An Occupier's Open Letter To Chris Hedges

Published Mar 30, 2012 9:39 PM

Chris Hedges, a writer for The Nation and former New York Times reporter, spoke at the Left Forum’s closing plenary on March 18 in New York City.

As someone who was among the thousands of youth on Sept. 17 when the occupation of Zuccotti Park began; as someone who attended some of the early General Assemblies prior to that historic day; as someone who was arrested as part of the OWS Martin Luther King Day actions; as someone who is currently involved in the continuing occupation of Union Square in preparation for the May 1st General Strike, I must say loudly and clearly that you, Chris Hedges, do not speak for me.

The speech you gave at the Left Forum this year, in which you presented yourself as someone with authority and wisdom needed by OWS, said things that are the opposite of how I and many other OWSers feel.

First of all, the police brutality rained down on OWS by police departments around the country, coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security, is not the fault of the Black Bloc anarchists or any other elements inside OWS. Before a single window was broken or trash can turned over, the NYPD was brutalizing OWS activists. The blood of OWS activists has been spilled by the NYPD without pause or remorse since the beginning of these demonstrations.

By engaging in particular tactics of resistance, correct or incorrect, the Black Bloc is not responsible for the NYPD’s behavior. The NYPD has killed Ramarley Graham, Sean Bell and countless other African Americans without any provocation. They need no excuse for their viciousness. Don’t blame the victims.

In Oakland, Calif., and all across the U.S., many OWS activists are facing serious criminal charges. Why would you divide the movement by trying to label one section as “violent” and “dangerous”? Why would you aid the state in isolating some sections? Aren’t the Wall Street bankers the real criminals?

Secondly, the remarks you made about the events of 1989-1991 in Eastern Europe were way off.

When the USSR collapsed and the socialist governments of Eastern Europe were overthrown, this was a huge victory for the 1% against the 99%.

Things like the right to health care, education and employment were abolished. Life expectancy in the Eastern European countries went down by big numbers. Right now, the women of Eastern Europe, who once had paid maternity leave, guaranteed employment, and birth control and abortion on demand, are sex trafficked at higher rates than ever.

The events you described in your speech as being so glorious were simply the 1% taking control of Eastern Europe for themselves. Things for the working class have gotten worse since Wall Street recolonized a big chunk of the globe, with your confessed assistance.

I don’t want to model our movement on the events that led to economic catastrophe and mass suffering in Eastern Europe. Rather, the political movements I look to as inspiration for the OWS are the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and other socialist revolutions where the 99% took power away from the 1%.

In addition, I think much can be learned from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, where young people like us fought to prevent capitalist restoration.

Likewise, the anti-war movement, the Black Liberation movement, the Unemployed Councils and sit-down strike waves of the 1930s have real lessons for OWS on how to fight and win against the 1% here in the U.S.

Many within these movements, just like many of us in OWS, thought of capitalism and U.S. imperialism as the true enemy of humanity. They saw their movements, as we see OWS, as a place to fight to overthrow the system and create a society where the 99% rule.

A new chant has been catching on at OWS rallies in New York. It was on our lips in Union Square on March 21 when they tried to evict us. We also chanted it when we took back Zuccotti with crowds of Left Forum activists.

We chanted, “Just like Ho Chi Minh! Occupy is gonna win!”

When the Vietnamese people kicked the Wall Street bankers out of their country, it was a great victory for all humanity. It took a great deal of militancy and relentless years of heroic sacrifice on the part of the Vietnamese people.

I have no doubt that it will take a similarly long and relentless struggle to bring down the 1% in the U.S. But I’m confident that just as the Soviet people drove the Nazis out of Eastern Europe, the Chinese Red Army drove Japanese imperialism out of their country, and the people of Cuba still stand strong, that just like Ho Chi Minh, we too will win and defeat the 1%!

— Caleb T. Maupin
OWS activist and Workers World Party youth organizer

Wisdom From Lenin: "Freedom, Democracy, and Capitalism"

No bourgeois republic, however democratic, ever was or could have been anything but a machine for the suppression of the working people by capital, an instrument of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the political rule of capital.

The democratic bourgeois republic promised and proclaimed majority rule, but it could never put this into effect as long as private ownership of the land and other means of production existed.

“Freedom” in the bourgeois-democratic republic was actually freedom for the rich...

Soviet or proletarian, democracy has for the first time in the world created democracy for the masses, for the working people, for the factory workers and small peasants.

Never yet has the world seen political power wielded by the majority of the population, power actually wielded by this majority, as it is in the case of Soviet rule.

It suppresses the “freedom” of the exploiters and their accomplices; it deprives them of “freedom” to exploit, “freedom” to batten on starvation, “freedom” to fight for the restoration of the rule of capital, “freedom” to compact with the foreign bourgeoisie against the workers and peasants of their own country.

Let the Kautskys champion such freedom. Only a renegade from Marxism, a renegade from socialism can do so.


V.I. Lenin "The Third International and Its Place in History"

Billionaire Mayor Says "Living Wage" Is Red

By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Oct 23, 2011 10:42 AM

The billionaire mayor of this city, Michael Bloomberg, is still refusing to sign a “living wage bill” currently before the New York City Council, despite revisions that watered it down somewhat. This bill would require some businesses that receive city funds to pay not just the minimum wage, but either a “living wage” of $10 per hour plus benefits or $11.50 an hour without benefits.

The Census Bureau recently reported that one in every five city residents lives in poverty as a result of unemployment and low wages.

In stating his reason for opposing the bill, Bloomberg said: “The last time people tried to set rates, basically, was in the Soviet Union, and that didn’t work out very well. I don’t think we want to go in that direction.” (New York Times, Oct. 5)

Bloomberg needs to learn history.

In the Soviet Union, where workers took power in a popular revolution in October 1917, things did work out well for a long time.

After the USSR launched its first Five Year Plan in 1928, the world looked on in amazement.

While the capitalist countries were plunging into a deep depression, the USSR went from being a country with no steel industry and barely any railroads, indoor plumbing or electricity, to a world economic power. The largest hydroelectric power plant in the world at the time, the Dnieper Dam, was constructed during this mass move to build an industrialized socialist economy.

The impoverished, agrarian countryside that had prevailed in Russia, Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia and the numerous other nations that made up the Soviet Union were soon filled with mighty industrial centers.

With the banks, factories and 91 percent of all economic institutions in the people’s hands, there was no need for anyone to be unemployed.

Thousands of jobless U.S. workers went to the Soviet Union in this period. Even though every citizen in the USSR was put to work at living wages, this wasn’t enough. Workers from all over the world were hired to go to the USSR and help out, in exchange for a living wage.

Illiteracy was abolished during this period of Soviet history and a national educational system constructed. Newly built universities allowed many former peasants to become engineers, artists, technicians and other kinds of skilled workers needed to build a socialist society. The country was on the road to realizing Lenin’s statement that “Socialism is Soviet power plus electrification.”

In 1941 German imperialism invaded the Soviet Union along an 1,800-mile front. They did terrible destruction to this struggling country, but at the heroic battle of Stalingrad, which lasted from August 1942 until February 1943, the people’s resistance defeated the Nazis and turned the tide of World War II. It was troops carrying the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union, not the red, white and blue, who liberated Berlin and the majority of Nazi concentration camps in Eastern Europe.

In the postwar period, the Soviet Union had to repeat its economic miracle, rebuilding what the Nazis had destroyed. It also aided other war-ravaged countries in Eastern Europe and Asia.

In 1946 the U.S. and Britain began the Cold War, which forced the USSR to devote much of its scientific and material resources to defense against the U.S. nuclear threat

Nevertheless, the USSR was the first country in the world to launch a space satellite, called Sputnik.

Until the 1980s, the USSR provided aid to countries and liberation movements threatened by U.S. imperialism with the kind of “regime change” forced on those who disobey Wall Street’s orders.

South Africans fighting the fascist apartheid regime and Angolans fighting Portuguese colonialism received Soviet weapons and training. Cuba, just 90 miles south of Florida, faced a U.S. blockade after its socialist revolution, but was able to survive with Soviet economic assistance. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which lost millions of people in the war against invading U.S. troops from 1950 to 1953, got Soviet aid to help its socialist construction.

The Soviet Union built up a mass media apparatus to spread its message of socialism and anti-imperialism. This global megaphone publicized the horrors of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. South to the peoples of the world, exposing the “democracy” the U.S. claimed to advocate.

China began its great revival with Soviet aid. Now one of the most powerful economies in the world, just 60 years ago it was dubbed “the sick man of Asia” because of its horrendous conditions of impoverishment.

Just where is this failure Bloomberg speaks of? Yes, the USSR collapsed, but only after Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his allies turned toward imperialism and actively began dismantling the Soviet economy. The USSR did not collapse until it was more polluted with “market reforms” than ever before.

In the modern world, the poorest countries of this earth, where people are suffering from mass unemployment, starvation and extreme poverty, all share governments that believe in Bloomberg’s “free market” nonsense and are backed up with Pentagon bombs.

Contrary to Bloomberg’s rhetoric, the construction of socialism in the U.S. will not be as simple as passing this “living wage bill” he loathes. The mass movement now emerging in the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon must lead to an uprising of revolutionary youth, workers and oppressed peoples against the capitalist system itself. It will take the formation of a mass, Marxist-Leninist party that can coordinate revolutionary activity to eventually liberate the banks and factories for the people themselves and create a new, working-class government to replace Wall Street’s cast of hired actors in Washington, D.C.

That’s when the successful economic model of socialism will be created in the U.S. At that point, we will in fact see what Bloomberg fears the most: a world without billionaires (like him), a world that instead provides a decent life for all.

Want to Freedom of Information? Abolish Capitalism!

By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Sep 17, 2011 8:49 AM

The profit-hungry, Wall Street billionaires love “private property.”

They love that while the majority of humanity has to sell their labor, renting out their ability to work to someone else in order to survive, they, the superrich, get to “own” the banks, factories, natural resources, and other “commanding heights” of the economy. They are happy that they can live off the work done by those who aren’t lucky enough to be among their small ruling segment of humanity.

Among the various types of private property that capitalists horde in order to keep their wealth and maintain their power, is one particularly valuable tool: information.

The billionaires and their governments want people to support and fight in their bloody imperialist wars. They also want people to happily accept their massive cutbacks and layoffs. If the people are to do this, the last thing they need to hear is the truth.

The ruling class has its own media, hired and paid to push its interpretation of world events, and often blatant falsehoods, on the people of the world.

So many working people are now excited by WikiLeaks, which let some of the hidden secrets of the ruling circles enter public knowledge. As the call to “Occupy Wall Street” on Sept. 17 went out, some of the forces involved are rallying around the call for “Freedom of Information” as a way to bring down the tyranny of those in power.

They are not alone in this call. It has long been a demand of socialists and revolutionaries that the people be allowed access to the secrets of the ruling class.

Militant unions in the 1930s screamed, “Open the books!” as a revolutionary demand. They called for bosses who said they couldn’t afford to pay decent wages to be required to prove this, by allowing the workers to inspect and see how much profits were being made from the work they did.

One of the greatest victories for freedom of information was the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

When the workers and oppressed people brought down the czar of Russia, and then the provisional government of capitalists, they revealed all the secrets hidden by the former ruling elites as they built a socialist society.

Secret treaties and agreements never made public by the czar were published to show the true profiteering nature of the world’s capitalist governments, often lurking behind closed doors.

The archives of the czar’s secret police were also opened, and many learned exactly the techniques used to suppress revolutionary organizations through infiltration, deception, and outright terrorist violence.

