capital. It was a period when anyone who wasn’t as conformist and as patriotic as possible was suspect. Substitute “terrorist” for “communist” and it sounds eerily like the social climate today, and once again religious fundamentalism is advancing in lockstep with social reaction.
John Scopes was indicted for violating Tennessee’s statute that banned teaching evolution. The high school biology textbook he taught from reeked of the racist Social Darwinist views of the times. Man was presented as the highest life form of evolution, with the Caucasian race being “finally, the highest type of all.” A large political contradiction of the times was that many of the promoters of evolution were Social Darwinists who crusaded for bettering the human race by eliminating the “feebleminded” through eugenics. By 1936, 35 states had laws compelling sexual segregation and sterilization of those deemed “eugenically unfit.” In America, that was a loosely applied euphemism for “poor white trash,” black people and immigrants.
Southern slaveowners often denounced the cruelty of Northern capitalism while falsely portraying themselves as loving Christian protectors of their Negro property. So, too, the eugenics movement enabled William Jennings Bryan, the blowhard orator, 1896 Democratic Party presidential candidate and prosecutor of John Scopes, to posture as a humanitarian! Bryan said, “The Darwinian theory represents man as reaching his present perfection by the operation of the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.” Dismissing geological evidence that the age of the earth was much older than the Bible said, Bryan blustered, “Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons.”
John Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, who used the trial as a platform to defend science and defeat Bryan’s religious foolishness and phony goodness. As Darrow once said in a speech to a group of prisoners on the false definition of crime in an unjust society, “It is not the bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel—he believes in punishment.”
Fundamentalism became notorious and identified with rural backwardness as a result of the Scopes trial. In response, fundamentalists constructed their own world with their own religious schools, universities and social institutions, beginning in the 1930s. But at every peak of fevered anti-communist and racist reaction, they were brought out of their subculture to center stage. Fundamentalists played a large role in the McCarthyite witchhunt of the 1950s, identifying the United States, Jesus and the Bible as God’s gifts to humanity and the Soviet Union as the Antichrist and Devil.
What used to be the kooky fringe of John Birch ilk is now frighteningly mainstream and mobilized. No longer content with ruling their own schools, they want to destroy the public schools, and indeed the entire world. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and bigwigs who overlap heavily with the Texas Republican Party and the Bush White House are “Dominionists” or “Christian Reconstructionists.” They believe that fundamentalist Christians are mandated by God to occupy all secular institutions in order to destroy society as we know it and usher in “the thousand-year reign of Christ.” Then, as Bill Moyers wrote in “Welcome to Doomsday” (New York Review of Books, 24 March):
“Once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands,’ legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned the Messiah will return for the Rapture. True believers will be transported to heaven where, seated at the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents writhe in the misery of plagues—boils, sores, locusts, and frogs—during the several years of tribulation that follow.
“I’m not making this up.”
Communism = America’s Last Best Hope
Civilization does not continually advance. Throughout history, human society has also paused, decayed or moved backward. This motion, its tempo and direction are intrinsically linked to the economy and class struggle. Science is not independent of these processes. At the time of the industrial revolution, when the ascendant bourgeoisie challenged and replaced the feudal order, there was not only tremendous progress in the material results of knowledge (e.g., the steam engine), but also leaps in ideas of human freedom (the Enlightenment). But the French Revolution’s philosophy of “liberty, equality, fraternity” was limited in application to the new ruling bourgeoisie once it had achieved its own fundamental class interest: the abolition of feudal restrictions on private moneymaking through exploitation of the working people. Marx surpassed the radical idealism of the French Revolution, understanding from his analysis that the dominant ideas of every historical period are those of the ruling class. Enlightenment philosophy could find universal material expression only through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat as a bridge to communism.
The working-class seizure of power in the 1917 Russian Revolution took Marxism out of the realm of ideas and gave it flesh and blood. Despite the relative backwardness of Russia, hostile imperialist encirclement, civil war and invasion by more than a dozen capitalist armies, the establishment of collectivized property and a planned economy spurred huge advances in science, technology, art and ideas. Despite the degeneration of the revolution in its national isolation and its grotesque deformation by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the standard of living as measured by key indexes of modern civilization (literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.) was testimony to the superiority and tremendous potential of working-class rule.
The last time the U.S. ruling class undertook a sustained effort to promote science education was after the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik I satellite in 1957. Fear of a Soviet lead in military technology led President Eisenhower to demand a billion-dollar program to improve science education in American schools and to the enactment of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Creationism was elbowed aside as the newly formed Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) wrote evolution into new high school textbooks.
Once again, the centrality of the struggle for black freedom to all progressive social change in America was revealed. The new textbooks reached Little Rock Central High in 1965 after almost a decade of pitched battles against court-ordered desegregation of Arkansas’ Jim Crow schools. The civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements were ripping apart the conservative fabric of post-World War II America. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the trial judge made no secret of his contempt for the state’s anti-evolution statute, scheduling the trial for April Fools’ Day and ruling in favor of Susan Epperson’s constitutional right to teach modern biology, namely Darwin’s theory of evolution. This and similar cases went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. For about 30 years, the creationists mainly lost and were decried even in Supreme Court decisions as “anachronistic.”
So, what changed? Capitalist counterrevolution across East Europe and in the USSR, where the final undoing of the Russian Revolution took place in 1991-92, defines today’s deeply reactionary period. Those wrenching events have been catastrophic for the people of the former Soviet Union and East Europe, especially women, whose rights and lives have been shattered by religious reaction and destitution.
Leningrad’s Kazan Cathedral provides a vivid illustration of what’s changed. In the Soviet Union, this former center of the deeply reactionary Russian Orthodox Church was turned into a grand Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. The central apse showcased an exhibit on Darwin’s theory of evolution, with life-size portraits of the transition from ape to man. Today the icon of the Madonna is back and the cathedral is again a nexus of reaction, bolstering an unjust social order with appeals to piety and mystical promises of reward after life on this earth ends.
Drunk with success in its crusade against the Soviet Union, the American ruling class falsely boasts that “communism is dead.” With a military budget almost as large as the rest of the world’s, according to the 2005 report by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, U.S. imperialism is plundering the world without fear of reprisal. The same unfettered imperialist monster that is laying waste to Iraq targets labor, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed at home. When the Soviet Union existed, in order to sport credentials especially in the Third World as top cop for “democracy,” the U.S. was forced to concede some basic civil rights to black people at home. Now, with affirmative action gutted, many black voters disenfranchised, jobs destroyed and jails filled, the Democratic and Republican rulers cynically pretend that racism is a bygone thing, that there is no need to talk about racial equality anymore—at least until the murderous abandonment of the black population in the flooding of New Orleans threw a worldwide spotlight on racial inequality in the U.S.
Science is subordinated to the capitalist state and its purse strings. Science is primarily funded for techniques of war, mass destruction and misery. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the napalming of Vietnam, to the bunker-busting destruction of Baghdad—in the cradle of civilization—the legacy of science in the service of imperialism is measured in mass graves worldwide. Even advances in biological science that could better the human condition, stamp out disease or eradicate hunger are deformed by the profit system. That developing countries must vow to respect drug company patents as a condition of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrates the point. AIDS ravages Africa, but anti-retroviral drugs that give people the possibility to live with this disease are priced beyond reach. U.S. imperialism and the WTO have made India knuckle under and pledge to cease producing patent-busting, low-cost generic versions of the same drugs, thereby condemning millions around the world to death.
The war against teaching evolution in the schools is irrational even from the bourgeoisie’s own class standpoint. To take the above example, pharmaceuticals can’t be developed without an understanding of modern biology, which is incompatible with and counterposed to Biblical literalism. New bacterial strains emerge every day, exchanging whole DNA sequences and becoming drug-resistant; viruses mutate. Replace modern biology with Genesis and a new threat like the species-jumping avian-borne flu virus has a better shot at killing millions worldwide. The Bush administration has outlawed government funding for extraction of stem cells from new human embryos, thereby blocking therapeutic cloning and growth of tissue transplants for research to help treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.
To be sure, an elite will continue to be trained at private universities that are beyond the reach of the working class. But the anti-scientific religious dogma pushed by elements of the ruling class retards science even in those bastions of class privilege. Ultimately, it isn’t possible to remain a world power and destroy science education and industry, the way the U.S. rulers largely have. In the short term, they can certainly stay on top of the world as Western ayatollahs with nukes. Thus, even a very basic issue like the right to learn Darwin’s theory of evolution in public school requires that a multiracial revolutionary workers party be built in this country to rip power out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. Communism is the last best hope for America and the world.
Dr. Edgar Keemer was a courageous black physician who performed thousands of abortions for poor and desperate women under conditions of complete illegality for decades before the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. His story, which has largely been lost to history, is detailed in his autobiography, Confessions of a Pro-Life Abortionist (1980), unfortunately out of print. It is an inspiring account of the fight not only for women’s rights but also for black freedom and the socialist liberation of humanity. Imprisoned for his defiance of anti-abortion laws and hauled into court for refusing to bow to the Jim Crow racism of the military in World War II, Keemer was also, for a time, a member of the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). There he was known for his real flair for bringing revolutionary Marxist politics to black workers who were among the most militant fighters in the struggle for industrial unions.
Keemer was born in Washington, D.C., in 1913, and learned the names and life histories of his slave ancestors as well as the story of his father’s uncle who was lynched in 1875. Against all odds, his father, who came from a poor rural background, studied chemistry and became a pharmacology professor. Inheriting his father’s defiance of racial injustice, when Keemer was confronted with Jim Crow segregation as a school boy in Nashville, he refused to sit in the “colored” seats on the city’s buses. Instead, for seven years, he walked three miles each way to and from school.
Keemer managed to graduate from college and medical school under the crushing conditions of the Great Depression, standing up to the racist taunts of white medical students who called him “boy” and “Sam.” Then, as a practicing physician in Indiana, he was routinely excluded from public accommodations, denied membership in the local medical society and refused hospital admitting privileges. He and his wife, also a physician, lived in poverty as most of their rural patients, both black and white, could not afford to pay.
Early in their practice in Indiana, a 19-year-old woman, daughter of a preacher, asked for an abortion, threatening to kill herself if the Keemers would not help end her pregnancy. Keemer recounted that, to his shame and against his wife’s pleading, he refused. The young woman carried out her deadly promise that same night. Keemer soon came to understand that his patient was the woman, not the embryo. Describing what he means by “pro-life abortionist,” he wrote in his autobiography: “Slowly the realization emerged that by not performing that abortion, I had committed more of a criminal act by far than terminating her early pregnancy would have been. I had taken an oath to save human lives when I became a doctor, not to destroy them.”
Vowing that he would oblige the next time a desperate patient asked for an abortion, Keemer went to the top abortionist on the East Coast, “Dr. G,” for training and supplies. At the time, vacuum aspiration was not available and dilation and curettage required anesthesia. The other method was the application of Leunbach’s Paste which, injected across the cervix into the uterus, precipitated a miscarriage within 24 hours. Keemer enhanced the composition of the paste in collaboration with his father and improved the sterility of the technique. He also added a next-day home visit to the patient to make sure all went as expected.
In the late 1930s, Keemer went to New York City looking for a paying medical practice that would include hospital privileges. He found his colleagues—black doctors—working as railway porters at night to make ends meet. Chicago was no better. It was in Detroit, where tens of thousands of auto workers had been unionized as a result of the great sit-down strikes of 1936-37, that Keemer found he could make a living. Additionally, the county welfare system was paying for doctors’ visits.
Keemer set up a practice in Detroit that included performing abortions. At first, his patients were the relatives of black physicians. But, since he was the only physician performing safe abortions in a clean clinical setting, the referrals multiplied. Considering it his particular duty to assist poor and working-class women, Keemer described his patients: indigent women for whom a third or fifth or seventh child would be a disaster; women who would lose their jobs and homes by continuing a pregnancy; young women unable to finish their education who would raise a child in abject poverty; women who would resort to back-alley abortions or attempt self-abortion that could end in mutilation, infection and death.
In her book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 (1997), Professor Leslie Reagan wrote of Keemer’s practice:
“The fee Keemer charged for his first abortion in the late 1930s was $15; by the 1960s he charged on a sliding scale up to $125. If the procedure failed, Keemer returned the fee. In the unusual case where a dilation and curettage was needed, Keemer sent the woman to the hospital, called in a specialist, and paid all fees as well as any money lost by the patient in missing work. Keemer protected his patients by providing after-care; his sense of financial responsibility protected him from complaints and legal interference.”
Defying the Jim Crow Military
During World War II, Keemer received a notification letter, sent to doctors at the time, instructing them either to enlist in the military as a physician or else be drafted into the Army as a private. Keemer went to enlist as a physician in the Navy but was ridiculed with racial slurs and told that as a black man he could only mop floors or work in the kitchen. When he was later drafted into the Army as a private, Keemer refused induction, stating, “I will not be drafted as a private since I have been turned down as an officer in the navy because of my color. I’ll go to jail first.”
He came under enormous pressure to submit, and not only from FBI interrogation. He was urged to give in from all sides. Keemer recalled a local NAACP leader arguing: “God damn it, Keemer, this system has flaws, but it’s the best in the world and some of us Negroes are doing quite well by it. Don’t spoil it for us.” He received an equally patriotic appeal from a representative of the reformist Communist Party (CP).
After June 1941, under the direction of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, the CP in the U.S. peddled the lie that World War II was a “great democratic war against fascism” and was among the most rabid supporters of American imperialism. Having long abandoned any shred of Marxist class principle, the Stalinist CP championed government strikebreaking, supported the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps and, as they did in Keemer’s case, opposed the fight against Jim Crow segregation in the military. In contrast, as Keemer recounted, only one person “came not to lecture me but to help me win my struggle. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party.”
Unlike the CP, the Trotskyists of the SWP remained true to the program of revolutionary proletarian internationalism. The SWP recognized that World War II, like World War I, was a conflict between the imperialist powers to redivide the world. Calling for the defeat of all the imperialist combatants, the SWP at the same time steadfastly fought for the defense of the Soviet degenerated workers state despite its Stalinist bureaucratic misleaders. On the home front in the U.S., the Trotskyists championed the cause of working-class struggle, the fight for black rights and the defense of all the oppressed.
The SWP referred Keemer to an ACLU lawyer, who went after the draft board for racial discrimination. Newspapers ran stories about his case and letters came from other black people congratulating him on his stand. As Keemer wrote: “The ones that moved me most came from black soldiers overseas who informed me that racism was being practiced even on the front lines in this so-called ‘war against racist Nazi Germany’.” When Keemer’s case finally went to court, the prosecutor moved to dismiss the charges. The draft board dropped the induction order. But the FBI continued to hound Keemer and pump his friends and associates for information about him. Keemer was characteristically unintimidated.
Inside the Socialist Workers Party
Keemer’s discussions with SWP members convinced him that racial oppression and imperialist war were inherent to the capitalist system. He joined the party in 1943, expressing his commitment to the fight to replace “capitalism with socialism wherein every man and every woman would be guaranteed a satisfying function in society and no person would be allowed to parasitize another.”
Under the pen name Charles Jackson, Keemer wrote weekly articles in the SWP’s newspaper, the Militant, some of which are reprinted in a collection of writings from the SWP press called Fighting Racism in World War II (1980). His writings illustrated the profound contradiction between the American rulers’ false claim of defending “democracy” and the brutal reality of workers being sent to die in the bosses’ war for imperialist plunder and domination. In “The Case of Milton Henry” (6 May 1944) about a black second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps who was court-martialed and discharged, Keemer wrote:
“The segregated, second-class, Jim Crow army ‘for Negroes’ is a dead giveaway to the hypocritical character of the high-sounding phrases such as ‘liberation of oppressed people,’ ‘four freedoms,’ etc., which are being applied to this worldwide slaughter.”
Other articles by Keemer included: “Plight of Japanese-Americans” protesting the mass internment of Japanese Americans; “Hellish Homecoming” on the shameful treatment of black servicemen arriving home after WWII; and “Nigerian Workers Set the Tune” about strikes and revolts against colonial rule in Africa. Keemer’s pamphlet A Practical Program to Kill Jim Crow sold 10,000 copies in three weeks, a record for the SWP. This fact was noted in the FBI records that Keemer acquired decades later under the Freedom of Information Act.
Keemer’s autobiography describes the physical attacks on SWP members doing political work under the hyper-patriotic, repressive conditions of World War II. He recalled chairing a party meeting when a firebomb was thrown up the stairway and attendees narrowly escaped death. Eighteen of his comrades, leaders of the SWP and the Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544, were imprisoned for their opposition to the war. Throughout this time, Keemer continued to work three days a week as a doctor, still performing abortions.
By 1946 Keemer had built a powerful SWP local in Detroit centered on militant black workers. He proposed that the party launch an independent organization committed to the struggle for black equality—a transitional organization to address the felt needs of black people and to recruit them to a fighting Trotskyist program. Keemer’s proposal was referred to the SWP’s Trotsky School meeting where members of the National Committee, the party’s leadership body, were in attendance. It was roundly rejected.
Instead, the party adopted a doomed policy of joining the thoroughly legalistic, petty-bourgeois NAACP—the same NAACP that had urged Keemer to capitulate and be drafted as a private in the Jim Crow Army. Black militants who had broken with the liberal conciliationism of the NAACP in order to become Marxists were reluctant to pursue work in that organization. Not long after his proposal was defeated, Keemer resigned from the SWP, expressing his demoralization “that the party was making little headway.”
One SWP National Committee member who was dissatisfied with the rejection of Keemer’s proposal and the party’s orientation to the NAACP was Richard Fraser. As he wrote, “The basic elements in the NAACP argument, which had been put forward by all the leading people, was that they couldn’t believe or admit to the maturity of the existing consciousness among the hundreds and thousands of blacks, who were militantly pressing toward integration” (“On Transitional Organizations” [1983] printed in “In Memoriam, Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990). Fraser’s concerns led him to undertake a serious study of black oppression in the U.S., concluding that the SWP lacked a coherent program which corresponded to the actual living struggle of black people for integration and equality.
Against the liberal integrationists who looked to pressure the racist, bourgeois rulers to grant equality for black people, and also against the despairing program of black nationalism, Fraser argued that the only road to black liberation lies in the revolutionary proletarian struggle to overthrow the capitalist system in which the vicious segregation and oppression of black people are rooted. [For more information, see “In Defense of Revolutionary Integrationism,” Spartacist (English Edition) No. 49-50, Winter 1993-94.] Fraser was a mentor to the Spartacist League on this strategic question, and we carry forward his program of revolutionary integrationism.
After leaving the SWP, Keemer still considered himself a “sympathizer with international socialism.” He redoubled his medical practice, continuing to risk his freedom and his medical license by performing abortions, which had become the mainstay of his practice.
From Jailed Abortion “Conspirator” to Vindicated Hero
In 1956, Detroit homicide detectives raided Keemer’s clinic and arrested him for conspiracy to perform abortions. The case came before a fiercely conservative Roman Catholic judge, and Keemer’s patients were threatened with five years in prison unless they testified against him. Only four women agreed, three of whom testified that the abortions were performed to save their lives. The prosecution could not find a single doctor to testify against Keemer. However, one white female patient was relentlessly bullied by the prosecution until she agreed that she was unsure whether it was a speculum or “something” else that had been inserted in her vagina during treatment. The prosecutor’s insinuation of rape was an explosive appeal to white racism. Keemer was convicted and sentenced to up to five years in prison and his medical license revoked.
After a month in the notorious Jackson Prison, he was transferred to the Detroit House of Corrections. Here a “high prison officer” arranged for Keemer to perform an abortion on the officer’s daughter. This was not the first time that a government official, including police, referred family members to Keemer for a safe abortion. In prison, Keemer taught reading classes, worked as a librarian and assisted in group therapy for drug addicts (as well as fermenting “spud juice” moonshine in the attic over the library). After 14 months behind bars, he was paroled but barred from working in the medical field in any capacity.
In the 1960s, Keemer participated in civil rights marches in Atlanta and Birmingham and met with Malcolm X. Recalling his conversations with young civil rights activists, he wrote of being “struck by their militant attitudes,” concluding “that the nonviolent strategy of Martin Luther King would not win support of the militant youth.”
Times were changing. After Keemer repeatedly petitioned to have his Michigan medical license restored, the medical board eventually gave him that victory, determining that he should never have been convicted in the first place. Back in Detroit, Keemer resumed performing abortions and became active in the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. For the first time, Keemer realized the parallels between women’s oppression and black oppression. He aggressively addressed the argument, still heard today, that abortion is genocide against black people. Among others in the civil rights movement, Jesse Jackson and Dick Gregory argued that abortion was a plot to decrease the black population and the black vote.
Keemer also took on the anti-woman chauvinism of the black nationalists. Addressing their meetings, he argued that women, not men, have the right to choose: “If a sister chooses to defer her family until later, she goddamned well has a right to the same safe and legal treatment as a middle-class white woman.” Taking on the retrograde idea that the primary role of women was to breed more black children, Keemer exposed the nationalists for relegating black women to the same role of forced childbearing that had enriched the slaveholders. At the same time, he vigorously opposed forced abortion and forced sterilization. In one 1973 letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Keemer denounced the forced sterilization of eleven teenagers in a federally funded birth control clinic in Alabama.
By 1972, New York and California had legalized abortion, and Michigan was having a referendum to do the same. Ten days before the vote, Keemer’s office was raided and patients, staff, doctors and nurses were arrested. The abortion referendum failed, but there was an outpouring of support for Keemer. His patients filed suit against the Catholic prosecutor and the five cops responsible for the arrests, and they won.
In the context of mass mobilizations for women’s rights and ongoing protests against the Vietnam War, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion in the first trimester. Congratulations to Keemer poured in and he basked in the glow of vindication, only regretting that his father, who had supported him throughout his life, had not lived to see it. Nonetheless, Keemer warned: “I can’t believe that the struggle will be over and that they will just lie down and give up. We can expect them to resort to all kinds of means to bypass and to defeat this new-won freedom for women.” No sooner had abortion been legalized than the war against it commenced—from the halls of Congress to state legislatures, and the firebombing of clinics and murder of abortion doctors by anti-abortion fanatics. Today, the limited access to abortion granted in 1973 hangs by a thread.
Dr. Ed Keemer had a profound understanding that the denial of access to safe, legal abortion especially targets poor, minority and working-class women. According to Keemer’s autobiography, he performed some 30,000 abortions under conditions of illegality, defiantly risking his career, his freedom and his life to help these women. It is a fitting juncture to resurrect the story of his life to inform and inspire a new generation with the understanding that any gains for women under capitalism can only be won through mass social struggle. And these gains can be extended and deepened only when the capitalist system in which exploitation, black oppression and the subordination of women are rooted has been overthrown. Only in an egalitarian socialist society will every man and woman, in Keemer’s words, “be guaranteed a satisfying function in society and no person would be allowed to parasitize another.”
Below is an excerpt from Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. The selection is from an article titled “The Fetish of Cosmetics,” written in 1954 by Joseph Hansen (1910-79), a leader of the Socialist Workers Party.
BY JOSEPH HANSEN
Long ago in analyzing the strange powers of money, Marx called attention to this projection by which human beings see their relations not as relations but as things which they endow with remarkable powers. Indicating the parallel to certain magic objects in primitive beliefs and religions he called it fetishism. What we have in cosmetics is a fetish, a particular fetish in the general fetishism that exists in the world of commodities. The special power that cosmetics have derives from the fact that in addition to economic relations, sexual relations attach to them. That is the real source of the “beauty” both men and women see in cosmetics. …
At a certain age, girls—sometime very young ones—begin trying out lipstick, powder, and rouge. In almost every case, this either causes or is associated with a sharpening of relations with their parents. At the same time they often seem to leap ahead of their age group so far as their former boy associates are concerned. If they can get away with it, they go out with youths considerably older than they are. The reason such girls use cosmetics is to facilitate this by appearing older than they are.
What they seek to say is quite obvious. Through the magic of cosmetics they express their wish to cut short their childhood and youth and achieve the most desirable thing in the world—adulthood. Why they want to be adults can be surmised in the light of how capitalist society treats its youth.
Precisely at the age when the sexual drives begin to appear and an intense need is felt for both knowledge and experience, capitalist society denies both of them. Just when the developing human being must set out to establish normal relations with the opposite sex, capitalist society through the family intervenes and attempts to suppress the urge.
The relation with the other sex thus tends to become distorted and the interest that belongs to the relation shifts to a considerable degree to a symbol. The powers and allure of the relation—some at least—are likewise transferred to the symbol. Lipstick, for instance, comes to signify adulthood; that is, the adult capacity and freedom to engage in activities forbidden to children. By smearing her lips the child says, this gives me the power to do what I want.
Naturally it’s only a wish and an imaginary satisfaction—or at least that’s what most parents imagine it to be or wish to rate it as, and the real power of the drive toward relations with the opposite sex, disguised by the fetish, is not always recognized. The symbol becomes beautiful or ugly, beneficent or malignant. In Antoinette Konikow’s youth [1880s], for instance, lipstick was “indecent.” Today it is a “must.”
This interesting alternation in time of the aesthetics of cosmetics is accompanied by an even more striking duality in its powers. To a child, as we have noted, cosmetics are a means of hiding and disguising youth, a means of appearing to be at the age when it is socially acceptable to gratify the urge for knowledge and especially experience in sexual relations.
Thus the same fetish displays opposite powers at one and the same time—the power to make old women young and young women old. Mother uses cosmetics to hide her age and bring out her youth by covering up the dark circles under her eyes. Daughter uses them to hide her youth and even touches up her eyes with blue shading to bring out her adult beauty.
Now what shall we say of children who use cosmetics because of the social necessity to look old: Shall they be denied that right? My inclination would be to go ahead and use cosmetics if they feel like it. At the same time I would be strongly tempted to explain what a fetish is, how it comes to be constructed, what is really behind it and how this particular society we live in denies youth the most elementary right of all—the right to grow naturally into a normal sexual relationship—and gives them instead the fetish of cosmetics as an appropriate companion to the fetish of money.
The application of Marxist method has thus forced cosmetics to yield two important results. We find ourselves touching two problems of utmost moment in capitalist society—the interrelation of men and women and the interrelation of youth and adults; that is, the whole problem of the family. In addition, we have discovered that these interrelations as shaped by capitalist society are bad, for it is from the lack of harmony and freedom in them that the fetish of cosmetics arises.
Existence of the fetish, in turn, helps maintain the current form of interrelations by creating a diversionary channel and an illusory palliative. Thus we have uncovered a vicious cycle. Bad interrelations feeds the fetish of cosmetics; the fetish of cosmetics feeds bad interrelations.
Our application of Marxist method has given us even more. If we deny that beauty is inherent in a thing, then it must be found in a human relation; or at least its source must be found in such a relation. Doesn’t that mean that the beauty associated with sex is at bottom the beauty not of a thing but of a relation? If we want to understand that beauty we must seek it first in the truth of the relation; that is, through science.
Is it really so difficult to see that in the society of the future, the society of socialism where all fetishes are correctly viewed as barbaric, that beauty will be sought in human relationships and that after science has turned its light into the depths that seem so dark to us—the depths of the mind—the great new arts will be developed in those virgin fields?
When reading the political memoirs of bourgeois politicians, or opportunist or sectarian figures in the workers’ movement the truth very often takes a back seat. Accordingly the past is not to be studied in order to learn any lessons from it, rather it is to be reinvented in order to preserve the infallibility of the author. This is most definitely not the case with Barry Sheppard. Once a central leader of the US Socialist Workers Party (US SWP) and Fourth International he and his partner Caroline Lund resigned from the party in 1988 in protest against its political degeneration and increasingly sectarian and cultist behaviour under the leadership of Jack Barnes (pictured). Even though for many years he went along with this political degeneration and has to take partial responsibility, to his credit Sheppard fully accepts his misdeeds and does not try excuse himself in any way. Taken as a whole the two volumes of Sheppard’s political memoirs represent a history of the US SWP and of the proletarian class struggle in both the US and the world generally over three decades as seen through the eyes of a participant.
To briefly summarise Volume 1, dealing with the 1960s and early 1970s. Amongst many things Sheppard takes us through the Cuban revolution, the black civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the growth of the women’s and lesbian and gay movements. The US SWP certainly did not get everything right in this period. But it was definitely a revolutionary organisation that actively intervened in a broadly positive way into the class struggle and the major political and social movements that arose though struggle. At the time the party was also the largest revolutionary organisation on the US left with well over a thousand members. How therefore can we square this with the burnt out shell of a sect that the US SWP and its satellite organisations (sometimes referred to as the Pathfinder Tendency) have become today?
To return to Volume 2. Sheppard deals with the internal factional struggle inside the Fourth International in the 1970s in which the US SWP leadership played a prominent role as part of an international minority against the majority leadership. The factional struggle was triggered by the opposition of the US SWP leadership and others to the disastrous line of prolonged rural guerrilla warfare throughout Latin America adopted by the Fourth International at its 1969 World Congress. Though initially focussed on Latin America the factional struggle spread to other areas including Europe before both the majority and minority factions dissolved in 1978 when the Fourth International majority made a full self-criticism on Latin America. In all this the US SWP saw itself as the defender of Trotskyist orthodoxy against the Fourth International majority. The Fourth International had grown substantially as a consequence of the post 1968 political radicalisation and it would probably be fair to say that the majority was much more influenced by this post 1968 generation and therefore more open to new ideas. Not that being open to new ideas is in and of itself a bad thing but clearly some of these ideas such as those that informed the guerrillaist turn in Latin America were not only wrong but often disastrous in their implementation.
Permanent revolution repudiated
Within a decade though all this had changed in a way that few could have foreseen in advance. In the early 1980s it was the ‘orthodox Trotskyist’ leadership of the US SWP that repudiated the programme of permanent revolution as originally put forward by Trotsky in favour of Lenin’s pre 1917 formulation of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Peasantry. In doing so they regurgitated many old slanders from the Stalinists and others concerning Trotsky’s so called underestimation of the peasantry. At the time their rationale was that permanent revolution was a sectarian obstacle to building a new revolutionary international with the ‘three jewels’ of the Caribbean; namely the Communist Party of Cuba, the FSLN of Nicaragua, and the New Jewel Movement of Grenada. Not surprisingly many US SWP members opposed the new line against permanent revolution but in due course all were bureaucratically expelled. However as Sheppard points out this line of building a new international was already virtually redundant by the mid-1980s. Firstly the New Jewel Movement imploded into internecine warfare culminating in the murder of Maurice Bishop in 1983, and latterly the increasingly rightwards trajectory of the FSLN in power. Accompanying this was also the so called turn to industry which in practise led to the vast majority of members who could not or would not get industrial jobs being eventually hounded out of the organisation. Not only that but many members who did get industrial jobs also left because of its sectarian practise, including for example its position of forbidding members from standing for elected positions in trade unions.
At the time in the 1980s many of us thought the rejection of permanent revolution was an adaptation to Stalinism that would lead to the US SWP moving in an opportunist direction. We were wrong as the exact opposite has happened. For all the bluster from Jack Barnes and others about breaking with past sectarian shibboleths, it has in fact become increasingly sectarian, abstentionist and divorced from reality over the last three decades. As one example of its increasingly bizarre politics it now actively opposes Palestine solidarity activists who call for a boycott of Israeli goods on the grounds that this is being anti-Semitic! Where once the SWP was the only serious force on the revolutionary left in the US, today it is an irrelevant sect. Although he perhaps might not put this as sharply as I would all this is covered by Sheppard in the final chapters of the book.
Minority representation
There are a number of issues that I feel though that Sheppard could perhaps been a bit more reflective and self-critical about. Firstly concerning the expulsion of the Internationalist Tendency (supporters of the Fourth International Majority) from the US SWP in the 1970s. He defends its expulsion on the grounds that it functioned as a faction with its own discipline over and above that of the US SWP, this may or may not have been true. However at the same time he accepts that the US SWP made an error by failing to give the Internationalist Tendency minority representation on its National Committee. But surely it should be a norm in revolutionary proletarian organisations that minorities are given representation on leadership bodies. If they were not deemed worthy of representation as a minority on its leadership bodies why then should the members of the Internationalist Tendency feel any loyalty to the US SWP as an organisation? Certainly as far as I am aware during that period co thinkers of the US SWP were always given representation on leadership bodies in sections of the Fourth International where they were a minority, such as in Britain.
Secondly, perhaps Sheppard could have attempted some analysis at how mini bureaucracies can develop within revolutionary organisations. Normally when we think of bureaucracy we think of the labour or trade union bureaucracy or a bureaucratised workers state, in other words the bureaucracy as an irreformably counterrevolutionary layer. Revolutionary organisations can and do build up apparatuses with full-timers and necessarily so. The danger is that the organisation creates an entrenched layer of full time leaders, separate from the working class, who feel they have a divine right to lead the organisation, and who accordingly use bureaucratic methods (expulsion of oppositionists etc) to maintain control. This is bureaucratisation of a qualitatively lesser order to that of the labour or Stalinist bureaucracy as we are certainly not talking about class traitors or anything like the same degree of privileges, but nevertheless it is very real and can be highly destructive.
Finally, I have no idea what his current position is regarding this Sheppard could also have said something about Mark Curtis. Curtis was a US SWP member convicted and imprisoned in 1988 for the sexual assault of a young woman. Unless one can seriously entertain the idea that the state would concoct a frame up where the key prosecution witnesses were a young woman of fifteen and her eleven year old brother than it should be quite clear that Curtis was guilty as charged. The US SWP though claimed otherwise and launched a campaign to free Curtis on the grounds that his conviction was a frame up. To their discredit many individuals and organisations on the US and international left were suckered into endorsing this campaign, though some endorsers recanted once they became familiar with the facts of the case. At the time of writing in Britain we are witnessing the possible implosion of the British SWP over allegations of rape or sexual assault or harassment by a leading member of that organisation. If we can learn anything from Mark Curtis it is the fact that men who see themselves as revolutionaries can in some instances be guilty of extreme misogyny up to and including violence against women.
From The Militant, Vol. 10, No. 28, July 13 1946, p. 3.
Antoinette Konikow was a revolutionary socialist to the last day of her life. A striking incident the night before she died indicates her spirit.
One of her friends in the medical profession, a leading Boston psychiatrist, visited her. Antoinette has long been famous in the medical world. But the conversation quickly turned to questions far more important than shop talk. Antoinette raised the question of dialectical materialism. The doctor responded with an attack on the dialect method claiming that it has not been borne out by latest developments in science.
Antoinette did not spend much time on the defensive. Almost 60 years as a Marxist had taught her the extraordinary importance of the dialectic method, and all her experiences in the medical field as well as study in other sciences had only confirmed what she had learned from the great Marxist teachers. She opened up with a counter-attack that quickly won her the upper hand. And then to pursue her advantage she persuaded her foe in dialectics to continue the subject the following night.
Antoinette wanted to pass on to the younger generation the lessons and truths gleaned in a long lifetime of hard experience. Three years ago, she retired from active practice, intending to devote the remainder of her life entirely to recording the most important things she had learned.
She assembled the great mass of notes she had jotted down from time to time and began putting them in order. First on the agenda was her memoirs. After writing about her childhood and youth in Czarist Russia and Germany as a background, she took up her political recollections. These begin with her impressions of George Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Marxism and teacher of Lenin.
Still Learning—At 76!
To facilitate her work she decided last winter to learn touch typing—at the age of 76! Her letters to the Political Committee changed all at once from the long-familiar, difficult-to-decipher handwriting to neatly typed communications.
But she did not succeed in finishing her memoirs. The considerable body of material she leaves will have to be assorted and woven together by someone else.
Her main objective in this work was to leave the younger generation with a true impression of more than a half century of revolutionary socialism. She had seen what damage opportunism can do. With her own eyes she saw the Second International brought to ruin and betrayal. In the light of this experience she understood to the full the need for battling Stalinism tooth and nail, for the Stalinist regime not only spreads the same poison of opportunism as the Second International, but wields totalitarian state power with utter ruthlessness. Consequently she devoted a great deal of her last days to analyzing the revolutionary period of the Communist International in order to show what the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky really set out to do. The task of her generation, she felt, was to hand on the program of revolutionary socialism as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky had shaped it. Her study of the First Four Congresses of the Communist International resulted in an outline for class use and much additional unpublished material.
She wanted especially to write down her impressions of the Bolshevik generation that led the October 1917 revolution. Many of them she knew personally. They were the men cruelly slandered by Stalin as fascist “dogs gone mad.” She knew them to be victims of Stalin, framed-up in the Moscow trials organized by the Kremlin dictator.
In 1940 she visited Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia at Coyoacan. There the friendship with the great revolutionary couple, already many years old,: was still more firmly cemented. The assassination of Trotsky by a GPU agent was a terrible personal blow to Antoinette. Despite her age, Antoinette followed the press very closely. She intervened actively in political events, following the Militant and Fourth International and sending in her criticisms and opinions.
Recently she pointed out the necessity for the European Trotskyist movement to start up a paper in the Russian language. She mentioned the hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking refugees now in various countries. The paper, she thought, should be popularly written, and even if her own Russian wasn’t “classical” she was willing to become a contributor.
Antoinette spent her last days in the kind of surroundings she loved most, a cottage on the shores of Morse Pond, a beautiful lake at Wellesley, Massachusetts. The green surroundings reminded her of the Black Forest country of Germany where she one lived. She particularly admired a great pine tree standing between the porch and the lake. Some time ago a bolt of lightning ripped through the branches of this tree. After every storm Antoinette came out to see hour it had weathered the ordeal. But it always stood, sturdy and strong, ruggedly beautiful despite the scars of time, wind and lightning.
Busy With Party Tasks
It was here that Antoinette Konikow died, busy with party tasks up to the very end.
Antoinette was not only a great teacher and leader of the Trotskyist movement. She was an Integral part of the Boston branch of the Socialist Workers Party. The members counted her as their closest friend and advisor. Most of them she had nurtured as budding revolutionary socialist politicians of the working class, and she took great personal interest in the development of each one. Her classes in speaking, in the principles of Marxism, and in the history of the movement gave most of the Boston comrades their first insight into Trotskyism.
No one saw through sham and pretense quicker than Antoinette. No one had more contempt for the traitors, the liars and the tyrants who occupy the high places. No one was more revolted than she over the medals showered by Stalin on his sycophants. But that did not prevent her from seeing the value of genuine leaders and of appreciation well earned. In fact she probably understood the pricelessness of these things all the more because she was a real iconoclast. One of the most moving incidents in her political life was her reaction to an autographed photograph and letter from Leon Trotsky on her Fiftieth Anniversary in the Marxist movement. In response to the tribute paid her by those present on the occasion, she responded:
Trotsky’s Warm Tribute
“The comrades have received me with warmth and friendship. It gives me tremendous happiness. The kind words written by Comrade Trotsky on his picture presented to me remind me of the greatest honor—the honor that was! —given to comrades in Russia, the Order of Lenin pinned upon their breasts. I feel as if Comrade Trotsky has pinned the Order of Trotsky on my breast! Not that I am a hero- worshipper—for I have helped to pull down too many heroes from their pedestals, But in the last ten years of darkness, of despair, the words of Leon Trotsky have been like a bell for a ship in distress, leading it to safe harbor.”
March 14 marked the 135th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. We print below excerpts from the graveside speech given by his cothinker and longtime comrade Friedrich Engels in London’s Highgate Cemetery on 17 March 1883.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.
Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated—and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially—in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries.
Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general….
For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival….
His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work!
—Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” Marx-Engels Reader, W.W. Norton & Company (1978)
News reports of Tokyo’s probable Winter Olympics boycott over human rights were especially crassly timed, coinciding with the anniversary of a Japanese atrocity committed in China in 1937 that still affects the country deeply.
Monday marked the 84th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, or what is sometimes known as ‘The Rape of Nanjing’, during which Japan’s imperial army was estimated to have killed over 200,000 Chinese people and brutalized many more on seizing the city of that name. The atrocity took place during the Second Sino-Japanese War, in which Japan sought to conquer and occupy all of China.
Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of Chinese history ought to know that the massacre is the single most sensitive and traumatic event for the country in modern times, not least because – from China’s perspective – Japan has not atoned or duly apologized for its atrocities.
Despite this, on this most sombre of anniversaries, it emerged that Japan was considering joining a diplomatic boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing on the grounds of human rights, alongside the United States and other countries in the Anglosphere.
This is a slap in the face for China on multiple levels, not least because Beijing provided crucial support to Tokyo during this summer’s Olympics. For Japan to take a moral high ground over China on the matter of human rights is seen as undignified, insensitive and arrogant in the wake of such a horrific memory as Nanjing.
After I highlighted on Twitter the hypocrisy of Japan’s stance on human rights, one person replied, stating, “It was 1937.” The logic of that reductive ‘argument’ reflects a familiar theme in Anglophone thinking: that misdemeanours carried out in their name in the past simply don’t matter anymore.
The obvious retort is this: had it been China that had committed such an act long ago, would it now be treated in the same way as Japan? Would its misdeeds be forgotten? Absolutely not. There seems to be a logical fallacy at play here – that the passing of time is somehow equal to the deliverance of justice, because some countries are among the ‘righteous’ ones.
Yet if we applied that logic to, let’s say, the Holocaust, it would be widely – and rightly – condemned as outrageous. Does time undo the severity of the atrocity? Of course it doesn’t. So, why should China simply be told to forget about Nanjing, when – in very much the opposite fashion to what happened with Germany and the Nazis after the war – the offending country has never truly had to face any kind of reckoning for what it did.
When the Empire of Japan surrendered to the United States, the existing imperial regime was simply reincorporated into a new system. The fact that the US had exclusive jurisdiction over Tokyo, did not have to bargain with the Soviet Union in the way it did with Germany, and sought to immediately transform it into a strategic asset to supplement American dominance in Asia explains why Japan largely got a free pass on its wartime barbarity.
And because of that, the wounds the Japanese inflicted on Asia haven’t been able to heal. Whether in Korea or in China, the sentiment is the same. While, in practice, Japan and China have learnt to live with each other – trade between Tokyo and Beijing, for example, is huge – the traumatic experience of events such as Nanjing has left an indelible mark on China’s contemporary national identity.
The Communist Party prides itself as having participated in the anti-Japanese struggle and restored the sovereignty of the nation against the backdrop of a century of foreign aggression, during which Nanjing was the most horrific atrocity committed on Chinese soil.
The scarring is so deep that the anniversary of Nanjing has become a time of collective national mourning throughout China. Every time an elderly survivor of the event passes away, it is reported widely by media. For Japan to ignore this and take the moral high ground against China is, by default, an explicit insult to every single Chinese person. It is seen as the perfect illustration of Japan’s lack of remorse for and sensitivity about its imperial legacy, which it has enshrouded in its relationship with the US.
Nonetheless, with the rise of China, many people are hopeful the shift in the balance of power means Japan’s day of self-introspection will not be far away. While once Japan was an economic giant, now China’s economy is three times its size. And the gulf only widens with each passing year. By the end of 2021, it’s predicted China’s GDP will have grown by 8%, while Japan’s will have contracted by 3%. In 2020, China’s grew by 2.1%, while Japan’s fell by 4.59%.
This economic trajectory makes clear why, on the back of such brutal historical experiences, China is so proud of its achievements – and why, on the other hand, Tokyo ultimately fears Beijing.
Born poor on Belfast’s Shankill Road in the midst of the Great Depression was certainly no entré to a life that would cross paths with Bertrand Russell, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. Ernest (Ernie) Tate would nevertheless work closely with luminaries such as these and many others who, like him, opposed the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. A lifelong revolutionary socialist, Tate was a leading organizer of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, worked for Russell’s Peace Foundation and its International War Crimes Tribunal, and partnered with the then leftist, David Horowitz (now a prominent conservative spokesman), in taking the anti-war side at an Oxford Union debate.
This was quite something for a lad who dropped out of high school before he was 14. As a teenager Tate apprenticed as a machinist’s attendant in the Belfast Mills. At that young age, Ernie could look forward to a life of dreary, non-union factory labour, his day commencing with the screech of workplace sirens. Keen to escape this fate, a 21-year-old Tate emigrated to Canada in 1955.
Ernie Tate (front left) and Toronto Hydro strikers, 1989. Photo by Jess MacKenzie.
Young Ernie soon crossed paths with Ross Dowson, proprietor of the Toronto Labour Bookshop, a pioneering figure in the small Canadian movement of dissident communists who aligned with Leon Trotsky. Dowson, whose brothers Murray and Hugh, were also part of this oppositional politics, ran for mayor in Toronto under the banner, “Vote Dowson, Vote for a Labour Mayor, Vote for the TROTSKYIST Candidate.” His campaigns, at their highwater mark in the late 1940s, garnered 17 percent of the vote.
Tate, who landed his first job at Toronto’s premier department store because his Ulster lineage seemingly aligned him with the store’s patriarch, Timothy Eaton, quit in disgust when he found out that his two-week paycheque totalled $60. He found better paying work in a variety of factory employments at Maple Leaf Milling, Radio Valve, and Amalgamated Electric. But Tate longed for more out of life than a mundane job.
Joining and Learning
The young man soon joined Dowson’s Socialist Educational League. A stern taskmaster, Dowson schooled the new recruit in the rudimentary texts of revolutionary Marxism, tutored Tate in public speaking, and assigned him tasks of writing for and selling the League’s newspaper, Workers Vanguard.
Not yet 25, Ernie’s competence and commitment attracted the attention of the international leadership of the Trotskyist movement. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States called on him to help in recruiting youth in the late 1950s. When in New York on this assignment, Ernie met Hannah Lerner and she returned to Toronto with him, where they married in 1957. During these years, Tate also twice attended an SWP educational centre, the New Jersey Mountain Spring Camp, his last participation in the classes offered there being in 1960.
In Canada, Dowson sent Tate on cross-country tours. He lived out of a truck, and sold revolutionary literature to pay for his meals. It was “missionary work” for socialism. He saw the country, made contact with workers, and crossed paths with all manner of militants, including Communist Party members fleeing the Soviet Union’s sinking political ship. In the aftermath of Nikita Khruschev’s 1956 speech revealing Stalin’s atrocities many dissident and disillusioned communists were finally ready to talk to a Trotskyist revolutionary. It was all, in Tate’s words, a “terrific education.”
At the height of the Cold War, in which Moscow and Washington seemed trapped in an irrational race to stockpile more and more nuclear weapons, Tate took umbrage at the building of an official fallout shelter at Queen’s Park. He brazenly defaced the ridiculously inconsequential plywood and cement structure, spray painting “Ban the Bomb” on one of its walls. Hauled into court, and fined $50 for public vandalism, Tate was unrepentant. He declared that he was prepared to take to graffiti again if it might impress upon people the necessity to halt the arms race.
The Toronto Socialist Educational League grew, merged with like-minded radicals in Vancouver, and became the League for Socialist Action (LSA). Its members played a leading role in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the early 1960s. They also harboured black radicals like the Monroe County, North Carolina advocate of armed self-defence against racist attack, Robert F. Williams, when he fled the United States. On the run from the FBI, Williams was designated “armed and dangerous.” The LSA harboured the African-American fugitive, distributed Williams’s magazine, The Crusader, and helped him abscond to Cuba.
Tate spent much of the early 1960s on the west coast. Hannah and he parted amicably, but the two did not divorce until the 1980s. Now partnered with another comrade, Ruth Robertson, Tate was charged with consolidating the Vancouver local of the LSA.
He faced an uphill battle to bring warring factions in the small Trotskyist milieu together. His difficulties were compounded by the New Democratic Party (NDP), which the LSA’s members joined to participate in political campaigns and causes. Too often, the Trotskyists found themselves ostracized for their left-wing views, even expelled.
As an unpaid organizer, Tate scrambled to make ends meet. He lived from hand-to-mouth, the material situation quite dire. Ruth experienced a difficult pregnancy, culminating in the birth of a son, Michael, in 1963.
Picket line skirmishes often left Tate responsible for the well-being of arrested comrades. Ernie himself received a suspended sentence of four months on one “obstruction” charge. If there was camaraderie aplenty – Tate enjoying the company of poets like Milton Acorn and Al Purdy who were sympathetic to the LSA cause – Vancouver was nonetheless a difficult assignment.
Tate loved the west coast city and the surrounding natural setting, one of great physical beauty. And the dreary rains reminded him of his Belfast home. But the internal political turmoil dividing comrades in the branch rarely let up. Things worsened when Ernie and Ruth separated, and she departed for Toronto with their son.
UK in the Sixties
With the SWP looking for someone to relocate from North America to London, England to consolidate those sympathetic to its section of the movement, Tate volunteered for the assignment. Arriving in London in 1965, Ernie rented an office for Pioneer Books. It consisted of a few rooms above a butcher’s shop at 8 Toynbee Street, and offered a range of Marxist literature and SWP publications not generally available in London.
Ernie consolidated a relationship with Jess MacKenzie, a Scottish comrade who had also emigrated to Canada. She came to London in late 1966 on her way to a Brussels Youth Conference. Jess took over running the bookstore, freeing Ernie to spend more time on his organizing work. Mackenzie and Tate would be inseparable for the next 55 years.
Tate’s political work in London was to unify disparate forces aligned with the Socialist Workers Party, which was affiliated with what was known as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. World Trotskyism had fragmented over the course of the 1950s with different groups claiming to represent the Fourth International that Trotsky had founded in the late 1930s.
In Britain there were three established Trotskyist groups – the International Socialists, Militant, and the Socialist Labour League (SLL) – which also claimed membership in another wing of the Fourth International. Tate’s task was to regroup those outside of these political organizations, long aligned with their own specific bodies and fractured by differences, many of which Ernie thought either arcane or animated by historic but all too personal antagonisms. This necessarily meant delicate negotiations among fissiparous comrades, as well as challenging established rivals on the Trotskyist left, which the SWP thought could never be assimilated.
It was tough sledding. Tate was physically beaten by members of the SLL outside one of their meetings. He had the temerity to sell a pamphlet criticizing the group’s leader, Gerry Healy.
The hooliganism became an international cause célebré. Tate, who publicized the attack as an assault on workers’ democracy, refused to back down when Healy threatened legal action. In the end, the distinguished Polish Marxist, biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, and future G.M. Trevelyan Lecturer at the University of Cambridge (1966-67), Isaac Deutscher, rallied to Tate’s defence. He used his considerable authority within the emerging New Left of the mid-to-late 1960s to summon Healy to his home and, with Ernie present, upbraided the thuggery of the SLL, foreign as it was to the practice of the socialist movement.
Tate, MacKenzie, and a veteran of British far-left politics, Pat Jordan, established the International Marxist Group (IMG) as the section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in Britain. Jordan was once described by a London newspaper in 1968 as “the most dangerous man in Britain.”
The IMG became the vehicle through which a small contingent of Trotskyists made common cause with a growing youth radicalization and rising opposition to the war in Vietnam. Tate’s organizational acumen and his personal discipline and commitment were in good part responsible for the successes of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. He contributed mightily to the work of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation’s anti-war agitation and its War Crimes Tribunal, conducted in two 1967 sessions in Sweden and Denmark. Sartre’s On Genocide (1968) presented some of the findings.
Protest demonstrations in 1967-68 saw Tate join Jordan and the increasingly prominent New Leftist and former President of the Oxford Union, Tariq Ali, on speakers’ podiums at massive anti-war rallies. Currently one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals, and long associated with the New Left Review, Tariq Ali soon became the visible face of the anti-war movement. Recruited to the IMG by Tate, Ali introduced Ernie to celebrities like Vanessa Redgrave, who lent their support to the growing campaign against the American invasion and bombing of Vietnam.
Tate often accompanied Ali, worried that his friend and comrade would be attacked by right-wing opponents. There were indeed skirmishes in which Ernie was physically assailed. One pitched battled, in London’s Grosvenor Square, was ostensibly the inspiration behind the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards anthem to the moment, “Street Fighting Man”: “Ev’ry where I hear the sound/Of marching charging feet, boy/’Cause summer’s here and the time is right/For fighting in the street, boy.”
At a massive rally in Hyde Park, October 27, 1968, Tate and others addressed a massive throng of 200,000 in what is remembered as one of the great anti-war protests of the 1960s. The Guardian found Ernie anything but a poster-boy for the flamboyant counter-culture of the time. This “able Ulsterman in his early thirties, with unmodishly short dark hair, the black-rimmed spectacles of an advertising executive, and a terse, direct, manner,” seemed an incomprehensible incongruity.
Return to Canada
For all the advances made, and exhilarating struggles, Ernie felt he should return to Canada, where he could secure paid employment and contribute materially to the support of his son. He had originally signed on to devote two years to the work in Britain, and that had stretched into four. Financial support that Tate expected to be forthcoming from the LSA in Canada rarely materialized. So in 1969, Ernie and Jess returned to Toronto, needing some time to recharge their batteries and get themselves on a more secure economic footing.
They found the LSA much changed. It had grown significantly, its membership now in the hundreds. Ross Dowson seemed uninterested in Ernie taking up a paid position within the LSA.
