Did anyone even bother bring up that while NYU and Columbia are UNTAXED by the city of NY [and gigantic landlords], CUNY tuition climbs and that CUNY had managed to remain tuition-free during the Great Depression?

Here’s where the formlessness, the “autonomy” of OWS like actions really falls apart.

Nobody knows why the fuck they are doing anything.

“To be clear… we are NOT against transitional demands. But we do believe that such demands – even where we ask the existing order to grant some things – must enhance the struggle for greater autonomy of ordinary people and not be merely illusions.
When people struggle for transitional demands, instead of lobby for them by relying on electoral politics… the demands should clarify what social classes leads the mass democratic struggle. Transitional demands must be economic gains but also an expansion of the power to directly govern of the working people, mothers, the wageless and unemployed.
“…it is crucial to distinguish between participatory democracy grafted on to a republic…and direct democracy where no professional governing classes have claims to legitimacy and are abolished. But their abolition will only be real if ordinary people in their councils and assemblies not merely protest but conduct themselves as if they have perspectives and proposals of their own and are prepared to carry them out (we might call this an enlarged concept of citizenship).
“…As we begin to formulate transitional demands that underscore disproportionate unemployment, police brutality and incarceration of people of color – and make these demands on Mayor Kasim Reed’s government – we should also do something else.
An excellent transitional demand should be to call on the NAACP, SCLC, and Rainbow Push and its leadership to divest from Big Business sponsorship – if we want to get Big Business out of politics, why not prioritize getting Big Business out of freedom movement politics?
…When is OA going to tap into the true Black radical tradition in Atlanta?…
An Occupy Atlanta movement that is not bogged down by white guilt, and the opportunistic Black middle class it serves, will make transitional proposals, that recognized African Americans as having the dominant role from above and below, in Atlanta city politics. A Direct Democratic United Front in Atlanta cannot include both Black capitalists and Black workers (just as it cannot include both the masters and servants of any people).”

I hope it will be of some use. I would like to address one concern I see in your argument, however. I think the point I was trying to get across is that any extension of demands which, while have been at best resistant to co-optation into the capitalist system, necessarily means the end of the Occupy movement. The union form is already enmeshed in capitalist social relations, and although that does not preclude that some sort of struggle take place within them, workers know that such limited struggles are limited by the unions themselves in addition to the capitalists. In light of capitalist decadence, I see really no worker struggle pushing forward any union (be it the IWW or something else), but rather having to go outside it as we’ve already seen in the events in Egypt and in Wisconsin. You can place as many demands on an ever-growing list, but no amount of calls for a general strike or the abolition of wage labor will make people confront the issue of production.

Best,

KA

a) the need for an alternative program

and

b) the racial question

Regarding a), I liked this:

“They don’t understand that you don’t get the loyalty of the masses by telling them what they already know at their most conservative. The OA spokespeople never made a press statement asking people in their workplaces and neighborhoods to take matters into their own hands where they labored and lived.”

Regarding b), this was a particularly succinct statement:

“The Oakland events, especially the turn to the Port and dockworkers (however few as a result of containerization) we think pointed the way forward. But what we are fighting in Atlanta is not fear of Jim Crow police but the inability to confront soundly the Black police and Black corporate political establishment. ”

This brings a) and b) together:

“Neither group condemned the President or Mayor who were people of color Democrats. No local demands were made on the Black led city government.”

The alternative program that you describe is kind of vague – worker/community self-management through councils. This program would seem to circumvent the whole aspect of politics that engages the status quo, and instead focus exclusively on creating dual power. Yet the quote above about local demands suggests that you may be open to certain reforms as a legitimate component of the overall strategy.

In my personal opinion, we need the right mix of both challenging the establishment for the right reforms AND (mainly) building the bases that evolve into true dual power institutions. Its hard to do both without falling off some kind of slippery slope, but I think this is the challenge at hand.

Towards the beginning of this piece, you state:

“The goal of the 99% Declaration is to have a national convention of delegates which passes a program of transitional demands palatable to, but slightly to the left of, Obama, such as healthcare by a single payer system and restoration of Glass-Steagall—laws which assume the capitalist state can regulate Big Business.”