When activists in the town of Media, Pa., broke into the FBI offices in 1971, they revealed that the FBI did the same things here in the U.S. to attack the anti-war movement along with the Black and other national liberation movements, by releasing numerous classified FBI documents to those who could make them public.

Unlike in capitalist countries, socialist Cuba is a society in which information is readily available to the people. In Cuba, the current economic changes are being enacted after literally millions of Cuban factory workers, students, women, farm laborers, and others were consulted in mass meetings, and given all the information as well as the ability to give input into how society is run.

Socialist societies arm their populations with education and literacy, as well as popular democratic control of the economy, so that no more are decisions and information only accessible to a small segment of society.

The capitalist bosses fear the free flow of information. When BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system cops shot down Charles Hill — the third BART shooting since African-American Oscar Grant’s killing sparked rebellions — Internet and cell phone access was turned off to prevent protests in another sign of the fear of the people’s righteous anger that exists within the halls of power.

The fact that Congress has discussed a “kill switch” for the Internet, also shows how afraid of the people those with the wealth actually are.

The struggle for freely accessible information, and a world where people are empowered to know the truth and use it to rule society, is not just a struggle against corruption, bad government officials or Wall Street’s “influence.”

It is a struggle against the capitalist system itself, which must be overthrown if a better world is to blossom.

Workers World Editorial: Revisiting the Berlin Wall

Published Aug 19, 2011 7:13 AM

From: Workers World

On Aug. 13, the corporate media in imperialist Germany used the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Wall to propagandize against communism and the German Democratic Republic.

The GDR had built the wall at a time when Germany and Berlin were divided between a capitalist West and a socialist East. After Hitler’s defeat in World War II — largely at the hands of the Soviet Union, which also suffered the greatest casualties from Nazi aggression — the U.S. had poured billions of dollars into West Germany to rebuild capitalism there. West Berlin, where many of the capitalist elite were concentrated, was much richer than East Berlin. Nevertheless, the socialist East offered free education and health care to everyone. The wall was built largely to stem an exodus to the West, known as the “brain drain,” of skilled people educated at the expense of the workers’ state.

There are many in the united Germany of today who are not celebrating the fall of the wall and the GDR. Their voices were heard on Aug. 13 when the non-affiliated Marxist German daily newspaper, Junge Welt, ran a front-page article along with a historical photo of army troops of the GDR defending the Brandenburg Gate, one of the entry points between West and East. The headline read, “At this time, all we can say is: Thank you.”

The article went on to give examples of what the GDR had achieved during the 28 years of the wall — much of which was lost once the socialist state was overthrown and the GDR swallowed by West Germany.

The article thanked the GDR for “28 years of peace in Europe” and “28 years without any German soldiers participating in wars.” The united Germany, as a member of NATO, now has armed forces in Afghanistan, parts of the former Yugoslavia and Sudan, as well as off the coasts of the Horn of Africa and Lebanon.

It also thanked the GDR for 28 years without unemployment, homelessness and soup kitchens and for providing education, child care and health care for all “without a consultation fee or two-tier health care.”

Reflecting popular anger at German capital, it thanked the GDR for “28 years without hedge funds and private equity parasites.”

Germany today, like the rest of the capitalist world, is cutting social programs while unemployment grows, especially in the east where workers used to be guaranteed work under socialism. In the land of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, many now know from bitter experience that capitalism can never bring a better life to the majority of the people.

1917: Women of the 'Death Batallion'

Women Soldiers in the Bolshevik Revolution

From: Six Red Months in Russia by Louise Bryant

NO other feature of the great war ever caught the public fancy like the Death Battalion, composed of Russian women. I heard so much about them before I left America that it was one of the first things I investigated when I got to Russia. In six months I saw them go through a curious development which divided them into two bitter hostile camps. Their leader, Leona Botchkarova, was severely beaten and had to be taken to a hospital. Hurt, uncomprehending, she declared: "I do not want to be associated with women! I do not trust them!" If she had been a thinker as well as a fighter she would have known that sex had little to do with the matter. Class struggle permeated everything and it hurled the women's regiments into the maelstrom with everything else.

Near Smolny Institute there was a recruiting station. It was here that I made my first friends among the women soldiers. A short dumpy little girl with cropped black hair stood awkwardly holding a big gun with a long bayonet. She regarded me belligerently.

"Stoi! What do you want?" she queried. I decided she must be the guard and explained my mission.

Inside were half a dozen girls sitting on stools in the hallway. They were arrayed in the strangest attire; one had on dancing slippers and a frivolous waist; another high-heeled French shoes, and still another wore brown buttoned shoes and green stockings--the only universal note was short hair and men's trousers.

They looked like the chorus of a comic opera in various stages of make-up. They all began to talk to me at once, as is the Russian custom. "Who are you?" "Are you English or American?" "Are you going to join the regiment?"

A very intelligent and lovely girl by the name of Vera, who was in charge that day, came out and invited me into her office. I often went back after that and had lunch with her. She was well read and spoke live languages. The only thing I didn't like about her was that she loved to salute so much that she kept doing it all the time, and as she was the superior officer, she couldn't very well salute any one else but me. This I found very droll after coming from France, where war correspondents are not treated like commanders-in-chief.

Vera explained about the variety of shoes. She said that they had ordered boots, but had never heard any further word. There was a very good reason, which I found out afterwards; there was no leather. The only women soldiers that ever did get boots or overcoats or anything else they needed were the first recruits to the Death Battalion. All the others were "just waiting" as every one does in Russia.

It was the Death Battalion that book part in the last Russian offensive. There were two hundred and fifty in the battle; six were killed and thirty wounded. That was their last and only battle, except for the girls who were brought to the Winter Palace the day that it fell. And they surrendered before a single one was wounded.

I gathered these statistics very carefully and have compared them with the statistics gathered by reliable persons. I took great pains because I could not believe them when I first got them. I had been led to believe that the movement was much larger. In all Russia less than three thousand were gathered into the recruiting stations. It is interesting to note that many more have since taken part in the Red Guard Army.

Women in Russia have always fought in the army. In my opinion the principal reason for the failure of the woman's regiment was segregation. There will always be fighting women in Russia, but they will fight side by side with men and not as a sex. Botchkarova herself fought several gears before she organised the Death Battalion at the instigation of Kerensky and Rodzianko.

When the Soviet formally took over the government the women soldiers were given two months' leave. The majority were ordered home and told to put on female attire because they were considered enemies of the revolution. There was a good deal of misunderstanding on both sides.

I came across a peculiar case. I had heard a rumour that some of the girls had been mistreated the night the Winter Palace fell. I didn't believe it, but I wanted to assure myself. After a great deal of searching around I found that one girl really had been hurt and had been in a hospital. And another girl had committed suicide because she was "disappointed in her ideals." I got the address of the girl who had been sick and went round to see her.

She lived with another girl in one of the great barnlike unused buildings so common in Petrograd. Kira Volakettnova was her name. She was a dressmaker and had always been very poor. The building had a court with snow piled high in the centre. Garbage and filth of all sorts were thrown on top of the snow.

I knocked a long time at the front door; nobody answered. I found the back door wide open and went in. Hearing a noise in one of the rooms, I called out but received no reply. I opened the door and a lot of startled chickens ran in every direction. I searched all over that floor with no result, and finally went to the second floor. There in a tiny room I found Kira and her friend, Anna Shub. Anna was seventeen and came from Moghilev.

I asked Kira to explain how she was hurt.

"Well, that night when the Bolsheviki took the Winter Palace and told us to go home, a few of us were very angry and we got into an argument," she said.

"We were arguing with soldiers of the Pavlovsk regiment. A very big soldier and I had a terrible fight. We screamed at each other and finally he got so mad that he pushed me and I fell out of the window. Then he ran downstairs and all the other soldiers ran downstairs.... The big soldier cried like a baby because he had hurt me and he carried me all the way to the hospital and came to see me every day."

"And how do you live now?" I said. "How do you manage to get enough to eat?"

Anna Shub answered my question. "Why, the Red Guard," she said, blushing a little, "have been dividing their bread with us, and yesterday," she went on proudly, "they brought us six pieces of wood, and so we have been warm all day."

"Have you forgiven the Bolsheviki for disarming you?" I asked Kira.

Anna Shub broke in and asked excitedly: "Why should we forgive them? It is they who should forgive us. We are working girls and traitors have been trying to persuade us to fight our own people. We were fooled and we almost did it."

"How was that?" I asked.

Anna reached under her cot and took out a pasteboard box. The contents of that and what she had on her back was all that she had in the world besides a sick sparrow. The sick sparrow she had picked up on the street half frozen. Now it hopped about the room looking for crumbs and picking at spots on the floor. Anna opened the box and took out some folded papers. Two were small posters like those pasted daily on the buildings on the streets of Petrograd. "Read them," she said. They were written in the usual extravagant and colourful language of Russian bulletins. I give a free translation:

"Come with us in the name of your fallen heroes I Come with us and dry the tears and heal the wounds of Russia. Protect her with your lives.

"Wake up and see clear, you who are selling the heads of your children to the Germans. Soon, very soon, you will prefer to face ten German bayonets to one tigress. We pour out our maledictions upon you. Enough words! It is time to take up arms. Only with a storm of fire will we sweep the enemy off Russian soil. Only with bayonets will we attain a permanent peace. Forward against the enemy! We go to die with you."

After I finished reading Anna went on with her story.

"I left home," she said. "I left everything because I thought the poor soldiers of Russia were tired after fighting so many years, and I thought we ought to help them. When I arrived in Petrograd I began to see the truth; we were supposed to be shaming the soldiers."

Tears welled in her eyes. "I felt as if I myself could die of shame. I didn't know what to do. And then, just before the Winter Palace fell, one of the aristocrats of the Death Battalion came in and asked us to go down and join the Cossacks to fight the revolution."

"I am a Jew," said Anna, "and I come from within the Pale. Liberty is dearer than life to me. And I ... I was actually asked to do this thing!"

"I used to talk to the people in the bread-line," she went on, "about the Bolsheviki, and they said they were not bad people, and that they were our friends. When you go back to America," she said eagerly, as if every one would know about her unfortunate conduct, "tell them I am a woman soldier, and I fight only imperialistic invaders."

Anna and Kira had virtually no clothes at all. They had thin summer clothing, pieced out with all sorts of rag-tags they had managed to gather together, and they didn't know where to get their next meal. I offered them money and clothes. At first they both wept and refused and then they were quite happy in accepting.

A few nights before I left Petrograd I stopped at one of the huge military hospitals, where women soldiers were working. The Bolsheviki had secured them places so that they could get enough to eat.... That very day I hall seen two begging at one of the stations. I found that the girls had already gone home for the night. Following vague directions I walked up a dark street for about a quarter of a mile. The little house where they stayed stood in the middle of a deserted garden, snow-covered and desolate.

I went through an open door that sagged down on a broken hinge, and felt my way along the hall until I saw a shaft of light. I knocked and entered. Inside the little room was a peasant, his wife, their baby, the store, the bed and a highly pungent odour of cooking cabbage.

At the next door I had better success. This time it was a large room containing ten girls and ten beds, a long bench and a Russian stove. They were delighted to have company, especially from "so far away." We sat down on the bench and talked most of the night. Their stories were much the same as Anna's.

"We are girls from little towns," said one. "Some of us came with our parents' blessing, but most of us came with their curses. We were all moved by a high resolve to die for the revolution.

"How unhappy we have been! Everywhere we have been misunderstood. We expected to be honoured, to be treated as heroes, but always we were treated with scorn. On the streets we were insulted. At night men knocked at our barracks and cried out blasphemies. Most of us never got within miles of the front. The soldiers thought we were militarists and enemies of the revolution, and at last they disbanded us and took our arms away."