Jess, whose experience in running a bookstore was considerable, was passed over when the organization was looking for someone to oversee their Cumberland Street shop. She found paid employment at Ma Bell and worked with a dedicated corps of women’s liberation activists. They played important roles in advocating for women’s reproductive rights, defending Dr. Henry Morgentaler from vigilante attack and legal assault, and putting out an early women’s liberation newspaper, Velvet Fist.
Ernie and Jess thus remained in the LSA, but distanced themselves somewhat from the leadership. Tate continued to be a member of the International’s Control Commission. The couple remained affiliated with the LSA and its successors for years, outlasting Ross Dowson. Younger LSAers clashed with Dowson over a number of issues, including how to relate to the NDP and Canadian nationalism. Dowson left the organization to form the Forward Group in the early 1970s.
Ernie remained a senior voice within the LSA, advising comrades on the best ways to weather the storm of Dowson’s departure, fuse with other Fourth International-affiliated groups to form the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) in 1977, and move the new organization in more decisively working-class directions.
Eventually, however, Ernie and Jess found that the SWP-affiliated Canadian section of the Trotskyist movement was not what it had once been. The RWL’s “turn to industry,” which Tate had hopes would integrate the Trotskyist movement more effectively with trade unionism and its struggles, never really jelled. Instead it descended into a wooden insistence that all comrades find factory jobs, abandoning professions, higher education, and much of their sense of self. Even getting a trade was frowned upon, regarded as joining the privileged, aristocratic section of the working class.
More and more, the RWL took its cues from an SWP that Tate thought obsessed with otherworldly assessments of an impending revolutionary class struggle that was supposedly erupting from below. As comrade’s lives were squandered in factory employments where the scope for union work was limited, the American leadership removed itself more and more from the terrain of international politics, where the Trotskyist movement had always flourished.
As the 1990s opened with the Iraq War, the RWL, now renamed the Communist League (CL), had become little more than an appendage of the SWP. It no longer published its own press, but sold the SWP’s Militant. Tate, his politics forged on the anvil of anti-war movements, was disgusted when the CL absented itself from protests, which some described as “patriotic” and “anti-American.”
By this point, Ernie and Jess had left the RWL, departing in the late 1980s. They never, however, renounced their understandings of the importance of the organized revolutionary movement, or the ideals and principles animating their involvement in it. Ernie remained throughout his life a revolutionary socialist and committed Marxist. As he moved out of the RWL, he picked up his longstanding activism in the labour movement.
Upon returning to Canada in 1969, Ernie worked for a time as a stationary engineer in Toronto’s west end Canada Packer’s plant, and was a union steward with the Packinghouse Workers Union. Upgrading his work skills at Ryerson Polytechnic (where his essays won academic prizes), Ernie ended up employed as a shift, then chief, engineer at Domtar Papers from 1975-1977.
He was hired at Toronto Hydro in 1977, where he worked until he retired in 1995. Active in Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local One (which eventually amalgamated with Local 1000), Ernie served as a chief steward and helped to galvanize the somewhat somnolent union, which had not taken job action for well over a decade. As vice president of the local, Tate was one of the leaders of a successful 1989 strike, working with President Rob Fairley and a team of union militants.
Tate continued to be employed at Toronto Hydro into the 1990s, working in energy management and conservation. Eventually, he was assigned to City Hall, coordinating Hydro’s relations with the municipality. He played a key role in the late-1990s building of a united front that opposed the Mike Harris Conservative government’s plan to privatize the province’s hydro-electrical power industry.
Over the course of the last decades, Ernie and Jess were ever-present in Toronto’s broad, left-wing community. They attended rallies and demonstrations, public forums and left-wing gatherings, radical cultural events and anti-war protests. Active in Toronto’s Socialist Project, Ernie and Jess were enthusiastic supporters of the struggle to up the minimum wage. They connected with younger activists in the Fight for $15 and Fairness.
Elders of the left, the revolutionary couple travelled to socialist conferences, in New York, Chicago, London, and elsewhere. In 2019 Ernie was a featured speaker at an historic gathering addressing the life and work of Leon Trotsky, held in Havana, Cuba.
Ernie Tate and and Jess MacKenzie.
With Jess’s collaboration, Ernie published a two-volume memoir of his life on the far left in Canada and Great Britain. Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s (2014) is a unique resource, a rewarding read for anyone interested in a gritty account of mid-twentieth century revolutionary movements.
It has recently been a valued source of information for the 2020-21 Undercover Policing Inquiry, taking place in England. Its hearings have revealed the illegal and immoral activities resorted to as police agents surreptitiously wormed their way into left wing organizations like the IMG. Its office keys were copied and passed on to MI5, which subsequently burgled the group’s premises to secure membership lists and financial records. These undercover officers – at least six of whom were, at various times in the late 1960s and early 1970s, tasked with spying on or reporting about Tate – went so far as to form intimate relationships with targeted female leftists.
One of Ernie’s last political acts was to provide compelling testimony to these hearings. He condemned the “gross violations of people’s civil liberties” that had taken place over many years, orchestrated by “the British security services.” Tate expressed the hope that the Inquiry would lead to “legislation and public oversight” limiting the ability of the police and other forces of the state to “harass those who happen to be critical of society or are fighting for social change.”
Hope in the Future
A working-class autodidact, Ernie Tate was a literate and cultured man, able to reflect engagingly on art and literature, film and music. He could build a cottage and renovate a house, organize a demonstration, engage a crowd, and convince others of the need to use their particular talents to fight for a better world. A love of food and sociability, valued friendships and good health, were paramount in his everyday life.
Tate was an example of what the working-class is capable of at its best. He found in revolutionary Marxism answers to big questions. This body of thought defined his approach to life within a capitalism whose accomplishments he recognized but whose acquisitive individualism, exploitative essence, and myriad oppressions he abhorred.
Ernie understood well the strengths of the Old Left in which he was educated, but he appreciated as well the promise and possibilities of the many New Lefts that he saw come and go, all of which he regarded with a critical but buoyant hope.
Revered and respected among Trotskyists throughout the world, Ernie was a man of deep convictions. He held to them, through thick and thin. Compromise over cherished principles was not something he could countenance. Yet he was also capable of great warmth and generosity, which he routinely bestowed on those with whom he disagreed. His smile enticing, he could laugh at himself as well as the absurdities of a social order he knew was sick to its core.
At a book launch for his Revolutionary Activism I spoke of Ernie’s sacrifices for the revolutionary left. Not one to hold his tongue, Ernie upbraided me. His life had not been one of sacrifice at all, he insisted. Rather, it was a unique adventure, one in which the rewards received and work conducted in the struggle to build socialism far outweighed anything else that might be taken into consideration. He was a happy man, comfortable in the sincere belief that he was fortunate to have had the opportunity to do what he had done.
Ernie Tate died at his Toronto home on February 5, 2021, aged 86, succumbing to pancreatic cancer that he battled for months. He was cared for by his loving partner and political collaborator, Jess MacKenzie, and will be sorely missed by many. He leaves a legacy of his example, one that will guide those fighting for the day when, “The Internationale/Will be the human race.” •
Why Are There So Few Large Strikes? Blame the Democratic Party
The number of large strikes has plummeted since the 1970s. The main reason is the link between union leaders and the Democratic Party. That link has to be cut.
Jason Koslowski
December 7, 2021
The strike is one of the most important weapons that the working class has against the ruling class.
That’s why strikes are so hated and feared by capitalists and the Democratic and Republican Parties that look after their interests. It’s why there are so many laws and government bodies with the power to restrict when, whether, and how unions are “allowed” to strike.
But if strikes are such powerful and feared weapons, why has the number of large strikes plummeted since the 1980s — grinding to historic lows in the last few years? Above all, blame the Democratic Party.
If we want more strikes, bigger strikes, and more militant strikes, we need a political fight in our unions to break with the Democrats.
An Alliance against the Rank and File
The strike waves of the 1930s in the U.S. have become almost legendary for the Left today. Immortalized in books like Teamster Rebellion, it was an era of intense worker struggle, with many thousands of workers in key industries striking en masse.
That upsurge was driven, above all, by rank-and-filestruggle, as Mike Davis points out in Prisoners of the American Dream. But over the next few decades, the union leadership of the new CIO federation fought toshut downrank-and-file organizing and power — a task that linked that leadership to the Democratic Party.
In the mid-1930s, at the dawn of the CIO, the link with the Democrats was already being forged. Roosevelt and the Democrats were scrambling to control the upsurge of worker struggles. One key weapon for doing that was legislation. 1934 brought the Wagner Act, or the National Labor Relations Act, which officially recognized unions and protected their activity — a move to help channel the union struggle and bring it into the orbit of Democratic Party influence as a voting bloc. That alliance was one, as Sharon Smith points out, that CIO labor leaders were very happy to leap at, pushing workers to vote for and support Democrats.
That alliance between union leaders and Democrats reached a tipping point during World War Two and the years just after. The leaders of the CIO and AFL federations agreed to try to enforce Roosevelt’s request: no strikes during the war. The agreement gave CIO union leaders the chance to consolidate national power over their union locals, precisely because they needed to be able to enforce the no-strike deal with the president. That process was helped along by the Communist Party leadership, which threw its support behind both the CIO bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.
Union leaders, then, had to be the “economic police” over their own unions to shut down the rank-and-file struggle that had surged in the 1930s — a process helped along by the establishment of pattern bargaining, setting wages, for example, in an entire industry like steel rather than fighting workplace by workplace.
By the end of the war, the concentration of power at the top of the CIO was well underway. The leadership of the UAW, as Kim Moody points out in An Injury to All, pushed to massively centralize the union, carrying “top-level decisions all the way down to the local level. Staff members were disciplined to carry out administration policies and denied the right to run against administration candidates at any level.” That meant central control even of union local newspapers.
And Moody argues that a key force consolidating power at the top of unions — away from the rank and file — was the rise of multi-year contracts. During the 1930s, union contracts, where they existed, typically lasted a year. But in the years after WWII, union leaders pushed for multi-year contracts. These served both union leaders and their Democrat allies by disciplining shop-floor struggle under the leadership of union heads and guaranteeing “labor peace” for extended periods of time.
Those kinds of contracts increasingly contained no-strike clauses. Explicit no-strike clauses were rare in the 1930s. By the late 1940s, they had started to become boilerplate. The no-strike clause vested more power in union leaders, who in turn, were trying to serve up “labor peace” to the Democratic Party’s allies in exchange for influence. What’s more, the 1947 Taft-Hartley act deeply restricted the use of the strike. It outlawed solidarity strikes, and consolidated a national, homogeneouslegal framework for enforcing no-strike clauses.
Another key factor to consolidate power of union leaders was the post-war anti-Communist crusade inside unions. The Taft-Hartley Act required unions to expel and denounce communist members. This was not just accepted by CIO national leadership; Moody shows how it was executed with relish. The label “communist” was used to silence any critique of union leaders by the rank-and-file.
With these changes, the basic terrain of struggle for unions was shifting away from rank and file struggle on the shop floor, and into capitalism’s legal system.
Helping to power the shift, between 1934 and 1947 Democrats established a system of labor arbitration — a legal framework for resolving the struggle between workers and management. The arbitration system put more power in the hands of union staff, and so it helped to blunt rank-and-file struggle by snaring it in a system of red tape and delays. Worker grievances and unfair labor processes had to pass through labor bureaucrats and management-controlled systems of arbitration or the state run NLRB. .
That arbitration system, and more complex multi-year contracts, required an extraordinary increase in the number of union staffers. The apparatus was becoming truly massive. Davis points out in Prisoners of the American Dream: “By 1962, for instance, there were 60,000 full-time, salaried union officials in the United States (one for every 300 workers), as contrasted to 4,000 in Britain (one for 2,000) or 900 in Sweden (one for 1,700).”
In other words, unions were investing a massive amount of funds in precisely the kind of staff whose main concern is working inside the ruling class’s legal system. And that shift of focus was accompanied by the constant push by union leaders to raise money for Democratic Party members running for office and to push union member votes their way, too.
The idea was, and remains, this: if the main arena of struggle is the legalsystem, unions should focus, above all, on influencing Democrats to make better laws — not using workers’ main weapons against the ruling class.
Wildcats and Bureaucrats
All of this shows that the attack on rank-and-file, militant struggle, and on large strikes, was primarily rooted in the link between union leaders and the Democratic Party.
And yet the period from WWII through the mid-1970s was roiled by mass worker struggle. 1947 alone saw 247 major work stoppages of 1,000 workers or more; by 1952 that number was 470. The 1970s in particular were periods of major wildcat action — with rank and filers rebelling against their leaders’ blunting tactics and walking off their jobs in huge numbers. The number of large strikes in that time nearly reached the post-war numbers.
We see in this period the uneven establishment of the new forms of control over the rank and file. Since unions had already been purged of communists and socialists, that rank-and-file revolt had few real organizational alternatives to the new bureaucratic union structure and its integration into the U.S. legal system.. Moody writes: “In each case, the union was able to ignore the strike movement through its bureaucratic control of the negotiating process or to defuse the strike by getting better economic terms.”
But this meant labor was totally unprepared for the hammer blows that were about to fall. The mid-1970s brought an economic crisis that drove up unemployment and so fundamentally weakened the bargaining position of labor. By the early 1980s, the ruling class was fully on the offensive — launching the neoliberal capitalist policies that would shatter unions and decimate their numbers in the decades to come.
Union leaders had —- with their allies, the Democrats — unwittingly prepared labor to succumb. They had worked together to shatter the initiative of rank and filers and ensure the main field of struggle was the law, not strikes. It’s no coincidence that in the decades after 1980, the number of large work stoppages largely collapsed — from 187 in 1980 to a historic low of just five in 2009, rising to 25 in 2019.
Forty years — and multiple Democratic administrations — after the neoliberal offensive started, the disaster of our union leaders’ strategy is still on full display.
Above All: Cut Ties
In other words, union leaders’ deal with the Democrats has been a deal with the devil.
We need to cut our unions’ ties to the Democrats just to be able to win real bread-and-butter economic concessions. Bosses fear strikes for very good reason; they are one of the most important weapons of workers against them and a key weapon for winning better wages, hours, and working conditions. But labor leaders kowtow to the Democrats and think we should fight in the courtroom, not on the shop floor. So building our capacity tostrike will have to come from rank and filers ourselves.
It’s true that, occasionally, our union leaders do call strikes, even large ones. But these exceptions show just how strike-averse our union heads are. 2018 and 2019 saw a modest rise in the number of big strikes from previous years. 2021 seems to continue the trend. These strikes are important, but have to be seen in context. While they return us to the numbers of the early 2000s, they fall short of any year on record before 1998, and are a tiny fraction of the number of big strikes in any year before 1980.
And today, when leaders do call strikes, their ties to the Democratic Party mean those leaders force strikes to play according to the ruling class’s own rules in the legal system. Accepting this fixed carnival game, our leaders usually refuse to try to build roiling solidarity strikes with other unions to cause more serious disruptions to the economy. And they typically refuse to organize against scabs who are crossing picket lines and keeping workplaces running — making it far easier for bosses to replace strikers and therefore for strikes to fail.
So in order to have more, bigger, and more powerful strikes, we badly need rank-and-file organizing — the kind willing to break the law. That means organizing to strike even when there’s a no-strike clause in effect. And it means deying restrictive no-strike laws that have been so dear to the Democratic party — like the Taylor Law in New York State that forbids public sector strikes. In the same way, it will take rank and filers, organizing from below, to spearhead the fight against scabs — keeping up pressure on the bosses by refusing to allow any workers to turn out profits in the midst of a strike.
But allying with the Democratic Party hasn’t only been catastrophic for winning economic concessions. It has also been a disaster by keeping the working class disconnected from the wider, crucial struggles that concern it — like the fight for racial equality and abortion rights.
It’s no secret that organized labor mostly sat on the sidelines last year during the BLM uprising — the biggest social protest movement in U.S. history — though there were some important exceptions. Some unions took part in Strike for Black Lives Day or otherwise expressed support. But large strikes in solidarity were mostly, and strikingly, missing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes only eight large strikes last year as a whole, making 2020 the third lowest year in terms of large strikes ever recorded.
Labor leaders by and large couldn’t call on rank and filers to strike against the police and for Black lives. That’s because their allies, the Democrats, were themselves the ones spearheading the violent repression of protesters in major cities across the U.S., while Democrats like Biden came out against calls to defund the police. Yet it’s that division — that refusal of organized labor, across its history in the U.S., to take up racial struggle as its own — that has repeatedly hobbled the labor movement.
Linking organized labor to the wider fights of our class is crucial for the power of the working class to unite its struggles, rather than remaining divided under the attacks of the ruling class.
For example, the fight against U.S. funding of Israel and its slaughter of Palestinians — championed by Democrats and Republicans alike — isn’t just a noble moral stance. The state of Israel receives billions in aid from the U.S., while labor at home is told there isn’t enough money for a minimum wage that could keep up with (currently spiking) inflation. And Israel trains the police that murder Black people, overwhelmingly from the working class, as well as attack strikers.
And access to a free, safe, and legal abortion is one key to the working class’s power and freedom. Yet union leaders are sitting on their hands waiting for the Democrats to save Roe v. Wade, on the very eve of Roe v. Wade’s overturning. Our union leaders have overwhelmingly shown they want to shy away from that wider struggle, all to kowtow to the Democratic Party — despite the utter failure of Democrats to take abortion rights seriously. And yet to unite our class and build our power, we badly need our unions to be part of every fight that affects our class — against imperialism, against misogyny, against racism.
Connecting unions to the wider struggles of our class will have to mean cutting ties to Democrats. That means building militant strikes ready to stop scabs and push for solidarity strikes — without regard for the laws that are designed to blunt and dissipate our power. It means fighting for real union democracy — for real control of all union affairs to be placed in the hands of the rank and file in mass assemblies, and not in the hands of the bureaucracy. And it means helping build up alternative spaces where rank and filers and the struggle for Black lives, for abortion rights, and beyond can link up and coordinate their struggles.
There can be no militant, powerful labor movement in the United States as long as it is chained to the Democratic Party. That link has to be cut. Only rank-and-file organizing from below can cut it.
Οι περισσότεροι αρχαιολόγοι πιστεύουν ότι τα ευαγγέλια της Καινής Διαθήκης είναι «μυθοποιημένη ιστορία». Με άλλα λόγια, πιστεύουν ότι γύρω στις αρχές του πρώτου αιώνα ένας αμφιλεγόμενος Εβραίος ραβίνος ονόματι Yeshua ben Yosef συγκέντρωσε ακόλουθους και η ζωή και οι διδασκαλίες του παρείχαν τον σπόρο που αναπτύχθηκε στον Χριστιανισμό.
Ταυτόχρονα, αυτοί οι μελετητές αναγνωρίζουν ότι πολλές ιστορίες της Βίβλου όπως η παρθενική γέννηση, τα θαύματα, η ανάσταση και οι γυναίκες στον τάφο δανείζονται και ξαναδανείζονται μυθικά θέματα που ήταν κοινά στην Αρχαία Εγγύς Ανατολή, όπως ακριβώς οι σεναριογράφοι βασίζουν τις νέες ταινίες σε παλιές γνωστά τροπάρια ή στοιχεία πλοκής. Με αυτή την άποψη, ένας «ιστορικός Ιησούς» μυθοποιήθηκε.
Για περισσότερα από 200 χρόνια, ένα ευρύ φάσμα θεολόγων και ιστορικών -οι περισσότεροι από τους οποίους χριστιανοί- ανέλυαν αρχαία κείμενα, τόσο αυτά που μπήκαν στη Βίβλο όσο και αυτά που δεν το έκαναν, σε προσπάθειες να ανασκάψουν τον άνθρωπο πίσω από τον μύθο. Αρκετά τρέχοντα ή πρόσφατα μπεστ σέλερ ακολουθούν αυτήν την προσέγγιση, αποστάζοντας την υποτροφία για ένα δημοφιλές κοινό. Οι γνωστοί τίτλοι περιλαμβάνουν Zealot του Reza Aslan και How Jesus Becane God του Bart Ehrman.
Αλλά άλλοι μελετητές πιστεύουν ότι οι ιστορίες του Ευαγγελίου είναι στην πραγματικότητα «ιστοροποιημένη μυθολογία». Από αυτή την άποψη, αυτά τα αρχαία μυθικά πρότυπα είναι τα ίδια ο πυρήνας. Συμπληρώθηκαν με ονόματα, μέρη και άλλες λεπτομέρειες του πραγματικού κόσμου καθώς οι πρώτες αιρέσεις της λατρείας του Ιησού προσπαθούσαν να κατανοήσουν και να υπερασπιστούν τις λατρευτικές παραδόσεις που είχαν λάβει.
Η αντίληψη ότι ο Ιησούς δεν υπήρξε ποτέ είναι μια θέση μειοψηφίας. Φυσικά είναι! λέει ο David Fitzgerald, συγγραφέας του Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus never Existed at All. Για αιώνες όλοι οι σοβαροί μελετητές του Χριστιανισμού ήταν οι ίδιοι Χριστιανοί, και οι σύγχρονοι κοσμικοί μελετητές στηρίζονται σε μεγάλο βαθμό στις βάσεις που έθεσαν για τη συλλογή, τη διατήρηση και την ανάλυση αρχαίων κειμένων. Ακόμη και σήμερα οι περισσότεροι κοσμικοί λόγιοι προέρχονται από θρησκευτικό υπόβαθρο και πολλοί λειτουργούν εξ ορισμού με ιστορικά τεκμήρια της προηγούμενης πίστης τους.
Ο Φιτζέραλντ είναι ένας άθεος ομιλητής και συγγραφέας, δημοφιλής στους κοσμικούς φοιτητές και τις κοινοτικές ομάδες. Το φαινόμενο του Διαδικτύου, Zeitgeist the Movie εισήγαγε εκατομμύρια σε μερικές από τις μυθικές ρίζες του Χριστιανισμού. Αλλά το Zeitgeist και παρόμοια έργα περιέχουν γνωστά λάθη και υπεραπλουστεύσεις που υπονομεύουν την αξιοπιστία τους. Ο Fitzgerald επιδιώκει να το διορθώσει δίνοντας στους νέους ενδιαφέρουσες, προσβάσιμες πληροφορίες που βασίζονται σε υπεύθυνες γνώσεις.
Περισσότερα ακαδημαϊκά επιχειρήματα για την υποστήριξη της θεωρίας του μύθου του Ιησού μπορούν να βρεθούν στα γραπτά των Richard Carrier και Robert Price. Carrier, που έχει Ph.D. στην αρχαία ιστορία χρησιμοποιεί τα εργαλεία του επαγγέλματός του για να δείξει, μεταξύ άλλων, πώς ο Χριστιανισμός θα μπορούσε να είχε απογειωθεί χωρίς θαύμα. Ο Price, αντίθετα, γράφει από την οπτική γωνία ενός θεολόγου του οποίου η βιβλική επιστήμη αποτέλεσε τελικά τη βάση για τον σκεπτικισμό του. Είναι ενδιαφέρον να σημειωθεί ότι μερικοί από τους πιο σκληρούς απομυθοποιητές των περιθωριακών θεωριών του μύθου του Ιησού, όπως αυτές του Zeitgeist ή του Joseph Atwill (ο οποίος προσπαθεί να υποστηρίξει ότι οι Ρωμαίοι επινόησαν τον Ιησού) προέρχονται από σοβαρούς Μυθιστές όπως οι Fitzgerald, Carrier και Price.
Τα επιχειρήματα και στις δύο πλευρές αυτού του ερωτήματος -μυθοποιημένη ιστορία ή ιστορικοποιημένη μυθολογία- γεμίζουν τόμους και, αν μη τι άλλο, η συζήτηση φαίνεται να θερμαίνεται αντί να επιλύεται. Ένας αυξανόμενος αριθμός μελετητών αμφισβητεί ανοιχτά ή επιχειρηματολογεί ενεργά κατά της ιστορικότητας του Ιησού. Δεδομένου ότι πολλοί άνθρωποι, τόσο χριστιανοί όσο και μη, βρίσκουν έκπληξη το γεγονός ότι αυτή η συζήτηση υφίσταται -ότι αξιόπιστοι μελετητές μπορεί να πιστεύουν ότι ο Ιησούς δεν υπήρξε ποτέ – εδώ είναι μερικά από τα βασικά σημεία που κρατούν τις αμφιβολίες ζωντανές:
Δεν υπάρχει κανένα κοσμικό στοιχείο του πρώτου αιώνα που να υποστηρίζει την πραγματικότητα του Yeshua ben Yosef. Σύμφωνα με τα λόγια του Bart Ehrman (ο οποίος πιστεύει ότι οι ιστορίες του Ιησού χτίστηκαν πάνω σε έναν ιστορικό πυρήνα): «Τι είδους πράγματα έχουν να πουν γι’ αυτόν οι ειδωλολάτρες συγγραφείς από την εποχή του Ιησού; Τίποτα. Όσο κι αν φαίνεται παράξενο, δεν υπάρχει καμία αναφορά στον Ιησού από κανέναν από τους ειδωλολάτρες συγχρόνους του. Δεν υπάρχουν αρχεία γέννησης, ούτε μεταγραφές δίκης, ούτε πιστοποιητικά θανάτου. Δεν υπάρχουν εκδηλώσεις ενδιαφέροντος, ούτε έντονες συκοφαντίες, ούτε παροδικές αναφορές – τίποτα. Στην πραγματικότητα, αν διευρύνουμε το πεδίο της ανησυχίας μας στα χρόνια μετά το θάνατό του –ακόμα και αν συμπεριλάβουμε ολόκληρο τον πρώτο αιώνα της Κοινής Εποχής– δεν υπάρχει τόσο μια μοναχική αναφορά στον Ιησού σε οποιονδήποτε μη Χριστιανό, μη Εβραίο πηγή κάθε είδους. Πρέπει να τονίσω ότι διαθέτουμε μεγάλο αριθμό εγγράφων της εποχής – τα γραπτά ποιητών, φιλοσόφων, ιστορικών, επιστημόνων και κυβερνητικών αξιωματούχων, για παράδειγμα, για να μην αναφέρουμε τη μεγάλη συλλογή σωζόμενων επιγραφών σε πέτρα και ιδιωτικές επιστολές και νομικά έγγραφα σε πάπυρο. Σε κανένα από αυτό το τεράστιο φάσμα των σωζόμενων γραπτών δεν αναφέρεται ποτέ τόσο πολύ το όνομα του Ιησού». (σελ. 56-57)
Οι πρώτοι συγγραφείς της Καινής Διαθήκης φαίνονται να αγνοούν τις λεπτομέρειες της ζωής του Ιησού, οι οποίες αποκρυσταλλώνονται περισσότερο σε μεταγενέστερα κείμενα. Ο Παύλος φαίνεται να μην γνωρίζει καμία παρθενική γέννηση, για παράδειγμα. Χωρίς σοφούς, χωρίς αστέρι
Most antiquities scholars think that the New Testament gospels are “mythologized history.” In other words, they think that around the start of the first century a controversial Jewish rabbi named Yeshua ben Yosef gathered a following and his life and teachings provided the seed that grew into Christianity.
At the same time, these scholars acknowledge that many Bible stories like the virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, and women at the tomb borrow and rework mythic themes that were common in the Ancient Near East, much the way that screenwriters base new movies on old familiar tropes or plot elements. In this view, a “historical Jesus” became mythologized.
For over 200 years, a wide ranging array of theologians and historians—most of them Christian—analyzed ancient texts, both those that made it into the Bible and those that didn’t, in attempts to excavate the man behind the myth. Several current or recent bestsellers take this approach, distilling the scholarship for a popular audience. Familiar titles include Zealot by Reza Aslan and How Jesus Became God by Bart Ehrman.
But other scholars believe that the gospel stories are actually “historicized mythology.” In this view, those ancient mythic templates are themselves the kernel. They got filled in with names, places and other real world details as early sects of Jesus worship attempted to understand and defend the devotional traditions they had received.
The notion that Jesus never existed is a minority position. Of course it is! says David Fitzgerald, author of Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All . For centuries all serious scholars of Christianity were Christians themselves, and modern secular scholars lean heavily on the groundwork that they laid in collecting, preserving, and analyzing ancient texts. Even today most secular scholars come out of a religious background, and many operate by default under historical presumptions of their former faith.
Fitzgerald is an atheist speaker and writer, popular with secular students and community groups. The internet phenom, Zeitgeist the Movie introduced millions to some of the mythic roots of Christianity. But Zeitgeist and similar works contain known errors and oversimplifications that undermine their credibility. Fitzgerald seeks to correct that by giving young people interesting, accessible information that is grounded in accountable scholarship.
More academic arguments in support of the Jesus Myth theory can be found in the writings of Richard Carrier and Robert Price. Carrier, who has a Ph.D. in ancient history uses the tools of his trade to show, among other things, how Christianity might have gotten off the ground without a miracle. Price, by contrast, writes from the perspective of a theologian whose biblical scholarship ultimately formed the basis for his skepticism. It is interesting to note that some of the harshest debunkers of fringe Jesus myth theories like those from Zeitgeist or Joseph Atwill (who tries to argue that the Romans invented Jesus) are from serious Mythicists like Fitzgerald, Carrier and Price.
The arguments on both sides of this question—mythologized history or historicized mythology—fill volumes, and if anything the debate seems to be heating up rather than resolving. A growing number of scholars are openly questioning or actively arguing against Jesus’ historicity. Since many people, both Christian and not, find it surprising that this debate even exists—that credible scholars might think Jesus never existed—here are some of the key points that keep the doubts alive:
No first century secular evidence whatsoever exists to support the actuality of Yeshua ben Yosef. In the words of Bart Ehrman (who himself thinks the Jesus stories were built on a historical kernel): “What sorts of things do pagan authors from the time of Jesus have to say about him? Nothing. As odd as it may seem, there is no mention of Jesus at all by any of his pagan contemporaries. There are no birth records, no trial transcripts, no death certificates; there are no expressions of interest, no heated slanders, no passing references – nothing. In fact, if we broaden our field of concern to the years after his death – even if we include the entire first century of the Common Era – there is not so much as a solitary reference to Jesus in any non-Christian, non-Jewish source of any kind. I should stress that we do have a large number of documents from the time – the writings of poets, philosophers, historians, scientists, and government officials, for example, not to mention the large collection of surviving inscriptions on stone and private letters and legal documents on papyrus. In none of this vast array of surviving writings is Jesus’ name ever so much as mentioned.” (pp. 56-57)
The earliest New Testament writers seem ignorant of the details of Jesus’ life, which become more crystalized in later texts. Paul seems unaware of any virgin birth, for example. No wise men, no star in the east, no miracles. Historians have long puzzled over the “Silence of Paul” on the most basic biographical facts and teachings of Jesus. Paul fails to cite Jesus’ authority precisely when it would make his case. What’s more, he never calls the twelve apostles Jesus’ disciples; in fact, he never says Jesus HAD disciples –or a ministry, or did miracles, or gave teachings. He virtually refuses to disclose any other biographical detail, and the few cryptic hints he offers aren’t just vague, but contradict the gospels. The leaders of the early Christian movement in Jerusalem like Peter and James are supposedly Jesus’ own followers and family; but Paul dismisses them as nobodies and repeatedly opposes them for not being true Christians!
Liberal theologian Marcus Borg suggests that people read the books of the New Testament in chronological order to see how early Christianity unfolded. “Placing the Gospels after Paul makes it clear that as written documents they are not the source of early Christianity but its product. The Gospel — the good news — of and about Jesus existed before the Gospels. They are the products of early Christian communities several decades after Jesus’ historical life and tell us how those communities saw his significance in their historical context.”
Even the New Testament stories don’t claim to be first-hand accounts. We now know that the four gospels were assigned the names of the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, not written by them. To make matter sketchier, the name designations happened sometime in second century, around 100 years or more after Christianity supposedly began. For a variety of reasons, the practice of pseudonymous writing was common at the time and many contemporary documents are “signed” by famous figures. The same is true of the New Testament epistles except for a handful of letters from Paul (6 out of 13) which are broadly thought to be genuine. But even the gospel stories don’t actually say, “I was there.” Rather, they claim the existence of other witnesses, a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has heard the phrase, my aunt knew someone who . . . .
The gospels, our only accounts of a historical Jesus, contradict each other. If you think you know the Jesus story pretty well, I suggest that you pause at this point to test yourself with the 20 question quiz at ExChristian.net.
The gospel of Mark is thought to be the earliest existing “life of Jesus,” and linguistic analysis suggests that Luke and Matthew both simply reworked Mark and added their own corrections and new material. But they contradict each other and, to an even greater degree contradict the much later gospel of John, because they were written with different objectives for different audiences. The incompatible Easter stories offer one example of how much the stories disagree.
Modern scholars who claim to have uncovered the real historical Jesus depict wildly different persons. They include a cynic philosopher, charismatic Hasid, liberal Pharisee, conservative rabbi, Zealot revolutionary, nonviolent pacifist to borrow from a much longer list assembled by Price. In his words (pp. 15-16), “The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time.” John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar grumbles that “the stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment.”
For David Fitzgerald, these issues and more lead to a conclusion that he finds inescapable:
Jesus appears to be an effect, not a cause, of Christianity. Paul and the rest of the first generation of Christians searched the Septuagint translation of Hebrew scriptures to create a Mystery Faith for the Jews, complete with pagan rituals like a Lord’s Supper, Gnostic terms in his letters, and a personal savior god to rival those in their neighbors’ longstanding Egyptian, Persian, Hellenistic and Roman traditions.
In a soon-to-be-released follow up to Nailed, entitled Jesus: Mything in Action, Fitzgerald argues that the many competing versions proposed by secular scholars are just as problematic as any “Jesus of Faith:” Even if one accepts that there was a real Jesus of Nazareth, the question has little practical meaning: Regardless of whether or not a first century rabbi called Yeshua ben Yosef lived, the “historical Jesus” figures so patiently excavated and re-assembled by secular scholars are themselves fictions.
We may never know for certain what put Christian history in motion. Only time (or perhaps time travel) will tell.
We print below an educational given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Joseph Seymour at the Twelfth National Conference of the SL/U.S. held last summer as published in the Young Spartacus pages of Workers Vanguard Nos. 840 (21 January), 842 (18 February), 844 (18 March) and 846 (15 April).
………………………….
Becoming a professional revolutionary of the Marxist persuasion almost always involves an intellectual challenge. You have to learn to think about the world in a fundamentally different way than when you first came to social and political consciousness.
Sometimes it also involves a personal challenge of one kind or another. For example, one’s parents may strongly disapprove of this particular career choice. This was definitely not what they wanted and expected for their son or daughter. For those of you who have faced that particular personal challenge, you’re in very good company. Throughout her life, Marx’s mother believed that her son had wasted his great talents on that communist nonsense. It is said that she once exclaimed: “If only Karl had made some capital instead of just writing about it.”
The term “dialectical materialism” was devised by George Plekhanov, often called the founding father of Russian Marxism, as a capsule formula for the Marxist worldview. Dialectics or dialectical understanding is not a mysterious concept, although it has been subjected to a great deal of mystification, not least by professed Marxists. In the course of the faction fight with Burnham and Shachtman over the Russian question in 1939-40, Trotsky commented: “What does this terrible word ‘dialectics’ mean? It means to consider things in their development, not in their static situation” (“On the ‘Workers’ Party” [August 1940]).
In the most general sense, dialectics signifies that what exists at present and will exist in the future is determined and conditioned by the entire prior course of historical development or, in some cases, retrogression from it. Change is caused by the interplay of contradictions, tensions, antagonistic elements inherited from the past; the remote past as well as the more recent past.
One of Sigmund Freud’s favorite aphorisms is that the child is the father of the man. This is a dialectical approach to individual psychology. How one feels, thinks and acts is strongly influenced by one’s early childhood experience, especially one’s relations with one’s parents or parental figures. Someone may wake up one morning and say to himself: “I really hate what my life has become. I hate what I have become. I want to be happy and successful.” Who doesn’t? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. You cannot wipe out your entire past experience and reconstruct your life and personality anew according to some preferred model. There is no such thing as being born again. That is true for individuals. It is true for societies. It is true for the non-human natural world.
Like everything else in the world, the origins and also subsequent development of Marxism can only be understood dialectically. As Marx himself stated in this regard: “The biography of a single individual can in no way be separated from the biographies of previous and contemporary individuals: indeed, it is determined by them.”
So to understand how Marx became a Marxist, we have to start by looking at the socioeconomic, political, cultural and intellectual universe which Marx encountered and entered as a young liberal idealist in western Germany in the mid-late 1830s. Marx grew up in a society in which a developing industrial economy, based on modern technology, both confronted and coexisted with a political and cultural complex inherited from the late medieval world.
When Marx was nine years old, Alfred Krupp established a steel-making foundry in the Ruhr city of Essen which later developed into one of the great industrial empires in the modern world. The year Marx graduated gymnasium, the equivalent of high school, in 1835, the first railroad was launched in Germany. Two years later, when Marx was at the University of Berlin, August Borsig founded a subsequently famous machinery works in that German city.
At the same time, despite its liberal facade, the Prussian state was a form of monarchical absolutism in which the political personality of the monarch mattered. When the old king died in 1840, he was succeeded by his son, a religious reactionary, who instituted a more repressive policy toward academic and intellectual life. One consequence was that Marx left Germany and moved to Paris, which was then the center of the communist and socialist movements. It was then and there that Marx himself became a communist.
Prussia was officially a “Christian state.” Thus in order to practice law, Marx’s father, who was a secularized and non-believing Jew, had to legally convert to Lutheranism and also change his name from Herschel to Heinrich.
Marx first entered the political scene in 1837 as part of a radical intellectual circle called the Left Hegelians or Young Hegelians. This movement had been initiated a few years earlier with the publication of a book titled The Life of Jesus by David Strauss. This was a work of biblical criticism which questioned whether Jesus had actually performed the miracles ascribed to him. It ignited an intellectual and political firestorm because decisive sections of the German ruling class, especially the Prussian landed nobility (the so-called Junkers), identified a skeptical, not to speak of hostile, attitude toward orthodox Christianity with the ideology of the French Revolution, with what was called “red republicanism.” “First, they question the truth of the Bible; next they’ll be calling for the execution of the king of Prussia.” This was the mindset of the men who ruled Germany when Marx entered the political scene. In 1843, Marx published an important work in which he called for eliminating the “Middle Ages” in Germany because the heritage of the Middle Ages was so strongly present in the Germany of the day.
Contradictions of Enlightenment Thought
A basic premise of materialism is that external reality exists independently of our consciousness. Thus in understanding the intellectual development of the young Marx, it is useful to consider not only what he thought at the time but what others thought about him. When Marx was a member of the Left Hegelian movement, a close colleague, Moses Hess, wrote the following appreciation of him in a letter to a friend:
“Dr Marx (that is my idol’s name) is still a very young man—about twenty-four at the most. He will give mediaeval religion and philosophy their coup de grâce; he combines the deepest philosophical seriousness with the most biting wit. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel fused into one person—I say fused not juxtaposed—and you have Dr Marx.”
—reproduced in David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx: Interviews and Recollections (1981)
Hess was not simply saying that Marx was a very smart and very knowledgeable guy who had read and assimilated the ideas of the main progressive thinkers from the mid 18th-century French Enlightenment through the then-present day. He was saying something much more significant than that.
Why? Because Rousseau and Voltaire represented fundamentally different and indeed counterposed worldviews within the universe of progressive social thought. They were protagonists in the most famous debate in Enlightenment literature. The question was whether civilization was progressive or retrogressive, with Voltaire maintaining the former and Rousseau the latter.
Rousseau summarized his ideas thus: “Man is naturally good and that it is by institutions alone that men become evil.” He maintained that man in a so-called state of nature was instinctively empathetic to the sufferings of fellow members of his species. However, the institution of private property had turned men against one another. Men in society had become murderously acquisitive, driven by greed and envy.
Rousseau himself was a deepgoing historical pessimist. He was a moralist critic of the existing social and political order in Europe. He believed that the large majority of men had become irremediably corrupted by millennia of civilization.
However, during the course of the French Revolution, Rousseau’s ideas were in a sense inverted into a naive, world-conquering optimism. The leaders of the Jacobin regime like Robespierre and Saint-Just, who revered Rousseau, believed that the revolutionary transformation of institutions had brought about the moral regeneration of the French people. The establishment of a democratic republic had imbued the citizens of the French nation with the spirit of patriotism and virtue.
In opposition to Rousseau, Voltaire maintained that the betterment of humanity and the progress of society were centrally dependent upon the further development of science and technology. One of his early works was a popular exposition of Isaac Newton’s theories of physics. If Voltaire had summarized his worldview in a sentence, it would have been something like: “Man is naturally ignorant, and it is only by the acquisition of knowledge that he gradually becomes enlightened.”
But who are the social agents who will so enlighten the benighted mass of humanity? For Voltaire, they were and could only be benevolent and rational members of the upper classes and intellectuals, like himself, who could influence the ruling circles.
In addition to Rousseau and Voltaire, Hess mentions another leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Holbach, whose ideas influenced the young Marx. Holbach, who was a wealthy nobleman, was a thoroughgoing materialist, in effect an atheist. But he believed that such advanced views were the limited preserve of exceptional members of the upper classes like himself. “The people,” he wrote, “reads no more than it reasons; it has neither the leisure nor the ability to do so.”
So how did Marx fuse the democratic egalitarianism identified with Rousseau with the intellectual elitism of Voltaire and Holbach? To oversimplify, Marx combined the goal of Rousseau with the means of Voltaire by way of a dialectical conception of history derived from Hegel, while purged of the latter’s idealist metaphysics.
The goal of communism is an egalitarian and harmonious society in which all men support the needs and interests of other men. But such a future society can come into being only through the overcoming of economic scarcity by qualitatively raising the level of production and labor productivity through the further progressive development of science and technology. Moreover, throughout the history of civilization prior to advanced industrial capitalism, raising the level and forces of production necessarily entailed the exploitation and oppression of the mass of humanity by a small class of property owners. In other words, private property and class-divided society were not a tragic historical mistake which could have been avoided if only people had known better.
A very good capsule statement of the Marxist worldview in this regard is to be found in one of Marx’s lesser-known works, Theories of Surplus-Value (1863):
“Although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed.”
This conception fundamentally differentiates dialectical materialism from all variants of radical idealism, such as anarchism.
Liberalism, Communism, Socialism
In the period in which Marx and also Engels first came to political consciousness, the terms liberalism, communism and socialism were commonly used in conventional political discourse. However, liberalism, at least in emphasis, meant something significantly different than it does today, while communism and socialism meant something fundamentally different than today.
Central to the liberal worldview was a belief in raising the level of production and productivity through the application of science and technology. Scottish and English political economists—from Adam Smith in the late 18th century to David Ricardo in the early 19th to lesser lights like James Mill in Marx’s formative years—were leading intellectual representatives of liberalism. They maintained that the wealth of nations—to use the title of Adam Smith’s classic and seminal work—would be maximized by the institutional framework of a competitive market economy made up of a multiplicity of capitalist entrepreneurs. In order to maximize profits and avoid losses (and potential bankruptcy), such entrepreneurs would supposedly be compelled to continually reduce the costs of production through technical innovation.
What I want to emphasize here is that in this period it was liberalism, not communism or socialism, which was identified as centrally concerned with and committed to increasing what Marx later called “the forces of production.” The intellectual hegemony of liberalism as a doctrine of economic production was a major factor that later caused Marx to write Capital. Throughout Capital, there are polemical arguments against David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and other economic ideologists of the new bourgeois order. Some years ago, a perceptive Polish ex-Stalinist intellectual observed that Marx was the first major left-wing thinker who took on liberalism on its own chosen terrain, that of political economy.
What then of communism and socialism? Communism, both as a doctrine and movement, originated as an episode in the last phase of the French Revolution with Gracchus Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals in 1795-96. This was a movement of former left-wing Jacobins who had come to the conclusion that their principles could be realized only by a revolutionary dictatorship, brought to power through a popular insurrection, which would establish a communism of distribution and consumption.
That is, peasants would continue to grow crops on their small farms as before. Artisans—tailors, shoemakers, carpenters—would continue to produce their goods in small workshops as before. However, instead of selling these on the market they would be deposited in a kind of gigantic state-run warehouse system, and the government would distribute them on an egalitarian basis. Families with more children would receive larger houses and proportionally more food, clothing and the like.
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) Marx wrote of the Babouvist movement in this way:
“The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.”
This leveling-down conception of communism was necessarily conditioned by the pre-industrial character of French society at the time.
In the lengthy period of reaction in Europe following the overthrow of Napoleon in 1815, what I have called the Jacobin communist tradition was perpetuated and promoted by one of the surviving leaders of the Babouvist movement, Philippe Buonarroti. In the late 1820s he published a book about it, including original documents, which became known as “the bible of revolutionaries.” A little later I’m going to discuss Buonarroti’s ideas in another context. But here I want to emphasize that even after the advent of industrial capitalism in continental West Europe in the 1820s, the term “communism” retained its programmatic connotation of a leveling-down. It evoked in popular consciousness, as well as among the ruling classes, the spirit and the image of the French Revolution in its most radical phase, that is, a violent uprising of the poor against the rich, of the have-nots against the haves.
In the period we’re talking about, the difference between communism and socialism was more sharply delineated than it later became and is today. Whereas communism was insurrectionary—it meant red revolution—socialism was reformist and pacific at two fundamental levels. First, all socialist tendencies appealed to the supposedly benevolent and rational-minded members of the ruling class to promote their program. For example, Robert Owen, the foremost British socialist of the era, dedicated a section of his pioneer work, A New View of Society, written in 1813, to the prince regent of England.
Secondly, with the important exception of the Saint-Simonians (whom I’ll discuss in a bit), all major socialist schools—the Owenites in Britain, the followers of Charles Fourier and Étienne Cabet in France—advocated a system of decentralized, self-governing communities based on economic cooperativism. Such socialist communes, so to speak, could be established and coexist within the overall framework of the developing capitalist economies of the day. People would be able to see for themselves in practice that socialist cooperativism was in every respect a better way to organize society. More and more people would form more and more socialist communes until, peacefully and gradually, they completely displaced the existing class-divided and exploitative society. In short, socialists sought to transform society through the force of example rather than the force of force.
In the early 19th century, numerous attempts were actually made to establish socialist communities. Many of these attempts were made in the northern part of the United States with its relative political liberty, fluid social structure and cheap land. However, one of the most interesting and historically noteworthy attempts to form a socialist commune was made in, of all places, Romania. An eccentric Romanian landowner was an enthusiastic admirer of the ideas of Charles Fourier. So he set up a commune—it was called a phalanstère—for his peasants on Fourierist principles.
Fourier was a pioneer advocate of what was later called “free love.” He opposed traditional marriage and sexual monogamy. It turned out that many of these young Romanian peasant men and women appreciated Fourier’s ideas in this respect and practiced them. Pretty soon news of the strange and scandalous goings-on of this estate reached the ears of the Romanian Orthodox clergy and government authorities who were, of course, outraged. They organized a reactionary mob to attack and demolish this commune. I’m happy to report that the Fourierist peasants of Romania heroically defended their socialist commune. A small historic victory for our cause.
Between the French Revolution and Marx’s formative years, the Industrial Revolution crossed the channel, so to speak, from Britain to France, Germany and elsewhere in continental West Europe. This opened up a historical possibility which did not previously exist and could not have been envisioned by even the most far-sighted progressive intellectual. It now became possible to envision the limitless expansion of material wealth available to all members of society, not just a small privileged class of property owners.
This idea was first developed in programmatic form by the followers of Saint-Simon after he died in 1825. Henri de Saint-Simon is usually and rightly described as an idiosyncratic genius. He was a wealthy French nobleman who claimed direct descent from Charlemagne, the founder of the early medieval French feudal state. Saint-Simon himself was a liberal and in the last phase of his life he became a leading spokesman and publicist for the bourgeois liberal opposition—bankers and industrial entrepreneurs—to the reactionary Bourbon monarchy.
However, he was a liberal imbued with the ideas of rational humanism. Even in this early stage of capitalism, he recognized what Marx would later call the anarchy of the market. There were periods in which industrial production declined instead of increasing. Factories went bankrupt, causing great suffering to their former workers, because the owner had miscalculated future market conditions. Useful inventions were not introduced into production because bankers and entrepreneurs would not take the financial risk. To solve these problems, Saint-Simon advocated what could be called centralized capitalist planning. That is, all financiers and industrialists should get together through the banking system and coordinate their operations so as to continually maximize production.
After Saint-Simon died, his followers took the next logical step. This is, they advocated a public institution that would take over all the factories, railroads, mines and other industrial resources and direct these so as to maximize the production of society in line with the progressive development of science and technology. In 1830, they published the Exposition of the Doctrine of Saint-Simon, the crux of which was:
“A social institution is charged with these functions which today are so badly performed; it is the depository of all the instruments of production; it presides over the exploitation of all the material resources; from its vantage point it has a comprehensive view of the whole which enables it to perceive at one and the same time all parts of the industrial workshop….
“The social institution of the future will direct all industries in the interest of the whole society, and especially of the peaceful laborers.” [emphasis in original]
—quoted in George Lichtheim, The Origins of Socialism (1969)
These ideas were so far ahead of their time that they found no point of support in the French society of the day. The bourgeois liberals who had sponsored Saint-Simon were, of course, appalled by the new radical ideas of his followers. But neither did Saint-Simonian socialism get a sympathetic hearing in the working class. The mass of urban wage earners were artisans using pre-industrial technology. They aspired to own their own small shops. A typical French carpenter, furniture maker, watchmaker would have considered a central institution directing a technologically dynamic industrial economy as both utterly fantastical and deeply repugnant to his perceived interests.
Completely politically isolated, the Saint-Simonian school soon disintegrated into antagonistic sects. And I am using the term “sect” in the literal religious sense. One of the latter-day Saint-Simonian groups believed in the Great Mother. This personage was supposedly an Oriental Jewess living in the Near East who was destined to unite East and West, man and woman, matter and spirit. The leaders of this group went to Egypt, Palestine, Turkey searching for the Great Mother. The left was a lot more imaginative and interesting in those days. These were wild and crazy guys. Almost all of our left opponents today are real dullards by comparison.
Although the Saint-Simonian school had disintegrated while Marx was still in his early teens, its ideas gained a widespread and sympathetic currency among progressive-minded intellectuals in France, Germany and elsewhere in continental West Europe. One such intellectual was a learned Prussian nobleman and middle-level government official, Ludwig von Westphalen, who was a friend of the Marx family in Trier. He saw in young Karl a kindred spirit—hungry for knowledge, committed to the betterment of humanity—and he took him under his wing. Marx later described von Westphalen as a “paternal friend,” who also became his father-in-law. The two would go for long walks in the Rhenish countryside where they would exchange ideas on everything from Shakespeare to socialism.
In this way Marx early on acquired a knowledge of the Saint-Simonian school, that is, of a far more advanced conception of the future collectivist organization of the economy than the crude leveling-down of the Jacobin communist tradition or a system of decentralized socialist communes. When in the mid 1840s Marx made the transition from radical democrat to communist, he operated with a basically Saint-Simonian conception of the future organization of the economy.
Buonarroti and Hegel on the French Revolution
In 1843, commenting on the increasingly repressive policies of the Prussian state, Marx wrote in a letter to a colleague, Arnold Ruge:
“The mantle of liberalism has been discarded and the most disgusting despotism in all its nakedness is disclosed to the eyes of the whole world.
“That, too, is a revelation, although one of the opposite kind. It is a truth, which, at least, teaches us to recognise the emptiness of our patriotism and the abnormity of our state system, and makes us hide our faces in shame. You look at me with a smile and ask: What is gained by that? No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind; shame is actually the victory of the French Revolution over the German patriotism that defeated it in 1813.”
The French Revolution was the Russian question of the day. One’s attitude toward the French Revolution and its various phases centrally defined one’s political outlook and program. If you opposed the French Revolution in toto from the beginning, you were a monarchical reactionary. If you supported the early moderate period of the revolution—expressed in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which explicitly included the right of private property deemed “sacred and inviolate”—then you were a liberal. If you supported the Jacobin regime of Robespierre, you were a radical democrat. And if you supported Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals, you were a communist.
In our Enlightenment pamphlet, I said one could think of two roads leading from the French Revolution to the Marx of the Communist League and Communist Manifesto of 1848, a rightward road and a leftward road. The rightward road ran from the Napoleonic occupation of western Germany through Hegel to the left Hegelians. The leftward road ran from Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals through Buonarroti and Auguste Blanqui to the German worker-communists of the League of the Just in the 1830s and 1840s.
In keeping with this approach, one can say that Marx had two political godfathers, a liberal political godfather, Hegel, and a Jacobin communist political godfather, Buonarroti. Both had been members of the defeated progressive party. Buonarroti had been a left-wing Jacobin, part of Robespierre’s personal circle. Hegel had been one of the few prominent German liberal intellectuals who supported the Napoleonic occupation throughout as historically progressive. He called Napoleon the “world spirit on horseback.” If you understand that image, then you can understand Hegel. In 1813, Hegel advised his students not to join the German volunteer corps fighting the French army in the so-called “wars of liberation.”