Are you critical of the idea of transitional demands in general, or just these particular demands (which don’t seem to fit in the category of “transitional” to me, but maybe thats a semantic misunderstanding).

What are the demands you elude to that might be made on these governments? How would these be different from the “transitional” demands you criticized at the top of your article?

Thank you for a very concise, honest, and hard-hitting piece.

Solidarity from Oakland!

The demands have to be something other than “honor the original contract” or “No to union on union scabbing”:

What can be developed as social demands?

JG.

JG

Workers in Wisconsin and across the nation are at a cross roads. Either we continue down the road of dependence on the Democratic Party, political lobbyists, court-rulings and reliance on union leaders, who offer concessions instead of fight, who tell us to: “share the pain” instead of taking actions designed to make the capitalists pay for their crisis; or, we open a new road of working class independent action to make the bosses pay!

The Democrats and union tops will have us “put down the placards and pick up the clipboards” they intend to channel the masses energy off the streets and into the electoral arena and courts. A recall campaign will be coupled with mobilization for Democratic candidates and a demoralizing wait for court cases to be adjudicated. This is a dead end strategy which leaves resolution of the crisis in the hands of the capitalist’s institutions and capitalist politicians. For a solution to the crisis in favor of the working class a strategy of self activity and political independence is required.

The outcome of this struggle is decisive for the entire working class. Either the workers’ movement will prevail, and based on this victory a sense of revitalization will swell the ranks of labor with a new spirit to turn the tide, or the capitalists will be victorious, and will take their campaign from state to state and pick the unions to the bone, crushing the working class. For big capital, this is a nationwide attack; for the working class, the response must be nationwide as well. The Democrats could not even deliver the Employee Free Choice Act no way can they protect our right to collective bargaining.

Break with the Democrats:
To resolve the economic and political crisis in the interest of the working class we must organize from the bottom up (factory/office/job-site committees), we need to develop new leaders who will prepare for general strikes. As a recall campaign is already underway we need to reject the Democrats who expect our support and instead run independent labor candidates, build working class political independence and lay the foundation for a fighting workers’/labor party.

The old strategy is one of class collaboration between labor and the Democrats have long tied the American worker to the imperialist project, pitting the American workers against the workers of the world. Labor allied with the Democrats has, for over a century, endorsed imperialist interventions supported and planned on a bi-partisan basis by Wall Street politicians who took labor for granted, promised us crumbs while militarily plundering and exploiting the resources of the world. An alternative strategy which breaks the stranglehold of class collaboration, identifies that workers’ interests are not the same as Wall Streets’ and opens the road to international workers’ solidarity joint actions.
Our task: to exploit the cracks in consciousness
The consciousness of the working class in America is changing under the pressure of deteriorating material conditions. Old prejudices and illusions in the American dream are daily being crushed under the weight of unfulfilled expectations. Workers are starting to question the efficacy of the strategy and tactics of the current crop of labor fakers. As workers find that their dependence on the Democrats, even coupled with daily protests, candle light vigils and pajama parties in the Capitol Rotunda, have not produced the desired results, they will be looking for working solutions.

The general strike and a system of transitional demands is our answer; with it we fight for control of the work and the workplace, as the bosses have shown they are no longer capable either of administering the work process, or of guaranteeing the product – which, in the case of public work, is providing services (education, health & safety, roads, transit, home care etc.) to the people. WE DO THE WORK! WE SHOULD CONTROL IT!

Advocacy for a general strike, today, exposes the incapability of the existing union leaderships to guide the working class to victory. The call for the general strike puts them on notice that we know they do not have a strategy or tactics that can resolve the crisis in the interest of the working class. Our strategy is to take every step with the masses toward greater and greater self expression of the historic interest of the working class. The tactics we use must rely on workers’ self organization, united front action, and the international workers solidarity needed to win. The emergence of a general strike poses the question of which class should run society: the capitalists or the workers. As the crisis becomes more acute and it becomes apparent that capital can not resolve the crisis.