Another girl began to talk.

"That night," she said, "all of us thought of suicide; there was nothing left. We had no clothes and nowhere to go; life was unbearable. Some of us wanted to appeal to the Bolsheviki, to have a conference with them and explain our purpose. We wanted them to know that we would go to the front and fight for them or for any party. Our aim was to save Russia. But when we suggested that there were members of our battalion who objected and tried to get us to go down and join the Cossacks. We were horrified. We understood then how we had been misled. Of course we would not go...."

"Thirteen went," cried one of the girls.

"But they were aristocrats," answered the first speaker in great contempt.

They were violent in their denunciation of Botchkarova. "She calls us cowards," they said, "but it is she who runs away. It is she who abandons her country, who believes neither in Russian women nor Russian men. .. ."

It was just about the time that the negotiations were broken off at Brest-Litovsk and the possibility of the German advance was in everybody's mouth. I asked them if they would offer their services to the Soviet government in that case. They replied unanimously that they would.

"And how about you?" said one. "Will you fight with us?"

I said that I would. The idea pleased them very much. I was on my way home when the advance began and could not keep my word. But perhaps there will still be opportunity. Russia will be at war with Germany until the present German government is overthrown, and in that struggle for freedom of the Russian people I offer my services unreservedly.

It was almost dawn when I bid the women soldiers farewell. One of them walked a little way with me into the night. It was painfully cold.

"Be sure to come back," she urged sweetly as we shook hands.

"I give you my word of honour," I said, feeling terribly solemn. I looked down and suddenly I realised that her feet were bare. ...

When I think back now she personifies Russia to me, Russia hungry and cold and barefoot--forgetting it all--planning new battles, new roads to freedom.

Socialism: What It Is

By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Jun 23, 2011 9:29 PM

There has been much media talk about “socialism” since the 2008 financial near-meltdown.

From the left, Lawrence O’Donnell, the liberal MSNBC commentator who has replaced Keith Olbermann, calls himself a “socialist.” Film-maker Michael Moore’s film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” the ninth-top-grossing documentary in history, tears capitalism apart, but stops far short of describing real socialist change.

From the far right, Glenn Beck, due to be removed from his Fox News pulpit later this summer, has made a career of falsely accusing centrist President Barack Obama of being a “socialist,” “Marxist” and “Maoist,” without defining any of these terms.

But what is socialism in reality? In an earlier article, we wrote about what socialist isn’t. In this one we’ll briefly describe what it is.

In a socialist society, the “commanding heights of the economy” or the “major means of production” -- banks, factories, businesses, health care, education, natural resources -- are the collective property of the workers. The handful of people -- the small class of wealthy individuals -- who now own them privately are no longer allowed to control them nor appropriate the wealth that the workers produce. Rather, these things become the common property of the vast majority of the population. They are used to serve human needs instead of profits.

Socialist revolutions, yesterday and today

In 1917 there was a socialist revolution in Russia. The organizations that were the basis for the new society were called “soviets,” the Russian word for “councils.” Lenin, the leader of the party that directed this great revolution, defined the soviets as “Councils of Worker’s and Soldier’s Deputies.” These bodies directed the new state power that replaced the old czarist-capitalist state.

With the support of this new state, Russian workers seized control of their factories. The vast natural resources of the country, such as the mines and oil wells, became common property as well.

With the workers and peasants as the rulers, Russia and other Soviet republics of what had been a czarist empire became the Soviet Union, which was transformed over several decades into a newly industrialized country. Illiteracy was abolished by an educational system that served the people. Health care was available free to all in hospitals run not for profit but owned collectively.

When German imperialism invaded in 1941, the Soviet Union defeated it and liberated half of Europe from fascism. The Soviet Union launched the first spacecraft, Sputnik, into orbit in 1957 and achieved other great achievements in science. While on the path to constructing socialism, the Soviet Union provided enormous aid to the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America in their struggle against domination by Western imperialists.

This was all done due to the change in property relations. With no capitalist class to dictate government policy and promote social inequality and discrimination against women, gays and oppressed nationalities, the kind of solidarity, unity and joint effort needed to carry these things out could be achieved.

Cuba had a socialist revolution as well in 1959. The revolution began as a popular armed revolt against a U.S.-sponsored dictator, but after expelling him, it could not liberate itself from imperialist rule without taking the country’s sugar and fruit plantations, cigar factories and other means of production under public control. With aid from the Soviet Union, Cuba began to build toward a socialist society with the goal of full employment and managed to construct excellent education and healthcare systems at no cost to individuals.

The Cubans too had a new state, with an army rooted in the revolutionary guerrilla movement supplemented by Committees for Defense of the Revolution, community organizations where workers could enforce popular defense of the system against attacks from U.S. imperialism and any internal enemies.

In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a popular armed revolt at the end of World War II and the Japanese occupation made the people the owners and operators of the economy. The DPRK has successfully resisted U.S. domination for over half a century and has provided universal literacy and housing for the population. By taking steps toward socialism, the DPRK has defended itself and made some gains despite existing in a constant state of siege, having gone through a horrendous imperialism war in 1950-53 and facing continuing threats from the heavily armed, U.S.-occupied capitalist south Korea.

Envisioning socialism in the U.S.

Socialism in the United States, as everywhere else, will mean that the private property that was grabbed up by Wall Street and the corporations in the form of banks, oil wells, businesses and service industries like health insurance companies will become the property of all the workers -- that's 90-plus percent of the people.

Undoubtedly any struggle for socialist changes will involve organizing to combat racism, sexism, anti-lesbian/gay/bi/trans/queer bigotry and other forms of oppression. Under socialist workers' state power, the economy and society will no longer be led by those who have a material interest in maintaining divisions in the working class or of paying certain sections of the working class even less than others.

Most socialist societies have started from a place of extreme underdevelopment. But in the modern United States there is already huge material abundance. But this abundance is controlled by a wealthy, elite few, and huge poverty persists amid great wealth.

A socialist society in the United States would utilize the huge wealth and productive capability that exists, not to benefit a few rich people, but to provide a decent life for all, with a better future for generations to come.

As capitalism shows signs of potential collapse, more voices express interest in the socialist alternative. Workers World Party has as its main task the establishment of a socialist U.S. WWP fights against imperialist wars, for full employment and an end to all forms of oppression, all with the goal of ending capitalism and replacing it with socialism.

Those who wish to engage in the hard, difficult, yet glorious revolutionary struggle to abolish capitalism and fight for a socialist future should get in touch with WWP. We call on all those who wish to engage in this historic effort to join us!
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

WW Editorial: Mladic, Libya and justice

Published Jun 2, 2011 8:55 PM

Politicians running the powerful imperialist countries in Europe and North America and their corporate media have unanimously hailed the arrest of Yugoslav/Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic as a triumph of democracy. Even if you knew nothing about the civil war in Bosnia, you would have to be suspicious of these declarations. Why? Because the first thing the imperialists tried to do is use the arrest to justify the current war against Libya.

Editorials in Britain and the U.S., for example, presented the following Big Lie: Mladic’s case proves that NATO’s so-called humanitarian military interventions are needed. Then they argued that the “West” has to go after the Moammar Gadhafi government in Libya. If not, they contend, some massacre would happen like in Srebenica, a town in Bosnia.

If NATO’s “humanitarian” bombings kill a dozen Afghan children, as one did May 28, the same editorial writers pass it off as “collateral damage,” a phrase a NATO’s spokesperson invented during the 78-day bombing war against Yugoslavia in 1999. That war has many similarities to the current U.S.-NATO bombing of Libya.

There is not enough space here to review the 1990-2000 imperialist campaign that succeeded in destroying and tearing apart Yugoslavia or to review all the controversial statements about Srebenica. But there is no reason to accept the judgment from London, Paris, Berlin and Washington that Mladic and the Serbs were evil incarnate. Nor is there reason to consider the court in The Hague, Netherlands, fair.

There is good reason for thousands of Serbs to protest their government’s arrest of Mladic, as they did May 29. NATO set up this court to try Serb leaders and to put pressure on them. It was never fair. It brought few charges against other political elements or peoples in the former Yugoslavia. Like the International Criminal Court bringing charges now against Gadhafi and his government or against leaders in Sudan, the Yugoslavia court is a political weapon in the hands of the imperialists.

And this court never reviewed the serious war crimes that NATO leaders committed in the Balkans. From the beginning, German imperialism provoked the civil war in Bosnia when it recognized the split-off, right-wing Alija Izetbegovic government. U.S. imperialist diplomats prolonged the civil war for three years when they encouraged Izetbegovic to refuse a truce in 1992 quite similar to the one that ended the war in 1995. (For more information see the book “NATO in the Balkans” published by the International Action Center, 1998.)

The truth of Bosnia, Mladic and the town of Srebenica will never come out of a NATO court, where NATO’s own war crimes are being covered up. Even Phillip Corwin, the highest ranking United Nations official in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, says that the international media “exaggerates” — diplomatic jargon for “lies” — when claiming there was a massacre of 8,000 civilians in Srebrenica. Srebrenica was a battle site, and, he says, there were civilians killed, as civilians are killed in all war zones. He says that about 800 died in the battle, most of them combatants. (“The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics”) It was NATO, under the same political leaders and generals who are now charging Mladic, that has committed serious war crimes in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and now in Libya.

No bomb, no “international court,” no news media in the hands of the imperialists can be trusted. Put the NATO leaders on trial. Hands off Serbia and Libya!
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Academic History of Vital Years of the Communist Party, Full Text Now Online

"American Communism in Crisis" By Joseph Robert Starobin

1933 Dmitrov v. Georing: When Communists Humiliated Nazis In Their Own Court

In 1933, the Nazi Party attempted to prove that the Communist International was responsible for the Reichstag Fire, in which the German Parliamentary Building was burned to the ground.

In order to do this, they charged Bulgarian-Born Communist Georgi Dmitrov with being involved. Because the trial had some many international ramifications and was watched by the international press, it was much more fairly carried out than the trials usually given in Nazi Germany.

Georgi Dmitrov, a the accused Communist, interrogated Georing, the head of the Nazi Propaganda operations.

Georing was humiliated by Dmitrov, who showed that Georing was a liar. He forced Georing to admit that he declared that the fire was set by Communists, long before any of the 'evidence' that proved this had ever been discovered.

The interrogation reduced Georing on the stand, to a screaming Nazi drill sergeant, preventing his own interrogation. Below is the transcript.


Dimitrov: Count Helldorf 1) here testified to the effect that on February 27 at about 11 p. m. on his own initiative he gave orders for the arrest of the Communist and Social-Democratic leaders and functionaries. I now ask the Prime Minister: did Count Helldorf discuss then this measure with Mr. Goering, or not?

Goering: As a matter of fact an answer to this question has already been given. When Count Helldorf heard about the fire, he realized, as well as every one of us, that it must have been the work of the Communist Party. He had already given orders to his closest assistants. But I wish to stress once more: I, of course, called him to my room and told him that now I had to ask him to put his SA 2) troops at our disposal, to which he replied that he had already given partial instruction to that effect. I thus assumed the responsibility for the orders which he had given, but which had not yet come into effect, and once again backed him with the authority of the state.

Dimitrov: I would like to know only whether between 11 and 12 o'clock a personal conference was held between Count Helldorf and Prime Minister Goering.

Goering: You have just heard it: he was with me 3).