In the long period of reaction following Napoleon’s decisive defeat at Waterloo in 1815, both Buonarroti and Hegel thought long and hard about the causes of the defeat of the French Revolution. Why had Robespierre been overthrown? Why had Napoleon been defeated? More fundamentally, why had the ideals of the French Revolution expressed in the slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” not been realized in the Europe of the day?
Buonarroti and Hegel arrived at fundamentally different answers and corresponding programmatic conclusions. Buonarroti operated with a Rousseauean worldview. Hegel rejected the concept of natural law and natural right in favor of a dialectical—though not materialist—conception of historical development.
To use a term and concept with which we’re all familiar, Buonarroti maintained that the French Revolution was “betrayed.” Robespierre was overthrown by a group of Jacobin leaders who had become morally corrupted by access to the wealth which their newfound political power and influence gave them. He maintained and truly believed that had Robespierre continued to rule France, he would gradually have introduced communism in the Babouvist sense.
What then was to be done? To use another term and concept with which we’re all familiar, Buonarroti maintained that the crisis of humanity had been reduced to the crisis of “revolutionary leadership.” He and his successor Auguste Blanqui sought to construct an organization of morally stalwart revolutionaries which at a suitable moment would launch an insurrection to establish a revolutionary dictatorship on the Jacobin model. This regime would install a communist system based on the egalitarian distribution of the means of consumption, which would in fairly short order bring about the moral regeneration of the citizens of the new “red republic.”
Doubtless everyone in this room has relatives and friends who say that communism is contrary to human nature. But the main body of communists in early 19th century Europe believed just the opposite, that it was private property which was unnatural. Communism was that form of social organization which corresponded to man’s instinctual empathy with the fellow members of his species.
Hegel rejected that concept, both its programmatic conclusion and theoretical premise. He maintained that society was not governed by man’s supposedly instinctual nature. Men’s consciousness changed qualitatively over the course of history as it expressed the progressive development of what he called the “absolute spirit.” The ideals of the French Revolution could not be realized because European civilization had not attained a sufficient level of spiritual maturity.
What did Hegel mean by “spirit”? Not an easy question to answer. I’ve read a couple of dozen books and articles on this subject and have gotten several different and mutually exclusive explanations. In the early 1840s, Ludwig Feuerbach exercised a strong influence on Marx and also Engels. At this time he summarized his own intellectual evolution in this way: First, I believed in God. Then I believed in reason (that’s when he was a more or less orthodox Hegelian). Now, I believe in man. All of us understand what it means to believe in God, doubtless some of you from bitter personal experience. And you can understand what Feuerbach meant when he said he now believed in man. If you recognize the illusory character of an all-powerful supernatural deity, then you can believe that man is the master of his own fate.
But what does it mean to believe in reason instead of and in between believing in God and in man? Reason is not an all-powerful entity; it’s an activity. Men reason, they think in order to pursue their needs and interests. But for Hegel, it was the other way around. Man in the natural, biological sense existed to serve the needs and interests of reason. Men were the necessary agents to actualize the progressive development and self-consciousness of the absolute spirit.
But let’s try to set aside the semimystical, metaphysical component of Hegel’s philosophy. What was he saying in real-world terms about Europe in the era of the French Revolution? He was saying that the leaders of the French Revolution like Robespierre had failed because they tried to wipe out in one stroke the cultural inheritance of millennia of European civilization—the Christian religion, respect for monarchical authority. At another level, Hegel maintained that no government, including a revolutionary government, could eliminate individual egoism—material self-interest. He held that the role of the state was to represent the general interests of the community by mediating between the conflicting material interests of individuals and groups, for example, between employers and workers.
Hegel maintained that social progress had to be organic and gradual—in his case, very gradual. Thus he wrote in his major work on political philosophy that political change should be such that “the advance from one state of affairs to another is tranquil in appearance and unnoticed. In this way a constitution changes over a long period of time into something quite different from what it was originally” (The Philosophy of Right [1821]).
As Marx developed historical or dialectical materialism, he incorporated Hegel’s understanding that one could not reconstruct the world anew according to some ideal model. He likewise agreed with Hegel that Europe during the French Revolution and in subsequent decades was not sufficiently developed to realize the principles of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” But he came to understand that underlying what Hegel called the “spiritual immaturity of European civilization” was its material or economic immaturity.
In one of Marx’s last major writings he stated: “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines” (Critique of the Gotha Programme [1875]). This statement encapsulates the fundamental difference between Marxism and both the Rousseauean concept of natural law and the Hegelian concept of the autonomous and transcendent development of consciousness or culture. How Marx arrived at this understanding is the subject of the next session.
Many, many years ago I did a multi-part series of educationals under the general heading of “Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition.” One reason was because I thought the Hegelian contribution to Marxism had been overvalued, especially by bourgeois academics, and the influence on Marx and Engels of contemporary plebeian and proletarian radicalism—red republicanism— had been undervalued.
So I’d like to conclude this session with the wisdom of Philippe Buonarroti, a great and noble-minded man. For decades, usually under conditions of severe repression, he sought to form and lead revolutionary communist organizations. On one occasion he made a list of the personal qualities he looked for in recruits:
“Devotion to the principles of the order and willingness to sacrifice to them personal interests and pleasure.”
“Courage, that is to say, scorn of danger, of work and hardship.”
“Reflection, gravity, prudence.” It’s a dangerous world out there, so be careful.
“Patience and perseverance.”
“Scorn for wealth, position, men, and power….”
“Inviolable respect for the word, the promise, and the vow.” Say what you mean and mean what you say.
“Willingness to overlook personal wrongs.” In other words, don’t be subjective, don’t be cliquist.
“Moderation in the use of intoxicating liquors.” Well, that’s really a matter of personal taste.
“The habit of speaking little and to the point.” This will make local meetings a lot shorter, comrades.
“No wish to make an impression, to shine, and to impose oneself.” In other words, don’t try to be a star.
“Caution in gambling, in love, in anger, and in the opening of one’s heart.” That really is a matter of personal style.
And finally: “Exquisite sensibility concerning the wrongs that weigh on humanity.” With that we can all agree.
Marx was born in 1818 in the city of Trier in the German Rhineland bordering on France. It was the region of Germany most directly affected by and sympathetic to the French Revolution. It was the main concentration of German radical democrats ideologically akin to the French Jacobins. The French revolutionary army occupied the Rhineland a decade before Napoleon occupied the rest of western and southern Germany. So the French Revolution was extended to this region in its more radical and democratic phase. Marx grew up in a city in which many bourgeois notables had been ardent revolutionary democrats in their youth, and some retained a sentimental attachment to their old ideals.
In the earlier session, I cited Freud’s aphorism that the child is the father of the man. But the father is also the father of the child who is the father of the man. And Marx revered his father throughout his life. A boyhood friend of Marx and later his brother-in-law, Edgar von Westphalen, described Heinrich Marx as a “real eighteenth-century Frenchman, who knew his Voltaire and Rousseau inside out.”
Heinrich Marx was a leading figure in the Trier liberal social club. On one occasion he and some other members had a little too much to drink, and they started singing the “Marseillaise,” the anthem of the French Revolution. This was rather like singing the “Internationale” at a local Democratic Party headquarters. News of the scandal got out, and the Trier liberals involved were strongly denounced by the Prussian authorities, including the crown prince. Fortunately, nothing worse came of it for Marx’s father.
How Marx Became A Marxist – ( 2 of 3)
So Marx was raised in the spirit of rational humanism. And this can be clearly seen in an essay he wrote titled, “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Career” (1835), upon graduating gymnasium at the age of 17:
“History calls those the greatest men who ennoble themselves by working for the universal. Experience praises as the most happy the one who made the most people happy….
“When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are only sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited, egotistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective.”
—quoted in David McLellan, Marx Before Marxism (1970)
So Marx began as a liberal idealist wanting to better the condition of humanity. Broadly speaking, his outlook at 17 was similar to my own at that age and probably to most of yours at that age. It’s also similar to most of the student youth we encounter in, say, the “anti-globalization” protests at least in the U.S.
Marx then went to the University of Bonn in western Germany for a year. So far as we know, there was no significant change in his intellectual outlook in this period. But an incident occurred which illuminates Marx’s personal character and also the character of German society at the time.
The university had the equivalent of today’s fraternities in the form of tavern clubs or drinking societies. These were organized on geographical and, to a certain extent, class lines. Marx joined a tavern club of students from Trier who were mainly of bourgeois and professional backgrounds like himself. There was also a tavern club of young Prussian aristocrats—Junkers—who despised and constantly baited Rhenish bourgeois types like Marx.
And on one occasion one of these young Junkers provoked Marx into a duel with sabers—real sabers, not with tipped points and blunted blades. Marx held his own and got a permanent scar above his left eye. For the rest of his life he was immensely proud of that scar as a wound gotten in honorable class combat. “See this—I got this in a saber duel with some young Junker creep in my university days.”
Origins of the Hegelian Left
The following year, Marx transferred to the University of Berlin. He arrived there at the very moment that it was becoming the main center of the main left-radical intellectual current in Germany: the left Hegelians, sometimes also called the Young Hegelians although some of them were a good deal older than some right Hegelians. This current was the product of two mutually reinforcing developments: the rightward motion in Prussian ruling circles, especially as it affected academic and intellectual life, and the internal contradictions of Hegel’s philosophy.
During the so-called “wars of liberation” against the Napoleonic regime, a strong rightist tendency cohered, centrally within the Prussian nobility, which combined Christian fundamentalism—it was called Pietism—with backward-looking German nationalism conveyed by the expression “blut und boden”—blood and soil. A very good book on the emergence of the Hegelian left by an American academic, John Edward Toews, commented in this regard: “These young Junkers had experienced the war against Napoleon as a kind of Christian-German crusade against French rationalism and liberalism” (Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841 [1980]).
In opposition to Christian fundamentalism and romantic German nationalism, Hegel sought to mediate at the intellectual level between the era of the French Revolution and the post-1815 period of reaction. He maintained that Prussia, as a result of the reforms undertaken during the Napoleonic period, had become a modern, rational state—a rechtstaat, a state of law. Hegel considered himself a good Christian of the Lutheran persuasion. He maintained that Protestant Christianity expressed in terms of symbols and allegories fundamental truths about God which philosophy, that is, his own philosophy, apprehended through reason.
The Christian right of the day regarded Hegel’s moderate liberalism as containing the seeds of dangerous radicalism in both politics and religion. Granted, Hegel himself maintained that the laws and policies of the Kingdom of Prussia represented the highest interests of the German community. But from the same theoretical premises someone else could maintain that those interests required the overthrow of the Prussian monarchy and its replacement by a democratic republic.
The Pietists were even more virulently hostile to Hegel’s views on religion than to his politics. Christianity, they insisted, must be based on faith in an unknowable God. Hegel’s contention that man through reason could understand God and his works was blasphemy. One of the leading Pietists, Heinrich Leo, exclaimed that Hegel’s philosophy would lure “‘the children of the German nation into Satan’s watchtower’ where they would ‘die from hunger and thirst for the word of the Lord'” (quoted in Toews, Hegelianism).
In the 1820s, the top level Prussian bureaucrats in charge of academia were relatively liberal and favored the Hegelians over the Christian rightists. However, in the 1830s the balance of political forces in Prussian ruling circles was reversed. The more liberal Hegelians were now regarded and treated as dangerous radicals. They were thwarted in their academic careers. As a consequence, some of them moved to the left as they intersected and influenced a new generation of young liberal idealists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who eventually would become truly dangerous radicals.
In their own way the Christian rightists recognized the potentially radical implications embedded in Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel maintained that the broad sweep of history expressed the progressive development of the absolute spirit. But he didn’t consider that this was true of everything that happened. He allowed for historical accidents. And he recognized that many institutions and cultural attitudes were dead remnants of the past devoid of spiritual vitality. As Protestants, Hegel and his followers consigned Roman Catholicism to the latter category as an outmoded superstition.
Hegel thus differentiated between existence, the German word being dassein, and reality, the German word being wirklichkeit. Dassein was the totality of that which existed empirically. Wirklichkeit represented those particular aspects of existence which corresponded to the historical development of reason. But how was one to know what was merely existent and what was really real? The answer is—one couldn’t.
Thus even in Hegel’s lifetime there were very significant political differences of a left-right character among his followers. His best-known protégé was Herbert Gans, a secularized Jew. Like Marx’s father, Gans had to legally convert to Lutheranism in order to hold a professorship at the University of Berlin where he lectured on law and political philosophy. Perhaps because of his Jewish background, Gans was much more critical of the Prussian government from the left than was Hegel. The crown prince once complained to the minister of education that Gans was turning his students into revolutionary republicans. Incidentally, Gans was still at the University of Berlin when Marx arrived there, and he attended Gans’ lectures. The old left Hegelian died a few years later. Basically, a very good guy.
The contradiction at the core of Hegel’s philosophy was implicit in his most famous aphorism: what is real is rational and what is rational is real. The first implies that the world as it currently exists is perforce rational; the second that what is irrational is soon fated to disappear and be replaced by what is rational.
You may recall from the earlier session that Moses Hess listed six thinkers who influenced the young Marx. Only one of these was an older contemporary, Heinrich Heine, who was the best-known German writer of the day of radical leftist sympathies. Heine studied under Hegel in the 1820s though he was never a Hegelian. He later settled in Paris where he met Marx in 1844-45, and the two became good friends. At this time Heine commented on the rise of the Hegelian left in his usual wise guy style:
“We now have monks of Atheism [he’s referring to the likes of Feuerbach and Marx], whom Mr. Voltaire, because he was an obstinate Deist, would have broiled alive. I must admit that this music does not appeal to me, but it does not frighten me either, for I have stood behind the Maestro [that is, Hegel] while he composed. To be sure, he composed with indistinct and elaborately adorned notes—so that not everyone could decipher them. Occasionally I observed how he anxiously looked about in fear that he might have been understood. He liked me very much because he was convinced that I would not betray him; I even thought him servile at that time. Once, when I expressed displeasure with the phrase ‘Everything that is, is rational,’ he smiled strangely and said, ‘One could also read it as “everything which is rational must be”.'”
—Toews, Hegelianism
The Influence of Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach
A year after arriving at the University of Berlin, Marx joined the left Hegelian circle which was organized around the Doctors’ Club. Its leading figure was Bruno Bauer, and Marx became one of Bauer’s main protégés over the next few years. There’s some anecdotal evidence that Marx collaborated in writings which Bauer published in his own name and also in writing an anonymous pamphlet Bauer brought out. Marx himself did not publish anything in his own name until his doctoral dissertation on ancient Greek philosophy in 1841. However, since Bauer treated him as a protégé, one can reasonably assume Marx’s ideas at the time were broadly similar to Bauer’s.
Basically, what Bauer did was to jettison the metaphysical, semi-religious aspects of Hegel’s philosophy while retaining its idealist conception of historical development. He also took the rationalist implications of Hegel’s doctrines to their extreme, even absurdist, logical conclusion. Bauer maintained that what Hegel had called the absolute spirit was really the collective self-consciousness of mankind or, to use more conventional terminology, the prevailing cultural attitudes.
Many years later in a brief sketch of his own intellectual development, Marx wrote: “My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]). The idea that legal and political institutions express the general development of the human mind was that of Bruno Bauer, which Marx shared for a time and then transcended.
Like Hegel, Bauer viewed the history of European civilization as a progression from lower to higher levels of thought. Applying this conception to the present, Bauer maintained that by theoretical criticism he was dealing the Prussian Christian monarchical state a decisive blow against which its empirical reality could not long resist. He wrote to Marx in 1841: “The terrorism of true theory will clear the field…. Theory is now the most effective practice and we cannot yet predict in what a great manner it can become practical” (quoted in Toews, Hegelianism). Once an institution was condemned in theory as historically outmoded, its fate was thereby sealed.
Bauer considered himself a revolutionary, indeed an extreme revolutionary. But the arena in which the revolution was to be made was that of ideas, indeed academia. In a letter to Arnold Ruge, Bauer exclaimed: “My blasphemous spirit would be satisfied only if I were given the authority of a professorship to teach publicly the system of atheism” (quoted in Toews, Hegelianism). If only Bauer could preach atheism from a university lecture hall, thrones would be toppled across Europe from Portugal to Russia. Christian churches would be closed down for lack of believers.
Marx and Engels’ first joint work, The Holy Family, written in 1845, was centrally a polemic against Bauer. Here’s the crux of it:
“History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” [emphasis in original]
In the 1860s, a friend and admirer gave Marx an old copy of The Holy Family, and he reread it probably for the first time since it had been originally published. Marx wrote to Engels, “I was pleasantly surprised to find that we do not need to be ashamed of this work, although the cult of Feuerbach produces a very humorous effect upon one now.”
What was it about Feuerbach’s ideas at this juncture that had such an immediate and powerful impact on Marx, Engels and other left Hegelians? Feuerbach argued that Hegel’s concept of absolute spirit and its derivative, Bauer’s idea of the general development of the human mind, shared the same basic premise as traditional Christianity and other religions. An imaginary entity created by men’s minds was elevated above real, living human beings. Men came to believe that they were dominated by what was in fact the product of their own thoughts. As Engels later explained:
“With one blow it [Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity] pulverised the contradiction, by plainly placing materialism on the throne again. Nature exists independently of all philosophy. It is the foundation upon which we human beings, ourselves products of nature, have grown up. Nothing exists outside nature and man, and the higher beings our religious fantasies have created are only the fantastic reflection of our own essence.” [emphasis in original]
—Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886)
Feuerbach himself summarized his ideas in this way: “The new philosophy deals with being as it is for us, not only as thinking, but as really existing being…. It is the being of the senses, sight, feeling and love” (quoted in David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx [1969]). A few years later Feuerbach carried his view that the behavior of man in society was governed by his biological make-up a step further. He maintained that the actions of individuals and groups were strongly influenced by their diet, by the kind of food they ate. One can understand why this idea would have a special appeal for a German intellectual. In German, the third person singular of the verb “to be” and “to eat” is a homonym: Man ist was man isst. One is what one eats.
Feuerbach was a materialist in terms of man and nature. But he was an idealist in terms of man and man, of man in society. Like Bauer and other left Hegelians, he believed in the liberating power of ideas. Once men recognized that they themselves had created God as an all-powerful entity, they would reappropriate the powers which they had alienated to an imaginary deity. Thus he wrote: “To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must become nothing.” But a recognition of the illusory character of God does not imbue man with latent powers of which he was previously unaware. It does not increase the material wealth and productive forces of society. Rejection of religion removes an important ideological barrier to progressive social struggle on the part of the exploited and oppressed. But atheism does not in itself constitute such social struggles.
Furthermore, one can be an atheist and also believe in, so to speak, cynical self-interest. “There’s no God. There’s no heaven or hell. I’m going to get mine here and now. Screw the rest of the world. I’m looking out for number one.”
Here we come to the second major aspect of Feuerbach’s idealism, his concept of the “religion of humanity.” Man, he argued, was a social animal. The well-being and happiness of an individual depend upon his cooperation with the fellow members of his species, on their respect and affection for him. Thus he wrote: “Only community constitutes humanity…. That the thou belongs to the perfection of the I, that men are required to constitute humanity” (quoted in Toews, Hegelianism). However, society not only unites individuals for their common interests; it also divides them into classes and other groups based on conflicting material self-interest.
Marx Becomes a Communist
Even in this period when Marx was most strongly influenced by Feuerbach, he was beginning to understand the primacy of material self-interest and class divisions in society. How so?
The rightward motion in the Prussian ruling classes not only propelled some liberal Hegelian intellectuals to the left; it also resulted in a more oppositional mood among some elements of the liberal bourgeoisie. In late 1841, Moses Hess convinced a number of wealthy liberal businessmen in the Rhineland to finance a newspaper whose contributors and staff would be heavily drawn from left Hegelians. One of the main backers, Ludolf Camphausen, later became Prussian prime minister during the Revolution of 1848. The paper was called the Rheinische Zeitung and subtitled “For Politics, Commerce and Industry.” Politics was a code word for liberal reform, which was linked to the progress of commerce and industry.
Given Marx’s reputation as a left Hegelian and protégé of Bruno Bauer, he could not get an academic appointment. So Bauer suggested he contribute to the Rheinische Zeitung, which he did. He soon became de facto and then official editor of the paper. According to Marx’s own later testimony, it was as a result of his involvement with the Rheinische Zeitung that he began to develop a materialist understanding of society.
As an academic intellectual, Marx had been concerned almost exclusively with questions of philosophy and history. He had little if any interest in current events. He was far more knowledgeable about the different schools of ancient Greek philosophy than about the different political tendencies in the Germany of the day.
But as editor of a newspaper, Marx had to think about and make judgments on current events. That was his job. Shortly after becoming editor, Marx wrote an article strongly critical of a proposed law imposing harsher penalties on the theft of dead wood from privately owned forests. This was an important source of heating fuel for poor people in the countryside. Along similar lines, the paper ran a series on the economic distress of farmers in the Moselle valley who grew grapes and made them into wine.
Marx came to recognize that differences over laws protecting property, differences over the causes and solutions to poverty did not express differences over abstract concepts of justice or economic doctrine. Rather they expressed conflicting material interests, ultimately conflicting class interests. As Marx later wrote:
“In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhine Province Assembly on thefts of wood and the division of landed property; the official polemic started by Herr von Schaper, then Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Mosel peasantry, and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions.”
—”A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859)
Marx’s growing recognition of the primacy of material interests and class divisions in society did not lead him immediately and directly to communism. He remained within the political mainstream of the left Hegelian movement. The extreme left wing was represented by a coterie of intellectuals in Berlin who called themselves die Freien (The Free). Among them were a young Russian nobleman, Mikhail Bakunin, and the son of a wealthy western German textile manufacturer, Friedrich Engels. Die Freien combined a bohemian lifestyle with anarcho-communist political posturing.
In a letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx joked that he had thrown out more contributions from die Freien than had the official government censor. He described them as “scrawls pregnant with world revolutions and empty of thought, written in a slovenly style and flavoured with some atheism and communism (which these gentlemen have never studied).” Marx did not reject and oppose communism at this time. Rather he was not convinced of its theoretical and practical validity as expounded in the mainly French communist literature of the day.
Even without contributions from die Freien, the Rheinische Zeitung was too radical for the Prussian authorities to tolerate, and the paper was suppressed in early 1843. The following autumn, Marx moved to Paris, having just married his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen. They lived in a housing complex with other German leftist radicals, among them Georg Maurer, who was a leader of the Paris branch of the League of the Just. This was a group of German communists, mainly artisans, who were closely tied to their French counterparts. A few years earlier, the League’s cadre had participated in a failed insurrection led by Auguste Blanqui, the foremost representative of Jacobin communism in that era.
For the first time in his life, Marx now socialized with communist and socialist workers—French as well as German—whose political views were as advanced as his own, if not more so. And it was then that Marx became a communist. He might well have arrived at communism in Germany through a purely intellectual path, as had Moses Hess and Engels before him. But the fact is that he didn’t. In the notebooks he kept at the time, he expressed his deep admiration for the communist workers he had come to know. One gets the impression that this experience dispelled an element of intellectual elitism in Marx’s outlook. He recognized that workers with little formal education, not only intellectuals like himself, could be deeply committed to the struggle for a future world free of oppression and exploitation.
Part 4
On Left Hegelian Radicalism
The period between late 1843 and the spring of 1845, when Marx wrote the “Theses on Feuerbach,” was a transitional period in his thinking. His ideas did not constitute a consistent and coherent whole. Elements of left Hegelian idealism coexisted with rudimentary elements of what Plekhanov would later term “dialectical materialism.”
Thus in late 1843, Marx projected an imminent revolution in Germany led by the proletariat. At the same time, he by no means rejected and opposed Feuerbach’s concept of the “religion of humanity.” He wrote to Feuerbach in 1844:
“In these writings you have provided—I don’t know whether intentionally—a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!” [emphasis in original]
Marx was here still operating with a concept of man in society which was class undifferentiated.
A superficial and ahistorical reading of Marx’s early writings might give the impression that he was more radically leftist in 1843-44 than in 1847-48. In the introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” written in late 1843, Marx declared:
“In Germany emancipation from the Middle Ages is possible only as emancipation from the partial victories over the Middle Ages as well. In Germany no kind of bondage can be broken without breaking every kind of bondage. The thorough Germany cannot make a revolution without making a thoroughgoing revolution. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of the human being. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat.” [emphasis in original]
However, in the Communist Manifesto, written four and a half years later, Marx projected:
“The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.”
How does one explain Marx’s change in position on the crucial question of the social character of the coming revolution in Germany? The answer is that in 1843-44 Marx was not yet a Marxist. He used the terms “proletariat,” “revolution” and “communism,” but these terms were placed within a left Hegelian conceptual framework. The proletariat was assigned the role of the revolutionary negation or antithesis of the existing social and political order in Germany. Marx defined the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat essentially, indeed entirely, in negative terms. It was
“a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it.” [emphasis in original]
—Introduction to “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”
None of Marx’s early writings investigate the actual socio-economic condition of the German proletariat, its various components (such as artisans versus factory workers), its organizations and political consciousness. The empirical reality represented by the term “proletariat” in Germany in the 1840s was fundamentally different than it is today or, for that matter, half a century later. No more than a third of urban wage earners worked in factories. The large majority were employed in small workshops using pre-industrial technology. And they considered having to work in a factory a form of social degradation which they resisted as best they could.
When the political situation opened up in 1848, the newly formed mass working-class organizations did not look forward to a collectivized industrial economy, but rather backward to a protected artisanal economy. They demanded higher tariffs to protect German workers from cheap manufactured imports from Britain. They agitated for laws to protect artisans from competition from goods made in German factories. On a few occasions, small groups of artisans physically attacked and sought to demolish factories. “We are destroying industrial capitalism…literally. Smash! Take that, you evil factory!”
I want to digress a little on the present-day significance of left Hegelian radicalism. Because of Marx’s involvement in this movement, left Hegelianism is usually identified with Germany in the early-mid 1840s. But the German left Hegelian movement was very short-lived. Even before 1848, its leading figures—Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, Arnold Ruge—had dropped out of radical politics, while Marx and Engels transcended left Hegelian idealism.
It was not German but rather Russian left Hegelians—notably Alexander Herzen and his colleague Mikhail Bakunin—who founded historically significant political-ideological tendencies which exist to this day. Herzen was the founding theorist of Russian populism—the idea of a peasant-based revolution leading to peasant-based socialism. Bakunin was the founding figure of anarcho-communism both as a doctrine and a movement.
We’re all aware of the revival of anarchism in the post-Soviet period. However, there has been a revival of left Hegelian radicalism, in substance though not form, since the 1960s. From the late 1950s until his early death in 1961, Frantz Fanon, a left-wing intellectual from the French West Indies, served as a publicist for the Algerian petty-bourgeois nationalists then waging a war of liberation against French colonial rule. In that capacity he published a book whose title, The Wretched of the Earth, instantaneously entered into the vocabulary of the left internationally.
Fanon maintained that the industrial working class in the advanced capitalist countries, and also the colonial and semicolonial countries, had become bourgeoisified. The revolutionary negation of the global capitalist-imperialist system was now to be found in the “wretched of the earth”—the poorest and most downtrodden section of the peasantry and the impoverished slum dwellers in cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In the U.S., Fanon’s views strongly influenced the leaders of the Black Panther Party like Huey Newton and David Hilliard, who maintained that black lumpens—the “brothers on the block”—were the social vanguard of the American revolution. To speak Hegelian, the black lumpenproletariat was the revolutionary antithesis of the American racist, capitalist social and political order.
All of us in the SL/U.S. are familiar with the expression: the most oppressed is the most revolutionary. This is the crux of left Hegelian political radicalism which Marx and also Engels transcended in the course of becoming Marxists.
Toward Dialectical Materialism
Looking back in the 1880s, Engels considered that the “Theses on Feuerbach,” written by Marx in the spring of 1845, was the first coherent expression of historical materialism. The following year, Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, which was in a sense an explanation and elaboration of the ideas which the “Theses” presented in a highly encapsulated, almost cryptic, form. Marx later wrote that The German Ideology was a work of “self-clarification,” thereby implying that it criticized ideas which he and Engels had recently shared with other left Hegelians, notably Feuerbach.
I want to emphasize three aspects of the new Marxist worldview which sharply differentiated it from left Hegelian idealism. First, external reality cannot be adequately understood through passive contemplation. Thought is purposive. People think in order to pursue their needs and interests. One can expand and deepen one’s understanding of the world only by seeking to change it, by trying to act upon it. One can then assess the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of such efforts and therefore the validity and adequacy of one’s understanding of the world. As Marx wrote in the second thesis on Feuerbach:
“The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which isolates itself from practice is a purely scholastic question.”
Second, Marx insisted that the elimination of oppression and exploitation in their various historically derived forms required the development of the productive forces of society. It was not enough to expose and refute the ideological legitimations of the existing social and political order such as religion and nationalism or, for that matter, liberalism. Thus a key passage in The German Ideology:
“We shall, of course, not take the trouble to explain to our wise philosophers that the ‘liberation’ of ‘man’ is not advanced a single step by reducing philosophy, theology, substance and all the rubbish to ‘self-consciousness’ and by liberating ‘man’ from the domination of these phrases, which have never held him in thrall. Nor shall we explain to them that it is possible to achieve real liberation only in the real world and by real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. ‘Liberation’ is a historical and not a mental act.”
Marx and Engels did not, of course, deny or minimize the importance of combating the influence of bourgeois ideology among the mass of the working class. Such propagandistic activity was a necessary precondition for a proletarian revolution. But it was the proletarian revolution that was the necessary and decisive act of social liberation in the real world.
This bears on a third important aspect of Marxism as it differentiated itself from left Hegelian radicalism. This was a dialectical materialist understanding of the working class. Here I believe Engels’ contribution was of crucial importance. Unlike Marx, during this period Engels acquired firsthand knowledge of a mass political movement of an industrial proletariat, the British Chartist movement of the 1840s.
In 1843, Engels was sent to help manage the family textile factory in Manchester, England. At the time he was a pure left Hegelian communist who believed that what is rational must soon become real, especially in Germany. Soon after arriving in England, he wrote an article, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent,” for the Owenite socialist journal, The New Moral World, in which he stated:
“The Germans are a philosophical nation, and will not, cannot abandon Communism, as soon as it is founded upon sound philosophical principles: chiefly if it is derived as an unavoidable conclusion from their own philosophy….
“There is a greater chance in Germany for the establishment of a Communist party among the educated classes of society, than anywhere else. The Germans are a very disinterested nation; if in Germany principle comes into collision with interest, principle will almost always silence the claims of interest. The same love of abstract principle, the same disregard of reality and self-interest, which have brought the Germans to a state of political nonentity, these very same qualities guarantee the success of philosophical Communism in that country.” [emphasis in original]
So how did Engels become a Marxist? Certainly, an important factor was that he developed a close political relationship with the leaders of the left wing of the Chartist movement, notably Julian Harney and Ernest Jones. He came to recognize both the potential social power of the organized industrial proletariat and the many obstacles to and difficulties in organizing the mass of workers on a revolutionary program.
Even among the relatively advanced workers who participated in and supported the Chartist movement, there were significantly different levels of political consciousness. The Chartist movement, whose central programmatic demand was universal suffrage, had a well-defined right-left factional spectrum. Workers who supported the right wing were willing to settle for moderate reforms and were prepared for that purpose to collaborate with bourgeois liberals. The leaders and militants of the Chartist left were “red republicans,” and indeed, later chose that term for the name of their newspaper.
Unlike Marx’s earlier writings, the Communist Manifesto presents, albeit briefly, a dialectical materialist analysis of the modern working class, explaining the interaction between objective economic development and the organization and political consciousness of the proletariat. The Manifesto also for the first time clearly defines the fundamental difference between the communist vanguard and the relatively more backward workers:
“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”
The same month that the Manifesto was published, a popular, working-class-centered uprising in Paris overthrew the government of Louis Philippe, known as “the bankers’ king.” This initiated revolutions throughout continental west and central Europe. The revolutions of 1848, Marx and Engels’ participation in them, their defeat and aftermath lie beyond the scope of this educational, which is plenty ambitious as it is.
However, one episode in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions bears directly on one of the themes I’ve been discussing. By 1850, following the defeat of the revolution in Germany, the leadership of the Communist League reassembled in London. In the fall of that year, the League experienced a factional struggle leading to a split. A group around Karl Schapper, the veteran leader of the organization before Marx, maintained that the victory of monarchical reaction in Germany was transient. Schapper and his cothinkers projected a renewed imminent revolutionary upsurge which would be even more radical than before, since the bourgeois liberals had discredited themselves with the workers and petty-bourgeois masses.
Marx and Engels considered this wishful thinking. In the course of the fight, Marx exclaimed:
“The materialist standpoint of the Manifesto has given way to idealism. The revolution is seen not as the product of realities of the situation but as the result of an effort of will. Whereas we say to the workers: You have 15, 20, 50 years of civil war to go through in order to alter the situation and to train yourselves for the exercise of power, it is said: We must take power at once, or else we may as well take to our beds.” [emphasis in original]
The basic point is that the revolutionary capacity of the working class is not simply a result of the condition of oppression and exploitation but is a product of its own historical development, in which the communist vanguard plays a crucial role.
In 1850, Marx and Engels did not foresee and could not possibly have foreseen that the reactionary conditions in Germany and also France would last another decade and a half. And even after that, except for the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, there was no prospect for proletarian revolution in Europe during Marx and Engels’ lifetimes.
When the Communist Manifesto was published, there were a couple of thousand members and supporters of the Communist League in Germany and elsewhere in West Europe. Ten years later only a handful of these were still communists. The overwhelming majority of “Red ’48ers,” as they were called, had come to terms with the developing bourgeois order. One even ended up as German finance minister under Bismarck. A goodly number of former “Red ’48ers” emigrated to the United States where they played an honorable and important role as officers and soldiers in the Union Army in the American Civil War. But they did so as radical democrats, no longer communists.
A parallel development occurred in Britain. In 1850, the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto was published on the front page of the journal of the Chartist left, the Red Republican. However, over the next decade, the Chartist movement disintegrated completely. First Julian Harney, then Ernest Jones became demoralized, moved to the right and came out for collaboration between the workers movement and bourgeois liberals.
Almost uniquely among the leading “red republicans” of the 1840s, Marx and Engels continued to stand for and fight for communism for the rest of their lives. They modified their concrete program in line with changing historical conditions (for example, on the colonial question), but they did not change their ultimate goal. Eventually, they were able to intersect a new generation of young militant leftists—represented by Jules Guesde in France and Georgi Plekhanov in Russia—who had not been scarred by the historic defeat of 1848.
If, in the years or decades after 1848, Marx and Engels had abandoned communism as a utopian fantasy, the Communist Manifesto would today be as little known and little read as the writings of Wilhelm Weitling, Étienne Cabet, Auguste Blanqui, Robert Owen and the many other communists and socialists of the pre-1848 era. Marx and Engels were the human, that is, material, agents necessary to transmit their ideas to future generations.
We, too, now operate in the aftermath of a world-historic defeat: the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union. And we, too, are the only human agents—there’s no one else out there—who can transmit the principles and program of communism and the understanding of dialectical materialism to future generations. That’s just the way it is.
This June marks the 65th anniversary of the East German proletarian uprising, which, for the first time, posed the potential for working-class political revolution to sweep away Stalinist bureaucratic rule and establish a government based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. Contrary to claims by bourgeois ideologues and the Stalinists, who portrayed the uprising as a pro-capitalist rebellion, the workers defended the collectivized foundations of the East German deformed workers state. They raised the call to their class brothers in West Germany: “Sweep out your crap in Bonn—In Pankow [East Berlin] we’re cleaning house.” In the excerpt below, published shortly after the suppression of the uprising, the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party emphasized the need to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist party. (For more on the subject, see “The East German Workers Uprising of 17 June 1953” in Workers Vanguard No. 332, 17 June 1983.)
The general strike was deeply rooted in the masses of East Germany. It was splendidly organized. Who were the leaders? Who were the workers that formed the strike committees, which numbered thousands of members, coordinated the actions of numerous cities, organized the storming of the prisons to free political prisoners, and displayed such heroism and organizing capacity in the face of the repressions? This workers vanguard is composed of trade unionists, communist and socialist workers, who acted with splendid revolutionary initiative despite the Stalinist and the Social Democratic leadership of the workers organizations.
The regroupment of this workers vanguard into a revolutionary Leninist party, that will organize the struggle and guide it to victory is the burning task of the hour. The perspective opened up by the beginning of the political revolution is thus the perspective of the reconstitution of the revolutionary socialist party of Lenin and Trotsky. The leaders of the East German workers are forging the basis for such a party in the heat of struggle. Brutal repressions by the Stalinists, however ferocious, will not prevent this indispensable and unpostponable task from being realized. There is only one banner under which such a revolutionary party can march, the banner of Trotskyism, the movement that today constitutes the organizing nucleus for the Leninist rearmament of the working class.
—“German Revolt—Beginning of End for Stalinism,” Militant (13 July 1953)
Uring Manggagawa Magtanggol sa SariliBumaklas sa mga Taksil sa Paggawa—Muling Pandayin ang Ika-Apat na Internasyonal!
Miserableng pangangalagang medikal, bulok na pabahay, produksyon para sa tubo, imperyalistang dominasyon: ang likas na katangian ng paghahari ng uring kapitalista ang gumagatong sa krisis sa ekonomiya at kalusugan na nanalanta sa buong mundo mula nang sumiklab ang Covid-19. Tinugon ng parasitikong burgesya ang pandemya sa paraang kapakipakinabang sa kanilang mga interes, pilit nilang ikinukulong ang buong populasyon sa tahanan, habang nakabinbin ang pagbabakuna.
Ang mga lockdown ng burgesya ay reaksyunaryong hakbang sa pampublikong kalusugan. Dapat itong tutulan ng mga manggagawa! Maaaring pansamantalang makapagpabagal ng pagkalat ng mga impeksyon ang mga lockdown, subalit pinapahina nito ang kakayahang lumaban ng manggagawa. Sa pamamagitan ng pagsasara sa buong sangay ng industriya at serbisyo, nagdulot sila ng krisis sa ekonomiya at inihulog ang masa ng mamamayan sa disempleyo. Ang pagsara ng mga paaralan at pasilidad sa pangangalaga ng mga bata ay nagpabigat sa mapang-aping pasanin ng pamilya. Ang panunupil ng estado ay malubhang pinatindi habang ang mga karapatang demokratiko at ng uring manggagawa ay nabasura. Ang mga pagtitipon, protesta, pagbiyahe, welga, pag-oorganisa ng unyon: lahat ay pinaghigpitan o ipinagbawal. Nilalayon ng mga lockdown na pigilan ang pakikibaka ng uring manggagawa, ang tanging paraan na tunay na maipagtatanggol ng mga manggagawa ang kanilang kalusugan at labanan ang mga panlipunang sanhi ng krisis.
Habang nagsusumamo ng “damayan at bayanihan,” naglunsad ang mga kapitalista ng Blitzkrieg laban sa uring manggagawa. Ang pagdurog sa mga unyon, malawakang layoff, pagbawas sa sahod at pagpapabilis ng trabaho ay ang “new normal.” Sa harap ng pinagsamang banta ng nakamamatay na virus at ng mabangis na kapitalistang pagsalakay, nananatiling walang armas ang uring manggagawa. Sa buong mundo, matapat na nakikipagsabwatan sa opensiba ng naghaharing uri ang mga maka-kapitalistang lider ng mga unyon at partidong manggagawa. Sa ngalan ng pambansang pagkakaisa at pagsugpo sa virus, ipinagkakanulo ng mga ito ang uring manggagawa.
Mula sa Labour Party ng Britanya at Australia hanggang sa Partido Sosyal-Demokratikong Aleman at Die Linke, ang mga Partido Sosyalista at Komunistang Pranses, at ang Partido Komunista ng South Africa (SACP), ang mga huwad na lider sa paggawa ay gumagampan ng pangunahing papel sa pagpapatupad ng mga lokal at pambansang lockdown, pati ang pagsalaksak nito sa lalamunan ng mga manggagawa at mga masang api. Mula sa AFL-CIO ng America hanggang sa mga unyon sa Mexico at Italya tungo sa pederasyong Rengo, Zenroren at Zenrokyo ng Japan, hinihikayat ng mga lider ng mga unyon ang kanilang kasapian na suportahan ang mga hakbang ng mga burgesya: ang manatili sa tahanan at gaguhin!
Ang kagyat na pangangailangang ipagtanggol ang kalusugan at kabuhayan ng uring manggagawa ay direktang naglalatag ng tungkulin sa pagpanday ng bagong pamunuan ng kilusang manggagawa. Kinakailangang makibaka ang mga unyon kontra sa pagpapasara sa mga industriya na pinapatupad ng kapitalistang estado at para sa ligtas na kondisyon sa trabaho. Ang kalunos-lunos na imprastruktura sa pangangalagang medikal at ng pabahay ay kailangang manumbalik sa maayos na kalagayan at mas pag-unlarin ngayon. Ang pagsamsam sa mga kapakipakinabang na gusali na pag-aari ng mga kapitalista at kasama ang mga malawak na programa ng pagawaing bayan ay kinakailangan upang mabigyan ng disenteng kondisyon sa pamumuhay ang sambayanang manggagawa.
Sa bawat paghakbang, bumabangga sa mga haligi ng paghahari ng uring kapitalista ang mga saligang interes ng mga manggagawa at masang api. Iginigiit ng kasalukuyang krisis ang pangangailangan para sa emansipasyon ng kababaihan mula sa kadena ng angkan, para sa pagtatapos ng makalahing pang-aapi at para sa pagpapalaya mula sa imperyalistang pagsasamantala. Ang tanging landas para sa pagsulong ng sangkatauhan ay sa pamamagitan ng mga rebolusyong manggagawa at pagtatag ng isang pandaigdigang sosyalistang planadong ekonomiya.
Kaharap ng lubos na pagkabangkarote ng mga tumatayong lider ng kilusang manggagawa at ng kanilang mga pekeng-Marxistang tagasunod, ang susing tanong na nakalatag para sa mga mga proletaryong may makauring kamalayan ay ang pangangailangan para sa isang lideratong nakasandig sa rebolusyonaryong programa ng Trotskyismo—tunay na Marxismo-Leninismo. Nagsusumikap ang Liga Komunista Internasyonal (Pang-Apat na Internasyonalista) [International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)] na magtayo ng isang internasyonal na talibang partido Leninista, ang esensyal na instrumento para dalhin ang rebolusyonaryong kamalayan sa proletaryado at makamit ang kapangyarihang manggagawa. Muling pandayin ang Ika-Apat na Internasyonal, pandaigdigang partido ng sosyalistang rebolusyon!
Ibagsak ang Makauring Kolaborasyon at Pambansang Pagkakaisa!
Nitong huling taon, ang naging posisyon ng LKI ay tanggapin ang mga lockdown kung kinakailangan. Itinatakwil namin ang posisyon na ito. Isa itong pagsuko sa panawagan ng “pambansang pagkakaisa” para suportahan ng lahat ng mga uri ang mga lockdown alang-alang sa pagsalba ng buhay.
Para sa umano’y unibersal na hangaring ito, kusang isinakripisyo ng mga lider sa paggawa ang interes ng proletaryado. Tulad ng pampublikong kalusugan sa pangkalahatan, ang pagsugpo sa pandemya ay hindi nakalutang sa taas ng mga maka-uring antagonismo. Sa likod ng pag-aalala ng mga kapitalista para sa “pagsalba ng buhay,” ang katunaya’y isinusulong nila ang kanilang maka-uring interes. Ang interes ng burgesya sa pampublikong kalusugan ay ang pagpapanatili ng isang lakas paggawa para sa pagsasamantala sa pinakamurang halaga na posible habang pinoprotektahan ang sariling kalusugan nito. Taliwas sa reaksyunaryong layunin na ito, ang proletaryado ay may interes na makamit ang pinakamahusay na kondisyon sa pamumuhay at pangangalaga ng kalusugan para sa lahat. Malinaw na magkasalungat ang mga maka-uring interes na ito at hindi maaaring magkasundo, may pandemiya o wala. Sa pamamagitan lamang ng nagsasariling mobilisasyon laban sa burgesya maipagtatanggol ng uring manggagawa ang kanilang kalusugan at kaligtasan.
Pang-blackmail ng burgesya sa mga manggagawa ang ideya na ang pakikibaka para sa kanilang interes ay nagkakalat ng sakit—na ang mga pulong ng unyon at protesta ay banta sa kalusugan ng publiko; na ang mga manggagawang pangkalusugan ay pumapatay ng tao kapag sila ay nakikibaka para sa mas mabuting kondisyon sa pagtatrabaho; na ang mga paaralan at day-care ay dapat isara para maprotektahan ang mga bata. Malaking kasinungalingan ito! Ang pakikibaka laban sa mga lockdown ay ang kinakailangang panimulang-punto upang matugunan ang mga panlipunang sanhi ng kasalukuyang kalamidad. Ang mga miting ng unyon ay esensyal sa pansariling-depensa ng mga manggagawa. Ang pakikibaka ng mga manggagawang pangkalusugan ay ang daan tungo sa mas mahusay na atensyong medikal. Ang pakikibaka laban sa pagsasara ng paaralan at day-care ay ang paunang kondisyon para sa mas mahusay na mga paaralan at pangangalaga ng mga bata—at nagsusulong ng pakikibaka para sa pagpapalaya ng kababaihan.
Sa The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (1938) [Ang Naghihirap na Paghihingalo ng Kapitalismo at ang mga Tungkulin ng Ika-Apat na Internasyonal], iginiit ng pinunong Bolshevik na si Leon Trotsky:
“Sa isang lipunang nakabatay sa pagsasamantala, ang pinakamataas na moralidad ay ang panlipunang rebolusyon. Ang lahat ng mga pamamaraan ay mabuti na nagpapataas ng maka-uring kamalayan ng mga manggagawa, ang kanilang pagtitiwala sa kanilang sariling mga puwersa, ang kanilang kahandaan sa pagsasakripisyo sa sarili sa pakikibaka. Ang mga hindi matatawarang pamamaraan ay iyong nagtatanim ng takot at pangangayupapa sa mga inaapi sa harap ng mga nang-aapi sa kanila.”
Paulit-ulit na ginagamit ng burgesya ang pinakamataas na moral na imperatiba tulad ng “pagsalba ng buhay” upang bigyang katwiran ang mga krimen nito. Halimbawa ng mga ito ay ang paggamit ng mga imperyalistang Aleman at Pranses ng European Union upang madambong ang proletaryado sa buong Europa sa ngalan ng kapayapaan at kaunlarang panlipunan. Winasak ng imperyalistang Amerikano at ng kanilang mga kaalyado sa NATO ang Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan at marami pang mga bansa sa ngalan ng “demokrasya” at “kalayaan”. Ang pagsalakay sa Somalia noong 1992 upang “pakainin ang nagugutom.” Kapag ang burgesya ay apuradong nananawagan tungkol sa “pagsalba ng buhay,” palagi itong ginagamit upang magtanim ng pagpapakumbaba sa naghaharing uri at upang manghikayat ng pambansang pakikiisa sa mga interes nito.
Para sa Pagkontrol ng Unyon sa Kaligtasan!
Ang kapitalistang estado—na ang bag-as ay binubuo ng pulisya, mga bilangguan, hukbo at korte—ay isang aparato ng organisadong karahasan upang mapanatili ang paghahari at ganansya ng mapagsamantalang uri. Habang sinusuportahan ng mga Marxista ang ilang hakbang sa pampublikong kalusugan na pinapatupad ng estado at kapaki-pakinabang sa uring manggagawa, tulad ng mandatory na pagbabakuna, ang umasa sa estado para maprotektahan ang kalusugan at kaligtasan ay pagpapatiwakal.
Ang mga Stalinista ng Partido Komunistang Griego ay dalubhasa sa pambabaluktot ng naturang mga ABCs ng Marxismo. Ang isa sa mga pangunahing kahilingan na kanilang iginiit sa mga unyon ay ang:
“Organisadong kontrol sa sanitasyon nang maiwasan ang pagkalat ng virus, sa ilalim ng responsibilidad ng mga ahensya ng estado, sa pantalan ng Piraeus, sa Cosco, sa mga barko, sa zona ng paggawa at pagkumpuni ng mga barko, sa mga pabrika at mga industriyal na yunit na nag-eempleyo ng libu-libong mga manggagawa.”
–Rizospastis (1 Abril)
Ito’y katumbas ng paggapos ng uring manggagawa sa kapitalistang estado at pagsaboy ng mga ilusyon sa kabutihang loob ng mga ahensyang pangkalusugan nito. Kailangang ipaglaban ng mga manggagawa ang pagkontrol ng unyon sa kaligtasan. Mga unyon, hindi kapitalistang estado, ang dapat magtukoy ng mga kondisyon para sa trabahong ligtas.
Ang mga unyon ay mga batayang organisasyong pang-depensa ng uring manggagawa. Ang kanilang layunin ay ipagtanggol ang mga manggagawa sa trabaho, hindi ipaglaban na manatili sa tahanan ang mga manggagawa. Taliwas dito, sa maraming mga bansa, ipinaglaban ng mga lider ng unyon ng mga guro na panatilihin ng mga gobyerno ang pagsara sa mga paaralan upang “mabigyan ng proteksyon” ang mga guro at mag-aaral. Isa itong labis na pagtalikod sa laban para sa mga ligtas na paaralan. Kontra sa politika ng mga burukrata ng unyon na “manatili sa bahay at maghintay”, dapat ipundar ang isang pamunuan ng makauring pakikibaka na nakabase sa pagmobilisa sa hanay ng unyon at ng buong kilusang paggawa laban sa pagsasara, para sa mas mahusay na mga paaralan at ligtas na lugar ng trabaho.
Kagyat ang pangangailangan para sa mga kampanya ng pag-oorganisa ng unyon para magkaisa at mapalakas ang proletaryado. Kailangang mapaloob sa mga unyon ang mga pansamantala at subcontractual na manggagawa ng may sahod at benepisyo bilang mga ganap na kasapi. Ang unyonisasyon ng mga empleyado na may kaunting kapangyarihang panlipunan—sa retail, mga restawran, bar, delivery services, atbp.—ang maghahatid sa kanila sa lilim ng proteksyon ng organisadong uring manggagawa.
Muling Buksan ang Ekonomiya! Labanan ang Kawalan ng Trabaho!
Habang sila ay nakabuntot sa mga taksil sa paggawa, ang mga nagpapanggap sa Trotskyismo ay nagpatirapa sa harap ng burgesya. Ang Lutte Ouvrière, ang International Marxist Tendency (IMT), ang World Socialist Web Site, ang Internationalist Group, ang Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International atbp: silang lahat ay yumakap sa mga lockdown, nagtaksil sa proletaryado.
Ang IMT, halimbawa, ay humiling: “Lahat ng di-esensyal na produksyon ay dapat ihinto agad. Ang mga manggagawa ay dapat pauwiin na walang bawas sa sahod hangga’t kinakailangan” (Marxist.com, 20 Marso 2020). Isa itong lubos na reaksyunaryong panawagan na maaari lamang humantong sa mas maraming tanggalan sa trabaho! Nais ng IMT na ilaglag ang malalaking bahagi ng manggagawa sa disempleyo at ayuda.
Ang kapangyarihang panlipunan ng uring manggagawa ay nagmumula sa lugar nito sa produksyon. Kailangang tutulan ng kilusang paggawa ang mga layoff at sapilitang leave without pay sa pamamagitan ng pakikibaka para sa pag-rekruta at treyning na kontrolado ng unyon, at para sa mas maikling lingguhang pagtrabaho na walang kaltas sa suweldo nang maipamahagi ang trabaho sa lahat ng mga manggagawa. Ang kasalukuyang krisis ay sumisigaw para sa dagdag na produksyon at serbisyo: higit at mas mahusay na pangangalagang medikal; malawakang konstruksyon ng pampublikong pabahay; mga gusaling maaliwalas at maayos ang bentilasyong para sa mga paaralan at day care; mas mahusay na pampublikong transportasyon. Ang muling pagbubukas at pagpapalawak ng ekonomiya ay kinakailangan upang matugunan ang mga pangangailangan ng sambayanang manggagawa at labanan ang kawalan ng trabaho at pagdarahop.
Para sa Dekalidad na Pangangalagang Medikal, Libre sa Punto ng Serbisyo!
Ang sistema ng produksyon na para sa ganansya ay hindi maaaring magbigay ng sapat na pangangalagang medikal. Samsamin ng walang kompensasyon ang mga ospital na pribado at pagaari ng Simbahan at mga kumpanyang parmasyutiko! Para sa malawakang pagsasanay at pagrekruta ng mga manggagawang medikal at pang-ospital sa pangangasiwa ng unyon! Tanggalin ang mga patent, upang magkaroon ng malawakang produksyon ng mga bakuna at gamot sa buong mundo!