Confronting old limitations and roadblocks
The path to victory in Wisconsin is via general strike, but we must not ignore what it will take to win. In order to win, ties to the Democrats and the entrenched labor fakers need to be broken. A new militant rank and file leadership committed to class struggle methods and class independence must be forged, must fight for and win leadership. Without ousting the bureaucracy and reclaiming the unions as democratic unions run by the most militant workers, the general strike will flounder and be smashed.
All the hurdles in the way need to be consciously considered by mass assemblies of workers and popular forums, run on the principles of workers’ democracy. The task at hand is to convene and turn solidarity actions into popular/worker/labor assemblies that meet everywhere to plan and prepare for a nationwide indefinite general strike. Local assemblies should delegate strike committees of the activists in the ranks to go to all worksites to organize meetings, help establish rank-and-file committees, caucuses, and networks, and enlist support for the strike to build locally and regionally before setting the date for the big one. Our strategy is workers’ self-activity and solidarity! Such organizational developments are the very foundational organizations needed for the formation of a workers’ government that can administer the economy in the common interests of the masses. The union busters have not hesitated to use their ‘nuclear option.’ We workers must not hesitate to use ours! Solidarity Forever!

HUMANIST WORKERS FOR REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM
e-mail: hw4rs@yahoo.com
March 2011 Labor Donated

I noticed a tension between the program offered in this article and the one offered in Garvey’s excellent “Rethinking Educational Failure” in the same issue. Here, Goldner calls for “universal outreach” among various sectors of the U.S. working class, including racialized sectors. From this I gather that Black, Latino, and white workers (among others), need to reach out to each other so that they might be forged into a class-for-itself. In Garvey’s article, he insists that teachers under attack in Wisconsin and elsewhere need to express solidarity with the communities they teach in (particularly Black communities), before they can or should expect to be supported by these communities when they themselves are under attack by tools such as Wisconsin’s Governor Walker.

These programs appear similar, but they are not. Garvey suggests something much more profound than white workers reaching out to Black and Latino workers, for example. He seems to argue that public sector workers (teachers, prison guards, cops, etc.) must take responsibility for their own role in reproducing racial inequalities in education, incarceration, and police brutality (among other public sector functions)–by which I take him to mean they must work to abolish them. Further, he seems to suggest that addressing these inequalities is a _precondition_ for racial alliances among the working class.

This seems much harder than universal outreach. It also seems like there is no such program in the works among the left in Wisconsin, or elsewhere. Yet it also seems desperately necessary.

Am I right to read this tension? Perhaps this is related to the “sharp debate” within the editorial board on this matter.

Thanks again for this issue of IN.

The concept is simple enough: a logical ordering of programmatic points that indicate the practical path from the minimum to the maximum program. That’s it, really. So, for example in the U.S., a program should begin by addressing the reality of the international migrant workers, mostly Mexican, presently contained in the political form of the immigrant rights movement. Through its various semi-legal and legal gradations as “Latino”, this sector forms a crucial part of the North American proletariat.

It should also be noted that the U.S. radical right continuously insists upon impaling itself on this “Latino bogeyman”. In the recent mid-term U.S. elections the key electoral defeats of the radical right were experienced by the most “Latino bashing” campaigns, notably in Nevada and Colorado, where that POS Reid had his derriere saved by the “Latino vote”. (We should also note in aside the failure of Silicon Valley capitalists to seize the key nodes of the state apparatus in California, the Governorship and the U.S. Senate). That tells us something else: the Democratic Party arm of the electoral state apparatus anxiously seeks to integrate a privileged sector of this population under its political circus tent.

It should also tell us that the program must address the electoral system as another “immediate reality” to be transitioned beyond. Yes, U.S. elections are the most banal of subjects, but some programmatic address must be made, even if only to advocate complete abstention (which in effect the program does by its complete absence). My own approach is “negative intervention” for the purpose of 1) disruption of the state apparatus and 2) propaganda platform. Nothing should be novel here, except that it has never really been done in the U.S.

Otherwise, good start!