Dimitrov: The deputies of the National Socialist Party to the Reichstag, Mr. Karwahne and Mr. Frey, testified here that at about 11o'clock they were in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, and informed it that both of them and the Austrian National Socialist Kroyer had seen Torgler with van der Lubbe on thee day of the fire. Did these Reichstag deputies speak at that time to the Prime Minister, Mr. Goering?

Goering: No.

Dimitrov: Did the Prime Minister know that Mr. Karwahne and M. Frev had made this report?

Goering: On the day after the fire I learned about their report.

Dimitrov: Was it in the morning or still during the night?

Goering: In the morning, or maybe in the afternoon.

Dimitrov: So it was either in the morning or in the afternoon.

Goering: When that report was made to me can be established by interrogating Ministerial Counsellor Diehls4)!

Dimitrov: I should like to have it established exactly, because Karwahne categorically answered my question that he made the report after midnight, immediately after the fire.

Goering: The three of them gave their information at the Ministry before officials and not before me. I may not know that. It may have been during the night or in the morning: I cannot recall when I was told about it.

Dimitrov: On February 28 Prime Minister Goering gave an interview on the Reichstag fire, in which it was said: at the arrest of the 'Dutch Communist' van der Lubbe, besides his passport, his Party membership card was seized. How did the Prime Minister Goering know then that van der Lubbe had a Party membership card on him?

Goering: I must say that so far I have not been so much interested in the present trial, i.e. I did not read all the reports. I only heard from time to time that you (to Dimitrov) were a particularly clever man. That is why I supposed that the question which you asked has long been clear to you, namely that I never occupied myself with the investigation of this matter. I do not run about or search the pockets of people. If this (to Dimitrov) should still be unknown to you, let me tell you: the police examines all great criminals and informs me of its findings.

Dimitrov: The three officials of the criminal police who arrested and first interrogated van der Lubbe unanimously declared that no membership card was found on Lubbe. From where has the information about the card come then, I should like to know?

Goering: I can tell you that with absolute exactitude. This report was officially made to me. If on that first night they reported things which perhaps could not be checked so quickly, if before an official, perhaps on the basis of the depositions, it was mentioned that Lubbe had a membership card on him and if that could not be checked, they probably assumed it to be a fact and, of course, let me know it. I gave this information on the following day before noon when they had not yet definitely concluded the examination. This is of no significance in itself, because here, at the trial, it seems to have been established that van der Lubbe had no mrmbership card.

Dimitrov: the witness is Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior and President of the Reichstag, so does the Minister bear responsibility for his police?

Goering: Yes!

Dimitrov: I ask: What did the Minister of the Interior do on February 28 and 29 or during the following days in order to establish through a police investigation van der Lubbe's moves frorn Berlin to Hennigsdorf, his stay at the Hermigslorf asylum, his getting acquainted there with two other persons, so as to discover in this way his real accomplices? What did your police do?

Goering: As Minister I, of course, did not go after the traces like a detective, for I have my police for this job.

Dimitrov: After you, as Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, had declared that the incendiaries were Communists, that the German Communist Party had committed the crime with the aid of van der Lubbe as a foreign Communist, did this declaration on your part not serve to direct the police inquiry and afterwards - the Court investigations in a certain direction, excluding the possibility of looking for other ways and means of finding the true incendiaries of the Reichstag?

Goering: First of all, the law prescribes to the criminal police to make its investigations in all criminal cases along all lines, regardless of where they may lead to, and wherever there are traces. However, I personally am not an official of the criminal police but a responsible Minister, and that is why it was not so important for me to find the particular petty criminal, but the Party, the outlook on life which was responsible for it all. The criminal police will investigate all traces, be sure of it. I had only to establish: was this a crime beyond the political sphere or was it political in character. For me it was a political crime and I was also convinced that the criminals had to be looked for in your (to Dimitrov) Party (Shakes his fists at Dimitrov and shouts). Your Party is a Party of criminals, which must be destroyed! And if the hearing of the Court has been influenced in this sense, it has set out on the right track.

Dimitrov: Is it known to the Prime Minister that the Party, which 'has to be destroyed,' rules over one sixth of the globe, namely in the Soviet Union, and that this Soviet Union maintains diplomatic, political and economic relations with Germany and that hundreds of thousands of German workers benefit from its economic orders?

President (to Dimitrov): I forbid you to make Communist propaganda here.

Dimitrov: Mr. Goering is making National Socialist propaganda here! (After that he turns to Goering). This Communist outlook on life prevails in the Soviet Union, the largest and best country in the world, and here, in Germany, it has millions of followers among the best sons of the German people. Is this known...

Goering (yelling loudly): I shall tell you what is known to the German people. the German people know that here you are behaving insolently, that you have come here to set fire to the Reichstag. But I am not here to allow you to question me like a judge and to reprimand me! In my eyes you are a scoundrel who should be hanged.

President: Dimitrov, I have already told you not to make here Communist propaganda. That is why you should not be surprised if the witness is so agitated! I most strictly forbid this propaganda! You can only ask questions referring to the trial.

Dimitrov: I am highly pleased with the reply of the Prime Minister.

President: Whether you are pleased or not is quite immaterial. Now I deprive you of the right to speak.

Dimitrov: I wish to put one more question pertaining to the trial.

President (still more abruptly): Now I deprive you of the right to speak.

Goering (yelling): Go out, scoundrel!

President (to the policemen): Take him out!

Dimitrov (whom the policemen have already seized): You are probably afraid of my questions, Mr. Prime Minister?

Goering (shouting after Dimitrov): Be careful, look out, I shall teach you how to behave, only come out of the courtroom! Scoundrel!

May Day in Moscow Includes Countless Competing Rallies

Not just unions and communists in Moscow this year for May 1st. The Russian LGBT movement marched, as did the Russian Fascists.

Recalling "Romantic Notions" Without Profits: RT on Soviet Railroad Construction

Sam Marcy on Albania Part 2.

In Defense of the Peoples Republic of Albania
December 22, 1961
By SAM MARCY

From: Selected Works of Sam Marcy

As Enver Hoxha and the ideological line of Albania have a renewed interest among the online Marxist-Leninist community, I thought it would be of interest to re-post Sam Marcy's two articles on Albania. Enjoy. - Caleb T. Maupin


Of all the errors committed by the Khrushchev leadership, the break in the diplomatic relations with Albania is unquestionably the worst and the most grievous of all. It cannot be justified by any standards of working class principles, nor can it be justified by the long-standing tenets of Soviet foreign policy.

This action must be unequivocally condemned as a calculated attempt to undermine the Albanian Peoples Republic, overthrow the existing leadership by forceful and external methods, and substitute a leadership which will do Khrushchev's bidding.

If this is what is called "democratization," militant Communists the world over must take another look, and try to decipher its deeper significance.

To begin with, the glee and merriment in the camp of the class enemy over the diplomatic rupture, should be enough to make any class conscious worker suspicious of the motivation behind the move.

WHY ALBANIA?

What has Albania done to deserve such a rash and unwarranted attack? The accusations leveled against her range all the way from fostering the "cult of personality" to the denial of the "Leninist principle of co-existence."

Even if one were to assume that Khrushchev's indictment against her was true in all respects, it could under no circumstances be regarded as sufficient cause for taking such an extreme measure. Even in the case of Yugoslavia there was no actual severance of diplomatic ties. Why Albania? Why not the re-Nazified government of Western Germany? of Denmark? or of the U.S.?

Such governments as the U.S. and West Germany are pursuing the "cult" of war against the Soviet Union! Is the pursuit of the "cult" of Stalin and Hoxha so much worse than the pursuit of the "cult" of superprofits and imperialist war?

Is it not the height of irony to preach peaceful co-existence with states having different social systems, while initiating a merciless war against a small state with a similar social system?

If there is to be peaceful co-existence should it not be first and foremost among the fraternal states within the socialist camp?

A BELEAGUERED FORTRESS

To begin with, it should be borne in mind that Albania has been a beleaguered fortress ever since the ouster of Tito. It is amazing how such a small country, surrounded on all sides by enemies, should have been able to survive and develop under such hostile surroundings.

Of course, the tremendous contributions of the Soviet Union, China and the other socialist countries helped the Albanian Peoples Republic in no small measure. But there is no ground whatever to doubt the assertion of the Chinese Communist Party, that it was accomplished "mainly by relying on their own (i.e., Albanian) efforts."

The account of the struggles of the Albanian Peoples government in ridding the country of feudal and foreign rule, and the heritage of a backward, agricultural population that was 80 percent illiterate, is contained in the November 17, 1961 issue of Peking Review.

The appraisal by the Chinese of the role of the leadership of the Albanian Party of Labour, contrasts sharply with the dark picture painted by Khrushchev. Whatever may be the faults of Enver Hoxha and his collaborators, they have been the leaders who have, through trial and tribulation, seen their country through foreign oppression to socialist construction. To extirpate this leadership by external pressure -- which is what Khrushchev apparently wants to do -- is to do violence to the most elementary principle of socialist justice.

Khrushchev, it seems, would be only too glad to see Albania come hat in hand to the imperialists, begging for a handout. But the firm and loyal support of the People's Republic of China and others in the socialist camp, make such a development unlikely.

It should be noted, however, that Poland and Yugoslavia both receive imperialist handouts, but are not under attack from the Khrushchev leadership.

In the context of the present international situation, and considering the fact that Albania is completely isolated geographically from the other socialist countries -- and especially when one regards the fact of Albania's small population (one and a half million) -- the Albanian Peoples Republic and its leaders, have every right to regard the diplomatic rupture as an attempt at political and economic strangulation.

"INORDINATE DEMANDS"

It is claimed by the Khrushchev leadership that Albania made "inordinate demands" upon the Soviet Union with regard to economic assistance.

It is difficult to conceive of "demands" being made by little Albania. But if so, could not these "demands" be politely turned down?

It is further claimed that the Albanian leadership expressed "resentment" over the "aid rendered by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries to the underdeveloped countries of Asia and Africa." This is the claim made by Professor Fedor Constantinov in the November issue of Kommunist, theoretical organ of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

It is a distortion of the real issue raised by Albania and China on the permissible limits to which a socialist country may obligate itself in rendering aid to such countries as India, Egypt, and others -- while at the same time reducing aid, or denying it completely to such governments as those of China, North Vietnam, and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic.

HOW CHINA VIEWS IT

"... Hoxha and Shehu," says Professor Constantinov, regard the Leninist principles of co-existence of two systems not as the general line of foreign policy, but as "merely a phrase, words which do not bind one, a clever tactical maneuver, whereas the policy (of the USSR) is no tactical device, but the general line of foreign policy substantiated by Lenin and creatively developed by the CPSU, by Nikita Khrushchev." But the truth of the matter is that Hoxha, no less than Khrushchev, is for peaceful coexistence. Only his interpretation of it differs. It reflects a more militant attitude toward imperialism. Unquestionably, Albania holds a political position on this issue very similar to that championed by the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese position was aptly summarized by Liu Ning-yi, head of the Chinese trade unions, in a speech at Peking celebrating the anniversary of the Algerian rebellion:

The only effective way to deal with imperialism and the new and old colonialism headed by the United States is to wage a head on struggle against them, tooth for tooth and eye for eye. We should never cherish the slightest illusion about them. (New York Times -- November 2, 1961)

It is difficult to see how militant Communists can help but support the Albanian-Chinese position as against Khrushchev's.

Whoever does so, however, is immediately branded as a Stalinist by the bourgeois apologists, or a dogmatist and a left-sectarian by Khrushchev's apologists.

A leftist apology for the Khrushchev position is contained in the Monthly Review -- December 1961. In its view, the above quotation from Liu Ning-yi epitomizes all that is wrong with the Chinese position, which it characterizes as a severe case of " dogmatic leftism."