Kaharap ng gumuguhong labi ng mga sistema sa pangangalagang pangkalusugan, ang lahat ng anyo ng mga repormista ay naglabas ng mga panawagan para isabansa ang pangangalaga sa kalusugan. Kagaya ng Left Voice, seksyon sa U.S. ng Trotskyist Fraction, na nananawagan para sa “nasyonalisasyon ng lahat ng mga industriya na kaugnay sa kalusugan sa ilalim ng kontrol-obrero” (Left Voice, 13 Abril 2020). Huwag palilinlang sa retorikang tunog-kaliwa nitong mga sosyal demokrata. Itinaguyod ng Left Voice ang mas istriktong mga lockdown, na lalo pang hahadlang sa anumang uri ng masang-pagkilos ng proletaryado, at gagawing imposible ang pakikibaka para sa mas mahusay na atensyong medikal.
Ito ang modelo ng Left Voice para sa kontrol-obrero: “Sa Argentina, ipinapakita ng mga manggagawa kung paano ito maisasakatuparan. Mga pabrika na kinokontrol ng mga manggagawa na walang mga boss sa buong bansa ay nagsisimula ng produksyon para sa pangangailangan sa halip na kasakiman.” Ang binabanggit rito ng Left Voice ay ang takeover ng ilang bangkarote at sekondaryong mga pabrika sa kapitalistang Argentina. Hindi ito modelo para sa kailangang gawin. Ang perspektiba ng Left Voice ay administrasyon ng obrero ng isinabansang sistema ng pangangalagang medikal sa balangkas ng kapitalismo, ibig sabihin, institusyonalisasyon ng makauring kolaborasyon. Ang pagkalas ng pangangalagang medikal mula sa mga ganansyador ay makakamit lamang sa pamamagitan ng pagbuwag sa burgis na estado, paghalili nito ng diktadura ng proletaryado at ekspropriyasyon ng uring kapitalista.
Kailangang Ipagtanggol ng Uring Manggagawa ang Lahat ng Inaapi!
Sinasalanta ang mga pinakamababang saray ng panggitnang uri. Ang kriminal na pagsuporta ng mga pinuno ng paggawa at lahat ng repormistang kaliwa sa mga lockdown ay pagsuko sa dulong kanan, pagbigay pahintulot sa mga mapagbantang reaksyunaryo at tahasang pasista na pumustura bilang tagapagtanggol ng mga karapatang demokratiko at kampeon ng napinsalang petiburgesya. Pakikilusin ng isang rebolusyonaryong partido ang uring manggagawa upang ipagtanggol ang lahat ng naaapi at pagkaisahin sila sa panig ng mga manggagawa laban sa burgesya.
Sa Asya, Latin America at Africa, milyun-milyong mahihirap na magsasaka ang pinipiga ng mga panginoong maylupa at mga bangko habang ang mga manininda sa lansangan ay ginugutom ng mga lockdown. Kahit saan, ang mga maliliit na tindahan, bar at restawran pati na rin ang mga estudyante ay nasasakal sa utang. Kanselahin ang lahat ng kanilang pagkakautang!
Milyun-milyong mga nag-oopisina ang pinilit na mag-“work from home”. Ang “work from home” ay gumagatong sa mga layoff at walang bayad na overtime, nag-aatomisa sa lakas paggawa na nagpapadali sa mga kontra-unyong pananalakay at ginagawang imposible ang pag-organisa ng unyon. Ang mga welga ay hindi naipapanalo sa pamamagitan ng Zoom kundi sa mga picket line. Ang anumang unyon na karapat-dapat sa ngalan nito ay kailangang tumutol sa iskemang “work from home”.
Binubuo ng mga imigrante ang susing bahagi ng uring manggagawa at ang malaking bilang sa kanila ay mga namamasukan ng may miserableng pasahod sa mga napinsalang industriyang pangserbisyo. Upang mapag-isa ang hanay nito, kailangang makibaka ang uring manggagawa para sa lubos na karapatang pangmamamayan ng lahat ng mga imigrante!
Isalipunan ang mga Gawain ng Angkan!
Buong lakas na pinagpipilitan ng burgesya na paatrasin ang gulong ng kasaysayan. Sa angkan, pangunahin sa balikat ng kababaihan ibinubunton ng mga lockdown ang gawaing pag-aaruga sa mga bata, edukasyon at pangangalaga sa mga matatanda. Sapilitang pinababalik sa tahanan ang kababaihan, na mas malaking bilang ang nawalan ng hanapbuhay kaysa sa kalalakihan, at nagiging biktima ng matinding pagtaas ng domestikong karahasan. Ibinibilanggo kasama ng kanilang mga magulang ang mga bata at teenager. Pinababayaang mamatay nang mag-isa sa mga bulok na bahay-kalinga ang mga may edad.
Kung may iisang bagay na ipinamalas ang mga lockdown, ito’y ang walang patutunguhan ng peministang programa ng redistribusyon ng gawaing bahay sa loob ng angkan. Ang kinakailangan ay kunin ang gawain-bahay mula sa angkan at halinhan ng libreng 24-oras na day care, mga kolektibong kusina at palabahan, mga de-kalidad na sentro ng pagreretiro.
Ang mga lockdown ay nagpapatibay sa mga institusyong haligi ng kapitalismo—ang estado, ang simbahan pati na rin ang angkan. Ang paglaya ng kababaihan ay makakamit lamang bilang parte ng isang pandaigdigang sosyalistang transpormasyon na kabahagi ang paghalili sa angkan ng sosyalisadong gawaing bahay at pangangalaga ng mga bata. Para sa paglaya ng kababaihan sa pamamagitan ng sosyalistang himagsikan!
Imperyalismo Ibagsak!
Ang imperyalistang sistemang pandaigdig, kung saan ang ilang dambuhalang kapangyarihan ay nagkukumpitensya sa paghahati ng daigdig, na nagsasamantala sa bilyun-bilyon tao, ang siyang pinaka-ugat ng kasalukuyang krisis sa mundo. Ang pandemya ay nananawagan para sa isang koordinadong tugon na pandaigdigan. Ngunit sa isang sistemang nakabase sa tunggalian sa pagitan ng mga magka-ribal na imperyalista at nagkukumpetisyong pambansang-estado, ito’y imposible. Dinurog at pinigilan ng imperyalismo ang pang-ekonomiya, panlipunan at pangkulturang pag-unlad ng mundo para sa interes ng stock exchange ng Wall Street, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt at Paris. Ginagamit ng mga imperyalista ang krisis na ito upang higpitan ang pagsakmal ng pandaigdigang kapital sa pananalapi sa mga dependenteng bansa. Kanselahin ang utang na ipinataw ng mga imperyalista! Ibagsak ang UN, IMF, NATO, NAFTA 2.0 at ang European Union!
Depensahan ang China! Dinodoble ng mga imperyalista ang kanilang pagsisikap para sa kapitalistang kontrarebolusyon upang itumba ang Rebolusyong 1949 at buksan ang depormadong estado obrerong Tsino sa kanilang pambubuwitre. Para sa pampulitikang rebolusyong obrero na magpapatalsik sa Stalinistang burukrasya!
Para sa mga Bagong Rebolusyong Oktubre!
South Korea, Sweden, Australia? Ang mga diyaryong burgis ay batbat ng walang katapusang debate kung alin sa mga bansa ang pinakamahusay sa pagbalanse sa malawakang pagkamatay at panunupil sa masa. Kaming mga Marxista ay may ganap na kakaibang modelo: ang Rebolusyong Bolshevik ng 1917. Sa pagwasak sa mga kadena ng kapitalistang pagsasamantala, ang uring manggagawa sa direksyon ng mga Bolshevik nina Lenin at Trotsky ay nagsagawa ng gahiganteng hakbang para sa pagsulong ng sangkatauhan. Ang sistema ng pampublikong kalusugan ng estado obrerong Sobyet ay isa sa pinakamalaking tagumpay nito, sa kabila ng pagkapanday sa krisol ng digmaang sibil at ng imperyalistang pananalakay sa larangang winasak ng digmaang pandaigdig. Ang namuno sa paglikha nito, si Nikolai Semashko, ay sumulat noong 1919:
“Ang mailipat ang maralitang taga-lungsod mula sa mga amaging bartolina tungo sa maaliwalas na silid sa mga maayos na tahanan, ang tunay na pagbaka sa sakit na panlipunan, ang lumikha ng mga normal na kondisyon ng trabaho para sa obrero—ang lahat ng ito ay hindi magkakamit kung isasaalang-alang natin ang pribadong pag-aari bilang isang bagay na sagrado at hindi malalabag. Ang lumang sistema ng kalusugan bago ito ay nag-atubili na parang kaharap ay isang di-malampasang hadlang; ang kapangyarihang Soviet—ang kapangyarihang Komunista—ang dumurog sa hadlang na ito.”
—“The Tasks of Public Health in Soviet Russia,” [Ang Gawain sa Kalusugang Pampubliko sa Soviet Russia] nilathala sa William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990)
—Internasyonal na Komiteng Tagapagpaganap ng Liga Komunista Internasyonal (Pang-Apat na Internasyonalista) 19 Abril 2021 (Salin sa Tagalog Oktubre 2021)
Originally appeared in Workers Hammer No. 221 (Winter 2012-2013), newspaper of the Spartacist League/Britain, section of the International Communist League.
In Part Three that concluded the series of articles “A Marxist Critique of the New Atheists” (Workers Vanguard No. 1009, 28 September 2012) it is noted that: “The state of Pakistan was deliberately created as an Islamic political entity in 1947 when the British partitioned the Indian subcontinent, over which they were no longer able to maintain colonial rule.” The article makes the point that, contrary to some leftist groups like the [former cothinkers of the International Socialist Organization, the British] Socialist Workers Party (SWP), there is no basic conflict between Western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism. It goes on to quote John Foster Dulles on the common bond between imperialism, religions of the East and anti-Communism. In 1950, Dulles, soon to become secretary of state, observed: “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us, and our task is to find it and develop it” (quoted in Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 1957).
The British imperialists have maintained that the partition of India was aimed at creating a homeland for Muslims where they would be protected from Hindus, a claim belied by the fact that far more Muslims were left behind in India than those incorporated in the new entity of Pakistan. Besides, in the provinces that became Pakistan, the Muslims were dominant; they were neither threatened by post-independence Hindu domination nor were they interested in a separate Muslim state. In fact, the majority of Muslims were fearful of the economic and social impact of uprooting and relocation. They resented the fact that they would be confined to the two corners of the subcontinent and have to abandon the heartland of India, where Muslim rulers held sway for over 600 years before their defeat by the British, and in which lie some of the magnificent symbols of past Muslim power and glory such as the great forts of Delhi and Agra, the Taj Mahal and others. Muslim merchants and businessmen opposed the partition out of concern for the loss of a long developed market. The sizable Shi’ite Muslim population, dreading living in a Sunni-dominated Pakistan, was opposed to the partition scheme.
Up until World War II the British depended on the strategically situated India as a military base to safeguard their interests—in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and their colonies across the Indian Ocean in east Africa. As India’s independence dawned, the British, fearing that the Hindu nationalists who would rule post-independence India would deny them military cooperation, settled for creating a weak, truncated entity that would serve their imperialist interests, would depend on Britain for its defence and would be ruled by their pliable lackeys of the Muslim League of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Through their divide-and-rule policy and using religion as a tool, the British drove a wedge between Hindus and Muslims, built close ties with Jinnah, in whom they nourished separatist aspirations, and recognised him as the sole spokesman of the Muslims of India.
In his well-documented book, The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition (2005), Narendra Singh Sarila laid bare the true intentions of the British behind the partition: a meticulously calculated scheme to detach Pakistan from India, create a militarily strategic foothold aimed at the Soviet Union and maintain control over the oil fields of the Middle East. Sarila, who served as an aide-de-camp to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, was privy to the British manipulative machinations. He unearthed piles of documents pertaining to the partition: correspondence of British colonial officials; archival papers of major players, British and Indian; etc.
On 5 May 1945, the same day Germany surrendered, Churchill ordered an appraisal of the long-term policy required to safeguard the interests of the British Empire in India. The report presented to him stressed the strategic importance of India “from the northwest of which British air power could threaten Soviet military installations.” Churchill told Lord Archibald Wavell, then viceroy of India, to “keep a bit of India.” According to Sarila, a more candid Lord Wavell, who prepared a blueprint of the partition borders as early as February 1946, grasped the fact that: “The breach to be caused in Britain’s capacity to defend the Middle East and the Indian Ocean area could be plugged if the Muslim League were to succeed in separating India’s strategic northwest from the rest of the country, a realizable goal considering the close ties that Lord Linlithgow, Wavell’s predecessor, had built up with the Muslim League leader Mohammad Ali Jinnah.”
Dulles’ idea about utilising reactionary religious forces as a battering ram in the Cold War against the Soviet Union echoed British imperialist schemes. In his writings in the late forties and early fifties, British colonial official Olaf Caroe posed the question: “Will Islam stand up to communism?” He advocated turning Pakistan into a base for a community of Muslim states that “would show the way for reconciliation between the Western and Islamic models.” A major architect of the partition, Caroe served in British India as the viceroy’s chief adviser, foreign secretary and governor of the North West Frontier Province, which later became incorporated into Pakistan.
After his retirement Caroe was sent by the British Foreign Office on a lecture tour to the United States to solicit a joint Anglo-American alliance against the Soviet Union and to control Middle East oil. The theme of his lectures, in his own words, was: “The importance of the [Persian] Gulf grows greater, not less, as the need for fuel expands, the world contracts and the shadows lengthen from the north [i.e., the USSR]. Its stability can be assured only by the close accord between the States which surround this Muslim lake, an accord underwritten by the Great powers whose interests are engaged.” Caroe wanted the U.S. to join a “partner full of garnered knowledge but overcome for a while with weariness, [as] both are faced with the imminence of Soviet Russia towering over these lands.” Caroe’s lectures were later published in a book titled Wells of Power: The Oilfields of South-Western Asia, a Regional and Global Study (1951). His schemes found resonance with American imperialists who were eager to control the oil resources and to expand the boundaries of the Cold War by ringing the Soviet Union with a series of alliance systems in the region.
By the early 1950s Pakistan became, in the words of a Pakistani leader, “America’s most allied ally in Asia.” In 1954 it signed a mutual defence agreement with the U.S. Later that year Pakistan became a founding member of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), even though the country is thousands of miles away from Southeast Asia. The next year Pakistan joined the Anglo-American sponsored Baghdad Pact along with Turkey, Iraq and Iran, constituting what Dulles called “the northern tier” that linked the southernmost member of NATO, Turkey, with the westernmost member of SEATO, Pakistan. Pakistan went on to host secret bases for the CIA U-2 planes conducting espionage over the USSR, one of which was shot down by the Soviets in May 1960. In one of the Cold War historical moments, Khrushchev, with no small degree of pleasure, displayed the mostly intact wreckage of the supposedly invincible U-2 and its captured pilot, Francis Gary Powers. In the 1980s Pakistan provided a base for launching attacks against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Workers Hammer Adds:
Following the entry of Soviet troops in 1979, Afghanistan became the front line of the imperialists’ relentless drive to destroy the Soviet Union. As the CIA undertook its biggest covert operation ever, Pakistan played a strategic role. The U.S., Britain, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, among others, armed, funded and trained reactionary mujahedin (holy warriors) to kill Soviet soldiers. The Soviet Red Army intervened on the side of a regime that sought to introduce minimal social reforms and faced a jihad (holy war) led by reactionary landlords, tribal chiefs and mullahs. That war, in which imperialist-backed forces threatened the southern flank of the Soviet Union, posed an acid test for revolutionaries.
The Soviet intervention was progressive, underlining the Trotskyist understanding that despite its degeneration under a Stalinist bureaucratic caste, the Soviet Union remained a workers state embodying historic gains of the October Revolution of 1917, centrally the planned economy and collectivised property. These were enormous conquests, not least for women and the Muslim peoples of Soviet Central Asia, where conditions before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had been as backward and benighted as in Afghanistan. For Afghanistan, which is not a nation but a patchwork of tribes and peoples, with its minuscule proletariat, progress would have to be brought in from the outside. The international Spartacist tendency, now the International Communist League, said: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” and called to extend the gains of the October Revolution to the Afghan peoples. In stark contrast, the bulk of the left internationally lined up with the imperialists by denouncing the Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan. The SWP in Britain criminally stood foursquare with the imperialists. The 12 January 1980 issue of Socialist Worker blared, “Troops Out of Afghanistan!” (For fuller treatment of our position on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Moscow’s treacherous withdrawal, see “Afghanistan: Women Under Imperialist Occupation,” Workers Hammer No. 219, Summer 2012 [reprinted from WV No. 998, 16 March 2012].)
Following counterrevolution in the USSR, the end of the Cold War meant that Pakistan’s usefulness to the imperialists was greatly diminished. Pakistan is today subject to U.S. imperialist drone attacks aimed at the Taliban and Al Qaeda—reactionary fundamentalists whose forerunners were created in the 1980s by the Pakistani military and Inter-Service Intelligence as well as the American CIA.
Pakistan, like India, is a prison house of peoples, a legacy of three centuries of British colonial divide and rule that culminated in the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan’s claim to constitute “one nation” of all Muslims masks the domination of the Punjabi ruling class over Pashtuns, Baluchis and other oppressed nationalities. Kashmir epitomises the seething complex of national and communal conflicts that extend from Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. India’s brutal repression in Kashmir, the only majority Muslim state in India, gives the lie to New Delhi’s claims that it is a secular democracy. The Indian state was founded on naked Hindu chauvinism, and brutal oppression of minorities has been the rule under the Congress Party as well as the avowedly chauvinist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). For their part, Pakistan’s rulers can ill afford to support independence for Kashmir, which would pose the same question for the minorities within their own borders.
The task of liberating all the exploited and oppressed of the Indian subcontinent demands the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisies in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and the establishment of a socialist federation of South Asia.
Liberation of Dalits: Key to Indian Workers Revolution
Ants Among Elephants
For a Leninist Party to Fight Caste Oppression!
A Review
In modern India, with its gleaming IT centers and manufacturing hubs, there are widespread illusions that untouchability is a thing of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. Untouchability is at the core of the caste system, which has been perpetuated and entrenched within every sphere of Indian capitalist society. Sujatha Gidla’s 2017 book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, shatters many of the myths that serve to make untouchability invisible. Her book is a sharply drawn picture of caste oppression and of her family’s unending struggles against it. It is a compelling read and has been widely acclaimed by reviewers.
Untouchability is not simply a condition of poverty that can be overcome by education and social mobility. As Gidla matter-of-factly states: “I was born into a lower-middle-class family. My parents were college lecturers. I was born an untouchable.” She uses the word “untouchable” rather than “Dalit” because it emphasizes the reality of what it means to be part of that population. Untouchability was formally abolished by the constitution of India, which gained its independence from Britain in 1947, and since that time much has changed in the country. But little has changed for the vast majority of India’s 220 million Dalits, for whom freedom from the yoke of caste oppression is yet to come.
Ants Among Elephants is both a family memoir and a political history of the author’s uncle, K.G. Satyamurthy (1931-2012), who became a famous leader of a Maoist guerrilla group. As such, the book shines a harsh spotlight on the atrocious record of India’s Stalinist parties on the question of untouchability. The Communist Party of India (CPI) and its offshoot the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI[M]) reject the fight for proletarian independence, and thus the fight for socialist revolution. Instead, they subordinate the interests of the oppressed and exploited masses to an alliance with the national bourgeoisie. From its inception, the CPI has acted as an appendage of the Congress Party, which has always been permeated with brahminical (high-caste) Hindu nationalism. Both the CPI and CPI(M) have utterly refused to fight against caste oppression, falsely counterposing such a fight to the class struggle. This is the opposite of Leninism. We stand on the tradition of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, who insisted that the revolutionary workers party must champion the cause of all the oppressed in society, acting as the “tribune of the people.”
Untouchability is a form of special oppression that is not simply reducible to class exploitation, though it overlaps with it. A classic example of special oppression is the subjugation of women, which is a key prop of capitalist rule; a working-class woman, for example, bears the double burden of her oppression as a woman and as a worker. India is permeated with myriad forms of oppression, including those based on religion, language, ethnicity and nationality. In heavily Muslim Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan, the Indian army this month gunned down twelve people in one day.
For Marxists, addressing the oppression of Dalits is a matter of strategic importance. Without a program for the liberation of Dalits, there will be no socialist revolution in India. Dalits are a central component of the working class. To date, there is no history or tradition of genuine Leninism as applied to caste oppression. As part of the struggle to forge a genuinely Leninist party in India, we Marxists of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) are committed to the fight to end the caste system and for the liberation of Dalits.
The Indignities of Caste Oppression
The age-old caste system is historically rooted in India’s rural village economy. The wealthy upper castes dominate the lower castes and the countless subcastes, each one bowing their heads to those above and grinding the faces of those below. But none of these caste divisions is as fundamental, or as envenomed, as the chasm between caste and outcaste. A special place in hell is reserved for “untouchables,” who are forcibly segregated, socially and often physically, beneath all castes. As Gidla writes:
“The untouchables, whose special role—whose hereditary duty—is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils. There are thousands of other such restrictions and indignities that vary from place to place. Every day in an Indian newspaper you can read of an untouchable beaten or killed for wearing sandals, for riding a bicycle.”
In Gujarat last year, a Dalit man was thrashed by upper-caste thugs for “sporting a moustache.” In late March, a Dalit youth was bludgeoned to death for owning and riding a horse.
Gidla’s great-grandparents, tribal forest dwellers, were born in the late 1880s. They were not Hindus but worshipped their own deities. The family was driven out of its dwellings by the British colonial rulers in order to clear the forests for teak production. Her forebears worked an unused area of land and grew crops, only to be forced to pay revenue to the hated zamindar (landowner), who collected taxes on behalf of the British. The family was driven into debt and forced to surrender its land to the zamindar, and they became landless laborers. The enslavement of tribal people (the adivasi) continues to exist to this day.
Gidla’s family converted to Christianity and Sujatha, the author, grew up in a Dalit slum in what was then part of the state of Andhra Pradesh, where being Christian is synonymous with being “untouchable.” She “knew no Christian who did not turn servile in the presence of a Hindu” and “knew no Hindu who did not look right through a Christian man standing in front of him as if he did not exist.” It was only at the age of 15 that Gidla discovered, to her great shock, that there are Christian Brahmins—the Nambudiripad caste, which exists mainly in Kerala.
So entrenched is the caste system in the Indian subcontinent that it is practiced by virtually all religious groups in the region, including Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists. India’s Muslims are in their vast majority regarded as “untouchable” and targeted for communal violence. This month, protests of outrage erupted over the torture, rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl, Asifa, from a nomadic Muslim family—a depraved and calculated act of terror by Hindu chauvinists in Kashmir. In Bangladesh, outcastes include the Rohingya, many of whom have been massacred in Myanmar. Pakistan’s impoverished Christians, who face Muslim-chauvinist terror, including for “blasphemy,” are also overwhelmingly deemed outcastes. Oppression based on caste is rife in Nepal as well as in Sri Lanka, where it is practiced by both Tamils and Sinhalese. Gidla, who lives in New York and works as a conductor in the subway system, points out that caste prejudice is rampant among Indians living in the U.S.
Gidla’s grandparents were allowed to attend a school run by Christian missionaries. Education enabled them—and their children—to rise above the unspeakable poverty that afflicts the vast majority of Dalits. But the family could not escape the burden of their untouchability. The story of the author’s mother, Manjula, a central character in the book, gives a sense of the oppression that Dalit women face: blatant caste and sex discrimination. Manjula and the other women in the family had to clean, cook and care for the extended family. Her older brother chose Manjula’s husband, who beat her to appease his own mother. Overcoming these immense obstacles, Manjula acquired a postgraduate degree.
Gidla’s family lived in the city and was thus spared the most heinous violence that is intrinsic to the caste system in the villages. Women are particularly targeted for sadistic crimes by upper-caste men who use rape as a means to humiliate both the woman and her caste. At the same time, inter-caste relationships are deadly dangerous. In February, a 20-year-old woman writhed in agony for hours before dying of poison that her father, assisted by the mother, forced down her throat. The father told the police that this was “just punishment for loving a man outside the community,” i.e., a Dalit.
In the city, one’s caste is less obvious. But by tradition everyone has the right to know, and if you lie, countless clues would give your caste away. In the universities, Dalit students are entering citadels of brahminism. In 2016 Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student at Hyderabad Central University, was hounded to death in a witchhunt spearheaded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. Vemula’s suicide note said: “My birth is my fatal accident.” This February in Uttar Pradesh, a Dalit university student, Dileep Saroj, was beaten to death for having accidentally touched a caste Hindu. As Gidla put it: “Your life is your caste, your caste is your life.”
On average, every 15 minutes a crime is committed against Dalits, who have been facing increasing attacks since the BJP came to power in 2014. On April 2, Dalits staged an enormous bandh (shutdown protest) across India against a court ruling that weakens the Prevention of Atrocities Act, which ostensibly facilitates the prosecution of crimes committed against Dalits. Protesters were met with massive repression by the police, who killed at least twelve people, injured dozens and arrested thousands. While the legislation does little to protect Dalits from being murdered and maimed with impunity, the court ruling gives the green light to caste-chauvinist gangs for even more violent attacks. Indeed, upper-caste politicians and spokesmen have long been howling to repeal the law.
Stalinism: A Rotten Tradition on Caste
Sujatha Gidla’s uncle, K.G. Satyamurthy, who is a focus of Ants Among Elephants, was a college student when he was drawn to the Congress-led Quit India campaign against British rule. Quickly disillusioned with Congress, Satyamurthy decided to join the Communist Party of India. In so doing, he accepted the view that “one was supposed to think only in terms of class and not of caste. When the class struggle was won, discrimination based on caste would disappear.” With this rotten line, India’s Stalinist parties have tarnished the banner of communism on the question of caste, as they have on every other question of revolution. The deep caste chauvinism prevalent in society constitutes an enormous obstacle to forging the unity the working class needs in its struggles against capital. The struggle for socialist liberation in India requires the building of a Leninist vanguard party to lead the proletariat in the fight against the oppression of the Dalit masses.
Satyamurthy joined the CPI because—unusually for the Stalinists—the party joined a revolt of the oppressed in Telangana (which was then part of Andhra Pradesh). The Telangana struggle (1946-51) was an insurrection against the monstrous rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad. The Nizam’s rule was reinforced by the British, providing a textbook example of how colonial rule strengthened the caste system. As Gidla writes: “There were systems of servitude in every part of India, but none was as ruthless as the vetti system in Telangana, the heartland of the Nizam’s kingdom of the Deccan.” Under the vetti system, “every untouchable family in the village had to give up their first male child as soon as he learned to talk and walk.” The child would become a slave in the household of the dora, the Nizam’s local agent. Similarly, all the women of the village were the property of the dora. Gidla notes that if the dora “called while they were eating they had to leave the food on their plates and come to his bed.”
The CPI in Andhra Pradesh became involved in the Telangana armed struggle and built a guerrilla army that soon controlled large areas of the countryside. In 1948, the ruling Congress Party under Jawaharlal Nehru dispatched the army to Telangana. The Nizam had initially refused to bring his kingdom into the newly independent state of India, but quickly surrendered his “princely state” to the Indian army, which then turned to its main mission: crushing the Communist-led rebellion. Over the next three years the army massacred untold numbers of Muslims, peasants and tribal people. In the wake of the slaughter, the CPI reverted back to its historic role as an appendage of Congress, which had previously ordered that Communists be hanged from trees. Gidla bitterly notes that the CPI leadership “gave in to Nehru without even demanding amnesty for the ten thousand party members who were rotting in detention camps.”
Satyamurthy was devastated that the CPI abandoned the armed struggle and even more shocked to discover that the turn was sanctioned by Stalin. In 1964, the CPI split into pro-Soviet and pro-China wings. Satyamurthy sided with the pro-China faction that would become the CPI(M), hoping that the “Chinese path” would mean following the example of Mao, who had led a peasant army to victory. But the CPI(M) voted at its first conference to follow the parliamentary road.
When the CPI(M) became part of a capitalist government in West Bengal in 1967, a layer of party cadre split and launched an armed uprising in Naxalbari, becoming known as Naxalites. The split attracted a large portion of CPI(M) members in Andhra Pradesh, including Satyamurthy and many veterans of the Telangana struggle. Both the CPI and CPI(M) drew a blood line against the Naxalites. In the 1970s, the CPI supported their ruthless suppression at the hands of Congress leader Indira Gandhi. In August 1971, CPI(M) cadre joined with Congress goons in a massacre of Naxalite suspects and sympathizers in Calcutta.
And when it came to crimes against Dalits, the CPI(M) during its decades in power in West Bengal mirrored the Indian ruling class. In 1979, the CPI(M)-led government massacred hundreds of Dalit Hindu refugees from Bangladesh who were living on the island of Marichjhapi. In 2007, in Nandigram, West Bengal, CPI(M) goons joined cops in a massacre of perhaps 100 people who were protesting against land-grabbing for capitalist enterprise.
In 1980, Satyamurthy cofounded the People’s War Group (PWG) in Andhra Pradesh with Kondapalli Seetharamayya, a caste Hindu who was a veteran of the CPI and the Telangana uprising. The PWG, which became one of the best-known Naxalite groups—and the Naxalites in general—won significant support among Dalits, for whom the armed guerrillas offered a much-needed measure of protection against the brutal violence of the upper-caste landlords and the state. However, the Maoist program offers no way forward. The Maoists have no political program other than to look for “progressive” bourgeois allies, invariably sacrificing the interests of the poorest peasants to unity with “broader forces.” According to the Naxalites, Dalits must unite with the “intermediate” castes in a struggle against the “feudal” large landowners. In reality, the “intermediate” castes are often bitterly and violently hostile to Dalits and tribal people owning land.
While the Naxalites traditionally drew their support largely from Dalits (and today mainly from among the adivasi people), they have refused to politically address the question of untouchability. The issue exploded inside the PWG in 1984 when young Dalit party members complained to Satyamurthy of caste-chauvinist practices in the functioning of the party: comrades of the barber caste were assigned to shave other comrades; those from the washer caste to wash clothes; Dalit members were told to sweep floors and clean lavatories.
Satyamurthy, who had personally experienced caste chauvinism from his comrades, scheduled a Central Committee meeting to discuss the issue. The party leadership responded by having him “expelled on the spot for ‘conspiring to divide the party’,” as Gidla reports. In refusing to even discuss caste prejudice in its own ranks, the Maoist PWG was true to its political roots in the CPI.
M.N. Roy’s Distortions of Leninism
Ants Among Elephants brilliantly exposes the political bankruptcy of Indian would-be Marxists on the question of caste oppression. The task that genuine communists face is to outline a Bolshevik perspective for India. Marxists must address the daily oppression of Dalits and adivasi people up to and after the victory of socialist revolution. The ICL looks to the lessons of the first four congresses of the Communist International (CI). We seek to forge a party in India armed with a program of permanent revolution, the program that laid the basis for victory in the Bolshevik-led 1917 October Revolution. Under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolsheviks established the dictatorship of the proletariat with the support of the poorer peasantry and downtrodden ethnic minorities. The Soviet government issued far-reaching decrees, granting the right of self-determination to the oppressed nations, full legal equality for women and land to landless peasants.
In 1920, Lenin drafted a set of theses on the agrarian question, which could have been written for India today. As opposed to the Maoist strategy of peasant war divorced from the struggles of the working class, the theses stipulate that “there is no salvation for the working masses of the countryside except in alliance with the Communist proletariat.” The theses continued: “The industrial workers cannot accomplish their epoch-making mission of emancipating mankind from the yoke of capital and from wars if they confine themselves to their narrow craft, or trade interests, and smugly restrict themselves to attaining an improvement in their own conditions.”
The founder of the Communist Party in India, M.N. Roy, brought a distortion of Leninism to the subcontinent and put the nascent movement on a course of capitulation to bourgeois nationalism. As early as 1922, Roy drafted a manifesto for the bourgeois-nationalist Congress Party urging the organization to put itself at the head of the working-class and peasant masses. Under Roy’s guidance, the CPI set out from its founding in December 1925 to build a Peasants’ and Workers’ Party in Bengal. Rather than fighting to build a proletarian party that could lead the peasant masses, Roy sought to build a two-class party (i.e., a bourgeois party) where the interests of the working class would necessarily be subordinated to those of the petty-bourgeois peasantry.
Roy’s political program was contrary to the perspective outlined at the 1920 Second Congress of the CI, which Roy himself attended. Lenin insisted: “The Communist International must enter into a temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in the colonial and backward countries, but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form” (“Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions,” 1920).
When the CI came under the bureaucratic leadership of the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, Roy acted as Stalin’s representative in China in 1927. On Stalin’s instructions, the Chinese Communist Party remained within the bourgeois-nationalist Guomindang even as its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, staged a coup in April 1927 and disarmed and massacred tens of thousands of Communist-led workers in Shanghai (see “M.N. Roy, Nationalist Menshevik,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 62, Spring 2011). The slaughter in China was the bitter fruit of the Stalinist program of subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeois nationalists. Two decades later, the Indian Stalinists reaped the reward for their support to the Indian nationalists in the bloody suppression of the Communist-led peasant uprising in Telangana at the hands of Nehru and his home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, known as the “Iron Man of India.”
The CPI’s capitulation to brahminical chauvinism precluded their fighting against the oppression of Dalits. This was evident in the late 1920s when Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the historic Dalit leader, led mass protests against untouchability in the state of Maharashtra. During that period, the Communists had acquired significant support among the combative proletariat in the Bombay textile mills, where Dalit workers were forbidden from working in the higher-paying weaving department and forced to drink water from separate pitchers. A Leninist party would have fought tooth and nail to win all workers to demand an end to untouchability in the workplace and for equal pay for all.
But CPI leaders would not carry out such a fight and did not even mobilize for the protests against untouchability. An exasperated Ambedkar disdained the CPI leaders as “mostly a bunch of Brahmin boys.” He concluded: “The Russians made a great mistake to entrust the Communist movement in India to them. Either the Russians didn’t want Communism in India—they wanted only drummer boys—or they didn’t understand” (quoted in Selig S. Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades [1960]).
Amid the growing drive for Indian independence from British rule, the CPI grotesquely dismissed the fight against caste oppression as a diversion from the “anti-imperialist” struggle. Moreover, in the wretched tradition of Roy, the CPI ceded the leadership of the anti-colonial struggle to the bourgeois nationalists led by Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi. By turning a deaf ear to the struggle against untouchability, the CPI drove many Dalits into Ambedkar’s dead-end framework of reforming capitalism.
In 1931, the British masters of “divide and rule” offered Ambedkar a separate electorate for the “depressed classes,” as they had granted to Muslims. This would have allowed Dalits, who are geographically dispersed, to form a single electoral bloc. Astutely recognizing that Ambedkar’s followers might unite with Muslims to form a counterweight to Congress, Gandhi declared a “fast to the death” against the British proposal. In opposition to Ambedkar, Gandhi proclaimed himself to be the leader of those he patronizingly labeled “harijans” (children of God). Though he campaigned against certain aspects of untouchability—demanding, for example, temple entry—Gandhi was a staunch supporter of the brahminical caste system.
For his part, Ambedkar fostered illusions that the British could be used as a bulwark against the upper-caste Indian nationalists. With the outbreak of World War II, he supported the imperialists and joined the Viceroy’s Executive Council. In this, he was not unique. Gandhi, too, supported the British at the beginning of the war, though he could not win the Congress leadership to his position. It was not until 1942 that Congress launched the Quit India movement. As for the CPI, the Indian Stalinists also supported the “democratic” imperialists from the time of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 onward, betraying the interests of the colonial masses.
Following independence, the ruling Congress Party agreed to reserve seats in Parliament for “scheduled” tribes and castes and co-opted Ambedkar to draft the new constitution. In addition to banning untouchability, the written document promised many freedoms, including for women, but they remained largely a dead letter. Ambedkar himself later noted: “The same old tyranny, the same old oppression, the same old discrimination which existed before, exists now, and perhaps in a worse form.”
For a Trotskyist Perspective
India’s transition from preindustrial society did not lead to the dissolution of caste relations. The British colonial rulers—backed by the large landowners and nascent local bourgeoisie—preserved, manipulated and reinforced rural backwardness and the caste system. The post-independence period has shown that the Indian capitalist rulers are incapable of solving basic democratic questions. The land reforms introduced by Congress largely restricted redistribution to those within the landowning castes.
To this day, Dalits who manage to buy land are often attacked by mobs, and the legal transfer of ownership is routinely bogged down in wrangles for years. The proportion of landless people in rural India has increased from 28 percent of the rural population in 1951 to nearly 55 percent in 2011. And it continues to rise.
Indian capital is dependent on imperialist finance capital. Almost 70 percent of the population lives in small villages. However, the rural areas are no longer the main source of capital accumulation for the dominant rural castes, who are increasingly investing in industry. This fact underlines that the fight to expropriate the landlords—and provide land to the landless masses—is inseparable from the fight to expropriate the bourgeoisie as a class.
Side by side with its rural backwardness, India is now the fifth-largest manufacturer in the world. The Indian proletariat is small relative to the rural population, but it has the social power to lead the peasant masses and all the oppressed in a fight to overthrow capitalist exploitation. To exercise that power will take a struggle to overcome the insidious caste divisions in the working class.
As Leninists, the ICL fights to build a vanguard party that imbues the proletariat with the understanding that the struggle against Dalit oppression is in the interest of the entire working class of India. A case in point would be to mobilize to free 13 imprisoned union leaders from the Maruti Suzuki plant at Gurgaon-Manesar near Delhi. In 2012, a supervisor attacked a Dalit worker with casteist slurs. The union defended the worker. But the company, which has long sought to crush the union, hired thugs who provoked an altercation, after which the union leaders were outrageously framed up on a murder charge. Last year, the 13 unionists were sentenced to life in prison (see “India: Free Maruti Suzuki Union Leaders!” WV No. 1112, 19 May 2017).
The workers movement should also take a stand in defense of the Bhim Army, a Dalit rights organization that has been subjected to fierce repression by the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh. The Bhim Army’s leader, Chandrashekhar Azad, is being held in prison under the draconian National Security Act, despite having been acquitted of all the (bogus) charges against him. The unions and organizations of the oppressed must demand: Free Chandrashekhar Azad now!
Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants powerfully illustrates the central role caste oppression plays in Indian society. The liberation of the Dalit masses requires the forging of a revolutionary workers party dedicated to fighting all forms of oppression. In turn, Marxists committed to building such a party must fight to overcome the shameful legacy of Stalinism by planting the banner of the Trotskyist program of permanent revolution. This program is thoroughly internationalist, aiming for proletarian revolution not only in India and the rest of South Asia but also in the imperialist centers of North America, West Europe and Japan. The true Leninist party that we aim to build will be composed in its majority of Dalits as well as oppressed minorities. Winning the trust of the Dalits and adivasi people will require special demands and forms of organization. A Leninist-Trotskyist party in India, section of a reforged Fourth International, will open up the possibility of a way out of the endless cycles of brutal oppression, injustice and poverty.
For several decades, the state of working-class power in the United States has been bleak. Unions are weak, and millions of workers, including nearly half of union household voters, voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Seeing the weakened state of labor, many liberals and leftists have turned to other social forces — nonprofits, left politicians, or even climate-friendly billionaires — to win health care, environmental, and other progressive legislation.
Warehouse Worker = Fulfillment Center Associate
In recent years, inspired by the experience of Bernie Sanders’s and others’ campaigns, the US left has recognized the strategic importance of political action: elections, legislation, and political parties. The need for political action has become common sense for today’s left: Neither mass protests nor workplace organizing alone are sufficient to build the power needed to defend workers’ interests and ultimately transform society.
Some leftists take this argument even further. Pointing to the role of politicians and legislation in the New Deal labor upsurge and workers’ decreasing structural power under “post-industrial” capitalism, Chris Maisano argues that elections may now be more important for “working-class reorganization” than workplace organizing. “The potential for making new advances today,” he writes, might be “relatively more dependent on political action than on leveraging workers’ location in the production process.”
At its best, left-wing political action can catalyze and reinforce workers’ movements while advancing legislation on their behalf, as the Bernie campaigns showed. But the excitement of election campaigns and the need to build a new political party shouldn’t eclipse the central strategic importance of workers’ own activity and organization, especially where they have the most potential power: at work.
Workplace organizing is of course hard, even more so given the defeats of the last four decades. But it’s both possible and indispensable. The Left needs to commit to rebuilding the labor movement from the bottom up, without which our reform program — not to mention democratic socialism — will remain off the agenda indefinitely.
Which Came First?
In two recent articles, Maisano argues that workers will need an “assist from public policy” in the form of progressive labor law reform like the PRO Act to create a “more favorable environment” for class struggle. Only then, he implies, will workplace organizing bear fruit again.
But this “legislate first, organize later” sequence draws the wrong lessons from the 1930s, the last time such ambitious labor law reform passed. The PRO Act is an excellent demand for labor and the Left to fight for right now, and we should hope that it passes before Democrats lose the Senate. But if it doesn’t, that would not be a surprise — major labor law reforms tend to follow upsurges in union organizing and strike activity, not the other way around.
Political scientist Michael Goldfield shows in a seminal study that massive unrest and then three major general strikes in 1934 — led in part by revolutionary socialist cadres — pushed political and economic elites to choose an ultimately successful strategy of concessions in order to placate, contain, and redirect worker rebellion into less disruptive channels. One pro-New Deal congressperson summarized the mood: “What we are trying to do . . . is save [big] corporations from communism and bloodshed.”Major labor law reforms tend to follow upsurges in union organizing and strike activity, not the other way around.
The 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) itself had limited impact on the upsurge, as the labor board it established, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), accomplished little in its first two years. It was the 1936–37 Flint auto workers’ strike victory that sparked, within only one month, 247 other sit-down strikes involving over 200,000 workers. The number of union members surged from 4 million to 7 million by year’s end, leading Goldfield to write that “the dam had been broken with little help from the NLRB.”
Maisano claims that earlier legislation, the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), helped get the union organizing “genie out of the bottle” by giving workers a “license to organize.” But Maisano also admits the toothless NIRA “went unenforced.” It was at best merely a symbolic catalyst or proximate cause. The legislation doesn’t prove much about the special role of legislation vis-à-vis organizing, as any number of things can provoke strikes, from bad bosses to inspiring examples in other factories. And regardless, mass disruption — including millions protesting for unemployment relief and successful auto strikes in Detroit — had already been underway for years before the NIRA’s passage.
Finally, Maisano talks about the central role played by “sympathetic politicians” in a few 1930s strikes. Labor activists surely benefited from this political support. But there were 4,740 recorded work stoppages in 1937 alone. In only a few of these could workers rely on sympathetic politicians. The one thing common to all of them is the action, organization, and tenacity of countless workers in the face of powerful companies or even violent strikebreakers.
Goldfield shows that mass, disruptive action by the workers tended to push politicians to be more “sympathetic”: As workers became more confident of their power, elites became increasingly hesitant to use violent repression, which was only provoking more unrest and radicalization.
Political action was of course necessary to winning New Deal legislation. But the crucial power to win those reforms was generated by workers themselves, primarily at the point of production. To win major reforms in the twenty-first century, from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal, we need to build class struggle at the workplace, and lots of it.
The Cause of Labor Is Still the Hope of the World
How can workers’ own militancy and organization exert so much power? Because under capitalism, the working class is, as Vivek Chibber writes, “the goose that lays the golden eggs.” Chibber explains:
The reason labor is so central to socialist strategy is that it is the only social actor with both the power and the interest in taking on capital. It has an interest in doing so because it suffers systematically at the hands of capital. And it has the capacity to fight the power of capital because capital depends on labor to keep its wealth and profits flowing.
Maisano argues that, while this might have been true in earlier eras, the nature of capitalism has changed. With a relative loss of manufacturing jobs and the geographic reorganization of cities, the US proletariat has lost much of the “structural power” in the workplace that it once relied on to advance its interests. While historically “industrial workers have been the leading edge of democratic and socialist movements around the world,” recent “labor-saving technical change, outsourcing, and other pressures” have “eroded” the proletariat’s potential power.
Under “post-industrial capitalism,” Maisano suggests elsewhere, the hope of the working class might lie more in “political mobilization” (primarily through elections and lobbying) than in “leveraging the [structural] position of workers” through union organizing and direct action in the production process.
The task of revitalizing the labor movement is certainly as daunting as ever. But it’s not true that it is structurally off the table. Kim Moody shows that “the popular tropes of a fragmented, atomized, casualized working class obscure the degree to which the last three decades have in fact created new zones of centralized production, new vulnerabilities for capital, and also underplay important elements of continuity in forms of employment.”
As Jacobin’s Paul Prescod put it last month, “The industrial working class hasn’t disappeared. It’s just been transformed.” The over 4 million workers involved in logistics (transporting goods) “are the new core of the US industrial working class.” The “logistics revolution” has created whole new industrial fortresses in major urban areas, the last bastions of high union density. Moody explains that scores of “logistics clusters” in the United States, some of which concentrate over 100,000 workers, are “at the center of today’s broader production processes, much as the clusters of auto-assembly plants in Detroit or the steel mills in Gary of yesteryear.”
Amazon alone now employs nearly 1 million people directly in the United States. As one United Parcel Service (UPS) driver wrote recently in Jacobin, organizing Amazon is do-or-die for the labor movement, since their prices, wages, and conditions are determinative for the rest of this key industry. But “conditions for organizing Amazon, and achieving a revitalizing breakthrough for unionism,” he writes, “have never been better.”While US labor has been disorganized by a decline in traditional industrial employment since the mid-twentieth century, there are important new openings for organizing today.
The 1.4 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) has committed (under pressure from union reformers) to organizing Amazon. Especially because the more ambitious reformers supported by Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) just won the elections for IBT leadership, a Teamster-led national Amazon campaign could represent the most important new private sector organizing drive in a generation. IBT’s resources would supplement grassroots organizing being carried out already by scrappier but highly committed activists (for example, Amazonians United). A potential contract fight or even strike by 300,000 UPS Teamsters in 2023 under more militant IBT leadership could also help raise US labor’s expectations in general, and Amazon workers’ interest in unionization in particular.
Besides logistics, two other sectors have been growing rapidly along with their centrality to US society: education and health care. There were 3.5 million full- and part-time public school teachers in the 2017–18 school year, a nearly 20 percent increase since 2000. The vast majority of these teachers are already in unions. A wave of largely victorious teacher strikes across the United States in 2018–19 involving nearly 650,000 workers reintroduced the idea of strikes to unions, and unions to US society. Researchers at Columbia have shown that these strikes actually increased the appeal of unions to nonunion parents and other observers.
Maisano suggests that “working-class reorganization today” will not primarily run through “workplace organizing or strikes,” but rather through political action. But the Columbia researchers highlight “the importance of strikes as a political strategy for unions: not only can they build stronger public support for the striking workers but they can also inspire greater interest in further labor action among other workers.” The teachers’ strikes confirm that, more than a conservative focus on electing and lobbying Democrats, “strikes are workers’ most powerful weapon.”
Rank-and-file reformers, radicals, and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members in the “militant minority” were essential to initiating and leading many of these strikes, just like Communist and other radical militants were in the 1930s upsurge. Rank-and-file teachers in New York City had to merely threaten a wildcat strike last year, despite New York’s ban on public sector strikes, to force their union to call for school closures in the face of rising COVID-19 infections — a demand they won, saving countless lives in a viral epicenter. Teachers’ power to force concessions at work and in the statehouse has been proven in practice.
About 20 million people, or one in seven workers, now work in “healthcare and social assistance” in the United States, the largest sector as tracked by the Census Bureau. Many of these workers are concentrated in huge hospitals and campuses. While a smaller share of workers are unionized in health care than in education, militant worker-led action and progressive union leaderships show that health care workers can play an important role in revitalizing US labor. At the beginning of the pandemic last year, workers in Cook County hospital in Chicago challenged mismanagement and understaffing — part of the “lean production” methods imported from auto manufacturing to the health care industry — with a series of successful shop floor actions.
Since then, thousands of Chicago-area healthcare workers participated in two major strikes. The first was in defiance of a court injunction, and the second won unions’ demands for higher wages and safe staffing. In the Bay Area, over three thousand county health care workers — led by Labor Notes–trained rank-and-file reformers — successfully struck last fall against austerity. Seven hundred nurses in Massachusetts have been on strike for six months for safe staffing and protective equipment. Thirty-five thousand workers at health care giant Kaiser authorized a strike earlier this month to fight, among other issues, against the introduction of a two-tier wage system.
Traditional segments of the private sector like construction and manufacturing are still important battlegrounds too, as shown by recent strikes by Washington carpenters and Nabisco workers. There are still about a million auto workers in the United States, 50,000 of whom struck against General Motors in 2019, while a national rank-and-file movement is fighting to democratize the United Auto Workers (UAW). Ten thousand UAW members at John Deere walked off the job last month, along with 14,000 Kellogg’s workers. Sixty thousand film and TV workers almost struck before a deal was narrowly reached recently.
While US labor has been disorganized by a decline in traditional industrial employment since the mid-twentieth century, there are important new openings for organizing today. Socialist advance in the twenty-first century will rest in part on our ability to make the most of these opportunities.
No Shortcuts for Working-Class Power
The socialist movement can’t remain entirely confined to street protests or shop floor fights. But this is hardly a danger right now. Most of the contemporary Left instead focuses on electoral action to the detriment of labor organizing. This makes sense: Thousands were brought to DSA by the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and AOC, and electoral organizing is more salient and accessible to a generation of young activists who grew up largely removed from a small union movement. Socialist election campaigns today raise far-reaching redistributive demands that would benefit poor and working people.
But we should be worried that our movement remains, to paraphrase Leo Panitch, working class-oriented but not working class–rooted. The best way for the Left to fix this is to help build the labor movement.Political action was necessary to win New Deal legislation. But the crucial power to win those reforms was generated by workers themselves, primarily at the point of production.
Until more workers experience the sense of power they can collectively exercise at the workplace and through their unions, it will be near impossible to root our political agenda in working-class communities. A stronger union movement and class-struggle culture — wherein firsthand experiences of collective power build class consciousness and raise expectations for millions of workers — is a prerequisite for winning majorities to left-wing campaigns like those of Bernie Sanders.
And without a revitalized working-class movement built on a strong union foundation, it’s unlikely that a socialist government could achieve major reforms. Under capitalism, the state is not merely a neutral tool to be wielded by whoever wins office. The power to transform society therefore lies not just in the state but in the economy.
Progressive reforms are of course possible, but only because disruptive movements, most of all the labor movement, make the costs of resistance greater for employers than the costs of concessions. Strong labor movements provided the powerful engine driving progressive reforms in the United States in the 1930s and 1960s and in post–World War II European social democracies.
Maisano is right that labor organizing alone was never sufficient for these wins. The existence of a national political party of the working class is a key ingredient for winning major reforms. But such a party will only be able to fight for workers’ interests if it is backed by social forces outside the state — especially organized workers who can shut down production.
Political action can supplement workplace organizing and, in some cases, encourage it. But there’s no substitute for the real thing. An overriding task of socialists today is to not only speak to and about working-class struggles, but to begin to participate in them directly, especially on the shop floor. Political action helped birth a new generation of socialist activists. The next task for today’s left is to bring some of that radical zeal and organizing experience into the union movement.
This is why democratic socialists are undertaking the “rank-and-file strategy” for transforming the labor movement from the bottom up: taking jobs in strategic sectors like health care, education, logistics (including Amazon), the building trades, and communications in order to rebuild a militant working-class movement today and win socialism tomorrow. The role of radical rank-and-file activists in recent healthcare- and education-sector militancy echoes that of radicals and revolutionary organizations that were an essential part of the “militant minority” of the 1930s upsurge.
No amount of working-class power under capitalism is enough to advance and defend the interests of the poor and the planet. There’s room for some amelioration, but it is limited and fragile while billionaires and corporations, with interests opposed to those of the rest of us, control the vast majority of resources and therefore power. Sooner or later, a successful project of reform under capitalism will come up against these limits, and the working class will have to be prepared to fight for something beyond capitalism.
But this is a distant scenario. Right now, we should be concerned with raising the low level of working-class organization and consciousness, from the shop floor on up.
Over the last year or so, fervent anti-vaxxers have become a major presence on our alt-media website, a situation I found very disagreeable. Many of our longtime columnists—Mike Whitney, Paul Craig Roberts, Linh Dinh, Gilad Atzmon, and Israel Shamir—had also moved strongly into that ideological camp, with Whitney’s long articles drawing enormous readership from across the Internet.
I’ve never paid any attention to vaccines and my own views on the role they might play against Covid were entirely mainstream and conventional, as I explained a couple of months ago in a candid 9,000 word interview:
The resulting comment-thread—heavily laced with ferocious attacks against me—soon exceeded 200,000 words and became quite sluggish, so I was forced to follow it up with two successiveOpen Threads on the vaxxing controversy. Several of the anti-vaxxing articles by Whitney, Roberts, and Dinh also provoked enormously long exchanges.