Most factory workers however do not use the Internet and surfing is primarily restricted to office employees with at least a secondary school diploma. That said, lawyers are a rising force in Chinese society and government is still figuring out how to adjust to this, particularly at provincial, county and city level.

—Towards Goldner’s statement, ” As capital turned inward on itself, the self-cannibalization of its social reproductive base since the late 1970s was echoed with eerie concision in the self-cannibalization of its once-emancipatory culture in the ideological Ebola virus spread by the post-modern nihilists and deconstructionists, the Foucaults, the Saids and the Derridas. As Marx said long ago, “the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.”

As an admirer of Foucault, Edward Said, and Derrida, I certainly would muddy the simple minded view of their relationship with the ruling elites. How is Foucault a part of the ruling elite in anyway? The most conservative is Derrida. He may have ended up a social democrat and an atheist/jewish mystic, but is he really to be dismissed without regard to his specific ideas. The late Said also ended becoming a liberal within the PLO, but so what. Said still pushed forward some brilliant criticism of the creation of colonial and post-colonial subject.

I would also add that non and post Marxist thinkers, like Deleuze, Laclau and Mouffee, Zizek, Negri, Badiou, Ranciere, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, V. Shiva, et al. certainly give me more inspiration than what is left of the old Marxian/anarchist paradigms.

But let us be like our caricature of the old left dismissing new and creative ideas.

Connecting together my thoughts on Angelo and Goldner is also my concerns about Insurgent notes dismissal of identity politics and any form of nationalism. Is not it time for a synthesis of class with race, ethnicity, sex, gender, preference and other forms of identity? If not a synthesis, how apart a constellation where we may focus on class in one moment, but pause to think apart queer and racial politics?

While revolution in itself is a negation – by definition – of what previously existed, negation is not the same as rejection. Reject nationalism all you want – the important thing is to negate it, and history shows this is not achieved by rejection; in fact, the rejection of nationalism has only led to its resurgence in more rabid and successful forms afterward (ie Nazi Germany, Eastern Europe, Islamism, Zionism, etc). It is better, practically, to provide a framework for negation, than to outright reject.

Likewise, a critique of identity politics that merely rejects it with empty declarations of class solidarity, but will not dare to explore the material basis of the existence of privilege not aligned with class that has concrete effects on class politics is theoretical poverty and practical abstention – or worse – practical exercise of these privileges in an oppressive fashion.

A critique of anti-imperialist forms that assume the support of States rather than peoples cannot become anti-anti-imperialism without becoming imperialist in discourse and practice. Or social-imperialist if you will. Just as Polish workers rejected the Bolsheviks early on, one can both reject facile, reactionary nationalism, and understand the need for national self-determination as an integral part of the process of class self-determination. Chavez’s State is not the same, qualitatively and quantitatively, as Obama’s and to treat them as the same is theoretical lazyness at the level of those who hide behind this fact to provide unconditional defense of Chavez.

Lastly, I cannot help but view this as yet another sectarian, shibboleth pseudo-academic study group that will do nothing to organize real people, with real tasks, that have any real political impact. Too bad, because some of the things said here are indeed important.

I can also say from first hand experience that SEIU does the same thing here in Baltimore: rely on lobbying politicians and getting them to intercede legislatively for the health care industry. This happened over a hospital bankruptcy in Prince Georges County a few years back. The SEIU shop stewards I knew all saw their union’s role as that: lobbying for beneficial legislation, not mobilizing membership or reaching out to the general public, even as a traditional union may have routinely done a couple decades ago.

This raises my final point, which I haven’t really seen adequately addressed: discussion of unions in the U.S. inevitably focus on numbers and growth but not on questions of what it means to be a union activist today. A couple generations ago and even before, to be a union activist involved dedication and commitment to a larger “cause.” Today, that sensibility has almost totally disappeared and the relationship between union member and union is almost inevitably that of client and service provider. This decline in subjectivity has many causes, including those promoted by the conservative left, but it’s a subject largely not acknowledged in discussion of the labor movement.