In reality it represents the inflexible determination of the Chinese CP not to be taken in by the wiles of imperialism, and to be prepared for any eventuality, since imperialism -- as the CCP has said on innumerable occasions -- will not change its aggressive warlike nature.

"The world should be grateful to the moderating influence of the Soviet Union" upon China, says Monthly Review. Whether it is speaking of the capitalist world or the working class world here, the reader can judge by its additional statement:

"As compared to the Chinese, the Soviet position puts more emphasis on nations as actors on the world stage and less emphasis on classes."

MR's analysis of the differences between the Chinese and the Russians is inaccurate and faulty -- especially coming from authors who regard themselves as Marxists, for they failed to take into consideration the Marxist-Leninist definition of a nation from the point of view of its relation to the classes. "A nation," said Lenin, "is an instrument of a definite specific class."

All nations big and small, both oppressor and oppressed, are definite instruments of a given specific class. It is true that nations exist as independent entities, but to put more emphasis on nations without respect to whether this or that nation is an instrument of the bourgeois class or the working class, is to blur over and deny the significance of class antagonisms, which is one of the issues in dispute in the first place.

"DE-STALINIZATlON"

In addition to the dispute over the nature of imperialism, there is also what the bourgeois press refers to as "de-Stalinization."

For a long time now, the bourgeoisie has been bestowing accolades on Khrushchev for his ouster of old "Stalinists" and the process of "de-Stalinization." This chorus of applause ranges all the way from the semiofficial organ of the State Department, The New York Times, to their social democratic lackeys.

But while the so called "de-Stalinization" has found a welcome reception among the ruling classes, it has not found such a reception among the class-conscious Communists anywhere in the world. On the contrary, it has met with stubborn resistance. For what the bourgeoisie and its agents call "de-Stalinization," is in reality appeasement and capitulation to imperialism.

(The process of reviving socialist legality and enlarging the rights of the masses is a more or less independent process, not really related to what the bourgeoisie call "de-Stalinization." We hope to return to this theme at a later date.)

Where "de-Stalinization" has been approved by masses of party members in the world Communist movement, it is done so out of party loyalty, with little if any conviction that the line is correct.

One need not be an adherent of Stalin to realize that this "process of de-Stalinization" does not augur well to those who were looking forward to a genuine revival of Leninism following the death of Stalin. All who are interested in the history of Communism know by this time that Stalin has played a dual role in the movement. That while he defended the gains of the proletarian revolution, he also exterminated practically the entire generation of old Bolsheviks by his abuse of power and personal dictatorship.

WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY?

The revelation by Khrushchev and his collaborators, of some of the reactionary aspects of Stalin, has unfortunately not been done in a spirit calculated to revive genuine Leninist principles. But on the contrary, it has been carried out in the spirit of appeasing imperialism.

In an earlier article we expressed the hope that the political struggle within the Communist movement should not lead "to a rupture in the relationships between the Socialist states."

Now that this has happened, the responsibility for it must be put squarely on the shoulders of Khrushchev and his collaborators.

Sam Marcy on Albania Part 1.

China and Albania
The reemergence of Teng
July 26, 1977

From: Selected Works of Sam Marcy

As Enver Hoxha and the ideological line of Albania have a renewed interest among the online Marxist-Leninist community, I thought it would be of interest to re-post Sam Marcy's two articles on Albania. Enjoy. - Caleb T. Maupin

The reemergence of Teng Hsiao-ping to almost the same preeminent position he held in the party and government before he was purged comes almost as an anticlimactic event. In reality, the political beheading of Chiang Ching, Yao Wen-yuan, Chang Chun-chiao, Wang Hung-wen, and countless but unannounced hundreds of thousands of others signalled the triumph of the rightist opposition, led by Liu Shao-chi and Teng Hsiao-ping, over the Maoist policies and the revolutionary struggles of the Cultural Revolution of more than a decade.

Teng's reinstatement ends a cycle in the revolutionary development of China. It signifies that the Heroic Age of China's Revolution is over. indeed, it has probably been over for a longer period than had been previously believed.

The new era that is now unfolding in China is the age of the bourgeois pragmatists. But this does not at all mean that the bourgeoisie has been restored to power in China.

OVERTURN OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

This event confirms a historical trend to the right which in effect overturned and discredited the aims and objectives of the Cultural Revolution -- the revolution which was aimed at curbing bureaucratic excesses, at prohibiting enormous privileges and emoluments to the upper crust in Chinese society. The Cultural Revolution had combatted those enormous material incentives which tend to cultivate a class differentiation in the peasantry, the working class, and especially in the so-called managerial class, that stratum in Chinese society which holds such a central role in planning, management, administration, and the various fields of science, technology, and industrial know-how.

Undoubtedly much will be attributed to the personal traits of Teng, especially his cunning and his ability to survive during periods of revolutionary storms, to once again be reinstated after having been cast into purgatory twice during Mao's lifetime. But personal traits, important though they are in the political struggle, are not what is really decisive.

The basic point which accounts for his reemergence is that the counter-current, the current against the Cultural Revolution, proved in the final analysis to be predominant and overwhelmed the left opposition.

Neither Chiang Ching nor Yao Wen-yuan, certainly not Wang Hung-wen, the sole strong revolutionary leader who emerged from the Shanghai working class, and not even Chang Chun-chiao held any great sway in the planning and management sector of the economy -- which of course is very important in a socialist country. Nor did they enjoy much loyalty or adherence from this sector to the Maoist doctrine. Contrary to what Mao's detractors are now hinting, his doctrine did not seek to belittle the significance of technology in the construction of socialism, but to make the masses the ultimate historical instrument in shaping their own socialist destiny.

Teng's relation to Mao is best summed up in Mao's own commentary on Teng. "Teng Hsiao-ping is deaf [hard of hearing] but at meetings he would sit far away from me. In the six years since 1959 he has not reported to me about his work. He relies only on Peng Chen [former mayor of Peking and ally of the Liu-Teng faction] for the work of the secretariat." (Quoted by Edgar Snow in The Long Revolution, p. 83.)

According to Snow, the only one of the many writers friendly to the Chinese Revolution who had long and extensive interviews with Mao over a period of years, among the important items that Teng failed to report to Mao was the policy of "the extension of plots for private use and of free markets, the increase of small enterprises with sole responsibility for their own profits and losses, and the fixing of output quotas [in communes] based on the household [individual] enterprises." This line of political divergence from Mao clearly puts Teng in the role of the early "liberalizers" who were then in the ascendant in the Soviet Union.

It did not, in the Teng world outlook, mean any particular subservience to the Soviet Union or agreement to be a subordinate partner in a Sino-Soviet alliance, but a sharing of views on the evolution of the economy, its management and direction, and the role of the state in the distribution of the national income vis-a-vis the different strata of the population.

TENG AND THE 'EUROCOMMUNISTS'

It was only a bare two years ago that Teng in his capacity as Deputy Prime Minister visited Paris to launch a virtual crusade to unify and strengthen NATO against the "greatest danger," Soviet "social-imperialism." He was then rudely rebuffed by George Marchais, the leader of the French CP.

The incident is illustrative of how superficial appearances convey the impression of deep-seated differences in world outlook, which speedy developments soon tear to shreds. For the truth of the matter is that since 1975 the trends of social development make abundantly clear that the world outlook of Teng Hsiao-ping does not fundamentally differ from that of Marchais, Berlinguer, or Carrillo.

These leaders of so-called Eurocommunism are actually leaders of social reformism, promoting the cause of the preservation of the capitalist system in their respective imperialist countries which are in irreconcilable conflict with the Soviet Union as a workers' state and a new, progressive social order.

Teng represents the current Chinese version of what the Carrillos, Berlinguers, and Marchais' stand for in the way of renouncing and abandoning the revolutionary struggle for socialism. They are bound together, at last, by their lynch-pin of anti-Sovietism.

They differ in this fundamental respect: Whereas Teng is anchored to a workers' state in a period of profound political reaction, the Marchais-Berlmguer-Carrillo grouping are reformists tied to the working class movement in a period of deep capitalist decline and resurgent aggressive political reaction and imperialist pressure at home and abroad from the U.S. Teng's social reformism is reformism on the foundation of a workers' state. The social reformism of the Eurocommunists is reformism based on workers' movements in the imperialist countries.

Of course the whole kit and kaboodle of the theory of "social-imperialism" was introduced by Mao himself. It became the touchstone, as did the so-called "restoration of capitalism in the USSR" theory, of the struggle against the extension of Khrushchevite revisionism on the soil of the Chinese Revolution. In this fierce struggle the theory of "social-imperialism" and of the "restoration of capitalism in the USSR" was more of a highly excessive reaction against the domestic aspects of revisionism, of which Liu and Teng were the principal promoters, than a serious, sober appraisal of the class character of the USSR.

Nowhere did this play more of a role than in the relations between China and Albania. The fact that Teng's reinstatement comes almost simultaneously with what amounts to a virtual end in the fraternal relations between China and Albania is deeply ironic and significant.

ALBANIA AND MAOIST DOCTRINE

Albania was very important, not just as a socialist ally to China, but because it seemed to confirm and validate the Maoist doctrine as a world ideology. None of the other socialist countries, not Vietnam, nor Laos or Korea, embraced the Cultural Revolution, promoted it, or in any way regarded it as more than a national phenomenon confined to China. None of the other socialist countries embraced the false super-power theory and the doctrine of "social-imperialism."

Albania alone seemed to be the only follower of Mao among all the socialist countries. For that alone it was frequently and effusively praised.

The fraternal relations between Albania and China seemed to be of a model character -- what the relationship between a big socialist country and a small one ought to be. They demonstrated, seemingly, how solidarity in Marxist-Leninist ideology and correct socialist relations between fraternal parties with similar social structures could thrive and develop.

Now all this has apparently come to an end, almost at the same time as the reemergence of Teng.

It is not true, however, that ideological considerations were the only ones that moved the Albanian party leadership in the direction of China. A great deal of this ideological agreement stemmed from the original relationship between the Albanian Peoples Republic established in 1945, and Yugoslavia, which at the time held a preeminent position in Eastern Europe. Both Tito and the Yugoslav Revolution had attained tremendous prestige as a result of the victorious liberation struggle conducted against fascist aggression during the Second World War. But at the time of the split between Yugoslavia and the USSR, Albania was in a difficult position.

According to Yugoslav sources after the split, especially Djilas in his book Conversations with Stalin and Dedijer's book Tito, Stalin appeared to be urging Tito "to swallow up" Albania. There is no way to confirm this, as both the sources are extremely tendentious and Djilas is an out-and-out counter-revolutionary. But the existence of an Albanian ethnic minority in Yugoslavia under oppressive conditions, notwithstanding much-touted social achievements and material improvements by the Yugoslav authorities, has been an ever-present concern of the Albanian government and people.

It is possible that Albania as a Balkan state might have become part of a federation with Yugoslavia, or that Tito might have been interested in achieving such a federation. In the period right after World War II, he had expressed interest in forming a Balkan federation in East Europe, and even Dimitrov, the Bulgarian leader, lent support to it. The latter was immediately rebuked in a public statement by Pravda, which scotched the plan.

ALBANIA DIFFERED ON CZECHOSLOVAKIA

All this is important in viewing the later developments of the ideological struggle against Khrushchevite revisionism, especially since Albania and China had in reality differing appraisals of the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia. The Albanians had conducted a far more realistic and more accurate appraisal of the deepening of revisionist trends in Eastern Europe, which of course both China and Albania correctly held to be the responsibility of the so-called de-Stalinization efforts of the Khrushchev era in the first place.