The commenting-software I’ve developed for this website is quite powerful and flexible, allowing meaningful debates that may easily reach the length of a hefty book, a situation quite rare elsewhere on the Internet. As a consequence, some of the anti-vaxxers declared that our million or two million words of anti-vaxxing discussions probably constituted the largest such repository in existence, an achievement that gave me rather mixed feelings.
I’d gradually discovered that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., heir to the famous family, was a leading public figure in the anti-vaxx movement, and he released his lengthy book on the subject last month. A commenter whose opinion I respect had strongly endorsed it, so I decided to get a better sense of the issue directly from that source, and bought it by clicking a button.
Others apparently shared my interest. For ten days or so, The Real Anthony Faucibecame the #1 bestseller on Amazon, and it has now accumulated over 1,500 reviews, 95% of them five-stars, which must be close to a record. The work also carried a couple of dozen strong endorsement-blurbs, mostly from medical doctors or scientists, including a Nobel Laureate, but also from public figures across the ideological spectrum including Oliver Stone, Tucker Carlson, Naomi Wolf, and Mark Crispin Miller. Meanwhile, despite its huge success and the famous name of its author, the work seems to have been greeted by almost total silence across the media.
I found the book itself rather unprepossessing. Although the text seemed fine and generally well-edited, I noticed some peculiar stylistic quirks. The text-margins were extremely narrow, so narrow that the pages lacked any chapter-headings, while the font-size was also smaller than normal, and tiny for the quoted passages. These unusual choices allowed a work that should have filled 600 or 650 pages to be squeezed down to just 480, but at the cost of some readability, with the intent probably being to minimize the length and the price. There were a couple of thousand reference-notes, but instead of being shown on each page or grouped together at the end, they were distributed chapter-by-chapter, which I found inconvenient. Worse still, the book lacked any index, severely diminishing the usefulness of the hard copy version, which I prefer reading. All of this suggests that the book was produced in considerable haste, but I think it would have been worth the effort to take an extra week to produce an index or reorganize the notes, and perhaps this will be done in a second edition.
[Editor: The downloadable Kindle version of the book cost $2.99 and has text that can be adjusted to many sizes and live links that can be checked easily. With Windows 10 on a computer one can click on ‘read aloud’ and have the text read out loud. Or, one can go to Audible for a professional audio reading of the book at a cost of about $20.]
However, none of these flaws nor the apparent near-total lack of any media coverage or advertising seem to have hindered the rise of this gigantic #1 bestseller, proving that controversial content does still sometimes triumph over anything else.
But evaluating that content is another matter entirely, especially for an ignorant layman such as myself. A sizable fraction of the author’s two thousand source-references are to academic journal articles or discussions of other scientific studies, and I am neither a medical doctor nor a biological researcher, so even if I had tried to check any of them—which I did not—I wouldn’t have been able to properly weigh their evidence against that on the other side. Therefore, all my remarks, at least with regard to the scientific issues, should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Surprisingly enough, and very contrary to my expectations, Kennedy’s stated position on vaccines seemed rather mild, quite different from the wild fear-mongering so regularly encountered on the Internet. He claimed that many vaccines weren’t properly tested, often had harmful side-effects, and were promoted mostly due to the profiteering of greedy pharmaceutical corporations and their subverted governmental regulators, accusations far more moderate—and far more plausible—than I had assumed he would make. While it’s not at all uncommon for wild-eyed anti-vaxxers to warn of millions—or even billions!—of deaths due to the current Covid vaccination drive, I didn’t see any such egregious claims in the carefully-documented chapters of this book.
Some of his theories about vaccination efforts over the last couple of decades do seem rather implausible to me. He regards Microsoft founder Bill Gates as a nefarious mastermind behind the global vaccination project, though Gates’ suggested motive is the multiplication of his wealth and power rather than a diabolical plot to exterminate most of the human race, with the latter allegation being widespread among the more excitable anti-vaxxers. But despite reading Kennedy’s account with an open mind, I saw nothing to seriously challenge my own much more mundane explanation. After having been vilified in the 1990s as a monopolist who had become the wealthiest man in the world by selling mediocre, buggy software, Gates may have simply sought to redeem his reputation by funding completely innocuous do-good projects, and he selected public health and vaccines as obvious choices, never dreaming that two decades later these efforts would have become so exceptionally controversial.
Similarly, although there is certainly much to condemn in the responses of the American and European governments to the Covid epidemic, my own interpretation sharply diverges from that of the author. In his opinion, the lockdowns and other disease control measures taken by our political elites represented a planned, sinister strategy for destroying all our traditional freedoms and establishing a totalitarian police state, while what I saw instead was utter incompetence.
China had responded brilliantly to the totally unexpected threat of a mysterious, highly-contagious disease, imposing an extremely severe short-term lockdown a thousand times larger than anything seen in world history; this allowed the government to completely stamp out the virus with minimal human losses, while restoring normal life for almost all Chinese within a month or two. But when the West tried to mimic that successful approach, the lockdowns imposed were so haphazard and disorganized that they proved entirely ineffective at controlling the virus, and since our flummoxed leaders had no other solution, they kept those lockdowns in place for a year or more, so that millions died while the lives of many hundreds of millions were severely disrupted.
My analysis is obviously quite different from Kennedy’s. But if we merely disagree about whether our ruling elites should be condemned and punished for their evil subversion or instead for their criminal incompetence, we are obviously allies in every practical sense, and disputing such matters of interpretation serves no purpose.
This relates to a broader criticism. Though many of the substantive, factual claims Kennedy makes seem reasonably plausible and are usually well-documented, they are often presented in an overly shrill tone that I found distracting, a tone that at times almost lapses into hysteria. Given the enormity of the issues involved and the millions of lives at stake, his tendency is quite understandable, but I think the book would have been strengthened if the same material had been presented in a more restrained manner.
RFK Jr. clearly ranks as a leader of America’s anti-vaxxer movement, which may broadly encompass 20-30% of our population, and his massive bestseller seems likely to become its seminal text. Meanwhile, I would regard myself as very much on the other side, but after carefully considering his views, I think the disagreements may be more apparent than real. I lack the scientific expertise to evaluate 95% of his claims. Yet even if many or most of them were correct, I do not think I would need to retract any of the statements I made in my long August interview denouncing “anti-vaxx crackpots.”
His first and longest chapter discussed the various proposed responses to the Covid epidemic, arguing that the use of extremely cheap but reasonably effective medical treatments such as Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IVM) had been torpedoed by the vested interests of the powerful pharmaceutical industry, eager for lucrative profits from experimental vaccines and their own patented and very expensive drugs. This exact debate has been raging on the Internet since the early months of 2020, and I have never taken a stand on the contentious issue. But although I can’t weigh the credibility of the scientific studies he cites against those on the other side, I thought he made a reasonably persuasive case, especially with regard to IVM.
Unlike some of his more extreme supporters, Kennedy seemed to fully admit that Covid is a dangerous disease, but correctly emphasized its extreme age-skew. He pointed out that the vaccines have proven far less effective than originally predicted, and he noted that they were rushed into widespread release without sufficient testing, which may eventually lead to major future health problems. The legal fig-leaf that allowed the normal regime of patient trials to be set aside was the claim that no other medical treatment existed, and this probably explains the widespread attacks on the use of IVM. Moreover, the vaccination of children or the youthful seemed very misguided given mildness of the illness for those age-cohorts.
Mandatory vaccination efforts enforced by serious legal or employment sanctions are the explosive flashpoint of the anti-vaxxer movement, but these never made any sense to me. The vaccines appear ineffective in preventing infection or transmission, and their main benefit is to greatly reduce the risk of serious illness or death. So the vaccinated have little to fear from those who reject the needle, while the latter can made an informed—or perhaps emotional—choice in weighing the risks of a relatively untested vaccine against those of severe Covid illness. Given the extreme paranoia of a considerable segment of anti-vaxxers, heavy governmental pressure may even be proving counter-productive.
Kennedy is most closely identified with Covid vaccine issues, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover few sharp disagreements on those matters, but I was even more pleased with his discussion of one of my own areas of focus. I regard the long-obscured history of America’s massive biowarfare program as central to properly understanding the global epidemic currently ravaging the world, but any such association has been almost entirely avoided by mainstream journalists and even within the alternative media very few have been willing to broach that subject. Yet Kennedy squarely confronts the reality, devoting his last and second-longest chapter to this topic, ensuring that many millions will probably now encounter it for the first time.
Although the author is a liberal Democrat, with deep ideological roots and the strongest of family pedigrees, in today’s topsy-turvy America his only significant mainstream media coverage came from an hour-long interview by Tucker Carlson of FoxNews, who praised him as “one of the bravest and most honest people” he’d ever met. And near the end of that broadcast, listeners were told that if they only read one chapter of the book, the section on American biowarfare was the most important:
(Update: video not available – No RFK jr and Tucker Carlson interviews on Youtube)
That chapter begins with a brief overview of the World War II origins and later growth of those controversial military programs, noting that they were officially abolished by President Richard Nixon in 1969, and afterwards banned by international treaty. But those prohibitions contained a large loophole, allowing the continuing existence of “dual use” biodefense projects, so much of what had been biological warfare development was simply rechristened “vaccine research” and shifted from the Pentagon to the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy then focuses his attention on Dr. Robert Kadlec, a central figure in the story he tells. From the late 1990s onward, Kadlec had been one of America’s leading advocates of biowarfare, arguing that the technology offered the possibility of launching powerful attacks against the food supply or population of global adversaries while minimizing the risk of direct retaliation. As he wrote in 1998:
Biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic losses and consequent political instability, coupled with plausible deniability, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.
Over the last few decades, our biowarfare programs have absorbed well over $100 billion in government funding, yet ironically the only known victims have been the American citizens who died in the false flag anthrax attacks that quickly followed 9/11. As Kennedy explains, those deadly bioweapon mailings to leading U.S. Senators and journalists stampeded Congress into passing the controversial Patriot Act and although purportedly from Islamic terrorists, the FBI later determined that the spores had been drawn from our own biowarfare stockpiles, possibility the one at Ft. Detrick. Although I had always been aware of these facts, until reading Kennedy’s book I hadn’t known that Kadlec’s business associates benefited enormously from those mysterious attacks, which panicked the government into rescuing their BioPort corporation from the brink of bankruptcy with huge and lucrative new biodefense contracts.
During the years that followed, Kadlec regularly switched back and forth between senior roles in America’s federal biowarfare programs and in the private corporations that received related contracts, with investigative journalist Whitney Webb providing a very detailed account of his activities. After the Trump Administration came into office, some of its leading elements began immediately mobilizing for a global confrontation against China, and Kadlec was brought back into government in 2017. Then in 2018 and 2019, China’s food supply was severely impacted by mysterious viral epidemics that destroyed much of its poultry industry and 40% of its entire pig herd, by far the largest in the world.
During these years, Kadlec was also heavily involved in a number of different biowarfare drills, intended to help prepare American society for the outbreak of dangerous and mysterious new viruses. In particular, he ran the large-scale “Crimson Contagion” simulation exercise from January to August 2019, in which federal and local authorities practiced a coordinated defense of their communities against risk of infection from the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory virus in China; and two months after this major drill ended, a mysterious virus of exactly those characteristics suddenly appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The chapter also notes the close links between America’s biowarfare establishment and the Wuhan lab, which held the closest genetic match to the Covid virus and also received American funding to undertake the “gain of function” experiments that many experts now believe produced the enhanced virus that created the current pandemic. The author is very careful to avoid including any of the explicit accusations or scenarios that have been the centerpiece of my own series of articles over the past 18 months, but he provides a enormous amount of important information spread across those 65 pages and nearly 300 source references. This conveniently allows thoughtful readers to easily connect the dots.
Based upon Kennedy’s public focus and the individuals championing his book, I had expected it would contain a detailed critique of vaccines and the controversial public health measures Western governments had implemented to control the Covid epidemic, and so it did. I was pleased to also see a lengthy chapter on the substantial nexus between the mysterious new virus that had devastated the world and America’s longstanding biological warfare programs. But a major portion of the text was devoted to an entirely different topic, one that I had not expected to see and found completely astonishing.
The eponymous target of Kennedy’s book is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had spent five decades playing a leading role in the public health activities of the American government before he became the official face of our response to the Covid epidemic. With the calm, soothing demeanor of an experienced physician and his ubiquitous presence on TV, he was elevated as a national hero by the political mainstream, which endorsed the policies he advocated, but eventually attracted huge hostility from those segments of the population that vehemently opposed lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations.
Since I don’t watch cable news and hadn’t paid much attention to the details of our Covid public health response, I completely missed most of Fauci’s burgeoning fame, and never had strong feelings about him one way or the other. However, his name was already somewhat familiar to me from three or four decades earlier when he had played a similar governmental role in America’s AIDS crisis, and he’d always been vaguely associated with that disease in my mind.
Given that Fauci was Kennedy’s primary target and AIDS had launched his career, I might have expected some discussion of that topic, but what I encountered were seven full chapters running nearly 200 pages and constituting almost half the entire book. The incendiary claims that Kennedy makes about AIDS and Fauci’s role in that human disaster were entirely new to me, and I lack even a sliver of the technical expertise to properly evaluate them. But if even 10% of his accusations are correct, his portrait is an absolutely devastating one.
Almost half of Kennedy’s book may be devoted to AIDS, but this shocking material seems to have been studiously avoided by most who have discussed it or interviewed the author, and it receives negligible attention on the Amazon sales page. Indeed, when I mentioned some of his claims to an academic I know, he checked around a bit, found no mention of them anywhere, and almost seemed to suspect that I had been hallucinating. Kennedy opens one of this AIDS chapters with the phrase “I hesitated to include this chapter…” and I can easily understand why.
As all of us know from the media, AIDS is a deadly auto-immune disease that was first diagnosed in the late 1970s, primarily afflicting gay men and intervenous drug users. Transmitted by body fluids, the disease usually spread through sexual activity, blood transfusions, or the sharing of needles, and HIV, the virus responsible, was finally discovered in 1984. Over the years, a variety of medical treatments were developed, mostly ineffective at first, but more recently so successful that although being HIV-positive was once considered a death-sentence, the infection has now become a chronic, controllable condition. The current Wikipedia page on HIV/AIDS runs more than 20,000 words including over 300 references.
Yet according to the information provided in Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this well-known and solidly-established picture, which I had never seriously questioned, is almost entirely false and fraudulent, essentially amounting to a medical media hoax. Instead of being responsible for AIDS, the HIV virus is probably harmless and had nothing to do with the disease. But when individuals were found to be infected with HIV, they were subjected to the early, extremely lucrative AIDS drugs, which were actually lethal and often killed them. The earliest AIDS cases had mostly been caused by very heavy use of particular illegal drugs, and the HIV virus had been misdiagnosed as being responsible. But since Fauci and the profit-hungry drug companies soon built enormous empires upon that misdiagnosis, for more than 35 years they have fought very hard to maintain and protect it, exerting all their influence to suppress the truth in the media while destroying the careers of any honest researchers who challenged that fraud. Meanwhile, AIDS in Africa was something entirely different, probably caused mostly by malnutrition or other local conditions.
I found Kennedy’s account as shocking as anything I have ever encountered.
Extraordinary claims obviously require extraordinary evidence. Kennedy’s chapters on AIDS include more than 900 source-references, many of them to academic journal articles or other sources of supposedly authoritative scientific information. But although I have a strong science background, with my original academic training having been in theoretical physics, I am not a medical doctor nor a virologist, let alone someone with specialized expertise in AIDS research, and these articles would mean nothing to me even if I had attempted to read them. So I was forced to seek other indications that Kennedy’s 200 pages on AIDS represented something more than sheerest lunacy.
His book carries glowing praise from a long list of medical doctors and scientists, but their names and backgrounds are completely unknown to me, and with nearly a million practicing physicians in America, a few could surely be found to endorse almost anything. However, the first endorsement on the back cover is from Prof. Luc Montagnier, the medical researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus in 1984, and he writes: “Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.” Moreover, we are told that as far back as the San Francisco International AIDS Conference of June 1990, Montagnier had publicly declared “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.”
Perhaps the Nobel Laureate endorsed the book for other reasons and perhaps the meaning of his striking 1990 statement has been misconstrued. But surely the opinion of the researcher who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the HIV virus should not be totally ignored in assessing its possible role.
And he was hardly alone. Kennedy explains that the following year, a top Harvard microbiologist organized a group containing some of the world’s most distinguished virologists and immunologists and they issued a public statement, endorsed by three additional science Nobel Laureates, that raised the same questions:
It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes a group of diseases called AIDS. Many biomedical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis, to be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that the critical epidemiological studies be designed and undertaken.
As Kennedy tells the story, by that point AIDS researchers and the mainstream media were completely in thrall to the ocean of government funding and pharmaceutical advertising controlled by Fauci and his corporate allies, so these calls by eminent scientists were almost entirely ignored and unreported. According to one journalist, some two trillion dollars has been spent on HIV/AIDS research and treatment over the decades, and with so many research careers and personal livelihoods dependent upon what amounts to an “HIV/AIDS industrial-complex,” few have been willing to critically examine the basic foundations of that empire.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never given any thought to questioning AIDS orthodoxy. But discovering the longstanding scientific skepticism of so many knowledgeable experts, including four Nobel Laureates, one of them the actual discoverer of the HIV virus, has completely shifted my perspective. I cannot easily ignore or dismiss the theories Kennedy presents, but can only briefly summarize them and leave it to individual readers to investigate further then decide for themselves. And in basic fairness to the author, he himself also repeatedly emphasizes that he can “take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS” but is simply disturbed that Fauci has successfully used his government funding and media clout to suppress an ongoing and perfectly legitimate scientific debate. According to Kennedy, his book is intended “to give air and daylight to dissenting voices.”
His narrative of the origins of the HIV/AIDS connection is absolutely stunning and seems well-documented. Dr. Robert Gallo, an NIH researcher in Fauci’s orbit, originally announced HIV as the apparent cause of AIDS at a packed 1984 press conference, which he held before any of his supportive research findings had actually been published and reviewed by his scientific peers. Only long after the theory had become firmly embedded in the national media did it come out that only 26 of the 76 AIDS victims in his seminal study showed any traces of the HIV virus, an extremely slender reed for such a momentous conclusion.
Furthermore, critics eventually noted that many thousands of documented AIDS victims similarly lacked any signs of the HIV virus, while millions of those infected by HIV exhibited absolutely no symptoms of AIDS. Correlation does not imply causality, but in this case, even the correlation seemed a very loose one. According to Kennedy, fully orthodox AIDS researchers grudgingly admit that no scientific study has ever demonstrated that HIV causes AIDS. The widespread accusations of serious scientific misbehavior and outright intellectual theft that long swirled around Gallo’s laboratory research were eventually confirmed by legal proceedings, and that helped explain why his name was not included on the Nobel Prize for the HIV discovery.
AIDS had originally come under the purview of the National Cancer Institute, but once it was blamed on a virus, Fauci’s own infectious disease center managed to gain control. That resulted in an enormous gusher of Congressional funding and media attention for what had previously been a sleepy and obscure corner of the NIH, and Fauci soon established himself as America’s reigning “AIDS Czar.” The HIV-AIDS link may or may not be scientifically valid, but it carried enormous political and financial implications for Fauci’s career.
In 1985 AZT, an existing drug, was found to kill the HIV virus in laboratory tests. Fauci then made tremendous efforts to speed it through clinical trials as an appropriate treatment for healthy, HIV-positive individuals, with FDA approval finally coming in 1987, producing Fauci’s first moment of triumph. Priced at $10,000/year per patient, AZT was one of the most expensive drugs in history, and with the cost covered by health insurance and government subsidies, it produced an unprecedented financial windfall for its manufacturer.
Kennedy devotes an entire chapter to the story of AZT, and the tale he tells is something out of Kafka or perhaps Monty Python. Apparently, Fauci had been under enormous pressure to produce medical breakthroughs justifying his large budget, so he manipulated the AZT trials to conceal the extremely toxic nature of the drug, which rapidly killed many of the patients who received it, with their symptoms being ascribed to AIDS. So following FDA approval in 1987, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy individuals found to be infected with HIV were placed on a regimen of AZT, and the large number of resulting deaths was misattributed to the virus rather than to the anti-viral drug. According to the scientific experts cited in the book, the vast majority of post-1987 “AIDS deaths” were actually due to AZT.
One of the major scientific heroes in Kennedy’s account is Prof. Peter H. Duesberg of Berkeley. During the 1970s and 1980s, Duesberg had been widely regarded as among the world’s foremost virologists, elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences at age 50, making him one of the youngest members in history. As early as 1987 he began raising serious doubts about the HIV/AIDS hypothesis and highlighting the dangers of AZT, eventually making his case in a series of journal articles, which gradually won over many others, including Montagnier. In 1996 he published Inventing the AIDS Virus, a massive 712 page volume setting out his case, with the introduction provided by Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the renowned inventor of PCR technology and himself another leading public critic of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis. Duesberg even underscored the confidence of his HIV skepticism by offering to be injected with HIV-tainted blood.
But rather than openly debate such a strong scientific opponent, Fauci and his allies blacklisted Duesberg from receiving any government funding, thereby wrecking his research career, while also vilifying him and pressuring others to do the same. According to fellow researchers quoted by Kennedy, Duesberg was destroyed as a warning and an example to others. Meanwhile, Fauci deployed his influence to have his critics banned from the major national media, ensuring that outside a narrow segment of the scientific community few ever even became aware of the continuing controversy.
These elements merely scrape the surface of Kennedy’s remarkable story and I would urge those interested to buy and read the book, then decide for themselves, an inexpensive option since the Kindle version sells for just $2.99. For further information, they can also consult the lengthy review we published a week ago by French writer Laurent Guyénot, which focuses on exactly the HIV/AIDS chapters that are the most explosive but under-reported elements:
Fauci and the Great AIDS Swindle A Partial Review of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci Laurent Guyénot • The Unz Review • November 27, 2012 • 5,900 Words
I found the medical history presented by Kennedy absolutely extraordinary, representing as it did a near-total inversion of the scientific reality that I had always accepted until just a couple of weeks ago. I do vaguely recall that my newspapers had occasionally included some mention of these sorts of AIDS controversies 25 or 30 years ago, but I had assumed that such disputes had long been resolved. Although I have now read all his AIDS chapters twice and found his narrative disturbingly credible and persuasive, I would obviously need to read several books on the other side before I could hope to form an intelligent opinion.Subscribe to New Columns
But suppose that despite Kennedy’s wealth of factual material we assume that there is an 80% chance that the theory he presents is overwhelmingly wrong. That necessarily means that there is also a 20% chance that it is substantially correct, and such a conclusion would be staggering. Prior to the Covid outbreak, AIDS had spent almost four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, absorbing perhaps a couple of trillion dollars of funding and becoming the central focus of an army of scientists and medical experts. It simply boggles the mind for someone to suggest that HIV/AIDS might have largely been a hoax, and that the vast majority of deaths were not from the illness but from the drugs taken to treat it.
My science textbooks sometimes mentioned that during the benighted 18th century, leading Western physicians treated all manner of ailments with bleeding, a quack practice that regularly caused the deaths of their patients, with our own George Washington often numbered among the victims. Indeed, some have argued that for several centuries prior to modern times, standard medical treatments inadvertently took far more lives than they saved, and those too poor or backward to consult a doctor probably benefited from that lack. But I had never dreamed that this same situation might have occurred during the most recent decades of our modern scientific age.
According to Kennedy, the extremely lucrative nature of AZT and other early AIDS treatments blinded their manufacturers to the obvious harm they were inflicting, and that situation recalls the similar case of Vioxx, a heavily-marketed pain medication eventually removed from use. As I discussed in a 2012 article, Merck had continued to promote that very profitable drug in a massive advertising campaign long after learning of its sometimes deadly side-effects. By the time the FDA finally demanded that it be withdrawn, government studies indicated that Vioxx had already caused tens of thousands of premature deaths, while my own examination of the mortality statistics suggested that the true figure may have been in the hundreds of thousands.
Kennedy’s account emphasizes that those who challenged the reigning HIV/AIDS orthodoxy included top scientific experts, and Fauci and his allies overcame their criticism not by refuting their arguments but by instead by blacklisting them in the media and working to destroy their careers. Just two weeks ago I had published an article discussing the very similar fate that befell leading journalists and scholars who had questioned establishmentarian doctrines on controversial political and historical topics, but I am surprised to discover this parallel in the supposedly more objective world of medical science.
In all these examples, powerful critiques by influential adversaries were greeted by absolute silence, and that silence suggested that the arguments they made were not easily refuted by evidence or logic. I now see exactly the same response to Kennedy’s national bestseller and the seemingly impossible HIV/AIDS “conspiracy theory” that it presents at such length.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a top figure in America’s much-vilified anti-vaxx movement and his book is becoming a major element of that cause. His strident attacks against pharmaceutical companies, medical orthodoxy, and Fauci have earned him numerous, powerful enemies. If his AIDS claims were as ridiculous as they might seem, would they not have already been made a lightning rod for attacks against him? Suppose that his anti-vaxx tome had devoted 200 pages to arguing that our world was secretly controlled by invisible 12-foot-tall Reptilians from another dimension. Surely Kennedy’s enemies would have unleashed a huge storm of media ridicule against him for that lunacy, thereby discrediting his critique of vaccination campaigns. Yet instead complete silence has greeted his AIDS claims, raising questions in my mind of whether the medical establishment realizes that it has a great deal to hide and that many of Kennedy’s accusations might be correct.
As an outside observer with no special expertise in these areas of medicine, I was impressed by much of the evidence that Kennedy presented in support of his unorthodox views on vaccines and Covid treatments, but found the evidence he provided on HIV and AIDS vastly more comprehensive and persuasive, while being backed by far more authoritative experts. And if as he argues, the truth about HIV and AIDS has been successfully suppressed for decades by the entire medical industry, we must naturally become very suspicious about their other claims, including those regarding Covid and vaccinations.
I even wonder if this may not represent part of the hidden subtext of the bitter current battle over vaxxing and the almost paranoid reaction of so many opponents. Those who have challenged the official scientific dogma on AIDS have long since been driven out of the public square so that few who draw their information from the mainstream media are even aware of the dispute. But the sort of divergent theories presented by Kennedy have probably circulated for years in particular segments of the population, and these individuals have become firmly convinced that huge numbers of Americans died because the medical establishment inflicted the deadly AZT treatment to combat the harmless HIV virus. So they would grow extremely suspicious when they learned that a low-mortality Covid virus was being treated by the widespread use of experimental new vaccines that had completely circumvented the usual testing process through a set of emergency waivers. After absorbing the remarkable contents of Kennedy’s important book, I think these are not unreasonable questions to ask.
Prior to opening his book, I’m not sure I’d ever read anything by Kennedy, and although he is in his late sixties and carries one of the most famous political names in modern American history, I was only slightly aware of his activities. Until about a decade ago, I had remained almost as ignorant of the actual circumstances surrounding the assassinations of his famous father and uncle, casually accepting the soothing media narrative that both their tragic deaths had been at the hands of deranged lone gunmen. As I emphasized in my original American Pravda article, once we pierce our media veil of ignorance on several important matters, we become much more willing to recognize that other surprises may await our investigation. Although his book deals with subjects outside my expertise and which I have never explored, I think it may be as important as any of the works of history and politics that I have read over the years. And although Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has never held any public office, this book by itself demonstrates that he is absolutely worthy of his family name.
……………
Coffee Shop Ambiance Reading of Ten Minutes of the Article by Unz about RFK jr Book About Fauci…
The horrific Las Vegas massacre at the start of October and the more recent massacre at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas has rekindled the debate about what can be done to prevent the nightmare of recurring mass shootings. There have been renewed calls from liberal politicians for gun control measures. Even the National Rifle Association recently agreed that there should be some limits placed on the availability of “bump stocks” which allowed Stephen Paddock to turn his weapons into killing machines spewing hundreds of rounds of ammunition over the course of a few minutes into the concert crowd across the street from the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
But while mass shootings focus public attention, the truth is that they only account for a fraction of the total number of people killed by guns in the U.S. One recent report suggested that more Americans have died due to gun violence since 1968 than in all the wars engaged in by the U.S. in its entire history.
The question we posed in the document is whether the situation where society is awash in weapons in the interests of the working class. We elaborate why, as socialists, we reject both the “gun rights” narrative of the right as well as the liberal gun control narrative.
We must also note though that despite numerous horrific mass shootings, overall support for gun control measures has not grown over the last five years although there are increases in support for some measures in the wake of particularly horrific mass shootings. For example, 64% told Politico/Morning Consult in October that they support tightening gun regulation, a 3% increase. But the picture becomes much less clear when you look at specific measures
The longer term trend over the past 20 years is actually away from support for tougher gun control measures. For example, according to Gallup the support for a ban on assault rifles went down from 46% in December 2012 to 36% in October 2016. In 1996, by contrast, there was 57% support for a ban.
The gun control measure with overwhelming support is universal background checks including for private sales and sales at gun shows. There is also strong support for preventing people with mental health issues and those on government screening lists from buying weapons as well as for a centralized national database for gun sales.
Gun rights have become a key issue in the country’s deepening political polarization. It is also clear that the liberal arguments for more sweeping gun control measures have failed to convince broad swathes of the population. The NRA tragically has clearly had some success arguing in sections of the population that the way to combat gun violence in society is for the “good guys” to be armed to the teeth. This points all the more to the left needing to articulate an independent position on how to address the epidemic levels of violence in our society.
Is Gun Control the Solution to Gun Violence? A Socialist Analysis (2012)
Horror in Newtown
The massacre of 20 students and 7 adults in a Newtown, Connecticut school in December 2012 by a mentally disturbed young man has reignited the debate on gun control in the U.S. In mid-January, the Obama administration announced its support for a series of legislative measures that would among other things mandate background checks on all gun sales; ban the sale of “military style” semiautomatic weapons and limit ammunition magazines to a maximum of 10 rounds. This proposal to impose limited measures of gun control at the federal level has led to a furious response from the right, led by the National Rifle Association (NRA). However, polls indicate that there is a significant shift in popular sentiment toward supporting such measures.
Nevertheless the attempt to strengthen gun regulation at the federal level is for now dead in the water after even the background check measure which polls say is supported by nearly 90% of the public failed to get the 60 votes required to prevent a filibuster in the Senate. It should be stressed that this outcome does not mean the debate on gun control is over. Measures have been brought forward at state level and other massacres, unfortunately inevitable, will revive the issue. It is also clear that a significant section of the elite for their own reasons want to bring the gun lobby to heel.
As a Marxist organization with an increasing public profile we need to have a clear position in this public debate. We must look at the historical context of the right to bear arms and gun control both in the U.S. and internationally. We need to analyze the complex causes of the massive level of gun violence that exists in American society and put forward socialist solutions. We must look dispassionately at the real agenda of both the bourgeois forces pushing for gun control and those opposing it.
Perhaps most importantly, we must ask whether the arming of large sections of the American population in the concrete circumstances of the early 21st century and given the reactionary individualist ideology that promotes this is really in the interests of the working class. On the other hand, how do we address the ever increasing powers of the state which clearly do pose a threat to any section of American society that would resist the dictates of the ruling class? These are complex issues which cannot be summarized in a few glib phrases.
Historical Context
The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads as follows: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The context of the amendment in 1791 was the recent Revolutionary War and the belief that the struggle against the British crown was probably not over – this was confirmed by the War of 1812 when the British burned Washington DC to the ground. There was strong opposition to the idea of a standing army based on historical experience in Europe and recent experience with the British Army. Standing armies were correctly seen as the tools of tyrannical regimes.
As a result, in the early American republic, a big section of the white male population was armed for military reasons first and foremost. Of course there was no question, as far as the elite was concerned, of allowing black slaves or even free blacks to have guns. Many states required gun owners to register their weapons and prohibited carrying concealed weapons.
Broadly speaking, the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights of which it is part, represents part of the progressive legacy of the American Revolution. But as capitalism developed, the issue of weapons and gun control became inseparable from the class struggle between labor and capital and the desire of the ruling class to maintain the subjugation of the African American population.
There have been repeated horrific massacres in U.S. history of working people fighting for their rights. In 1914 during a miners’ strike in Colorado, 21 men, women, and children were killed in Ludlow by machine gun fire from the state militia. In 1937 during a peaceful protest of striking Republic Steel workers and their families in South Chicago, the police opened fire. Ten workers were shot dead and another 40 workers were wounded by gunfire, all of them shot in the back.
On the other side, striking workers resisting attacks from company goons and/or the state during strikes have on numerous occasions armed themselves for self-defense. In the 1880s Chicago’s militant German-centered labor movement went as far as creating a workers’ militia. This is not just a question of the dim and distant past. As recently as the 1970s, some miners pickets armed themselves in self-defense during wildcat UMWA strikes.
Likewise in the mid-1960s during the civil rights movement, the armed Deacons for Defense and Justice were formed by black veterans to protect civil rights activists against attacks by the Klan and state forces. The Deacons were very effective and played an important adjunct role to the mass protests at the heart of that struggle.
The Black Panther Party for Self Defense continued this tradition although their experience also shows the life and death consequences of an “ultra-left” approach to this question. Initially some of the actions the Panthers took were effective in exposing police violence, giving people confidence to stand up and putting a check on the state. On a general political level the Panthers were correct to argue a revolutionary case, i.e. against pacifism, and for the right to self-defense, and indeed to take concrete defensive action that was understandable to broader (not yet revolutionary) layers of the black community and the working class – such as practical measures to defend against violent attacks by racist forces.
However, the brandishing of weapons, while being attractive to a minority of revolutionary black youth, was a serious mistake. It contributed to keeping the Panthers isolated from the broader black working class, which sympathized with them but was not prepared to join an explicitly armed revolutionary organization, and played into the hands of the capitalist state which succeeded in brutally crushing them.
Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and the Panther leadership eventually recognized this. As Huey Newton says in his book Revolutionary Suicide “We soon discovered that weapons and uniforms set us apart from the community. We were looked upon as an ad hoc military group, acting outside the community fabric and too radical to be a part of it. Perhaps some of our tactics at the time were extreme; perhaps we placed too much emphasis on military action.”
Even in an actual revolutionary situation, the key issue is not military but political mobilization of the working class and the oppressed on the basis of defensive and democratic appeals to oppose and defeat any violent efforts of the small ruling elite to subvert the will of the majority. This was precisely what the Bolsheviks did in October 1917, the most democratic revolution in history in which there was extremely little violence. The Bolsheviks also made a class appeal to the ranks of the Tsarist army thereby largely neutralizing the old state forces as a weapon for the autocratic regime.
Of course history is replete with negative examples where the working class lacked a leadership sufficiently determined to face down the threat of the old order to unleash counterrevolutionary violence. Adventurist attempts by revolutionaries to prematurely “seize power” have also led to bloody defeats for working people.
The ruling class always tries to portray its opponents as violent. It is the task of Marxists to demonstrate to the mass of the population that the central source of violence in modern society is capitalism and the capitalist elite. This is particularly true in the United States whose ruling class has waged and is still waging a whole series of bloody imperialist adventures around the world to defend the rule of profit.
This is the context in which we must look at gun control. Attempts at gun control have been an ongoing feature of U.S. and other capitalist societies. In Europe, the ruling class made concerted efforts to disarm revolutionary and working class forces in the wake of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. In general, whatever the reasons given at the time, most attempts at gun control have been at least partly motivated by the desire of the ruling class to disarm its potential opponents, first and foremost the working class. For example, the Mulford Act passed by the California legislature in 1967 which banned the public carrying of a loaded firearm was a direct response to the Black Panthers. The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 was also partly motivated by fear of an armed black population especially in the wake of the 1967 urban upheavals.
Marxists have historically opposed such attempts to try to enforce the bourgeoisie’s desire for a monopoly of force. We do not accept the idea that only the state should be armed as a “neutral” arbiter between the classes. All historical experience shows that the state’s armed bodies are not neutral but rather serve the interests of the ruling class.
How the debate on gun rights changed
For much of the 20th century, federal gun control measures had bipartisan support. In the wake of the defeat of the radical wing of the civil rights movement, the collapse of Stalinism, and the drastic weakening of the labor movement and any real internal challenges to the power of U.S. capitalism, the debate on weapons within the ruling class shifted away from trying to disarm its potential adversaries.
This shift could already be seen during the Reagan administration, with the development of the New Right which took the position that any restrictions on the “right to bear arms” were an attack on the Second Amendment. This was part of a broader process underway in the Republican Party with a turn towards populist and religious appeals. The issue of gun ownership was tied to right-wing populism which used coded racism about crime to mobilize sections of the white working and middle class. This was part of providing a broader political and electoral base for an increasingly aggressive neoliberal corporate agenda.
The NRA wielded increasing power. Despite suffering a setback in the banning of the sales of assault rifles from 1994-2004, their influence continued to grow. At state and local level, they have had a string of successful drives to remove restrictions on the “right” to carry concealed weapons. [According to David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, “Since Newtown, more than two dozen states have expanded the right to carry into previously unknown places: bars, churches, schools, college campuses, and so on” (10/3/2017)]. While we would not in general base ourselves on the argument of what the Constitutional “founders” had in mind, let us be clear that the members of Congress who voted for the Bill of Rights in 1789 would not have supported the right to carry concealed weapons into taverns!
What is behind the rise of the NRA and the drive to systematically repeal gun control measures? One part is the NRA’s role as mouthpiece for the incredibly profitable gun industry whose sales in 2012 are estimated to have been $11.7 billion and whose profits amounted to $993 million (Washington Post, 12/19/2012) [by 2015 revenue had reached $13.5 billion and profits stood at $1.5 billion]. In the wake of the Newtown massacre, it was revealed that Cerberus Capital, a major Wall Street private equity firm, owned the Freedom Group, makers of the legally owned Bushmaster AR-15 that was used by Adam Lanza. Those making big money off of the sale of guns are not just the manufacturers but retailers like Walmart which is now the biggest seller of firearms and ammunition in America (The Nation, 1/7-14/2013).
But the NRA is also driven by a right-wing libertarian ideology that promotes a particularly reactionary version of individualism. This point of view overlaps with the idea that an armed (white) citizenry is needed to defend the constitution against a new tyranny. Of course it is true that the state has significantly increased its powers in the past historical period, using first the “war on drugs” and then the “war against terrorism” as excuses for increasing surveillance and largely shredding Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable search and seizure.”
It is no accident that gun sales have accelerated since Obama came into office in 2008 and have reportedly skyrocketed since his announcement in the wake of Newtown that he would make gun control a priority. Obama’s reelection margin as we have noted was significant but hardly overwhelming. And within the vote for Romney there is a significant section that has been influenced by the fantasies of the far right, specifically the view that Obama is some sort of anti-American Muslim/socialist tyrant. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, right-wing militia groups and other right wing extremist groups have been growing since 2008 although for the time being none of them has a mass audience. The Tea Party was a vehicle for this development but they were set back after 2011.
In reality one of the main right wing groups with a mass base is the NRA itself – as of 2010 it claimed 4.3 million members [5 million as of 2017]. Currently it is used in the interests of the gun industry and to mobilize for “gun rights” as one of several issues that provide cover for the right wing of corporate America to pursue its anti-working class agenda (along with opposition to abortion, immigration, etc.). But we should be clear that while the NRA and its backers currently promote the idea of individually armed citizens and not militias, at another stage a significant part of their heavily armed base could be turned into an overtly counterrevolutionary force to terrorize left-wing activists, workers in struggle, people of color, immigrants, and LGBT people as an auxiliary force to the capitalist state.
Gun violence in the U.S. today
We also need to look at the specific features and causes of the extremely high level of gun violence in U.S. society.
There are an estimated 300 million privately owned weapons in the U.S. The U.S. is far and away the most violent of the wealthy capitalist societies. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany. To quote Occupy the NRA, an OWS offshoot, “The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but accounts for half of all firearms worldwide and 80% of gun deaths in the 23 richest countries.”
Nevertheless we also need to recognize that the homicide level declined sharply in the 1990s. As of 2009 the homicide rate was at its lowest level since 1964 and half of what it was at the start of the 1980s. While this is a significant fact, the level of violent death is still staggering. In 2010, there were 14,748 homicides. 67.5% of these killings involved a gun (“Crime in The United States 2010, FBI Statistics” ).
The homicide rate nearly doubled from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s. In 1980, it peaked at 10.2 per 100,000 population and subsequently fell off to 7.9 per 100,000 in 1984. It rose again in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s to another peak in 1991 of 9.8 per 100,000. From 1992 to 2000, the rate declined sharply. (Bureau of Justice Statistics) [in the past few years, the number of homicides has been creeping upward nationally, and dramatically in some cities like Chicago].
And while homicide levels have declined to the level of the early 1960s, violent crime overall (much of it involving guns) remains at a much higher level than it was 50 years ago (FBI Uniform Crime Reports).
While media attention has focused on massacres from Virginia Tech to Aurora, Colorado, gun violence is concentrated in poor neighborhoods in big cities and most of the victims are poor people of color. Perhaps the most extreme example is New Orleans where the 2004 homicide rate was 52 per 100,000, ten times the national average.
Chicago has recently experienced a spike in gun violence. But as The New York Times noted, more than 80 percent of the Chicago’s 500+ homicides in 2012 took place in only about half of the city’s 23 police districts, largely on the city’s South and West Sides (1/3/2013).
Opponents of gun control will argue that the sharp decline of homicides shows that the prevalence of gun ownership and lack of much regulation does not mean that violence will increase. On the other hand, proponents of gun control like New York City’s former Mayor Mike Bloomberg will cite the fact that homicides in NYC are at a 50 year low [334 in 2016 compared to a high of 2,245 in 1989] as proof of the effectiveness of aggressive policing policies and the drive to get illegal guns off the street. In reality in many big cities there is much tighter gun control than in suburbs and rural areas. Massive police presence in poor communities has undoubtedly had some effect but at the cost of creating mini-police states where the police systematically harass young men and a massive prison gulag.
But there are clearly other reasons for the decline in homicide including the end of the crack epidemic of the 1980s. A more recent factor is the improvement in emergency medicine which improves the survival chances of people who have been shot. A Wall Street Journal (12/8/12) article on this subject is worth quoting at length because of its emphasis on the key point – gun violence and overall violence remain at epidemic levels:
“The number of U.S. homicides has been falling for two decades, but America has become no less violent.
“Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half. Improved medical care doesn’t account for the entire decline in homicides but experts say it is a major factor.
“Emergency-room physicians who treat victims of gunshot and knife attacks say more people survive because of the spread of hospital trauma centers—which specialize in treating severe injuries—the increased use of helicopters to ferry patients, better training of first-responders and lessons gleaned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Why is American Society So Violent?
There is no single reason for the level of violence in society. Clearly, the fact that the U.S. is one of the most – if not the most – unequal of the Advanced Capitalist Countries (ACCs) is very relevant. For example the U.S. has a higher poverty rate (17.2% in late 2000s) compared with 22 other OECD countries (Economic Policy Institute, based on OECD Stat Extracts). As documented in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the level of inequality in a society contributes directly to the level of alienation. But of course massive inequality is the result of the particular development of U.S. capitalism. U.S. society has also been steeped in violence from its birth. One element of this historical legacy was that the U.S. was a frontier society where the violent campaign to wrest land from Native Americans lasted well into the 19th century. This involved the arming of a significant section of the population.
Even more important is the legacy of chattel slavery and the ongoing violent repression of African American communities to the present day. The “war on drugs” beginning in the 1970s was an attempt to criminalize and suppress black youth whom the state saw as the most radical section of society, as well as a political/electoral strategy to make a coded appeal to racism under new conditions with the end of legal segregation. This has led the U.S. to have the highest level of incarceration in the world – which in itself is a huge source of violence. Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders enter the extremely violent prison system and come out with far fewer rights and far more alienated from society than when they entered.
In many of the most depressed communities in the U.S. there exists a toxic combination of systemic poverty, massive alienation, and ferocious state repression. Violence is the inevitable result. Does the availability of weapons contribute to the level of violence? Undoubtedly but it is not the central cause.
And while the dynamic is not the same in more affluent communities like Newtown, it is undoubtedly the case that stress because of economic uncertainty and general social alienation are pervasive in American society. It can be argued that alienation for some young people in some suburbs may be even worse due to the lack of recreation facilities, areas to socialize, etc. An author of a study of “rampage shootings” points out that “There has been only one example of a rampage school shooting in an urban setting since 1970” (The Nation, 12/19/2012).
Added to this is the severely ineffective mental health system, an inevitable result of for-profit medicine and the cuts in funding for mental health and social services. These factors have all contributed to the spate of massacres.
U.S. imperialism’s willingness to unleash massive violence around the world also directly contributes to the violence within the U.S. itself. In a direct sense it has led to a massive expansion of the state justified by the “war on terror.” Obama and other capitalist politicians repeatedly call to “end the violence” inside America while using drones and state assassination abroad and militarizing the police domestically.
But there are other indirect effects as well. As Marxists point out, cultural production inevitably reflects the dominant (ruling class) values of society. Given the commitment of the U.S. ruling class to endless violence against its perceived enemies it is not surprising to see this reflected in movies, videogames, and music which idealize a macho, gun toting cult of death. The Current Debate on Gun Control
After years in which gun control measures especially at the federal level were seen by liberals as politically unfeasible because of the strength of the NRA, the aftermath of the Newtown massacre caused the issue to return to center stage. Obama decided to make this one of the central issues of his second term alongside immigration reform, fiscal “reform,” and climate change.
The debate on gun control as played out in the capitalist media features only two sides: on the one hand high profile Democrats, big city mayors and a section of the bourgeois who have decided that it is time to take on the NRA and on the other side right wing Republicans, backed up by the NRA who are digging in to oppose almost any gun control measures.
Our starting point in formulating our position should be sympathy with the understandable desire of most ordinary people to do something about gun violence, particularly to stop the horrific string of massacres. We completely rejected the NRA’s proposal that the appropriate response to Newtown was to put an armed police officer in every school in the country – right wingers have even raised the idea of allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons in the classroom and incredibly South Dakota passed a law to allow this! Their argument that the only way to stop “bad guys with guns” is to have more “good guys with guns” on the streets is a recipe for even more violence in society not less.
While we strongly believe in the right of working people, racial minorities, and the oppressed to defend themselves against the violence of the bosses, the state or reactionary groups, the current level of gun violence in the U.S. is actually an obstacle to the development of social struggle. While defending our general theoretical position on the state – and not making any concession to liberal ideas that the state is neutral we need to examine the question concretely under the current conditions, balance of forces, and consciousness. In the situation prevailing in the U.S. today, does the current regime of widespread access to guns actually help strengthen the position of the working class?
The reality is that it does not, and in fact the past 30 years – when the tendency has been for gun control to be relaxed – has seen a major offensive by big business, an undermining of democratic rights, and the strengthening of the repressive powers of the state. The dominant forces arguing against gun control promote a right-wing, individualist, racist, and sexist ideology that weakens the working class.
Furthermore the threat of violence, ranging from the everyday threat of shootings in many communities up to and including the threat of terrorist attacks, has given the state ready-made excuses to ramp up its powers of repression. That does not mean we should adopt the position of the liberal gun-control advocates or echo the view that guns are the main problem in society. We need to put forward an independent, working-class position.
We reject the NRA argument that the type of limited gun control measures proposed by Obama are the beginning of the end of the Second Amendment or the right to bear arms. There is no serious proposal being put forward to try to disarm or partially disarm the population as a whole. The only areas where there are forcible attempts by the police to disarm people are public housing projects in the inner cities.
But opposing the attempt of the NRA to whip up collective paranoia is not sufficient. We also need to be clear that there are many legitimate reasons why people want to own guns. In rural culture, guns are widely used for hunting, dealing with predators, and entertainment. This does not inevitably lead to massive levels of violence. Likewise many suburban and urban dwellers understandably want to own a gun for protection. This is often particularly the case in areas where gun violence is endemic. It is not surprising that many women want to own a gun for self-defense. Socialists are not pacifists and we do not criticize ordinary people for owning a gun or wanting to.
But the question which most ordinary people want answered now is how to significantly reduce the violence. The elite advocates of gun control do not have a serious answer to this question. Even if all the measures proposed by the Obama administration were passed into law the history of recent gun control measures suggests that the extremely powerful gun industry will find ways around them. This is what happened to the 1994 “ban” on assault weapons.
The other fundamental reason that the ruling-class gun-control lobby can’t show a way to seriously reduce violence is that, as has already been pointed out, the central source of violence in society is capitalism itself including the capitalist state.
Serious measures to reduce violence would include ending the “war on drugs” and decriminalizing most or all drugs. (It should be stressed that decriminalization is not the same as legalization. Essentially it means trying to treat drug addiction as a public health problem first and foremost.) Releasing the hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders from prison and the dismantling of the bloated and racist criminal injustice system would do more to reduce violence than any gun control measure.
We also advocate taking serious measures against the massively profitable gun industry such as banning the sales of weapons by these companies (or the government) to various right-wing regimes around the world. We also are for ending the military adventures of U.S. imperialism abroad and massively reducing the scale of the military and the Pentagon budget. The resources freed up could be used to create jobs and improve education, health care (including mental health), and social services and thereby contribute to reducing violence abroad and at home. Finally we are for repealing the Patriot Act and other legislation that has legalized a massive security state that has done precious little to improve the safety of ordinary people but has certainly contributed to a big increase in state violence.
Simply enacting a massive jobs program, a $15 an hour federal minimum wage and other anti-poverty measures, and a single-payer, socialized health-care system which prioritizes mental health care would be huge steps forward in creating a saner, less violent society. We advocate all measures that would reduce the level of inequality in society and that would dismantle institutional racism, but we stress that only by uprooting capitalism can we create a just, egalitarian society. However, even limited reforms quite quickly come up against the limits of this diseased and decaying system.
Again it should be stressed that these measures we are proposing would be far more effective in reducing gun violence than “gun control” which is likely to be very ineffective. But in the context of our wider aim of strengthening the struggle of working people, we support some gun control measures including mandating background checks [ by the capitalist government’s police forces ] on all gun sales, banning the sale of “military style” semi-automatic weapons, and reducing the number of rounds in ammunition magazines on the basis that they would act to reduce the level of violence even if only to a limited degree.
However, we have reservations about how background checks proposals are often written. Banning anyone with a conviction from buying a gun in practice means excluding a significant section of the black working class. At the very least, there should be an appeal process built into background checks.
Again we are in no way saying that many ordinary people do not have entirely legitimate reasons for owning or wanting to own weapons but we do not see the present situation as being in the interests of the working class. Not all issues have a simple yes or no answer. Our position embodies a certain contradiction but really it is reality which is full of impossible contradictions as long as we continue to operate within a capitalist framework.
In late August, the military of Myanmar (Burma) launched a systematic campaign of massacre, rape and arson against the deeply oppressed Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority, killing thousands and fueling a mass exodus to neighboring Bangladesh. Nearly 700,000 people, some two-thirds of the Rohingya population, have fled the northern part of Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine (formerly Arakan), their small villages burned to the ground. The pretext for this latest scorched-earth carnage was an attack by lightly armed Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) fighters on police posts and an army base in Rakhine that reportedly left 12 security personnel and at least 59 Rohingya dead.
Genocidal terror at the hands of the armed forces is nothing new for the beleaguered Rohingya. They have been kept subjugated and impoverished by the generals from the ethnic Burmese (Bamar) Buddhist majority, who remain the real power in Myanmar despite the “democratic transition” that began in 2011. Especially since the 1962 military coup, the Rohingya have increasingly been subjected to organized state violence—arbitrary arrests, forced labor, restriction of travel and marriage, destruction of mosques and seizure of their lands. To limit their population, the government bars them from having more than two children. In 1977 and again in 1991, the military carried out “cleaning operations” that resulted in some half million people being forced out. The latest wave of Rohingyans to enter Bangladesh’s squalid camps join some 300,000 who escaped previous attacks, while nearly a million more are overwhelmingly in other Muslim-majority countries. Many of those still in Rakhine are interned in camps, surrounded by government forces and hostile Buddhist communities and denied work, education and medical care.
Myanmar is a prison house for over 135 ethno-linguistic groups. The country’s rulers, predominantly Bamars from the central lowland of the Irrawaddy River valley, lord over a myriad of nationally oppressed peoples, including the Shan, Mon, Kachin, Karen, Chin and Wa. Since Myanmar gained independence from Britain in 1948, many of these ethnic groups have engaged in insurgencies of varying levels of intensity to assert separatist claims or to attain some form of autonomy or greater rights. Among them are the Rakhine Buddhists, who are the largest group inhabiting the state that bears their name.