In evidence, Mao shielded Zhou Enlai who in turn shielded Deng Xiaoping from anything much worse than wearing a dunce cap when, for being a master bridge player, he ought to have qualified for the worst. Meanwhile, Liu Qhaoqi, Peng Dahuai and other generals were jailed and left to die. Indeed, those who suffered most from the Cultural Revolution were coincidentally those who suffered most FOR the establishment of the PRC. And they were also those who would have opposed most fiercely any gearshift back into a market economy.

For the gearshift to become possible, Communism itself had to be discredited first and what better way to do it than to hand power and book of rules to a bunch of boy scouts with no life experience? Of course their egos went overboard! They were supposed to!

But of course, it is so much easier to assume Mao was a beastie.

How easy do you think it is for a middle-class farm kid with no special connections to found a movement that successfully fights (1) a civil war, (2) a foreign invader of substance and (3) establishes truly domestic rule over a nation of 400 million people, along with the political and economic independence that entails?

Who else in history compares?

Speaking of the left communist book of the ICC, I wrote, I read something “in their.” That’s the wrong spelling of “their.” It should have read, “in there.”

I enjoyed your article.

But what constantly ran through my head as I read it was, well, yes, I’m politically schizophrenic between traditional Leninist-Trotskyist communism with its principle, “The crisis of humankind can be reduced in the final analysis to the crisis of proletarian leadership,” more or less as comrade Trotsky put it in 1938 in The Transitional Programme — and, on the other hand, left communism of the sort espoused by you, this on-line publication, Insurgent Notes, other left-communist types of organizations like the Internationalist Communist Tendency, International Communist Current, and, more traditionally and older, the International Communist Party (“Bordigists”).

But what I never see in the latter groups (with, perhaps, the exception of the Bordigists, i.e., the hardline Bordigists of the International Communist Party) is some conception that to make that final assault against capital of which you speak succeed, mobilization is objectively necessary, and since mobilization is objectively necessary, there’s got to be a revolutionary party — as Trotsky put it, a revolutionary leadership — doing the mobilizing. I mean, after all, even left communists call the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution a workers’ revolution (most, at any rate; I realize Paul Mattick concluded eventually that it was a kind of non-proletarian revolution, although reading all the history of the Bolshevik Revolution I’ve read, I can’t to this day comprehend how comrade Mattick concluded that), and a fair reading of the history of that world-shaking event shows there was a Military Revolutionary Committee in the Petrograd Soviet led by a fellow named Leon Trotsky and that they on the significant night of November 7-8, 1917 (October 25-26, 1917 by the old Julian calendar still in effect when the Bolsheviks took the power that night) that Military Revolutionary Committee and particularly comrade Trotsky did, like it or not, have to issue instructions to take over the various offices like the banks, police stations, telegraph office, etc., and then finally an order for the arrest of the old provisional government was issued and a Bolshevik-led squad of revolutionary workers and soldiers did the deed.

It’s certainly right to say that the lead-up to that titanic event was the preparations of about 6 or 8 months. But someone did the preparations. Who? Well, there was this entity called, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party-Bolshevik, and more specifically, before the return of the key guy who built that party, their own central leaders right after the March 1917 toppling of tsarism (February by the Julian calendar) were still following the Menshevik line of “critical support” to the bourgeois liberal government of the capitalists, and saying that in the elected soviets. Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others were saying this line.

When comrade Lenin got back from exile, he was pretty pissed off about this, and a month of national congresses and arguments and debates ensued in the Bolsheviks over the line they were taking, and comrade Lenin knew damned well when he was already going public right at the moment of his return with what has gone down in history with his April Theses so that he read them not just to a closed Bolshevik conference but to a joint open conference of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks — Lenin knew damned well he was breaking formal Bolshevik party discipline. And he did it anyway. Why? Because he was saying in effect to his party leadership who were still following the old “critical support” line to the bourgeois liberal government, “This is a sufficiently world-shaking moment to make a political split, and if you guys don’t go with the flow of proletarian anger and rage that’s out there, I will go to the proletarian ranks and mobilize them against you and for a second revolution.” That’s what in effect he was saying. And that month of struggles in the party ensuing after he returned did, indeed, show that that massive proletarian-soldier-sailor-peasant-farm laborer anger was out there and that corresponded not with the “critical-support-to-the-bourgeois-liberal” line of the right-wing and center wing of the Bolsheviks, nor of the Mensheviks, but to the left-wing “for-a-second-proletarian-revolution” line of Lenin.