But as the struggle between the two trends in Eastern Europe developed, particularly in Czechoslovakia, the Albanians stressed more the aspect that the Soviet leadership under Brezhnev was a continuation and deepening of the Khrushchev period and that the development of the "liberalizers" and the so-called Spring Thaw in Czechoslovakia demonstrated that the Soviet bureaucracy, which had introduced the deepening revisionist trend, was now incapable of arresting it. Their position clearly reflected the view that the Czechoslovak developments were reactionary and were leading to bourgeois counter-revolution similar to what had taken place in Hungary in 1956, and that the Soviet bureaucracy was either too cowardly or too helpless to do anything about it.

They wrote in the March 24, 1968, Zeri i Popullit, "The new Czech counter-revolutionaries resort to new and multilateral methods. They attach great importance to the complete taking into their hands of the internal situation, without neglecting foreign policy. Naturally, out of demagogy, they openly speak of friendship with the Soviet Union, in order to completely undermine it.

"Their principal aim is the liquidation of Novotny and of his clique which is for the Soviet revisionist leadership and the reduction of the relations with the Soviet Union to mere trade relations. In the van of the campaign for the liquidation of Novotny, for his exposure, his compromisation and, finally, for his removal were the Slovak nationalists and the anti-Czech chauvinists, also the old bourgeois intellectuals and the new revisionist intellectuals as well as the students and hooligans who came out and still come out in demonstrations.

"... it (the Dubcek clique) enjoys the guaranty of the West ... [and] the interests of world capitalism are visible in central Europe and Czechoslovakia is its epicenter."

Zeri i Popullit asks, "What will the Soviets do? Nothing, but take Novotny into their old people's home, if the revisionists permit it, and give him a villa like Rakosi."

It follows from their analysis that the intervention of the Warsaw Pact, which they had not expected, was no more than a defensive move against Czechoslovakia becoming the "epicenter of world capitalism," as they put it.

But in 1968, during the fierce struggle that had been unfolding against the Liu Shao-chi and Teng forces, any kind of indication that the USSR had moved in a progressive direction and was in reality taking a defensive move against capitalist restoration could only have weakened the Maoist struggle against the domestic right. Thus, a real contradiction developed in China and Albania's respective appraisals of trends in Eastern Europe and later for all of Europe.

CHINA, ALBANIA, AND YUGOSLAVIA

It did not serve Albania's interest to proclaim the intervention in Czechoslovakia as counter-revolutionary and as evidence of "social-imperialist" aggression. For one thing, Tito, who had taken an ambivalent position on the Hungarian intervention in 1956, in 1968 was aggressively anti-Soviet so far as the intervention went, and joined the chorus of Western imperialist denunciations. Moreover, he strengthened his armed forces and enlarged them, always regarded as a danger to Albania.

In the meantime, under the impetus of unleashing a barrage of "social-imperialist" propaganda about the Czech intervention and the "danger" it posed everywhere in Europe, the Chinese press forgot in the meantime that Yugoslavia had originally been cast by the Chinese press in the role of a "fascist" state which had consummated a bourgeois counter-revolution and restored capitalism. Indeed, China now began to cast flirtatious glances at Yugoslavia and showed regard for its "struggle for independence," which could not possibly have found a great deal of credibility in Tirana.

Nevertheless, the Albanian party, loyal in the general struggle against revisionism, dutifully followed along. But the split was inevitable when the Chinese press began more and more to highlight the "greater danger" from so-called social-imperialism and urged the Europeans to galvanize NATO. This imperialist alliance is clearly a danger to Albanian independence when one remembers that one of the anchors of the southern flank of NATO is Greece, Albania's next-door neighbor.

And it shows that Albania's most recent polemic against China should center on China's thesis on the "Third World" and the "nonaligned" movement when one considers that Tito is one of the big wheels in the "non-aligned" movement.

SETBACKS IN TRANSITION TO A NEW WORLD ORDER

Our epoch is in many ways similar to that long and protracted period of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In particular, our contemporary period bears strong resemblance to the Renaissance: a tremendous era of great hopes and new anticipations, but also an era of great disillusionment and disenchantment, and periods of passivity on the part of large masses of people who otherwise would be in convulsive mass action.

A period of transition from one social order to another, from a dying social system to a new world social order, is long and protracted and entails many acute contradictions, by the hopes it sets in motion, by the inevitable setbacks, and more often by the cynicism as well as corruption which it breeds, which leads bourgeois historians and commentators to come back to that old, old standby on the "essential character of Man" -- the inherent nature and fragility of the human species, so forth and so on.

But the reality of the situation is that in a protracted period when two worlds are in struggle and defeats are inflicted upon both sides of the divergent class systems, disillusionment and disenchantment by temporary setbacks are bound to bring to the surface precisely those negative social trends which are characteristic of the older, decadent order of society.

But this is of a purely temporary character, in the long run, no matter what the setbacks in the socialist countries, no matter what severe trials and tribulations the working class and the oppressed peoples may endure as a result of the defection of leaders and the succumbing of certain strata of the population to the class enemy, the ultimate result cannot be anything else but the socialist reorganization of the planet on the basis of serving human need.

Grover Furr on Stalin

Lenin's Lecture on the 1905 Revolution

From: Marxist Internet Archive

These words of Lenin are very important in light of recent events in Wisconsin, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere. It reflects on the role revolutionaries in uprisings.

My young friends and comrades,

Today is the twelfth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday”, which is rightly regarded as the beginning of the Russian revolution.

Thousands of workers—not Social-Democrats, but loyal God-fearing subjects—led by the priest Gapon, streamed from all parts of the capital to its centre, to the square in front of the Winter Palace, to submit a petition to the tsar. The workers carried icons. In a letter to the tsar, their then leader, Gapon, had guaranteed his personal safety and asked him to appear before the people.

Troops were called out. Uhlans and Cossacks attacked the crowd with drawn swords. They fired on the unarmed workers, who on their bended knees implored the Cossacks to allow them to go to the tsar. Over one thousand were killed and over two thousand wounded on that day, according to police reports. The indignation of the workers was indescribable.

Such is the general picture of January 22, 1905—“Bloody Sunday”.

That you may understand more clearly the historic significance of this event, I shall quote a few passages from the workers’ petition. It begins with the following words:

“We workers, inhabitants of St. Petersburg, have come to Thee. We are unfortunate, reviled slaves, weighed down by despotism and tyranny. Our patience exhausted, we ceased work and begged our masters to give us only that without which life is a torment. But this was refused; to the employers everything seemed unlawful. We are here, many thou sands of us. Like the whole of the Russian people, we have no human rights whatever. Owing to the deeds of Thy officials we have become slaves.”

The petition contains the following demands: amnesty, civil liberties, fair wages, gradual transfer of the land to the people, convocation of a constituent assembly on the basis of universal and equal suffrage. It ends with the following words:

“Sire, do not refuse aid to Thy people! Demolish the wall that separates Thee from Thy people. Order and promise that our requests will be granted, and Thou wilt make Russia happy; if not, we are ready to die on this very spot. We have only two roads: freedom and happiness, or the grave.”

Reading it now, this petition of uneducated, illiterate workers, led by a patriarchal priest, creates a strange impression. Involuntarily one compares this naïve petition with the present peace resolutions of the social-pacifists, the would-be socialists who in reality are bourgeois phrase-mongers. The unenlightened workers of pre-revolutionary Russia did not know that the tsar was the head of the ruling class, the class, namely, of big landowners, already bound by a thousand ties with the big bourgeoisie and prepared to defend their monopoly, privileges and profits by every means of violence. The social-pacifists of today, who pretend to be “highly educated” people—no joking—do not realise that it is just as foolish to expect a “democratic” peace from bourgeois governments that are waging an imperialist predatory war, as it was to believe that peaceful petitions would induce the bloody tsar to grant democratic reforms.

Nevertheless, there is a great difference between the two—the present-day social-pacifists are, to a large extent, hypocrites, who strive by gentle admonitions to divert the people from the revolutionary struggle, whereas the uneducated workers in pre-revolutionary Russia proved by their deeds that they were straightforward people awakened to political consciousness for the first time.

It is in this awakening of tremendous masses of the people to political consciousness and revolutionary struggle that the historic significance of January 22, 1905 lies.

“There is not yet a revolutionary people in Russia,” wrote Mr. Pyotr Struve, then leader of the Russian liberals and publisher abroad of an illegal, uncensored organ, two days before “Bloody Sunday”. The idea that an illiterate peasant country could produce a revolutionary people seemed utterly absurd to this “highly educated”, supercilious and extremely stupid leader of the bourgeois reformists. So deep was the conviction of the reformists of those days—as of the reformists of today—that, a real revolution was impossible!

Prior to January 22 (or January 9, old style), 1905, the revolutionary party of Russia consisted of a small group of people, and the reformists of those days (exactly like the reformists of today) derisively called us a “sect”. Several hundred revolutionary organisers, several thousand members of local organisations, half a dozen revolutionary papers appearing not more frequently than once a month, published mainly abroad and smuggled into Russia with incredible difficulty and at the cost of many sacrifices—such were the revolutionary parties in Russia, and the revolutionary Social-Democracy in particular, prior to January 22, 1905. This circumstance gave the narrow-minded and overbearing reformists formal justification for their claim that there was not yet a revolutionary people in Russia.

Within a few months, however, the picture changed completely. The hundreds of revolutionary Social-Democrats “suddenly” grew into thousands; the thousands became the leaders of between two arid three million proletarians. The proletarian struggle produced widespread ferment, often revolutionary movements among the peasant masses, fifty to a hundred million strong; the peasant movement had its reverberations in the army and led to soldiers’ revolts, to armed clashes between one section of the army and another. In this manner a colossal country, with a population of 130,000,000, went into the revolution; in this way, dormant Russia was transformed into a Russia of a revolutionary proletariat and a revolutionary people.

It is necessary to study this transformation, understand why it was possible, its methods and ways, so to speak.

The principal factor in this transformation was the mass strike. The peculiarity of the Russian revolution is that it was a bourgeois-democratic revolution in its social content, but a proletarian revolution in its methods of struggle. It was a bourgeois-democratic revolution since its immediate aim, which it could achieve directly and with its own forces, was a democratic republic, the eight-hour day and confiscation of the immense estates of the nobility—all the measures the French bourgeois revolution in 1792–93 had almost completely achieved.

At the same time, the Russian revolution was also a proletarian revolution, not only in the sense that the proletariat was the leading force, the vanguard of the movement, but also in the sense that a specifically proletarian weapon of struggle—the strike—was the principal means of bringing the masses into motion and the most characteristic phenomenon in the wave-like rise of decisive events.

The Russian revolution was the first, though certainly not the last, great revolution in history in which the mass political strike played an extraordinarily important part. It may even be said that the events of the Russian revolution and the sequence of its political forms cannot be understood without a study of the strike statistics to disclose the basis of these events and this sequence of forms.

I know perfectly well that dry statistics are hardly suit able in a lecture and are likely to bore the hearer. Nevertheless, I cannot refrain from quoting a few figures, in order that you may be able to appreciate the real objective basis of the whole movement. The average annual number of strikers in Russia during the ten years preceding the revolution was 43,000, which means 430,000 for the decade. In January 1905, the first month of the revolution, the number of strikers was 440,000. In other words, there were more strikers in one month than in the whole of the preceding decade!

In no capitalist country in the world, not even in the most advanced countries like England, the United States of America, or Germany, has there been anything to match the tremendous Russian strike movement of 1905. The total number of strikers was 2,800,000, more than two times the number of factory workers in the country! This, of course, does not prove that the urban factory workers of Russia were more educated, or stronger, or more adapted to the struggle than their brothers in Western Europe. The very opposite is true.