While many of Myanmar’s peoples suffer under Bamar rule, the Rohingya, with their distinctive South Asian features, language and religion, are the most vulnerable. Unlike larger ethnic minorities that have greater military capacity and occupy the inaccessible rugged and mountainous terrains of the frontiers, the Rohingya are relatively small in numbers and reside in the coastal plain of Rakhine state. Denigrated as “Bengali” foreign intruders, they are denied Myanmar citizenship—codified in a 1982 law—rendering them stateless, even though they have lived in Rakhine for generations. Bangladesh does not allow the Rohingya citizenship, either. In the mid 1990s, some 200,000 of them were forcibly repatriated to Myanmar, a process overseen by the United Nations; today, Bangladesh again wants to expel the Rohingya.
These stateless people desperately need their own independent state in what is now north Rakhine, both as an elementary measure of protection for those still there and to permit the safe return of the million-plus Rohingya now in the diaspora. Rohingya Muslims have repeatedly expressed their desire for separation from Myanmar since the time of the country’s independence, when they waged an armed struggle seeking to be part of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). At other times, they have agitated for autonomy. In armed clashes between the ARSA or other Rohingya insurgents and the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military), revolutionary Marxists militarily side with the Rohingya, who are locked in a struggle for existence. We uphold full equality and democratic rights for all the peoples in Myanmar, including the right to self-determination, and raise the call: Tatmadaw out of Rakhine! For an independent Rohingyan state!
The Buddhist chauvinists want to erase all memory of the Rohingya in accordance with the policy of “Burmanization,” an ultranationalist ideology based on asserting the mythical racial purity of the Bamar ethnicity and upholding the conservative Theravada Buddhist faith. (The same form of Buddhism is dominant in Sri Lanka, where it promotes violence against Tamil Hindus and Christians, and in Thailand, where it targets Muslims.) Burmanization’s loudest advocates include extremist monks of the Buddhist organizations 969 and the Committee to Protect Race and Religion (or Ma Ba Tha). But they are not the only ones inciting holy war. In October, Sitagu Sayadaw, a supposedly “pacifist” monk, gave a sermon to a group of army officers that invoked a parable about an ancient Sri Lankan king who was advised not to grieve for the many non-Buddhists he killed in battle because they were not human beings.
The monks and their organizations are backed by the Tatmadaw and Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy. A darling of the U.S. and other imperialists, Suu Kyi was showered with accolades, from the Nobel Peace Prize to the Congressional Gold Medal. Liberals embraced her as a “champion of democracy and human rights.” Truth is, she is a Buddhist chauvinist who denounces the Rohingya as “terrorists” and Bengali “foreigners” and dismisses their massacre as “a huge iceberg of misinformation.” As State Counsellor, she is presiding over the terror campaign against the Rohingya. Two decades ago, well before Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and assumed office, our comrades of the Spartacist League of Australia succinctly described her role as “a very thin ‘democratic’ veneer to the continued brutal exploitation of the workers and peasants” (Australasian Spartacist No. 159, Spring 1996).
One of the poorest nations in Southeast Asia, Myanmar has suffered from decades of economic stagnation and isolation. After the return to a nominally civilian government, large chunks of state/military-owned enterprises were sold off at rock-bottom prices, largely to a small circle of military cronies. The end of sanctions by the West and the passage of new laws over the same period have opened the economy to international capital. Major corporations from Coca-Cola to Chevron and General Electric are moving in to get a piece of the action. Textile barons are scrambling to set up poverty-wage sweatshops employing largely young female workers.
It is in the interest of the country’s small but growing working class, itself multiethnic, to take up the cause of the Rohingya and other minorities. The Myanmar regime whips up anti-Muslim fervor to deflect workers from struggle against the ravages of capitalism and the relentless violence unleashed by those at the top of society.
U.S. Imperialism and China in Myanmar
In September, the Trump administration urged the UN Security Council to take “strong and swift action” to end violence against the Rohingya. This rhetoric was pure hypocrisy. The U.S. imperialists have one overriding strategic objective in Myanmar: countering China, the largest and most powerful of the remaining bureaucratically deformed workers states.
When Barack Obama first assumed the presidency in 2009, he initiated a new policy of engagement with the Myanmar military to pull the country away from China’s orbit. As Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner documented in his book Great Game East (2015):
“In early December 2011, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a visit to Burma, the first by a high-level American official in more than half a century. While paying lip service to democracy and human rights, it was clear that China’s growing influence in Burma was a major concern. Hillary raised Burma’s ties with China—and North Korea—in her talks with the new Burmese president, Thein Sein, and strategic interests have now returned to the forefront of Washington’s Burma policy.”
Obama himself subsequently made two separate trips to Myanmar, promoting stronger trade and security relations. In 2016, the Obama White House feted Suu Kyi, U.S. imperialism’s chief political asset in Myanmar, and lifted economic sanctions against the country. The last of these was scrapped that December, with the Democratic president declaring that Myanmar had made “substantial progress in improving human rights.” At the time, the Tatmadaw was sweeping through Rakhine in yet another savage anti-Rohingya offensive.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the imperialists imposed sanctions on impoverished Myanmar in a cynical maneuver to isolate its military regime. As a result, China became the country’s main foreign investor, gaining a foothold in every sector of the economy. In recent years, China has begun extensive infrastructure development there. As part of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, oil and gas pipelines were built from southwestern China to coastal Rakhine. A nearby Chinese-owned deep-sea port on the Bay of Bengal, now under construction, will provide China with an alternative route for energy imports that bypasses the chokepoint of the Malacca Straits.
As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of the Chinese deformed workers state against imperialism and the forces of capitalist counterrevolution. Despite the rule of a parasitic Stalinist bureaucracy, the overthrow of capitalism in the 1949 Revolution and establishment of an economy centrally based on collectivized property forms were historic gains for the world’s working people. Key to our defense of the Chinese Revolution is the struggle for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist misleaders and replace them with a regime of workers democracy committed to the fight for world socialism.
While we support Beijing’s right to enter into economic relations with whatever capitalist country it so chooses, we recognize that the ruling bureaucracy is guided by narrow nationalist interests, which are rooted in the anti-revolutionary dogma of “building socialism in one country.” Thus, China lends its political and military support to the junta in Myanmar, which viciously represses workers, ethnic minorities and the rural poor.
Since 1988, China has been the Tatmadaw’s top supplier of military hardware, including armored vehicles, artillery, aircraft, missiles and naval vessels. (Playing both sides of the fence, Beijing has also armed, to a lesser extent, the United Wa State Army and other insurgent groups.) Last May, the Chinese navy conducted its first-ever exercises with its Myanmar counterpart. Now the Beijing Stalinists are providing cover for the murderous generals in the name of stabilizing Rakhine, where China has large infrastructure investments. We oppose and condemn China’s military aid to Myanmar’s junta.
Colonial Divide and Rule
While a comparatively modern term, “Rohingya” simply means “inhabitant of Rohang,” the Muslim name for the formerly independent Buddhist kingdom of Arakan. From the early 15th century, the Rohingya served in the Arakan court and settled as traders in its dominion. The Burmese king, having staked claims for submission, tribute and slaves across much of what now constitutes Myanmar, conquered Arakan in the mid 1780s.
Burmese control of the territory was short-lived, as the British seized Arakan in 1824 during the first of three Anglo-Burmese wars. Colonial rule, by design, greatly aggravated tensions between the Arakanese (Rakhine Buddhists) and a rapidly growing Muslim population. With Arakan incorporated into British India, hundreds of thousands of Bengalis readily emigrated there to toil in the fields, which the colonial masters had handed over to largely Indian Muslim landlords.
After completing the conquest of the Burmese in 1886, the British drew Burma’s borders and constituted it as a single province within the Indian empire. Forcibly lumping together extremely diverse and potentially antagonistic peoples in a single state, while simultaneously playing them off against one another in line with their policy of divide to better subjugate, the British stoked the fires of communal violence. Notably, Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, were promoted at the expense of the Burmese and others. The administrative units of “Burma Proper” were policed, taxed and ruled by a new layer of officials, mostly brought over from the subcontinent. British army units composed of Indian troops were deployed to suppress Burmese resistance to colonial rule. The British also relied on ethnic minorities—the so-called “martial races” like the Karen, Kachin and Chin—for military manpower.
The often-violent tensions between all these groups exploded with the Japanese invasion of Burma during World War II. Burmese nationalists, led by Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father, fought on the side of the Japanese (before switching to the British at the war’s end when it became clear Japan would lose). Tens of thousands of Indians attempting to escape the country were butchered, including by Aung San’s forces. In the course of the interimperialist conflict, Arakan descended into a brutal civil war that pitted Muslims against Buddhists. By the end of that fighting, the Muslims were compacted in the north of Arakan and the Buddhists in the south.
The Communist Party of Burma (CPB) was founded on the eve of WWII, in August 1939, largely by student leaders of the militant nationalist Dohbama Asiayone (“Our Burma Association”), including Aung San. Although elected secretary-general, Aung San decamped from the CPB soon after. The CPB never had a commitment to the Marxist principle of proletarian class independence from all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces. During the war, the loosely organized Communists lent their services to the British imperialists in accordance with the line issued by the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy. After Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the wartime alliance between Britain and the USSR was sealed, the Comintern promulgated the “People’s War Against Fascism” and all-out support for the war effort in the Allied imperialist countries and their colonies.
By helping the British reconquer Burma, the CPB betrayed the anti-colonial struggle. In fact, the Communists were the initial go-betweens for Aung San and the British at the war’s end and to that end set up a popular front, that is, a political bloc with the bourgeois nationalists. The CPB’s class collaboration had a predictable outcome. Just over a year after the Aung San-led popular front—at Britain’s invitation—took the reins of the postwar capitalist government, the Communists were expelled from its ranks and targeted for severe state repression.
From May 1945, workers strikes in the cities and peasant revolts in the countryside had come under Communist leadership. With independence negotiations underway, Time magazine (3 February 1947) reported that Aung San “liked the idea of British troops staying awhile to help him control the Reds, some of whom could not even be controlled by Moscow.” Although that idea did not come to pass, the next year the hammer came down on the CPB, which abandoned the cities, adopting a peasant-based guerrilla strategy. In 1989, the CPB collapsed.
The Fight for Permanent Revolution
Resource-rich Myanmar is marked by combined and uneven development, with stark contrasts of wealth and poverty, of new industry and unspeakable squalor. The British imperialists threw fuel on every manner of special oppression inherited from the past, and the generals continue to fan the flames of communalist terror. What is needed is revolutionary proletarian opposition to both the imperialist powers and local capitalist rulers. The way forward is shown by the program of permanent revolution, developed by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky and verified by the Russian October Revolution. Trotsky recognized that in backward, semicolonial countries, the achievement of modernization and liberation from the imperialist yoke requires smashing capitalist rule, which would clear the path for socialist development.
The socialist liberation of Myanmar, where 70 percent of the population depends on agriculture for its livelihood, requires looking not only to the fledgling working class there but also to the massive proletarian concentrations in its neighboring countries: India, Bangladesh, Thailand and China. Myanmar’s exploited and oppressed, from those of South Asian and Chinese origin to the ethnic groups on the Thai border, have significant links to all these countries. What is posed is the need to forge proletarian internationalist parties committed to the overthrow of capitalist rule in the region as well as to political revolution in the Chinese deformed workers state. Within Myanmar itself, it is vital to plant the seeds of Marxism and cohere the cadres who would struggle to build a genuinely Leninist party that acts as the tribune of the people, including by championing the right of self-determination for all oppressed national minorities.
This perspective must be tied to the fight for socialist revolution in the U.S. and other imperialist centers. We fight to reforge Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution. When those who labor rule on a global scale, technology and industrial development will be tapped to lift the world’s masses out of want and misery on the road to building a secular, classless communist society free of communal, national and religious conflict.
After nearly half a century in the orbit of the Democratic Party, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) has finally landed. In March, the reformist group and publisher of Socialist Worker voted to disband following internal disarray over how to capitalize on the “emerging socialist movement”—which is neither socialist nor a movement but a layer within the capitalist Democratic Party. The popularity of Bernie Sanders and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), with its rising Congressional star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, posed an existential crisis for the ISO, which had long assumed dominion over petty-bourgeois “fight the right” activism in the U.S. The collapse, spurred by a scandal involving an alleged cover-up of an alleged sexual assault in 2013, also laid bare an organization mired in bureaucratic rot.
As its former members perform a political autopsy, what is in the guts of the ISO is no mystery: anti-Communism. The organization was born upholding imperialist “democracy” against Soviet “totalitarianism,” promoting the cause of imperialist-backed counterrevolutionary forces whose aim was the destruction of the Soviet bureaucratically degenerated workers state. The domestic corollary of its anti-Sovietism was to chase after a supposed “progressive” wing of the bourgeoisie at home, that is, the Democrats, and prettify capitalist rule. Though paying occasional lip service to Marxism, the ISO was always a staunch enemy of proletarian revolution.
For the last two years, the ISO has been eclipsed by the DSA in the anti-Trump “resistance,” whose entire purpose is to get Democrats elected in 2020 by selling the lie that they can represent an alternative for workers and the oppressed. Within the left, the prevailing pro-Democratic Party pressures of the Trump era have fractured other pseudo-socialist groups like Socialist Alternative and Workers World Party.
The DSA, with its nearly 60,000 members, has attracted droves of millennial Berniecrats behind the trending banner of “democratic socialism.” The expressed goal of the DSA, which is organically embedded in the Democrats, is to “realign” the party of slavery, Hiroshima and Vietnam. The ISO wanted a cut of the DSA’s electoral success, but was stifled by the fact that it was supposed to feign at least one degree of separation from the Democrats by not openly endorsing them. At the same time, the ISO always gave Democrats backhanded support or celebrated them outright, as it did with Wall Street’s man Barack Obama.
Last summer, a debate ran in the pages of Socialist Worker between those advocating a “clean” versus a “dirty” break from the Democrats, a squabble over whether to officially campaign for candidates running on the Democratic ballot. Well before the ISO’s annual convention in February, which established an “Elections committee,” the organization had been touting a new crop of Democratic Party “progressives” and the 2020 presidential bid of long-serving imperialist politician Sanders. The tomes of internal bulletins published in the lead-up to the convention document the enthusiasm for joint work with the DSA and support to DSA candidates.
After all, if the DSA represented a supposed “unprecedented” opening and if the Sanders campaign put “socialism in the air,” why not swim with the big fish? Former honcho Todd Chretien lamented during a workshop at the DSA-affiliated Jacobin’s “Socialism in Our Time” conference in New York last month that the ISO had been “built for a period of defeat,” i.e., with the labor movement in steep decline, and thus was unable “to adapt our politics and our form for a new sort of movement.” Far from advancing the cause of socialism, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and their ilk serve to deepen deadly illusions in the capitalist Democratic Party. Such illusions are the greatest political obstacle to militant class struggle and a key mechanism for co-opting discontent among youth.
As we wrote in “Opponents of the Revolutionary Internationalist Workers Movement,” published alongside the SL/U.S. Programmatic Statement in 2000:
“Lacking a revolutionary perspective, the reformist left is inexorably led to the gates of the Democratic Party, reinforcing its influence. This has many expressions, from overtly calling for votes for Democratic candidates to somewhat more masked appeals to ‘fight the right’ (i.e., the Republicans) to working hand in glove with the labor bureaucracy. Deriving from the reformist view of the ‘neutrality’ of the capitalist state, and in the absence of a mass social-democratic party in this country, the Democratic Party is offered as the vehicle through which the capitalist state can be pressured to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed.”
Shachtmanism Full Circle
The ISO and the DSA have a common granddaddy, Max Shachtman, who split from the Trotskyist movement in 1940, dumping the position for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union and subsequently rejecting its class nature as a workers state. Shachtman eventually ended up an unabashed social-patriot in the right wing of American social democracy, working in the Democratic Party and with the agencies of U.S. imperialism to push counterrevolution. He became the most effective ideologist of “State Department socialism.”
The ISO’s forebears flunked the most basic acid test for Marxists: defense of the world’s first workers state, born through the October 1917 Russian Revolution led by V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which was a historic victory for the international proletariat. Despite its subsequent degeneration under a conservative bureaucratic caste headed by J. V. Stalin that seized political power in 1923-24, the key gain of the October Revolution remained: the collectivized economy, which laid the basis for full employment, universal health care, free education and affordable housing.
To his dying day, Trotsky fought to defend the workers state, which was being undermined by the Stalinist bureaucrats. These misrulers had renounced the struggle for workers revolution internationally in the name of building “socialism in one country” and seeking “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. Trotsky’s last political struggle was against Shachtman and others on the Russian question. We Trotskyists in the ICL fought for the unconditional military defense of the USSR against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution, as well as for proletarian political revolution to replace the Stalinist bureaucracy with a government based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism.
Both Michael Harrington, who was the founder of the DSA, and Hal Draper, whose Independent Socialist Clubs were the precursor to the ISO, followed Shachtman into the Cold War Socialist Party (SP) in 1958. Harrington, a leader of the SP until 1973, was a loyal servant of U.S. imperialism, supporting its war in Vietnam and acting as a consultant to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Draper, a left-wing critic of the SP leadership, split in the early 1960s, coalescing his group around the New Left student movement in Berkeley. As the student protests grew more radical, old-style Cold War social democracy was pushed to the sidelines. Renaming itself the International Socialists (I.S.) in 1969, Draper’s group used Marxist-sounding rhetoric about revolution and claimed to be “anti-imperialist,” but anti-Communism was its real program and essential reason for existing.
The I.S. had a loose association with Tony Cliff’s followers in Britain. Capitulating to the Cold War Labour government, Cliff had refused, in 1950, to defend the North Korean and Chinese deformed workers states against a counterrevolutionary war on the Korean peninsula by U.S. imperialism and its British allies. Cliff came up with a theoretical justification for his programmatic departure from Trotskyism by maintaining that the Soviet Union was “state capitalist” and that the bureaucracy was a new ruling class. (See “The Bankruptcy of ‘New Class’ Theories,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 55, Autumn 1999.)
In 1977, with the U.S. capitalist rulers about to launch Cold War II, a section of the I.S. split off to form the ISO, adopting Cliff’s “state capitalist” line and claiming to stand for an illusory “third camp” between capitalism and Stalinism—encapsulated in the slogan “neither Washington nor Moscow.” In reality, the so-called third camp was always the camp of imperialism. Cliff’s equally Stalinophobic British Socialist Workers Party was affiliated with the ISO until the early 2000s, when its American satellite split away after a bitter factional struggle over competing opportunist appetites.
Like Shachtman, who supported Washington’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, Cliff and his American cothinkers worked overtime in support of imperialism. In the 1980s, the ISO threw its lot in with the forces of capitalist restoration in Poland around the purported “union” of Solidarność, which was an instrument of the Vatican, Wall Street, and Western social democracy. The ISO also championed the CIA-backed mujahedin fundamentalists in Afghanistan against the Soviet Army’s military intervention—one of the few progressive acts carried out by the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy—which could have crushed the woman-hating butchers. We said, “Hail Red Army!” and denounced the Kremlin’s withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1988-89 as a betrayal. The ISO, in contrast, rejoiced: “We welcome the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. It will give heart to all those inside the USSR and in Eastern Europe who want to break the rule of Stalin’s heirs” (Socialist Worker, May 1988).
In the early 1990s, the ISO—along with every imperialist ruling class on the planet—got what it wanted. The restoration of capitalism in the USSR and East Europe had the U.S. bourgeoisie rejoicing over the “death of communism” and the Cliffites were singing in tune, trumpeting that Boris Yeltsin’s coming to power “should have every genuine socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker, September 1991). The final undoing of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 ushered in a global offensive against the world’s working class and oppressed by the imperialist ruling classes, as well as profound economic and social devastation. The collapse of the USSR qualitatively threw back political consciousness such that advanced workers generally no longer identified their aspirations for a better life with the fight for workers power and a classless, communist future.
The ISO assumed that the post-Soviet world would generate mass radicalization and open up a left niche. Today, some former members admit that this demented fantasy was off. For the last 25 years, these opportunists tried to cash in on the backward ideological climate—to which they had in their own way contributed—by moving farther to the right. ISOers continued their practice of hyper-activism within single-issue “movements,” acting as a barnacle on whatever liberal coalition was on offer from the campus left and trying to maneuver their way into positions of leadership.
With Cold War season over, the ISO still promoted the “human rights” guise for U.S. imperialist intervention. Socialist Worker spent the last few years supporting the CIA-backed “democratic” rebels in the so-called “Syrian Revolution,” berating Washington for not doing enough while slandering leftists opposed to U.S. intervention for their “Islamophobia.” The ISO also echoed the Democratic Party’s hysteria against Russia, the main ally of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. (See “Pimps for U.S. Imperialism,” WV No. 1097, 7 October 2016.)
Class Independence vs. Class Collaboration
The ISO’s plunge into demoralization and self-destruction was evident at its February convention, described as the “most painful” in the history of the organization. There, several longtime leaders like Ahmed Shawki, Paul D’Amato, Sharon Smith, Lance Selfa and Lee Sustar—regular writers for their International Socialist Review journal and publishing company Haymarket Books—were voted off the Steering Committee. Things blew up just three weeks after the convention when a letter was circulated alleging that the former leadership had protected a member accused of sexual assault in 2013 and then concealed it from the membership. We have no way of knowing the truth of the allegations. A mere two weeks later, the ISO ceased to exist.
Following the letter’s receipt, nearly the entire 2013 Steering Committee was either suspended or forced to resign. The new leadership had no qualms over dumping the old guard, which had already been sacked from leading bodies for putting up some resistance to dissolving whole hog into the Democrats. These gestures by the old guard, labeled the “arch-conservative” minority, were nothing more than an attempt to preserve the organization’s existence. As then-Socialist Worker labor editor Lee Sustar put it: “If the ISO were to accept that its independence from the Democratic Party is ‘strategic’ rather than a principle, then the question arises as to why the ISO should exist outside the DSA.”
The ISO’s occasional talk of “independence” from capitalist parties was fraudulent. Among other things, it politically endorsed and ran its own candidates on the ticket of the capitalist Green Party, which acts as a shill for the Democrats. Todd Chretien’s Green campaign in 2006, as well as the ISO’s support to union-buster Ralph Nader earlier and Green Party activist Jill Stein later, were the very opposite of fighting for the necessary independent mobilization of the working class against the capitalists and all their parties.
In the labor movement, the ISO’s activity reinforced illusions in capitalist politicians and state agencies by acting as waterboys for a wing of the labor bureaucracy. Union formations it supported over the years, from the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) to the CORE caucus in the Chicago Teachers Union, regularly endorsed Democrats for office and proved themselves to be total class collaborationists when in leadership positions. The TDU were cheerleaders for government intervention, inviting the courts into the affairs of the union to supposedly “clean out” corruption, although the purpose of the state was to destroy the powerful Teamsters. (See “Lawyers for Government Union-Busting,” WV No. 738, 30 June 2000.)
As further proof of being deep in the pockets of the class enemy, the nonprofit that managed the finances for the ISO and Haymarket Books—the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC)—received money from sources tied to U.S. big-business interests, including the Wallace Global Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. CERSC accepted grants from a variety of bourgeois “charitable” sources and liberal institutions. Such ties recall the old saying: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”
Leninism: What It Is and What It Isn’t
In search of the ISO’s original sin, a number of former members have published documents attacking Leninism, even though the ISO’s life and death had zilch to do with Lenin. The Cliffite castoffs are burnishing their anti-Communist “god that failed” credentials as they dive headfirst into the DSA. Both groups have embraced every rotten social-democratic position that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to defeat in order to lead the October Revolution.
The March 21 “A Letter from Canadian Comrades” published on socialistworker.org grotesquely links the ISO’s purportedly “Leninist party model” to the alleged sexual assault cover-up. The letter claims: “When people make the stability or preservation of the leadership and its ‘Leninist’ authority their top concern, they may avoid suspending or expelling members, especially ‘leaders’ for oppressive behavior,” adding, “We’re convinced that what should be discarded isn’t socialism from below, but the ‘Leninist’ micro-party model.” The ISO’s mantra of “socialism from below” is its way of saying that Leninism is elitist, a version of the bourgeois lie that Leninism leads to Stalinism.
The ISO never had any semblance of or need for Leninist organizational practices, because it was thoroughly hostile to the entire purpose of a Leninist vanguard party: to lead the working class, through conscious and collective action, to the taking of state power. All experience has shown that even the most militant struggles by the workers spontaneously produce a consciousness that is limited by a framework that accepts capitalism. Socialist consciousness can only be brought to the working class through the intervention of a democratic-centralist Leninist vanguard party—made up of advanced workers and declassed intellectuals—which seeks to instill in the working class an understanding of its historic revolutionary mission of abolishing the rule of capital.
The purpose of democratic-centralism is for the party to speak and act with a single voice while allowing the fullest possible debate among its membership. Unlike the Cliff tendency, we do not publicly thrash out internal differences. Doing so is tantamount to inviting more backward layers of society to be the jury to decide matters of revolutionary strategy, and making the party more permeable to bourgeois ideas. Regarding Leninist organizational principles, the founder of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, wrote:
“Democratic-centralism has no special virtue per se. It is the specific principle of a combat party, united by a single program, which aims to lead a revolution. Social Democrats have no need of such a system of organization for the simple reason that they have no intention of organizing a revolution.”
—“Leninist Organization Principles,” 3 April 1953, Speeches to the Party (1973)
Insofar as the ISO honchos displayed any pretensions to Leninism or democratic-centralism, it was to justify the bureaucratic suppression of their membership. The external reflection of this internal bureaucratism was the ISO’s hatred of open political debate on the left and rejection of elementary workers democracy. The ISO had a special animus toward us as revolutionary Trotskyists: it regularly resorted to red-baiting, exclusion and thuggery against our organization.
The task of a vanguard party is also to act, in Lenin’s words, as a “tribune of the people” championing the cause of the exploited and oppressed and combating every manifestation of national, racial and sexual oppression. As opponents of workers rule, the ISO could provide no program for the liberation of black people or women, which requires the overthrow of the system of exploitation in which their oppression is rooted. Instead, the ISO, having rejected the working class as the motor force for revolutionary change, embraced petty-bourgeois liberalism like #MeToo feminism and Democratic Party constituency politics. The ISO simply reaped what it had sown.
The difference between the ISO and the Spartacist League always came down to the difference between reform and revolution. For revolutionary, proletarian, internationalists in the U.S. imperialist belly of the beast, our central strategic task remains the same: breaking the allegiance of the working class to the Democrats to forge a revolutionary vanguard party that can lead the fight for socialist revolution. It is only under the banner of Leninism that the workers of the world can at long last sweep away the capitalist exploiters into the dustbin of history.
Historical Materialism and the Protestant Reformation
(Quote of the Week)
October 31 marked the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses criticizing the Roman Catholic church to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. Friedrich Engels explained that behind the cloak of religious ideology lay a clash of class interests between the rising bourgeoisie and the decaying feudal order that was more starkly shown in the 17th-century English Revolution led by Oliver Cromwell.
When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognised position within medieval feudal organisation, but this position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.
But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalised Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organised its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, full one-third of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organisation, had to be destroyed….
The war-cry raised against the Church by Luther was responded to by two insurrections of a political nature: first, that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants’ War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the towns—an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter. From that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out Germany for two hundred years, from the politically active nations of Europe. The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasants of North-East Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.
But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin’s creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man’s activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith—the value of gold and silver—began to totter and to break down. Calvin’s church constitution was thoroughly democratic and republican; and where the kingdom of God was republicanised, could the kingdoms of this world remain subject to monarchs, bishops and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.
In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory.
—Friedrich Engels, Introduction to the 1892 English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
We print below the first part of a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at a November 4 forum in Chicago.
It is the 100th anniversary of the Russian October Revolution, the defining event of modern history and the greatest victory ever for working people. The proletariat, led by a Leninist vanguard party, smashed the bourgeois state and set up a workers state. I pondered what I could tell you in one hour—when after all, Leon Trotsky needed about 1,200 pages in his History of the Russian Revolution (1932). But if this talk encourages you to read or reread Trotsky’s History, then I will have accomplished something.
As the founder of American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, put it:
“The Russian Bolsheviks on November 7, 1917, once and for all, took the question of the workers’ revolution out of the realm of abstraction and gave it flesh and blood reality….
“The Russian revolution showed…how the workers’ revolution is to be made…. It showed in life what kind of a party the workers must have.”
—“Speech on the Russian Question” (1939), printed in Struggle for a Proletarian Party (1943)
The need for a revolutionary party will be one of the themes of this talk. During the course of the Russian Revolution, the multinational proletariat, drawing behind it the peasantry and the oppressed nationalities, forged its own new organs of class power, the soviets, or workers councils. With the smashing of the old capitalist state, these soviets, under Bolshevik leadership, formed the basis of the new workers state. The vanguard of the workers understood that they were not just taking power in Russia; they were opening the first chapter of international proletarian revolution. The Russian Revolution inspired workers uprisings throughout Europe and rebellions in the colonial countries.
The Soviet government expropriated the capitalists and landlords and repudiated totally the tsar’s massive debt to foreign bankers. It proclaimed the right of working people to jobs, health care, housing and education, as the first steps to building a socialist society. Sounds good, doesn’t it?! The new workers state gave land to the peasants and self-determination—the right to their own independent state—to the many oppressed nations that had been ruled over by the hated tsar. I will speak some about the struggles V.I. Lenin waged to ensure the right of these nations to self-determination. The early Soviet government gave women in Russia an unprecedented level of equality and freedom.
Like many people, when I first came around the Spartacist League, I assumed that in a revolutionary situation all the left would get together and fight for socialist revolution. Comrades encouraged me to read about the Russian Revolution, which proves exactly the opposite. Believe me, if a group like the International Socialist Organization or Workers World has a reformist approach to pressuring the capitalist state now, then when the time comes, like the Mensheviks, they will wind up defending capitalism tooth and nail.
The bourgeoisie has always wanted to bury the October Revolution under a mountain of lies. There has been a bunch of articles in the press on the 100th anniversary. A few were interesting. Most were like, “Yikes, it was just a historical accident, let’s hope it never happens again.” But it happened because the socially organized productive forces of the planet had developed to the point where bourgeois private property forms and the bourgeois nation-states had become shackles on social progress. World War I marked the descent of the capitalist system into mass slaughter and barbaric destruction. It signaled that to free the planet’s productive forces from capitalist imperialism, proletarian revolution was necessary.
Capitalist imperialism is still caught in its fatal contradictions; it still creates a proletariat with the social power to overthrow the bourgeoisie, and it still creates the barbarism that we see around us. Under both capitalist parties, Democrats and Republicans, U.S. imperialism has destroyed countries around the world. Much of the Near East is a bombed-out shell. Now Trump is threatening nuclear war against North Korea for their terrible crime of developing weapons to defend themselves. We call for the military defense of the North Korean and Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers states. It’s a good thing that North Korea is developing a credible nuclear deterrent. Without that, the U.S. would already have bombed them into oblivion.
Here at home, racist cop terror, union-busting, destruction of working people’s living standards, domestic surveillance and mass deportations continue apace under Trump as they did under Obama. Trump is not a fascist, but he has encouraged the fascist scum to come out of the woodwork. We all wish for there to be some hard class struggle in this country, and it will come—it is inevitable under capitalism. Our job is to make sure that there will be a party like Lenin’s in the right place at the right time. So this talk is not just about what happened in 1917 in Russia; it is also about the fight of the International Communist League to organize for new Octobers.
Russia’s Uneven and Combined Development
At this point I am going to discuss some of the background to the Russian Revolution and speak to why the first and, so far, only proletarian socialist revolution occurred in Russia. Russia was an acute example of what Trotsky called uneven and combined development. The country was ruled by a reactionary tsarist aristocracy presiding over a prison house of many oppressed nations. Seventy million Great Russians constituted the main mass of the country, but there were 90 million “outlanders.” So a majority of the country was oppressed nationalities. Barely 50 years out of serfdom, peasants made up some 85 percent of the population and lived in the most backward conditions imaginable. Ignorance and illiteracy were the norm. The ancient institutions of the traditional household and the communal village enforced a rigid patriarchal hierarchy and the degradation of women. Peasant women were beasts of burden; we have a picture in an article on “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women” of peasant women harnessed up like oxen to pull a river barge (see Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006).
But underdeveloped countries do not just mechanically go through every stage that the more developed countries went through: they jump over certain aspects while retaining many very backward elements. By 1914, massive investment from Europe had created a new urban proletariat (one-third women!) in large-scale, state-of-the-art industrial concentrations. The percentage of Russian workers employed in factories of more than 1,000 employees was higher than in Britain, Germany or the U.S. The late-emerging Russian bourgeoisie, subordinated to foreign capitalists and tied to the Russian aristocracy, knew that any mass upsurge against tsarism was bound to sweep them away, too.
It was in response to this uneven and combined development that Trotsky formulated his theory of permanent revolution. Trotsky projected that despite the economic backwardness of the country, the Russian proletariat could come to power before an extended period of capitalist development. Indeed, the workers would have to come to power if Russia were to be liberated from its feudal past because the weak and cowardly capitalists sure weren’t going to do it.
An essential aspect of Trotsky’s permanent revolution was, as he wrote in the August 1939 article “Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution” (also known as “Three Concepts”): “Only the victory of the proletariat in the West will shield Russia from bourgeois restoration and secure for her the possibility of bringing the socialist construction to its conclusion.” And that, of course, was and is the rub. With the delay of world revolution, particularly in the advanced industrial countries, the Stalinist bureaucracy usurped political power in the Soviet Union in 1923-24, and capitalism was eventually restored in 1991-92. I will make the point that the ICL defended the Soviet Union against capitalist counterrevolution to the bitter end, unlike most left groups.
Key to the Bolsheviks’ success in 1917 was the coming together of Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution with Lenin’s struggle to build a programmatically based vanguard party steeled against all manner of reconciliation with the capitalist order. The Bolshevik Party was cohered in the long years of struggle against the Mensheviks, who looked to the liberal bourgeoisie to overthrow tsarism.
World War I had a profound impact on Lenin’s thinking. In 1916, he wrote the book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which explained that imperialism is not a policy, but is the highest stage of capitalism. Imperialist wars to divide and redivide the world are inevitable under monopoly capitalism. World War I triggered the collapse of the Second “Socialist” International, which the Bolsheviks had considered themselves part of, when the vast majority of its affiliated parties lined up behind their own bourgeoisies’ war efforts. Lenin at first didn’t believe it when he heard that the German Social Democratic Party’s parliamentary group had unanimously voted to support the war. I guess he thought it was what today might be called “fake news.” But it was true.
Lenin concluded that the war had demonstrated that capitalism was in its final stage of decay. He maintained that the path to proletarian revolution was the transformation of the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war and that socialists in the imperialist centers must stand for the defeat, above all, of their own bourgeois state in the war. Lenin also concluded that a new, revolutionary international, the Third International, must be built on the hard programmatic Bolshevik model.
National Liberation Struggles and Socialist Revolution
If you look at Lenin’s writings during the years leading up to 1917, a lot of them deal with the need for a hard position against the imperialist war and against not only the overtly pro-war fake socialists but also against the centrists like Karl Kautsky who covered for them. A number of the articles deal with the national question.
Now, the ICL has just had an intense internal struggle against a longstanding perversion of Leninism on the national question, particularly in relation to oppressed nations like Quebec and Catalonia within multinational states. As the fight unfolded internationally, it exposed a number of examples of chauvinist positions in opposition to just national struggles of oppressed nations. To get a sense of how these represented a capitulation to the pressures of Anglophone imperialism, read “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 65, Summer 2017).
The point is that our old position went against Lenin’s very extensive writings on the national question. In his 1914 article, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” Lenin outlined a very definite programmatic stance: “Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.”
This stance applied not only to colonies but also to countries forcibly retained within multinational states. Lenin wrote:
“The proletariat must struggle against the enforced retention of the oppressed nations within the bounds of the given state…. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words…”
Further:
“On the other hand, the socialists of the oppressed nations must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organizational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in face of all manner of intrigues, treachery and trickery on the part of the bourgeoisie.”
—“The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1916)
During the war years, Lenin waged a struggle against the advocates of what he called imperialist economism. The original Economists of whom he speaks in What Is To Be Done? (1902) thought that the economic struggle was everything and that there was no need to bother with political problems and struggle. The imperialist Economists thought that since imperialism had triumphed, there was no need to bother with the problems of political democracy and self-determination. These included various Polish Social Democrats whom Lenin denounced for thinking that “self-determination is impossible under capitalism and superfluous under socialism” (“A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism” [1916]).
Lenin adamantly disagreed with both these propositions. He wrote: “Socialist parties which did not show by all their activity, both now, during the revolution, and after its victory, that they would liberate the enslaved nations and build up relations with them on the basis of a free union…these parties would be betraying socialism” (“The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” emphasis added).
This position was key to making the Russian Revolution. Our old articles contained phrases like “getting the national question off the agenda,” which we often used as an excuse for not supporting struggles for national liberation. The Bolsheviks saw that national liberation struggles could be catalysts for socialist revolution and sought to unleash their revolutionary potential. National liberation can be a motor force for proletarian rule if the proletariat acquires communist consciousness and is led by a communist party.
Fighting national oppression is one of the things the Bolsheviks were known for, as well as their workers mobilizations against anti-Jewish pogroms by the fascistic Black Hundreds. We could certainly use some of these workers mobilizations against today’s fascists. As Lenin said in What Is To Be Done?, the party must be “the tribune of the people…able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression.”
The February Revolution
So by now you’re all saying, “Enough already, let’s get on with the revolution!” The February Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsarist monarchy was carried out overwhelmingly by the working class, with the peasants, organized in the army, also playing a key role. The spark was a demonstration by women workers demanding bread on February 23 (which is March 8 in the new calendar, International Women’s Day). It shows it’s a good thing for women to get out of the villages and have some social power as workers! Then on February 25 there was a general strike in Petrograd, followed by a mutiny in some army regiments.
What broke the back of the tsarist monarchy was that the army no longer wanted to fight, and whole units were abandoning the front or refusing to carry out orders. A powerful indication was when the Cossack regiments, who were considered very loyal to the tsar, refused to suppress a workers demonstration in Petrograd. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky relates:
“The officers first charged through the crowd. Behind them, filling the whole width of the [Sampsonievsky] Prospect, galloped the Cossacks. Decisive moment! But the horsemen, cautiously, in a long ribbon, rode through the corridor just made by the officers. ‘Some of them smiled,’…‘and one of them gave the workers a good wink’.”
If the Cossacks were winking at the workers, the tsar was in trouble.
You have to realize how bloody and unpopular the war was. The ABC of Communism (1920) by Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky estimated that by 1918 the number of Russian soldiers killed in the war was eight million. And they remarked acidly, “If we assume the average weight of a soldier to be 150 lb., this means that between 1 August 1914, and 1 January 1918, the capitalists had brought to market twelve hundred million pounds of putrid human flesh.” Trotsky encapsulated the situation as follows: “‘Everything for the war!’ said the ministers, deputies, generals, journalists. ‘Yes,’ the soldier began to think in the trenches, ‘they are all ready to fight to the last drop…of my blood’.”
Trotsky’s History shows the quick tempo of events. February 23 International Women’s Day demo; February 25 general strike; police and state officials were sent packing and on February 27 the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was formed. The soviets, which had previously arisen in the 1905 Revolution, were revived in the February Revolution, but they now included soldiers, who were mainly peasants and who would otherwise have been difficult to organize. By February 28 the tsar’s ministers were arrested, and by March 2 the tsar had abdicated.
The paradox of the February Revolution was that while the autocracy and the tsar had been overthrown by the workers, the official government that emerged was bourgeois. Even as street fighting was raging in Petrograd on the night of February 27, a self-appointed Provisional Committee composed of bourgeois-monarchist politicians met in the Tauride Palace, behind the back of the popular revolution. They declared a Provisional Government aimed at erecting a constitutional monarchy.
Meanwhile, in another wing of the Tauride Palace, a “Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies” was being formed. The leadership of the Soviet was dominated by the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs). While the SRs were largely based on the peasantry, the Mensheviks represented urban petty-bourgeois layers and the more conservative and privileged workers. The program of the Mensheviks and SRs was that the bourgeoisie should lead and rule, and they desperately appealed to the bourgeois Provisional Government to take control.
Trotsky often quotes the left Menshevik Nikolai Sukhanov, who was a leader of the Soviet in its early days and himself wrote a history of the Russian Revolution. Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution quotes Sukhanov as saying: “The Executive Committee [of the Soviet] was in a perfect position either to give the power to the bourgeois government, or not give it.” Further: “The power destined to replace tsarism must be only a bourgeois power…. Otherwise the uprising will not succeed and the revolution will collapse.”
That’s blunt! When I first read about this, I had trouble believing that any kind of so-called socialist, with the workers in ascendancy and soviets being set up, deliberately runs around the city looking for capitalist politicians to hand over power to. But let me tell you something: This has happened many times. From the abortive Chinese Revolution of the late 1920s to Spain in the 1930s to Greece in the late 1940s after World War II, promising revolutionary situations have been betrayed by latter-day Mensheviks and deliberately handed over to the bourgeois executioners time and time again. These reformists seriously do not believe that the working class can take and hold power.
The February Revolution thus resulted in a situation of dual power. That is, alongside the Provisional Government of the bourgeoisie, there stood the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. There was continual conflict between the Provisional Government and the soviets. Trotsky notes that one bourgeois politician complained: “The government, alas, has no real power; the troops, the railroads, the post and telegraph are in the hands of the Soviet. The simple fact is that the Provisional Government exists only so long as the Soviet permits it.” Dual power is unstable and can only be resolved either by revolution or counterrevolution.
Rearming the Bolshevik Party
Trotsky comments that the February Revolution was led by “conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin.” The Bolsheviks were in the soviets, of course, but as a minority. The Bolsheviks were slow off the mark, with a leadership underground and dispersed—Lenin was in exile—and, in general, lagging behind the masses. The soviets in February were dominated by the SRs and Mensheviks, who maintained that the February Revolution had achieved the main task of overthrowing the monarchy, and now the task was to defend “democratic” Russia against German imperialism. In other words, upholding the war aims of the Russian bourgeoisie, the Mensheviks and SRs took positions similar to the pro-war German Social Democrats. During Lenin’s exile and particularly after the return of Joseph Stalin and Lev Kamenev, the Bolshevik leaders in Russia began to bend in the direction of the Mensheviks’ defensism, dropping Lenin’s revolutionary defeatism and even mooting the possibility of the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks merging! Lenin in exile was trying desperately to get back to Russia and wrote in a furious March letter: “I would choose an immediate split with no matter whom in our party, rather than surrender to social-patriotism.”
When he finally arrived in Petrograd, Lenin climbed atop an armored car to address the cheering workers who had brought down the tsar. Lenin hailed them and, to the shock of the official pro-war Soviet welcoming committee, gave an internationalist salute to the German revolutionary Marxist leader Karl Liebknecht, who was in prison for opposing German militarism. “The hour is not far when, at the summons of our comrade Karl Liebknecht, the people will turn their weapons against their capitalist exploiters…. Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution).
Lenin went straight on to a Bolshevik meeting, where he gave a two-hour speech. The speech is not preserved, but the ever-present Sukhanov, who was allowed into this Bolshevik meeting by an overindulgent Kamenev, describes Lenin as saying: “‘We don’t need any parliamentary republic. We don’t need any bourgeois democracy. We don’t need any government except the soviet of workers’, soldiers’, and farmhands’ deputies!’” Sukhanov bleats: “I will never forget that thunderlike speech, startling and amazing not only to me, a heretic accidentally dropped in, but also to the faithful.”
This was the opening shot of Lenin’s fight to rearm the party. Lenin’s “April Theses,” which he fought for at the April party conference, included recognition that the seizure of power by the proletariat in Russia would place on the order of the day not only the democratic tasks but also socialist tasks. So now Lenin is sounding more like Trotsky on permanent revolution. As Trotsky noted in Lessons of October (1924): “The fundamental controversial question, around which everything else centered, was this: whether or not we should struggle for power; whether or not we should assume power.”
Lenin could win over the party because his program corresponded to the needs of the proletariat and peasantry. And because there was a proletarian base to the party that had been waiting—as Trotsky says in his History of the Russian Revolution, “gritting their teeth”—for Lenin or someone to put forward a revolutionary strategy for the seizure of power by the Soviets. Yet, at the same time, there was a conservative wing of the party. As Trotsky points out in Lessons of October, “A revolutionary party is subject to the pressure of other political forces.” The party’s power of resistance is weakened when it has to make political turns and it “becomes, or runs the risk of becoming, the indirect tool of other classes.” The most abrupt turn is when the question of armed insurrection against the bourgeoisie is on the agenda. We’ll see a second part of this fight right before the insurrection. After Lenin’s successful struggle to rearm the party, the Bolshevik Party began to raise its revolutionary program, and its influence spread like wildfire.
Not surprisingly, the fall of the tsarist monarchy in February had stimulated national movements among the oppressed nations of Russia. Trotsky wrote: “In this matter, however, we observe the same thing as in all other departments of the February regime: the official democracy, held in leash by its political dependence upon an imperialist bourgeoisie, was totally incapable of breaking the old fetters.” They sure weren’t going to relinquish, as Trotsky put it, “Ukrainian grain, Donetz coal, and the ores of Krivorog.” So, after February as before, Lenin kept hammering away on the right of self-determination for oppressed nations.
We print below the second part of a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League speaker Diana Coleman at a November 4 forum in Chicago. Part One appeared in WV No. 1123 (1 December).
The first Provisional Government, which was established after the February Revolution, was brought down by the uproar over its pledge to continue the hated imperialist war. A new cabinet was formed on May 5. This time Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party and Menshevik leaders in the soviets (councils of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies that arose in the wake of the February Revolution) took ministerial posts, alongside the bourgeois Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, in the capitalist government. Trotsky later called this Russian coalition government “the greatest historical example of the Popular Front” (“The POUM and the Popular Front,” July 1936).
The popular front was the name that the Stalinists would use, starting in the 1930s, to designate their coalition government betrayals. In South Africa it’s called the Tripartite Alliance. Such class collaboration is not a tactic but the greatest betrayal! When a workers party enters a popular front with capitalist parties, whether in government or in opposition, it is a pledge by the traitorous working-class leaders that they will not violate the bourgeois order; in fact, they’ll defend it.
The mood in Petrograd was changing in favor of the Bolsheviks, who had a near majority in the factories. In early June when a demonstration called by the Bolsheviks was banned by the Menshevik/SR-led Soviet, the Bolsheviks stood down and called it off. The conciliationist Soviet leadership then called a demonstration on June 18, but to their horror the workers came out en masse under Bolshevik slogans, including: “Down with the offensive!” “All power to the soviets!” and “Down with the ten capitalist ministers!”
Trotsky was now back in Russia and, finally understanding the need for a hard Leninist party, was working closely with Lenin. In response to the coalition government, Lenin and Trotsky devised the slogan, “Down with the ten capitalist ministers!” It meant: break the coalition with the capitalists; the soviets should take all the power!
By early July, Petrograd was in semi-insurrection. Workers and soldiers infuriated by the coalition government, now led by Alexander Kerensky, were demanding “All power to the Soviet!” In his History of the Russian Revolution (1932), Trotsky vividly quotes an eyewitness who saw Victor Chernov, an SR minister, trying to speak to a crowd of workers and soldiers: “A husky worker shaking his fist in the face of the minister, shouted furiously: ‘Take the power, you son-of-a-bitch, when they give it to you’.”
But the conciliationists didn’t want the power! This is very different from the Bolsheviks. Speaking at the First Congress of Soviets in June 1917, Lenin called for a Soviet government and asserted: “According to the previous speaker…there was no political party in Russia expressing its readiness to assume full power. I reply: ‘Yes, there is. No party can refuse this, and our Party certainly doesn’t’” (“Speech on the Attitude Towards the Provisional Government,” 4 June 1917).
The Bolsheviks were worried that a July insurrection in the cities was premature, that it would not be backed by the peasantry, and thus it would be impossible for the workers to hold power. But after initially opposing the July demonstrations, the Bolshevik leadership decided that it was better to go with the masses and try to provide leadership and prevent a premature insurrection. The Bolshevik estimation was correct, and after the demonstrations, a period of severe repression followed. Bolsheviks were killed, Trotsky was arrested and Lenin went into hiding. The repression, however, did make clear to the workers the true nature of this popular-front government—that it was nothing other than the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
While in hiding, Lenin devoted what he thought might be his last days to writing The State and Revolution. He argued that while the bourgeoisie uses lies to hide its dictatorship, the truth is that the state is not a neutral arbiter above classes. He defended Friedrich Engels’ understanding that the core of the state is armed bodies of men—the military, prisons and police—who hold a monopoly of violence over society. These instruments exist for the social domination by the ruling class—under capitalism, the rule of the bourgeoisie.
Lenin’s pamphlet codifies a central lesson of revolutionary struggle: that the proletariat cannot take over the bourgeois state to wield it in the interests of the working class. Rather, the proletariat must smash the old state machinery, create a new state and impose its own class rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat—to suppress and expropriate the capitalist exploiters. As you can see, this was not an abstract discussion but a part of an ongoing political debate. There was supposed to be a seventh chapter of The State and Revolution, but Lenin had to stop writing and go back to Petrograd to actually lead the revolution. As he noted in a postscript: “It is more pleasant and useful to go through the ‘experience of the revolution’ than to write about it.”
By August, the bourgeoisie had realized that only a military coup could stop the revolution and called on the commander-in-chief of the army, General Kornilov, to crush the soviets. Kornilov was a monarchist general of the anti-Jewish “Black Hundred” type. Trotsky notes that Kornilov had the heart of a lion and the brain of a sheep. The conciliationist soviet tops were paralyzed in response to the counterrevolutionary offensive, but the masses rallied around the Bolshevik-organized united-front action that stopped Kornilov in his tracks.
Lenin was very clear:
“Even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing; there is a dividing line here, which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise and allow themselves to be carried away by the course of events.
“We shall fight, we are fighting against Kornilov, just as Kerensky’s troops do, but we do not support Kerensky. On the contrary, we expose his weakness.”
Lenin was also very clear on the war even though by this time the German army was approaching Petrograd: “We shall become defencists only after the transfer of power to the proletariat” (“To the Central Committee of the RSDLP,” 30 August 1917).
It is also worth noting that a victory for Kornilov would have meant not only a slaughter of the pro-Bolshevik masses, but would also have been fatal for many of the compromisers as well. The failed coup showed that bourgeois democracy, as represented by the Provisional Government, was not viable in the historical sense in Russia in 1917. The real choices were represented by the Bolsheviks on the one hand and Kornilov and the forces of military reaction on the other.
Toward the Seizure of Power
A crucial corner had been turned by the beginning of September. The masses were convinced that the old soviet misleaders were politically bankrupt and that only the Bolsheviks would take decisive action to end the war, stop capitalist sabotage of the economy and lead the soviets to power. The general staff of the army was no longer capable of mobilizing military units against revolutionary Petrograd. The countryside was aflame as returning peasant soldiers seized the landlords’ fields and torched their huge mansions. On September 4, Trotsky was released from prison, and by the 23rd he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet.
The Bolsheviks finally had solid majorities in the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets. Trotsky declared, “Long live the direct and open struggle for a revolutionary power throughout the country!” The bourgeoisie and the conciliationists tried some parliamentary diversions—the Democratic Conference and the Pre-Parliament—but it was too late for that. The crucial upcoming event was the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which was very popular with the masses because it was sure to have a Bolshevik majority.
The first showdown in the Bolshevik leadership over the insurrection was the famous central committee meeting of October 10, where the insurrection was voted up ten votes to two—Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev voted against. As Trotsky wrote: “Whatever remains in the party that is irresolute, skeptical, conciliationist, capitulatory—in short Menshevik—all this rises to the surface in opposition to the insurrection” (Lessons of October, 1924). The resolution, as is typical of Lenin, starts with the international situation, that is, the ripening of world revolution; the insurrection in Russia is regarded as a link in the chain. The idea of having socialism in one country was not in anyone’s mind then, even Stalin’s.
Alexander Rabinowitch, in The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976), tells a funny story about this meeting which had to be held secretly because Lenin was still subject to arrest:
“By an ironic twist of fate the gathering was to be held in the apartment of the left Menshevik Sukhanov…. But on this occasion Sukhanov was not in attendance. His wife, Galina Flakserman, a Bolshevik activist since 1905…had offered…the use of the Sukhanov flat, should the need arise.”
Rabinowitch continues:
“For her part, Flakserman insured that her meddlesome husband would remain away on this historic night. ‘The weather is wretched, and you must promise not to try to make it all the way back home tonight,’ she had counseled solicitously as he departed for work early that morning.”
He must have been irritated to miss this meeting.
So, after this decisive resolution, the workers were arming, drilling, setting up the Red Guards. Workers at the weapons factories were funneling weapons directly to the Red Guards. But there were still differences in the leadership. There was another meeting on October 16, where Lenin again argued for insurrection and Kamenev and Zinoviev again voted against it. Then Kamenev and Zinoviev got a public statement printed in a non-Bolshevik newspaper opposing the insurrection. Lenin called them strikebreakers and demanded their expulsion from the party. Luckily for them, the revolution intervened. Stalin voted with Lenin for insurrection but defended Kamenev and Zinoviev and minimized the differences. He was keeping his options open in case the revolution didn’t come off.