And like it or not, that’s called revolutionary leadership.

So in a way, I read all this stuff, and think, okay, how to make this next assault you want succeed against capital?

And I still am compelled in some form to return to comrade Trotsky’s conception that the crisis of global humankind reduces itself in the final analysis to the crisis of proletarian leadership.

Now, you did something kind and good for me. You gave me information about comrade Gabriel Miasnikov. And I’d not known squat about him till you told me what happened to him.

Subsequently, I read the left communist book published by the International Communist Current, The Russian Communist Left, and read more about him published in their by the ICC’s late supporter, comrade Ian Hebbes, who got ahold of some actual archives and documents of comrade Miasnikov. And you in effect said to me something that did make a dent on my sometimes thick skull. You in effect said, what was the justification for what happened to Miasnikov, and while the Lenin-Trotsky regime were still in existence at that? And that’s a good question. That sort of goes to the heart of communist morality and communist ethics, I guess.

But then, I’m compelled to think back on what some other communists, the late comrade Isaac Deutscher, the late comrade Victor Serge, wrote in some of their books about what happens to intransigently honest revolutionary regimes, and more historically specifically, what happened to the intransigently honest people in the Bolshevik leadership during the course of the era of the revolutionary proletarian communist phase of the regime in Russia, which I date typically as 1917-1923 (that’s probably more a Trotskyist or crypto-Trotskyist dating than it is a left-communist dating; I suspect left communists would probably date the proletarian communist phase of the regime as being more like 1917-1920 or 1917-1921, or in some really extreme cases, 1917-1918). I don’t think Serge and Deutscher were dishonest. I think they were trying to explain what happened in the case of the original Bolshevik regime to honest revolutionary men and women when they were put into intolerable conditions. I mean, their country, a new revolutionary Soviet republic, was invaded by 14 capitalist armed forces. Were they supposed to take that lying down, or were they supposed to fight back? They decided, we’ll fight back, and they appointed comrade Trotsky to organize the Red Army to do that.

Now the argument can be made, here was in embryo some sense of the later Stalinization of the regime, because the Soviet Red Army organized by Trotsky certainly had internal discipline, and some of the traditional elements of a traditional armed force, a stratified armed force.

But do you and other left-communists honestly think Cromwell’s New Model Army in England, for instance, that smashed the last remnants of feudal obligations in England, or that the French Revolutionary armed forces of 1792-1794, the embryo of the later armed force of Napoleon, which, however, in the heady French Revolutionary days of 1792-1794, the most plebeian democratic days of the French Revolution, did not have some kinds of internal discipline and organization? They did.

Now, of course, they were, indeed, not only revolutionary and formally democratic, but also bourgeois in the sense that the objective historical tasks imposed on them were bourgeois tasks. I could have added a third instance, the Union army of Lincoln. That was a socially revolutionary armed force, especially from 1862 on, but again, it was organized from the top down. Should Lincoln have said to the slaveholders’ rebellion, “Oh, we agree with your philosophy of decentralization sufficiently to set up our own armed force in a decentralized fashion, because we’re nice people”? I trust if he’d done that, slavery would not have been overthrown.