But it does show how great the dormant energy of the proletariat can be. It shows that in a revolutionary epoch—I say this without the slightest exaggeration, on the basis of the most accurate data of Russian history—the proletariat can generate fighting energy a hundred times greater than in ordinary, peaceful times. It shows that up to 1905 mankind did not yet know what a great, what a tremendous exertion of effort the proletariat is, and will be, capable of in a fight for really great aims, and one waged in a really revolutionary manner!

The history of the Russian revolution shows that it was the vanguard, the finest elements of the wage-workers, that fought with the greatest tenacity and the greatest devotion. The larger the mills and factories involved, the more stubborn were the strikes, and the more often did they recur during the year. The bigger the city, the more important was the part the proletariat played in the struggle. Three big cities, St. Petersburg, Riga and Warsaw, which have the largest and most class-conscious working-class element, show an immeasurably greater number of strikers, in relation to all workers, than any other city, and, of course, much greater than the rural districts.[1]

In Russia—as probably in other capitalist countries—the metalworkers represent the vanguard of the proletariat. In this connection we note the following instructive fact: taking all industries, the number of persons involved in strikes in 1905 was 160 per hundred workers employed, but in the metal industry the number was 320 per hundred! It is estimated that in consequence of the 1905 strikes every Russian factory worker lost an average of ten rubles in wages—approximately 26 francs at the pre-war rate of exchange—sacrificing this money, as it were, for the sake of the struggle. But if we take the metalworkers, we find that the loss in wages was three times as great! The finest elements of the working class marched in the forefront, giving leadership to the hesitant, rousing the dormant and encouraging the weak.

A distinctive feature was the manner in which economic strikes were interwoven with political strikes during the revolution. There can be no doubt that only this very close link-up of the two forms of strike gave the movement its great power. The broad masses of the exploited could not have been drawn into the revolutionary movement had they not been given daily examples of how the wage-workers in the various industries were forcing the capitalists to grant immediate, direct improvements in their conditions. This struggle imbued the masses of the Russian people with a new spirit. Only then did the old serf-ridden, sluggish, patriarchal, pious and obedient Russia cast out the old Adam; only then did the Russian people obtain a really democratic and really revolutionary education.

When the bourgeois gentry and their uncritical echoers, the social-reformists, talk priggishly about the “education” of the masses, they usually mean something schoolmasterly, pedantic, something that demoralises the masses and instils in them bourgeois prejudices.

The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will. That is why even reactionaries bad to admit that the year 1905, the year of struggle, the “mad year”, definitely buried patriarchal Russia.

Let us examine more closely the relation, in the 1905 strike struggles, between the metalworkers and the textile workers. The metalworkers are the best paid, the most class-conscious and best educated proletarians: the textile workers, who in 1905 were two and a half times more numerous than the metalworkers, are the most backward and the worst paid body of workers in Russia, and in very many cases have not yet definitely severed connections with their peasant kinsmen in the village. This brings us to a very important circumstance.

Throughout the whole of 1905, the metalworkers strikes show a preponderance of political over economic strikes, though this preponderance was far greater toward the end of the year than at the beginning. Among the textile workers, on the other hand, we observe an overwhelming preponderance of economic strikes at the beginning of 1905, and it is only at the end of the year that we get a preponderance of political strikes. From this it follows quite obviously that the economic struggle, the struggle for immediate and direct improvement of conditions, is alone capable of rousing the most backward strata of the exploited masses, gives them a real education and transforms them—during a revolutionary period—into an army of political fighters within the space of a few months.

Of course, for this to happen, it was necessary for the vanguard of the workers not to regard the class struggle as a struggle in the interests of a thin upper stratum—a conception the reformists all too often try to instil—but for the proletariat to come forward as the real vanguard of the majority of the exploited and draw that majority into the struggle, as was the case in Russia in 1905, and as must be, and certainly will be, the case in the impending proletarian revolution in Europe.[2]

The beginning of 1905 brought the first great wave of strikes that swept the entire country. As early as the spring of that year we see the rise of the first big, not only economic, but also political peasant movement in Russia. The importance of this historical turning-point will be appreciated if it is borne in mind that the Russian peasantry was liberated from the severest form of serfdom only in 1861, that the majority of the peasants are illiterate, that they live in indescribable poverty, oppressed by the landlords, deluded by the priests and isolated from each other by vast distances and an almost complete absence of roads.

Russia witnessed the first revolutionary movement against tsarism in 1825, a movement represented almost exclusively by noblemen. Thereafter and up to 1881, when Alexander II was assassinated by the terrorists, the movement was led by middle-class intellectuals. They displayed supreme self-sacrifice and astonished the whole world by the heroism of their terrorist methods of struggle. Their sacrifices were certainly not in vain. They doubtlessly contributed—directly or indirectly—to the subsequent revolutionary education of the Russian people. But they did not, and could not, achieve their immediate aim of generating a people’s revolution.

That was achieved only by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. Only the waves of mass strikes that swept over the whole country, strikes connected with the severe lessons of the imperialist Russo-Japanese War, roused the broad masses of peasants from their lethargy. The word “striker” acquired an entirely new meaning among the peasants: it signified a rebel, a revolutionary, a term previously expressed by the word “student”. But the “student” belonged to the middle class, to the “learned”, to the “gentry”, and was therefore alien to the people. The “striker”, on the other hand, was of the people; he belonged to the exploited class. Deported from St. Petersburg, he often returned to the village where he told his fellow-villagers of the conflagration which was spreading to all the cities and would destroy both the capitalists and the nobility. A new type appeared in the Russian village—the class-conscious young peasant. He associated with “strikers”, he read newspapers, he told the peasants about events in the cities, explained to his fellow-villagers the meaning of political demands, and urged them to fight the landowning nobility, the priests and the government officials.

The peasants would gather in groups to discuss their conditions, and gradually they were drawn into the struggle. Large crowds attacked the big estates, set fire to the manor-houses and appropriated supplies, seized grain and other foodstuffs, killed policemen and demanded transfer to the people of the huge estates.

In the spring of 1905, the peasant movement was only just beginning, involving only a minority, approximately one-seventh, of the uyezds.

But the combination of the proletarian mass strikes in the cities with the peasant movement in the rural areas was sufficient to shake the “firmest” and last prop of tsarism. I refer to the army.

There began a series of mutinies in the navy and the army. During the revolution, every fresh wave of strikes and of the peasant movement was accompanied by mutinies in all parts of Russia. The most well-known of these is the mutiny on the Black Sea cruiser Prince Potemkin, which was seized by the mutineers and took part in the revolution in Odessa. After the defeat of the revolution and unsuccessful attempts to seize other ports (Feodosia in the Crimea, for instance), it surrendered to the Rumanian authorities in Constantsa.

Permit me to relate in detail one small episode of the Black Sea mutiny in order to give you a concrete picture of events at the peak of the movement.

“Gatherings of revolutionary workers and sailors were being organised more and more frequently. Since servicemen were not allowed to attend workers’ meetings, large crowds of workers came to military meetings. They came in thousands. The idea of joint action found a lively response. Delegates were elected from the companies where political understanding among the men was higher.

“The military authorities thereupon decided to take action. Some of the officers tried to deliver ‘patriotic’ speeches at the meetings but failed dismally: the sailors, who were accustomed to debating, put their officers to shameful flight. In view of this, it was decided to prohibit meetings altogether. On the morning of November 24, 1905, a company of sailors, in full combat kit, was posted at the gates of the naval bar racks. Rear-Admiral Pisarevsky gave the order in a loud voice: ‘No one is to leave the barracks! Shoot anyone who disobeys!’ A sailor named Petrov, of the company that had been given that order, stepped forth from the ranks,load ed his rifle in the view of all,and with one shot killed Captain Stein of the Belostok Regiment, and with another wounded Rear-Admiral Pisarevsky. ‘Arrest him!’ one of the officers shouted. No one budged. Petrov threw down his rifle, exclaiming: ‘Why don’t you move? Take me!’ He was arrested. The sailors, who rushed from every side, angrily demanded his release, declaring that they vouched for him. Excitement ran high.

“‘Petrov, the shot was an accident, wasn’t it?’ asked one of the officers, trying to find a way out of the situation.

“‘What do you mean, an accident? I stepped forward, loaded and took aim. Is that an accident?’

“‘They demand your release....’

“And Petrov was released. The sailors, however, were not content with that; all officers on duty were arrested, disarmed, and locked up at headquarters.... Sailor delegates, about forty in number, conferred the whole night. The decision was to release the officers, but not to permit them to enter the barracks again.”

This small incident clearly shows you how events developed in most of the mutinies. The revolutionary ferment among the people could not but spread to the armed forces. It is indicative that the leaders of the movement came from those elements in the army and the navy who had been recruited mainly from among the industrial workers and of whom more technical training was required, for instance, the sappers. The broad masses, however, were still too naïve, their mood was too passive, too good-natured, too Christian. They flared up rather quickly; any instance of injustice, excessively harsh treatment by the officers, bad food, etc., could lead to revolt. But what they lacked was persistence, a clear perception of aim, a clear understanding that only the most vigorous continuation of the armed struggle, only a victory over all the military and civil authorities, only the overthrow of the government and the seizure of power throughout the country could guarantee the success of the revolution.

The broad masses of sailors and soldiers were easily roused to revolt. But with equal light-heartedness they foolishly released arrested officers. They allowed the officers to pacify them by promises and persuasion: in this way the officers gained precious time, brought in reinforcements, broke the strength of the rebels, and then followed the most brutal suppression of the movement and the execution of its leaders.

A comparison of these 1905 mutinies with the Decembrist uprising of 1825 is particularly interesting. In 1825 the leaders of the political movement were almost exclusively officers, and officers drawn from the nobility. They had become infected, through contact, with the democratic ideas of Europe during the Napoleonic wars. The mass of the soldiers, who at that time were still serfs, remained passive.

The history of 1905 presents a totally different picture. With few exceptions, the mood of the officers was either bourgeois-liberal, reformist, or frankly counter-revolutionary. The workers and peasants in military uniform were the soul of the mutinies. The movement spread to all sections of the people, and for the first time in Russia’s history involved the majority of the exploited. But what it lacked was, on the one hand, persistence and determination among the masses—they were too much afflicted with the malady of trustfulness—and, on the other, organisation of revolutionary Social-Democratic workers in military uniform—they lacked the ability to take the leadership into their own hands, march at the head of the revolutionary army and launch an offensive against the government.

I might remark, incidentally, that these two shortcomings will—more slowly, perhaps, than we would like, but surely—be eliminated not only by the general development of capitalism, but also by the present war...[3]

At any rate, the history of the Russian revolution, like the history of the Paris Commune of 1871, teaches us the incontrovertible lesson that militarism can never and under no circumstances be defeated and destroyed, except by a victorious struggle of one section of the national army against the other section. It is not sufficient simply to denounce, revile and “repudiate” militarism, to criticise and prove that it is harmful; it is foolish peacefully to refuse to perform military service. The task is to keep the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat tense and train its best elements, not only in a general way, hut concretely, so that when popular ferment reaches the highest pitch, they will put themselves at the head of the revolutionary army.