A decisive step toward the seizure of power came when the Petrograd Soviet, at the behest of the Bolsheviks, invalidated an order by Kerensky to transfer two-thirds of the Petrograd garrison to the front. Trotsky noted:
“The moment when the regiments, upon the instructions of the [Soviet] Military Revolutionary Committee, refused to depart from the city, we had a victorious insurrection in the capital, only slightly screened at the top by the remnants of the bourgeois-democratic state forms. The insurrection of October 25 was only supplementary in character.”
—Lessons of October
The Seizure of Power
On October 24, Kerensky foolishly tried to shut down the Bolshevik newspaper. The Military Revolutionary Committee immediately sent a detachment to reopen it and also to start taking over the telephone exchange and other key centers. Even at this point Lenin was frustrated with the lack of progress of the insurrection and went in disguise to the Bolshevik headquarters at the Smolny Institute to oversee preparations personally. One Bolshevik remembered that Lenin “paced around a small room at Smolny like a lion in a cage. He needed the Winter Palace at any cost: it remained the last gate on the road to workers’ power. V. I. scolded…he screamed…he was ready to shoot us” (Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power).
Kerensky, by the way, escaped in the safety of a diplomatic vehicle flying the American flag. He wound up here in the U.S., home to counterrevolutionary gusanos of all varieties, at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. There he wrote and lectured about how to fight communism—something which he hadn’t done too well in life.
The cruiser Aurora was firing on the Winter Palace when the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened. Lenin got up and opened his speech with the famous sentence: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” The three-point agenda was: end the war, give land to the peasants and establish the socialist dictatorship. The Bolsheviks’ proclamations were punctuated by the steady boom of Red naval artillery directed against the government holdouts in the Winter Palace, which was finally taken.
As we’ve seen, the soviets by themselves do not settle the question of power. They can serve different programs and leaderships. As Trotsky wrote in Lessons of October, “Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer.” At the opening session of the Congress of Soviets, the Mensheviks and the right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries were enraged that the Bolsheviks had taken power and walked out. Trotsky basically said “Good riddance!”
Consistent with their opposition to the seizure of power, the right wing of the Bolshevik Party leadership around Zinoviev and Kamenev argued for a coalition government. They had to back down when it became clear that there was nobody to form a coalition with. Far from wanting to help run a workers state, the Mensheviks and SRs immediately started organizing a counterrevolutionary uprising against the Bolsheviks, which was quickly suppressed.
Let me state as a general rule that it is a bad idea to seek a coalition with those who are actively trying to overthrow the workers state and kill you all. This right wing of the Bolsheviks would re-emerge after Lenin’s death and the defeat of the German Revolution of 1923, when a bureaucratic caste began to coalesce around J.V. Stalin. But for now, another acute party crisis had been overcome. Some Left SRs finally did join the government, at least for a while.
I will briefly comment on the “constituent assembly” call and recommend to people our article in Spartacist ([English-language edition] No. 63, Winter 2012-13), “Why We Reject the ‘Constituent Assembly’ Demand.” This was a longtime Bolshevik demand, but the problem is that a constituent assembly is a bourgeois parliament. When it finally came into being after the revolution, it was counterrevolutionary. As we state in our article:
“The issues of permanent revolution and the constituent assembly are closely linked because the central question is what form of state will be able to accomplish the democratic tasks of the revolution: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or that of the proletariat?…
“Even after the essential concepts of the perspective of permanent revolution came to be accepted—by Trotsky in 1905, by Lenin in early 1917—the relationship between soviets and constituent assembly remained to be tested in real life. It was the experience of the October Revolution that led Lenin and Trotsky to support the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, despite their previous support for calls to convene it.”
The Revolutionary Regime
Besides proceeding on peace negotiations and land to the peasantry, a new revolutionary government of People’s Commissars was appointed, which over the next period moved forward with nationalizing the banks, restarting industry and laying the foundations of the new soviet state.
On November 15, the new Soviet government issued the “Declaration of Rights of the Peoples of Russia,” putting forward the following principles: equality and sovereignty of the peoples of Russia, the right of self-determination up to secession and formation of a separate state, abolition of all national and religious privileges, and the free development of all national and ethnic groups inhabiting Russia. Trotsky comments in his History of the Russian Revolution:
“The bourgeoisie of the border nations entered the road of separatism in the autumn of 1917, not in a struggle against national oppression, but in a struggle against the advancing proletarian revolution. In the sum total, the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations manifested no less hostility to the revolution than the Great Russian bourgeoisie.”
True enough, and certainly the local bourgeoisie of various border areas were willing lackeys of the imperialist powers, including of course the U.S., which tried to overturn the Russian Revolution. But this is why Lenin’s position on the national question spoke so powerfully to the working masses. What he wanted was a voluntary union of nations. Writing in December 1919 about the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Lenin said:
“Regarding it as beyond dispute for every Communist and for every politically-conscious worker that the closest alliance of all Soviet republics in their struggle against the menacing forces of world imperialism is essential, the R.C.P. [Russian Communist Party] maintains that the form of that alliance must be finally determined by the Ukrainian workers and labouring peasants themselves.”
—“Draft Resolution of the C.C., R.C.P.(B.) on Soviet Rule in the Ukraine”
The question of national divisions does not go away the day after the socialist revolution, but only in the more distant communist future. The idea that the national question was no longer an issue was defeated in the debate in 1919 over the Russian party program. Actually, it was another go-around with those who had proposed “imperialist economism” before the revolution (see Part One of this presentation).
The party program asserted not only that “the colonial and other nations which are oppressed, or whose rights are restricted, must be completely liberated and granted the right to secede.” It also emphasized that “the workers of those nations which under capitalism were oppressor nations must take exceptional care not to hurt the national sentiments of the oppressed nations…and must not only promote the actual equality, but also the development of the language and literature of the working people of the formerly oppressed nations so as to remove all traces of distrust and alienation inherited from the epoch of capitalism” (“Draft Programme of the R.C.P.[B.]”).
Indeed, Lenin’s last struggle was waged against the Great Russian chauvinist bullying of Georgian Communists by Stalin and others. This was part of the struggle against the developing Stalinist bureaucracy. As Trotsky said: “Whatever may be the further destiny of the Soviet Union—and it is still far from a quiet haven—the national policy of Lenin will find its place among the eternal treasures of mankind” (History of the Russian Revolution).
This talk cannot take up in any depth the question of the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union. Marxists have always understood that the material abundance necessary to uproot class society and its attendant oppressions can only come from the highest level of technology and science based on an internationally planned economy. The economic devastation and isolation of the Soviet workers state led to strong material pressures toward bureaucratization.
In the last years of his life, Lenin, often in alliance with Trotsky, waged a series of battles in the party against the political manifestations of the bureaucratic pressures. The Bolsheviks knew that socialism could only be built on a worldwide basis, and they fought to extend the revolution internationally, especially to the advanced capitalist economies of Europe. The idea that socialism could be built in a single country was a later perversion introduced as part of the justification for the bureaucratic degeneration of the revolution.
Despite the triumph of the bureaucratic caste in 1924 and the consequent degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the central gains of the revolution—embodied in the overthrow of capitalist property relations and the establishment of a collectivized, planned economy—remained. We of the International Communist League stand on the heritage of Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which fought against Stalin and the degeneration of the revolution. We stood for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist attack and all threats of capitalist counterrevolution, internal or external. At the same time, we understood that the bureaucratic caste at the top was a mortal threat to the continued existence of the workers state. We called for a proletarian political revolution to oust the bureaucracy, restore workers democracy and pursue the fight for the international proletarian revolution.
The gains of the revolution were apparent, for example, in the material position of women. Despite the grim poverty of Russia at the time of the October Revolution, the young workers state implemented far-reaching measures of equality for women. The Soviet government established civil marriage and allowed for divorce at the request of either partner; all laws against homosexual acts and other consensual sexual activity were abolished.
As explained in a pamphlet, The Sexual Revolution in Russia (1923), by Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, the Bolshevik position was based on the following principle: “the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon.” This is light-years ahead of the consciousness of liberals and fake leftists today, like Socialist Alternative, who go ballistic over our defense of Roman Polanski, who has been persecuted for consensual sexual activity, and NAMBLA (the North American Man/Boy Love Association), which advocates the right of consensual relationships between youth and older men.
One of the few recent good articles in the New York Times about the Russian Revolution was an August 12 piece by Kristen R. Ghodsee titled “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” It was mostly about East European countries, which became bureaucratically deformed workers states after World War II. The article stated: “A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women.” Some examples:
“Consider Ana Durcheva from Bulgaria…. Having lived her first 43 years under Communism, she often complained that the new free market hindered Bulgarians’ ability to develop healthy amorous relationships. ‘Sure, some things were bad during that time, but my life was full of romance,’ she said. ‘After my divorce, I had my job and my salary, and I didn’t need a man to support me. I could do as I pleased’.”
From a 30-something working woman of Germany today speaking of her mother’s desire for grandchildren: “She doesn’t understand how much harder it is now—it was so easy for women [in East Germany] before the Wall fell,” referring to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “They had kindergartens and crèches, and they could take maternity leave and have their jobs held for them. I work contract to contract, and don’t have time to get pregnant.”
Another quote from researchers in Poland when it was still a workers state: “Even the best stimulation…will not help to achieve pleasure if a woman is stressed or overworked, worried about her future and financial stability.” Indeed! In fact, the most amazing thing about this article is that the New York Times actually published it.
“Left” Apostles of Counterrevolution
The destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism there in 1991-92 and in East Europe transformed the political landscape of the planet and threw proletarian consciousness backward. Capitalist counterrevolution triggered an unparalleled economic collapse throughout the former Soviet Union, with skyrocketing rates of poverty and disease. Internationally, with the destruction of the Soviet Union as a counterweight, the imperialists felt they had a free hand to project their military might.
We actively fought counterrevolution from East Germany to the Soviet Union itself. The Socialist Workers Party of Britain, then affiliated with the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the U.S., was just the bluntest of the “left” cheerleaders for counterrevolution when they triumphantly proclaimed: “Communism has collapsed…. It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991).
Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin and big shot in the Democratic Socialists of America, has this to say about the Russian Revolution:
“One hundred years after Lenin’s sealed train arrived at Finland Station and set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags [really?!], the idea that we should return to this history for inspiration might sound absurd. But there was good reason that the Bolsheviks once called themselves ‘social democrats’.”
So Sunkara believes Leninism leads to Stalinism and wants to return to every rotten social-democratic position that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to fight against to make the Russian Revolution. Todd Chretien, ISO honcho, endorses the article with a few oh-so-polite caveats and says: “Today, like it or not, all of us socialists are on the same train, even if we might start out on different cars…and communication between compartments is flowing freely”—between what he calls the “healthy sections of the socialist left,” i.e., the reformists of various varieties.
Well, we Trotskyists of the ICL are not on their train. We don’t spend our days trying to refurbish the capitalist Democratic Party; we don’t support U.S. imperialism’s bloody wars around the world; and we don’t promote counterrevolution in those countries, like China or North Korea, where capitalist rule was overthrown. And our goal isn’t trying to reform the capitalist system.
During World War I, Rosa Luxemburg posited that the choices were socialism or barbarism. That’s true now, too. We know we have a long row to hoe and that we are a small international revolutionary Marxist propaganda group. We also know that the tide will again turn and that future workers revolutions will need the Bolshevik political arsenal. Their cadres must be educated in the experiences of the October Revolution. So that’s our job and no one else’s. To quote James Cannon, “We are, in fact, the party of the Russian revolution. We have been the people, and the only people, who have had the Russian revolution in their program and in their blood” (Struggle for a Proletarian Party [1943]).
This month, we continue the communist tradition of honoring the “Three L’s”: V.I. Lenin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. On 15 January 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, founders of the German Spartakusbund and Communist Party, were murdered by counterrevolutionary troops unleashed by the Social Democratic Party-led capitalist government as it crushed a workers uprising. Five years later, on January 21, Lenin, head of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet workers state, died after suffering a series of strokes following an assassination attempt. Liebknecht and Luxemburg’s assassination exemplified “democratic” bourgeois rule, as Lenin noted in a resolution presented to the First Congress of the Communist International.
In Germany, the most developed capitalist country of continental Europe, the very first months of full republican freedom, established as a result of imperialist Germany’s defeat [in World War I], have shown the German workers and the whole world the true class substance of the bourgeois-democratic republic. The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg is an event of epoch-making significance not only because of the tragic death of these finest people and leaders of the truly proletarian, Communist International, but also because the class nature of an advanced European state—it can be said without exaggeration, of an advanced state on a world-wide scale—has been conclusively exposed. If those arrested, i.e., those placed under state protection, could be assassinated by officers and capitalists with impunity, and this under a government headed by social-patriots, then the democratic republic where such a thing was possible is a bourgeois dictatorship. Those who voice their indignation at the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg but fail to understand this fact are only demonstrating their stupidity, or hypocrisy. “Freedom” in the German republic, one of the freest and advanced republics of the world, is freedom to murder arrested leaders of the proletariat with impunity. Nor can it be otherwise as long as capitalism remains, for the development of democracy sharpens rather than dampens the class struggle which, by virtue of all the results and influences of the war and of its consequences, has been brought to boiling point….
In these circumstances, proletarian dictatorship is not only an absolutely legitimate means of overthrowing the exploiters and suppressing their resistance, but also absolutely necessary to the entire mass of working people, being their only defence against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is preparing new wars.
—V.I. Lenin, “Theses and Report on Bourgeois Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (4 March 1919)
Die Internationale Kommunistische Liga (Vierte Internationalisten) hielt in diesem Jahr ihre VII. Internationale Konferenz ab, die das höchste politische und organisatorische Entscheidungsgremium der IKL ist. Ein monatelanger intensiver interner Kampf gegen eine langjährige Entstellung des Leninismus in der nationalen Frage, besonders hinsichtlich unterdrückter Nationen in multinationalen Staaten, gipfelte in der Annahme des Hauptdokuments sowie in den Anträgen, Diskussionen und in einer neuen Führung, die auf der Konferenz gewählt wurde. Diese Deformation stellte eine Kapitulation vor dem vorherrschenden Druck des anglofonen Imperialismus der USA dar, wo unsere Tendenz ihren Ursprung hat. Im Verlauf des Kampfes wurde klar, dass diese Anpassung an den Großmachtchauvinismus unseren Kampf für die Wiederschmiedung der Vierten Internationale infiziert hatte, was sich besonders an der arroganten Herabsetzung von Genossen aus unterdrückten Ländern zeigte.
Begonnen hat der Kampf, als ein Kollektiv von Kadern aus Québec, die wir nach den dortigen massiven Studentenstreiks 2012 rekrutierten, sich gegen die groteske anglochauvinistische Geringschätzung der nationalen Rechte und Sprachenrechte der unterdrückten Québécois-Bevölkerung wandte, die in Artikeln von Spartacist Canada (SC), Zeitung der Trotskyist League of Canada (TLC), ausgedrückt wurde. Die schockierendsten Beispiele fielen in den Zeitraum zwischen der Gründung der TLC 1975 und dem Jahr 1995, als die Sektion beschloss, die Forderung nach Unabhängigkeit für Québec zu erheben. Dieser notwendige Linienwechsel hatte jedoch einen zentristischen Charakter, da die Arbeit und Propaganda der Sektion weiterhin im anglochauvinistischen Rahmen verblieben.
Von Anfang an schlossen sich den Québécois-Genossen die führende Genossin unseres Internationalen Sekretariats (IS), Genossin Coelho, sowie der Gründer und Führer unserer internationalen Tendenz, Jim Robertson, dem Kampf gegen Anglochauvinismus an. Robertson hatte 1995 erfolgreich dafür gekämpft, unsere Opposition zur Unabhängigkeit für Québec umzukehren. Als die Auseinandersetzung sich international ausweitete, kamen weitere Beispiele des Chauvinismus ans Licht, wo wir gegen gerechte nationale Kämpfe aufgetreten waren, insbesondere in Bezug auf den Kampf des baskischen und des katalanischen Volkes, sich aus dem Völkergefängnis Spaniens zu befreien sowie auch vom Joch der rabiat chauvinistischen französischen Imperialisten. Es kam zu einer politischen Differenzierung unter den historischen englischsprachigen Kadern der IKL. Auf der einen Seite standen diejenigen, die dem alten Programm zur nationalen Frage und der alten Funktionsweise der Partei verhaftet blieben; auf der anderen standen jene, die für eine authentische, längst überfällige Fusion mit den Québécois-Genossen kämpften.
In dieser Ausgabe des Spartacist drucken wir den Großteil des Konferenzdokuments ab, „Der Kampf gegen die chauvinistische Hydra“, zur Veröffentlichung redigiert. Das Dokument behandelt den theoretischen Rahmen und die politischen Konsequenzen unserer früheren, antileninistischen Positionen zur nationalen Frage. Indem die Genossen, die diesen Kampf führten, ein äußerst grelles Licht auf unsere Anpassung an imperialistische Vorherrschaft warfen, insbesondere die der USA, haben sie sich für die Erhaltung unserer revolutionären Kontinuität eingesetzt. Wie der revolutionäre marxistische Führer W. I. Lenin schrieb:
„Das Verhalten einer politischen Partei zu ihren Fehlern ist eines der wichtigsten und sichersten Kriterien für den Ernst einer Partei und für die tatsächliche Erfüllung ihrer Pflichten gegenüber ihrer Klasse und den werktätigen Massen. Einen Fehler offen zugeben, seine Ursachen aufdecken, die Umstände, die ihn hervorgerufen haben, analysieren, die Mittel zur Behebung des Fehlers sorgfältig prüfen – das ist das Merkmal einer ernsten Partei, das heißt Erfüllung ihrer Pflichten, das heißt Erziehung und Schulung der Klasse und dann auch der Masse.“
– Der „linke Radikalismus“, die Kinderkrankheit im Kommunismus, 1920
Um mit der englischsprachigen Vorherrschaft in unserer Internationale zu brechen, wurde das Dokument in Québec-Französisch verfasst. Es entstand durch die mehrsprachige Zusammenarbeit von Kadern aus der ganzen IKL, insbesondere aus unseren Sektionen in Mexiko, Griechenland und Südafrika, deren Hingabe für unsere Partei und deren Führungsqualitäten hervorstachen. Der erwiesene Internationalismus dieser Genossen wurde von einer Reihe von IS-Regimen lange missbraucht. Besonders seit dem Untergang der Sowjetunion 1991/92 gaben diese Regime dem Druck der imperialistischen USA nach, wo sich unsere Zentrale befindet.
Bei dieser Konferenz hatten wir zum ersten Mal vollständige Simultanübersetzungen der Sitzungen in drei Sprachen. Die Genossen verschiedener Sektionen überbrachten Grüße an die Konferenz in ihrer Muttersprache (oder ihren Muttersprachen). Damit brachen wir mit unserer jahrzehntelangen Praxis, Diskussionen bei internationalen Treffen auf Englisch abzuhalten (und für Nicht-Englischsprachige nur informelle Übersetzungen bereitzustellen). Diese Praxis stellte an sich schon eine Anpassung an das anglo-imperialistische Diktat von „Englisch über alles“ dar. Unsere neue Vorgehensweise drückt unsere Entschlossenheit aus, die Sprachen der Arbeiter und unterdrückten Völker der Welt zu erlernen und zu sprechen. Wie ein Führungsgenosse unserer australischen Sektion treffend argumentierte: „Kommunisten wollen nicht in einer Welt leben, in der die historische Sprache der britischen imperialistischen Unterdrücker, ihrer australischen Ableger … und des bluttriefenden amerikanischen Ungeheuers weiter dominiert.“
Der Kampf, ein internationalistisches Führungskollektiv aufzubauen
Im Verlauf des internen Kampfes gab es unter langjährigen englischsprachigen Kadern – von denen etliche zu den Verfassern unserer antileninistischen Linie gehört hatten – Opposition gegen die Fusion mit den Genossen aus Québec. Niemand wollte offen den Anglochauvinismus verteidigen. Stattdessen nahm die Opposition die Form eines Guerillakriegs gegen die Genossen an, die den Kampf führten, obwohl diese mit großer Geduld versuchten, diese Kader zu gewinnen. Zwar wurde das Konferenzdokument einstimmig angenommen, aber oppositionelle Nachhutgefechte gingen während und nach der Konferenz weiter. Genossin Coelho unterstrich den hinterhältigen, cliquistischen Charakter dieser Opposition und erinnerte an Trotzkis Erklärung in „Der Zentrismus und die IV. Internationale“ (Februar 1934):
„Der Zentrist, seiner Position und seiner Methoden nie gewiss, steht dem revolutionären Prinzip Aussprechen, was ist voll Widerwillen gegenüber; er neigt dazu, anstelle grundsätzlicher Kritik personelle Kombinationen und kleinliche Organisations-Diplomatie zu setzen.“
Die Zukunft wird zeigen, ob diese Kader sich in der Tat dieser Fusion verpflichtet haben. Wir schmälern ihre lebenslangen, oft hart erkämpften Beiträge zum Aufbau unserer Internationale nicht. Diese Schicht ist weiterhin in unserem Internationalen Exekutivkomitee (IEK) vertreten, allerdings ohne entscheidende Stimme. Die Mehrheit der Vollmitglieder des neuen IEK entstammt nicht dem englischsprachigen Raum, jedoch gehören auch langjährige englischsprachige Kader, die diesen Kampf zu führen halfen, dem IEK an.
Der Kampf in Kanada verschaffte Genossen in anderen Ländern das Gerüst, Probleme im Verhältnis zwischen der Internationale und ihrer eigenen Arbeit zu verstehen. Die Genossen der Trotzkistischen Gruppe Griechenlands (TOE) sahen Parallelen zwischen der Bevormundung und Arroganz, der die QuébécoisGenossen ausgesetzt waren, und der ekelhaften und chauvinistischen Verachtung, der sie selbst unterworfen waren, insbesondere seitens einiger Genossen, die in den letzten Jahren an der Arbeit der Sektion stark beteiligt waren. Die Konferenz erkannte endlich die TOE als volle Sektion der IKL an. Durch ihren Kampf für die Verteidigung der Rechte unterdrückter nationaler Minderheiten in Griechenland und für Frauenbefreiung – in Opposition gegen den krassen griechischen Chauvinismus des Anführers ihrer damaligen Gruppe – waren die Genossen 2004 zu einer sympathisierenden Sektion geworden. Die Tatsache, dass die TOE 13 Jahre lang eine sympathisierende Sektion blieb, zeigt überdeutlich die bevormundende Politik des IS.
Ebenso wie die Genossen aus Québec wurde die TOE praktisch als Jugendgruppe behandelt und ihre ganz besonderen politischen Erfahrungen und herausragenden Führungseigenschaften wurden ignoriert. Es hat mehr als zehn Jahre gedauert, bevor wir in Griechenland eine Zeitung herausbrachten. Propaganda ist absolut notwendig, damit wir in diese explosive Gesellschaft intervenieren können, wo eine der wenigen stalinistischen Massenparteien der kapitalistischen Welt existiert. Unsere griechischen Genossen stellen eine lebenswichtige Brücke zu anderen Ländern auf dem Balkan und zum Nahen Osten dar, und sie sind ein bedeutendes Gegengewicht zu dem Druck, der auf unseren Sektionen in den imperialistischen Ländern lastet, die die Europäische Union (EU) dominieren.
Auch unsere mexikanische Sektion, die Grupo Espartaquista de México (GEM), wurde seit ihrer Gründung auf herablassende Weise behandelt. Vor mehr als 20 Jahren fand ein scharfer Kampf gegen die opportunistische Politik des diktatorischen Jefe [Boss] der Sektion, Negrete, statt. Bald darauf zogen Negrete und sein Mentor Jan Norden, langjähriger Chefredakteur unserer amerikanischen Zeitung Workers Vanguard, die organisatorischen Schlussfolgerungen aus ihrem Zentrismus und setzten sich aus der IKL ab, um die Internationalist Group zu bilden. Als der wohl hässlichste der „Ugly Americans“ hatte sich Negrete als Herr der mexikanischen Sektion in den ersten sechs Jahren ihres Bestehens aufgespielt. Über seinen Kopf hinweg fusionierte die Sektion 1990 mit zwei früheren Führern einer Opponentenorganisation, die beide mehr als ein Jahrzehnt an Erfahrung in der Arbeiterbewegung hatten. Jedoch wurde ihre reiche Erfahrung ignoriert, und diese Kader wurden weder wirklich in unsere internationale Führung integriert noch wurde ihnen erlaubt, eine führende Rolle in Mexiko wirklich zu spielen. Selbst die Propaganda der GEM wurde weitgehend von Norden oder Negrete geschrieben.
Auch nachdem die GEM Negrete losgeworden war, behandelte das IS die Sektion weiterhin als Anhängsel der Spartacist League/U.S. (SL/U.S.). Das wurde besonders augenfällig beim Streik an der UNAM (Nationale Autonome Universität von Mexiko) 1999, als das IS erst gegen jede nachhaltige Intervention argumentierte und dann die GEM des „Abstentionismus“ bezichtigte. Das Extrembeispiel dieser Verachtung, Arroganz und des ausgesprochenen Chauvinismus war die Auflösung des Zentralkomitees der GEM 2007 auf Geheiß des Wolkenstein-Regimes, dessen zentrale Mitglieder 2010 austraten.
Bis vor kurzem war auch die Beziehung des IS zu Spartacist/South Africa, ebenfalls von der Konferenz zu einer Vollsektion der IKL gemacht, von ähnlichen Problemen gekennzeichnet. Das Konferenzdokument begrüßt den jüngsten erfolgreichen Fraktionskampf unserer südafrikanischen Genossen gegen ihre historischen Führer, die unsere grundlegende programmatische Forderung nach einer zentral von Schwarzen getragenen Arbeiterregierung auf den Müll werfen wollten (siehe „The Fight for a South African Section of the ICL“, Extrablatt von Spartacist South Africa, April 2016). Gegen die fehlbenannte „Leninistische Fraktion“ bildeten unsere Genossen die Fraktion für trotzkistische Kontinuität. Ihre Fraktionserklärung verwies auf die Probleme, die dem südafrikanischen Kapitalismus notwendig innewohnen, und unterstrich:
„Nur durch die Diktatur des Proletariats können die nationale Unterdrückung der schwarzen Mehrheit beendet und die rassischen, ethnischen und auf Stammeszugehörigkeit basierenden Spaltungen innerhalb der nicht-weißen Völker überwunden werden.“
In einer frappanten Parallele zum Ahornblatt-Chauvinismus der TLC hinsichtlich Québecs setzte die Leninistische Fraktion den Nationalismus der unterdrückten schwarzen Mehrheit mit dem rassistischen Chauvinismus der weißen Unterdrücker in Südafrika gleich und behauptete, es sei eine Versöhnung mit schwarzem Nationalismus, die beiden zu unterscheiden!
Während des Fraktionskampfes war Hilfe vom IS und vom IEK wesentlich. Diese Intervention unterschied sich aber drastisch von der früheren Behandlung der südafrikanischen Genossen, deren Meinungen regelmäßig, vor allem von US-amerikanischen Genossen, herabgemindert oder ignoriert worden waren. Genosse Bride, ein Führer des IS, schrieb vor fast 20 Jahren treffend:
„Genossen, die aus dem Westen hierher gezogen sind, mögen darüber nachdenken, dass unsere südafrikanischen Mitglieder nur allzu viel Erfahrung damit haben, dass die aus Europa stammende herrschende Klasse dieses Landes sie herumkommandiert. Wenn wir zulassen, dass auch nur ein Hauch der Ungleichheit der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft in den Beziehungen zwischen Genossen in unserer Partei auftaucht, sind wir in großen Schwierigkeiten.“
Imperiale Arroganz kennzeichnete später auch das Regime von Wolkenstein, das unverhohlen die Fähigkeiten der Führer unserer südafrikanischen Sektion verhöhnte. Mit der Behauptung, die Genossen verstünden den Charakter der regierenden Dreierallianz nicht, stoppte sie deren Veröffentlichung von Propaganda zu dieser Frage und bevorzugte stattdessen ihre IS-Agenten, die sie mit dieser Aufgabe betraute.
Was unsere amerikanische Sektion betrifft, so bekräftigte das Konferenzdokument unser Ziel, eine Partei aufzubauen, deren Mitgliedschaft und Führung zu 70 Prozent aus Schwarzen, Latinos und anderen Minderheiten besteht. Ursprünglich war der Aufruf zu einer 70-prozentig schwarzen Partei eine interne Polemik gegen Genossen, die in den 1970er- und frühen 80er-Jahren vor dem Kampf um die Rekrutierung von schwarzen Arbeitern und Jugendlichen zurückschreckten. Im Grunde genommen handelt es sich hierbei nicht um eine Losung, sondern um unsere Entschlossenheit, eine schwarze trotzkistische Führung zu rekrutieren und zu konsolidieren. Die Konferenz bekräftigte unser revolutionär-integrationistisches Programm, dargelegt in einem Gründungsdokument der SL/U.S., „Black and Red – Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom“, Schwarz und Rot – Klassenkampfperspektive für die Freiheit der Schwarzen (Spartacist, englische Ausgabe Nr. 10, Mai/Juni 1967), wo es heißt:
„Unser unmittelbares Ziel ist es, schwarze trotzkistische Kader herauszubilden. Wir streben nicht nur an, schwarze Mitglieder zu rekrutieren – in dieser Periode eine Abkürzung zur Arbeiterklasse –, sondern diese schwarzen Arbeiter zu trotzkistischen Kadern herauszubilden, die bei der Organisierung der schwarzen Massen, innerhalb der League [SL/U.S.] und darüber hinaus eine Führungsrolle spielen werden.“
Ein andauerndes hohes Bewusstsein ist nötig, um führende schwarze Kader in einem Land zu entwickeln, dessen definierendes Merkmal intensiver Rassenhass ist, der in der erzwungenen Ausgrenzung der Mehrheit der schwarzen Bevölkerung in der untersten Schicht der Gesellschaft wurzelt. Das verlangt besondere Wachsamkeit gegenüber dem unablässigen Druck und Missbrauch, dem unsere schwarzen Genossen ausgesetzt sind, und zwar auch von Seiten scheinheiliger weißer Liberaler. Stattdessen benutzten frühere Führungen unseren wertvollen Kern von schwarzen Genossen oft als Aushängeschild für opportunistische Kampagnen. Zwei Beispiele: der „Große Sprung nach vorn“ – eine wirklichkeitsfremde Kampagne zur Rekrutierung junger schwarzer Arbeiter nach einer Einheitsfrontaktion gegen den faschistischen Ku Klux Klan in New York City 1999 –, und das endlose Bemühen, eine nicht existierende Massenbewegung für die Freiheit des Klassenkriegsgefangenen Mumia Abu-Jamal „wiederzubeleben“.
Für die Wiederschmiedung der Vierten Internationale!
In dieser Ausgabe drucken wir auch einen von den Konferenzdelegierten angenommenen Antrag ab, der unsere Artikel über den indisch-pakistanischen Krieg von 1971 korrigiert. Diese Artikel behaupteten fälschlich, dass der Kampf für die Unabhängigkeit Bangladeschs der Intervention des indischen Militärs untergeordnet gewesen sei (siehe Seite 30). Die Konferenz unterstützte auch einen von der Spartacist League of Australia angenommenen Antrag, in dem die Forderung nach der Unabhängigkeit Westpapuas von indonesischer Herrschaft wieder erhoben und erneut die Forderungen bekräftigt wurden: „Indonesische Truppen raus, sofort! Australien: Hände weg!“ Der Antrag verweist auf einen Bergarbeiterstreik von 2011, der die aktive Unterstützung von westpapuanischen Unabhängigkeitskämpfern hervorrief, und schlussfolgert:
„Das beleuchtet unsere Perspektive, die Befreiung der zutiefst ausgebeuteten Arbeiterklasse des Archipels mit den Kämpfen seiner Minderheitenvölker zu verknüpfen, und zeigt die Notwendigkeit, den Kampf für Arbeiterrevolution in Indonesien mit dem Kampf für Arbeiterrevolution in den fortgeschrittenen imperialistischen Ländern zu verbinden.“
Die zentralen Kader, die am Konferenzdokument arbeiteten, machten effektiven Gebrauch von den wertvollen Ressourcen der Prometheus Research Library (zentrales Referenzarchiv des Zentralkomitees der SL/U.S.). Ihre intensiven Forschungen und Diskussionen in der PRL bekräftigten erneut die Bedeutung dieser Bibliothek als marxistischer Arbeitsstätte. Die Bibliotheksbestände bewahren die hart erkämpften Lehren der Vergangenheit und werden gleichzeitig als Waffen dienen für den Kampf neuer Generationen von kommunistischen Führern. Die kostbaren Materialien der Bibliothek in diversen Sprachen, wie Hindi und Bengali, müssen für die Ausweitung unserer Internationale genutzt werden.
Die Konferenz setzte sich auch zum Ziel, die Redaktionen unserer viersprachigen internationalen theoretischen Zeitschrift Spartacist zu wirklichen politischen Körperschaften mit eigenen Beratungen und Entscheidungen über den Inhalt zu machen, die nicht nur Übersetzungsbüros der englischsprachigen Ausgabe sind. So wurde die französische Ausgabe diesmal vor der englischen veröffentlicht. Die französische Ausgabe hat für die IKL besondere Bedeutung in Québec, wo eine öffentliche Korrektur unserer früheren anglochauvinistischen Linie unentbehrlich ist für unsere weitere Arbeit, nicht zuletzt den Start unserer Québécois-Zeitung République ouvrière.
Seit der konterrevolutionären Zerstörung der Sowjetunion musste die IKL wiederholt Kämpfe austragen, um unsere revolutionäre Kontinuität gegen eine Reihe von opportunistischen Führungen zu bewahren. In Erwiderung auf Genossen, die die Hauptschuld für unsere Probleme auf den Druck der ungünstigen Realität legen, mit der wir konfrontiert sind, antwortete ein führender Québécois-Genosse:
„Der objektive Druck auf uns ist eine gewaltige Herausforderung, aber das rechtfertigt nicht das Aufgeben unseres Ziels. Es wäre objektivistisch und deterministisch zu denken, dass der subjektive Faktor die Realität nicht verändern und den Druck der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft nicht überwinden kann. Die Rolle der Führung und der Partei als Ganzes ist es, sich diesem Druck entgegenzustellen und ein marxistisches Programm auf die Realität anzuwenden…
Die politischen Verhältnisse werden für uns nicht günstiger. Es ist die Aufgabe der vor uns liegenden Konferenz, eine Führung zu wählen, die am besten dazu fähig ist, die anstehenden Herausforderungen mit einem trotzkistischen Programm zu konfrontieren. Eine Garantie auf Erfolg gibt es nicht, aber wir haben eine Chance. Unseren Kurs können wir jedoch erst dann korrigieren, wenn wir unsere Vergangenheit ehrlich konfrontieren. Nur auf diese Weise können wir unsere Kontinuität verteidigen.“
Durch diesen Kampf, der die Notwendigkeit einer proletarischen, revolutionären und internationalistischen Partei erneut bekräftigte, wurde diese Kontinuität nicht nur bewahrt, sondern auch gestärkt. Das Singen der „Internationale“ zum Abschluss der Konferenz war eine kleine aber lebendige Bekundung unseres Ziels. Auf Französisch von einem Québécois-Genossen angestimmt, ertönte sie auf Punjabi, Katalanisch, Spanisch, Griechisch, Arabisch, Deutsch, Polnisch, Italienisch, Englisch und in anderen Sprachen. In diesem Mikrokosmos wurde der schallende Refrain greifbar (in der deutschen Fassung von Franz Diederich von 1908): „Die Internationale wird die Menschheit sein!“
Ideologues of Decaying Capitalism The Bankruptcy of Liberal Economists
By Joseph Seymour and Bruce André
(Part One)
“This expropriation [of capitalist property] will make it possible for the productive forces to develop to a tremendous extent. And when we see how incredibly capitalism is already retarding this development, when we see how much progress could be achieved on the basis of the level of technique already attained, we are entitled to say with the fullest confidence that the expropriation of the capitalists will inevitably result in an enormous development of the productive forces of human society.” [emphasis in original]
—V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
Lenin thus summarized Karl Marx’s fundamental critique of the capitalist system as well as the ultimate goal of socialism. Marxists gauge human progress by the development of mankind’s productive forces, from the stone tools of primitive society to present-day science, technology and the modern factory. With the advent and development of industrial capitalism beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, one could envisage for the first time a future end to scarcity and class divisions. However, the private ownership of the means of production increasingly acted as a brake on the further development of the productive forces, not least through periodic economic crises. The emergence of modern imperialism at the end of the 19th century marked the onset of an epoch of global capitalist decay. The major capitalist powers, having divided the world through imperial conquest, embarked on a series of wars for its redivision, seeking to expand their colonial holdings and spheres of domination at the expense of their rivals.
The goal of proletarian revolution is to resolve the contradiction at the heart of capitalism, in which production for private profit stifles overall productive growth. Collectivizing the means of production and making the bounty of society available to all, a workers state will organize all of industry in the way that an individual assembly line is today conceived: according to a rational plan. An international socialist economy, by applying scientific planning to the entire economic system, will unleash a qualitative development of the productive forces and of labor productivity. This will liberate the productive capacities of mankind, ultimately eliminating economic scarcity and, with that, laying the material basis for the disappearance of classes and the withering away of the state.
In contrast to that Marxist view, the equation of capitalism with unlimited economic growth was an article of faith for bourgeois economists of the post-World War II generation. Today, that faith has largely faded. In the eyes of liberal economists, the meager rate of economic growth experienced in the U.S. in the past few decades has become the “new normal.” Lawrence Summers, a key economic operator in the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s, sees the advanced capitalist countries as having entered a prolonged period of “secular stagnation,” reviving a notion that originated among liberal Keynesians like Alvin Hansen during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
That view was reflected in the 2016 presidential election as Hillary Clinton offered nothing except more of the same—“America is great”—with maybe some minor tinkering. Even her left-liberal (“progressive”) Democratic Party challenger Bernie Sanders did not claim that his policies would lead to a substantial boost in economic output but only that they would bring about a somewhat more equitable redistribution of income. Right-wing demagogue Donald Trump promoted the patent lie that he would double the current annual rate of economic growth from 2 percent to 4 percent, or even triple it.
Now, Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress, resurrecting Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics, have pushed through a massive tax cut for corporations and the ultrarich. The idea that the benefits resulting from tax breaks for the wealthy will “trickle down” to the rest of the population in the form of increased investment, more jobs and higher wages is even more ludicrous today than it was in the 1980s, when it was the centerpiece of Reaganomics. American businesses are already sitting on an unprecedented stockpile of more than $2.4 trillion in cash. Apple and General Motors are hoarding almost 30 percent of their total value in cash. Why are companies not investing those staggering sums in new plants, machinery and additional workers? The obvious answer is that they lack confidence that such investment would generate an acceptable rate of return.
Meanwhile, the Democrats do not even pretend to offer a policy alternative that might significantly increase the rate of growth. Paul Krugman, probably the country’s best-known “progressive” economist because of his regular column in the New York Times, defended Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign on the grounds that government policy has little effect on economic growth, a supposedly mysterious process beyond the ken of his profession to understand, much less change:
“What do we know about accelerating long-run growth? According to the [Congressional] budget office, potential growth was pretty stable from 1970 to 2000, with nothing either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton did making much obvious difference. The subsequent slide began under George W. Bush and continued under Mr. Obama. This history suggests no easy way to change the trend.”
—New York Times, 15 August 2016
The Falling Rate of Profit
A recent, book-length version of the “there’s not much we can do about economic growth” school of thought is Marc Levinson’s An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy (2016). A former economics and finance editor of the Economist, house organ of Anglo-American bankers, Levinson strikes a contrarian pose, gleefully debunking the economic policy doctrines of both wings of the bourgeois political spectrum: Keynesianism on the left and monetarism and supply-side economics on the right. He contends that the relatively high rates of growth experienced by the advanced capitalist countries in the three decades after World War II amounted to a fortuitous historical accident that cannot be replicated by any kind of government policy.
A much weightier expression (in every respect) of historical pessimism with regard to the American economy is a recent book by a prominent liberal academic economist, Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (2016). Unlike An Extraordinary Time, which has a slapdash, journalistic quality, Gordon’s book (a 700-plus-page tome) is a work of serious scholarship. While Gordon’s argumentation differs somewhat from that of Levinson, as does the historical scope of his study, his conclusion is basically the same:
“This is a book about the drama of a revolutionary century when, through a set of miracles, economic growth accelerated, the modern world was created, and then after that creation the potential for future inventions having a similar impact on everyday life of necessity was inevitably diminished. The implications for the future of U.S. and world economic growth could not be more profound….
“The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”
Gordon’s use of the term “miracles” underscores his belief that mere mortals cannot consciously control the quantity and content of the material wealth created by their labor.
In the introductory section of An Extraordinary Time, Levinson defends Obama against a charge leveled by right-wing scribe George F. Will, who stated: “Making slow growth normal serves the progressive program of defining economic failure down.” To this Levinson replies, “as if the rate of economic growth were a matter of presidential discretion.” It is, of course, true that in capitalist America the policies of a given administration usually have a marginal effect on economic growth.
The expansion (or contraction) of the production of marketable goods and services under capitalism is mainly determined by the extent to which the executives of large corporations and Wall Street financiers invest profits in new productive facilities, especially those embodying more advanced (labor-saving) technologies. What drives capitalist investment is not the impulse to maximize output or labor productivity but rather to maximize the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the market value of the means of production).
However, Marx, in one of his key insights, demonstrated that there is an inherent tendency for the rate of profit, the driving force of the capitalist system, to decline over time. By prompting capitalists to cut back their investments, a falling rate of profit generates periodic crises, usually triggered in financial markets. The result is a contraction of output and increased unemployment.
Marx’s explanation for the falling tendency of the rate of profit flowed from his understanding that surplus value—the unpaid portion of workers’ labor—is the source of profit, not the capitalists’ expenditures on the means of production (e.g., machinery and raw materials). Marx observed that especially in periods of economic boom, when workers can feel emboldened to demand higher wages, individual capitalists invest an increased amount of capital in plant upgrades and such in order to cut labor costs. By doing so, the capitalist gains a competitive advantage. However, as all capitalists follow suit, the total amount of surplus value generated per amount of capital invested—i.e., the average profit rate—declines.
Capitalists invest in expanding productive capacity on the assumption that they will be able to sell the goods produced at a particular rate of profit. However, as the profit rate drops, they find themselves unable to sell their products at the expected profit rate. They cut back investments and slash production, resulting in an economic downturn. Workers are thrown out onto the street; entire factories become rusted relics.
Bourgeois economic ideologues, from Keynesians to monetarists and supply-siders, identify the laws governing the capitalist mode of production with the laws governing production as such. In the absence of a revolutionary working-class alternative, the appeal of Trump’s right-wing populist demagogy is enhanced by the fact that both liberals, like Krugman and Gordon, as well as centrists on the bourgeois political spectrum, like Summers and Levinson, insist that it is not possible to overcome the decades-long stagnation in the living standards of American working people.
From Kennedy’s “New Economics” to Obama’s “New Normal”
In the past, Democratic politicians, especially those on the more liberal wing of the party, promised to deliver a new era of economic prosperity. John F. Kennedy’s successful 1960 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, who had been vice president in the Republican Eisenhower administration (1953-61), was dominated by Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union and fears among the ruling class that the U.S. was falling behind in science and technology. In its economic message, Kennedy’s campaign resembled Trump’s. His platform called for boosting economic growth and dynamism under the slogan “Let’s get this country moving again.” He pointed to the sluggish economic performance, punctuated by two recessions, during Eisenhower’s second term. In this respect, the campaign tactics used by Kennedy against Nixon and Eisenhower were similar to those used by Trump against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
In An Extraordinary Time, Levinson retrospectively criticizes liberal Keynesians like Walter Heller, chief economic adviser to both the Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. Heller claimed that fiscal policy (taxation and government expenditure) could be fine-tuned so as to maintain full employment and maximize economic growth. By the late 1970s, Democratic politicians and their intellectual apologists were singing a different, more downbeat, tune.
Capitalizing on the downfall of Nixon resulting from the Watergate scandal, in 1977 Jimmy Carter, a centrist Southern Democrat (like Bill Clinton), entered the White House. A few years later, the hapless Carter administration confronted an unusual condition termed “stagflation”: rapidly rising prices combined with a recession. Levinson describes the widespread economic insecurity that propelled the right-wing Republican Reagan to the presidency in 1981: “The conservative ascendance came only as mortgage interest rates above 11 percent made young people despair of ever buying a home and as layoff notices went out to ironworkers on construction sites and toolmakers in auto plants.”
Surveying those dismal times, a mainstream liberal academic economist, Lester C. Thurow, published a book in 1980 on the state of the U.S. economy titled The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change. As indicated by the title, Thurow argued that it was no longer possible to substantially increase the size of the economic pie so that everyone would get a somewhat bigger piece. Economic policy now involved recutting the existing pie such that some people would get a larger slice and others a smaller one:
“For most of our problems there are several solutions. But all these solutions have the characteristic that someone must suffer large economic losses. No one wants to volunteer for this role, and we have a political process that is incapable of forcing anyone to shoulder this burden. Everyone wants someone else to suffer the necessary economic losses, and as a consequence none of the possible solutions can be adopted.”
In fact, the almost four decades since Thurow wrote those lines have seen an unremitting war by the bourgeoisie to force workers, minorities and the poor to “suffer the necessary economic losses” to bolster capitalist profits. That one-sided war on workers has been facilitated by the trade-union bureaucracy, which maneuvers for crumbs while peddling a mythical “partnership” of labor with the bosses and their parties, particularly Democrats who falsely pose as “friends of labor.”
Technological Innovation and Capitalist Investment
The main theme of Levinson’s An Extraordinary Time is that economic growth, based on increasing labor productivity through technological innovation, is impervious to government policy. After listing several explanations offered by academic economists for the slower growth of labor productivity in the advanced capitalist countries since the 1970s, Levinson concludes:
“None of these explanations sufficed to explain the productivity bust afflicting countries with vastly different economies and divergent approaches to economic policy. The more deeply the scholars mined the data, the more confused they became. What the data could not yet show was that the world had moved to a new stage of economic growth, one that would develop in a far different way….
“Future advances in well-being would depend heavily on developing innovations and putting them to effective use.”
The last statement is manifestly true. Increases in labor productivity under capitalism are determined by two main factors: the extent to which capitalists invest their profits in new productive facilities (plant and equipment) embodying more advanced technology and the degree to which the new technology increases output per unit of labor input.
Levinson does recognize a causal link between the slowdown in the growth of labor productivity and a decline in the rate of capital investment:
“Across the wealthy economies, business investment, which had increased an average of 5.6 percent per year between 1960 and 1973, grew at a far slower rate, barely 4 percent per year, for the next two decades. Sluggish investment left steel mills operating antiquated blast furnaces and insurance offices using high-speed computer printers to spit out form upon form for clerks to organize in file cabinets. Technological innovations usually arrive in the business world incorporated in new equipment and facilities. With firms deferring such investments at every turn, their workers’ productivity improved at less than half the rate in the decades after 1973 as in the decades before.”
However, Levinson makes no effort to explain why the rate of investment has declined to such an extent. In particular, he does not consider the interrelationship between capital investment, technological innovation and the rate of profit.
As Marx underlined, capitalists will invest in new facilities incorporating more advanced technology if, and only if, they believe the increase in profit per worker will be greater than the increased market value of capital per worker. If capitalists discover that their investments are not generating a competitive rate of profit, they will halt or cut back their investments, often triggering an economic downturn.
Marx thus proved that capitalist production increasingly puts the brakes on historical development, at the same time that it creates capitalism’s own gravedigger, the proletariat. He and Friedrich Engels explained that the only way to end the boom-bust cycles inherent to capitalism is for the working class to take control of the means of production through socialist revolution and institute a planned, collectivized economy.
Economist Marc Levinson in An Extraordinary Time and his more liberal counterpart Robert J. Gordon in The Rise and Fall of American Growth both address the slowdown in the U.S. growth rate since the 1970s. Levinson at least recognizes that the slowdown was rooted in a decline in investment, although he provides no explanation for that decline. Gordon provides an explanation that is more apologetic for the capitalist system and even more pessimistic regarding future prospects.
Gordon’s implicit premise is that all progressive technological innovations—in the spheres of both production and consumer goods—have been and will be transformed into new, widely marketed (that is, generally affordable) commodities, although in some cases with a lengthy time lag. To paraphrase Voltaire’s parody of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, with regard to technological innovation Gordon views American capitalism as the best of all possible worlds. If the possibilities for growth have diminished in recent decades, it is because the intrinsic character of technological innovations has changed in a way that diminishes their effect on productivity.
The structure of Gordon’s historical study of U.S. economic growth is based on the concept of three successive industrial revolutions. The first industrial revolution (IR #1) derived from inventions developed between 1770 and 1820, primarily the steam engine and its offshoots—railroads, steamships and the shift from wood to iron and steel. The second industrial revolution (IR #2) derived from technology developed in the late 19th century, particularly electricity and the internal combustion engine. The third industrial revolution (IR #3), beginning in the 1960s, was centered on new information and communication technology (ICT), such as computers and smartphones.
According to Gordon, the root cause of the slowdown in U.S. economic growth in recent decades was the diminishing effects of the second industrial revolution and the insufficient potency of the third:
“This decline in productivity growth by almost half reflects the ebbing tide of the productivity stimulus provided by the great inventions of IR #2. Its successor, the ICT-oriented IR #3, was sufficiently potent to cause a revival in the productivity growth trend to an average of 2.05 percent during the decade 1995-2004. But the power of ICT-related innovations to boost productivity growth petered out after 2004.”
Gordon never considers the possibility that some progressive technological innovations might not be transformed into widely marketed commodities because it is not profitable to do so. Later we will address his insistence that computerization and new digital technologies in general cannot significantly increase labor productivity in the future. In fact, he maintains that these technologies have pretty much exhausted their potential.
Here we will consider Gordon’s implicit assumption that all new, widely marketed commodities were more efficient than those they replaced and improved the living standards of the populace. In particular, let’s consider the partial replacement of electrified streetcars and subway and elevated trains by the automobile, which began between 1910 and 1930. Gordon analyzes the transition from one means of personal transportation to another in some detail. However, he does not attempt to measure their comparative techno-economic efficiency. Did electrified subways and elevated trains expend greater or lesser economic resources per passenger mile than Model T Fords? And if lesser, wherein lay the advantages of the automobile?
Gordon does acknowledge that the ascendancy of the automobile was not just the result of the workings of “free market” capitalism. Government policy was a very important causal factor:
“Government policies encouraged urban sprawl and undermined the financial viability of urban transit and passenger railways. Even before World War II, public policy was skewed in favor of the automobile by building streets and highways with public funds while leaving urban transit and interurban electric railways to operate as self-sufficient private companies. Many of the early roads were built by issuing bonds on which the interest was paid by local property taxes, so the automobile owner and transit rider paid equally to build a road system that made the automobile ever more attractive than transit.”
However, Gordon offers no judgment on whether government policies that favored automobile travel at the expense of public mass transit were economically rational and socially beneficial. Nor does he address why state and local governments pursued auto-friendly policies. The answer, of course, is primarily rooted in the capitalist drive for profits: The bourgeois politicians involved were beholden to the owners of the big car companies, like Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors, and also the rubber and oil companies that provided tires and gasoline.
Class Struggle and a Shorter Workweek
Gordon states: “This book is about not just the standard of living from the viewpoint of the consumer, but also the quality of working conditions both outside and inside the home.” In keeping with his main theme, that the American people experienced a qualitative improvement in everyday conditions of life during the first half of the 20th century, Gordon cites the reduction in the average workweek from 60 hours at the turn of the century to 41 hours by 1950. But his liberal worldview blinds him to both the fundamental cause of that important change in the lives of working people and the inherent limitation of its impact on their quality of life.
According to Gordon, the decrease in the average workweek resulted from an interest shared by business owners and their workers in having a rested and healthy workforce:
“Interpretations of the movement for shorter hours center on the widespread belief on the part of both firms and labor leaders that a reduction in hours would improve work performance and increase production. Higher productivity and higher real wages made possible a gradual reduction of hours of work, for the onerous demands of sixty- and seventy-two-hour work weeks had created an exhausted male working class.”
To back up his view, Gordon cites legislation passed during the Progressive Era in the early 20th century and the New Deal in the 1930s.
In fact, the 40-hour workweek was won through decades of hard-fought and often bloody class battles by the workers movement. Agitation by the nascent industrial working class for the eight-hour day and for unions led to the Great Rail Strike of 1877, which was brutally suppressed by the Army. In the 1886 Haymarket massacre, Chicago police attacked workers rallying for the eight-hour day and arrested eight anarchist labor organizers who were subsequently framed up and imprisoned or executed. In the 1937 “Little Steel” strike, whose demands included a 40-hour week, police killed ten workers near the gates of Republic Steel in South Chicago in what became known as the “Memorial Day Massacre.”