Now, of course, in the aftermath of all 3 of these bourgeois revolutions, counter-revolutions set in. Cromwell became one of the earliest oppressors of the Irish people. The overthrow of the Jacobins in 1794 was followed by events which eventually culminated in Napoleon becoming in 1804 emperor of France. And after Lincoln was murdered in 1865, a full-scale counter-revolution against black people in the American South set right in, orchestrated at least in part by Lincoln’s own former vice-president, turned president, Andrew Johnson, at first, then there was the Radical Republican phase of attempted re-imposition on the South of a racially integrated plebeian dictatorship to smash the racist counter-revolutionaries, but then, the Northern bourgeois cut the fatal deal with the Southern white former plantation owners now aspiring to be Southern capitalist employers, and the federal occupying troops were withdrawn from the Southern states in 1877 to be sent to crush a labor strike that same year. That symbolized the fact American bourgeois capitalist rule had in some substantive sense ended its historical phase of being “progressive” in the sense that in capitalist crises in the so-called “progressive” phases, the wiping out of capital values at least leads to a basis for new qualitative leaps ahead, but in the period from 1877 on, wiping out of capital values in economic crises in the U.S. no longer meant that. (We could, I suppose, haggle over this last issue, and some might suggest it would be better to date this a bit later, say in 1901 or thereabouts, and I’m open-minded on that score; the robber barons, at least, still built something, unlike today’s capitalists who build nothing.).

But again, all these “betrayed revolutions” (using the phrase from Trotsky’s great 1936-1937 book, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?) were bourgeois revolutions. So betrayal was more or less in the cards and organic, as I see it.

But the Bolsheviks took a gamble in 1917, and Lenin and his colleagues knew it was a gamble. What were they gambling on?

They were gambling on the success of the world socialist revolution; that’s what they were gambling on.

And that gamble didn’t really pay off, eventually. It started to. But for different reasons, the only non-private-capitalist-based state left standing after the 1917-1923 revolutionary wave (and I notice you used the years 1917-1921, and again, I’m not sure if that’s calculated in your case or just that you had some differences over viewing, say, the attempted German proletarian insurgency in 1923 as part of that revolutionary wave) remained, the Soviet state.

And what Serge and Deutscher in their writings were saying was not, in my view, whitewashing the earlier forms of authoritarianism of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolshevik regime in the era of Lenin and Trotsky. Rather, Serge and Deutscher were trying to grapple with the actual factual and actual historical moment in which Lenin and Trotsky acted, and Serge and Deutscher were trying to make the rest of us see things how Lenin and Trotsky saw things.

I don’t think Serge and Deutscher, let alone Lenin and Trotsky, were amoral people immune to the concerns of communist internationalist egalitarian morality and communist internationalist egalitarian ethics. But I think they were in pretty damned intolerable conditions. And given that, there really wasn’t much else they could do, as they saw it.

Deutscher in his amazing 3-volume bio. of Trotsky (and I read that 3-volume bio. twice) said in, I believe it was volume 2, “The Prophet Unarmed,” that the Bolshevik leadership themselves first got entangled in the intricacies and threads of the growing authoritarian corruption of the new Soviet bureaucratizing state, but then, one by one, different Bolsheviks tried each in his or her own way, to disentangle himself or herself, and begin to struggle against the counter-revolution setting in in the new society. I am saying this from memory, not because I have “The Prophet Unarmed” in front of me, Loren. But I remember reading that and thinking seriously over it a lot, so it’s pretty much kind of what Deutscher said. And I think that’s a fair way of putting it.

I think that in the context of the conditions the Soviet state operated in in 1917-1923, it’s at least comprehensible why bad things happened to good people, including bad things to good people like Gabriel Miasnikov. I think it’s comprehensible why Trotsky was inculpated in that. I don’t think Trotsky’s inculpation in that is “good” from some abstract standard of morality. But communists are materialists and view morality as following from material conditions. Historical specificity is key in how communists look at how to arrive at what we must do. So in 1922 or 1923, I think some of the actions taken by Trotsky, and earlier, Lenin (before he was severely incapacitated by strokes) were at least comprehensible, even if we can view them with historical hindsight as being unfortunate.