The day-to-day experience of any capitalist country teaches us the same lesson. Every “minor” crisis that such a country experiences discloses to us in miniature the elements, the rudiments, of the battles that will inevitably take place on a large scale during a big crisis. What else, for instance, is a strike if not a minor crisis of capitalist society? Was not the Prussian Minister for Internal Affairs, Herr von Puttkammer, right when he coined the famous phrase: “In every strike there lurks the hydra of revolution”? Does not the calling out of troops during strikes in all, even the most peaceful, the most “democratic”—save the mark—capitalist countries show how things will shape out in a really big crisis?

But to return to the history of the Russian revolution.

I have tried to show you how the workers’ strikes stirred up the whole country and the broadest, most backward strata of the exploited, how the peasant movement began, and how it was accompanied by mutiny in the armed forces.

The movement reached its zenith in the autumn of 1905. On August 19 (6), the tsar issued a manifesto on the introduction of popular representation. The so-called Bulygin Duma was to be created oil the basis of a suffrage embracing a ridiculously small number of voters, and this peculiar “parliament” was to have no legislative powers whatever, only advisory, consultative powers!

The bourgeoisie, the liberals, the opportunists were ready to grasp with both hands this “gift” of the frightened tsar. Like all reformists, our reformists of 1905 could not understand that historic situations arise when reforms, and particularly promises of reforms, pursue only one aim: to allay the unrest of the people, force the revolutionary class to cease, or at least slacken, its struggle.

The Russian revolutionary Social-Democracy was well aware of the real nature of this grant of an illusory constitution in August 1905. That is why, without a moment’s hesitation, it issued the slogans: “Down with the advisory Duma! Boycott the Duma! Down with the tsarist government! Continue the revolutionary struggle to overthrow it! Not the tsar, but a provisional revolutionary government must convene Russia’s first real, popular representative assembly!”

History proved that the revolutionary Social-Democrats were right, for the Bulygin Duma was never convened. It was swept away by the revolutionary storm before it could be convened. And this storm forced the tsar to promulgate a new electoral law, which provided for a considerable increase in the number of voters, and to recognise the legislative character of the Duma.[4]

October and December 1905 marked the highest point in the rising tide of the Russian revolution. All the well-springs of the people’s revolutionary strength flowed in a wider stream than ever before. The number of strikers—which in January 1905, as I have already told you, was 440,000—reached over half a million in October 1905 (in a single month!). To this number, which applies only to factory workers, must be added several hundred thousand railway workers, postal and telegraph employees, etc.

The general railway strike stopped all rail traffic and paralysed the power of the government in the most effective manner. The doors of the universities were flung wide open, and the lecture halls, which in peace time were used solely to befuddle youthful minds with pedantic professorial wisdom and to turn the students into docile servants of the bourgeoisie and tsarism, now became the scene of public meetings at which thousands of workers, artisans and office workers openly and freely discussed political issues.

Freedom of the press was won. The censorship was simply ignored. No publisher dared send the obligatory censor copy to the authorities, and the authorities did not dare take any measure against this. For the first time in Russian history, revolutionary newspapers appeared freely in St. Petersburg and other towns. In St. Petersburg alone, three Social-Democratic daily papers were published, with circulations ranging from 50,000 to 100,000.

The proletariat, marched at the head of the movement. It set out to win the eight-hour day by revolutionary action. “An Eight-Hour Day and Arms!” was the fighting slogan of the St. Petersburg proletariat. That the fate of the revolution could, and would, be decided only by armed struggle was becoming obvious to an ever-increasing mass of workers.

In the fire of battle, a peculiar mass organisation was formed, the famous Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, comprising delegates from all factories. In several cities these Soviets of Workers’ Deputies began more and more to play the part of a provisional revolutionary government, the part of organs and leaders of the uprising. Attempts were made to organise Soviets of Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Deputies and to combine them with the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.

For a time several cities in Russia became something in the nature of small local “republics”. The government authorities were deposed and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies actually functioned as the new government. Unfortunately, these periods were all too brief, the “victories” were too weak, too isolated.

The peasant movement in the autumn of 1905 reached still greater dimensions. Over one-third of all the uyezds were affected by the so-called “peasant disorders” and regular peasant uprisings. The peasants burned down no less than two thousand estates and distributed among themselves the food stocks of which the predatory nobility had robbed the people.

Unfortunately, this work was not thorough enough! Unfortunately, the peasants destroyed only one-fifteenth of the total number of landed estates, only one-fifteenth part of what they should have destroyed in order to wipe the shame of large feudal landownership from the face of the Russian earth. Unfortunately, the peasants were too scattered, too isolated from each other in their actions; they were not organised enough, not aggressive enough, and therein lies one of the fundamental reasons for the defeat of the revolution.

A movement for national liberation flared up among the oppressed peoples of Russia. Over one-half, almost three-fifths (to be exact, 57 per cent) of the population of Russia is subject to national oppression; they are not even free to use their native language, they are forcibly Russified. The Moslems, for instance, who number tens of millions, were quick to organise a Moslem League—this was a time of rapid growth of all manner of organisations.

The following instance will give the audience, particularly the youth, an example of how at that time the movement for national liberation in Russia rose in conjunction with the labour movement.

In December 1905, Polish children in hundreds of schools burned all Russian books, pictures and portraits of the tsar, and attacked and drove out the Russian teachers and their Russian schoolfellows, shouting: “Get out! Go back to Russia!” The Polish secondary school pupils put forward, among others, the following demands: (1) all secondary schools must be under the control of a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies; (2) joint pupils’ and workers’ meetings to be held in school premises; (3) secondary school pupils to be allowed to wear red blouses as a token of adherence to the future proletarian republic.

The higher the tide of the movement rose, the more vigorously and decisively did the reaction arm itself to fight the revolution. The Russian Revolution of 1905 confirmed the truth of what Karl Kautsky wrote in 1902 in his book Social Revolution (he was still, incidentally, a revolutionary Marxist and not, as at present, a champion of social-patriotism and opportunism). This is what he wrote:

“...The impending revolution ... will be less like a spontaneous uprising against the government and more like a protracted civil war.”

That is how it was, and undoubtedly that is how it will be in the coming European revolution!

Tsarism vented its hatred particularly upon the Jews. On the one hand, the Jews furnished a particularly high percentage (compared with the total Jewish population) of leaders of the revolutionary movement. And now, too, it should be noted to the credit of the Jews, they furnish a relatively high percentage of internationalists, compared with other nations. On the other hand, tsarism adroitly exploited the basest anti-Jewish prejudices of the most ignorant strata of the population in order to organise, if not to lead directly, pogroms—over 4,000 were killed and more than 10,000 mutilated in 100 towns. These atrocious massacres of peaceful Jews, their wives and children roused disgust throughout the civilised world. I have in mind, of course, the disgust of the truly democratic elements of the civilised world, and these are exclusively the socialist workers, the proletarians.

Even in the freest, even in the republican countries of Western Europe, the bourgeoisie manages very well to combine its hypocritical phrases about “Russian atrocities” with the most shameless financial transactions, particularly with financial support of tsarism and imperialist exploitation of Russia through export of capital, etc.

The climax of the 1905 Revolution came in the December uprising in Moscow. For nine days a small number of rebels, of organised and armed workers—there were not more than eight thousand—fought against the tsar’s government, which dared not trust the Moscow garrison. In fact, it had to keep it locked up, and was able to quell the rebellion only by bringing in the Semenovsky Regiment from St. Petersburg.

The bourgeoisie likes to describe the Moscow uprising as something artificial, and to treat it with ridicule. For instance, in German so-called “scientific” literature, Herr Professor Max Weber, in his lengthy survey of Russia’s political development, refers to the Moscow uprising as a “putsch”. “The Lenin group,” says this “highly learned” Herr Professor, “and a section of the Socialist-Revolutionaries had long prepared for this senseless uprising.”

To properly assess this piece of professorial wisdom of the cowardly bourgeoisie, one need only recall the strike statistics. In January 1905, only 123,000 were involved in purely political strikes, in October the figure was 330,000, and in December the maximum was reached—370,000 taking part in purely political strikes in a single month! Let us recall, too, the progress of the revolution, the peasant and soldier uprisings, and we shall see that the bourgeois “scientific” view of the December uprising is not only absurd. It is a subterfuge resorted to by the representatives of the cowardly bourgeoisie, which sees in the proletariat its most dangerous class enemy.

In reality, the inexorable trend of the Russian revolution was towards an armed, decisive battle between the tsarist government and the vanguard of the class-conscious proletariat.

I have already pointed out, in my previous remarks, wherein lay the weakness of the Russian revolution that led to its temporary defeat.

The suppression of the December uprising marked the beginning of the ebb of the revolution. But in this period, too, extremely interesting moments are to be observed. Suffice it to recall that twice the foremost militant elements of the working class tried to check the retreat of the revolution and to prepare a new offensive.

But my time has nearly expired, and I do not want to abuse the patience of my audience. I think, however, that I have outlined the most important aspects of the revolution—its class character, its driving forces and its methods of struggle—as fully as so big a subject can be dealt with in a brief lecture.[5]

A few brief remarks concerning the world significance of the Russian revolution.

Geographically, economically and historically, Russia belongs not only to Europe, but also to Asia. That is why the Russian revolution succeeded not only in finally awakening Europe’s biggest and most backward country and in creating a revolutionary people led by a revolutionary proletariat.

It achieved more than that. The Russian revolution engendered a movement throughout the whole of Asia. The revolutions in Turkey, Persia and China prove that the mighty uprising of 1905 left a deep imprint, and that its influence, expressed in the forward movement of hundreds and hundreds of millions, is ineradicable.

In an indirect way, the Russian revolution influenced also the countries of the West. One must not forget that news of the tsar’s constitutional manifesto, on reaching Vienna on October 30, 1905, played a decisive part in the final victory of universal suffrage in Austria.

A telegram bearing the news was placed on the speaker’s rostrum at the Congress of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party just as Comrade Ellenbogen—at that time he was not yet a social-patriot, but a comrade—was delivering his report on the political strike. The discussion was immediately adjourned. “Our place is in the streets!”—was the cry that resounded through the hall where the delegates of the Austrian Social-Democracy were assembled. And the following days witnessed the biggest street demonstrations in Vienna and barricades in Prague. The battle for universal suffrage in Austria was won.

We very often meet West-Europeans who talk of the Russian revolution as if events, the course and methods of struggle in that backward country have very little resemblance to West-European patterns, and, therefore, can hardly have any practical significance.

Nothing could be more erroneous.

The forms and occasions for the impending battles in the coming European revolution will doubtlessly differ in many respects from the forms of the Russian revolution.

Nevertheless, the Russian revolution—precisely because of its proletarian character, in that particular sense of which I have spoken—is the prologue to the coming European revolution. Undoubtedly, this coming revolution can only be a proletarian revolution, and in an oven more profound sense of the word: a proletarian, socialist revolution also in its content. This coming revolution will show to an even greater degree, on the one hand, 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.

We must not be deceived by the present grave-like stillness in Europe. Europe is pregnant with revolution. The monstrous horrors of the imperialist war, the suffering caused by the high cost of living everywhere engender a revolutionary mood; and the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie, and its servitors, the governments, are more and more moving into a blind alley from which they can never extricate themselves without tremendous upheavals.

Just as in Russia in 1905, a popular uprising against the tsarist government began under the leadership of the proletariat with the aim of achieving a democratic republic, so, in Europe, the coming years, precisely because of this predatory war, will lead to popular uprisings under the leadership of the proletariat against the power of finance capital, against the big banks, against the capitalists; and these upheavals cannot end otherwise than with the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, with the victory of socialism.

We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution. But I can, I believe, express the confident hope that the youth which is working so splendidly in the socialist movement of Switzerland, and of the whole world, will be fortunate enough not only to fight, but also to win, in the coming proletarian revolution.