Today, after decades of one-sided class warfare by the bourgeoisie and givebacks by the hidebound trade-union bureaucracy, the 40-hour workweek has been substantially eroded. The average workweek for full-time U.S. workers has risen to about 47 hours, nearly a full extra eight-hour day per week. About one in five full-time workers toil 60 or more hours a week, while millions are unemployed or forced to work part-time.
Workers need to fight for a shorter workweek with no loss in pay, linking the fight for decent working conditions to the struggle for jobs for all. A 30-hour workweek at 40 hours’ pay, with the available work divided among everyone, would go a long way toward addressing both unemployment and the serious safety problems resulting from fatigue and understaffing.
The capitalists would, of course, reply that such demands are not practical—at least, not if they are to maintain their obscene wealth. Indeed, the felt needs of the working class run right up against the inability of the capitalist system to satisfy them. The solution will not be found in the struggle, however necessary, by workers for a slightly bigger share of society’s wealth against a capitalist ruling class determined to maximize its profits. The goal must be a wholly different type of society, a workers America where the productive wealth has been ripped out of the hands of the tiny capitalist elite and put at the disposal of the vast majority. Such a society can be achieved only when the working class, led by a revolutionary party, overthrows capitalist class rule through a socialist revolution and establishes a workers government.
On Labor and the Quality of Life
Like the class battles that won the 40-hour week, the steady erosion of this historic gain for labor since the late 1970s is for Gordon a closed book. Yet even if we accept his focus on the first half of the 20th century, when the workweek was reduced from 60 to 40 hours, this gain actually constituted something less than a qualitative change in the lives of American working people. While deploring growing income inequality in the U.S. in recent decades, Gordon does not address or even recognize a more fundamental inequality in all capitalist societies in all times: between the vast majority who have to perform what Marx called “alienated labor” to secure the means of subsistence for themselves and their families and the privileged few who can engage in creative, satisfying work.
In the preface to The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Gordon recounts that his interest in the changing rates of economic growth and labor productivity over the course of U.S. history goes back to his days as a graduate student in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid 1960s. The research for this book was undertaken to satisfy his intellectual curiosity, not because he had to do so to earn a living. But very few people have the luxury of working to satisfy their intellectual curiosity or express their creative impulses.
Consider, for example, the employees of Princeton University Press, who transformed Gordon’s manuscript into the printed pages of a book. True, they use technology that is radically different from that used by their predecessors in the 1920s, who set type for books by prominent academic economists of the time like Irving Fisher and Wesley C. Mitchell. And they work in more comfortable facilities. Nonetheless, they do the same kind of work for the same personal reason, to earn a livelihood.
Reading Gordon’s book, one would conclude that the 40-hour workweek and 11-plus-month work year, as in the U.S., is the highest possible level of organized society with regard to the necessary labor time expended by its members. However, in a planned socialist economy it would be possible, through a progressive, self-reinforcing increase in labor productivity, to radically reduce the total labor time necessary to produce both the means of production and articles of consumption. Within no more than a few generations, people would only be working, say, 20 hours a week and six months a year. Everyone would then have both the available time and access to material and cultural resources to acquire the scientific and technological knowledge that is now the province of a privileged elite. Projecting a future communist society, Marx wrote more than a century and a half ago:
“Free time—which is both leisure and time for higher activity—has naturally transformed its possessor into another subject; and it is then as this other subject that he enters into the immediate production process. This process is simultaneously discipline, with respect to the developing human being, and application, experimental science, material creative and self-objectifying science, with respect to the developed man, whose mind is the repository of the accumulated knowledge of society.”
—“Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy” (1857-58)
In a future communist society, there would be a vast expansion of the number of people capable of developing technological innovations on the order of Gordon’s heroes of the past, like Thomas Edison, Karl Benz (inventor of the automobile) and Guglielmo Marconi (a developer of the radio).
World War II: An Instance of State Capitalism
For Marxists, the most valuable part of Gordon’s book is his analysis of the “great leap forward” in labor productivity that occurred during the Second World War (1939-45) and carried into the first few decades of the postwar era. Gordon concludes: “World War II saved the U.S. economy from secular stagnation, and a hypothetical scenario of economic growth after 1939 that does not include the war looks dismal at best.” This was the one moment in modern American history when the expansion of productive facilities embodying new, more advanced technologies was not determined by the profit-making calculations of corporate executives and Wall Street financiers. In order to defeat its capitalist-imperialist enemies, the U.S. government—the executive agency of the American ruling class as a whole—directed and financed the unprecedented construction of industrial plant and equipment.
A standard economic history of the Second World War states:
“The period 1940 to 1944 saw a greater expansion of industrial production in the United States than any previous period…. Between 1940 and 1944 the total output of manufactured goods increased 300 per cent and that of raw materials by about 60 per cent. Investment in new plant and equipment, much of it direct investment by the government, is estimated to have increased the productive capacity of the economy by as much as 50 per cent.”
—Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society 1939-1945 (1977)
Government-funded factories and other productive facilities were turned over free of charge to corporate capitalists, thereby greatly increasing their profits both during and after the war. Gordon comments in this regard: “Though private capital input stagnated during 1930-45, the amount of capital input financed by the government surged ahead throughout that fifteen-year interval. Of particular interest was the creation of new plant facilities paid for by the government but operated by private firms to produce military equipment and supplies.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the other political directors of the U.S. imperialist state (for example, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau) were intimately familiar with the workings of industrial corporations and banks. They knew from firsthand experience that they could not depend on the normal mechanisms of the capitalist market to maximize the output of armaments in the shortest possible time. Big industrialists like Henry Ford and Henry Kaiser were therefore guaranteed profits through the cost-plus method of setting procurement prices. Their firms were paid whatever they claimed it cost them to build battleships, bombers, tanks, etc., with an additional markup for profit. Over the course of the war, the after-tax profits of industrial firms increased by 120 percent.
Far more important in its long-term economic effects was direct government financing of the construction of factories and other industrial infrastructure. Gordon emphasizes that the number of machine tools—the core component of an industrial economy—doubled from 1940 to 1945, and “almost all of these new machine tools were paid for by the government rather than by private firms.” Ford’s gigantic bomber-building plant in Willow Run, Michigan, was government-financed. Likewise were major pipelines, still in use today, conveying petroleum from the Texas oil fields to the Northeast. Moreover, the basic technology underlying what Gordon termed the “third industrial revolution,” beginning in the 1960s, also originated in the U.S. military during the Second World War. The prototype of the mainframe computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was developed by scientists and engineers, employed by the war department, at the University of Pennsylvania.
When the American capitalist-imperialist state maximized production, labor productivity and technological innovation, it was in order to bring death and destruction to other peoples. Arguably the most important scientific and technological breakthrough in the 20th century, the unleashing of nuclear energy, was used to incinerate the civilian populations of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Gordon Versus the “Techno-Optimists”
Gordon’s main foil in his book is an intellectual current he deems “techno-optimists,” who foresee new technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence placing the American economy on the cusp of a wave of economic growth. Like Gordon, these techno-optimists (including Joel Mokyr, Gordon’s colleague at Northwestern University, as well as Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT, among others) believe that it is technological innovation above all else that determines the course of society. The dispute involves two very different questions. One concerns the sphere of consumption in the present, the other the sphere of production in the future.
Gordon argues that the effect of the new information and communications technologies on the quality of everyday life has been relatively meager compared to the major innovations and inventions in the century between 1870 and 1970. Those ranged from indoor plumbing, electric lighting and central heating to automobiles, airplanes and television. Gordon writes:
“Though there has been continuous innovation since 1970, it has been less broad in its scope than before, focused on entertainment and information and communication technology (ICT), and advances in several dimensions of the standard of living related to food, clothing, appliances, housing, transportation, health, and working conditions have advanced at a slower pace than before 1970.”
At another level, the dispute between Gordon and the techno-optimists is over the “futurology” of the likelihood of dramatically transformative new technologies developing and being put into widespread use in the near future. Both sides implicitly treat capitalism as a system that best fosters technological innovation. Both, of course, write off the perspective of a collectivized planned economy as not meriting serious consideration.
In a 2014 essay titled “The Next Age of Invention: Technology’s Future Is Brighter than Pessimists Allow,” Mokyr rhapsodizes about supercomputers, 3-D printing, genetic engineering and the like. There is, however, no mention of wages, production costs, markets or profits. These basic categories determining capitalist production and investment in new technologies are likewise absent from his brief polemical response to Gordon’s recent book, “Is Our Economic Future Behind Us?” (29 November 2016). In the unlikely event that Mokyr becomes CEO of Apple or General Electric, these companies would likely face bankruptcy. If he followed his own prescriptions, Mokyr would use the most advanced and therefore most expensive equipment, irrespective of whether this elevated production costs above those of competing firms.
In his 2014 essay, Mokyr does advance an economic argument in the service of techno-optimism: “A second reason technological progress will continue unabated has to do with the emergence of a competitive global marketplace, which will encourage the spread of new technology from its originating locations to other users who do not wish to be left behind.” In fact, the extension of international trade and capital export hardly represents an unambiguous encouragement to the development of technology. In the imperialist epoch, the international economy runs up against the very nation-states upon which the imperialists base their power, constituting an obstacle to the further development of humanity’s productive forces. Production in Europe, Japan and some spots in Asia may use modern methods. However, the vast pool of cheap labor available in South and East Asia and Latin America tends to inhibit investment in laborsaving technology in both the Third World and the imperialist centers.
When U.S. and European industrial firms shift manufacturing operations to poor countries, they often tend to use less capital-intensive methods of production. Consider clothing manufacture. While the technology exists to perform this in capital-intensive, highly automated plants, it remains cheaper for companies to pay workers in oppressed neocolonies like Bangladesh pennies on the dollar to sew clothing in conditions that are closer to those of the 19th century than the 21st.
In First World countries, too, current scientific and technological knowledge is not used in a rational and socially beneficial way, and in many cases is willfully misused. Consider the field of medical research, where major efforts are made to treat baldness and erectile dysfunction while only a pittance is invested in new drugs and vaccines for potentially fatal tropical diseases.
In the U.S. alone, some 23,000 people die every year of infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A study commissioned by the British government reported that by midcentury as many as ten million people a year globally could die from drug-resistant bacteria if new treatments are not discovered. Yet despite the critical social need, most of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies long ago stopped developing new antibiotics, citing low returns on investment.
Likewise, some 25 million people in the U.S. suffer from so-called rare diseases, such as Lou Gehrig’s disease and cystic fibrosis as well as sickle cell anemia, which overwhelmingly affects black people. Yet investment in research on treatments and cures for such diseases is notoriously meager, even though rare-disease research has often uncovered fruitful pathways for treating and curing some of the most prevalent ailments. The Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California explained the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies: “Most say investing in treatments for rare diseases—ones that affect tens of thousands of people—does not make for good business sense.”
Disregarding the laws governing the capitalist mode of production, Mokyr, McAfee, Brynjolfsson & Co. project a quantum leap in productivity in the near future through the use of “brilliant technologies.” Gordon implicitly accepts the limitations of the capitalist system in denying the very possibility of such a development. With regard to robotics, he writes: “The exponential increase in computer speed and memory has apparently raced far ahead of the capability of robots to duplicate human movements.” Gordon offers no argument for why this gap could not be greatly reduced by future advances in scientific and technological knowledge. He makes no assessment of the resources currently expended on robotics research.
Most of the vast amount of scientific research conducted by universities is directly funded by the federal government, and the biggest chunk of federal funding is directed toward military ends. The U.S. budget last year directed $6.5 billion in R&D to the National Science Foundation, while the R&D budget of the Air Force alone totaled almost $27 billion. Research in the physical sciences, including robotics, even if at some layers of remove, tends toward the ultimate end of building better drones and other machinery to blow up things and kill people in the interests of capitalist imperialism. Mathematics funding tends toward algorithms for securing state secrets and operations while hacking into the secrets of others. The National Security Agency is widely thought to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S.
At every turn, despite its thirst for technological innovation, capitalism is not the ally of scientific advance but its opponent. From intellectual property laws and the perverse incentives of the market to the tens of billions spent on more effective weaponry, capitalism directs research in the interests of the ruling class and its state apparatus. If those same resources were directed toward advancing human knowledge, furthering human happiness and putting mankind in control of its destiny, what could be accomplished is nearly unimaginable. This requires overturning the capitalist-imperialist system through a series of proletarian revolutions, laying the basis for a globally planned socialist economy. It is to lead the proletariat in that fight that the International Communist League seeks to reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.
The following speech, edited for publication, was delivered by Spartacist speaker Laura Zamora at the Partisan Defense Committee’s 32nd annual Holiday Appeal for Class-War Prisoners in New York City on January 27.
On New Year’s Day, a few of us woke up to messages reassuring us that “this year will be better.” I found this 2018 catchphrase rather annoying and anti-scientific—Marxists don’t believe in crystal balls. I also knew why people were cursing last year, and it ends with the word Trump. One year into this new chapter of the evil empire, the U.S. rulers have continued their war against working people, the poor, black people, immigrants, women, gay and trans people. They’ve kept up their imperialist wars and occupations against the poor and dispossessed abroad.
Liberals are very fond of blaming everything on the Orange Vader Trump, as if nothing like this has happened before. Trump is, after all, an easy target—the big bully of racist American capitalism. He shows the rulers’ most primal urge for profit and power without the hypocritical pretense of “democratic values.” We’re in a midterm year; the Democrats say: “Take our country back.” Take it back? This country was founded through racist bloodshed, the genocide of Native Americans. U.S. capitalism was built upon the backs of black people—from slavery to convict labor, from the chain gang to the assembly line. Both Republicans and Democrats rule in the interest of the capitalist class and its profit system: the difference is that one party is better at putting lipstick on the pig. When we hear people talking about the “resistance” these days, it’s just about resisting Trump and the Republicans. It’s not about resisting the misery, exploitation and bigotry inherent to the capitalist order.
To use Trump’s word, the “shithole” is capitalist America. It has always been so for those at the bottom. About 5.3 million Americans live on less than four dollars a day. Some 30 million have no health insurance. Women in the U.S. are more likely to die from childbirth- or pregnancy-related causes than anywhere else in the industrialized world—black women at three times the rate of white women. The U.S. locks up more people than any other country. And we know who they lock up: courageous fighters like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and other class-war prisoners. Nearly 3,000 people are on death row. One in every nine people in prison is serving a life sentence, nearly half of them black. Meanwhile, the local cops are attacking protesters and killing people as much as they were last year and the year before and the year before that. The Feds are smearing black activists and radicals as “domestic terrorists,” setting them up for repression.
The capitalist class at the top, a tiny fraction of the “1 percent,” keeps making a killing while the laborers who sweat and toil get their wages slashed. And those whose countries have been wrecked by U.S. imperialism—they make a harrowing escape, come here to work for small change and live in fear of deportation. Anyone who has made it to this country should get all the rights of anyone already here. Our demand is for full citizenship rights for all immigrants.
Trump inherited a well-oiled deportation machine from the plantation’s first black overseer. Under Obama, we saw the expansion of nightmare detention centers, a “fast track” system for arrests and millions of deportations. Trump is explicit about his aims and has a loud mouth; Obama was the smart sugarcoater, the quiet enemy.
To get a measure of Washington’s contempt for those it dominates, look at Puerto Rico. Four months after Hurricane Maria, 40 percent of the island still has no electricity. On top of that: massive debt, taken out of the hides of working people; government services slashed; hobbled medical care and transportation; foreclosures. How does one breathe under this weight of a colonial master who loots you, lets you rot, then stomps on your tattered remains? Puerto Ricans are an important part of the working class and union movement here in the U.S. American workers should side with their Puerto Rican class brothers and sisters—they have a common class enemy. Cancel Puerto Rico’s debt! For the right of independence!
Imagine telling workers of countries plundered by imperialism like Puerto Rico that national sovereignty doesn’t matter, or that they have to suck it up and remain at the mercy of the overlords’ banks. That’s what it means to tell Greek workers that they should stay in the European Union (EU), an imperialist cartel where the European powers, especially Germany, dominate the weaker states. We are for breaking up this capitalist trade bloc. This is why we not only call for Greece to get out of the EU, but also welcomed the Brexit vote. The vote for Britain to leave the EU was a blow against the bosses and bankers of Europe—including those in the City of London, who lord it over workers in Britain.
And to those who point out how the hardcore racists and fascists seized on the Brexit vote to step up their race-hate provocations, I will say this: the answer to racist terror and anti-immigrant chauvinism does not lie in looking to the so-called good graces of the EU, which implements austerity and sets up immigrant concentration camps. The answer is mobilizing the multiracial and multinational proletariat at the head of all the oppressed.
That is definitely what needs to be done here in the U.S. In the last year, the race-terrorists, and that filth around the “alt-right,” have been taking their cue from the White House. They’ve fed off economic devastation. The new fascist organizations in the U.S. are small, but they’re growing, armed and dangerous. Their ultimate aim is racial genocide and the destruction of unions and the left.
The misery and discontent of the working class and oppressed can fuel the rise of a fighting workers movement. We talk about how organized labor must urgently mobilize to stop the fascists. Labor has a great weapon: its social power, numbers, collective organization and ability to choke off profits through strike action. In the factories, the transit barns and on the docks, the workplace remains the main site of integration in racist America, where the majority of black people remain a forcibly segregated race-color caste at the bottom.
The early union misleaders’ refusal to organize black workers gave the bosses the ability to use them against the unions—to the benefit of no one but the racist capitalists. It took organizing white and black workers side by side to forge the industrial unions in the 1930s, building picket lines that no scab dared cross.
If an integrated militant fight by organized labor seems improbable today, it’s because this generation has seen little to no real union struggle. Why is union membership half of what it was 30 years ago? How did the bosses get away with implementing “right to work” laws in 28 states? The trade-union misleaders bear much of this responsibility. They have fed patriotism and protectionist poison and begged the politicians for the right to live. They have chained the working class to the Democratic Party and therefore to its class enemy.
Yes, its enemy. When the Commander-in-Chief is an unabashed chauvinist and bigot, we have to remember who all our enemies are. The Democrats would have you believe that the nemesis is Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, who supposedly organized an army of hackers and trolls to subvert American “democracy.” Not so fast. The Trump-Russia collusion story is a big distraction by the same media pundits who manufacture the lies for war abroad. Malcolm X called the media the most powerful entity on earth that can “make the innocent guilty” and “make the guilty innocent.”
So, when the bourgeois media becomes the judge, jury and executioner against anyone accused of sexual misconduct, it should cause some apprehension. Sexual harassment is a serious problem; sexual assault and rape are serious crimes—and they’re regularly covered up in the workplace, in the military, and especially in the prisons. But the mainstream #MeToo movement has flattened any distinction between trivial acts—which very well could be offensive and unpleasant—and criminal acts. The media treats anything from a wink to a sleazeball comment like an act of coercion and violence, convicting all suspects without any due process. And that never bodes well for anyone outside bourgeois convention and especially not for black men, who are the main victims of lynch mob “justice” in this country.
The anti-Trump “resistance” gave birth to the liberal feminist #MeToo movement we see today. It was a way for the Democrats to keep up the ruse that Hillary Clinton—that imperialist hawk and wolf of Wall Street—represented some kind of advancement for women, and to pretend that they defend women’s rights. It was also a way for the Democrats to go after the “pussy grabber in chief” for his morals. Meanwhile, the rulers can get on with their crimes: nuclear war threats, union-busting, and, don’t forget, the gutting of abortion rights. Despite the formal existence of Roe v. Wade, 43 states outlaw most abortions after a certain point in pregnancy. There are more than 1,000 state restrictions making it impossible for the vast majority of women to have the procedure. One-third of those restrictions were enacted in the past seven years.
Where was the “resistance” when access to abortion was being dismantled? Where was the “resistance” when Obama deported more people than any other president in U.S. history? Where was the “resistance” when the livelihoods of black and working people were being destroyed by Wall Street? We want there to be protests and opposition to the depravities of this system. But this “resistance” is really about getting the Democrats back into the halls of power. And in power, they will try to crush us as they’ve always done. They will use any means to divide working people, primarily through race.
What makes America America is the all-sided brutal oppression of black people. To sweep away this rotting, decaying America means shattering this oppression. It’s in the interests of all workers, including white workers and immigrants, to take up this fight. The struggle for black liberation through socialist revolution is also a struggle for the liberation of all the working masses, women and all the oppressed in this country.
That is why any discontent needs to be directed against the capitalist class enemy, independently of the Democrats and other false friends. Our goal is for the working class to take power, to become the ruling class through workers revolution, as the workers did in Russia through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The continuity of revolutionary Marxism, of communism, is Trotskyism. Only with a Trotskyist program and the establishment of an egalitarian socialist society will the resources of society be able to be used for the benefit of all. For such a struggle to go forward to victory, we need to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Join the Spartacist League to make future years, future generations, better.
MY PRINCIPAL TEACHERS IN MARXISM were the Spartacist League, Adolph Reed and Moishe Postone — Theodor Adorno was also a crucial teacher, through his writings, which Reed had pointed me towards when we met up in Chicago after I graduated from college. The title of this essay is an homage to Adolph’s own “Paths to Critical Theory,” which narrates his political and theoretical coming to consciousness. I first met Reed when I was in college at Hampshire, in the same entering class as his son Touré, and when I was already a member of the Spartacus Youth Club, the youth group of the orthodox Trotskyist Spartacist League.
High school
I had previously considered myself to be a “Marxist” after having read the Communist Manifesto and other random, miscellaneous writings by Marx (also Ernest Mandel’s Revolutionary Marxism Today) in high school. I had been equivocal about the Russian Revolution and Lenin, but felt predisposed towards respecting Trotsky as a dissident figure — I had been taught not only George Orwell’s 1984 but Animal Farm as well: Emmanuel Goldstein and Snowball were sympathetic if tragic figures. But it was really Marx who got me.
I was a “Leftist” activist in high school during the 1980s, protesting against local anti-black racism (housing discrimination) and in solidarity with Central American movements and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. I was surrounded by Catholic Worker, Quaker (American Friends Service Committee) and Secular Humanist adult activists on Long Island, but I occasionally encountered “Marxist” Leftist organizations at demonstrations in New York City. My family was apolitical or otherwise conservative. Of all my friends, only one had any “Leftist” background of any kind: his parents were Irish immigrants of the Catholic Worker Liberation Theology variety and his older sister supplied us with “Left” literature as well as music listening recommendations (Depeche Mode, New Order, et al).
In my solidarity work on Central America and South Africa, I met émigré refugee militants who told me melancholically that “socialism is impossible” because “American workers voted for Ronald Reagan.”
College
By the time I was applying to college, my high school boyfriend discovered Hampshire College, to which we both applied and attended together. It was during our first year that we met the Spartacist League at the nearby University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Actually, a mutual friend had first met them and asked us to attend a meeting between them and her, because as “Marxists” we could help her evaluate them: Were they for real? She was unmoved but we were interested and became contacts.
The Spartacist League provided my first real education in Marxism. One of the first things I read by them was their Lenin and the Vanguard Party pamphlet from 1978, which greatly impressed me. (My first serious college course paper was on Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin, rebutting the usual anti-Lenin misreadings of Luxemburg.) Soon after, they had me read Cliff Slaughter’s 1960 essay “What is revolutionary leadership?,” whose oblique reference to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness I filed for a later date — I had already read Gramsci by that point in college and was intrigued but not exactly convinced by his arguments. Adolph said that the problem with Gramsci was that “he means all things to all people.” The Spartacists said simply that Gramsci was a Stalinist.
At this time the Fall of the Berlin Wall and uprisings in Eastern Europe and the USSR were taking place — the Soviet dissident Boris Kagarlitsky was an invited guest speaker at Hampshire College, who I distinctly recall telling me point-blank that there was no point to Marxism which was an outdated ideology of industrialization (when I asked him about this almost 30 years later, he denied ever saying such a thing, he claimed because he never believed it — perhaps it was someone else?).
With the Spartacist League I attended speeches with Q&A discussions by Noam Chomsky and Michael Harrington, with whom I was otherwise not acquainted. The Spartacists’ provocative questions from the audience prompted Chomsky and Harrington to articulate their anti-Leninism — their anti-Marxism: Chomsky rehearsed his condemnation of the Bolsheviks for allegedly hijacking and dominating the Russian Revolution; Harrington sarcastically confessed that, yes, he “killed Rosa Luxemburg,” with a cynicism that turned me off completely. I later came to respect Harrington more through his writings, and, if not Chomsky himself, at least anarchism to some degree, mostly through the classical writings — I had met Murray Bookchin in high school at New York City’s anarchist book store, when he came storming out of the back office to scold me after hearing me ask if they had any books by Lenin: I swear he yelled at me, “Listen, Marxist!”
The Spartacists introduced me to various different social and political realities, through activity in their locals on the East Coast. They had me do various manual labors as proof of my “proletarian” affinities, in addition to selling their newspaper Workers Vanguard weekly. For instance, I was required to do my bit cleaning the bathrooms and scrubbing the floors of their fortified international headquarters in New York’s financial district, as well as paying regular dues and contributing to various fundraising efforts. They resented my need as a working class student to work in the summer as well as work-study jobs to help pay my tuition and other expenses at Hampshire, asking, “Couldn’t your parents just give you the money?” (No, they couldn’t.) We attended a strike at the New York Daily News newspaper, where a union shop steward carried a pistol openly in his hip holster to defend against scabs, while across the street a police sniper was set up on the roof overlooking the picket line. At a demonstration against something or other in Manhattan, the Borough President Ruth Messinger showed up — the Spartacists pointed her out as a prominent member of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America): I saw a villain.
The big issues of the day were things like the Crown Heights anti-Semitic riots over a black child struck and killed accidentally by a Hasidic Jewish motorcade, and City College of New York’s Professor Leonard Jeffries teaching students that whites were “ice people” and blacks “sun people.” A Latino gay Spartacist member with whom I was acquainted was stabbed while selling WV on the campus of Howard University by a Nation of Islam supporter, because the Spartacists pointed out that Louis Farrakhan had called for Malcolm X’s death after Malcolm had broken with Elijah Muhammad. My friends and I had read Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as well as Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice) and watched all the Roots series on television. Public Enemy and NWA kept the memory alive.
Chris Hani of the South African Communist Party spoke at UMass and said that the “wind of democracy blowing through Eastern Europe should come to South Africa” — upon his return to South Africa a Polish immigrant gunned him down outside his suburban home. I was shocked and appalled by both his speech and his murder. — Later, I would meet Nelson Mandela of the ANC (African National Congress), Jay Naidoo of COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) and other famous anti-Apartheid political figures, when I visited South Africa for their first Gay and Lesbian Film Festival with a delegation of American and British filmmakers, including Isaac Julien, Barbara Hammer and others, in 1994. At a reception dinner, I got Mandela to inform my fellow travelers, who were otherwise drunk on rhetoric, that the end of Apartheid in South Africa was “not a revolution,” which anyhow would only provoke a civil war and U.S. invasion. At the time, Mandela’s ANC was engaged in fierce bloody street battles against Chief Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party of Zulu nationalists. I was critical but sympathetic to Mandela: at least he didn’t lie.
I met Adolph Reed when he visited Hampshire, as back then he was not so far away in New Haven at Yale. I had written to him in response to an op-ed in Long Island’s Newsday I read on the problem of black student activists’ demands on campus — at first, I had no idea he was a Marxist, though the Spartacists informed me that he was and spoke admiringly of his work. Adolph wrote back and said we could meet when he next came up to Hampshire.
I had read Horkheimer and Adorno’s “The Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment in a Media Studies course at Hampshire, but it didn’t leave much impression on me — I was much more influenced by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams in that context. It wasn’t until after I graduated that I started reading the Frankfurt School in earnest, and not until I was a graduate art student in Chicago that I read Adorno’s writings with any seriousness — in order for Adorno to help defend my Marxism against the postmodernism I was encountering for the first time: my Hampshire professor Margaret Cerullo, a friend of Adolph Reed and editor of the legacy SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) journal Radical America, had said to me discouragingly that, while her education was in Marxism (she later told me when applying for graduate study that “the Frankfurt School is like a second skin” to her, but no one was interested anymore, so why would I want to pursue such things?), perhaps now Foucault was more relevant; and anyway weren’t the Spartacists an FBI COINTELPRO operation?
Adolph Reed spoke on campus and made a special visit to my class taught by Margaret Cerullo and Carollee Bengelsdorf. The following week after Adolph spoke, some (white) students in class complained about him as an “African-American who was interested in an obscure 19th century Jewish philosopher (Marx).” When my professors failed to challenge this, saying, “That’s a good question,” I stood up to defend both Adolph and Marx, shouting, “No, it’s not!”
The anti-war movement around the Gulf War U.S. intervention against the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait was a key moment for me. The utter futility of the protests, which were met by counter-protesters with lurid signage against “Sodom Insane” (Iraqi Baathist leader Saddam Hussein) charging anti-war marchers with American flagpoles wielded as weapons, seemingly permitted to pass through police lines to do so, left me dejected as President George H.W. Bush declared, unhindered, the “New World Order.”
By the time I graduated from Hampshire in 1993, I was done with the “Left” — but not with Marxism. Events of my final year in 1992 — the “Left” protesting of the quint-centenary of the Columbian Discovery, the Los Angeles riots against the acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King that the “Left” called a “rebellion,” and the election of William Jefferson Clinton after 12 years of Republican Presidents, which was met with jubilation by my fellow “Left” students as well as by our “Leftist” professors at Hampshire — convinced me that my moment was not apt for Marxism or socialism. I was depressed that the world seemed forever frozen and stuck in a dead-end 1960s New Left framework that I could not abide. During the Rodney King protests, I witnessed black students take over an administration building at Hampshire, but proceed to kick out first the white students, then the non-black students of color and finally the black women for supposedly not sharing the plight of black men’s abuse by police. When soon afterwards the Spartacists decided to try to “break” me with accusations of “petit bourgeois intellectualism,” I had had enough.
Richard Rubin, an acquaintance from the Hampshire Spartacus Youth Club chapter, and I kept alive the idea of trying to carry on the Spartacists’ outlook without their organizational insularity and paranoia: we toyed with the idea of starting a “Leviné League,” named after the martyr of the 1919 Bavarian Workers Republic, Eugen Leviné, but it amounted to nothing. All the former Hampshire Spartacus Youth members I had recruited except me and Richard scattered to the wind. We maintained our subscriptions to Workers Vanguard. I dutifully checked in with the Chicago local — and reunited with Richard, who had always kept his distance from the Spartacist as an avowed heterodox “Menshevik Centrist” — when I moved there. But I settled depoliticized into the 1990s Clinton regime, struggling to make my way in the world as a young adult.
Chicago
I became a video artist and publicly continued to avow and promulgate my Marxism — mostly through quotations from Adorno’s cultural-critical writings in artist statements — but this made me into more of a curiosity than a militant ideologue in the art world. I met the poet Reginald Shepherd, who was the first to recommend Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (as well as his Notes to Literature) to me — Adolph had recommended Negative Dialectics, Minima Moralia and Prisms. Reginald told me that Adorno would cure me of my Marxism, but ended up only confirming it — and deepening it. I became convinced I had to read everything by Adorno — eventually, I realized I must write a dissertation on Adorno, on his Marxism.
Eventually, I earned first my Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and my Masters and PhD from the University of Chicago, launching my teaching career, first as a graduate student, and then thereafter, up to the present.
At SAIC, I studied in the Video Department, which was staffed with avowedly “Marxist” professors, one of whom had made a documentary on Mumia Abu-Jamal that the Spartacists used to promote Mumia’s case. — I recall vividly attending with the Spartacists a “Free Mumia!” rally in Philadelphia, which was denounced by the local Fraternal Order of Police head, who said on TV that we protesters should be put on an “electric couch” to join in Mumia’s execution. But my art work was accused of being “too aesthetic” by my professors and fellow students at SAIC. The separate Film Department was also staffed by “Marxist” filmmakers but was regarded by the Video Department as being too interested in art as opposed to “politics.” But I knew the difference between politics and art.
During this time of the mid-1990s, I met and became friends with the up-and-coming “New / Post-Black Black Artists” such as Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon and others, as well as meeting the faculty at the new Harvard University department organized by Henry Louis Gates Jr., such as Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha and others — including meeting Stuart Hall on a visit — when Isaac Julien was teaching there (in New York, Isaac introduced me to bell hooks, who objected to my existence). As an artist, I spoke individually and on panels about — dissenting against — racial and sexual identity, at film festivals, art museums and galleries, and colleges and universities around the world.
Many conversations about Marxism were had: the consensus was that it was finished.
Back in Chicago, I was living through the brunt of neoliberal capitalism. I participated marginally in Adolph’s anti-Clintonite Labor Party USA organizing, meeting his local colleagues in the venture (mostly Maoist labor union activists). I made my skepticism about the Labor Party clearly known to Adolph, and suggested that we should be working towards a socialist party instead. He said that I sounded like the “Trotskyite sectarians” he was struggling against in the Labor Party — the ISO (International Socialist Organization), Solidarity, and others — and accused me of being “too abstractly theoretical” in my politics. The Labor Party USA project seemed to me to be just Democrats dissenting against Clintonism. He was opposed to running Labor Party candidates against Democrats — he didn’t want to be a spoiler. Nonetheless, he called for voting for the Green Party’s Ralph Nader against Al Gore for President in 2000 — and regretted it ever since. Adolph amused me driving around Chicago: just missing an open parking space, he would exclaim, “Racist yuppies!” He introduced me through the Labor Party activities in Chicago to his then-girlfriend, Stephanie Karamitsos, a PhD student at Northwestern University, with whom I bonded as a fellow artist, reading and discussing Adorno widely and at great length.
Adolph is a follower of the later “council communist” Karl Korsch and of thinkers who were students of the later Lukács such as Istvan Meszaros and others such as Karel Kosik, whose book Dialectics of the Concrete Adolph opposed to the alleged bad “idealism” of the Frankfurt School. Both the later Korsch and Lukács had turned away from their Hegelian Marxism circa 1917 towards “materialism.” In Korsch’s case this meant turning against Lenin and ultimately against Marxism as a whole — including Marx — because of their alleged “bourgeois elitism and vanguardism” contra the working class. Adolph disliked Trotskyism on this basis. He worked out a very elaborate argument concerning this issue in his book on W.E.B. Du Bois on which he was working when I was in my period of closest contact with him.
Adolph ascribed my resistance to his Labor Party USA project to my supposed “abstract idealism” that he attributed to my Trotskyism and strong affinity for Adorno. It was precisely Adorno who, in his Negative Dialectics, had helped me sort out the vexed issue of “materialism vs. idealism” in Marxism, which he taught me to see as a historical symptom of the defeat of the revolution rather than a matter of ahistorical principle as Adolph and others did. There was no need to raise the failure of Lenin and Trotsky to achieve socialism through the Russian Revolution to a matter of principle; indeed, Adorno taught me that it was important to remember them and Marxism against the grain of subsequent history, as an important attempt not easily explained away.
In addition to working various odd jobs — for instance at Kinko’s photocopy shop, where I met a couple of young Zapatista militants visiting Chicago who came in with literature to print, and including as support staff for engineers at the local Shure Electronics factory, drafting assembly-line instructions for workers (mostly Mexican women) there as well as at their sister location across the border in Juarez — I taught film and video production to aspiring workers in the media industry at Columbia College in Chicago.
Meanwhile, local “Leftist” activists were protesting against “big box stores” such as Borders Books and Walmart, Target, et al, trying to defend local businesses from them — I saw them rather as opportunities for organizing — and shopping — for the working class. Adolph said of mom-and-pop stores that “exploitation begins at home.” Cynical city aldermen would hire insta-crowds to picket the stores. I encountered race-baiting at the NGO level with local arts and media “Left” organizations descended from the 1970s–80s post-New Left cultural activist scene, which lost their government funding and, seeking private foundation support, were attacked for being too “white” — and promptly confessed their guilt and disappeared, leaving a void artistically, culturally and politically. It was the end of an era.
At the time of the O.J. Simpson trial, Adolph pointed out that single cases never serve well as rallying-points politically because the facts are always complicated and reality is not symbolic or allegorical, though the capitalist politicians and news media try to make it so. About Simpson himself, Adolph observed that “even a guilty man can be framed” and the police frame people, innocent or guilty, routinely. O.J. was found not guilty, though he was not innocent. I learned later as a victim of crime that the trial court, if not the criminal justice system as a whole, exists — at least ostensibly — for the benefit of the accused defendant against the state — as it should be. The police are there not to protect society against crime but to enforce the law; and prosecutors try to win cases, not achieve justice — which cannot be found in court anyway, especially not in capitalism. A bitter truth, but true nonetheless. — Life is not a morality play.
Graduate school
At the University of Chicago, I again met my Irish-American high school friend, who was then finishing his PhD in Musicology, writing a dissertation on Weimar Republic popular music, and who told me that a German professor had said that unless one is a native German language speaker one can never truly understand Adorno. He studied German, found a German boyfriend and relocated there, claiming his Irish citizenship in the EU. Before parting, he warned me against studying with Moishe Postone because Postone didn’t tolerate any dissent from his students — I ignored his advice and became Moishe’s student anyway. Adolph warned me archly that Moishe was perhaps too “tribal” — a veiled reference to Moishe’s (famous, but as-yet unknown to me) criticisms of Palestinian solidarity and “anti-Zionist Leftism.” For his part, Moishe said that, while he appreciated Adolph’s work a great deal, he found it too “angular:” Moishe couldn’t countenance Adolph’s fierce criticisms of black Democrat politicians.
Before studying with Moishe, I first took Adolph’s friend Kenneth Warren’s courses in African-American literary history and theory at the University of Chicago, and Ken became one of my advisors, eventually serving as my dissertation chair. My dissertation was on Adorno, and when a professor, editor of a prestigious critical theory journal, heard my subject of study, he exclaimed, incredulously, “I didn’t know Adorno was gay!,” to which I replied that as far as I knew he wasn’t — I certainly hoped he wasn’t. Who knows what he thought of Ken chairing my committee?
I started out as an Art History — Media Studies — student, and earned the ire of the department chair when I corrected a fellow student’s misreading of Walter Benjamin’s essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as a culturally conservative rejection of modern mass media rather than a dialectical critique, which the chair blamed me for the student, the one black member of our cohort, eventually dropping out — he cut me from the program as punishment. Or perhaps it was for another reason: when discussing my Masters thesis on Benjamin, the chair chastised me that Lenin and Trotsky relished “killing the innocent as well as the guilty” — I learned later that he was an ex-Marxist.
At Univ. Chicago, I took courses with the Hegel scholar Robert Pippin, who had been a member of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in the 1960s and became an acolyte of Marcuse when he taught at University of California at San Diego. We conversed in and out of class on issues of German Idealism and Marxism, with Adorno and Benjamin figuring prominently. The question regarding Hegel and Marx was the philosophy of freedom.
The Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once replied to a question I posed at a Univ. Chicago event about his account of Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary — that perhaps it was about freedom and not merely happiness — that “freedom is a Right-wing concept.” Adolph responded to my question in a graduate student colloquium he co-taught with Ken on the history of anti-black racism in the U.S., regarding the issue with the Taft-Hartley Act of official government-recognized labor unions as a historical gain or setback for workers, that “freedom is in the eye of the beholder,” a version of the usual Leftist “freedom for who?” dismissal of the question of social freedom — the freedom of society as a whole, over which Marxists such as Lenin and Adorno considered capitalism to be dominating as an impersonal force, affecting all of its members.
As Postone did later, Pippin confessed that he felt he “couldn’t really understand” Benjamin and Adorno, which made sense to me as ignorance of the Marxism at the core of their work. Pippin highlighted a sentence in one of my course papers on Marxism about the philosophical difficulty of “recognizing oneself as a subject of change from within the process of self-transformation.”
Postone’s courses — which I attended with Stephanie and sometimes Richard as outside auditors — on Marx and the Frankfurt School as well as on the post-1960s “Left” criticisms of capitalism, were a welcome respite from the otherwise unrelenting anti-Marxism of postmodernist academia — if however, as I soon came to realize, they were their own form of anti-Marxism. Moishe would say that, while Marx himself was politically a “traditional Marxist,” his theoretical work pointed beyond this. When teaching Adorno’s work, Moishe confessed that he wasn’t sure he really understood it: I replied simply that Adorno was a Marxist; and maybe Marxist politics was more and other than what Moishe thought.
In Moishe’s classes, I met a new friend, Spencer Leonard, with whom I immediately engaged on issues of Lenin, Trotsky, the Russian Revolution and historical Marxism more generally. Spencer, Stephanie and I formed a close friendship circle; we were joined by fellow graduate student friends Atiya Khan, Sunit Singh and James Vaughn.
I appreciated the pedagogy in Marx and the Frankfurt School we were receiving from Postone, but felt it all made sense only if one took certain things about Marxism for granted, politically, which Moishe did not and indeed opposed. Still, I was a little shocked when Moishe told me point-blank, angrily, that I was inappropriately trying to reconcile his work with what it was designed precisely against, Marxism — more specifically, Lenin. But it was clear to me that Marx and Lenin wanted to overcome labor as a social relation and not hypostatize it politically, as Postone alleged. James’s old Trotskyist professor Robert Brenner (and member of Solidarity) said that Moishe’s insights into Marx were nothing new to actual Marxists, and his political apprehensions were misplaced. But I knew that most “Marxists” were exactly what Moishe said they were, not really followers of Marx at all: they were the socialists and communists that Marx himself had critiqued in his day. Marxists had always complained of the constant degeneration into “vulgar” and pseudo-“Marxism” and relapse into pre-Marxian socialism, for instance Luxemburg’s critique of reformist Revisionism of Marxism.
Moishe objected to what he called my characterization of “Luxemburg and Lenin as bosom buddies walking arm-in-arm,” and was incensed when I produced evidence that Luxemburg spoke and wrote fondly of Lenin and that they were indeed good friends who spent many an evening together, walking arm-in-arm, to which he responded dismissively that, “Of course Luxemburg was a traditional Marxist anyway.” Moishe ended up protesting stridently during my dissertation defense on Adorno’s Marxism, but relented when I talked him down, admitting, “Perhaps everything ended in 1919, but we’re still thinking,” to which I replied, “But are we really thinking, Moishe?” Meeting for coffee several weeks later, he said, “You know, Chris, you might have a point about Lenin, but you need to support it better.” I thought Lenin supported it best himself.
In any case, I remained independent from Postone in ways that always irritated him and made him distrustful of me. He told others that while he admired that I am “always thinking,” he thought that I was, problematically, “once a Spartacist, always a Spartacist.” — Here Moishe agreed with Adolph. Nonetheless, Moishe hired me in the College Core Curriculum of the Social Sciences, teaching undergraduates courses on Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Freud for the next decade and a half — until, after Moishe’s death, his students were purged from the staff.
When I began teaching Adorno and the Frankfurt School at SAIC, 9/11 had happened and the War on Terror was already underway, and Iraq had been invaded, but the U.S. occupation was facing difficulties, and the anti-war movement was regaining ground. My students attended protests and encountered the “Left” and its “Marxist” organizations, and the effects of this filtered back into my classes, raising many questions.
My students at SAIC and Univ. Chicago asked me to start an extra-curricular reading group in early 2006, wanting me to inform them more explicitly of the political implications of the Marxism I was teaching, outside the academic classroom. I warned them that this would become very intense and very political very quickly. Among the first writings we read together was something recommended to me by Adolph Reed more than a decade earlier, Korsch’s 1923 essay on “Marxism and Philosophy.” We attended “Left” events as a group, including the first national conference of the new Students for a Democratic Society, held at the University of Chicago in summer 2006. These activities soon led to founding an organization, the Platypus Affiliated Society, in 2007.
Far right is using Twitter’s new rule against anti-extremism researchers
Drew Harwell,
The Washington Post
Dec. 2, 2021
Neo-Nazis and far-right activists are coaching followers on how to use a new Twitter rule to persuade the social media platform to remove photos of them posted by anti-extremism researchers and journalists who specialize in identifying episodes of real-world hate.
Advocates said they worry the new policy will suppress efforts to document the activities of the far right and will prove to be a gift to members of hateful movements eager to keep their identities concealed.
“It’s going to be emboldening to the fascists,” said Gwen Snyder, an anti-fascist researcher and organizer in Philadelphia.
Snyder’s Twitter account was suspended early Thursday after someone reported a 2019 tweet of hers showing photos of a local mayoral candidate attending a public rally alongside the extremist group the Proud Boys. After The Washington Post asked about the suspension, a Twitter spokesperson said the tweet was not in violation and that “our teams took enforcement action in error.”
On Tuesday, Twitter said its new “private information policy” would allow someone whose photo or video was tweeted without their consent to request the company take it down.
Twitter said the rule would help “curb the misuse of media to harass, intimidate and reveal the identities of private individuals, which disproportionately impacts women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.”
The rule, company officials said Tuesday, would not apply to photos that added “value to public discourse” or were of people involved in a large-scale protest, crisis situation or other “newsworthy event due to public interest value.”
In the days since, however, white supremacists on channels such as the encrypted chat service Telegram have urged supporters to use the new policy against activists and journalists who have shared their information or identified them in photos of hate rallies or public events.
“Due to the new privacy policy at Twitter, things now unexpectedly work more in our favor as we can take down Antifa . . . doxing pages more easily,” a white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer wrote to followers on Telegram on Wednesday night, referring to the anti-fascist political movement whose members often clash with far-right protesters and to the practice of publishing people’s personal information online.
He included a list of nearly 50 Twitter accounts and urged people to report them for suspension under the new rule. At least one of the accounts was suspended by Thursday. Twitter did not respond to a question about why the account had been taken down.
The Telegram post has been viewed more than 10,000 times. After it was shared on Twitter by anti-extremism researcher Kristofer Goldsmith, the Telegram user wrote, “Yeah and we’ll do it again.”
How Twitter will enforce the new policy remains contentious. A Twitter spokesman told The Post this week that the policy would help prevent the unauthorized sharing of photos of rape victims or women in authoritarian countries who could face real-world punishment for going outside without a burqa.
The company said that each report will be reviewed case-by-case and that flagged accounts can file an appeal or delete the offending posts to resolve their suspensions.
Snyder, the Philadelphia anti-fascist researcher, said she believed her reported tweet did not break the rules but deleted it anyway, worried that any appeal she filed would take too long or ultimately fail. She suspects the rule could have a “catastrophic” chilling effect on other researchers working to expose extremists.
Since the violent white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, anti-extremism activists have used Twitter to identify previously anonymous members of far-right militias, neo-Nazis and other hate groups, sharing their photos, names and other information.
In some cases, the exposed people have lost jobs, been reported to law enforcement or faced consequences with co-workers, friends or family. Activists and researchers who have shared their information have also faced death threats and online attacks.
Goldsmith, a researcher with the Innovation Lab at Human Rights First who tracks the far right, said the rule could undermine Twitter’s front-line role in distributing critical information about online and real-world hate campaigns.
Amateur investigators known as “sedition hunters” openly used Twitter to identify rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Other researchers did the same after Charlottesville, he said. A jury last week ruled that more than a dozen white supremacists and hate groups should pay more than $26 million in damages for acts of intimidation and violence during the rally that left one woman dead.
“A large portion of the evidence that has been presented in these cases came from what Twitter now says is protected or ‘private’ information,” Goldsmith said.
Anti-extremism researchers and photojournalists on Twitter have in recent days posted reports showing suspension notices they’d received related to the new rule, even for months-old tweets of people in public places for whom the rule would not appear to apply.
Far-right activists have also worked to exploit their newfound power. On Telegram, one far-right activist shared tips on how to find potentially reportable images, using Twitter search queries such as “images fascist exposed.”
On other sites, like the fringe social network Gab, far-right activists said they were aggressively hammering out reports in hopes of taking down anti-fascist Twitter accounts. One said he had filed more than 50 reports in a day, adding, “It’s time to stay on the offensive.”
Some have also attempted to organize on Twitter, with one account saying they had submitted dozens of reports under the rule against anti-fascist accounts, tweeting, “[Right-wing] Twitter, it is time. I told you yesterday and you had reservations. No more excuses. We have work to do.” The account has since been suspended.
Goldsmith said he worried that Twitter’s moderators would not be prepared for a flood of reports from bad actors who could organize on other sites in hopes of blocking or hindering researchers’ work.
“Twitter simply does not have the human power to make these judgment calls,” he said.
Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, said that Twitter needs to provide more clarity into how these rules will be enforced.
“If the intention of the new rules is to help stop doxing and harassment, that is important. But exposing extremists is also important,” Segal said. “Accountability is important. And sunlight can be the best disinfectant when done responsibly.”
“The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.”
—John Abramson, M.D., Harvard Medical School
I wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms.
Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability.
Across Western nations, shell-shocked citizens experienced all the well-worn tactics of rising totalitarianism—mass propaganda and censorship, the orchestrated promotion of terror, the manipulation of science, the suppression of debate, the vilification of dissent, and use of force to prevent protest. Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating.
American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships. Citizens the world over were ordered to stay in their homes.
Today marks the day 106 years ago that Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah. An immigrant, worker, Wobbly, and songwriter, we celebrate his legacy with some of his best songs. His work lives on today, still performed widely with the same witty, fierce lyrics that rail against the capitalist system.
On November 19, 1915, the state of Utah executed Joe Hill on a trumped-up murder charge. A Swedish immigrant, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström, he came to the United States and joined the large swath of precarious workers in dangerous, low-paying jobs. Around 1910, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, and soon became renowned for his songwriting abilities. Utilizing well-known melodies, mostly from hymns, he wrote sharply funny lyrics that mock the capitalist system, aimed at rallying the working class to rise up. His fame soon got the better of him and he was framed for two murders at a Salt Lake City grocery store.
Why did the state murder Joe Hill? In every town the itinerant laborer and singer visited, he would sing his songs on the street and “rouse the rabble.” The capitalists were determined to put an end to that. Even an international campaign to overturn his conviction was unsuccessful.
Before his execution, he sent a telegraph to IWW “Big Bill” Haywood that read: “Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize … Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.”
His songs live on, and are oft-quoted and performed by many folksingers to this day. The IWW’s infamous Little Red Songbook is filled with his lyrics and has had a lasting effect on socialist art. Here are four of his tunes to listen to on the anniversary of his death, and one famous song that celebrates the man himself.
“The Preacher and the Slave”
The Preacher and The Slave – Utah Philips
Joe Hill coined the term “pie in the sky” with this song. A parody of the famous hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” his lyrics sharply criticize the weaponization of religion to placate the working class in its exploitative labor in life by promising salvation after death.
“You will eat (you will eat) by and by
In that glorious land in the sky (way up high)
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
(That’s a lie!)”
“Casey Jones—the Union Scab”
Casey Jones – Pete Seeger
Hill wrote this song shortly after the first day of a nationwide walkout of railway employees during the Illinois Central shopmen’s strike of 1911. An anti-scab anthem, it’s a good reminder that all scabs go to hell.
Casey Jones a-went to Hell a-flyin’
“Casey Jones,” the Devil said, “Oh, fine:
Casey Jones, get busy shovelin’ sulfur;
It’s what you get for scabbin’ on the S.P. Line.”
“The Rebel Girl”
The Rebel Girl – Hazel Dickens
One of his most earnest songs, Hill wrote this for IWW comrade Elizabeth Gurley Flynn as an ode to and celebration of working-class womenfor their strength, courage, and fearless fight against the capitalists.
Yes, her hands may be hardened from labor
And her dress may not be very fine
But a heart in her bosom is beating
That is true to her class and her kind.
“There is Power In a Union”
There is Power in A Union – Utah Phillips
Sung to the tune of “There is Power in the Blood (of the Lamb),” Hill subverted the song to instead relish in the power of the working class coming together. Oftentimes, the IWW would go to worksites to organize laborers, but were competing for the attention from preachers and church folk. Utilizing these hymns was a way to get noticed, but with lyrics holding up the fight against capitalism.
There is pow’r there is pow’r in a band of workingmen,
When they stand hand in hand,
That’s a pow’r, that’s a pow’r
That must rule in every land—
One Industrial Union Grand
“Joe Hill”
Joe Hill – Joan Baez
Perhaps better known as “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” this song was written after Hill’s execution to honor him and his unyielding commitment to overturning capitalism and freeing the working class from wage slavery. With lyrics by Alfred Hayes and music by Earl Robinson, it speaks poetically of Hill’s legacy living on in every struggle against the capitalist bosses. It was made most famous in a performance by folk singer Joan Baez at the 1969 Woodstock Festival.
Soviet troops are seen marching on November 7, 1989 during the military parade on Moscow’s Red Square as part ot the celebrations marking the 72 anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution. © TASS / AFP
People line up to buy groceries. © Sputnik / Yuri Abramochkin
Workers Vanguard 
xenagoguevicene 