The key thing in 1917 was, the Bolsheviks gambled on the world revolution taking their new state out of international isolation. I think that was the main gamble they made. When Trotsky finally awakened after first waffling when Lenin tried to get Trotsky to forge a bloc with Lenin in 1922 against Stalin, Trotsky fought the rest of his life for the world socialist revolution as the key programmatic element in his program which, were it to materialize, could take the Soviet state out of its isolation and, in so doing, undermine the bureaucratization and authoritarianism of the new society by creating the material foundations for material aid to the new Soviet state. The Bolsheviks were Marxist materialists, and they looked at their revolution in terms of its eventually getting aid from some richer and more well-heeled revolutionary proletarian government or revolutionary proletarian state, and they particularly focused on Germany for a number of diverse reasons I won’t enter into here. For different reasons, their hopes were dashed. The German Revolution in 1919 was smashed by the counter-revolution; the same thing happened in 1923 in Germany. There were efforts at forming a soviet in Seattle, Washington, but the American working class has historically been afflicted in our consciousness by this severe contradiction between on the one hand a willingness to enter into violent class conflict and violent class action in opposition to the capitalist bosses simultaneously with a kind of crypto-anarchic crypto-individualistic aversion to going beyond the bounds of pure-and-simple trade unionist militancy. I think a big part of that has a lot to do with the skin color question in America being a cutting issue that’s divided labor and kept labor from forging its own united class party independent of and apart from the capitalists. But in 1917-1923, even that Seattle soviet was only pretty brief, about a week or so my memory tells me (and I acknowledge that at my age, my memory is not always topnotch, so I’m willing to listen to factual corrections of some of my statements). The Bolsheviks needed the organic international unity of world socialist proletarian revolution to pull their chestnuts out of the fire of being internationally isolated, however, and that is my main point here. And one can only really condemn Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolsheviks who first got, as Deutscher said it, “entangled” in the bad elements of the new state, its authoritarianism, if one doesn’t really want a proletarian revolution in the first place, or if one condemns as the Bolsheviks’ “original sin” their leadership in 1917 of the second proletarian revolution.

If we’re going to make a successful assault on global capital, I think at bottom, that question Trotsky posed in 1938 of the crisis of humankind being the crisis of proletarian leadership still remains the main question for communists.

That, in a longwinded and roundabout way, is what I was getting at.

Anyway, again, I enjoyed your article.

Warm, comradely, communist,
internationalist greetings,

Al (Allan) Greene
Email: tompaine1917@yahoo.com

Congratulations on the new publication, which is most welcome at this time. Excellent article, look forward to more and will send some material in for your consideration.

Steven

http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/2009/09/wobbly-times-number-22.html

but in other posts as well.

Thanks for making the intellectual connections with Malthus and 19th Century capitalist conservatives. I reposted your piece to my Facebook page.

And internationally? Well, if the 3rd International is a paradigm, it’s a paradigm of something other than how an international communist movement should conduct itself.

Anyway, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. If a “new paradigm” is going to be developed, in order for it to be new, and developed, and a paradigm, it’s going to take a lot more than me and you talking about it. I’m pretty sure that part of the “trick” to all this is that the working class has to put itself into a position to establish its own organizations, its own models, its self as a paradigm.

best regards,

SA

1. implementation of a program of technology export to equalize upward the Third World.
2. creation of a minimum threshold of world income.
3. dismantling of the oil-auto-steel complex, shifting to mass transport and trains.
4. abolish the bloated sector of the military; police; state bureaucracy; corporate bureaucracy; prisons; FIRE; (finance- insurance- real estate); security guards; intelligence services; cashiers and toll takers.

etc., etc.

—

I know that you don’t have much regard for V.I. Lenin but his writings are focused laser-like on the immediate challenges of the class struggle in Czarist Russia, such as how to relate to the Zemstvo. My suggestion is to hold off on grandiose programs for worldwide communism and to use your considerable intelligence and facility with the keyboard to solve the problems facing us right now and right here in the USA, such as immigrant rights, BP oil spill, gay marriage, etc. It is only by achieving victories here and now in such struggles that we can advance toward the final goal of transforming society. Furthermore, for all your emphasis on proletarian power, there is a certain disjunction with the obvious reality of life in the USA, namely one in which workers *are not* on the move. Maybe they are in South Korea or Oaxaca, but you are not there. Unless you see yourself as a latter-day Trotsky issuing pronouncements from afar, my advice is to get a bit more grounded in the country that you live in.